Journal entry: Abuelita

by Natasha Aguilera

Edited by Devon Welsh

A couple of years ago, my abuelitaˆ1 took a trip to Chile and left my tioˆ2 in charge of watering her garden. She had given him specific instructions–which ones to water, how often, how much... which ones to leave alone. But he couldn’t quite remember, and looked around in dismay at the hundreds of expectant plants that had been left in his care. He began counting, before giving up at 700. The garden in their backyard is a sprawling kingdom over which my abuelita reigns.

She often leaves the gas stove on, she seldom takes her blood pressure medication, and I’m still not sure she knows how to use her hearing aid—but her plants are never forgotten, and they’re absolutely beautiful, plump and happy. Eerily, they seem to wait for her. When she’s gone, most of them fade to shades of brown or lime green. They sink deeper in their pots and hunch over in protest. But mostly, they make it through their love drought.

Last year, I visited abuelita in her garden after she came back to the US. She hadn’t planned to, but my grandfather had unexpectedly passed away. My grandparents had gone back to Chile to live out the rest of their lives... but my grandfather passed within the first months of their return. My abuelita never thought it would end like it did, with tata falling and hitting his head while he was alone. He simply never woke up. She is tired too. And last year, when I walked up the steps onto the dirt path in my tio’s yard that led to her, she seemed greyer. She was distant and filled with grief.

She saw me, recognized me, but couldn’t remember my name. Instead of lingering on my face, she moved on as she always has in life, greeting me as “m’hija”ˆ3. She searched the ground for the hose, which was gurgling water somewhere under the stout orange tree near where we were standing. She asked me how I was doing, whether I had a job, and what I did for a living. I’d told her all of this the previous month...how I had become an attorney and had a job at a law firm downtown...I’d been working there for almost a year by then. We’d had the conversation a couple of times. Every time, my career talk was just as boring; every time, she realized it was boring pretty quickly; and every time, she decided to tell me a story about her childhood instead. It was a better use of our time together.

Recently, she’d been recalling the horse races back in Chile. But before the horses, it was the swing. The single swing in a 100-mile radius that all the children in her village in northern Chile were forced to share. My small, wiry, determined abuelita, probably about seven years old at the time, would get up before sunrise, bolt across the dirt roads away from the village to the swing and leap on. She recalled how tightly she gripped the ropes, as if she feared the swing would disappear if she let go in the slightest. With her wrinkly eyes shut tight, she showed me just how tight, squeezing her fists until they shook. “Así!” she would tell me, “Like this!”

Children would come by and cruelly make fun of her for her blue eyes and her poverty. They’d call her names for being born out of wedlock. She would ignore them and hold on tighter. Recognizing that their taunts didn’t deter her at all, they’d resort to begging for a turn, which she assertively refused. She would not stop. She would not get off. No way. She would swing the entire day. A couple of times, she told me—not as a confession, but as a proud proclamation that she once peed right on the swing because she knew that if she took a bathroom break, someone else would steal her spot. She never described soiling her dress as an accident. It was a sacrifice she knew she had to make, and she did it gladly. To hell with the other children. “Y no me bajé! Y NO me bajé! Me quedé TODO el día,”ˆ4 she recalled, looking right through me into that distant time. My abuelita still clings tightly to what is important to her, and she doesn’t care who complains about it.

Today, however, was about the horse races. A cough caught hold of her voice as she started to speak. “Miechica!”ˆ5 she cursed, and without missing a beat, took a sip of water from the hose to clear her throat and started again.

“When I was young like you,” she said, pointing at me with all her bony fingers, “I used to go to the horse races every week after work to watch my father.” As in past renditions of this story, she leaned in and, in a low voice, told me how, after she and her sister would finish working at the suit factory for the day, they’d roll a cigarette and share it on the way to the racetrack. She was so close to her sister; I believe they became closer after their mother died young of an illness. Because she was the eldest, my abuelita took care of her siblings after her mother passed. She spoke of her sister as her best friend. An illness would also take her sister at a young age. Her sister left behind two daughters, and my grandmother took care of them too.

