Para todo hay mañas, menos para la muerte.
There are tricks for everything—except for death.
Mom and I meet up at the De Vargas Mall in Santa Fe, where I transfer my camera gear to her car, and we head north, climbing out of Santa Fe and breaking the gravity of day-to-day routines to launch into the spacious northern New Mexico world. We have no idea where we’ll go in Chimayó, but it doesn’t matter. We’re on our way and already feel ourselves entering a different temporal and spatial dimension.
It begins with the landscape, which works its alchemy well before arrival in Chimayó. The change starts along the fields of Nambé, where the car traffic slows from the frenetic pace on the main highway. The land secures its grip on our psyches and hearts in the empty spaces just beyond, where the open bowl of sky, rimmed by azure mountains, encircles a maze of barrancas and arroyos. The starkness, the silence, and the vast space—all these contribute to an exaggerated sense of distance and a corresponding stretching of time. The journey feels longer than the odometer tells us it is, the separation from the “other” world complete—and more than welcome.
We crest the top of arid barrancas and glide down the final hill into Chimayó, Mom pointing out the place where her late brother Robert Chávez’s ashes are scattered, there where the view of the valley is best. It was his favorite vista, and, an artist by training and avocation, he painted this landscape more than once. Below us, to the east, we can just make out the old wagon road, mostly erased by a serpentine arroyo. My grandmother used to tell stories about taking that road in a wagon loaded down with produce and blankets to sell in Santa Fe. Her trip to town involved an overnight campout by the Río Tesuque. Rolling into Santa Fe in predawn darkness (which presented her with her first glimpse of electric lights), she and her father, Reyes, would visit Jesusito “Sito” Candelario’s Original Old Curio Store on San Francisco Street to sell the handwoven goods Reyes had made, then they’d set up by the plaza to sell melons, corn, and chile.
Barrancas on the road to Chimayó, 2009.
We make the trip in just over half an hour on this, the “new” road, completed forty-eight years ago, in 1965. Prior to the construction of the new road, we had to drive through Española to get to Chimayó, an entirely different journey following the verdant, long-settled Santa Cruz Valley, rather than the arid country past Nambé. This new route added to the trip the spectacular overview of Chimayó where we stop now to gaze out over the valley and remember Bobby, a much-loved child of this area—and one who did very well in the wider world, as a businessman in Albuquerque. My mother used to say about Bobby, quoting a dicho, “Él que nace para guajes hasta jumates no para.—One who is born to gourds won’t stop until he becomes a dipper.” (In other words, someone born to be great won’t stop until he reaches the top.)
Mom also comments often about the work ethic that drove Bobby and his brother, Leo, to strive to make a better life for themselves outside of Chimayó. “They knew firsthand,” says Mom, “that ‘no hay bolsa más quieta que una bolsa sin dinero.—there is no purse more still than a purse without money.’ And so they worked hard—maybe too hard.”
We continue downhill, around the big curve through Potrero, past the turnoff to the santuario, the church built by my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Bernardo Abeyta, and dedicated to El Señor de Esquipulas. The small adobe church, replete with impressive nineteenth-century paintings commissioned by Bernardo and executed by some of New Mexico’s best artists, now draws tens of thousands of pilgrims and visitors each year. But we elect to skip the opportunity for healing earth. Ours is a pilgrimage of a different kind.
We cross the rushing Santa Cruz River, a vibrant ribbon of life that has always sustained the human communities in this place, including the small pueblos whose ruins remain amid cholla thickets on hilltops nearby. We cross on the “new bridge,” as Grandma referred to it when she told of the days before there was an easy passage across the water. Then, she recalled, she used to cross the river by stepping cautiously on a series of chairs placed in the current by her father as he chaperoned her and her sisters to the dance hall in Potrero—an exciting adventure that took her a full mile away from her home.
