I rather timidly entered Madre Superior’s room and found her alone. She bade me to sit down, and I did so. I suppose she sensed that I was agitated, and she told me not to be frightened. She slowly leaned back, closed her eyes, and began to speak in a low voice of some secret that she was about to lay bare to me. I was, quite naturally, confused, not only about the substance of the secret, but also about why she should have chosen to tell it to me. Then she opened her eyes, and searched my face in an intense manner, as though looking for some clue or comfort there.
“What I have to tell you concerns you in a most direct, personal way. It will affect everything that will happen to you for the rest of your life. Do you know how you came to this convent?”
I confessed to her that one of the older sisters, Sor Beatriz, who had taken care of me when I was young, had one day told me that, as a baby, I had been left at the convent gate, with a great deal of money and a note. I was the child of a nobleman and his wife. They had come to the New World full of hopes, but the wife had died, giving birth to me, their first child. The husband was so racked with grief that he could not bear to see the babe, a constant reminder of his beloved wife. He could not send the child back to relatives in Spain, for he had become estranged from them. He hoped that his contribution to the convent, and the dedication of his baby daughter to a religious life, would, in some way, expiate his own guilt for having abandoned his child.
“Yes,” the abbess answered, “that is correct. I know of the letter, and of its contents. I know, because I wrote it.”
In my surprise, I rose from my chair, but she continued.
“I have avoided you all these years so that no one would ever see anything in my eyes, would ever suspect. You are descended from a most worthy family, but from a mother who could not give you a name, because she had only her own name to confer. She had no husband. I am your mother. Do not condemn me. Perhaps, after you have read these papers, you will begin to understand.”
But I did not understand then, nor do I understand even now, how she could have divulged to me such a loathsome truth, with which I have lived ever since that day. And, further, having told me that she was my mother, she asked me to swear to her to keep the papers, to preserve them, and to pass them on to our female descendants. I stuttered that I could not keep the last part of the promise, that I hoped soon to take my final vows.
“You must leave the convent and make for yourself a real life, with children who share your blood, and with whom you can share your sorrows and your joys.”
“But I love my life here,” I protested. “I love Our Lord. I have been happy here.”
“I have not been so,” she whispered, so faintly that I could barely hear. “Swear to me. Give me your sacred oath before God. Swear to me, as I am your mother, and as I am your abbess.”
I did as she asked. I could not refuse her twofold authority over me. It is because of that day that I have lived an embittered life, never able to show my feelings. My husband would not have tolerated such gloom in his wife, though he was a better man than most, to have taken me without a proper background. I showed him the letter, which had been saved for me at the convent, and he was satisfied. He was much older than I, though I myself was old for a bride. He was kind to me in his way, and gave me children, but such was not the happiness I had sought.
My mother wrote of a hope that her writings would someday find themselves in a time when the way that men treat women, often with violence and injustice, may be a thing of the past. But from what I have seen, there is no abatement of these cruelties. Being out in the world has taught me that life holds much ugliness of which I never dreamed, so safe and secure in my life in the convent. What right did she have to banish me?
And so, child, I have determined much of the future course of your life, as mine was determined for me. You must marry and have children. Perhaps you will not regret this. You will be like most girls, who have no real choice.
Your grandmother,
Mercedes Torres
In the Year of Our Lord 1738
50
Luz
Mexico City, 1790
To my granddaughter,
I hardly know how to write this letter to you. In so doing, I am striving to fulfill a promise that I made to my grandmother Mercedes Torres when I was young and understood nothing of its implications. I wish that I could at least tell you this in person, to somehow soften the blow more than my grandmother attempted to do with me, but my daughter, Sofía, is leaving Mexico City with her husband, and she will not return.
Can you begin to imagine, I wonder, what it is like for a mother to know that she will never see her child again? Though she is a woman grown and wed, I cannot tell you of the loss I feel already, knowing that soon she will be gone forever from my sight and my embrace. I shall never again hear her voice or gaze upon her beloved face. When I see her, at times I seem to stare at the place where she is standing, trying to root her presence to that space, as though I could in future return to the memory of her there. But that is not possible, and I shall not see her pass through the stages of womanhood, nor shall I hold you in my arms, my own daughter’s daughter.
In giving this to your mother to take with her, I am trusting that she will one day bear you, a daughter. Your mother is the youngest of my children. All of the others are grown and married with children of their own. As much as I love my grandchildren, they are all boys and I do not believe that I can pass this legacy to them. I believe that my great-grandmother Juliana meant for her life’s secrets to pass through the women of her family. I cannot know how men would view what happened to her, or what she did as a result. I cannot know whether I can trust a man to deny his own importance so much as to keep the secret and be but a link in an unknown chain.
