To Germán Arciniegas:
One day, at recess, the nun who took care of the garden told us she’d seen a nest of birds up in the Midget. That was the name we’d given to the shortest, stoutest tree in the garden. She reached up and showed us the nest she’d seen from her ladder. There were four tiny eggs. I’d never seen eggs like those, and when the nun left I told my friends I was going to climb the tree. I climbed up the Midget like a monkey. When I tried to touch the eggs with one hand, my other hand clutched a branch so hard that I broke it, my body and face hitting the ground, and my stomach landing hardest. There was a little grass and some flowers around the Midget, but not enough to cushion my fall.
The pain in my stomach lasted all day. The next morning I woke hurting even more, and when I got out of bed I was terrified to find that my sheets and legs were covered in blood. I ran to the nurse and said through tears, “I broke myself. I fell from the Midget and broke myself, and I’m going to die.”
She had me climb onto an old bed, where she examined my whole body, even my chest. I insisted that it was my stomach that had burst. When she was done examining me, she told me with a laugh that what was happening was nothing really, that it was normal for all women. She asked me to come back at five o’clock because she had a lot of work. Taking out a ball of old rags from a large basket, she told me the blood would keep flowing and to put one of the rags between my legs to soak it up.
“But don’t be scared. This is normal for all girls.”
My fall from the Midget and the story of the blood and everything the nun told me—the truth is I didn’t really understand it all, not even half of it. The only thing that was clear was that this would last my entire life, that it would happen every month, and that the blood was for making children, that I too had been born from this blood. The stories of blood and children left me sick. I didn’t have anyone to talk to, because I was ashamed and didn’t feel like playing, so I ran to the chapel and kneeled down before the statue of Mary, our Virgin—that’s what we called her. She was pretty and seemed to be smiling, and with my eyes I could see she was looking at me too. I wasn’t alone—in her arms she held a son we called Baby Jesus. It bothered me a little to think that such a lovely child could’ve been made from the blood of Mary. I looked her straight in the eyes and began to tell her everything, yes, everything I knew about myself—I told her I felt very sad and alone and that I wanted her to be my friend and be able to tell her everything, absolutely everything. When I left, I felt I loved her very much, and from that day forward I decided to spend every free moment at recess with her. I told her everything about myself. When I had no more to tell, I started to tell her the stories I knew of my friends, and when I was done with those I began to invent fun stories to entertain her—after all, the poor thing spent most of the day and night alone with her little son.
Our friendship was a few days old, many days, and my sadness lingered because I couldn’t laugh or be happy and play at recess like I had before. And because I had nothing more to tell her, I decided to ask her for help, to tell her the many things I wanted. I wanted her to help me grow because I wanted to be big like some of the girls. I asked her also to help fix my eyes, because all the girls called me cross-eyed and mocked me by rolling their eyes, and I’d cry and love them a little less. I also asked Mary—I didn’t call her Our Lady or the Virgin anymore, we were so close that I called her Mary—I told her I wanted wavy hair, because I didn’t like my straight hair and could never make it pretty. I also asked if I could learn to sing. But she never gave me anything that I asked for, and since she didn’t talk, I began to turn my back on her and started playing with my friends again.
I almost forgot: the last day I went to visit her, I also told her I wanted to know all the animals. The nuns had told us there were many, many animals in the world, and some were very, very big, as big as the Midget.
When I was little and traveled with Mrs. María, I saw many large animals: cows, bulls, horses, burros, pigs, and other ones called dogs. But here in the convent we had only very small animals. A sad little cat, a cock that was very mean, two idiot hens, and what we found most frightening, the tiny mice. We also had lots of fleas and lice, but we never saw more than one at a time. Each of them was alone.