A WORLD BENEATH HER BODY
Due to some of the unexpected circumstances of life, Soledad Bautista arrived on Miracle Mile and lived under the care of her youngest daughter, Ximena. For most of her adult life, Soledad lived on an isolated ranch, where she raised her eleven daughters. Ximena has intense memories of her childhood on that ranch, scenes recorded perfectly in her mind like those of a movie. Now, those scenes come to her more vividly and easily than the everyday events of her life.
She thinks about her mother’s breakfasts with a deep yearning. Her mother always prepared fresh chicken eggs with golden yolks. She accompanied them with cups and cups of coffee made only with milk from the cows—never with water, because it dilutes the flavor, according to Soledad. Ximena remembers the infernal summer nights, when the mosquitoes celebrated, binged until they burst, and died in the midst of their human feasts. In her construction of the past, she also re-lives the winter, when they rationed hot water for bathing. These were precarious times for the Reyes family. Even so, Ximena’s most vibrant memories are those of plates full of her mother’s love incarnated. Ximena swears that one slept better in those times.
Ximena's sisters don't remember their upbringing in the same way. Some spent the days waiting for the arrival of gringos that would save them, that would take them out of the poverty that they loathed so much. The gringos who did arrive did not want to help. They had more perverse intentions. When they would leave, they would always take more than they would give. Some of her other sisters don’t have so many memories of those times. Mariana, in particular, lost years of her memories to alcohol and to other addictions that the family never found out about.
———
Soledad had twelve hearts. Any pain or joy that afflicted the whole family she felt first in the eleven hearts of her daughters and finally, in her own. She was a roof and shelter for her children. One of her greatest sadnesses in life was when her daughters began to look for their own roofs. Little by little, her sisters started to create their paths in life. The first to go was Josseline, the oldest. She married a man who took her to a distant city in the north. It was the kind of city that always appeared on the television. That man promised that they were going to the land of opportunity and ascension. He promised her happiness. Then followed Lola, and afterwards Mariana. One by one, they all distanced themselves from their past lives of poverty. They sought to separate themselves from their old realities as much as possible. Ximena never understood that anxiety that they had, that profound need to abandon and forget. She was the only one who stayed by her parents’ side.
The years passed and eventually, Soledad’s husband passed away. They buried him on a plot of land that they had bought for both of them—to bury Soledad and her husband together. Soledad could no longer sustain herself nor her daughter. When she married, Ximena decided to follow her sisters’ footsteps, and took her mother with her. Soledad had to abandon her ranch, her home. She moved to a strange land, where they didn’t speak her language and she did not speak theirs. She never made the effort to learn that language full of venomous words. Soledad knew that the people who spoke it would never attempt to learn hers. They only tried to extinguish it. In her sleep, she heard their whispers slowly erasing words from her memory. They chose to be ignorant about her existence, so she elected to be just as ignorant. They were neighbors, but complete strangers.
It was here, in this strange land, where Soledad learned that every life has a price, and one pays that debt with their body. She discovered that living cadavers exist, bodies wasted away with inflamed minds and destroyed bones. And the bags under their eyes … Soledad had truly never seen anything like them until she arrived here. She was frightened when she realized that she was getting bags like theirs under her own eyes. They were a premonition, a symptom, of death. The dead are everywhere—the majority of them transport themselves in their cars that they learned to want since they were little. They participate in this perpetual cycle of following the rules. They learned very young how to obey. That way, these worn out bodies with empty minds don’t need someone to give them orders. They regulate themselves because they don’t know any other way of living. They live in fear of death, but they have no idea that they have already died. They fear hell without realizing that they are already there.
Since arriving, a hatred started to grow in the family. Soledad realized that parents unlearned how to be patient with their children. Their bodies were always so tired that they could only speak with their children in yelled words. They started to live their lives correcting them, teaching them how to obey. In the end, one day, their kids would have to wear out their bodies too. It was better to show them that pain young, so that they wouldn't be so surprised when they were adults.
Soledad always knew that this painful ideology would result in pure tragedy. An example: in a moment of tiredness, Josseline didn’t realize that her son, who was just three years old, went outside. He entered the pool that they had just built at their enormous house, in the City of Ascension. He drowned, the week after his baptism. That moment marked Josseline’s body with suffering.
Josseline used to visit her deceased child in the cemetery every day. For years, she would cry until the sun dipped below the horizon. Sometimes she did not return home until very late, and sometimes she did not return at all. Ismael would have to drag her back to the house. Her crying was her only physiological response possible for the immeasurable years lost. Her doctor says that the glaucoma she suffered later in her life was the result of spending so much time crying. Josseline and Soledad both carried it around that pain like rocks in their shoes. They had dark bags around their eyes, swollen with desolate sadness.
