Elena was the village woman who had started the school. My daughter
was a teacher. Elena accepted me simply because I was Leslie’s
mother. There was an ease between us despite the limitations of my
Spanish, and her dignified formality.
During my last week, Elena invited
me to walk through her village.
“I worry about Helen,” She said of her toddler granddaughter,
playing in the room that served as kitchen, dining and living room,
now filled with the
scent of sauteing onions, the sound of Graciela slapping masa into tortillas.
Elena had said this before, but I hadn’t responded.
“What worries you?” I asked.
“That she might be crazy?”
“Why?” I asked, taken aback.
“She has parades with elephants and giraffes that aren’t there. She
plays school, pretending to be their teacher. There is a crazy man in the village
who mutters to himself and sees things that aren’t there. You are a psychologist.
Is she crazy?”
Elena had no education. The only time she snuck into school with
her brothers, her father pulled her out and ripped up her notebook.
We
climbed up the hill quilted with increasingly shabby plywood and
tin dwellings, distant from the valley’s electricity and running
water; over their tops majestic volcanos and green forests came into
sight, in stunning contrast.
“What a view,” I said, as if I didn’t see the houses.
Elena spoke again of her childhood, and Helen.
“I never played. When I was eight, I earned money babysitting.
I was so small, I fell over the first time I picked the baby up. All
I wanted was to learn
to read. My friends’ fathers hit them, but let them go
to school. I would have traded places.... It was long ago. Why
am I still sad?” Elena began
to cry.
I couldn’t compare our towns, our hills, our lives,
but I did.
“Because you couldn’t have what you wanted most.” I said, touched
by the tears which broke through her formality.
“Your suffering led you to make life better for others. Sadness
doesn’t
go away, but good came out of it. You know, you and Helen are
really a lot alike. Your imagination allowed you to dream up the school.
The difference is that she
gets to play, look at books—these things feed her
imagination. It is free because she is cared for. Your dream
was denied, but you channeled it
into this school. Her dreams are encouraged. In a way, we get
a second chance though our children.”
Elena nodded.
“You worry about Helen because she has experiences you can’t understand.
Elena, I was worried when Leslie came here. It’s the same—it
was beyond me. We parents, we worry about the unknown.”
“Helen isn’t crazy?”
“No. She has imagination, like you!”
The next morning,
Elena and Helen arrived at school, Helen with her stuffed bunny tied
like a baby on her back. Both were smiling.
“How is your baby?” I asked.
“Shh. He is sleeping. When he wakes up, Grandma Elena is going to play
with us.”