Past the river, we glance over at the Rancho de Chimayó, the immensely popular restaurant that our cousin Arturo Jaramillo and his wife, Florence, opened right along the new road. They converted the home of his grandparents Hermenegildo and Trinidad Jaramillo (the daughter of my mother’s great-aunt Epimenia Ortega Jaramillo) into a place whose appeal lay in the rural landscape, in the old building, and in the portraits of Arturo’s family hanging on the walls. (My family and I attended the inaugural dinner at the Rancho. Amid the enthusiasm about Arturo and Flo’s new venture, I remember hearing whispers around tables that they had made a terrible miscalculation: nobody would make the tedious drive from Santa Fe across the empty badlands to visit a restaurant in an old adobe building in dusty old Chimayó. The naysayers were proved drastically wrong.)
We continue on, veering off the new highway to take the old road through the orchard that belonged to my grandmother’s comadre Teresita Jaramillo, who was also her first cousin. The trees are withering and drying up, but I remember when they bore bumper crops of glowing red apples that Teresita and her husband, Severo, sold by the bushel. At one end of the orchard, we slow down by the small roadside shrine devoted to Danny Chávez, his smiling portrait and plastic flowers fading now. I remember the morning I came by here to find ribbons of police tape blocking off the orchard and a pool of dark red blood cupped by the fallen leaves beneath the trees, where Danny was gunned down.
It’s barely a half mile from here to the Plaza del Cerro. We pull in through the east entrance to the plaza, past Eduardo Naranjo’s store, long closed, where we used to buy candy as kids. We continue to the north side of the plaza, where I stop to take pictures of the windows and doors on the Cruz house. It’s been a long downhill slide for the house since the old man, Pedro Cruz, died, and the adobe walls are deeply furrowed with cracks and are slowly melting away.
Motoring slowly around the plaza, we take care to avoid the rest of the north side, where a resident from nearby has posted Keep Out signs. He believes he owns the right-of-way, even though everyone knows it’s long been a public pathway. In fact, we have a document affirming the primacy of this right-of-way, the pisos de la plaza, in 1848. Then, officials from Santa Cruz visited here and asked the oldest residents about customary rights-of-way on the plaza; the viejitos stated that there had always been a public path around the plaza, and the alcalde from Santa Cruz ruled that it should be respected and that no building or other encroachment would be tolerated.
Unfortunately, when the U.S. government surveyed properties in Chimayó in the early 1900s to legally confirm ownership under U.S. law, the public rights-of-way around the plaza were not included on maps. Neither were other important, long-recognized communal access ways to the ditches and the Santa Cruz River. Perhaps the current self-appointed guardian of the plaza and his few cronies rely on the map from the improper survey and ignore the deeper historical and customary precedents. In any case, for years he chased off tourists and locals alike in an attempt to guard a plaza—and a profound sense of history—that is slowly fading away.
This same person took me to task many times over the years I lived in Chimayó, because I was occasionally bringing people to see the plaza and because I argued for its preservation as a cultural treasure for Chimayó. I felt that I was educating people about a history I was proud of, which I regarded as a benefit to the community. But I learned the hard way that sometimes “un bien con un mal se paga.—a good deed is repaid with a bad one.” After numerous encounters, in which he threatened me and shouted the same epithets I’d learned from local kids as a child, his confrontations with me culminated in a dark and brutal way: my beloved dog, Gerónimo, turned up beaten and battered and dying in front of our house. Although I never thought he was capable of doing such a thing, my nemesis jeered at me and declared that he was responsible for Gerónimo’s mysterious and violent death. He intimated that he might just do the same to me.
The restraining order I obtained did little keep him from accosting me again in the plaza. One time I called the state police, and when they arrived on the scene to investigate, I recalled the advice a neighbor had given me—supposedly suggested to him by a law enforcement officer when the neighbor had similar troubles. At that time, the officer took him aside and counseled him in blunt and “strictly unofficial” terms: “Next time this guy bothers you, shoot him, make sure he’s dead, and then drag him to your house.” When my neighbor protested that this would land him in deep trouble, the uniformed officer handed him his business card and said, “I know how these guys operate. Call me. There won’t be a problem.”
As Mom and I talk about this local plaza vigilante and all the trouble he’s brought to our family and to others, Mom reassures me, “Don’t worry about it, ’jito, porque como dice el dicho, ‘Nadie se va de este mundo sin pagar lo que debe.’—like the saying goes, ‘Nobody departs from this world without paying what he owes.’”
