Artwork by Autumn Riddle
The letter "H" is mute in Spanish. It doesn't make a sound. Bertha was her name, but BER-TA is what it sounded like. Her name sounded as rough as she was, yet her face was soft and full of wrinkles. She blamed it on a lady who sold her counterfeit face lotion. She said she got the fake because she was white, and some longos and longas don't like whites.
She terrorized my childhood. I remember her threatening to slap me in the mouth with the back of her hand—if ever talked back—with the same hand she'd slapped my cousin G. But as a young kid, I didn't have the guts nor the tools to stand up for myself. After she got sick, following her first heart attack, my parents took her in. Every day, as soon as I would come home from school, she would enter my room and tell me story after story, speaking to me as if I were an adult. I was always quiet and listened, giving her my full attention (maybe that's why she said she liked me).
"At first we didn't like your father— you know, when your mother brought him home, your uncles asked: 'Who is that longo?'" she looked me straight in the eye. "But he turned out to be okay."
I wanted to scream at her. She probably saw it in my face, yet I was afraid of her hand.
She used to say she was my double mother, and so I needed to love her more. Sometimes, she would grab her breasts, so defiant, the same way a man would grab his crotch, and she'd say, "With these tits I nursed your mom and my other nine children, and if I wanted, I could nurse you, too!"
Her systemic aggressions and rhetoric turned louder and louder inside my head over the years, to the point that one day, I looked at myself in the mirror and felt sad: my skin wasn't as white as hers, my moms, or my cousins'.
She died in our place (my parents had built her a private room with a bathroom on the terrace). She was 82, and her bad heart couldn't keep up. She died in the early hours of the morning after agonizing all night. Everyone came to our house to say their goodbyes. When it was my turn to enter her room, one of my uncles was holding her hand, sobbing, telling her with muttered words that she had been a good mother. I didn't know what to say or do as my mind raced. I finally approached the bed after a fraction of an eternity, kissed her on the cheek, and told her I loved her. I never cried for her, but I have to admit, every so often she is a thought inside my head.
