The Moths and Other Stories Read online

  The Moths and Other Stories

  Helena María Viramontes

  Stories in this collection have previously appeared in the following publications: “Growing” in Cuentos: Stories by Latinas; “The Moths” in 201: Homenaje a la Ciudad de Los Angeles, XhismArte Magazine; “Birthday” in Cenzontle: Chicano Short Stories and Poetry; “Broken Web” in Statement Magazine and Woman of Her Word; The Long Reconciliation” in XhismArte Magazine; and “Snapshots” in Maize.

  Recovering the past, creating the future

  Arte Público Press

  University of Houston

  452 Cullen Performance Hall

  Houston, Texas 77204-2004

  Cover design by Mark Piñón

  Original art “La Butterfly”

  by John Valadez, 1983

  Library of Congress Catalog Number 84-072308

  ISBN 978-1-55885-138-2

  The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

  Second Printing, 1988

  Third Printing, 1991

  Fourth Printing, 1992

  Second Edition, 1995

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1985 by Helena María Viramontes

  Printed in the United States of America

  8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 13 12 11 10 9 8

  Contents

  Introduction, by Yvonne Yarbo-Bejarano

  The Moths

  Growing

  Birthday

  The Broken Web

  The Cariboo Cafe

  The Long Reconciliation

  Snapshots

  Neighbors

  To Mary Louise Labrada Viramontes

  for Pilar

  Introduction

  Introduction

  With this collection of stories, Helena María Viramontes makes an important contribution to the growing body of writing by Chicanas and Latinas in this country whose art speaks to the reality of women of color. It has been apparent for some time that Chicanas are riding a wave of creative expression that is carrying them to the forefront in the field of literary creativity in the United States. This trend has been most visible in the area of poetry, where a veritable explosion of Chicanas’ creative energies has occurred. Chicanas have moved more recently into fiction, as witnessed by Lucha Corpi’s prize-winning entry in the University of Texas at El Paso’s short-story contest “Palabra Nueva,” the publication of Gina Valdés’ novel There Are No Madmen Here (San Diego: Maize Press, 1981), and the stories represented in the collection Woman of Her Word: Hispanic Women Write (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1983), edited by Evangelina Vigil, to mention a few achievements among many.

  The current effervescence of Chicana writers is a tribute to their strength and determination to be heard, given the nature of the obstacles which lie in their path. The Chicana writers share with all women writers the problem of breaking into a male-dominated industry, but they must overcome others related to class and race as well. A long history of economic, racial and linguistic oppression has relegated the Chicana to menial jobs, systematically denied her access to literacy and robbed her of her mother tongue when she succeeds in educating herself. Even when she does learn to write, the self-hatred and sense of inferiority indoctrinated in all women by a patriarchal system of values, and exaggerated in the Chicana by her color and her class, militate against her conviction that she has something worth saying. In her open letter to third-world women writers, Gloria Anzaldúa suggests that their real struggle involves the search for a voice which is uniquely theirs. The Chicana writer must draw strength from the very conditions seen as sources of inferiority by the oppressor: her sex, her race and culture, her class. The search for their authentic voice has led Chicana writers to explore the personal in relationship to a collective identity. This process is not just one of affirmation, but also one of questioning and critical examination. At the same time that the Chicana writer recognizes her collective and familial history as a source of strength, she challenges values which continue to oppress women within the Chicano family and culture.

  This brings me to the importance of the stories published in this collection, stories written by a Chicana about women of all ages. Viramontes does not present idealized versions of feminists successfully battling patriarchy. Acutely aware of women’s dilemmas, Viramontes creates female characters who are a contradictory blend of strengths and weaknesses, struggling against lives of unfulfilled potential and restrictions forced upon them because of their sex. These women are conscious that something is wrong with their lives, and that what is wrong is linked to the rigid gender roles imposed on them by their men and their culture, often with the aid of the Church. Most display resistance: the rebellious behavior of the adolescents in “Growing” and “The Moths,” the courageous decision to abort taken by Alice in “Birthday” and Amanda in “The Long Reconciliation,” and the perpetration of criminal violence in “The Broken Web.”

  Viramontes focuses her narrative lens on the struggles of women within the Chicano family and culture, although larger social and economic conflicts often form a backdrop or frame for the main action. The relationship between Chato and Amanda in “The Long Reconciliation” is only understandable in light of the crushing poverty and exploitation of their lives in Mexico. In “The Broken Web,” Tomás transports undocumented workers into the United States to work in the fields where he himself, his wife and his three children slave under the Fresno sun during the grape harvest. “Neighbors” captures the desperation of the barrio, where “tough-minded boy-men” gather in groups to drink and “lose themselves in the abyss of defeat,” locked out of the dominant society by economic factors and discriminatory attitudes as effective as padlocks. Fierro is killed by the “heartaches” of losing a son to senseless violence and forty years of memories to the freeways which obliterated his home in the barrio “with clawing efficiency.” In the same story, Aura unleashes a chain of events which demonstrate the reality of police harrassment in the barrio. The disproportionate number of patrol cars, the flashing of red lights, and the batons speak of the brutality and prejudice which permeate the characters’ lives. When the police subdue a youth who tries to escape, Aura hears “the creak of their thick leather belts rubbing against their bullets.”