“Y también—and also,” she continues, “‘No hay mal que por bien no venga.—There is no evil that doesn’t bring good.”
Harrassment from this fellow and a few others has kept many people—even those with family roots in the plaza—from visiting or bringing guests there. And I can understand the sentiment that on some level motivates animosity toward visitors. A fear of the plaza becoming a tourist attraction or being taken over by “outsiders” fuels a determination among many in Chimayó to avoid the gentrification that has so altered Santa Fe and other Hispanic plaza towns. My argument that there is a way to preserve this singular place for its own and for the community’s sake doesn’t ease these fears. Unfortunately, as time goes on and people bicker about the plaza, entropy is winning. There is less to argue about every day.
Mom and I jog left at the west entrance to the plaza and drive down the west side, pausing in front of the chapel, known as the oratorio, its tilted belfry sadly empty.
“I can’t believe they took the bell again,” Mom laments, referring to the fact that the bell has recently been stolen—for the second time. A group of local people, including me, had labored long to fix the roof and replace the previous bell, ripped from the rooftop in the mid-1980s by thieves who at the same time made off with two priceless nineteenth-century bultos (carved wooden figurines) from inside the chapel.
“And remember when we dedicated the new bell?” Mom asks. “That was so nice.” I do indeed recall the gathering on that cool fall day in 1995. Many former plaza residents stood here, in the field in front of the oratorio, to witness a blessing of the bell by the local priest, Father Roca (a celebrity in his own right). A feeling of joy swept through the group as we tolled the bell. Its tones, floating out over the weedy fields and neglected fruit trees of the disheveled plaza, seemed to rekindle, if only momentarily, a spirit of community that once lived here. Old women who’d prayed in the oratorio decades before stood on wavering legs amid the gathered crowd. When one of these viejitas, Teresita Jaramillo, went inside the chapel, she marveled she hadn’t set foot in the oratorio for over forty years. Back then she sang hymns and prayed as one of the Carmelites, the laywomen’s organization that cared for the chapel. Now she whispered and hummed to herself the old prayers.
Others in the group remembered the night in 1910 when the ringing bell woke them to stumble out and watch Halley’s Comet light up the sky. In the predawn dark plaza residents had muttered in hushed tones, speculating on the portent of such an impressive cosmic display. So strong was the feeling of remembrance among the gathered crowd eighty-five years later that someone declared that this new bell must be the same one that had been stolen, returned to the oratorio by some miracle. But another resident said, “No, it doesn’t sound quite like the old bell. I’ll never forget that sound.”
“It’s too bad they stole the bell again,” Mom repeats, wistfully. “And they did it in the middle of the night! ‘Seguro que el diablo no duerme.—It’s true that the devil doesn’t sleep.’ It seemed for a while like we were going to bring people back to fix up the plaza.”
To “fix up the old plaza” is a dream that has held some of us in its spell for many years (and has led to offers of funding by national foundations, an impressive moviemaker, and many others), but with each passing year the prospect seems farther away.
Mom and I don’t have a key for the oratorio (it’s kept safely by our cousins, who aren’t in today) and so decide to travel on. We continue down the west side of the plaza, past rooms with their windows boarded, once the homes of Rafael and Perfecta Martínez, Isiderio and Pablita Ortega. We pause at the tiny room the viejitos called el cuarto del Pancho, with reference to its former resident Francisco (Pancho) Jaramillo. The roof on Pancho’s humble abode has collapsed, the white window frames are splashed with mud, and trees grow freely inside the remnants of walls. Many of the plaza’s buildings are facing the fate of Pancho’s place, with the residents gone and the empty shells of their homes crumbling. But not all buildings have suffered this fate.
