I was somewhat at a loss for which room to go through next. I didn’t want to do my mother’s bedroom yet. Instead, I dragged a stack of empty boxes to the kitchen. There were a few crumbs on the floor, and I quickly swept them up. In the last few years, things had slipped a little. Now and then I’d noticed small lapses in my mother’s housekeeping. It was nothing that I wouldn’t have found perfectly acceptable in my own home, but I knew that the stains on the sink or the dust on the mantel were due only to my mother’s refusal to wear her new glasses unless she was driving, and not to some newfound rebellion on her part. If she had known of the omissions, she would have been mortified. Saddened for her, I would clean the accusing blemish when she wasn’t looking.
As I finished sweeping, I pushed the maple colonialstyle chairs neatly under the table, pulled back the curtains, and opened the windows. The sunlight revealed the chipped paint spots on the white cupboards. I’d never noticed them before and tried to pretend that they were the shadows of small leaves on a tree that stood immobile against the wind.
I wrapped up some dishes to give away, then started packing up the china that Helen had from her grandmother. I would keep that. I’d always thought it was pretty, but she wouldn’t use it very often, afraid that something would break and she’d leave me an incomplete set. I pictured her holding up the large, box-shaped sugar bowl, explaining that these had been customary when her grandmother was young. Wrapping each piece of china, I wished that she had used it more often, instilling it with memories. As I reached for the final piece, I lost my balance and knocked the creamer to the floor. Only pieces, after all those years of self-denial. I stared at them a moment, then got the broom and swept them up.
I shifted to the baking cupboard. Cookie sheets and cake pans wouldn’t be so vulnerable to a shaking hand. Most of these I would give away. I reached into the dark recesses of the cabinet and pulled out an old, chipped measuring cup. I could see my mother standing at the table, precisely measuring out the ingredients she would need for her current project. She never stinted on the ingredients, but neither did she put in any extra. Every week, Helen would bake something for us and present it like a gift. I didn’t bake for my family. Gabe had asked me once why I didn’t. “I don’t need to,” I’d said. “Grandma always bakes for us.”
I walked over to the window above the sink and held the cup up to the streaming light, making out the faded red markings. I turned away and leaned against the sink, and as I clutched the cup, I slowly slid onto the floor. My eyes stopped focusing. I ran my fingers over the raised lines of measurement and let the loneliness swallow me, crushing me into someone new, someone with no sheltering generation to protect me from life’s hardness. I was the front line, and I knew myself unequal to the task.
I felt my wet blouse. My mind hinted that it was milk that had leaked from my breasts. I felt the ache in them, and the longing to relieve the pain by taking my baby to my breast. But I wasn’t nursing, only pregnant. It wasn’t mother’s milk at all.
I had never imagined myself sorting through my mother’s things. I had imagined a protracted old age, and I had prayed that I would have the strength and patience to care for her. Would I have the love to see beyond an illness that might make me a stranger to her, and make her love for me even more remote? I had imagined trying to be a mother to my mother. But I had not imagined this.
I had heard other people talk about the painful process of sorting through the leftovers of the life of a loved one. But their experience had always been tempered by the fact that the person had been ill for a long time, or had been very old. And by the fact that it was not my mother. The belongings of their loved ones did not taunt me. I registered their stories as complaints about the enormity or the tedium of the task. But now it was my turn, and the task was many things, but it was not tedious.
28
RACHEL
I had to wait several days before I could go back, but it was a shame to leave the house empty, no one getting any use from it. This time I planned it so that I would have a limited amount of time, hopefully forcing me to be disciplined and productive.
I started with the linen closet, and when I took the first sheet from the shelf, I could almost hear the snap as my mother unfolded it with one deft movement, allowing it to float onto the bed, straight as could be. It was one of those skills that fascinates little kids, things their mothers seem to be able to do so easily and that seem impossible for us ever to achieve. But those household skills come with age and practice, and we unthinkingly perform them before our own wondering children, forgetting how once we had wished for such grace.
As I pulled out more sheets, a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string fell to the floor. My immediate guess was that Helen had wrapped up some embroidered pillowcases, too old and threadbare to be of any use but with too much sentimental value to throw away. Maybe it was something I had embroidered when I was ten or eleven. I had kept us more than well supplied with fancy pillowcases. Once, I had embroidered pictures of baskets onto some hand towels, peach and black on a white ground. The technique was called huck-toweling, and the project was my fifth and final piece for a Girl Scout badge, each of the five with a different type of embroidery.
I put the package aside and told myself that opening it would be my reward when I’d gone through the rest of the closet. Maybe the package didn’t hold any old projects of mine at all. Maybe there were some old quilts, or crocheted doilies that my grandmother or great-grandmother had made. Helen had hated the doilies, which required starching and painstaking care to achieve the intended look of crisp waves all around the central flat portion, onto which a lamp or vase was placed. She liked old quilts but had never let us use them, for fear that they would become faded or frayed, spoiling the precious yield of so many hours’ work. I knew that she had some quilts, but I hadn’t found any yet. I was already planning how I’d display them to preserve their beauty and to proudly show their art, traditionally so undervalued, the invention of women. One of my friends hated old quilts, because they seemed to her the product of enforced domesticity, the pitiable offering of the only creative outlet open to our foremothers. But I had always believed that works of art endured, and that their creators would not want to see them scorned, even from a wish that they had led a freer life.
