Calligraphy of the Witch by Alicia Gaspar de Alba

Author:Alicia Gaspar de Alba
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
ISBN: 111-1-11-111111-1
Publisher: Arte Público Press

Chapter 41

22 February 1691/92

Querida Madre,

Today is my daughter’s eighth birthday, and it is you on my mind more than Aléndula. The roosters are starting to crow, and I am reminded of the crazy roosters that would run around in the courtyard of the convent, waking everyone before the bells of San Jerónimo, the bells of all the churches in the city, announced the prayers of the first office. I remember how you loathed that ritual, how you were forced to awaken after only three or four hours of sleep, for you and I always worked late into the night and you had no choice but to dress and trudge to the choir with the other nuns to sing the prayers of the Prima. I remember how sluggish and bad humored you were, so that not even the hot chocolate that Jane prepared for you would sweeten your mood. If only you knew how much I miss being in Mexico, in the convent with you, at this very moment. I wonder who is making your morning chocolate. Who is staying up long past the curfew bells taking dictation and copying manuscripts for you? Does anyone rub the lumbago pains in your back now that I am gone? Do you miss me, too?

It is my daughter’s birthday, and I must shake off all this melancholy. Can you imagine me as a mother? It has been difficult for me. At first I wasn’t even aware of wanting or loving the child that was growing inside me, for she was placed there by a pirate’s violation. Everything changed when she was born, and I saw that she would be the only thing of mine in this strange world to which I was brought against my will. But I have lost everything here—my name, my language, my freedom, even my child, who desperately wants to belong to my golden-haired mistress and not the half-breed slave (for that is what I am considered here, even though I’ve been manumitted by marriage) that bore her. What is so eerie is that each year, my child resembles Rebecca more and more. All of her is golden. Her hair is gold, her eyes amber, like the pirate’s, her skin the color of ripe wheat. Although you are her namesake and I am her mother, she rejects everything papist, as they call us Catholics, for they say we worship the Pope, who is nothing more than the Devil in human form and rich raiment.

Still, I love my bebita. She is my flesh and blood, even if they have turned her against me. Rebecca said she expected the child to be sickly or deformed because of the fever I had when I was first brought from the ship. But she emerged, my Jerónima, almost perfect, only a small part of her afflicted, her right foot thin and curved as a toy scythe. The midwife said she would be crippled the rest of her life, but I prayed to la Virgen to make her well, and she heard my prayers, even here.

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