The two women were old, fantastically so, more alike than dissimilar. Both were grandmothers and great-grandmothers, abuela to more lives than could be counted on a village’s worth of hands. In their youth they’d been close friends and when they’d married, almost by default their husbands had become friends. But it hadn’t been enough, time hadn’t been sated by their merely reaching middle age, they had to endure menopause and beyond the hormonal upheavals that came with it the slow painful deaths of their husbands. Soon they were two of a faltering species, women with so much time housed in their bodies they ceased to look entirely human, more a hybrid of human-driftwood or human-boulder.
Their names were Mirtha and Francisca. Each lived in tiny hovels that for later generations barely passed for homes. But these were the shacks they had tended for over six decades, that they’d cleaned and improved in small ways when they had the means, so their off-spring and off-spring’s off-spring didn’t argue with them, push for upgrades they would be more than happy to pay for. Each, they could see, had lived for so long in these houses they’d become part of them; to force a move would be akin to amputation.
These were not only the last days for such women, old as they were, but for the language they shared, in their youth a dialect omnipresent among their people, but which along their progress of living had dwindled into an artifact of lost culture spoken by only two people, Mirtha and Francisca specifically. They had not taught their children how to converse in the old tongue because the national language was essential for a chance at prosperity. There had been a time their children had begged to be taught and both women had refused, insisting ignorance of the language would keep them free from being hindered by tradition. No, they would say, it was too late for them. They were mere village wives and mothers, now grandmothers, great-grandmothers, their lineages spreading wide and sure to outlive them. The village would always be here where they left it and each would be waiting to greet them with toothless smiles when they visited. But when they talked about the greater world beyond the place of their birth, they would do so in the language that dominated and devoured all the lesser tongues, officially now and for their entire lives the apex argot that bound their country together.
When a daughter or son would visit, they would sit at the tiny kitchen table across from one old woman or the other and ask after their lives, the goings-on of the village, working subtly to discern any apparent changes in their mother’s health. Most queries would be brought to a soft conclusion by simple response, a yes or no or I can’t say. Having exhausted the usual round of questions the son or daughter or grandchild would then ask after their oldest friend, the other very old woman in the village. Usually the answer would be a brief report not on the life of the woman in question but of her bloodline, new jobs, new marriages, pregnancies and births, moves to and from the larger cities or into suburbs. The children would nod but make a point of disguising their amusement, that news of a friend began so far away from the friend herself, a village spreading roots far beyond its small insignificant borders to connect every other part of the country in name of one simple housebound abuela. Without intending, these old women had exercised great ambition through the siring of children, had multiplied themselves across many lives and established themselves as both men and women, doctors and engineers, real estate agents and servers at Michelin star restaurants. To keep grounded, they remained close to their kitchens and beds, same kitchens they’d cleaned for six decades, same beds they’d made long after their husbands had died in them. They were protean, these women, their agedness their finest disguise.
This was the rhythm of their lives then. Visitors would arrive, stay a while, leave to make room for more visitors. A week would hardly pass before another family member stopped by. Hugs, kisses on the cheek, an offer of coffee. Chairs taken at the small table in the kitchen near a window. So how’s Mirtha, Francisca’s visitors would ask, and Mirtha’s visitors would ask the same, So how’s Francisca. For as long as they had been visiting the response followed a set pattern of first discussing the woman-in-question’s minor health complaints before moving on to the main topic of the goings-on of her children and children’s children and children’s children’s children. The question was obligatory so they asked it, knowing how the woman-in-question when discussed went some way towards describing how their abuela was getting along herself. Fine, fine, was almost always the answer, quick, neat, and final. They would ask as a way of putting their minds at ease, since they all worried about their respective old women living alone, growing ever more frail each day. Once or twice a family member had made the mistake of suggesting they could maybe move in with each other, Mirtha into Francisca’s house or Francisca into Mirtha’s, or maybe even better, a new home altogether. The suggestions were cut short first with sharp silence then muttered curses, first in their shared language then in that dying tongue native to the hardships of their youth. What they didn’t need were more hardships, another bed to make, another kitchen to clean. What they didn’t need was another person to share their house with, especially given how many visitors they entertained. Were they tiring of visiting, did they want someone else to take their place? Mirtha had her own home and her people, Francisca would point out pridefully, and Mirtha, met with such gentle suggestions, would point out the same with similar pridefulness and stubbornness.
It was well known that though the two old women were friends, it had become rarer and rarer to catch sight of them standing in a yard or on a street, much less sitting in lawn chairs outside the doors of one of their houses or the other, talking as old women do, gathering the far reaches of their bloodlines into conversation. It had been assumed this was due to the natural courses of aging, restrictions in mobility they all knew better than to comment on, knee pain and hip pain, osteoporosis, lower back pain, arthritis, neuralgia, Plantar faciitis, sciatica. The younger people about the village may have noticed how infrequently the two women could be seen talking, but having seen one or the other often enough sweeping their front doorstep or sitting alone in the sun watching the neighborhood children play and the day pass around them, none judged it a matter of concern. They were old old women so it was only natural they’d become less and less mobile, less inclined to travel, even if it was only a matter of walking two or three blocks. If visits between their households had become anomalous, surely they called one another on the phone as their own grand and great-grandparents did, talking for hours while playing solitaire or crocheting. Señora Mirtha and Señora Francisca’s people had each asked the village neighbors to keep watch on their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, to give them a call if they noticed anything concerning or unusual. Not once in the decades of their watching over the old women had they had reason to dial the numbers given to them. Days passed and weeks passed and the women, having reached a plateau state of suspended animation, seemingly ceased to age and remained forever and incontrovertibly old. When their people came to town, greeting the neighbors upon their arrival or stopping by before leaving after a visit, both the old women’s kin and the neighborhood would comment on how they both seemed to have aged a little while the old woman remained unchanged. Given a few more decades the differences between generations would be sanded down, they’d joke, and soon they’d all be contemporaries.