Finally, I finished packing up all the items from the linen closet except for the brown parcel, and I allowed myself to open it. It was the sunbonnet quilt that my great-grandmother had made. I recognized it even from the back, from the yellow triangle points sewn around the edge. I carefully laid back the corner to reveal two of the girls appliquéd on the quilt. I knew from memory that each one had a sunbonnet and dress in a different fabric, but no hair, eye, or skin color depicted. As a child, I had wondered what each girl would look like were her sunbonnet pushed back to unveil her true identity.
But there was a bulk and weight to the package that couldn’t be accounted for by the quilt alone. I continued to unfold it and found another package nestled inside. Taped to the outside I saw, in a cursive that was unmistakably my mother’s, a note: “To be opened only by my granddaughter, in the requisite faith and urgent hope that she will one day exist and embrace what I here entrust to her. Read this book and papers in the order in which I have placed them here, so that you will learn your history as you were meant to do, and to pass it on as others have done before you.”
Curiosity and sorrow and anger seemed to compete for the upper hand. My heart raced and my hands shook, and I noted these with some wonder, as though my inner literary critic were observing. How many times had I scoffed at such reactions in a story, as not only unconvincing but clichéd?
I opened the package, my mother dead such a short time, and I already betraying her, and perhaps my unborn daughter. A lovely leather antique book lay on the top. The book’s pages were in Spanish, but a Spanish from long past, and in a handwriting filled with flourishes. I was the only one in my family who spoke Spanish. Tucked insid
e the book were extra pages in English, but the handwriting was not my mother’s, nor that of the book’s author. Under the book other types of papers were stacked, some curling or yellowed with age, some sewn together, some glued in an odd fashion on the edge, all with a variety of handwriting. Having found it on the top, and obeying this, at least, of my mother’s instructions, I picked up the small book and began to read.
29
Juliana
12 February 1661
I write by the dim firelight of a poor room at an inn. I have fled my lifelong home, not knowing what awaits me. To remain was to die at the hands of my own father, seeking to regain his honor by putting to death his only child. I was the innocent victim of Don Lorenzo’s most vile lust, and my father has sent him to his everlasting punishment.
I must write to put my thoughts in order. Though I had to leave much behind, I have brought this blank book, given to me by my beloved Tía Ana, whom I doubt I shall ever see again. She said that it was beautiful, as I am beautiful. She spoke from love, but what did any beauty I may possess buy me but violence and betrayal? Remembering her words, I find that the charm of the book now taunts, rather than consoles, and so it is a fitting symbol of my life, an apt receptacle of my thoughts. The incidents of these last two days seem unreal, and yet my circumstances assure me they are not.
Silvia and I have no destination yet. We travel to the south.
13 February
We depart for Sevilla, as that is the destination of the caravan that has allowed us to become a part of their group. I am disguised as a boy, my place purchased with money from Silvia’s lifelong savings. It is unusual, for any boy would normally work to pay for his journey by helping with the animals and provisions. Silvia travels with us also, but she does work to pay her way, helping with the cooking, cleaning, mending, and any other tasks she is assigned. Although he looked at us askance, as though he knew there was more to our story, Silvia convinced the caravan master, Señor Suárez, that I am her sickly grandson, traveling home to Sevilla after a pilgrimage to Ávila to ask Santa Teresa to come to my aid and give me health.
Silvia brought my mother’s jewels, my only dowry, used now not to go to a husband but to escape a father’s wrath.
14 February
We are in Toledo. I snuck away from the caravan and put on one of the dresses I had brought. I found a buyer for some of my mother’s jewels, though I have no knowledge of their value. They were probably worth more than what I was offered, but I had no choice. I felt that I should sell the jewels only a few at a time, so as not to arouse suspicion, for why would a girl have these things to sell?
My father spent some time here at the university, and it seems as though I feel his presence. I know it is my foolishness, but I shall be glad when we quit this place upon the morrow.
15 February
I must enter a convent, using my mother’s jewels to secure my place as a gentlewoman and to pay my way. Although I would wish to avoid the conclusion, it is inevitable. Where else can a woman such as I go? Don Lorenzo in one night denied me the future of which I had always dreamed. I must run to the enfolding walls, where I will hide my shame and sorrow till I die. My only bridegroom shall be Christ. I pray He gives me strength to accept Him as my all.
I am no longer Juliana Torres Coloma. In this caravan I travel as a boy, and when I go to the convent, I shall use Silvia’s name. Silvia said she could not find my mother’s purity-of-blood papers, but I will need them to enter the convent. Silvia has brought her own papers, which she will give to me. This, also, will aid in my disguise. I shall be hers in name, as well as love.
