Tales from the Town of Widows

by James Canon

  Suddenly, it occurred to her that the reason why she’d failed was that she had spent every single day of her magisterial career planning the things that she’d do the day after. She had sacrificed her today to a tomorrow that soon became today, and which was immediately sacrificed once more to another tomorrow, again and again, ceaselessly.

  “No, Señorita Cleotilde,” an energetic Rosalba finally said. “Mariquita’s time can’t wait until tomorrow. We must work on it now.”

  “But…what about my class?”

  “Oh, skip it.”

  “But my students will—”

  “Tell your students that you were sick, or that you were on a different schedule. It’s only an ethics class, for God’s sake!”

  The schoolmistress frowned at this last remark.

  MAGISTRATE AND SCHOOLMISTRESS spent the night and several candles thinking and conferring with one another about time. They talked about Santiago Marín’s burning candles and the Villegas widow’s blooming violets, and acknowledged the urgency of establishing a single system that allowed everyone in town to measure, in equal fashion, the duration of events.

  “I still think that you should send someone to the city to buy a watch and a calendar,” the schoolmistress observed. “The universal concept of time has been successfully used for hundreds of years.” She supported her recommendation by talking in great detail about the theories of a Mr. Isaac Newton and a Mr. Albert Einstein, and she quoted them with such a degree of familiarity that the magistrate assumed the two men had personally discussed their hypotheses with the old woman.

  “What you’re suggesting,” Rosalba said as soon as the teacher gave her the opportunity to speak, “is that we go back to the traditional male concept of time, in which time is all about productivity.”

  “In a way, yes, but—”

  “I refuse to replicate that concept, Señorita Guarnizo. We live in a male-free world.” She paused briefly, as to organize her thoughts, then added, “You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to create a female concept of time: the Theory of Female Time of Rosalba viuda de Patiño and Cleotilde Guarnizo.” While she spoke her hand flew in the air as if she were printing her words on some invisible surface. Things had begun to look a little more promising for the magistrate. If she pulled through this crisis, she thought, she’d be able to prove to the villagers that she still was competent and resourceful.

  IN DISCUSSING THE purported female concept of time, magistrate and teacher declined to make use of cyclical changes in their own environment, like migratory species, the recurrent proliferation of mosquitoes, or the predictable metamorphoses of the red-and-yellow butterflies that populated their region. “What if they become extinct?” Rosalba argued. They recognized the alternation of day and night as a natural and tangible method for keeping time, one that they would like to keep.

  “What about climate?” Cleotilde suggested. “We have two pretty consistent periods of rain and drought.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Rosalba replied. “The weather has become so unreliable in the last few years that even the trees have grown confused. They don’t know whether to order their flowers to bloom or their leaves to fall.”

  And then Cleotilde had a brainstorm.

  “How about menstruation?” she said, and almost immediately experienced a great deal of satisfaction. She was confident that menstruation, being an exclusively female condition, would be a suitable idea for the magistrate’s female concept of time. But she also proposed it out of some twisted desire to get even with Rosalba, who, the teacher had no doubt, was currently going through menopause. Some twenty years before, Cleotilde herself had undergone the change of life. She had endured the physical discomforts that came with it, but the emotional symptoms had taken her by surprise and forced her into a severe depression. She felt incomplete, half a woman, half finished. She decided that the magistrate was feeling the same way.

  “Huh!” Rosalba mumbled after hearing the teacher’s proposal. “I don’t know that our community’s time can rely on menstruation. Everyone’s cycle is different.” But both women knew everyone’s cycles were identical. Soon after time stopped in Mariquita, the women’s periods had synchronized. It occurred unexpectedly, as if nature, anticipating the chaotic situation that would follow the absence of time, had judged it its duty to grant all women an accurate way to keep the same schedule. And although nature hadn’t yet succeeded in its ultimate goal, ever since, every twenty-eight suns, all washing lines in Mariquita displayed the white rectangular pieces of cloth that women wore as undergarments during their periods.