Around the south side, we pass the house where Antonio and Seferina Martínez lived, still well cared for and breathing life, thanks to the efforts of its new owner, Miguel da Silva. Just down the south side, the buildings that once housed the post office and general store, which used to belong to my grandma’s Tío Victor, still stand; an old sign with simple hand lettering hangs on the white clapboard facade of the mercantile store: Post Office. But gone is the sign that hung here many years ago. That one, written in folksy handwritten script, read: Victor D. J. Ortega: Comericante en Abarrotes y Efectos, Compra y Venda Productos del Pais—Victor de Jesús Ortega: Merchant in Groceries and Goods, Buys and Sells Products of the Region. Victor, the plaza patrón, once ruled Chimayó with a firm Republican hand and held many important offices at the local, county, and state level. He reached what was perhaps the peak of his career when he served as a delegate to the New Mexico Constitutional Convention in 1910, but he never left his Chimayó roots. He remained a farmer and rancher as well as the local patrón until he died in 1944. (One neighbor from Potrero commented to me, “Victor, he was pretty sharp, but you knew he could be a really a big man here because ‘en la ciudad de los ciegos el tuerto es rey.—in the city of the blind the one-eyed man is king.’”) Now a bed-and-breakfast inn run by Jody Apple thrives in Victor’s former residence.
We stop and tap the horn at Lorenzo Martínez’s house, next to the old mercantile store. Lorenzo is the last plaza resident born and raised here. My grandmother was his madrina (godmother). Lorenzo leads a quiet existence in the home where his family has been for generations. We wait several minutes, but Lorenzo doesn’t emerge.
FROM THE PLAZA DEL CERRO WE STRIKE OUT, AWAY FROM OUR FAMILIAR haunts. We cross the Cañada Ancha arroyo and climb into sandy hills toward the Plaza de Nuestra Señora del Carmen, also known as La Cuchilla. Our spontaneous intention is to seek out an old friend, Magdalena Espinosa, who lives next door to her daughter Josie Luján, just off La Cuchilla plaza. We haven’t seen Magdalena since she came to Grandma’s one hundredth birthday party, ten years ago.
As we drive through the vestiges of the original La Cuchilla plaza, we pass the chapel dedicated to Nuestra Señora del Carmen (Our Lady of Mount Carmel), a Madonna with her origin in the Old World in the fifteenth century. If there was a formal plaza here, its rectangular layout is no longer apparent. The chapel is just about the only feature remaining to identify the plaza, whose name first appears on our family documents in 1837 in the last will and testament of José Antonio Cruz, “residente de la plasa de mi señora del Carmen—resident of the plaza of My Lady of Mount Carmel.” My great-great-great-grandfather, Gervacio Ortega, served as an albacea (executor) of the will. Writing in 1837, Cruz leaves 757 varas of land, two houses, some fruit trees, a hoe, and an ax to his daughter, María Manuela. He leaves another small house to “mi padre mio San Juaquin,” his patron saint. Exactly where those houses stood we’ll probably never know.
We negotiate the final tight turns in La Cuchilla, through a warren of houses and trailers on small lots that divide up once-productive farmland, to reach Magdalena’s well-kept adobe house. It’s all locked up and quiet, but we know she doesn’t leave home much these days, so I knock and then knock again. Finally I hear a voice and then notice a figure in the darkness, approaching the door. To my surprise I see the wide smile of Esequiel Trujillo through the steel security door. He swings the door open wide. “¡Pase!—Come in!”
I met Esequiel on a few occasions when I lived in Chimayó. Esequiel is best known as a nimble Matachín dancer. He is charismatic, friendly, and talkative, and he cuts a striking figure: tall, slender, high jawboned, with ample eyebrows leaning over light-blue eyes. He usually wears a black broad-brimmed hat that lends an air of rustic formality to his attire. He’s fit for his eighty-plus years. His knowledge of and passion for telling old stories about Chimayó, conveyed in a high-pitched, melodic Spanish, impressed me over the years in animated conversations we had during chance meetings in the post office, and I’ve always wanted to talk with him at greater length.
Esequiel is hatless today and wears a button-down blue shirt. He also has glasses on. He tells me he is taking care of his cousin Magdalena for the day. It seems at first a bit odd that an eighty-year-old is caring for a ninety-nine-year-old, but Esequiel appears perfectly capable and glad to be spending time with his prima.
Mom and I enter the dimly lit, warm interior of the house. Magdalena, in a lavender dress, is seated on a couch in the sala. She peers at us with a penetrating gaze through classic ’50s-era horned-rim glasses. She’s bright and alert and remembers us clearly.