According to Ximena’s youngest son’s theory, everyone in the family is neurotic because they inherited their worries as an ancestral curse. He believes that that is the seed of disdain that was planted in their heads—the weed that killed all of the flowers. Soledad spent much of her old age trying to understand the origin of that resentment, that indifference that burns like acid. She reached the conclusion that the family did not suffer from a curse, but rather from a molding. The family was molded with this country’s rotten clay.
Soledad never allowed herself to be empty like them, but she couldn’t protect her daughters from that life. All of them learned to live with their minds either in the future or in the past. If they think about the future, it is because there will always be more to do or conquer. If they think about the past, it is because there was something that they didn’t do or didn’t conquer. Like the small children of this land, they were conditioned to think like this. Soledad supposed that it was because an empty mind didn’t know how to live in the moment. It would never question or understand the injustices of the present.
———
She lived the last few years of her life with Ximena, her husband, and her four children in the white trailer on Miracle Mile. They moved to the same city where Josseline lived, but not all of her sisters were as close. Some of them went to even bigger cities. Others went in search of sceneries that would make them think about the future. Her family would be eternally divided and separated—be it because of family disputes, the distance between cities, or the borders that do not allow for completeness of the soul.
Ximena's husband built a ramp up the side of the trailer so that Soledad could enter the house in her wheelchair. She needed it because she had lost her left leg to gangrene—she smoked for almost six decades. Ximena well remembers the times when her mother would send her to the market to buy packs of cigarettes: "Bring some old cigarettes to your viejita, mija." At the time, cigarettes cost pennies, and whoever had a few pennies could buy them. She thinks about every “mija” fondly.
The street began at an exit off of Highway 10. On Miracle Mile, there was a little bit of everything. During those times, there was a gas station infamous for its wide selection of hot dogs and taquitos soaked in oil. On the opposite side of the gas station, a police department loomed threateningly over all the residents. A block ahead, a pay-by-the-hour motel, and near the motel, an ancient bowling alley. Further from the bowling alley stood a strip club—T.D.S. Girls, Girls, Girls!—where old men would spend all their money and embarrass themselves. Once, the Reyes family’s neighbor, Ana Lucía, heard that her husband was a regular. She dragged him out by the ear.
At the end of Miracle Mile, which later turns into Oracle Street, there was a plot of green land. It was one of the only green spaces in this infernal desert city where the sun dries out any being that cannot overcome its dangerous brightness. When passing it in the car, she always exclaimed, "Oh, what a wonderful garden!" Her eyes glimmered, impressed by the trees that protected the grass and the flowers below. "How I would love to care for a garden like that." Once, when she was in the car with Natalia, instead of Ximena, Soledad started daydreaming aloud about the magical garden. Natalia laughed tenderly and had to disappoint her: “Mamí, it's not a garden. It’s a cemetery.”
…
For the rest of her life, Soledad looked for that sensation of being truly alive, of feeling intimacy with her land, her body, her tongue. If she couldn’t return to the life she had before, she would have to reconstruct it where she could. Simply resisting the pressure to waste away her body and die was not enough. She was always surrounded by ugly words and insecurities, so she wanted to find a place where she felt she belonged. Her eyes started to lend themselves more and more to the beautiful things in life, as she searched for what was missing. It was an endless search. But even so, she would find lost pieces of that feeling everywhere.
For her own good, Soledad kept her wrinkled heart well-fed. She found her nutrition in the sparse, rare flowers that survived the sun's fatal rays. She saw herself in the daisies that peeked through the sidewalk cracks. She found love’s power in the sunrises that painted the sky in the rosy hue of her grandchildren’s cheeks. When her grandchildren could not sleep, she would stay awake with them to watch the stars. They always asked her about God, and she always struggled with her answers—but she would find strength in the song of the mourning doves. They rehearsed in chorus at dawn, with the intention of pulling her out of her nightmares and bringing her into a world of tranquility. They constructed this world for her from the trees and saguaros they inhabited.
Whenever she had the opportunity, she would do her best to break the curse that she could see shaping her grandchildren with her own eyes.
———
One night, Josseline called Soledad on the phone. She was surprised because Josseline almost never called her. Whenever she wanted to talk with her, she would visit her at Ximena’s house. Soledad went to her room to answer. She perceived that Josseline was crying. “But mija, what happened?” Josseline explained that she was going to divorce her husband. She couldn’t tolerate him anymore. She explained to Soledad how she truly felt, how lost she felt in her own home. Josseline spent decades pretending she had overcome it, that she was happy. But she wasn’t. Her marriage was a perfect union of resentment and greed. It seemed as though she had everything and nothing at the same time. “I lost myself on this path,” she told her mother. Her husband made her feel guilty for what had happened. He always destroyed any trace of happiness with the word “fault.” Soledad reminded her that he was wrong.
