Free My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor

often—even though Tío Vitín was Abuelita’s son and Titi Judy was just his wife? That was how their minds worked: if a man did something wrong, there was a woman to blame, whether wife, mother, sister, or sister-in-law. I recognized that it must be horribly painful to imagine you could have stopped him but didn’t. But I also knew all that was nonsense. There was no saving Papi from himself.
    IT IS a day like any other, and the door is still closed. My rational self hasn’t yet noticed it, but I can’t take another minute of this. Before I know what’s happening, I’m pounding with both fists on that stupid,blank, faceless door, and when she opens it, I’m screaming in her face, “Enough! You’ve got to stop this! You’re miserable and you’re making us miserable.”
    Such screaming hasn’t been heard in the house in months. She’s just standing there, blinking at me. I can’t help myself, I’m still screaming. “What’s wrong with you? Papi died. Are you going to die too? Then what happens to me and Junior? Stop already, Mami, stop it!”
    I turn around and march up the hall to the front bedroom, slamming the door behind me as hard as I can. I grab a book and lie down on the bed. But with my hands trembling and my eyes full of tears, there’s no way I can read. I close the book and sob for a very long time. I haven’t done that in ages. Crying like a stupid baby.

Seven
    I T WASN ’ T UNTIL I began to write this book, nearly fifty years after the events of that sad year, that I came to a truer understanding of my mother’s grief. For most of my life, my sense of my father, and of my parents’ relationship, was confined by the narrow aperture through which I watched them as a child. That sense was frozen in time when my father died. My theory of guilt-induced grief was hardly more sophisticated than Lucy’s psychiatric help at five cents a pop. The vague shame overhanging my father’s alcoholism silenced any conversation among the adults that might have caused me to question what I thought. As we grew, Junior and I would speak more openly to each other, but he could add nothing to my analysis. Although he was six when Papi died, he has virtually no memories of our father or of the time before his death. And so, with the vocabulary of hindsight, I came to assume that the intensity of my mother’s grief implied some form of clinical depression that was never treated but that somehow resolved itself eventually.
    I had never before in all these years asked that very intelligent and perceptive woman for her own version of events. I would be startled by what I uncovered and grateful even at this remove to meet a happier version of my father—and my mother—than I ever knew. My parents’ relationship was richer and more complex than a child could imagine, and the stories that have come to light are all the more precious to me for having been captured as my mother’s memory is fading fast with age.
    ——
    SOMETIMES THE PEOPLE closest to us are those we know the least.
    “Where should I begin, Sonia?”
    “Begin at the beginning, Mami.”
    MY MOTHER ’ S BIRTH , in 1927, was bad news. It was the reason, or at least the occasion, as she understood it, for her father’s abandonment of the family. Her own mother was sick, an invalid, as far back as she could remember. She believed her father was somehow to blame for that, but the story was never clear, since nobody spoke about him in their home. Toward the end, the sickness afflicted her mother’s mind as well as her body, and she would wander off. Celina would wake up at night alone in the bed they shared, the door open. She would find her mother by moonlight in the sugarcane field, take her by the hand, and lead her back to bed.
    Home was a little wooden shack of a house near Lajas, in the middle of the fields, with a dirt floor in the kitchen and an outhouse. There was no running water. It was the child Celina’s job to draw water for cooking