La Escondida, June 1962
Song of the Mourning Dove
The sky should have been gloomy. The trees should have been bare and the birds, silent, instead of chirping wildly in luxuriant trees under a clear clean blue sky. The nerve of those birds. Why weren’t they in mourning? A leaden stillness filled the house.
I’d gone to Mexico to be with her. She’d begged me to come. She needed me, she said. At a time like this, even Lew wasn’t enough. She needed her sister.
She was staring out the window. The gardener sang as he trimmed the hibiscus: “Dicen que por las noches / nomás se le iba en puro llorar...”
“Ah,” whispered Lola, “Cucurrucucú, the ‘Song of the Mourning Dove.’”
She rested her head on my shoulder and blinked back the tears. We all knew it was going to happen, so why had it taken her by surprise? But death is always a surprise—that instant when a living, breathing being is no longer. Everything seemed different. The rooms felt viscous, asphyxiating. The kitchen felt empty. Doña Antonia’s chair rocked eerily in its corner, vacant. The dresser stood against the wall, strange and lonely, like an old piece of junk stuffed into a storage area in someone else’s house. Lola wandered from room to room fingering objects. The doily that Mami had tatted years ago, when her hands weren’t gnarled with arthritis. The pillow she’d brought from Los Angeles, because she couldn’t sleep on any other. Voices of people tittering and twittering floated through the house. It had always been vibrant with people—movie stars, writers, artists...people like Frida Kahlo and Pablo Neruda, Dorothea Lange and Georgia O’Keeffe, Salvador Novo and Emilio Fernández. Now it was empty, but sounds still haunted the empty spaces.
Lola had held together during most of her mother’s funeral earlier that day, but when she witnessed the coffin being lowered into the ground, her body began to rack and tremble.
Afterward, the white page with the black marks was terrifying in its starkness: Antonia López Negrete de Asúnsolo. Under that, numbers. Under that, a cross. Lola signed the death certificate with a shaky hand: María de los Dolores Asúnsolo López-Negrete de Riley. June 22, 1962. It was over. It was official. Her mother was dead. She was alone.
Well, not entirely alone. Lew was with her, of course, and so was I. But the companion of her entire life, her friend and confidante since birth, was gone.
Now, back at La Escondida, Lola stared out the window dry-eyed. Doña Antonia’s fragrance still wafted on the air. Lola closed her eyes and breathed deeply. The rank odor of blood and shit had vanished, and only the scent of vanilla and gardenias remained.
The stillness of the rooms dizzied her. She buried her face in her hands. What would she do without Mami? During those heady days in Los Angeles, Mami was there. When Jaime died, Mami was there. When Orson ran off to Brazil, Mami was there. When El Indio Fernández pushed her into the mud, Mami was there. A world without Doña Antonia didn’t seem possible.
Outside, the gardener was still singing. His little boy was with him, and they were trimming back the morning glories. Lola watched them work, father and son, four perfectly coordinated hands. They clipped together in harmony, communicating without words, the way she and her mother once had. She would never have that bond with a child of her own. For decades, she’d told herself that she didn’t care about having a family, that her career was enough. But observing the exquisitely synchronized movements of the gardener and his boy, she felt a throbbing emptiness. She didn’t have to explain it to me. I could see it in her eyes.
Lola straightened the doily on the rocking chair. The gardener had stopped singing and was chatting softly with the child, explaining how to prune the roses without damaging them. He guided the boy’s hands gently over the stems, careful to treat the thorns with respect.
We went into Doña Antonia’s room. Lola sat on the bed and stared at the armoire. “What should I do now, Mami?” she asked the polished wood.
“Keep going, Gatita,” I said. “That’s what she would tell you. Listen to her voice in the sunrays bursting on the wall, in the tatted doily on the dresser, in the calla lilies. Listen to what she’s telling you, ‘Your life is your work, and besides, we gatas always land on our feet.’”