All this changed suddenly, one afternoon as old Francisca took a seat across from her great-granddaughter Beatriz, a hygienic assistant living in Veracruz. Beatriz was among the youngest of her great-grandchildren, not yet married, newly dating a promising young graduate student from the United States. From the tenor of her response to this news, that she was dating an American and that, yes, it had become to feel a bit serious, Beatriz could tell a visit by her boyfriend would one day be needed, to put a kind and actual human face before the old woman, who was ever skeptical of foreigners. Joe was so clearly a trustworthy, decent person, she was confident her great-grandmother, like most people who met Joe, would be won over. It wouldn’t hurt his Spanish was fluent and he was easy-going and self-deprecating.
Like most visitors to old Francisca’s equally ancient kitchen, Beatriz asked after other family members, the lives of the other villagers. If there were deaths to report, the old woman would report them. If there were illnesses or births, though increasingly there was hardly ever the latter, she would communicate those also. Beatriz ran down the mental checklist of topics to broach with her great-grandmother, arriving eventually to the question of Señora Mirtha, how had she been, had they spoken recently. Dozens of times she had sat in the kitchen, asked the same, and always the answer had been fine, fine, before the answer expanded to lengthy, elaborate descriptions of the exploits, gains and setbacks of the woman-in-question’s family. So having asked, this is what she’d expected, already slipping into a good-humored half-listening. Her? the old woman scoffed. I wouldn’t know and don’t want to. Do me a favor and don’t ever again mention her.
In her confusion Beatriz made the mistake of asking what, why, had something happened between them? With a flat palm the old woman slapped the table, startling her. I said no, she hissed. This followed by curses translated from their dominant, shared language to that more private dialect she refused to teach anyone, no matter how nicely it was asked of her. Señora Mirtha is a bad, bad woman. As far as old Francisca was concerned, they were no longer friends and had never been.
The old woman spoke bitterly for the rest of the visit, as if mention of her old ex-friend had spoiled even this, a rare visit from her youngest great-grandchild. Beatriz left in confusion, wondering what had happened. To her knowledge the two had never argued before, which when considered from the viewpoint of her own experience with friendships seemed improbable, though such was the claim circulated among several generations of family. Leaving the tiny house, crunching down its pebble walk past dwarf cacti and lavender-petaled flowers, she slipped past her car and walked across the street to greet a neighbor who had known her her entire life, old compared to her but compared to her great-grandmother a man in the prime of his senior years. They exchanged the usual words of greeting, talk of the weather, of significant minor events in the village over the previous year, all events in a village by definition being minor. After the requisite pleasantries had been exhausted, she asked the neighbor about Señora Mirtha, the state of relations between she and Beatriz’s great-grandmother, it seems she said there may have been a falling-out between them, did he know of this, could he explain what had happened. The neighbor said yes, it was true, no one knew exactly when the estrangement had begun, but people had begun taking notice about six months ago, sometime during winter. Neither woman would talk about it and it was far from their business to ask for details on the matter once rebuffed. Very characteristic of a village and its inhabitants, Beatriz thought, jealously guarding its privacies for the sake of keeping alive its gossip. Beatriz thanked the neighbor and walked to her car, already scrolling through her phone to call her sister.
So began a series of conversations about the women, back-and-forth debates in search of a reason for their estrangement. From that first call between Beatriz and her sister, other calls were made, sisters to mothers, mothers to grandmothers, grandmothers to brothers and cousins and sons. Word of the friendship and its end travelled from phone to phone, town to city, crossing the borders of two dozen provinces and at least three countries. Some of the more venerable members of the family even went so far as to call the old matriarch in her kitchen and village to ask directly, What happened between you and Señora Mirtha, we thought you were such good friends. These queries were put to an abrupt end with a scoffing remark, quick goodbye, click then dial tone. So it was true, it was serious after all, young Beatriz wasn’t exaggerating, the long friendship was over and their grandmother, great-grandmother wasn’t in the mood to discuss why. A bad year for friendships between very old women.
More visits, more conversations with the village neighbors, the handyman, the grocer, the daughters and granddaughters of much younger old people about the place, gained them very little in the way of actionable information. Yes, the old women went about their days as if nothing had happened, sweeping their front stoops, tossing seed to sparrows flicking and rolling themselves in the dust-puddles of their yards. They moved in timeless quiet worlds of their choosing and nodded and waved when greeted from afar. It’s as if they lived in separate villages, not three blocks away from each other. No one could say what slight or misstep had divided them nor why it was so unforgivable. It was bad for old women in general, the villagers said, and for Señora Mirtha and Señora Francisca in particular, but it also brought to the fore a concern about the fate of the tongue they shared, indigenous to that place and unfortunately to that place only. For as long as the two were friends and could be overheard talking, the language of their youth and origin and of the village’s dimmest early history was kept alive, breathing, last of its species. But since the two women had gone silent, the tongue had slipped into the final stages of its convalescence. When asked, neither would agree to teach the more curious among them even the more harmless fundamentals of the language. To talk in that way would remind them of the friendship they had ended, with good reason, but for no reason they would care to explain.
