Las madres by Esmeralda Santiago EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Esmeralda Santiago
- Language: English
- Genre: Hispanic American Literature
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Luz
JULY 4, 2017
After Luz Peña Fuentes settled in the United States, the accent mark over the
n in Peña was left out in English. In Spanish her full name means “Light
Rock Fountains” but without the tilde, Pena Fuentes means “Sorrow
Fountains” or “Penalty Fountains” or “Pity Fountains” or “Shame Fountains.”
“Crossing an ocean made me sadder,” she tells her daughter, Marysol Ríos
Peña, whose first name in English means “Sea-and-Sun.” “I’d rather be rock
than sorrow.”
“You are who you believe you are, Mom. Your name and your identity are
different things.”
“Sí, eso es verdad. That’s a good way to look at it.” Luz makes note of
Marysol’s words in her journal.
At a clinic, Luz is annoyed when a nurse calls for Mrs. Pena. “Am I
Señora Pitiful?”
“No, Mom. Far from it. You have a good life and you’re loved. Nothing to
pity there.”
Luz doesn’t have to add that to the page. At fifty-seven years old, and in
spite of some old injuries and age-related creaks and aches, she’s physically
fit, has satisfying work, and lives comfortably.
On weekdays, Marysol walks Luz to Mi Casa Adult Daycare, around the
corner from their home. There, Luz feeds clients, wheels them from one table
to another when they want to play cards or dominoes, keeps them company in
the garden behind the building, and three times a week, leads them in chairbound exercises.
She often interrupts her tasks to add entries in her journal. When the pages
are full, she shelves the journal next to those already arranged in her living
room, the spines labeled by day, month, and year so she can later consult what
she did when, with whom, and where. She reads her memory books with the
same excitement and engagement she does beloved novels, finding new details
with each reading. Sketches, drawings, cartoons, tickets from visits to a
museum, the theater, the zoo, or the Botanical Gardens interrupt her looping
handwriting. She lingers on the text or on the details that evoke a memory, a
curiosity, a revelation.
This is my life, she’ll tell herself, and just as often, Is this my life? The
statement does not invalidate the question.
After work and dinner, Luz enters her studio, formerly Marysol’s
childhood bedroom. On the wall, Luz has lettered PEÑA on a granite slab her
friends brought from the abandoned quarry near their house in Maine. Now
Luz prepares the materials for her next art project.
Soon after she met Danilo, the man who became her husband, Luz drew
his portrait on a stone she picked up in Van Cortlandt Park. He liked it so
much, she gave him a self-portrait for their first wedding anniversary. A year
later, she painted Marysol’s image and for every birthday after that. Marysol
now displays them in her apartment across the hall in their two-family house.
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