Mother Moon by Guillermo Márquez-Sterling

Author:Guillermo Márquez-Sterling [Márquez-Sterling, Guillermo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Published: 2017-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Cracked Dolls

Province of Veracruz, 1930 – 1936

The mirror revealed a woman beaten into submission. Her left eyelid sagged, a constant reminder of how violence can deform a radiant face. There wasn’t enough makeup in all of Veracruz that could mask it, yet everyone kept on commenting on how beautiful she looked. El General Juan Andreu Almazán was very generous and bought Rahui a tuxedo. Suré hated to see her son dressed in that manner, but she smiled and thanked el general for his generosity. She stood before the mirror, looking at the ill-fitting wedding dress that was handed down to her. On a tall and slender woman, the dress was meant to look regal. On a short and increasingly rounder woman, like herself, the dress looked ridiculous. But she smiled and thanked her benefactor, who made the arrangements for her to be wed.

This was to be a joyful wedding day, but Suré still remembered that ten years earlier, Almazán took her from Delicias and employed her as a house servant. It wasn’t long before the other servants asked why. She did not clean correctly. She did not cook without burning. She did not greet the guests with a smile, nor did she sing. No one speculated if he kept her for nightly reasons, because el general was married to the beautiful Doña Lilia. After repeated failures of tending to domestic chores, Almazán placed Suré as nanny to the children of the servants. But even that simple task became impossible when she began to teach the children Rarámuri words, which only she understood. Eventually, the other servants pleaded with el general to replace her with a Catholic woman who would teach Spanish, not the language of those mountain demons.

For three years following the bloody misfortune in Delicias, Almazán had provided a home for Suré, but it became clear to him that he could not justify keeping someone employed who was incapable of following the simplest of orders. He never tolerated mediocrity, not during his days in the revolution as the general of the Colorado army, not in the silver mines that he owned, and certainly not in his home. With his personal fortunes greatly debilitated by the U.S. stock market crash, el general grew increasingly impatient with employees who did not meet his expectations. Consequently, within three years of taking Suré from Delicias, he sent her to work as a domestic aid at the Hacienda Santa Rosa, owned by his nephew Fermín.

El general had fourteen nephews and nieces; three of them fought by his side during the revolution. The youngest and vilest of them all, Fermín, volunteered to help his uncle by taking the useless maid off his hands. Suré was not yet twenty-five years old, with three small children to care for, when el general sent her to work as a nanny at his nephew’s hacienda outside of Veracruz, where she endured arduous days trying to satisfy the never-ending demands of over indulged children and adults.

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