There were a few who carried half-knowledge of the dialect, a feel for certain words and phrases. These they’d gained from overhearing the old women converse sitting in lawn chairs on one stoop or another over the decades, mixing and matching flecks of exotic homegrown nouns and verbs with clearly discernible expressions in Spanish. They could speak that language in bits and pieces, but not fluently or confidently enough to make it move through the air and shared understanding as a live thing. Señora Francisca’s family made a point of collecting scraps of talk from these self-proclaimed half-ling speakers, but none of it held together as a whole when they pieced it together in a human voice. Old women weren’t an endangered species, there would always be an endless supply of them, but this was not the case for this old-woman language, the language of their forebears, people of sun and earth, of ancient times before invention of the birth-control pill. What right did they have to take a whole language to the grave with them? Wouldn’t they be heartened to know the world that birthed them and nursed them would carry on as an idiolect among their descendants? This was serious, Señora Francisca’s family decided, were Señora Mirtha’s people aware of it. Best if the two families discussed the matter, coordinated to convince their old women to make up, or if that wasn’t possible, loosen their hold on the language.
Isidro to Marcelo, Irene to Marta, Raimundo to Rosario and Socorro and Consuelo, texts were sent, phone calls made. Without their matriarchs’ knowledge or consent the two families entered into endless rounds of debate and speculation. Yes, Señora Mirtha’s family were made aware the two were not talking, and yes, they were equally concerned. Yes their attempts to discuss the matter with their abuela had been rebuffed, and strongly. It was a shame, after seven decades of a sharing a life, through births and illness and deaths, they would put their pride above friendship and refuse to make amends. At their age what insult could either possibly be capable of, that couldn’t be forgiven? Should the two families descend on the village soon and force an intervention? Both women were nearing ninety and though their health was fine was far from assured in the near future. There had been talk of nursing homes, of moving in with family who might take care of them. Either for one or the other or both, it was not out of the question circumstances could force a permanent move from the village, ending for good possibility they might repair the mysterious insult to their friendship, reviving that bygone tongue they’d chosen to silence and bury in a grudge.
As these communications crisscrossed the ethers, earth to satellite and back to earth, two women sat in tiny living rooms watching afternoon television, figures of invasive concern and wholly unaware of it. On walls, cluttered atop nearly every piece of furniture were framed depictions of the Virgin Mary and dozens upon dozens of faces resembling to varying degrees their own features at many previous stages of aging, infant to child, teenager to adult. On Mirtha’s walls were countless Mirtha-features dispersed and recombined as boys, young men, mothers of three, lawyers and college students and even one professional boxer. On Francisca’s walls were many Francisca-esque faces gazing from picture glass. These effigies of loved ones each signaled in their own way resemblance to their patron widow. Little did they know these photographs on their walls were debating about the best course of action, what to do, how to get them talking, best to not swarm them with phone calls and visits but send a single emissary, one of the women's clear favorites among their families, to sit for coffee and reason with them.
Señora Mirtha’s family agreed to send her second eldest son, Rodolfo, her eldest Horacio having died several years prior from prostate cancer. There were differing views in Señora Francisca’s family on who might be best sent as their representative, should it be Marta, the nun in the family, or Gertudis, the grand-daughter who visited her most often and whose handsome husband Benito resembled in fact a little her own late husband. After a week of passionate texting which left both candidates self-conscious and uncomfortable, their worthiness as family representatives touted then measured against one another, it was decided Gertrudis would serve as their spokesperson. Marta’s childlessness was judged a mark against her, though supposedly she was married to God and this might be enough to compensate for her deficiencies as a mother. No, best to take the safe, sure route and send smart practical Gertrudis. Should she bring Benito along with her? Yes, Benito should definitely accompany her, hasn’t their abuela mentioned after his every visit how much he reminded her of their late great-grandfather, grandfather? Benito was a must they all agreed, ask him to reserve the date on his schedule.
The two families sent their emissaries to the village on the 23rd of May, beginning of the last weekend of spring. Answering the knocks on their front doors, the old women were unaware that behind the faces that greeted them waited a whole family eager to talk with them. Señora Mirtha hugged her son, kissed him several times on the cheek, invited him to the kitchen. Señora Francisca lifted her hands from her walker, leaned a shoulder against the doorframe to gather her Gertrudis and Gertrudis’ husband into a shaky embrace, both at once. Where were the children, she asked. The girls were staying the weekend with friends, they lied, and Juan had decided to stay home and pick up shifts at the pet store where he worked. Duly convinced, the old woman welcomed them into her small dark living room, large enough to fit a couch, a recliner, a battered musty bureau and a television. The latter, a gift from the couple several years ago, became the opening subject of conversation, expressions of gratitude, such a nice gift, so thoughtful, every morning and afternoon she watched her telenovelas on it. Soon the old woman would discover she’d become a figure of intrigue among the village and her own family, but not yet, not until they took their seats, Gertrudis and Benito the couch, Francisca the recliner.
