Judith Ortiz Cofer

They are thin and rarely marry, living out their long lives in spacious rooms, French doors giving view to formal gardens where aromatic flowers grow in profusion. They play their pianos in the late afternoon tilting their heads at a gracious angle as if listening to notes pitched above the human range. Age makes them translucent; each palpitation of their hearts visible at temple or neck. When they die, it’s in their sleep, their spirits shaking gently loose from a hostess too well bred to protest.

Never let my hands be to any one an occasion to temptation. — ISABEL DE FLORES She was the joke of the angels—a girl crazy enough for God that she despised her own beauty; who grew bitter herbs to mix with her food, who pinned a garland of roses to her forehead; and who, in a fury of desire concocted a potion of Indian pepper and bark and rubbed it on her face, neck, and breasts, disfiguring herself. Then, locked away in a dark cell, where no reflection was possible, she begged for death to join her with her Master whom she called Divine Bridegroom, Thorn in My Heart, Eternal Spouse.

My dolls have been put away like dead children in a chest I will carry with me when I marry. I reach under my skirt to feel a satin slip bought for this day. It is soft as the inside of my thighs. My hair has been nailed back with my mother’s black hairpins to my skull. Her hands stretched my eyes open as she twisted braids into a tight circle at the nape of my neck. I am to wash my own clothes and sheets from this day on, as if the fluids of my body were poison, as if the little trickle of blood I believe travels from my heart to the world were shameful. Is not the blood of saints and men in battle beautiful? Do Christ’s hands not bleed into your eyes from His cross? At night I hear myself growing and wake to find my hands drifting of their own will to soothe skin stretched tight over my bones, I am wound like the guts of a clock, waiting for each hour to release me.

My name mocks me for I was born at the cost of my mother’s life, earning my father’s hatred with my first breath. All my life I have scoured a house soiled with the thick soot of his resentment. It has left its mark on the walls, in his eyes, and on me. All of it I have tried to wipe away. In my hands I hold a broom, in my heart— ashes, ashes.

It is a dangerous thing to forget the climate of your birthplace, to choke out the voices of dead relatives when in dreams they call you by your secret name. It is dangerous to spurn the clothes you were born to wear for the sake of fashion; dangerous to use weapons and sharp instruments you are not familiar with; dangerous to disdain the plaster saints before which your mother kneels praying with embarrassing fervor that you survive in the place you have chosen to live: a bare, cold room with no pictures on the walls, a forgetting place where she fears you will die of loneliness and exposure. Jesús, María, y José, she says, el olvido is a dangerous thing.