The Moths and Other Stories Read online

  Chato leaves and goes north, where he finally makes his peace with Amanda as he lies dying many years later in a hospital. He refers to his withholding of forgiveness as a mountain “too big for two little hands, one closed heart, too immovable.” Only at the end does he realize “that the mountain was no bigger than a stone, a stone I could have thrown into the distance where the earth and sky meet, thrown it away at 24 but instead waited 58 years.…” Amanda helps him “cast the stone,” initiating the “long reconciliation” of the title. But this forgiveness is tinged with bitter fatalism. Chato realizes the futility of his dreams (“the carousel horse with a glossy silver saddle moving but going nowhere was just wood”) and of his life: “Maybe we were all born cheated. There is no justice, only honor in that little world out in the desert where our house sits like decayed bones. All that can be done is what you have done, Amanda; sit on the porch and weave your threads into time.”

  The nameless female character of “The Broken Web” suffers the worst consequence for her violent break with the traditional role imposed on women. As Vigil points out, she is weighed down by her subservience to Tomás and the responsiblity of her family, and she acts to free herself “from the misery…of guilt imposed by man and God” (pp. 12-13). Musing on the fate of Olivia, the aging barmaid, she wonders if she would become like her if Tomás left her. By murdering Tomás, the woman breaks the cycle of use and abuse, just as she breaks the web of the title which connects the different women in the story through Tomás. Speaking to the dead man “with the voice of prayer,” the woman explains how she has been “tired and wrinkled and torn by him, his God, his word.” Her sexuality as well as her individuality have been stifled by their marriage. She tells Tomás that she gave up being a woman when she married him, and earlier in the story she thinks that “only in complete solitude did she feel like a woman.” Before marrying Tomás, she had defied the rules governing women’s behavior by sleeping with another man. But this had only increased her oppression, fueling Tomás’ rage against her. She feels enslaved by her marriage and her children: “And she could not leave him because she no longer owned herself. He owned her, her children owned her, and she needed them all to live. And she was tired of needing.” But her act of liberation from this life of imprisonment results in literal incarceration, and even after killing Tomás, she is not released from his power over her. Dead, he seems more alive to her, “more real than anything, anyone around her.” She herself feels “equally dead, but equally real.” Dead, he is an “invincible cloud of past” whose blood “stained all tomorrows.” She cannot escape Tomás by killing him; she believes she has condemned her soul to punishment. All she has left is the strength of defiant resignation, picturing herself as a “cricket wailing nightly for redemption.”

  “Neighbors” tells the story of an isolated old woman; “Snapshots,” “The Broken Web,” and “The Long Reconciliation” present women struggling with the limitations imposed on them by marriage. The two stories which open the collection, “Growing” and “Moths,” deal with another phase of women’s life cycle: the threshold of puberty.

  “Growing” captures the pain and confusion of adolescence. Naomi rebels against social and cultural values which dictate how her life must change because her body has changed. The exploration of her budding sexuality either leads to punishment or is tied to restrictions on her behavior imposed by the male. When her relationship with Eloy turns sexual, he becomes jealous and excludes her from activities she used to share with the other children.

  There were too many demands on her, and no one showed her how to fulfill them, and wasn’t it crazy?…and she began to act different because everyone began treating her different and wasn’t it crazy? She could no longer be herself and her father could no longer trust her because she was a woman.

  For her, becoming a “woman” is associated with loss of freedom and a vague sense of the oppression and injustice that await her. Her loss is momentarily attenuated by a baseball game. For a fleeting moment she returns to the world of childhood from which she has been barred. But her participation in the game is, appropriately, from the sidelines; she is like an outsider looking through a window at what was once hers and is now irretrievably lost. At the end of the story she sees her own lost childhood in her little sister’s sleeping face and envies her uncomplicated existence. The story is a lament for the sexual innocence and the carefree play of childhood; for Naomi, her newly discovered sexuality means only burdensome restrictions, frightening changes and confusing demands of conformity to her culture’s definition of the woman’s role.

  “The Moths” links the painful experience of adolescence with another threshold experience. The death of her abuela is part of the rebellious tomboy’s maturing process. She mourns the loss of the only person who understood her, and weeps for the death of her own childhood and innocence as well. Like “Growing,” “The Moths” shows the coercive socialization of adolescent girls in femininity as defined by their culture. The adolescent protagonist of the story is acutely aware that she is “different” from her sisters:

  I wasn’t even pretty or nice like my older sisters and I just couldn’t do the girl things they could do. My hands were too big to handle the fineries of crocheting or embroidery and I always pricked my fingers or knotted my colored threads time and time again while my sisters laughed and called me “bull hands” with their cute waterlike voices.