Greeting her guest, Señora Mirtha was less unsuspecting. When had her Rodolfo ever traveled so far alone for a visit? Not once that she could remember, usually his wife Nimi would accompany him and if not then his daughter Alante. Of late when her people visited there were questions about whether it was appropriate for her to remain in the house alone, they worried, they would tell her, what happened if she fell and broke a hip or needed help with looking after the house? The answer they received was always the same and frustrating for its vagueness, the blind faith it placed in the familiar, what an old woman knew from simple habit and so could trust to support her. I’m fine where I am, she would tell them proudly, challengingly, if I need anything the village will take care of me, as it always had. As Rodolfo took a chair at the kitchen table, the very table where she’d fed him as a boy, something about his manner warranted suspicion. When she’d asked after Nimi and Alante he’d been quick to explain they were busy but with what exactly he didn’t say. After having pulled a chair from the table for his mother to sit in, he took the only other chair then meshed his fingers into a pair of hands folded in his lap, where she couldn’t see them. The differences about him were subtle but notable. A stiffness, a contrived ease and gentleness. Since he was gentle by nature, the stiltedness beneath his self-presentation would have been detectable only by a wife or mother. After a few pleasantries between them, during which Mirtha tested and confirmed her suspicions, something was up, something was different about him, she folded her hands in her lap in imitation of him and asked directly, What is it? If you’ve come here to try to convince me of something, son, please don’t play me for a fool. I’m your mother, out with it.
Three blocks away in the same village Gertrudis and Benito were asking Francisca about her ongoing patronage of neighborhood cats. There were too many to count so to keep track of them she had abandoned attempts at numerical accounting and had begun naming them. By her lights she was the only one who could tell them apart and establish peace among them, laying out bowls of milk and leftovers from her meals in strategic stations throughout her yard and around the house. Each had their own assigned smidgen of territory, should a cat venture to eat from a bowl not its own she’d shoo it and castigate it. The cats of course were metaphor for family, Gertrudis and Benito would soon discover, when the husband laid a comforting hand on the back of Francisca’s grand-daughter, who leaned forward to rest elbows on her knees, hands placed palm flat against each other. In that posture anyone might have mistaken her for a woman praying towards the ground, the ground beneath the floor beneath her feet. For a brief instant before her granddaughter assumed an attitude of studied impartiality, a tone of voice edging cautiousness, Señora Francisca supposed she had leaned forward to make room for a husband’s hand on her back, soft circular rubbing between shoulder blades. What her grand-daughter then said caught her off-guard, embarrassed her, appalled her, that she hadn’t predicted it.
Rodolfo in his mother’s kitchen, Gertrudis in her grandmother’s living room, a village beyond the walls and beyond the village a country that blended the obsolescent with the modern, stone huts with skyscrapers. The new world visiting the old, to convince the latter it should make amends with its own. What could have happened between Mirtha and Señora Francisca that would warrant the end of their friendship? Mirtha told her son it was none of his business, he wouldn’t understand, it was the kind of rift that could only be respected among old women. All due respect, Mama, the son replied, I’m an old man now, in case you hadn’t noticed. I just might understand, why not give it a try, explain it to me. A similar exchange transpired between Francisca and her granddaughter. We, Gertrudis said, we being she and her husband sitting beside her, but also the whole family. We think it’s a shame that she and Señora Mirtha can’t put whatever-it-is-that-happened behind them. Surely it was nothing that couldn’t be forgiven, and perhaps they might help with that. Would she at least indicate who had done what, what had been said, assuming Señora Mirtha had been in the wrong and she’d been the one offended?
Fits of rage among the very old, Benito would later comment to his wife on the drive home from their intervention, witnessed from a certain distance are inspirational. But up close, they’re alarming. Can such a frail body withstand the intensity of such feelings coursing through it? Embarrassed, to hear the family had strategized to corner her in her own home, press her to talk on a subject she’d insisted she didn’t want to revisit. How was it they thought they had the right to ask? There was a time when a person was left alone to nurse their grievances and their familiars were content to discuss the matter behind their backs. Though they may have wanted to know more, they accepted the limits of their knowledge. Call it a village regard for the natural distances between people. But those values rotted on the vine long ago, because look how comfortable they are asking, Gertrudis and Benito, irrespective of her wishes to not discuss it. Old Francisca’s hands and shoulders, legs and head trembled as if electricity was traveling through every part of her, exiting through her mouth and widened eyes.
Mirtha’s response was cooler, more reserved. Having spotted her son’s subterfuge and challenged him, she had preserved some of her pride, enough to redraw the line between herself and her family before they had a chance to cross it. I’m an old man now, her son had said calmly, without a hint of patronizing weariness. There was a certain tone younger people assumed when reasoning with the elderly, one of patient condescending endurance, which she and the other village elders despised, but Rodolfo never slipped into addressing her from such heights. He loved her the only way a grown adult son could love a mother who had comforted and encouraged him at every stage of outgrowing her. Now, sitting at the kitchen table, he was entering a new stage and punishing him for it would shame the motherly parts of her. He was old now too, it was true, he wanted to understand why she had chosen friendlessness this late in life. Why did she no longer talk with Señora Francisca?
