1.
When I was 14, I read a book of stories by Gabriel García Márquez titled Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories. I still have the copy of that book. I do not hold onto books usually. I try to get rid of them every so often because my father hoarded books. I do not think about the library or collection I could have one day. I think of what I do not want to become, what I do not want to inherit, even though you do not get to choose what you inherit.
2.
My mother left Colombia and came to California; my father left Connecticut and landed in California. They met in Los Angeles, married, and had me. I always thought they were opposites, my mother and father, and, for the most part, they are. But they are similar in how they talk about the people and the places that they left, which is to say they do not talk about them.
With my father, everything about the past was a joke or off the table, and this combination was apparent when he would say in a sing-song tune: “Don’t ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.” My mother did not like questions either. She still does not. She becomes anxious. I understand their silence. It has to do with trauma or, maybe in Márquez’s words, misfortune. Strange that these two people, my mother and my father, would marry and have a daughter that would become a woman who makes a life out of stories, even as she feels robbed of her own. Or maybe it is not strange at all. Maybe it makes perfect sense.
My father is on his deathbed and I went to visit him and found myself thinking, Now is the time. You can ask him questions. He is at his most vulnerable. As he transitions from life to not-life, a man is dying, his lung capacity so weak that his voice is only a whisper, and I cannot stop being his daughter and feeling like I am owed something. Something he cannot give me.
3.
The copy that I still have of Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories is from Brand Bookshop. During high school, I had a crush on a bookseller there; he was not that much older than me, and a few years ago, he passed away. Last year the former store owner died and the year before Brand Bookshop went out of business. It no longer exists. I spent many hours in that bookstore as a girl with my father and then later with my high school friends, friends I no longer know.
“There is no real way to deal with everything we lose,” Joan Didion once wrote. Maybe because there is no real way to deal with what I have lost, I keep this book. I hold in my hands a concrete item and the past is with me again. To think that time is divided in clear lines of past, present, and future is one way in which we try to deal with what we lose. Maybe because there is no real way to deal with these things, I write. I make meaning out of things, knowing that to do so may be a futile attempt at controlling the uncontrollable. I write about Innocent Eréndira, about what the characters lost and inherited. I make connections that may or may not exist.
4.
The short story collection opens with “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother.” In the story, the character Eréndira is overworked and exhausted from doing endless chores for her cruel grandmother. One evening, without having the strength to get undressed, “she put the candlestick on the night table and fell onto the bed. A short while later the wind of misfortune came into the bedroom like a pack of hounds and knocked the candle over against the curtain.” The grandmother’s mansion burns to the ground, and the old woman looks at the ruins. “‘My poor child,’ she sighed. ‘Life won’t be long enough for you to pay me back for this mishap.’” The grandmother makes her 14-year-old granddaughter have sex with countless men in order to pay her back for what she has lost.
At first, the heartless grandmother keeps careful track of the debt owed. After six months, she says it will take Eréndira eight years, seven months, and eleven days to pay her back. But, as time passes, the grandmother stops speaking of the “original debt, whose details had become twisted and whose installments had grown as the costs of the business became more complicated.” Instead the grandmother says, “When you no longer have me…you’ll be free and happy.”
5.
My copy of Innocent Eréndira is worn, the pages are yellow, stained with age, an indication that time is passing. The paperback cover is torn and will fall off soon and when the cover falls off, I plan to frame and hang it on the wall near my bookshelf.
The cover illustration depicts a young woman who is sitting naked and alone. Her legs are bent and tucked into her body and her head is bowed down into her chest and hidden from view. This is the first image of Eréndira, a sad and vulnerable girl left to comfort herself.
I wonder if as a 14-year-old girl, I bought this book because I liked the cover illustration, because I related to it. I wonder if I as a 32-year-old woman, I plan to keep the cover because I still relate to the image of her.
6.
There are many images of Eréndira throughout the story that are difficult to read. Her first sexual experience is with a man who rapes her. Eréndira tries to shout and fight him, but he slaps her, grabs her, and holds her down. Finally “Eréndira then succumbed to terror, lost consciousness, and remained as if fascinated by the moonbeams.” The grandmother is in a room nearby. She negotiated 250 pesos for the price of her granddaughter, whom she described to the man as “completely new.”