Esequiel and Magdalena look like they’re ready for church, but they’re just passing the time together, cousins in their twilight years alone in a quiet corner of Chimayó. Esequiel leads my mother to sit on the couch beside Magdalena, offers me a stuffed chair, and pulls a wooden one from the kitchen for himself. The stage is set for the polite and warm plática to follow, all of it in the peculiar old Spanish I remember hearing as a child. I feel a familiar sense of time suspended.
Magdalena begins by addressing my mother, “O, yo quería mucho a su mamá, y ella quería mucho a mí.—Oh, I loved your mother so much, and she loved me.” She reminds us Grandma was her grade school teacher around 1920 in the tiny, one-room adobe schoolhouse in La Cuchilla.
“Sí, venía a pie cada día para La Cuchilla para enseñar a los niños.—Yes, she walked every day to La Cuchilla to teach the kids,” Magdalena says in her deep, husky voice. “Era muy buena maestra y muy buena conmigo.—She was a very good teacher and very good to me.”
After a few minutes of silence, we turn to a discussion of the Matachines dances. Although Spanish colonists developed its formal choreography, this dance drama has its roots in medieval Spain. Both Native and Hispanic villages perform it, from northern New Mexico southward through Mexico. Each dance group expresses the story differently, but it’s most often interpreted as a battle of good versus evil, played out by several characters.
Esequiel led Matachines performances for some years in Chimayó. I ask how he learned the dance, and he comes alive, answering in a voice as scratchy and vibrant as an old violin.
“Aprendí de mi papá, y él aprendió de un indio de San Juan que era gobernador.—I learned from my father, and he learned from an Indian who was the governor of San Juan Pueblo,” he says. “Mi papá, él se crió con los indios en el pueblo, y trabajaba allí mucho con los indios.—My father, he grew up there with the Indians in the pueblo, and he worked there a lot with the Indians.”
“Y le dijo el gobernador, ‘Nunca dejes tu danza, nadie te la quita, ésta es tuya en Chimayó. Lo mismo que aquí en el pueblo.’—And the governor told him, ‘Never forget your dance. No one can take it from you. This is your dance, in Chimayó, the same as here in the pueblo.’”
Esequiel goes into detail explaining the intricacies of the Matachines performance. He tells of the monarca (king), who wears a corona (crown); the young girl or princess named Malinche, who is dressed in virginal white; a toro (bull); two clowns or abuelos (grandfathers); and several danzantes (dancers) who are sometimes referred to as soldiers or warriors.
“Todos los danzantes, menos la Malinche, traen máscaras.—All the dancers except Malinche wear masks,” he says. “Y el monarca trae una palma y un guaje, y músicos tocan violín y guitarra.—And the king carries a trident and a gourd, and musicians play a guitar and violin.
“Yo era el líder de la danza, aquí en Chimayó. Una vez fuimos pa’ Santa Fe, allá en un museo. Y me preguntaron la gente, ‘¿Cómo sabe usted bailar?’ Y les dije, ‘La educación que tengo, lo traigo aquí, en esta cabeza.—I was the leader of the dance here in Chimayó,” he continues. “One time we went to Santa Fe, to dance at the museum there. And the people asked me, ‘How do you know how to dance?’ And I told them, ‘I carry it here, in this cabeza.’” (He points to his head.) “Allí en el santuario bailamos también. Todos los años bailamos el día primero del año.—There at the santuario we danced, too. Every year we danced on the first of January,” he reminisces, letting out a hearty laugh at the memory. Then he turns serious and sighs heavily, recalling the death of his nephew, whom he had hoped would take over as the lead dancer.
“Sí, Dios sabe toda la tragedia, pero ya no quiero yo andar allí. Si yo voy andar con ellos, dirigiendo, pero ya no—mover en la danza, ¿no?—Yes, God knows the whole tragedy, but I don’t want to go there. Yes, I’ll go with the dancers, but no longer will I move in the dance, you know?