  The animosity created between her and her sisters by their mockery of her difference explodes periodically in anger and violence; she is beaten for this and for her disrespectful rebelliousness. As in the above quote, her feeling of being different and awkward is concentrated in her hands: “My hands began to fan out, grow like a liar’s nose until they hung by my side like low weights.” The grandmother reshapes her grand-daughter’s hands, returning their use to her and making her feel more comfortable with herself: “Abuelita made a balm out of dried moth wings and Vicks and rubbed my hands, shaped them back to size and it was the strangest feeling. Like bones melting. Like sun shining through the darkness of your eyelids.” Her grandmother’s house is a peaceful refuge from the stormy home environment of quarrels and beatings, an evocative world of calm vegetation in which she feels protected by her abuela’s “gray eye” and comfortable silence: “It made me feel, in a strange sort of way, safe and guarded and not alone. Like God was supposed to make you feel.” Since her grandmother had “melted and formed” her hands, she feels that it is “only fair” that the same hands be the ones to care for her abuela on her deathbed, rubbing her body, arms and legs. The rejection of the cold emptiness of the church, closely associated with her father, contrasts with her feelings of protected safety at her grandmother’s: “I looked up at the high ceiling. I had forgotten the vastness of these places, the coolness of the marble pillars and the frozen statues with blank eyes. I knew why I had never returned.” In the chapel she remembers her father’s overbearing determination to indoctrinate her in her role as a woman through religion. Sent off to Mass, she would go to her abuela’s instead, where one day, helping her make chile, she works out her feelings under the silent gaze of her grandmother:

  The chiles made my eyes water. Am I crying? No, Mama Luna, I’m sure not crying. I don’t like going to Mass, but my eyes watered anyway, the tears dropping on the table cloth like candle wax…I…began to crush and crush and twist and crush the heart out of the tomato, the clove of garlic, the stupid chiles that made me cry, crushed them until they turned into liquid under my bull hand. With a wooden spoon, I scraped hard to destroy the guilt, and my tears were gone.

  Unlike her relationship with her grandmother, her relationship with her mother is strained. Her sisters berate her for hurting their mother by being selfish, disrespectful and unbelieving. She feels distant from her mother’s pain at losing her own mother and cannot comfort her. It is hard for her to express emotions other than anger. She is too tough and proud to admit to her grandmother that she is crying, and does no
t kiss either her abuela or her mother (“I never kissed her,” she says, of both). She manages to give her mother a pat on the back, but she cannot refrain from telling her how the grandmother fell off the bed, although she herself does not understand why she wanted to say it: “I guess I became angry and just so tired of the quarrels and unanswered prayers and my hands hanging helplessly by my side.” Hurt by her own inability to feel and express her feelings, she asks herself to give, when to stop and when to start. That she will learn is indicated by her regaining her hands once more: “and when my hands fell from my lap, I awoke to catch them.” She finds her abuela dead: “She had turned to the window and tried to speak, but her mouth remained open and speechless.” Through the mystery of death and the experience of mortal corruption, she begins to understand the miracle of rebirth, expressed in the image of the sun and her reassuring words to her dead grandmother: “‘I heard you, Abuelita,’ I said, stroking her cheek. ‘I heard you.’” These words suggest that her grandmother has handed down something to her which will persist as a part of herself. She bathes her abuela’s body in a cleansing ritual which is also a rite of passage. Her acceptance of death is accompanied by the poetic image of the title, the small gray moths which come from the abuela’s soul and through her mouth, “fluttering to the light, circling the single dull bulb of the bathroom.” She finally finds release in a flood of purging tears as she weeps for her grandmother, her mother and herself, “the sobs puking the hate from the depths of anguish, the misery of feeling half born, sobbing until finally the sobs rippled into circles and circles of sadness and relief.”

  In “The Cariboo Cafe,” Viramontes reveals another facet of her social consciousness as a writer, one with which she has been increasingly concerned lately. “The Cariboo Cafe” places the conflict in Central America at the center of her narrative world. Broadening her thematic spectrum, Viramontes addresses the plight of women suffering under repressive regimes which rob them of their children. The story weaves three paths which intersect with fatal consequences. In the process, Viramontes shows the economic and social parallels between the woman from El Salvador and the children of other “displaced people” in this country who live in fear of the urban jungle and La Migra. The cook of the Cariboo Cafe emerges as a fragmented consciousness from the shipwreck of his life, shot through with the loneliness of losing wife and son. He betrays the undocumented workers who seek refuge from La Migra in his bathroom out of rage and frustration at his own miserable existence. Although he justifies his action to himself (“Now look, I’m a nice guy, but I don’t like to be used, you know? Just because they’re regulars don’t mean jackshit”), he is left with the burning stare of the old woman seared into his memory. He also betrays the woman and the two children to the police. Ironically, his denunciation is motivated by his belief that “children gotta be with their parents, family gotta be together.” Through the story of this woman—from the morning her small son disappears to the day years later in the United States when she clings to the desperate delusion that she has found him once again—Viramontes makes a strong statement about the every-day horror that makes up the pattern of existence in countries like El Salvador.

