"Lala, where do you spit?" they'd ask. "In the toilet!" Lala would say.
"Elisa, where do you spit?" "In the toilet," she'd groan. "Jaime, where do you spit?" they asked (he was 3).
Jaime: "ON THE FLOOR"
"JAIME," she said, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"
"Schumando," he said casually. (Fumando: smoking.)
The 3 tias were saints, man.
(My family produces lots of redundancies--there are 3 Fernandos. I am the 3rd Liliana. etc.)
The thing is, I don't really quite know what happened to Filomena, and I'm not sure I want to
That's the worst case, but there's more. Like: she was locked up shortly after she gave birth to a daughter, Ines. But the kids at least visited her
She hadn't.
And her brother--my grandfather--knew it.
And he kept his sister in the dark.
Ines is in her 90s. I've been postponing a phone conversation with her about this. When her son (my uncle) didn't pick the phone up 2 weeks ago, I felt relief.
The letters are beautiful in the way that some love poems are beautiful. They're also sappy in the way love poems are sappy.
I wish I remembered more of what Lala said about this meeting. I vaguely recall her describing Filomena as a quiet lady. Kind. I wish I'd known to ask more questions.
"You know how I found out my mother was alive?" she said to me. "Your grandmother. She was the one who told me."
I can't begin to calculate the damage
a) As I'd understood it, Filomena was declared insane when Ines was small. But because F's family was wealthy, she stayed in a good/permissive institute. (Hence photos of her w/kids.)
What happened (per Ines) is that my great-grandfather Valentin (a womanizer) found Filomena "unfit for his bed" after she gave birth to Ines.
Filomena and Valentin had separated briefly after Fernando was born (perhaps for similar reasons, who knows). But this time, after Ines was born, it was permanent.
"IN A CONVENT?" I said.
"In a convent," Ines replied. "On Cerro Placeres in Valparaiso. To live with her Tia Emilia."
Ines didn't really know either. She was a baby at the time, after all.
Ines lived there with her mom for 3 years.
He told Emilia he was taking her for a walk, and then he never brought her back.
The job Beatriz got was administering an institute for kids w/tuberculosis
It is at this point that Beatriz--who has connections thanks to her work running the Institute--has Filomena declared insane and thrown in a public manicomio.
"They gave me her Singer sewing machine," Ines tells me. "They said that was my inheritance from my mom."
Wrong.
"I was thirty-two," she tells me. She found out in June 1958, when she pregnant with her third son. Her mother died nine months later.
"No one," she said. "I went straight from there to the Psiquiatrico. I brought her lunch."
He pauses in the middle of my questions to ask one of his own.
"I don't know," Ines finally says. "It never occurred to me."
"NADA," she says. "It was all Tia Beatriz."
Tio Gerald says Tia Beatriz's scheme to send my grandmother TO A PSYCH WARD didn't work because Lala trained as a lawyer. She could fight back.
(I didn't want to get interested in Tia Beatriz. Uggghhh)
You'll recall that Fernando was obsessed with Lala. Writing her constantly--long, tortured love letters asserting that his love exceeded hers in impossible ways. That he only knew joy with her. Etc. Etc.
The marriage was basically over by the time the ceremony ended, and she had no idea why, or what had changed.
Thanks for indulging me in this experiment in using twitter for literally anything else.