She’s never been to Paris. All she knows about the city is what her mother has told her. She can’t picture it. And there isn’t much point in trying anyway: she’ll be there in a few weeks and will have time to wander its streets and become acquainted with its features. The mother is worried that she won’t. She’s afraid the people taking her in will make her their slave and keep her locked up in their house, with no air to breathe or chance of coming home. Her ex-compañera-in-arms tells her it’s unlikely. She doesn’t believe her. She’s heard stories of girls being swept from their homes with promises of better lives, then forced to work as prostitutes. The daughter of a woman who sold tortillas and was her mother’s neighbor when she lived on the outskirts of the city had landed in a border town and then in jail. They said she’d killed a man for his money. This girl’s mother said it had been self-defense. And that the girl had defended herself from other men the same way but only been caught that once. She didn’t know what to think because the girl had gotten out of jail so fast. She’d been there no more than a few months. Her mother said it was because they needed the cells for another sort of person: guerrillas. Ordinary crimes weren’t an issue back then, even the terrible ones. She didn’t want her own daughter to end up like this other woman’s.
Her ex-compañera points out that these stories didn’t take place in the city her daughter is traveling to. She doesn’t believe that the people of that country think or behave like the ones from their part of the world.
The mother isn’t so sure. She thinks there are unscrupulous people everywhere. She teaches her daughter what to do if somebody tries to take advantage of her where she’s going. She tells her not to be afraid or to let it happen, even if they threaten to deport her or really do send her back home: better that than bend her knee. What’s more, she’ll always have a place here to return to.
The daughter has her doubts. Though she wants to believe what her mother says, she knows her days in the community she and her sisters have grown up in are numbered: the littlest is getting older and will soon reach the age that a nearby family had decided would be the cutoff point: if they haven’t left the area by that day, they’ll come and kill their mother—and the girls, too, if they get in the way.
It was a question of justice: the family believed the mother had ordered the death of one of their relatives after the war and had caused the death of another during it. They hadn’t asked her because they were positive she’d deny everything. And it wouldn’t have been much use, anyway: she’d never have breathed a word, not even in her own defense, because she wasn’t authorized to discuss those men’s affairs. She could assure them she hadn’t killed them or ordered their execution, but she couldn’t say who had or why. It didn’t concern them. The families wouldn’t understand. Nor would they admit that one of their own had behaved dishonorably. She understood, in a way. She wouldn’t have liked to be told such awful things about her relatives either, or to have people doubt them. Of course, she wouldn’t have threatened to kill them, as they had her. She wasn’t a civilian, nor was she a common criminal. These days, she wasn’t even a guerrilla. All she could do was come to terms with what was happening, be grateful she’d been given until her littlest grew up, and work as hard as possible to find someplace to go when the deadline set by the family arrived.
She hadn’t been able to save up any money until now. Every cent had gone on feeding her girls and funding their dreams of university. She couldn’t even help her daughter with the upcoming trip.
Her daughter said she needn’t bother: the people she was going to work for would cover her plane ticket. In reality, they would deduct it from her salary, month by month, for an agreed period of time. Even so, it’d be cheaper than hiring a girl from their country, or one who’d already emigrated, to look after the house. They didn’t have to bother checking her criminal record because she’d come recommended by someone they knew. What’s more, they had the chance to help a person from a different world than their own. If things went well, they’d extend her employment. If not, her open return ticket would end their troubles. They wouldn’t lose much. Neither would the girl and her family. But if things worked out, the daughter would have no difficulty studying, getting a job, and enabling her family to move, before embarking on her dream of helping people on a continent that needed her.
When that happened, she’d send money from the other continent to help with the costs of their new home and the littlest’s education. She was sorry she couldn’t help her next youngest sister: she had to save up for her own studies and still didn’t have a single cent. The mother understood. She told her not to worry about it, that it wasn’t her responsibility. Her sister, on the other hand, thought it was. She insisted that if she hadn’t spent all that money on attending university in the capital, they’d have had enough for her to enroll in a local college, or at least take a course that would help her get work in something other than her mother’s cornmill or raising animals no one thereabouts bought. Or they could have used it to leave that place before the deadline.
