Departing at Dawn

12 Ave Mar

61 12 Ave María Aunt Avelina had given Berta some hand-me-down clothes from an old chest so that she began wearing a robe and slippers. She had her long hair pulled back in a ponytail, the way she had worn it when little, and she even had on half socks like her aunt’s. She swept the house, sometimes singing and sometimes silently. She mended clothes and sewed with her aunt before ironing and darning socks at mate time, which was long and not made for people to sip anything other than their own patience. On Tuesdays they made bread and tortillas, and on Fridays they put the beans to soak for Saturday, because that was when Uncle Tristán Javier came in from the country and gobbled up bean stew with lots of red sausage, his favorite meal. He had been coming down every Saturday for more than twenty years to sell kid goats in the market and share the profit with his siblings, because those sales were the fruit of all the family possessions: thirty-five hundred hectares of rocky land where the goats scrambled over the same paths carved out by the first herds brought over by the Spaniards after the conquest. In four hundred years, the goats had not needed to 62 change their location because the soil had turned out to be capable of supporting their awkward haughtiness and their quadruped instinct for scavenging the tiniest and most tender bites that such unfertile land could offer up, whose boundaries could be appreciated only in late afternoon, the hour when the color of everything was changing. In full daylight, everything the Rieras owned looked like nothing but gray earth but, with the low lights of sunset, it changed to a full scale of bright colors . Then the cane stalks in the desert would be blue, the hills red, the thick walls violet, and the gray would change to orange while dark greens would spread out over the vast expanse even asthesunwasgoingdown,untilthebluishblackLaRiojanight covered everything once again leaving the land ready for dawn, the way it had been for centuries. In this land, time could not be measured in years but rather in eras: when it was an ocean bed, when it survived a cataclysm, when the earth dried up and the mountains formed, when forests grew and then caught fire and huge animals thrived before becoming extinct, and afterward , when everything became quiet and calm, like today, in that dried up land waiting for its own eternity, the rigid eternity one could read into the remaining cliff sculptures. At lunch on Saturdays, which was at twelve sharp because her uncle got up early, the old ones always talked about the same things: the neighbors, the goats, kids of these goats, and those from way back who were no good for anything except for making people think up stories to tell and being called “unmannerly creatures.” They also talked about the uncle’s store in Olpa and the past—everything always told and retold in the 63 same repeated phrases, always said in the same order, which served as a review of the family reminiscences that updated the inventory of stored memory about relatives, children, grandchildren , great-grandchildren, and their baptisms, deaths, and failures to marry, which were many. Weddings were few and far between in La Rioja. On one of those days, when they were finishing up the afterlunch talk and Aunt Avelina was already choosing from her pile of graphic novels, ready to sit and read under the mulberry tree, Berta heard: “Purest Ave María!” “Conceived without sin!” answered Aunt Avelina, who quickly threw down what she had in her hand and exclaimed: “But if it isn’t Miss Cholis, and here I was about to forget!” And then a pale, thin woman in her early fifties came inside , her sharp high heels clicking through the patio, dressed in a fake Chanel suit, her dyed blonde hair long, with bangs, her heart-shaped lips colored passion red, and a small purse on her wrist. Miss Cholis had the voice of a young soprano and enormous blue eyes, all made up so they could be seen for miles, which lent her an expression of surprise that might have been permanent, eyes that were so beautiful they could be seen in the dark, like cat’s eyes. She was Aunt Avelina...