By the end of the last Friday of the last weekend of spring, two versions of the story had been told, one in anger, the other with calm regret. Phone calls and group texts spread the angrier version among Señora Francisca’s family, whereas the calmer version was written and sent in an email from Gertrudis to all members of the Mirtha clan over age twenty. By the end of the last Sunday of spring, the two versions had blended in conversations between adult children of the two families. The falling-out between the two women had occurred, as the village neighbor had told young Beatriz, the previous winter, on a day Señora Mirtha had come calling at Señora Francisca’s house for their weekly Wednesday lunch. Since the death of Francisca’s husband nearly seven years prior, Mirtha’s husband having died three years before, they had alternated Wednesday visits to play cards and tell each other of their families and watch their favorite television program, Cool Is The Water. That particular Wednesday also happened to be the anniversary of Francisca’s husband’s passing. Mirtha found Francisca in a quiet mood but not necessarily preoccupied as years before. On that day years previously they would remark upon how good a man he had been, Francisca’s husband, and how the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons they had brought into this world had carried on his goodness in their own way. They were old after all and the world had passed them by, which was no problem, since they’d been born in a timeless place, this village. But Francisca’s husband, bless his soul, had travelled beyond it and was exploring what it was like to be young and busy, vicariously enjoying the exploits of his children’s children and children’s children’s children.
Sitting in that living room surrounded by generations of photographs, Francisca took one off the wall, a rare black-and-white photo pressed behind glass, bordered by a dainty tin frame. A photo of her Nuno as a young man, years before they married. During her many visits to Francisca’s home Mirtha had from time to time noted the little framed photo cramped among others on the wall, but this was the first time it’d been taken from the wall and she’d been given to hold it. There she saw a skinny shirtless boy standing on a rock by a water hole, face raised to an almighty sun off frame. Mirtha felt sudden emotion for the boy and Francisca, knowing her friend well, noticed. What was it about this photograph of Nuno that turned a feeling in her? Why did she respond differently to this one than the others, versions of Nuno when he was full-grown, bearded, gray-headed, or clean-shaven and pot-bellied? Such was the genuine surprise of the emotion come over her, Mirtha responded honestly, telling her friend this time what so many times before she’d elected to keep to herself. This boy, she said, I knew him. I know you know, I knew him before you knew him. Our families were close when we were children, my father worked with his at the quarry and our mothers shared recipes. This boy grew up and later you two met and fell in love and married, but during the time when this photo was taken, I knew him well.
Francisca spoke of what her friend told her next as betrayal, an insult from two directions, ambush from the grave and from the living. The two people she’d been closest to and trusted the way a bird trusts its wings. Before this boy Nuno grew into a man and met her, he had fallen in love once before and had a summer fling with a young girl, the girl long gone, regretful at the time but glad now to have broken his heart. I had always assumed Nuno would tell you, Mirtha explained, if not in the early days of their relationship then later, after they’d married and had children. She kept it to herself thinking one day Francisca would bring it up, Nuno having finally told her. Decades passed as she waited, until she found herself against her will holding a secret. To tell her before Nuno told her would have been unfair, selfish, for it was she who’d broken his heart and he who’d taken that heart to another woman who’d accept it as a gift, not an inconvenience or imposition. Not to cast aspersions on his memory, but she often thought his unwillingness to tell Francisca had been a sort of soft revenge against her, to hold the power to end a friendship, if he wished, with one simple disclosure.
That was when everything changed, Mirtha said, Francisca said, when the living room they shared split in two, separating them. Holding the photograph out for Francisca to take, Mirtha had made her admission, both women joined in the act of passing it hand to hand. As Mirtha explained herself, Francisca let go of the photograph and refused to take it. After the initial shock, as her mind came back to her, Francisca said, it came back angry. Keep it, she told Francisca. It’s yours then. I’m sorry to have kept for so long what wasn’t mine. Mirtha pleaded for Francisca to take the photograph but the old woman circled her arms behind her back and shook her head. Mirtha tried to hang it back on the wall and, having trouble with doing so, reached to set it among other photos on the bureau. Take it with you, the woman told her, I don’t want it here. Please leave, I have other visitors coming, she lied, and obviously. Since you were so good at respecting other people’s wishes, respect my wishes now and never come back.
A friendship cut in half doesn’t make two women, their families discovered. Four women come from it, two pairs, a real Mirtha and an unreal version of Francisca, a true Francisca and a projection of a Mirtha who couldn’t be forgiven. Talk and text as they might across that great divide, the efforts of their children and children’s children would never be enough to suture them back together, four women into two and sitting across from one another in a room again. Forgiveness would have to come from Francisca and acceptance of forgiveness from Mirtha. Though it would be natural to assume in late old age forgiveness would be widely available to be shared equally among survivors, that was not the case. Pride is often the last to leave a person once their abilities have begun leaving them bit by bit, forcing humility on them, the humility of wearing a diaper due to incontinence, the humility of amplifying one’s deafness with a hearing aid. Mirtha’s guilt was quaint as much as Francisca’s resentment was petty, but as contrarian members of both clans were quick to mention, it was a little selfish, wasn’t it, for one friend to assuage her guilt at the expense of another woman’s nostalgia for a husband. Others argued in the opposite direction, characterizing it as generous, that Mirtha would risk an unbothered friendship to offer a grieving widow more detailed, more intimate knowledge of her husband. Now she knew even his secrets, the silences that life had kept active between them. Disoriented as the news might be, Francisca should be thankful, these family contrarians believed. Easy to say, the others countered, since it wasn’t their life. In the busy world beyond their abuelas’ village, secrets were harder to keep but were also perhaps less damaging.