The mother considered taking her to see the woman who’d listened to her other daughter, to help her see reason. Of course, first she’d have to ask whether she was available and willing to receive her. She’d helped them before because her ex-compañera from the demobilization camp had asked, but she was under no obligation to do the same for her other daughter. They weren’t friends, though they might’ve been had they met in the mountains.
She can’t say whether she made any friends then. At most, she could call the woman who taught her to operate the radio transmitter a friend. Without her patient instruction, she might have been assigned a more dangerous role and been killed in one of their many skirmishes with the army. The woman who trained her thought that her fine work operating the radio could save the troop many casualties. Which made her try even harder to get it right. In this respect, she was like her ex-compañera’s friend, who labored over every word and punctuation mark in the bulletin as if their entire cause rested on it. Which is why she thought they’d make good friends, even though they felt rather differently about nuns.
She couldn’t blame her. They weren’t the same ones who sold her daughter and they hadn’t treated her badly. Her nuns, in fact, had been very helpful. When she came down from the mountains and back to the city, pregnant and separated from her life partner, they still had her school certificate from the year she’d left, even though she hadn’t sat any exams. Though they couldn’t let her finish her education there because it was against regulations to admit women who were married or had children, they pointed her in the direction of a place they knew would accept her despite it all.
It wasn’t the nicest, there were no daytime classes, and she wasn’t allowed to discuss sex or her way of life with the other students, but at least they admitted her and let her work at a bakery during the day to cover the costs of the child she was to give birth to, and get the qualification she needed to attend university. Based on her own experience, then, she knew that the daughter of this other combatant could get what she wanted if she persevered. She thought the girl’s mother must know this as well: she’d faced tougher situations than those her daughter would soon encounter, and at a more tender age. They and the other women who’d been in combat would rather their daughters never had to fight for anything. They hoped their struggle had been enough to change the world and free them from that need, but none of it was under their control. It may have never been.
Her father wouldn’t have liked to know that she thought this, after everything. She wouldn’t have liked him to discover that all his sacrifices had been in vain, although he said they hadn’t been and tried to see great things in small details. He’d have lost heart if he’d witnessed the times they were living through, just as she had. Maybe he too would’ve cried, from time to time. Maybe the fact that he’d died when he had, with everyone still convinced they’d win and that their lives would be different once the war was over, was for the best.
Her mother didn’t dwell on this. It made no sense to: the man was dead. He’d done what he had to do, and now he was no longer with them. There was no reason to question his motives or accomplishments. She had never done so, not to him or to the sons who left to join him, or to her. She’d never tried to stop them. She doesn’t understand why she now wants to stop her daughter. She has trouble seeing herself or her father in her attitude. She comes off as cowardly. She doesn’t remember her being that way when she was a kid. When had she let herself go soft?
She doesn’t know:
Maybe she’d always been soft, and just hadn’t had the time or chance to show it.
Nonsense.
Maybe it happened when she lost her firstborn. It’s hard losing a child.
She’s saying this as if she weren’t familiar with it herself: she’d lost three kids to starvation, one in battle, and another to the drugs he took to forget what had been done to him under torture. Her daughter hadn’t died. She can get her back whenever she likes.
She’s tried.
She doesn’t buy it.
She tracked her down, went to Paris to meet her.
And does that seem like enough to her?
What else can she do?
Bring her back.
It isn’t that easy.
Isn’t it?
She’d survived the war, pulled one brother from the army, torn the other from the hands of his torturers, and given birth to a girl against her superiors’ wishes. And she couldn’t get her daughter to come home with her?
She couldn’t get the second one not to leave.
That was different: children had to leave to find their way.
She doesn’t remember ever leaving to find hers.
Because she’d been a girl who knew her way home. Her firstborn, on the other hand, appears not to be. Maybe her other girl will help her come back. Maybe when she’s in the same city as her, she can show her the way.
Maybe.
Except her eldest isn’t in Paris anymore.