“Pero yo tengo todo el equipaje para la danza. Todas las coronas y vestidos. La ropa está allá en la petaquilla. Tengo el equipaje. Y luego el vestido de los abuelos. Lo compuse de sacos de guangoche, los en que venden papas. Y lo compuse bien todo, el chaleco, las máscaras, . . . nomás por no conocer quién es el abuelo.—But I have all the stuff for the dance. All the crowns and outfits. It’s all there in the wooden chest. And the costumes for the abuelos. I made them out of burlap potato sacks. I put all that stuff together, the vest, the masks . . .just so no one will know who it is dancing as the abuelos.”
Animated again, Esequiel bursts into laughter.
“Yo animé a mi familia, como me animó my papá. Que no dejara a la cultura.—I inspired my family to dance, just like my father inspired me. I told them not to leave behind their culture,” he continues. “Y mi sobrina que está en Seattle, Washington, ahora viene pa’ Crismes. Y tengo parte de la familia en Denver, el modo es que van a venir p’acá para hacer la danza. Van a bailar allá al santuario o aquí a la iglesia, o tal vez bailan aquí en casa, yo no sé.—And my niece who is in Seattle, Washington, she’s coming now, for Christmas. Part of my family is also in Denver, so they’re coming here to do the dance. They’ll dance at the santuario, or at the church, or maybe at my house. I don’t know.”
I inquire if anyone had performed the Matachines in Chimayó before he brought it back.
Turning to his elder cousin, Magdalena, Esequiel inquires, “Bailaban allí en La Cuchilla antes, ¿qué no, prima?—They danced there in La Cuchilla before, didn’t they, prima?”
Magdalena nods. “Sí. En La Cuchilla. Y era muy bonito! También en la capilla allá abajo, la que está al lado de la iglesia grande—allí bailaban cuando tenían funciones. El día veintiocho, Los Inocentes, allí bailaban. Y había mucha gente en aquellos tiempos.—Yes, in La Cuchilla, and it was really nice. And also in the chapel down below, the Plaza de Abajo, there by the new, big church—they danced there for feast days, like the twenty-eighth of December, the Day of the Holy Innocents. They danced there. There were many people in those days,” Magdalena answers.
“Benigno me curó de este pie.—Benigno fixed this leg,” Magdalena says, changing the subject to Esequiel’s father, who taught him the dance. “No podía andar. Andaba en la wheelchair. Me caí y me lo quebré. Y me curó.—I couldn’t walk. I was in a wheelchair. I fell and broke the leg. And he healed me.”
“Su papá era don Benigno?—Your father was Don Benigno?” my mother exclaims. “¿Benigno era muy buen sobador.—He was a really good sobador,” she says. I, too, recall the old man, Don Benigno, a renowned massage therapist, chiropractor, and herbalist all in one, who sometimes came to work on my grandmother’s injured knee. “Todos le tenían mucha fe a don Benigno.—Everyone had faith in Don Benigno,” Mom states unequivocally. “Era uno de los últimos curanderos aquí.—He was one of the last healers in the area.”
Esequiel nods: “Fue hasta Chromo y Leadville a curar a los que lastimaban en las minas. Hasta Denver fue. Y les preguntó a la gente allí, ‘¿Qué no tienen buenos doctores aquí en Denver?’ Y dijeron que sí habían, pero no sabían curar.—He went as far as Chromo and Leadville in Colorado, to heal men who were hurt in the mines. All the way to Denver, he went, and he would ask the people there, ‘Don’t you have good doctors here in Denver?’ And they would tell him yes, there were doctors, but they didn’t know how to heal.”
Noticing a portrait of a couple on the table behind Magdalena, I ask who the people are.
“Éste es me papá, Valentín Trujillo, y mi mamá, que se llamaba Celsa Chávez.—This is my father, Valentín Trujillo, and my mother, who was called Celsa Chávez.”
“O, era Chávez?—Oh, she was a Chávez?” Mom asks. “Yo también.—So am I.”
“Pero no era de aquí, ella. Era de San Pablo, Colorado.—But my mother wasn’t from here. She was from San Pablo, Colorado.”
“Mi papá también era de Colorado.—My father was from Colorado, too,” Mom responds.
“Yo conocí a tu papá, don Reyes.—I knew your father, Don Reyes,” Magdalena says.