  “If there’s one thing that women can rely on in this village, it is menstruation,” Cleotilde said. “Of course, you wouldn’t know anymore.” She paused to give Rosalba a complicitous look before adding, in a comforting whisper, “Rest easy, Magistrate. I won’t tell a soul. We all go through it at some point.”

  Rosalba decided to ignore the schoolmistress’s sardonic remark. “Your idea doesn’t offer anything new to the theory we want to create,” Rosalba said. She wouldn’t admit it, but the one thing about the menstruation calendar that really troubled her was to have to depend on other women––younger, fertile women––to tell her whether it was day three or day twenty. If only I were ten years younger, she thought, I would be not only Mariquita’s magistrate, but also its walking calendar.

  “Maybe so,” Señorita Cleotilde replied, “but a thirteen-month, twenty-eight-day calendar will make time calculation and recording very simple. Besides, if we keep time synchronized with the phases of the moon, Mariquita’s calendar will remain in use and accurate far into the future.”

  Rosalba giggled. “Do you really believe that a bunch of women dying slowly in a far-flung corner of the world have any future?”

  “Of course we have a future. Whether it’s good or bad is a different thing.” She pushed her spectacles up her nose.

  “The future’s only in…in the reveries in which we indulge ourselves,” Rosalba said ponderously.

  “That’s ridiculous!” Cleotilde groaned, shaking her head repeatedly. “If we don’t have a future, we might as well reverse time, go back to the past. That way at least we’d know where we’re heading.”

  This last observation, ludicrous though it was, had a great impact on Rosalba. The magistrate looked first serious, then contemplative, then perplexed, then dazzled and then serious again. For a while the only sounds in the room were produced by the drops of rain that had just begun hitting the window steadily. But then, abruptly, Rosalba exclaimed, “You’re brilliant, Señorita Cleotilde! Absolutely brilliant! We’ll go back in time. Yes, we’ll adopt the menstruation calendar you proposed, except we’ll make time flow backward.”

  “But, Magistrate, we can’t make time flow backward. It’s just—”

  “Our female calendar will begin with the last day of December and end with the first day of January. Better yet, we’ll replace those boring names of the months with thirteen of our own names.” Overly excited, Rosalba rose from the chair.

  Overly concerned, Cleotilde rose too. “I was just making a hypothetical argument, Magistrate. I didn’t intend for you to take it literally.”

  “How about if we start with the month of Rosalba and continue with the month of Cleotilde? Is that fair? Because if you want, we can start with the month of Cleotilde. It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Magistrate, what I meant to say was that—”

  “I know what you meant to say, Señorita Cleotilde. You meant to say that when time moves backward, people have a chance to change the course of their lives. That’s wonderful thinking! We’ll go back in time, fix the many problems there are in our history, and create a prosperous future for all of us.”

  Shaking her head, Cleotilde took a deep breath.

  “Now, how far in history should we go?” Rosalba went on. “First, I’d like to delete all of our stupid civil wars. Really, there’s no need to fight among ourselves. Same with that silly battle f
or independence of 1810. We’ll never be anybody’s colony, so such a battle should never take place. And what about the Discovery Day? How horrible that was! I’d really like to efface that whole passage from our history. We should not be discovered for another thousand years or so. Or maybe we should be the ones who discover Europe. What do you think, Señorita Cleotilde?”

  Señorita Cleotilde thought that the magistrate had finally gone crazy. She was just about to say that when Vaca walked into the room, holding a tray with two bowls and a couple of spoons.

  “Breakfast,” she announced.

  “Great!” Cleotilde said. “I’m starving. What is it?”

  “Hot soup.”

  “Again?” she sounded disappointed. “I always eat an egg in the morning. Don’t you have any eggs?”

  “If I had an egg, I’d have eaten it myself,” Vaca said. She set down the tray.

  “Well, I hope that at least there’s some kind of meat in it,” Cleotilde insisted. “Is there any?”

  “Maybe,” Vaca returned, shrugging her right shoulder.