Two women joined by love for the same man, all agreed, it was a classic dilemma and touching. This far into the long epilogue of their youths, why should it matter? The man gone, the women sharing their versions of him, and look here, their families joined in concern for their friendship, which unlike the man could survive outside of a single body and only perish if denied such a modest mortal gesture as an apology. How lonely a life must be without apologies, young Beatriz commented in one of three currently active group texts among the families, one for each generation. Lo lamento. Te perdono. Two words each, four altogether, loneliness would lift and their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers would be released from the burden of the past and so they might enjoy one another’s company for the last few days that remained for them. How to get them talking again?
Six weeks into a hot, rainless summer, the driest on record for half a century, young Beatriz texted a suggestion into the great-grandchildren’s group chat. Her fiancee Joe had a friend at university, a post-doc fellow in linguistics, very smart guy, nice guy also, who had been very curious about their grandmothers, that they were the last two living speakers of a dialect among their village and to anyone’s knowledge in the towns scattered across their province the last two living speakers of it anywhere. This friend, Mano, had a passion for smaller, more obscure tongues still active in pockets about the country and would often travel to meet with people to learn their language, to preserve it for safekeeping for a least a short while in his own brain. Mano had asked Joe to ask Beatriz if she might present his services to the families, to visit both their grandmothers incognito as a harmless, curious third party and ask if they might sit with him a few hours every few Saturdays to teach him the language they kept alive by waking each morning, even though they chose not to speak it. So long as Mirtha and Francisca weren’t aware their families had sent him, what harm could come from it? In the least he might keep them company, relieve them of loneliness and boredom for an afternoon. Who knows, they might be flattered to hear from someone beyond their families they were in almost sole possession of a cultural artifact of some importance. Never mind that, one of the granddaughters, a family wit in the Francisca clan texted, What’s he look like? Beatriz posted a photo of the man in question standing next to her universally handsome Joe. OK, the family wit responded, he’s handsome enough, if I was a granny I’d open my door for him.
Not long after a young man arrived in the village, parked his hatchback along the edge of a dusty street near a corner store and introduced himself to two older men sitting in the shade sipping sodas. From the way he was dressed the older men judged him not a local stranger but a stranger from more distant locales, almost certainly from a city. Khaki shorts, clean buttoned down short-sleeve shirt, European-looking sneakers. Stepping out the sun into shade, they took in a closer view of him, more boy than man, hair parted sharply along the left, fancy thick-framed glasses. His accent was unusual but neither old man commented on this, for being villagers they observed a certain etiquette when speaking with strangers. When those strangers turned and walked, of course, it ceased to be a matter of etiquette to openly speculate.
The boy introduced himself as Manolo Grimaldo, he was from Veracruz, he was looking for the house of a Señora Mirtha Loque. Do they know her? Could they point him in the direction of where she lived? The old men obliged and watched the boy cross the street veering left, his shadow squat on the ground behind him but following. The building with the pink walls, the men had told him, flower-colored from a distance. Up close, the walls were less pretty, scored and scuffed with holes pasted over with dried gray swipes of cheap mortar. To the boy the house looked as compact and tightly constructed as a take-out box of chicken Chow-Mein, untuck one paper panel from another on its top, fold it open. He stepped into the slim shadow of its awning, knocked at the door. Over his shoulder the old men across the street and to the left watched him wait. How many times would the boy have to knock before Señora Mirtha heard him, they wondered, which led to a friendly wager. Less than five minutes or more than, depending on the outcome, the loser would buy the next round of sodas. The boy had asked where she lived but not how best to rouse her, deaf as she was, one ear gone completely, the other soon to follow. A second round of knocking, hands in pockets, turning to survey the sights around him, then a third. One old man tracking the boy’s progress on his wristwatch sucked bottom lip against his teeth at the sight of the door opening ten seconds short of the wager falling in his favor. Conceding defeat he stood to shuffle into the grocery to buy his friend a soda, leaving the other to watch the boy step into the dark of the doorway, door closing behind him.
For the next few hours the men sat watching the house idly speculating about the goings-on within it. Near five the door opened and the boy walked into view, Señora Mirtha behind him smiling in her way and waving. This being a rare sight, the old woman in the company of a stranger, they were equally curious when the young man’s car arrived roughly the same time the next day, parked the same spot as before. Waving as he walked over, sunglasses tucked into his shirt collar, the young man commented on the weather, the quality of the shade the two old men had claimed for themselves, small talk he clearly believed most old men entertained among themselves when left unbothered. Thank you for your help yesterday, he said. I was hoping you might help me again today, if you don’t mind. I am looking for a Señora Francisca. I understand she lives close to here? This time around the directions required a little more than pointing. Double back down the street he came from, he was told, second right, down a short street to the end, third house on the left. The one with the blue door, the man giving directions told him. Teal, his friend corrected. What, the first man asked, turning with some discomfort, stiffness in the neck or somewhat dramatic illustration of his irritation. It’s not blue, it’s teal. Halfway between blue and green. After which a silence fell between the old men, leaving the young man to thank them and realize their directions through walking.
