“I’m sure Señor Avalos will let you stay here a day or so, but I heard he has plans to do some repairs and changes,” Señora Paz said. “We’ll let him know you are here. You can come and have something to eat with us when you are ready, Delia,” she added. “And until you decide what to do, you are welcome to stay with us as well.”
I said nothing. I kept my head turned away.
“No one was loved here more than Anabela. Come to us when you are ready and if you need anything,” Margarita said.
“Thank you. I mean gracias,” I said quickly. Speaking in English seemed like a betrayal to me now.
I didn’t turn around until I heard them leave.
My sorrow and despair turned to anger. Why couldn’t God wait for me to get home before taking Abuela Anabela? Why was she permitted to die before learning the truth about my new life? I was just as angry as I was the day my parents were taken. When I sat up and looked around, my anger subsided, and my sorrow returned. How empty the house now seemed. Without Abuela Anabela here, I did not care if it was sold.
I went to the sink and washed away my tears. Then I went to the bedroom Abuela Anabela and I had shared and looked for my clothes. Everything was still here, and in fact, Abuela Anabela had washed and folded my things as if she knew I would return. I quickly changed into clean things and then left to go to the cemetery.
I walked through the village like someone walking in her sleep. I saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing. Despite moving in a daze, I made the correct turns and headed up the small hill toward the cemetery, where my grandmother now lay near my parents. As soon as I reached it, I stopped on the pathway. A cat was lying on my grandmother’s freshly dug gravesite. It saw me and sauntered off as if it had been guarding the plot and waiting for my arrival. Although it wasn’t a margay, it looked a little like one, and for a moment I smiled, remembering Ignacio’s grandmother and her belief in sharing your destiny with an animal. Perhaps my margay had sent this cat to stand in until I arrived.
It really wasn’t until I saw her name engraved on the stone that I truly realized Abuela Anabela was gone. I fell to my knees, embraced myself, cried and rocked and cried until I could cry no more. After that, I remained there, picturing her face, her smile, hearing her voice as she sang me a lullaby or said her prayers.
“You will never die the third death, Abuela Anabela, never, as long as I live,” I swore. Then I prayed at my parents’ graves and pressed my hands to the ground, hoping to draw strength up from their sleeping souls. I stayed at the cemetery until it was almost twilight.
On my way home, I stopped at the square and sat for a while. Señor Hernandez came hobbling along with his painted hand-carved walking stick. For as long as I could remember, he was a regular citizen of the square. It was a rare night without him sitting and smoking his pipe or talking softly with anyone who would stop to pass the time. He was a great storyteller, having once been an actor who played in theaters all over Mexico. Although he didn’t look terribly old, I knew he was just as old as Abuela Anabela. She had told me he was getting more and more confused, mixing events from the past with the present, but somehow he still managed to care for himself. He never had a wife, and he never had any children to look after him, so I assumed he was used to being alone. How do you get used to that? I wondered, now that I was alone.
“Ah, Delia,” he said, approaching. “Are you on your way home from school?”
“No, Señor Hernandez. School won’t be over for at least another hour or so.”
“Ah, sí,” he said, standing and gazing about. “I don’t even look at my watch anymore. When I’m hungry, I eat. When I’m tired, I sleep. What difference does time make for an old man, anyway?” He smiled.
Even now, I thought, looking at his aged face, it was possible to see how good-looking a man he was once.
His question told me he either didn’t know or had forgotten that I had left. A realization came to him, however.
“Your grandmother has passed on.”
“Sí, Señor Hernandez.”
“When she was your age, she was the most beautiful young woman here. I would have asked her to marry me first, but her father was not happy to think of an actor as a son-in-law. I can’t say that I blamed him. But, alas, I could not give up the stage. It was in my blood. My father was not happy about it, either. Fathers, unless they are actors themselves, are not happy about their sons and daughters becoming actors.
“But you know why I became an actor, Delia? I became an actor because on the stage, you have control of happiness and sadness, life and death. In this hard world, it’s better to live in your imagination,” he said. “On the stage, you cry only when you play sorrow, and if you don’t want to cry, you don’t play sorrow.”
He sighed and sat beside me, leaning forward a little on his cane.
“I have played an old man on the stage many times, but when I walked off, I was a young man again. I’m stuck in this part now. Until I walk off,” he added, his voice drifting.
He stared ahead, and I could see from the way his eyes moved and his lips softened and then hardened that he was reliving some of his roles, perhaps seeing himself on the stage. I did not speak. I stared ahead with him, reliving my life here in this small Mexican village, the two of us, young and old, caught for a few moments in the same theater.
We were interrupted by Señora Paz and her sister hurrying toward me, shuffling over the cobblestones in synchronization like two parade soldiers, their skirts flapping around their legs.
“There you are,” Señora Paz said. “We were worried about you, Delia. You must come to our home to eat and stay. We discussed it and decided you must not be alone. There is to be no argument about it.”
I started to shake my head.
“You don’t want to be alone in that house now, anyway,” she added.
She was right about that.
“Come, dear,” Margarita said, reaching for me.
Despite their hunger for gossip, they were kindhearted, I thought. Abuela Anabela didn’t dislike them. They were amusing to her. She would want me to accept their generosity, to find comfort in their company. I stood up.