  “There’s more meat in a mosquito’s leg than in this soup,” Cleotilde complained bitterly as she stirred the clear broth splashed with bits of cilantro. She tried to eat it with the spoon, but there was nothing solid in it. So she lifted the bowl and literally drank the soup in one gulp. When she was finished, the schoolmistress got up and began smoothing down her short hair with the backs of her hands.

  “You’re not leaving, Señorita Cleotilde, are you?” If the schoolmistress left, Rosalba thought, she would not be back until the next sun—if at all. By then the project would have lost momentum.

  “Yes, Magistrate, I am. You already have a solution to the most urgent problem. That is if you can call a backward calendar a solution to anything. I trust you can figure out the rest on your own.”

  “I really think you ought to stay,” Rosalba said, in a tone that sounded more like a warning than a request. “How else are you going to claim that Mariquita’s female time is half your idea if you don’t help me draft a document with the specifics of it?”

  This last sentence felt like a slap across the teacher’s face. “It is half my idea,” she snarled. “I intend to help you draft the document. I just need to get some sleep before we start working on it.” She removed her glasses and massaged her eyes with the back of her index fingers.

  “Take a siesta in my bed,” Rosalba suggested. “It’s quite comfortable.”

  Cleotilde hated sleeping in other people’s beds. She had a sharp sense of smell that made it impossible for her to sleep while engulfed in the offensive odors that were likely to emanate from someone else’s bedclothes and mattress. As tired as she was, she decided that she’d rather work on that document now than sleep in the magistrate’s malodorous bed. She locked her hands behind her back and for a while walked back and forth across the room, thinking, until at length she slid a piece of paper and a stub of a pencil across the table toward the magistrate, saying, “Rosalba, I’m going to give you dictation.”

  “I beg your pardon?” the magistrate replied. She didn’t know what had startled her the most: being called by her first name, or being asked to take dictation.

  “Write this down, dear: To establish a Time Committee of five young, comma—” She paused to allow Rosalba to write the phrase, but the magistrate, still confused, began mumbling something unintelligible. Disregarding the magistrate’s bewilderment, Cleotilde went on with her dictation, “…healthy, comma—”

  “Excuse me, Señorita Cleotilde,” Rosalba attempted an objection.

  “Dear, please raise your hand if you wish to formulate a question or if you wish to be excused.” The schoolmistress waited a few seconds for Rosalba to raise her hand, but since the magistrate didn’t do so, she proceeded with the next phrase. Eventually Rosalba started taking terms and conditions down, crossing out and rewriting until they had a draft of a bill that satisfied both of them.

  IMPLEMENTING FEMALE TIME wouldn’t be an easy task, the magistrate thought. Especially now that every woman was keeping her own schedule. Just getting all the villagers together to announce the decree would be difficult. Rosalba knew she’d encounter some resistance among the most stubborn villagers. She’d have to work really hard to persuade them that having a communal time scheme would help improve Mariquita’s productivity, and therefore the living conditions of every family. But she’d have to work the hardest to convince them that keeping a lunar calendar in which time flew backward would eventually help each one of them get a second opportunity on earth.

  But did she really believe that? Rosalba asked herself. Did she really think that an archaic calendar turned backward would be good for everyone? Maybe not. What significance would it have to someone like Magnolia Morales, who had said that time only existed in one’s mind? Probably none. And would a systematic calendar appeal to the Pérez widow, who had declared that she lived the same day every day? Definitely not. Maybe Magnolia and the Pérez widow were right in their own eccentric ways. Women were idealistic and romantic by nature, and even though men had always seen those characteristics as faults, perhaps it was time for women to dignify them as unique female qualities and make use of them in their daily lives. Female time, Rosalba thought, should allow an infinite number of individual interpretations, so that it could exist simultaneously as the official system for the entire community, and boundless in each woman’s idealistic, romantic and fertile mind.

  The magistrate shared her latest thinking with Cleotilde, who was still walking back and forth across the room with her hands clasped behind her back.