We moved on to water the nispero tree. Pressing her thumb on the hose’s mouth, she began spraying water around the back of the trunk and continued her story. She recalled joking with her sister as they’d make their way across town. They’d smoke, cool off in the fresh air, finish their shared cigarette in the town square, and then head to the big dusty arena where abuelita recalls hearing men screeching at their horses and the varying rumble of horse hooves on the ground. They sat in the stands and watched her father, the small Chilean village’s “Casanova.” He had blond hair and blue eyes, both rare traits in the area at the time. She told me how amazing he was on a horse, showing me by impersonating him with her hands holding reins and moving as if she were galloping.

Although abuelita always speaks fondly of him, he never recognized her as his
daughter—he refused to give her his name. His decision impacted her entire life; those children’s taunts hurled at my abuelita as a child festered and grew into discrimination once she reached adulthood and became a mother... and then her children suffered as well.

In her time in Chile, food was rationed; every family received only one bag of rice and one chicken. My grandmother had seven children...she had eight children, actually, but one of my uncles died of the flu at nine months. Sharing a bag of rice and one chicken between so many children and herself was already difficult, to say the least. Her status as a child born out of wedlock made it worse. My father had told me how bad it was. Abuelita would wait in line all day for her ration. Once she got to the front of the line, every once in a while, the distributor (a pious woman) would shut the door on her. My grandmother, humiliated, would come back later to buy the rice at the back door.

“You know,” my grandmother continued, “I used to race horses, too.” She dropped her hose into one of her raised planters so she could pull some weeds while she talked, “They wouldn’t let me in the actual race because I was a woman. So, you know what I did?” There was a glint of mischief in her eye. “I just rode next to them on the street! Side saddle, which is harder. I won. I even beat my brother.”

By the time abuelita finished her stories about the horse races, we were by the
strawberries. She went silent. I think she had forgotten who I was again. She
looked at me in pain; she was sad. I knew she was scared and didn’t want to ask me who I was again. My grandmother had been suffering from this new stage in her life for some time, but I think this was the first time she completely forgot who I was. I was in pain as well. Still, we smiled. “Abuelita, vamos a tomar un tecito?” I asked, hoping she’d want to come with. It was her ritual to have tea and toast (often my uncle’s hallullas) every afternoon. I felt a pain in my stomach and chest as we turned down the dirt path away from the strawberry patch...

My grandmother’s life has been a harrowing adventure. She survived extreme
economic depression, the incredible grief of the death of her son and her sister, and discrimination in a classist Catholic society. She went from living in an adobe house with no running water in the Andes mountains to watering a garden in her home in Southern California. My grandmother has been to Paris, Pompeii, Las Vegas, Wisconsin, and many places in between. Still, when she goes back to Chile, people make the same comments. They still want her to get off the swing.

But my abuelita, Josialina, doesn’t dwell on tragedy. She remembers the joy of swinging, smoking cigarettes with her sister, and winning the horse races she wasn’t allowed to compete in. Her stories, like her garden, teach the same lesson. That in life, there are droughts. There are tough times. But if you hold on to hope, you’ll make it to the other side. And boy, is it beautiful.

ˆ1 “Granny” in Spanish
ˆ2 “Uncle” in Spanish
ˆ3 “My daughter” in Spanish
ˆ4 “And I didn’t get off! And I didn’t get off! I stay on the whole day!”
ˆ5 Chilean euphemism for “mierda,” which means “shit”

Natasha K. Aguilera writes about life growing up as a queer bi-cultural Latina, and she is working on her first sci-fi novel. Growing up, Natasha lived in San Diego, CA, Wausau, WI, Chile, and France. She now resides in Appleton with her wife, and their dog, Tom Hardy.