The following text is the winning letter of the “Love Letters to my dead” contest organized by Casa Círculo Cultural as part of the celebration of the Day of the Dead, 2023.
Hello Blanquita,
They say that one tends to privilege the bad episodes over the good ones in the family memory, nothing more accurate, I believe. I would like to begin this epistle wondering how much my childhood memories have evolved that I have about you after the learning and maturation process over so many years? forks that those childhood memories were already inevitably contaminated by the experiences lived later.
I start by remembering that when I was little (about 8 or 9 years old) I used to distress your possible absence and my only solution, then, was apparently suicide.
In some of my stories I present you physically as small, fragile but who to me You seemed enormous to me, it was true and it seemed that way until the end. ?My mother, a very petite, pale, fragile and thin woman, was just over five feet tall but she seemed enormous to me.? I wroteYo.
I was an extremely spoiled, overprotected and spoiled child, who was left do whatever he wanted, to whom nothing was ever denied and above all to whom I celebrated absolutely everything, everything; and you were the one who led my court of overprotective and allowed me everything except one thing: to stop taking my food. I remained unharmed -as far as I could- in the face of your harsh attacks that followed by the army of domestic employees, you did not rest until you achieved invigorate even a little my scrawny body, using various ways to convince me to accept even a small bite of food. You improvised, you did magic tricks (and horror), you threatened, you punished and I remember clearly when once you used a whip (the very Peruvian "San Martín" or chicote) that -horror of horrors - beyond the sensation of bursts of heat in my legs I could experience, for the first time, pain in the soul. I have tried to delete that episode but until today it has been impossible for me, I'm sorry mother. You too, I remember Clearly, you were trying to feed me with vitamins, nutritional reinforcements, potions that "woke the appetite", recipes from naturopathic doctors, herbalists and shamans. Today, I have the suspicion that in your role as a mother you had as one of your foundational and inalienable columns that of food. Your vehemence was such for making me eat that you could reach unsuspected limits.
I think I inherited your gesture of solidarity from you, I remember that you used to bring poor children (Ramiro and his little brother Alo were the most frequent) from a very poor neighborhood nearby to the food market so they could play with me and keep me company and they would be happy to be able to have fun with my toys but above all they were excited about the moment of lunch where I saw them gobble down the foods that I despised. Look, surely you Do you have to be poor for you to want to eat? You said, I'm going to send you to live. with them you threatened me.
You used to tell me about your own childhood full of scarcity and abandonment, with a father absent and with a hard-working, abused and servile mother. I remember that you remembered of your mother's effort and sacrifice but also of her ignorance, which was taken advantage of by my grandfather's machismo. You were telling me about your walks to the ?Playa de Ravine? When you were still a little girl, your grandmother took you and your eight little brothers and that despite that they took even more poor children from the neighborhood, who took the tram carrying a pot of red noodles for lunch and then Telling it you seemed happy, and yes, now that I think about it, telling it made you very happy. I remember that you dressed like a queen, not because of your extravagance but rather because of your innate talent to "have taste" although your taste was not only in dressing but also to decorate our house, taste in general to develop yourself in all aspects of social life.
I remember you wearing your Scottish flannel jackets that matched perfectly with your skirt pleated with a large safety pin at the side, calfskin shoes made on hand with a medium-sized purse of the same material hanging from your left shoulder. It is true that your pale complexion gave you many advantages over others who came from the same social level were prohibited to them, as a child I perceived that privilege but I attributed it only on your condition of being my mother.
Another thing you passionately focused on was curing me of anguishing illness of asthma, I saw you unsuccessfully visiting endless doctors, trying different medicines and quite a few treatments which finally led to my unhappy trip to an inland town playing your last card. You tried everything to remove that disease that afflicted me from a tender age but you couldn't much, just as you didn't achieve much with me in any way, I admit. There were many afternoons at the movies, let's go to the matinee. you told me (term used for designate the afternoon performance) and then a little lunch and then to shred, I You dressed and combed my hair and looked at me tenderly: how handsome you are! I think I believed you when you said that. Another time a Lucuma ice cream and then we sit down to watch the sunset, we almost always finished our ice cream in sync as the sun set I said, there you used to ask me questions like: why does God allow poverty? Or which is the purpose of suffering? I was too young then to be able to answer you. I'm not going to touch some of the bad memories I have, I prefer to think not were so bad if not that they became exaggerated and distorted over the years. years. Incredibly, the best memory I have of you is the sublime feeling of that moment when you came into my room in the morning, I was lying on my bed and you, thinking I was asleep, covered me with the blanket up to my shoulders? Always in my thoughts,
Your pussy, Pablo.
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