“
A thread of light leaked
through the window, which was ajar, and he was able to make out the
wide bed in which his father had died and his mother had slept every
night since she was married. It was carved in black wood, with a
canopy of angels in relief and a few scraps of red brocade that were
frayed with age. His mother was propped up in a half-seated position.
She was a block of solid flesh, a monstrous pyramid of fat and rags that
came to a point in a tiny bald head with a pair of eyes that were sweet,
blue, innocent, and surprisingly alive. Arthritis had transformed her
into a monolithic being. She could no longer bend any of her joints or
turn her head. Her fingers were clawed like the feet of a fossil, and in
order to sit up in bed she had to be supported by a pillow at her back
held in place by a wooden beam that, in turn, was propped against the
wall. The passage of time could be read by the marks the beam had cut
into the plaster: a path of suffering, a trail of pain.
“Mama,” Esteban murmured, and his voice broke in his chest,
exploding into a contained sobbing that erased in a single stroke his
sad memories, the rancid smells, frozen mornings, and greasy soup of
his impoverished childhood, his invalid mother and absent father, and
the rage that had been gnawing at him ever since the day he first
learned how to think, so that he forgot everything except those rare,
luminous moments in which this unknown woman who now lay before
him in her bed had rocked him in her arms, felt his forehead for fever,
sung him lullabies, bent over to read the pages of a favorite book with
him, had wept with grief to see him leave for work so early in the
morning when he was still a boy, wept with joy when he returned at
night, had wept. Mother, for me.
”
”