The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

Author:Julia Alvarez [ALVAREZ, JULIA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2024-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Alma

Alma is intrigued by Filomena’s obvious affection for Bienvenida’s marker. The caretaker visits the others dutifully, stopping to do her obeisance to el Barón at Papi’s snow globe, rocking it and watching the flakes fall. But she lingers in front of Bienvenida’s sorrowing face, absorbed, sometimes reaching out to stroke the plaster cheeks.

Brava has noticed this affinity as well, but she is not surprised. People do this all the time with art, she says to Alma. At galleries, museums, you sometimes see someone unable to tear her gaze away from a certain face or scene depicted on the canvas, framed, hung on the wall. A Diego Rivera mural will make a jaw drop in awe at all the anonymous hands that make the world run. A Van Gogh will bring back the field of sunflowers outside a childhood home.

Bienvenida’s story has definitely touched a nerve in Filomena.

Not the story itself, Brava doesn’t think. More likely, the face or attitude of the sculpture. Because how would Filo even know the story? Brava herself had only learned about it to satisfy her curiosity when Alma first commissioned the work. Ask any person on the street about Bienvenida Trujillo and I bet you there’s not a single one who will know who she was. They might recognize the name Trujillo, but that’s as far as it goes. Erased from the history books. Brava makes a sweeping gesture as if painting over a figure on a canvas that doesn’t suit her.

Brava is right, of course, no one remembers Bienvenida. After el Jefe divorced her, the new wife and former mistress, Doña María, removed all traces of her predecessor: no more Bienvenida Ricardo Schools; no Avenida Bienvenida—nice ring to it; no playing canciones composed for her on the radio or at fiestas. El Jefe had married his match.

Maybe Filomena has learned the story in other ways, Alma hints. Maybe the characters in the cemetery are releasing their stories, and Filomena hears them. I brought them here to lay them to rest, but maybe that’s not what they want. Alma is testing to see if Brava can tune into the voices, too.

Brava looks thoughtful. A bird calls relentlessly from a nearby laurel tree, the distant roar of traffic out in the carretera is punctuated by the wail of a siren, a car’s muffler backfiring nearby. So, if Bienvenida wanted to be known, why then couldn’t you tell her story?

She didn’t trust me, is all Alma can guess.

So, she trusts Filo?

Maybe Filomena’s a better listener. She won’t make use of her story the way we artists do. There’s a kind of violence in art. Alma thinks of Mami, her fury at being misrepresented. But it’s fiction didn’t work for her. Alma recalls a friend sharing that his own mother was upset about a farmwoman protagonist in one of his novels: You gave her my life without my permission. You put her in that horrid dress I would never wear.

Violence? Brava couldn’t disagree more. I call it surrender, I call it love.

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