They watched him go and across the street one of their neighbors, best friend of one of their wives, strayed across her yard to watch also, craning her neck to catch sight of him as he cut right down the aforementioned street and reached its end. The old men debated whether they should leave their shade to follow but decided otherwise, since Señora Francisca had no problems with hearing and in fact was famed for her sensitivity, sounds, smells, myriad intuitions, so often it seemed she could sense an event seconds before its occurrence. In this case they considered whether the old woman had heard the young man coming towards her house soon as he turned right and out of view. They were left to imagine the rest, the door opening before the young man had a chance to knock on it, the old woman blocking the doorway with her walker, asking who is he, what is it he wants. The young man would greet her politely and explain. As with Señora Mirtha, whatever reason he gave would ease her resistance, summon considerable reserves of hospitality within her. She would welcome him in for coffee or lunch and the door would close behind them, the rest left to multiply in several equally plausible directions, none of which were confirmable unless the old men asked the young man explicitly next time he strolled by with a smile and a well-scripted but casual greeting. By then they were curious but were loath to show it. Moreover they were not so unpracticed in the art of conjecture they couldn’t appreciate the pleasures of speculation, when prolonged, were often greater than the satisfaction of having one’s curiosity about a thing explained. Later, when the young man came strolling down the street towards his car, they watched him from their portion of shade and remarked to one another on the heat even that late in the afternoon. There was the sense he would return but they would have to wait and see.
A village has its ways of acquiring knowledge from its people. Small talk between neighbors, a kindly gesture from one to the other, taking out the trash for an elderly widow, carrying groceries to her home. Last weekend a young man had driven into town, left his car on the street near the corner market, walking about like a tourist. Some say he had gone around knocking on doors to introduce himself, had he knocked on yours, Señora Francisca, Señora Mirtha? From such casual inquiries the village learned the young man was a student of linguistics from Universidad Veracruzana, come to study the dialect of Señora Francisca’s distant childhood and somehow more distant young adulthood. Señora Mirtha explained the same, the visitor had sought her out as a resource of valuable knowledge, put himself under her tutelage, every few weekends planned to visit for language lessons so if anyone noticed him coming and going more frequently that was why. Across half a dozen conversations between its curious inhabitants and its eldest ladies, the village learned each woman believed themselves the sole figure of interest, the lone tutor the young man had secured to teach him their language. How presumptuous it would have been to disabuse Señora Mirtha or Señora Francisca of the belief they were necessary, the only means available for a young scholar to save an endangered pre-Columbian language, or at least extend its life a few more years.
The families heard of this directly from their old women. Weekly phone calls between the old women and their many children and children’s children spread word of a young university student, afternoon visits, very casual language lessons over coffee. Didn’t your Joe attend university in Veracruz, Francisca asked young Beatriz, perhaps they knew each other? Beatriz felt the pinch of a small but easily manageable guilt lying to her great-grandmother, no, if he did I’m sure I would have heard of him, this, what did you say his name was, Manolo Grimaldo? The two clans texted among each other, confirming the success of their venture across both households. Both women had been flattered by the young scholar’s interest in them, had agreed to meet every other weekend for the remainder of the summer and, if they still felt up for it, through the coming fall and winter. Due to the young man’s regularly appointed visits, family visits, they were informed, would have to be staggered every other weekend and maybe even then less frequent. They had a duty to posterity, they both said, exact phrasing, which after some consideration both families took as a direct quote from their scholar from Veracruz.
Near and far, outside houses but within a village, within families but beyond each of their member’s immediate surroundings, sitting in cars idling in traffic, standing at windows in living rooms far from the young man in question, the old women were unimaginable. They were familiar, they were commonplace among their families’ many concerns and annoyances, but were out of reach, for they sat in kitchens every other weekend across from their young scholar, teaching him words and phrases they had previously refused to teach any of them. What was different now? Why hadn’t they been deemed worthy enough to inherit the village’s earliest tongue? It had to be a stranger and not them. Contrarians in the text feeds dismissed those expressions of resentment out of hand. What does it matter, they said, as long as they’d found a way to get their grandmothers talking again, even if through a third party they didn’t know had been sent to join them again through the resurrection of a common language. It was a line of argument hard to dismiss, given how much livelier their grandmothers sounded over the phone when they called, translating into Spanish the goings-on of their most recent conversations with their young man.
What was it like, they wondered, being inside that old-woman’s-language? Beatriz would report to the rest after first-hand discussions with her fiancee’s friend back in Veracruz. Such a beautiful way of feeling through speaking and hearing, he told her. Grammatically its sentences were structured similar to Spanish, with quirky exceptions. Subjects tended to be placed before conjugated verbs but objects, either direct or indirect, always came before the former. Its beauty resided not in its grammatical structure but its semantic and phonological expressiveness. Even the simplest observation in Spanish, It’s hot outside today or This coffee is delicious, expanded beyond the boundaries of direct representation into hazy, water-colorish figurations. Nothing was literal, everything was suggestive of itself and something else. Vowels outnumbered consonants in the language and this might explain why boundaries between words were more fluid, even more so than in a sound-world as mellifluously porous as Spanish. There was less weight to words so sentences drifted off the breath like dandelion seeds. What were their grandmothers like as they spoke it, some asked through Beatriz. A day or so passed before an answer echoed back from Veracruz. Relaxed but lively, fresh with humor, eager even, though sometimes around the edges of a brief pause he thought he detected a bit of melancholy, or maybe simple nostalgia.
