From Grandmother to Granddaughter: Salvadoran Women’s Stories by Michael Gorkin Marta Pineda and Gloria Leal

Author:Michael Gorkin, Marta Pineda and Gloria Leal
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520222403
Publisher: University of California Press

We went on living up there in Cabañas. I had my first four children there. Jorge and I were in our own house, my in-laws in theirs with María. And my mother, yes, she was here too, raising my younger brothers and sisters by herself. Except she wasn’t just by herself all that time. She somehow got hooked up with two different bolos, one right after the other, and she had a child with each. What slobs they were! They just came to live there, drink and screw, that’s all. Drunken bastards, that’s all! Especially the last one. He was about fifteen years younger than my mother.

I tell you, one time I came over to my mother’s house and there she was running into her house as this drunken bastard was coming after her to beat her. I started screaming at him, “You drunken slob! Who the hell do you think you are, running after my mother like this? My father is gone, but you’re not the boss here. We are! If you don’t cut out your shit, me and the rest of us, we’re going to throw your ass out of here!” Well, the drunken fool, real brave, picks up his machete and whacks one of my sisters, Isabel. Thank God, he caught her with the reverse side— that drunken slob! I went running off to get Jorge, but by the time I got him, the whole thing had calmed down. No more beatings that day. But then you know what happened? A few months later, this same slob who beat Isabel, what does he do? He runs off with her! She was only fourteen. The bastard took her to San Salvador, to go live with him there. Of course Isabel didn’t stay with him. A short while later, she left him and found some work in San Salvador as a maid. I found out because she came back a year later with her new boyfriend. Since then, I haven’t seen her. Twenty years ago was the last time I saw her. My mother never said a word about the whole thing. And to this day, I’ve never said anything to her about it. It’s not one of those things a daughter can talk about with her mother. All I can say is, well, at least after that she didn’t take up with any more drunken fools. She’d had enough after that slob, I guess.

It was a little while after Isabel showed up with her new boyfriend and then disappeared again that me and Jorge and the rest of us had to leave our village in Cabañas. We got rid of our land there and moved to San Vicente. Why did we move? The plain truth is that in Jorge’s family there were also some problems going on at the time. It wasn’t safe for us to stay there in Cabañas any longer. Really, it was a stupid thing. Jorge’s brother had taken a fancy to a young girl in the village—a girl who was the daughter of a cousin of mine.

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