The story came to me from
a nun, Sister Marleny, I met some seven years ago in Huancayo, Peru, who often
visits us when we’re in or summer home in Lima. She had stopped over the second Monday of
October of 2016, during the evening. I
sat back in my pillowed chair, by my computer, and books, a table between her
and me, my wife Rosa made coffee, as I got up to make her an egg sandwich, then
sat back down; she’s a tinge under forty, young looking and slender, and the
director of a Catholic School, in one of Lima’s districts, which have many for
a city of eight-million inhabitants. She
wanted my attention, something was on her mind, I think often times she tells
me things to clear her mind, and often they are very interesting stories, and
this evening’s account would be just that.
She
said, “I stopped over by a neighbor’s house, once in the house offering the
daughter and mother, whom lived together with a dog, a fruit basket. I looked at the ninety-four year old woman,
Elvira, she was weary, had a coat of grim covering her body and a nest of
infested bugs in her hair, eyebrows, the old lady was glad of the chance visit,
and when her sixty-one year old daughter, whom had a form of schizophrenia,
left to go into the other room for a moment, she grabbed my hand, said ‘Don’t leave me here, take me with you’. The house was huge and at one time perhaps
beautiful, but now the tiles on the floor were dark with human and animal
excretions, and the house reeked with foul smells. Foods and cockroaches
seemingly appeared to be smashed and embedded into the floors in the house like
asphalt, one could not see the linoleum, or tiles, or rugs that were once part
of the floor, showed only filth. You get
awful feelings with such pools of filth on the walls and floors as if it was
war-ridden” she inferred, “…there was a strangeness to the 61-year old Carmen,
her moods in particular, and it grew more so and the anonymous: she
believed that her dog was her brother.
“They
had lived together a long while, like two refugees moving from room to room as
if from a war-zone, to another war-zone,
figuratively speaking. I called the police for help, and they refused at first,
until I told them I was going to the media. The old woman had said, after being
cleaned up and brought to our convent, ‘How did life ever come to this!’
“As
the days passed, her daughter wanted to go back to her house, and be with her
brother, the dog. Thus, she was brought to an asylum, and her relatives took
likelihoods against that, and she ended up back in her home, lest they take the
convent to court, and they voiced their concern on the nuns not trying to get
ownership of the house, to which was more of a concern than their health, and
so Carmen was brought back home.
“The old lady, insistently ate bits and pieces of food, seemingly all
her awaking hours at our convent…” whom at this writing, remains at the
convent. “Anyhow, after a week, she became sturdy and strong of body, talking
during the evening of her once high positions in the community, as being
director of two schools, and how proud her husband was of her. Yet one of her
comments were: ‘Why
did God allow me to end up like this?’” and so the story ended.
Faintly
a notion came to my mind, and I asked sister Marleny to take a book out of my
coat jacket that was wrapped around the top of a chair behind her, and hand it
to me, and she did, it was a chapbook of sorts, in English and Spanish, I had
done for the Huancayo cultural institutions. And I autographed the book for the old lady,
saying, ‘…you
were being tested, and you past God’s test.’ Inferring Job was tested in a similar manner. Then
I told Sister Marleny: the old woman was given a gift, and the gift was that of
old age, how many get to live per near a hundred years. And now that I think of it, it reminds me of
a recent friend from High School telling me
(Diane
Smith): ‘We all have a story,’ how true that is, and perhaps Elvira needed to live long enough to tell hers indirectly, and now it
is told.
#1185/10-18-2016