I base my mistrust of men’s true honor not only on what I have read within the pages I bequeath to you, but on my own life as well. When I was but a girl, not yet imagining what it would be like to enter marriage, I heard my parents speaking of the mistreatment my older sister was receiving at the hand of her husband. I later learned that my loving father had aided my sister with a civil suit against the husband. Though she had this right under the law, there were few women who dared. Very few prevailed in these kinds of cases, and my sister was no exception. In fact, her husband was so angered at my sister’s action that he beat her until she died, and still he beat her corpse. The fickle laws, which offered to give recourse to women, then punished her murderer but little, because he argued that her disobedience and disrespect had so fueled the passion of his anger that he could not control his actions.
Knowing of my sister’s fate did not prompt me to wish to enter the married state, and my parents’ grief tempered the usual insistence that a girl find a husband when she comes of age. I wished that I could enter a convent, but the solemn oath that I had made as a girl prevented me from following that path. I have no regrets on that account. My parents were happy when I married your grandfather, a friend of the family whom I had known for years to be a gentle man whom I could trust with my well-being. The life I have led with him has had its sorrows, but never any caused by him, and the life he gave us has given me the joy of my own children.
I have instructed your mother, Sofía, that she must teach you how to read, as I taught her myself, as my grandmother Mercedes commanded that I also learn this skill that is not always deemed necessary for a girl. I have made your mother swear to me that she will give these papers to you, having never looked at them herself. She is to extract from you a vow to pass the contents of the package only to your own granddaughter. When you have read this letter and the papers that go with it, you will understand as much as is possible of a message left so long ago. The manner in which I was raised, and in which my mother was raised by my grandmother Mercedes, would have led me to disdain the revelations from the writer of this journal. Instead, I believe that I have learned compassion, and that things are not always what the world deems them to be. I hope that yo
u will find a like understanding.
Believe in yourself, my child, and the goodness of God to enable you to someday pass on these writings to your own dear granddaughter.
All my love,
Luz de Porres Yañez
1790
51
Dolores
Missouri, 1844
My dearest Elizabeth,
I will place this letter, along with a diary and certain other letters, to be found among my things after I am gone. There will be strict instructions for the person who finds the package to deliver it to you, and to you alone. You are sixteen and about to be wed, and I do not wish to burden you with the knowledge within these papers just yet, though I fear it will not be long before they fall to you. The doctor tells me that I have not much time left in this world of joys and sorrows, though I have only just reached my forty-ninth year. Only your grandfather knows what I am suffering, and that is as I wish it.
I will tell you the story of how these papers came to me. When my mother, Sofía, first told her mother, Luz, that her husband wished them to move to Santa Fe, Luz reacted most strongly. My mother loved Luz very much and believed Luz’s reaction to be caused by her mother’s love for her. However, Luz entrusted Sofía with a package and said that she must not open it but save it for the daughter she must someday bear, give it to her secretly, and make her swear to follow the instructions therein. My mother spoke to me of her feelings of hurt and betrayal at her mother’s command, and I believe that in that moment I, who was yet to be born, fell from grace in my mother’s eyes.
My mother nevertheless kept her word to Luz and gave me the papers when I married, extracting from me an oath to obey the instructions I would find in them. She said that she gave them to me, rather than to my sister, because I was the first to wed. My sister was already promised to the brother of my new husband, but perhaps my mother simply wished to rid herself of the papers, to discharge her duty and be finished.
Not even your mother knows any of this, and although it pained me to not share this history with my beloved daughter Isabel, I had to obey the sacred oath that I had made, though it had been wrenched from me when I was also just a young woman. You must now decide whether you will be able to keep the promise that I demand of you by leaving these papers to you. If you cannot lock the secret of these papers in your heart, to be spoken of only to your future granddaughter, then you must give the packet, unread, to another of my granddaughters and bury your knowledge of their existence forever.
I pray, however, that you decide to take on the task of preserving and secretly handing them on to your own granddaughter. I hope that you have felt my love all of your life, and that your cousins did not discern the extra feelings I had for you. I decided early on that you would be the one to inherit this responsibility, which is both honor and hardship.
While I most sincerely charge you with upholding this promise that was first required of our ancestress so long ago, I must confess that I did falter, and though I do feel guilt at not having followed the letter of my vow, I tell myself that my treachery is not so great. After all, my twin, María, and I have always felt that we are but an extension of each other. Our mother Sofía’s choice of me to receive the papers was an accidental one, and they could easily have gone to María. Therefore, contrary to the requirement of our great-great-grandmother a century ago, I shared the papers with my sister.
I also justified my defiance because of something my mother told me. She said that when she and my father left Mexico City and made the six-month, arduous journey along El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro to Santa Fe, she almost lost the papers in a river crossing. In that eventuality, might not a second copy have preserved the message of the pages?
As the years passed and María and I had children, we didn’t think much about the papers. Then, in 1824, my husband told me of his intent to take us to Missouri. A few years earlier, some traders had begun to make regular journeys from Missouri to Santa Fe, and now it was his intention to join with one of these groups on the return. He felt that he and his brother, who would remain in Santa Fe, would better benefit from the trade if one of them worked from each end of the trading route. My husband and I did not know exactly when there would be a caravan returning, and we would be called upon to pack what we could and forsake the life that we had known.