  But racial prejudice and the economic and social oppression of Chicanos in this country are rarely the central theme of these stories. Viramontes is concerned primarily with the social and cultural values which shape women’s lives and against which they struggle with varying degrees of success. Most of the stories develop a conflict between a female character and the man who represents the maximum authority in her life, either father or husband. The fathers in “Growing” and “Moths” are oppressive figures who threaten violence and demand obedient acceptance of traditional roles. In “Growing,” Naomi is bewildered by her father’s distrust of her, not fully realizing that this distrust is inherent in her culture’s definition of gender:

  It was Apá who refused to trust her, and she could not understand what she had done to make him so distrustful. TÚ ERES MUJER, he thundered, and that was the end of any argument, any question, and the matter was closed because he said those three words as if they were a condemnation from the heavens and so she couldn’t be trusted.

  In many cases, Viramontes shows the collusion of the Catholic Church in the socialization of women in rigid gender roles. In “The Moths,” the father’s violent opposition to his adolescent daughter’s deviation from the cultural norm of femininity is closely linked to her rejection of the Church:

  That was one of Apá‘s biggest complaints. He would poun
d his hands on the table, rocking the sugar dish or spilling a cup of coffee and scream that if I didn’t go to Mass every Sunday to save my goddam sinning soul, then I had no reason to go out of the house, period. Punto final. He would grab my arm and dig his nails into me to make sure I understood the importance of catechism. Did he make himself clear?

  To assume more independence and responsibility in their lives, the women in these stories must break with years of indoctrination by the Church. In “Birthday,” Alice’s decision to take control of her own body and future by having an abortion is accompanied not only by guilt but by a radical redefinition of her relationship to her religion as well. After listening to Alice rationalize her position, her friend Terry responds: “Look, you’ll stew and brood and feel pitiful and pray until your knees chap—but in the end you’ll decide on the abortion. So why not cut out this silliness?” At the end, Alice reveals her contradictory feelings, mixing expressions of guilt (“forgive me for I have sinned”) with rejections of God (“No! I don’t love you, not you, God”) and loss of self-esteem (“not even me”). In “The Long Reconciliation,” Amanda decides to abort because she cannot bear “to watch a child slowly rot,” defying the values of her community and her husband and the dictates of the priest: “It is so hard being female, Amanda, and you must understand that that is the way it was meant to be.…” She reveals her disillusionment with a distant God who does not help the poor: “But, Father, wasn’t He supposed to take care of us, His poor?…You, God, eating and drinking as you like, you, there, not feeling the sweat or the pests that feed on the skin, you sitting with a kingly lust for comfort, tell us that we will be paid later on in death.” In “The Broken Web,” Martha reveals the trauma of her father’s murder to the priest through the language of a dream in which she identifies her father with a statue of Christ which shatters into little pieces. As Evangelina Vigil points out in her introduction to the collection Woman of Her Word, the priest “is detached from the spiritual needs of those he confesses” (p. 11). The mother in the same story expresses her guilt at killing her husband and her sense of alienation from a male, authoritarian God: “Her children in time would forgive her. But God? He would never understand. He was a man, too.”

  In most cases, Viramontes’ female characters pay dearly for breaking with traditional values concerning women, and the exploration of their sexuality often brings negative consequences.

  In “Birthday,” Alice’s fear of the abortion is only partly due to her religious upbringing; she is also frightened of having to make the decision. Characterized as a child in the story, Alice looks for direction first to her shadowy boyfriend, then to Terry. She realizes that having to make the decision alone is both burdensome and liberating. Accepting responsibility for her life matures and empowers her. When her boyfriend tells her it was her responsibility not to get pregnant, “her eyes, that had first pleaded desperately under the tree, now looked upon him as a frightened child.” The positive exploration of her sexuality, expressed in the poetic passage which opens and closes the story, is negatively tinged with guilt and the trauma of the abortion: “No sex, Alice. Punishing me. For loving? God! Fucking, Alice…God isn’t pregnant, Alice.” At the end, the passage of ecstatic sublimation is invaded by guilt (“forgive me, Father, for I have sinned”), juxtaposing pleasure (“God, how I love it”), rejection of God (“No! I don’t love you, not you, God”) and the “cold hands” in her experience of the abortion.

  Aura, the old female character in “Neighbors,” leads an isolated and solitary existence. The arrival of the strange woman disrupts the silent bond which she has formed with Fierro, her old neighbor, and heightens Aura’s solitude. She spies on them, envious of their laughing and dancing to a tune which takes her back to her youth. She goes to bed after watching them, “cold under the bleached, white sheets.” At first she attributes her feelings of weakness and uneasiness to the medication she was taking during her illness, but realizes the hollowness in her stomach is caused by the presence of the strange woman: “Aura’s heart sank like an anchor into an ocean of silence.” The youths of the neighborhood take their revenge on Aura for making the mistake of calling the police; she decides that since she is totally alone she must take care of herself. She gets the gun and sits with it facing the door, terrified, “because she refused to be helpless.” Her mind goes back to the rattlers her grandfather taught her how to kill, which she identifies with what is “out there” menacing her: the youths who have sworn to “get her,” but also the stranger who has disrupted the pattern of her existence. Ironically, Aura’s refusal to be passive leads to the armed confrontation, not with Rubén or Toastie, but with the strange woman who has destroyed the one tenuous relationship Aura has with her “neighbors.”

