Violeta

Exert some independence; you're not a little girl. You can't let anyone else decide things for you. You have to take care of yourself in this world, she said. I've never forgotten those words.

Affection must be cultivated, Camilo; it has to be watered and tended like a plant,

Teresa said that until men gave birth and put up with husbands, as women do, they should not have an opinion - let alone decide on - abortion and divorce. She didn't believe that men had the right to an opinion, much less to pass laws on the female body, since they'd never know the exhaustion of gestation, the pain of labor, and the eternal bondage of motherhood.

It’s much easier to be generous with a full belly than an empty one,” they said. I’ve never believed that, though, because I’ve seen that both kindness and cruelty exist everywhere.

The world is paralyzed, and humanity is in quarantine. It is a strange symmetry that I was born in one pandemic and will die during another.

Uncle Bruno and I celebrated the miracle of life with every chick that hatched from its egg and every tomato that came from the garden to the table; he taught me to observe and listen attentively, to get my bearings in the woods, to swim in freezing lakes and rivers, to start a fire without a match, to enjoy the pleasure of sinking my face into a juicy watermelon, and to accept the inevitable pain of saying goodbye to people and animals, because there is no life without death, as he always said.

Sometimes our fates take turns that we don't notice in the moment they occur, but if you live as long as I have they become clear in hindsight.

That fairy tale that all humans are equal before the law and in the eyes of God is a lie, Camilo. I hope you don’t buy into it. Neither the law nor God treats everyone the same.

I said goodbye, kissed her, and asked her forgiveness for the sins of withholding and neglect. I thanked her for having existed, promised her that she would live on in my heart, and in her son's, begged her not to leave me, to visit me in dreams, to send me signs and clues, to return incarnated in every beautiful young woman I saw on the street, and to appear to me in spirit during the darkest hours of the night and in the days of the midday Sun.

There’s a time to live and a time to die. In between there’s time to remember. That is all I’ve done for these past days, silently filling in the missing details to complete this testament—a sentimental legacy, more than a material one.

The rural women taught me that courage is contagious and that there’s strength in numbers; what you can’t do on your own can be achieved together, the more the better.

No one gives you anything in life, Teresa would say, you have to take it by force, and as soon as you get careless they’ll take it back.

It’s hard to make money working; and the harder the work, the worse the pay. It takes effort not to lose everything and end up on the street. It’s easy, on the other hand, to get rich without producing anything, moving money from one place to another, speculating, taking advantage of stock opportunities, investing in the hard work of others.

La bondad desgasta mucho, te lo he advertido. Los malos se divierten más y llegan a viejos en mejores condiciones que los santos como tú.

The reality is that everyone is responsible for their own life. We’re dealt certain cards at birth, and we play our hand; some of us lose, but others may play skillfully from the same bad hand and triumph. Our cards determine who we are: age, gender, race, family, nationality, etc., and we can’t change them, only play them to the best of our abilities. The game is marked by challenges and chances, strategizing and cheating.

Sometimes our fates take turns that we don’t notice in the moment they occur, but if you live as long as I have they become clear in hindsight. At each crossroads or fork we must decide which direction to take. These decisions may determine the course of the rest of our lives.

Me eché a llorar sin control, y ese torrente de lágrimas me fue lavando por dentro hasta que nada quedó del rencor y la culpa y los malos recuerdos.

The path to addiction is straight and well paved;

If God exists...God would be a Marxist.

Esas mujeres del campo me enseñaron que el coraje es contagioso y que la fuerza está en el número; lo que no se logra sola se consigue entre varias, y mientras más sean, mejor.

Allí donde se cruzan o bifurcan los caminos debemos decidir la dirección que vamos a tomar. Esa decisión puede determinar el curso del resto de nuestra vida.

until men gave birth and put up with husbands, as women do, they should not have an opinion about—let alone decide on—abortion and divorce.

Telling you all this, Camilo, the stab of pain that sliced through my chest that day comes back in full force; it’s a recurring pain that ambushes me out of nowhere. There can’t be a pain worse than that one, so great it has no name. I know, I know, who am I to complain? My daughter’s death wasn’t a punishment. I’m just a statistic, this is the oldest and most common suffering in human history. Before, no one even expected children to survive, so many died in childhood, and it’s still that way in a large part of the world, but that does nothing to lessen the horror when you’re the mother. I felt like I’d been emptied out from the inside, I was a bloody cavity, I couldn’t breathe, my bones were made of wax, my soul had taken flight. And the world still turned as if nothing had happened: I stand up, take one step then another, find my voice and respond, I haven’t lost my mind, I drink water, my mouth full of sand, my eyes burning, and my little girl stiff, frozen, sculpted in alabaster—my daughter who will never again call me Mom, who left a tremendous imprint in her passage through my life, the memory of her laughter, her grace, her rebelliousness, her suffering.

become a ghost. They’ve killed several

There's a time to live and a time to die. In between there's time to remember.

the Nordic concept of janteloven, which meant: Don’t think you’re so special—remember that the nail that sticks out is the one the hammer hits.

I didn’t get to prepare myself as well as I would’ve liked, and now there’s a lady, who must be death, sitting at the foot of my bed, motioning for me to follow her. I can’t distinguish clearly between night and day, and it doesn’t matter, because pain and memory aren’t measured with clocks. The morphine puts me to sleep and transports me to the dimension of dreams and visions.