Now the matter of the papers came to the forefront. María and I decided upon a course whereby the stories within the papers would be preserved by both of us. We set out to copy all of the writings. It was agreed that I would keep the originals, for in this way, we told ourselves, we were not straying as far from the vow that I had made. And so we proceeded, stealing moments from our busy lives as wives and mothers. María was able to copy more than I, for as it became clear that our time to leave with the traders’ group neared, there was much to be done in preparation. We finished only a few days before my departure. If you can imagine what it means to leave a twin, you will know the sorrow that I felt, but a woman must cling to her husband.
As the years in Missouri passed, and I saw my Isabel marry an American, and you were not even taught to speak my mother tongue, I decided that I must translate all of the writings into English, lest their meaning be lost. Those who would receive the papers would otherwise be passing on an indecipherable legacy, devoid of meaning. I am glad that I took this task upon myself, for in not just copying out the words, as María and I had done before, but in struggling to convey their message in another language, the pages became part of who I am. Thus, it is as though I have lived two lives, my own, and that of a woman so long ago. What she felt, I felt, and from how she endured, I perceived how to endure.
So these words from our past I bequeath to you, my child. My life has not been an easy one, but I somehow find a strange solace in knowing that so it has always been. A woman lives her life subject to the whims of God and men. But there are rewards, too, and you are one of my most precious. I hope that your trials are not many, and that you find strength in what you read here.
Your loving grandmother,
Dolores Martín Luengo
1844
52
Lizzie
St. Louis, 1881
To my darling Jenny, and to those who will read this letter after you,
I have given you a hard task in handing over these papers to you. I know from experience. It’s not easy keeping a secret. Sometimes the temptation to tell was so powerful I could barely stand it. But I made a solemn vow, and I didn’t want to risk retribution by breaking it. If you find you have to talk about it, you can always tell your old grandma, can’t you, even after I’m gone?
As the others have done, I thought I’d add a little something of my own here, to be passed along with the papers. I fancy the idea of knowing someone else will be reading my words long after I’m gone. What I have to say won’t be that interesting, but people being the curious creatures they are, I imagine they’ll read it right through.
Everybody always thinks that just because a person has been around awhile, they have a store of wisdom hiding inside, just itching to get out. Sorry, but that’s not the case here. Some of what I write here, you’ll already know, Jenny, but I’m putting it in just the same, for those who will come after you.
I’ve always pretty much liked to share my every thought, which is why telling no one about these papers has been a heavy burden. I never could keep from chattering away, especially to my mama. She’d be bone tired at the end of the day, and I knew she longed to go to bed, but she was almost always patient, even if it was in a pained kind of way. She’d at least pretend she was listening, while she’d be finishing up some last chore. That last bit of darning could have waited till the morning, but since I kept on talking, she’d always find something to keep her hands busy, since her ears had to be. Guess she always hoped to get a head start on the next day, as though a woman doesn’t always have a never-ending supply of something that needs doing. Sometimes I even felt sorry for Mama. She was so tired, b
ut I just couldn’t help myself. It seemed like the day just wasn’t real, didn’t count, till I’d had the chance to tell her all its highs and lows.
Even after I was a grown and married woman and my grandma Dolores had passed to the other side, I kept on telling Mama all about my day, because by then I had received the papers from grandma and had taken on the secret that she left for me. Maybe at that point I was trying to make up for the guilt I felt at not telling Mama about the papers. Maybe, if I just told her everything else, the sheer weight of trifles could outweigh that one big, important secret.
I didn’t get my chatty nature from Mama. No, she was more tight-lipped than a child caught stealing. She talked, but hardly ever about herself. Even if we asked her a direct question about her past, she’d usually give only some answer that never satisfied. For a long time I thought it was just lack of something interesting to tell, but later I figured maybe it was something else. After I’d seen my share of this life, and Mama was long gone, too late to search out the answer in her eyes, I puzzled it out that maybe Mama had too much to tell. Maybe there was something sorry there. Maybe she was afraid that once she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop, and whatever it was would come out like a beast and devour her. Maybe that was it, but I’ll never know, because Mama wouldn’t tell.
I have the opposite view of things. I reckon that if you don’t let out those things that are hurting you, that they’ll just take deeper root and grow and grow inside you like an oak, until you are nothing but a hard old trunk. Still, Mama did manage to move her branches to us children when a wind came upon us. Happiness and song still nested in her boughs.
Jenny (and all of you whose names I’ll know only from looking down from heaven), I hope you find something that helps you in these papers. What I found comforted me was knowing I had some different kind of people inside me, people I never could have dreamed up. It kind of made me feel better about something Mama used to say about me. I was always good at seeing things from somebody else’s point of view, and Mama thought that I must not have a very strong character, since I was so easily influenced by other people’s ways. I worried about that for a long time, but I’ve come to think that it’s not so bad to see things from behind other folks’ eyes. Oftentimes it helps them, and what else are we put on this good green earth for, if not that?
The Lines Between Us Page 25
