The Family Izquierdo by Rubén Degollado

Author:Rubén Degollado
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

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The morning after Dina Torres’s pesadilla—in which her envidioso former neighbor, the Brujo Contreras, dispatched the blue-black grackle birds to curse her with the evil eye—she made the decision to seclude herself in her house. By keeping herself hidden from the yellow mal de ojo of the multitude of zanates around her house and across the Valley, Dina believes she can keep Contreras’s bad intentions and jealous hatred for her, her father, and her family at bay. If the zanates are encamped around her home, she reasons, they will leave Papa Tavo alone along with the rest of her family, the Izquierdos, and she herself will be safe. If she just stays inside, the Brujo Contreras cannot get back at them for their perceived offense against him of having many beautiful children, of being successful in business, and being able to leave the barrio Zavala, while most of his children died and he was still poor. To keep her mind off of the Brujo Contreras’s curses and the plague of zanates with their taunting shrieks and croaks reverberating in the trees outside, Dina focuses on scripture, The Catholic Encyclopedia, prayers, photographs, music, and, of course, the Rosary. Her week is marked by the mysteries Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, and Luminous. After she reaches for the eternal with each bead, each decade, and she’s grown tired of reading, Dina passes the week ruminating on better times by playing Papa Tavo’s passed-down record collection of the old cantantes, the music of her upbringing in the Zavala, and looking at pictures of the Izquierdos’ and Torreses’ lives. She passes through her house listening to Jorge Negrete, Lola Beltrán, María Félix, Vicente Fernández, and the Christian conjunto of Paulino Bernal, while her fingertips hover over picture frames on the mantel, the Olan Mills portraits of the family, the old panoramic of the Izquierdos in front of the church when all of the sobrinos were so much smaller.

Dina spends her days thinking about the past because she has always wanted to hold on to the present, hoping things would never change. As she saw her older siblings Gonzalo, Braulio, and Marisol marry and leave home to start their own families, she knew each moment in their lives was a fleeting one and so she held on by becoming the chronicler of these moments. Dina in the middle—the last of the older children, the little mother to the younger brothers and sisters—has albums and boxes of photos she has either taken herself or the family has entrusted her with, black-and-white snapshots of her family while they all lived together at the house on Aurora.

Dina picks up the loose photographs she keeps in a Gamesa cookie box, careful not to smudge them. She tells herself she will organize each captured moment chronologically, but she never does. Instead, she shuffles the photographs like playing cards, enjoying the moments of surprise as she flips through the stacks, wondering at what memory from the Izquierdo history she will come to next.

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