16 February
Each day proceeds, no different from the one before. The chill reaches my bones almost as soon as we depart our shelter, then warms a bit at midday, only to become colder as the day wears on. Riding on and on and on. When I at last gain a place to lay my head, I fall into a sleep. But tonight, though I am exhausted, I cannot find the peace of slumber. Each time I close my eyes, I see Don Lorenzo’s face and I begin to shake. When at last I succeed in banishing this dark vision, my present danger leaps to mind and I cannot rest. I have found a place where the moon provides a feeble light, and I write here in my diary, the repository of the truth of this unfamiliar life.
The tenuous nature of my plans has begun to weigh heavily upon me. In my haste to escape my father’s vengeance, my course was uncharted. I knew only that flee I must, or die as punishment for a sin that was not mine. To a convent, yes, but where? I shall have to be careful in my choice and cunning in the lies I must invent.
They tell me that in two days we shall reach Ciudad Real, but now all places are the same to me.
19 February
Though we travel toward Sevilla, that is not my final goal. I have made a momentous and frightening decision, but I know that it is right. I would forsake this, my homeland, which condones a daughter’s murder. I shall discover for myself the New World, yet from within the limits of the convent walls, where I shall bury all the hopes I once held dear.
20 February
The journey is most tiresome, yet I am glad of my disguise, for as a boy I ride astride a mule, as do the merchants. Though it is most uncomfortable and my body aches from this unaccustomed means of travel, I prefer it to traveling in a litter fastened between and carried by two mules, constantly swaying and suffocating me within. The cold, my pain, and an ever-present nausea afflict me.
The inns that we have stopped at have hardly been reprieve from the days’ travails. The filth evident everywhere is enough to make one sick, and I have many fleabites on my body. The inns do not offer sustenance, and we are required to provide our own, which we purchase along the way. Mostly we buy bread and eggs, though two or three times we have happened on hunters who have sold us partridges or rabbits. Silvia at first tried to procure things for me especially, but we soon learned that the entire caravan shares all provisions.
From other travelers I have learned I must be careful of my belongings, for many of the innkeepers’ servants are not to be trusted. It is rare that Silvia and I have even the meanest room to ourselves, so we have slept with our meager possessions every night. In most of these wretched places, all travelers pass the night in a common room. Some nights we go to our rest on piles of straw. If the straw is fresh, this is preferable to a bed, which might be infested with bedbugs. Our only consolation is that the price is modest, at two reales, as the rates are fixed by royal decree.
22 February
Tonight we have reached Andújar. I am told that we have completed more than half of our journey from Madrid to Sevilla. I am relieved, as there has been little to occupy my mind beyond my bitter memories, and at times I think I shall go mad. We try to shelter ourselves from the cold and rain as we ride, but with little effect. Though many of the areas we pass through are stark, with little of beauty to recommend them, I have come to welcome a view not obscured by foul weather.
I am growing ever more anxious about what precisely I shall do once we have reached Sevilla.
23 February
A most frightening scene occurred today. One of the muleteers, having relinquished his reins to another on the pretext of hunting some rabbit for our dinner, dropped from his place in the line and approached me. From the first, he has looked at me in a way I did not understand, and, riding beside me, he began to murmur vague threats. At first the mad thought went through my head that he might know my identity and my plight, but the more he spoke, the more it became clear that his meaning referred to a depravity I did not know existed.
I loudly repulsed him, and as he reached to grab my arm, I felt a deadly fear and could not think how I would resist him. Then the leader of the caravan, Señor Suárez, came to my defense. He struck the young man hard on the back with the flat of his sword and uttered in a fury words I could not hear. The young man retreated angrily, and Señor Suárez approached me.
“I am sorry that you have been subjected to this. I am ashamed that this has ha
ppened in my train. I vow upon my honor that it shall not occur again.”
I could not even answer, and I began to tremble. He looked at me thoughtfully and said slowly, “I think that you have had your share of troubles. We shall not add to them.”
To this I have been reduced, to seeking a father’s protection from a stranger whose close scrutiny could present a danger of its own.
25 February
We stop in Córdoba tonight. I am too tired to write very much, for I have slept little these past two nights, fearing what might happen if the muleteer decided to defy his master. But now I must depend upon the guard of Señor Suárez, for I cannot keep my vigil yet again.
I did not tell Silvia what happened, for she seems unwell and beyond fatigue. I cannot heap another burden upon her. How I wish that my Tía Ana were here to hold me in her arms, to offer me comfort and guidance! I cannot think that I shall ever see her again, and this adds another weight to my sorrows.
26 February
Try as I will to build up a wall of bitterness and hatred toward my father, I have not succeeded. I tell myself that I am the most wronged of creatures, and that, even above the treachery of Don Lorenzo, lies the betrayal of one who should have defended me. Yet I find myself protesting that he does care about me. How could it not be so? He who has shown me all my life a loving kindness could not wish me harm.
But it is so, and this is the most difficult of all. I forsake a father who has loved me, but who holds his honor higher. I must try to harden my heart against him, or the pain will break me.
28 February
Now our journey’s end is in sight. We are to reach Sevilla in two days. I feel some apprehension at leaving the caravan, though it has held dangers of its own. There is a comfort to rising in the morning and knowing how you will occupy your time. I have grown accustomed to my role as a sickly boy traveling home with his grandmother. Would that it were true. But I have only started my inventions.
The Lines Between Us Page 13