Later in the story, there is another image of her “unable to repress the trembling in her body and she was in sorry shape, all dirty with soldier sweat.” When the grandmother sees her in this state, she tries to tell Eréndira that there are only 10 soldiers left, and “Eréndira began to weep with the shrieks of a frightened animal.” The grandmother strokes her granddaughter’s head and says, “The trouble is that you’re weak.”
7.
I consider the grandmother’s past. Her husband died of a fever, her son was murdered, and she buried them both in her courtyard. After her mansion burns down, she brings the bones of her husband and her son with her. From one town to the next, she carries her heavy losses. She cannot let them go.
While she sleeps, she has “repressed ravings,“ and relives trauma. Her dreams are dark and turbulent. She screams and sobs, she sings for God to bring back her innocence. She retells of a time when a “crew of madmen” arrived and of one man in particular who had the “breath of death” and called her “the most obliging, most beautiful woman on earth.” While she dreams, the grandmother tells the story of a man (presumably the same man, the man with the breath of death) who wanted to come into her bedroom. She says, “I felt I was going to die, soaked in the sweat of fear.” She barricaded the door. He invaded her space and she gave him a warning and he just laughed. Then she slit his throat.
8.
The women and men who act cruel in life often have a past that is filled with darkness. I think of my father. He knew how to hurt people and he did. He did not have friends. He did not have close relationships with his family. Many of his brothers and sisters did not speak to him, and I stopped speaking to him in my mid-20s. When he was dying, when he had little time left, I decided to see him again. He was delirious and wide-eyed with pain. Repeatedly he asked me, begged me to help him. He wanted someone, anyone to ease his suffering. This was something I could not give my father, could never give him.
When I started this essay, my father was on his deathbed and now as I finish it, he is no longer alive. When I think of his past, I am left with questions. I find myself asking: How much did his past shape him? And when I ask that question, I am asking: How much of a choice did he have in becoming the man he became? How much did Eréndira’s heartless grandmother have a choice in becoming the woman she became? I do not know the answers to these questions, and I likely never will. What I do know is that my father’s past is also my past. The grandmother’s past is also Eréndira’s past. This is how trauma works. It gets passed down. This is what we inherit.
9.
At the end of the short story, a young man with the “gringo name” of Ulises, who has fallen in love with Eréndira, kills the grandmother. He commits murder because Eréndira asks him to do so. He says, “For you I’d be capable of anything.” Murdering the old woman is no easy task and it takes a few attempts. When she is lifeless, he is no knight in shining armor. The last image the reader has of Ulises is him “lying face down on the beach, weeping from solitude and fear.” Eréndira does not live happily ever after with the young man who loves her. She loves him but does not choose him. Instead, she chooses to run.
“She was running into the wind, swifter than a deer, and no voice could stop her.” Eréndira runs and runs and runs. She outruns her past or runs from it or runs it out of her system. Or maybe she runs with her past. Her grandmother’s blood flows through her veins and Eréndira runs and run and runs. I do not believe the grandmother was right. I do not think Eréndira finds freedom or happiness without her, but I believe that in her flight, she experiences moments of joy.
10.
The story ends with these words: “…she was never heard of again nor was the slightest trace of her misfortune ever found.” This is interesting because there are two characters that keep alive Eréndira’s story of misfortune: a musician by the name of Rafael Escalona and the narrator of the story. The narrator is a man who saw Eréndira and her grandmother but once in a border town. Years later, he hears Rafael Escalona sing a song that “revealed the terrible ending of the drama” and the song inspires him. He thinks that “it would be good to tell the tale,” which I understand. I am not the kind of woman who runs. I am the kind of woman who tells the story. I am not running like Eréndira “beyond the arid winds and the never-ending sunsets.” I am sitting in bed and finishing this essay, and as I write, I experience moments of joy, that same kind of joy I imagine Eréndira experiences as she runs.