When Josseline hung up, Soledad breathed in deeply. She lied down, and started dreaming. She had prepared herself for her nightmares, but this time, they didn’t appear. In her first dream, she was alone on her farm. She closed her eyes and looked directly at the sun. She could never do this when she was awake because her eyes would burn. Here, she took advantage of the opportunity. She was seeing pure light, and that was how she felt inside.
Her dream changed. She was in her room in the trailer. She saw a dark figure, a shadow, in the corner of the room by the door. But she wasn’t afraid. It was watching her. It was protecting her. The shadow tried to speak, but its words didn’t get to her. It was as though the empty space between them was swallowing its voice.
Suddenly, she was floating in the ocean. She was far from land, but wasn’t alone. With her ears submerged in the water, she listened to the whales’ song. She sang along with them. A shark approached her out of curiosity, but ignored her when it realized that she was where she belonged. There existed an entire world below her body. All of the beings here kept her company. Underneath her raced the ocean’s pulsing heartbeat that filled every corner of the earth’s veins with water.
The next day, Soledad awoke to the mourning doves’ song. She prepared her coffee with only milk. She made herself comfortable in her wheelchair on the patio. She watched the sunrise, like she did everyday since she arrived here, but this morning was peculiar. She felt a unique vibration in the air. The sun’s heat touched her, and then suddenly! She felt a strange, rare sensation.
Suddenly, she could feel her legs again. Her heart filled with freedom. She felt like she was dancing with her ancestors. It’d been such a long time since she had danced. The shadow singing a hymn of intimacy. She was alive, but truly alive. All of the thoughts, worries, and sadness melted away. She clung to that tranquility. She didn’t want to lose it. She lifted her arms and hugged it like an old friend, like someone she knew in a past life. The tears ran down her face. She closed her eyes to eternalize the moment in her memory, and she never opened them again.
YEARS LATER
Every change, no matter how small, fascinates me. We get off Highway 10 and turn right, towards Miracle Mile. We find the gas station completely renovated, and the motel too. It seems that they finally closed the bowling alley and the parking lot, though the trailer is still standing in the place where we left it. Only now, it is painted a dark brown color, and the ramp is missing. It seems that the trailer is painted a different color every year. It always impresses me how much spaces transform when they cease to be under our control.
We arrive at the end of the street, but stop before we get on Oracle Street. We couldn’t bury her with my grandfather, in her motherland. When I was 15, my parents and I went to a city hundreds of miles to the north. We return to this road every year, so she knows that we haven’t forgotten her.
We bring some red and white carnations to my grandmother Soledad. The weather is beautiful. It is a winter day, but the sun’s warmth makes us want to spend the entire day laying down in the grass. We sunbathe and appreciate the garden that my grandmother loved so much. We walk around the graves and see all the flowers, some plastic and some real. Some are totally abandoned, covered with dirt. There are other graves with lit-up Christmas trees, with pinwheels that suppress their desire to fly. They remain still in the absence of wind.
My mom reminds me of how much my grandmother loved flowers. I think to myself about the heart leaf that we have at home. From my room, I always hear my mother coddling the plant with sweet words while she pours more water on it and adjusts it by the kitchen window. My mother called the heart leaf Soledad. I wonder how it’s doing.
My mother's brown-red hair shines in the sun. The natural color of her hair is a dark brown, almost black, like mine. It has now been almost five weeks. I see her gray hair escaping from the scalp, and I remind her that they are heavenly comets that God gives her as a gift for her birthday, but she just laughs, and I know she never believes me.
She tells me stories from my childhood that are, for me, very distant dreams, fragments that seem increasingly unrecognizable every day. I listen carefully to every word—I want every chisme, every drop of detail, every little laugh that slips away from the intonations of her voice. It excites me how easily she accesses her memories. She narrates her life on the ranch with precision and nostalgia. The perfect home from her childhood only exists inside of her now. We talk about my grandmother. I see in her eyes the desire to cry, and she sees it in mine too. We hold ourselves back. She tells me defeatedly, "Now I understand her more than ever."
We arrange the carnations together with the daffodils that my Tía Josseline brought. They are still alive, despite being there for over a month. My mom tells me that, from time to time, when she feels her mother’s absence, my Tía Josseline finds a comfortable chair and loads it in the trunk of her car. She places her chair next to Soledad’s grave. They spend hours talking and joking, until her dimples get tired from smiling and her stomach hurts from laughing. They pray together. They spend all day smelling the flowers and marvelling at the sky.
“Josseline does not cry because she knows she is not alone,” my mom explains to me. She stays until the sky chooses another color of fabric to weave itself with. It starts with gold. Then it follows with pink and red. It weaves itself in a slow, undulating, serene manner, like the sea. Finally, the sky contents itself with a strong purple. The darkness of the night overcomes the light of day. There, in her garden of eternity, Soledad reminds Josseline: "It’s time to go home."
Translation by Megan Bott