  Olga Ruiz, in “Snapshots,” is a middle-aged woman who has been trapped by the meaningless routines of a wasted life. She has spent thirty years in total self-abnegation, trying to fulfill the role of perfect wife and mother. The gap between the ideal and her reality is captured by the “snapshot”: “If it wasn’t for the burnt cupcakes, my damn varicose veins, and Marge blubbering all over her day suit, it would have made a perfect snapshot for him to keep.” Hers is a story of unfulfillment, having dissipated her life in the hopeless pursuit of cleanliness:

  How can people believe that for years I’ve fought against motes of dust and dirt-attracting floors or bleached white sheets to perfection when a few hours later the motes, the dirt, the stains return to remind me of the uselessness of it all? I was always too busy to listen to swans slicing the lake water or watch the fluttering wings of wild geese flying south for a warm winter. I missed the heartbeat I could have heard if I had just held Marge a little closer.

  Her divorce and her alienation from her daughter have opened her eyes to the time she has lost. She rebels, letting the dust collect under the bed, “as it should be.” But she substitutes her previous frenzy of meaningless activity with non-activity, not with productive action: “To be quite frank, the fact of the matter is I wish to do nothing but allow indolence to rush through my veins with frightening speed.” Olga Ruiz describes her obsession with the albums of snapshots as an addiction to nostalgia and searches them for lost time, for the past that never existed which has taken away her future. The snapshots are ghosts she can no longer recognize; she herself has “faded into thirty years of trivia.” The distance and lack of affection between her parents, between her and her parents, and between her and her daughter is mirrored in her attitude toward her sexuality. She viewed sex as something to be done privately and efficiently, not necessarily for pleasure, and when her husband searched her eyes the next morning, she says she “never could figure out what he expected to find there.” She desperately searches for meaning in the snapshots, yet knows they are unreal, frozen moments of time. Olga wishes Marge would “jump out of any snapshot,” break out of their programmed patterns of relating as mother and daughter. She fears that Marge is turning into another “Olga,” blending into nothing. Her panic over losing her identity drives her to the snapshots, but she is equally horrified by what they reveal. The story ends with her torn between her rejection of the snapshots and her need for them: “It scares me to think that my grandmother may have been right. It scares me even more to think I don’t have a snapshot of her. So, I’ll go through my album, and if I find one, I’ll tear it up for sure.”

  In “The Long Reconciliation,” Amanda is almost a child when she marries. She is considered wild by her family, “like the jackrabbits, timid, not strong, but strong-willed.” After discovering her sexuality on her wedding night, Amanda has come to think of sex as one of the only pleasures in her life. The priest tries to force her to accept sex only for procreation, but she refuses to give it up: “Sex is the only free pleasure we have. It makes us feel like clouds for the minutes that not even you can prevent. You ask us not to lie together, but we are not made of you, we are not gods.” She experiences pregnancy as a threat to her meager survival resources:
“To awake and feel something inside draining you. Lying on my back, I can almost see where all my energy is going.…I stroke it to calm its vulgar hunger, but it won’t be satisfied until it gets all of me.” Her defiance of the taboo against abortion costs her the love of her husband Chato and the expression of her sexuality. After the abortion, Chato shuns her, rejecting her attempts “to make him love her again. Each time she touched him, he saw his child’s face and would jerk away from her grasp.” Her affair with Don Joaquín, the hated landowner who has sold Chato a piece of worthless land, causes her great sadness and guilt because she still loves Chato and longs for him to forgive her. She ends the affair too late, for Chato finds out about it and stabs Don Joaquín. Amanda herself takes a savage revenge on her ex-lover for telling her husband, ripping open his wound and stuffing it with maggots to hasten his death. Chato is unable to forgive Amanda, accusing her of acting like God by daring to change their destiny and insisting that in killing Don Joaquín he acted like a man should. When he tells her that he has killed for honor, Amanda replies that he acted in blind obedience to his concept of his role as a man:

  …I killed for life.…Which is worse? You killed because something said, “you must kill to remain a man.”…For me, things are as different as our bodies.…But you couldn’t understand that because something said, “you must have sons to remain a man.”

  The carousel represents Chato’s dreams for the future, dreams dashed by the poverty of the land, the oppression of Don Joaquín and Amanda’s decision to abort their son. The difference between Chato and Amanda is captured in the scene where he attempts to console her, not realizing that her anguish is caused by her pregnancy:

  She heard him fumbling through some boxes in the closet and turned to find him holding the carousel. “Children die like crops here,” she said, but he could not hear her for the bells of carousel music came forth sounding like an orchestra in the silence of the night.