  “I like that idea,” the old woman said, “but I think the villagers should have at least one parameter, or else we’re going to end up with ten Magnolias running around naked, claiming that time is a…bare nipple or something like that. I suggest we ask that every month each woman chooses a virtue she wants to master or a defect she wants to eliminate, and that she apply her mind to it.” She now sank into a chair, convinced she had said something important and definite.

  Soon afterward, the two women engaged in a long conversation about morality, justice, faith, dignity, rectitude, generosity, tolerance, devotion, determination, patience, strength, hope, responsibility, trust, optimism, wisdom, prudence, understanding, tact, intuition, sense and many other things they considered virtues. Next, they spoke about vice, sinfulness, evil, virulence, mordancy, corruption, depravity, abuse, wickedness, iniquity, cruelty, abomination, conceitedness, degradation, lechery, rancor, bitterness, mediocrity, egotism and many more things they considered faults. And after so much talk about virtues and faults, Rosalba and Cleotilde resolved that instead of “months” and “years”—which they considered meaningless words—female time would be introduced as “rungs” and “ladders” to self-improvement. But unlike the intimidating ladders to success or fame established by men, these ladders would go down and down only, because, Cleotilde declared, “Except for God, no one has ever found glory on high.” The women of Mariquita would never feel coerced into stepping up. Instead they’d be encouraged to go all the way to the bottom, where one’s mind, character and soul would meet perfection, and most importantly, where perfection would have as many definitions as there were women.

  SUDDENLY, SOUNDS FROM the outside intruded: there was a commotion in the streets. Rosalba and Cleotilde could hear, in the distance, the raucous voices of the women of Mariquita repeating the same phrase over and over.

  “What are they saying?” Rosalba asked

  “I’m not sure,” the teacher replied, her hand cupped around her ear, “but they’re enraged.”

  Rosalba sighed. “There’s always something.”

  “Shouldn’t we find out what they’re up to out there?”

  “Let them kill one another. We can’t leave this house until we have an acceptable drawing of the calendar.” She handed Cleotilde a piece of paper and began sharpening a pencil with a knife that needed sharpening itself. “Can you draw fre
ehand, Señorita Cleotilde?”

  Before the schoolmistress could reply that “of course” she could, there came a thunderous tapping on the door, and presently Vaca stormed into the room.

  “Magistrate, you need to go outside immediately,” Vaca began, catching her breath. She explained that a group of villagers, taking advantage of Rosalba’s absence, had gone to Cecilia and demanded that a vote be taken for a new magistrate. Cecilia had tried to dissuade them, but they complained that Rosalba hadn’t done a darn thing for Mariquita, that what they farmed wasn’t nearly enough to feed everyone in town, and that most people had already forgotten what milk tasted like. Furthermore, the younger women accused the magistrate of having allowed el padre Rafael to execute a scheme to deceive them, while the older ones charged her with letting the priest get away after murdering their innocent boys. They’d so pressured Cecilia that she’d called a quick election in which Police Sergeant Ubaldina had been elected the new magistrate of Mariquita. “Cecilia just announced it,” Vaca said. “They’re still striding around the plaza with Ubaldina on their shoulders, giving cheers for her.”

  And just like that, without warning, Rosalba was forced to confront her greatest fear. Fortunately, things were much more different now. For the first time in several suns Rosalba felt in control. Not only had she regained her self-confidence, but once again she was near achieving something exceptional for Mariquita. This time she wouldn’t allow anyone or anything to ruin it for her. She would go out there and reason with them. The women, she was certain, would reelect her by acclamation.

  OUTSIDE, THE HEAT was stifling. The light rain that had fallen earlier had made the air heavy and sticky. The windows of most houses were wide open, not so much to allow the slight breeze to circulate as to let the heat out. Walking down the street with Vaca and Cleotilde, Rosalba encountered nothing but two dogs curled up in the shadow of a tree, sleeping, and a long line of hardworking ants. Except for them, there was nothing alive on the streets.