Both women had allowed their pupil to record patches of conversation on his phone, for later review and further study. These sound files he forwarded along to the families through Beatriz. Five minutes of talk between Mirtha and her conversation partner, five more between Francisca and the same partner, different day. What were they saying? Here and there they’d dip into Spanish, comment on what they were trying to convey, then vanish back into sing-song incoherence. They didn’t sound like themselves, some noticed. The language’s vowelishness seemed to moisturize the dryness of old age in their throats. One of the younger of the Mirtha great-grandchildren edited the files, removed the young man’s voice wherever it interjected, spliced the old-women voices together until an impossible conversation flowed seamlessly, Francisca and Mirtha talking with one another in the outmoded language of their village. The village had lost the ability to speak and understand it, the girl texted, but listen to how well they compensate for its deficiencies. The traditionalists among them were more to the point. Once their scholar in Veracruz had a handle on the language, would he mind teaching others how to speak it? The response they received through Beatriz was unexpected, unfortunately that would run counter to the ethics of the relationship between research subject and scholar. Both old women had stated they did not wish their families to learn the language, out of concern it would cause them to forget themselves. Forget themselves, they asked. What did that mean? The world that birthed it was gone, the old women had explained to the young man in their kitchens, having disappeared into many graves. To teach it to the young would put them in danger of premature aging. For they who were at the end of life, it worked in the counter direction, drawing from reserves of youthfulness long lost to them, so they could talk like birds or coyotes or insects. Superstition, many complained, a fancy dodge, others said. But this is what they asked of him, the young scholar explained, and these were their reasons. It would be in poor taste to discount their wishes and teach them.
July through August through the early days of September, the sky over the village remained cloudless, the sun a cruelty to anyone who stepped from their home. The old women’s families came with newly purchased window units and back-up generators, worried the heat might be too much for them. Despite the sorry state of the village in a dry spell, Francisca and Mirtha were much as they left them. The kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, each were well-preserved and curated their histories matter-of-factly. Photographs on walls. Furniture inherited from previous generations. Francisca’s family noticed less bitterness in her descriptions of her days, Mirtha’s family commented about her growing tolerance for questions about how she was feeling, who she had talked with, what she planned to do once they left. The hopeful among both families sensed a thaw was underway, and said so, but the more cautious among them, not by any coincidence also the older among them, encouraged them to wait and see.
By then the young scholar was a familiar sight in the village, no one deemed him worthy of special consideration. When he was sighted on the street, walking to either old woman’s house, raconteurs sitting in the shade outside the corner market would let him pass without notice. He came dressed as a grandson, though not long ago he’d been a stranger, and most neighbors agreed it was a kindness he visited so often, to keep their two oldest widows company. The village accepted him as one of its own. How could it not, since over successive weekends he was learning to speak like a villager of old. Señora Mirtha and Señora Francisca had grown so comfortable with his arrivals, they welcomed him without a knock at the door. Like family, he was granted the right to let himself in, announcing himself with a hello. That he would greet them in the old language, not Spanish, was an intimacy not even extended to their grand or great or great-great grandchildren. Yes, there had been more births in both families, too distant for the old women to travel and hold the infants, these newest additions would need to arrive weeks or months in the future in the arms of their parents, but when the young scholar stepped into their living rooms speaking their private language they would inform him they were now great-great grandmothers, amazed to have lived so long and populated the world with four generations, five if they included themselves.
It was during one such visit, third weekend of September, sitting across from Señora Francisca at her kitchen table, the young scholar mused to himself aloud, for the old woman’s benefit, it was a shame. What was, Francisca asked. It was a shame he might never hear the language as it was meant to be spoken, he explained, between two who’d first grown their souls by learning it, as children. Francisca paused at this, turned to gaze out a window. There was someone else, she told him, another woman in the village. Is that so, he asked, feigning eagerness. We haven’t spoken for a year, she said. That’s even more a shame, he told her. Why not? It would be difficult to explain, she said. They were best friends for sixty years. Sixty, he asked. That’s long as a lifetime. Whatever it is that had gotten between them must have been serious, to have been worth setting aside sixty years of history. For a while it did seem that serious, Francisca conceded, but now seemed less so. It might have something to do with her talking with him so frequently these past months, living again in the language of their youth. When they visited each other, she told him, they spoke as she did with him. It was a privacy between them. Made it impossible for anyone to eavesdrop, their small talk untranslatable. Do you miss her, he asked. Yes, she told him, this young scholar, I do. What was her name, he asked. Señora Mirtha Loque, she told him. Oh, he said then, risking everything, pretending genuine surprise, Señora Loque, I know her!
The two families learned of the rest second-hand, from a series of texts that made the rounds the following week. Francisca had balked, Mirtha also. But the young scholar had not asked in Spanish, but in that dying tongue, one which, he reported months earlier in his descriptions of its many quirks and beauties, did not observe a past or future tense. Verbs could not be conjugated from the present tense, for the language lived only in an eternally recurring ongoingness. If there was no past in their tongue, how could there be room for regret or resentment, he later told Beatriz, who in turn later told both clans in text thread. One afternoon, he’d asked each old woman in their kitchens, would they meet, an hour at most. They did not have to make amends or aspire to be friends beyond that one encounter. He would understand if they said no, wouldn’t take it personally. But such was his admiration for their language, he would be grateful to sit in their company, listen to its full capacities take flight between them. His appeals were nowhere near as eloquent, he explained to Beatriz, his grasp of their language imperfect as it was, but his faltering at certain words and turns of phrase may have worked in his favor, inspiring in Mirtha and Francisca a desire to coach him along the way to completing his thought without reverting to Spanish. Something about the sight of an earnest, capable young man grappling to make a simple appeal moved both to aid him in convincing them to lay aside their quarrel. Yes, Mirtha said, I will go. If she came over, Francisca told him, I would welcome her. Of course neither said as much exactly, for they spoke to him in an expansive vowel-flowing manner, free of the reductive complications of Spanish.
