It wasn’t that she’d settled down, or that she’d lost the habit of moving from place to place when necessary, or that she was bound by what little she’d managed to save up in life. True, she couldn’t help feeling uneasy at the idea of living again—even if only for a short time, according to her mother’s calculations—on the farm named after a horse, where she’d never felt comfortable or safe, or loved. But that wasn’t why she refused to move right then and asked her mother once again to consider coming to live with her in the house she’d built with the father of her three daughters, and improved with help from her littlest daughter’s money and the labor of a man who might’ve killed her in one of the many skirmishes she’d been in. She understood that she wanted to stay in the place she’d grown up in, but asked her to understand: she couldn’t leave her own home for such an extended period.
Was it because of the girl? She could bring her with her, if she liked. She was her mother, the woman who’d raised her second daughter during the war, and not the mistress of one of those houses she’d considered working in. She didn’t care if the girl made a racket, distracted her from the domestic chores she’d come to help her with, or interrupted her when she was acting as her nurse. She was her granddaughter, even though she didn’t much look like her father or her or her family. She didn’t care if she broke something or rummaged through her things a bit or asked uncomfortable questions. What’s more, a change of scene would be good for her. She could enroll in the local school, which was always on the lookout for new students. She’d like it there. The teachers reminded her a little of the missionaries who’d flocked through their villages and always left without founding a single church. They’d be delighted if her littlest daughter was to enroll.
Again, she says no. She asks her to stop begging her.
The mother feels as she did when her husband grew quiet, before the war began and he left for it. The daughter’s expression is the same. She uses the same words. This is when she understands there’ll be no way of making her leave that place. There’s no use trying to reassure her that her brothers will help with her and her littlest one’s expenses while she’s looking after her, no use telling her she wants to spend time with her before she can’t spend time with anyone anymore and is covered in shovelfuls of dirt, even though both things are true. She asks her to give her a few days to gather her things and find someone to help her move to the daughter’s community.
She won’t lie: she doesn’t like the place. She feels strange there. She thought it’d be prettier, more pleasant, more like her husband had said the world would be after they’d won.
Many of her former compañeros have sold the land they were given during the distribution. New people, from other places, have come to fill their spots. They’re not like the villagers. They neither fear nor respect them. They’re a little like the staff at the hospital where they go for consultations, who look at them as if they owe them nothing, at times even abuse them, as if they don’t deserve their attention and aren’t capable of defending themselves. Some are so young they wouldn’t understand what they’ve done for them, even if they were to explain everything. They don’t even understand the word war. It bores them. They say it’s all the old folk ever talk about and they’re tired of hearing it. These people don’t call them compañera and stopped using their aliases once they found out they had other, given names. This makes her feel strange. Like she does when her mother uses that name. She warns her that her older neighbors call her by another name in the community. She doesn’t know if she wants her to use that one, and nor does she ask her to, but she feels she ought to know, to avoid any misunderstandings or surprises. She utters it to her for the first time.
She’d rather use the one she and her father gave her at birth. The combatants who are still in the community will find it strange, no matter how many times the mother explains it’s her legal name. They’ll speak to her of merit and of how proud her daughter must feel to use the one she was given in the mountains. She’ll say that she, and not the mountain, is her mother. They’ll disagree. They’ll say her daughter was born again up there. Her mother will want to say that the mountains killed her a little, but won’t, because her daughter will intervene. She’ll say that her mother had never known her alias, or her father’s, or her brothers’ aliases. They hadn’t shared them with her, as per security regulations. And her mother never asked. She always treated the movement with respect. She hoped they’d do the same for her now. The woman was ill. She hadn’t come here to get grief. She asked them to call her by the name her mother had chosen for her, at least when she was around. Or they could just refer to her as her daughter if they didn’t want to feel they were betraying the cause by using a civilian name.
Was it too much to ask?
They hoped it wasn’t a sign she was abandoning the group. They weren’t pleased she’d decided not to vote for the political party her group had become once the war ended. Disappointment wasn’t an option for them. What would’ve become of their group if she’d disappointed them in combat? How many would’ve died because she hadn’t felt what they’d wanted her to feel?
The party hadn’t lost the elections that time.
But they might’ve.
They had, every time she voted. Maybe she was bad luck.
This wasn’t a laughing matter. They could tell she’d lost respect for everything they believed in. What else could they expect from her? Would she vote for the opposition in the next election? Was she a traitor? Why hadn’t she just killed them in the mountains? It would’ve been easier for everyone involved.
They ought to calm down: all she was asking was that they show some consideration to her mother, a civilian.