“No, mi papá se llamaba Abedón, de los Chávez aquí en Potrero.—No, my father was Abedón, of the Chávezes here in Potrero,” Mom replies.
“O, sí. Lo conocí también. Tu abuelito era Reyes Ortega.—Oh, of course,” Magdalena says. “I knew him, too. Your grandfather was Reyes Ortega.”
“Papá mencionaba mucho a los Ortegas.—My father talked a lot about the Ortegas,” Esequiel offers. “Era muy amigable a ellos.—He was very friendly with them.”
Changing the subject suddenly again, Magdalena asks Esequiel, “¿Cuánto tiempo desde murió mi hermanito?—How long has it been since my brother died?”
“Dos meses.—Two months,” he answers. “Ya dos meses desde murió Abel del derrame. Tenía noventa y dos años. Y mi hermano Lionicio murió el año pasado a los noventa y tres años, de cáncer.—Already two months since Abel died of that stroke! He was ninety-two. And my brother Lionicio died last year at ninety-three, of cancer.”
A long silence fills the room, until Magdalena offers, “Yo tenía siete años nomás cuando murió mi mamá.—I was only seven years old when my mother died.”
“¿Y quedó huérfana?—You were left an orphan?” Mom asks.
“Sí, y mi hermanito Abel tenía nomás que dos años.—Yes, and my little brother, Abel, was only two years old.”
“¿Quién los cuidaba?—Who took care of you?” my mother asks.
Magdalena points to her chest and nods firmly, proudly: “Yo me cuidé sola. Y crié a mi hermanito.—I took care of myself. And I raised my little brother.”
“¿A los siete años?—When you were seven years old?” Mom asks, incredulously.
“Sí, y Abel y no nunca estábamos apartes, ¿qué no, primo?—Yes, and Abel and I were never apart, right, primo?” Magdalena asks, turning to Esequiel, who nods.
“Nunca.—Never,” she says again and looks down at the floor.
“¿Y cuándo murió su cuñada Pilar?—And when did your sister-in-law Pilar die?” I ask, remembering the wonderful, warm viejita who lived next door to Magdalena.
“No me acuerdo—pero espérate. Yo te digo.—I don’t remember—but wait, I’ll tell you,” she says, furrowing her brow and looking up at the ceiling. “Tres años.—Three years.”
“Y mi primo José y su esposa, ¿ya habían muerto antes de Pilar, qué no?—And my cousin José and his wife, they had already died before Pilar, right?” Esequiel asks.
“O, seguro. Muchos años antes. Y Pilar ya tenía . . . Oh, certainly. That was many years before. And Pilar was almost . . .” Magdalena replies, looking again at the ceiling, “Tenía casi ciento cinco cuando murió.—She was almost 105 when she died.”
“¡¿Ciento cinco!?—One hundred and five!?” says Esequiel.
“Mi mamá mía tenía ciento tres.—My mother was 103,” Mom adds.
“Yo la quería mucho.—I loved her very much,” Magdalena says again. “Y ella me quería a mí.—And she loved me.”
“¡Mire no más!—My word!” Esequiel adds. “¡Fíjese!—Just imagine.”
“Sí, fíjese.—Yes, just imagine,” Mom says, and there follows another long silence.
Achaque busca la muerte para llevarse al difunto.
Death looks for excuses to take the deceased away. (Don’t give death any excuses.)
El muerto al pozo y el vivo al retozo.
The dead to the grave and the living to the frolic. (Said sarcastically when a spouse dies and the surviving partner starts having a good time right away.)
Él que por su gusto muere, hasta la muerte le sabe.
To a person who dies for his own pleasure, even death tastes good. (Said of someone who does foolhardy or dangerous things, knowing full well the consequences.)
Nadie se lleva lo que tiene.
Nobody takes with him what he owns. (Nobody takes his worldly goods with him when he dies.)
Para todo hay mañas, menos para la muerte.
There are tricks for everything—except for death. (All problems have solutions except for death.)
Nadie se va de este mundo sin pagar lo que debe.
Nobody departs from this world without paying what she owes. (Debts and obligations always catch up to you.)
Parece la muerte en calzoncillos.
He looks like death wearing underpants. (He looks like death warmed over.)
