November 18, 2012
-
Santana
I climbed up a washed out set of steps to see a small depressing house of one light bulb and broken down bricks, half the roof collapsed. Santana has lived here for 30 years. Dogs surrounded, barking me to leave and a wee little woman came out to greet me, the open scab on her forehead distracting every Portuguese word I knew out of my head.
Santana was too embarrassed to let me come into her house. She and I both hemmed and hawwwed a bit, and then she apologized that she had no place for me to sit. She didn’t have any chairs. We did the interview standing up. She didn’t know when her son’s birthday was. No one does. Sometime in the summer, she said…July? And the day? Well, towards the front part. I wrote down July 11. From now on, it will be July 11. Who gave me this power?
Last year, her older son dies of throat cancer. Her 12 year old son is in 1st grade and cannot read. She doesn’t notice much, because she has never been to school. She knows he is 12, but not what year he was born.
She ‘married’ twice and both were died. Both were abusive alcoholics. The older son works as a motorcycle taxi driver, often shuttling me back and forth to the church when it is worth my time to pay. She cannot talk for long, they have no plumbing, and she needs to walk down the hill to the neighbor to get some water.