They were civilians too, now, though she couldn’t say so because they’d be so offended they might ask her to leave the community. And that was a luxury she couldn’t afford. She had to stay in the post she’d been assigned when the disarmament orders arrived: her house. Instead, she told them to remember that it was their duty always to protect civilians. As far as her mother was concerned, this meant not making her angry. The doctor had told her to avoid getting agitated. She herself was doing her best not to upset her.
Why hadn’t she said so before?
She couldn’t, not in front of her: she would’ve gotten very angry. It was a symptom of her illness.
Their anger, on the other hand, was fickle. Even though they blamed it on her behavior, she knew it wasn’t that, because it had all started the day she refused to take the community representative as her lover.
The day after she’d told him to focus his attentions on his wife and kids instead of wasting his time hounding her, the harassment had started. Anything she did became a gripe or a slight to the ideals they’d fought for. And he always admonished her as publicly as he could. His favorite time to do so was whenever a distribution of clothing, food, construction materials, and whatever else arrived in the community. On those occasions, the representative would strike her off the list. When it was her turn in line, he’d tell her she didn’t deserve anything because she hadn’t helped the party win the elections. She’d respond that she didn’t care if she didn’t get anything, but that, if they were going to talk about justice, he had to recognize she’d earned everything she and her family had ever been given, and more. Everyone there knew it. They might decide to deny it with one voice, but they all knew she was right. Which was why, once they were done distributing and everyone had left, the representative sometimes sent someone to her house with a little bit of what was left over. She always turned them away. She’d say that, luckily, she didn’t need any favors from him or any of the goods he was given. Then he became even more upset and spread the word that she was prideful and, on top of that, that she’d never suffered any hardships, unlike the rest of them. He implied that she was getting money from a source he couldn’t specify, probably because it was connected to something or someone in the opposition.
The girls didn’t take gifts either. After the community representative accused her of saving the best for her daughters when she was recruited by one of the churches to distribute toys, on the recommendation of teachers from the local school, the mother forbade them from standing in line for anything—even when various churches paid them visits around Christmastime. Wanting to dispel any doubts, she presented them with a report on the toys they’d delivered and gave them permission to search her house so they could see for themselves how her girls hadn’t gotten a single toy, because they’d wanted to make sure the rest of the kids each had a gift for that holiday.
The people from the church told her it wasn’t necessary, but called someone else to handle the distribution the following year. As an excuse, they cited the need to make everyone feel included and to share the responsibility around so as not to overburden a single person. Even so, they couldn’t convince her that they hadn’t been taken in by what the community representative was touting.
She didn’t attend their services again or take the girls to the kids’ lunches that were sometimes held to lure in adults. She wouldn’t let the girls accept the education grants the church managed alongside international donors, nor did she let them take photos of her and her daughters so the donors could see where their money was going, even if not all of it reached them. And before the incident with the toys, she’d felt uncomfortable when they hadn’t wanted to photograph her and her family in their own house, but instead in one whose condition was worse, because it’d help arouse more pity in the people who lived in other countries, and move them to donate more, or faster. She didn’t want her girls partaking in what she considered a scam, even though the church people said it wasn’t, that she was misinterpreting things, that all they wanted was to illustrate what conditions were really like there.
The community representative said they shouldn’t insist, that the girls were as prideful as their mother and no good could be expected of them. He did his best to make them look bad, not because he was obsessed with the mother, but because he was after the house she kept. And she knew. She knew he wanted to get her to go and leave her land vacant for him to take. The peer pressure and even his romantic overtures had been attempts on his part to get near her parcel of land, to enter the house unrestricted. Which is why she never stayed away long.
When she needed to leave to try and recover her firstborn from the place she’d been taken as a baby, she had to pay the señora who looked after her other daughters an additional fee to stop anyone from entering and sacking her house in the middle of the night.
The woman she hired had always thought it was a question of protecting her belongings: her cornmill, the grain she’d harvested for the entire year, some jewelry maybe. But what she was actually guarding was an order she’d been given. She didn’t tell her this, though. There was no need. She might be a good person, but she was a civilian. She wouldn’t understand. Or she’d understand it all so well she’d get spooked and run off at once without caring that she’d left the girls behind, or even take them with her and figure out a way of not giving them back, not so she could hold on to them and raise them as her own, but so she could keep her away from them. She might turn them over to an institution, then ensure that she herself was taken to a different one, for many years. Best to avoid alarming her, to say it was a favor and not to give any explanations she couldn’t understand.
Saying she was simply looking after her house was the perfect excuse.