  “The Cariboo Cafe” is characteristic of Viramontes’ narrative technique. In this story, as in others, she experiments with shifting points of view, interweaving various characters’ perspectives and avoiding a linear development of the action. “The Broken Web” and “The Long Reconciliation” make the severest demands on readers’ ability to reconstruct the temporal sequence of events. The language of the stories is rich and varied. Viramontes’ style in “Snapshots” captures Olga Ruiz’s dilemma with an offhand humor that is both poignant and wacky. The cook in “The Cariboo Cafe” is particularly well-characterized through his speech. Ways of seeing and speaking typical of children and adolescents make up the stylistic texture of “Growing,” “Moths,” and “The Cariboo Cafe,” combined with an expressive density of poetic imagery. On the whole, Viramontes’ language is terse and innovative. Her exploration of narrative structure and her constant struggle with words to make them yield fresh insights constitute an ongoing concern with craft in order to form a vehicle for these women’s stories that need to be told and heard.

  Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano

  Stanford University

  The Moths and Other Stories

  The Moths

  The Moths

  I was fourteen years old when Abuelita requested my help. And it seemed only fair. Abuelita had pulled me through the rages of scarlet fever by placing, removing and replacing potato slices on the temples of my forehead; she had seen me through several whippings, an arm broken by a dare-jump off Tío Enrique’s toolshed, puberty, and my first lie. Really, I told Amá, it was only fair.

  Not that I was her favorite granddaughter or anything special. I wasn’t even pretty or nice like my older sisters and I just couldn’t do the girl things they could do. My hands were too big to handle the fineries of crocheting or embroidery and I always pricked my fingers or knotted my colored threads time and time again while my sisters laughed and called me bull hands with their cute waterlike voices. So I began keeping a piece of jagged brick in my sock to bash my sisters or anyone who called me bull hands. Once, while we all sat in the bedroom, I hit Teresa on the forehead, right above her eyebrow, and she ran to Amá with her mouth open, her hand over her eye while blood seeped between her fingers. I was used to the whippings by then.

  I wasn’t respectful either. I even went so far as to doubt the power of Abuelita’s slices, the slices she said absorbed my fever. “You’re still alive, aren’t you?” Abuelita snapped back, her pasty gray eye beaming at me and burning holes in my suspicions. Regretful that I had let secret questions drop out of my mouth, I couldn’t look into her eyes. My hands began to fan out, grow like a liar’s nose until they hung by my side like low weights. Abuelita made a balm out of dried moth wings and Vicks and rubbed my hands, shaping them back to size. It was the strangest feeling. Like bones melting. Like sun shining through the darkness of your eyelids. I didn’t mind helping Abuelita after that, so Amá would always send me over to her.

  In the early afternoon Amá would push her hair back, hand me my sweater and shoes, and tell me to go to Mama Luna’s. This was to avoid another fight and another whipping, I knew. I would deliver one last direct shot on Marisela’s arm and jump out of our house, the slam of the screen door burying her cries of anger, and I’d gladly go help Abuelita plant her wild lilies or jasmine or heliotrope or cilantro or hierbabuena in red Hills Brothers coffee cans. Abuelita would wait for me at the top step of her porch holding a hammer and nail and empty coffee cans. And although we hardly spoke, hardly looked at each other as we worked over root transplants, I always felt her gray eye on me. It made me feel, in a strange sort of way, safe and guarded and not alone. Like God was supposed to make you feel.

  On Abuelita’s porch, I would puncture holes in the bottom of the coffee cans with a nail and a precise hit of a hammer. This completed, my job was to fill them with red clay mud from beneath her rose bushes, packing it softly, then making a perfect hole, four fingers round, to nest a sprouting avocado pit, or the spidery sweet potatoes that Abuelita rooted in mayonnaise jars with toothpicks and daily water, or prickly chayotes that produced vines that twisted and wound all over her porch pillars, crawling to the roof, up and over the roof, and down the other side, making her small brick house look like it was cradled within the vines that grew pear-shaped squashes ready for the pick, ready to be steamed with onions and cheese and butter. The roots would burst out of the rusted coffee cans and search for a place to connect. I would then feed the seedlings with water.

  But this was a different kind of help, Amá said, because Abuelita was dying. Looking into her gray eye, then into her brown one, the doctor said it was just a matter of days. And so it seemed only fair that these hands she had melted and formed found use in rubbing her caving body with alcohol and marihuana, rubbing her arms a
nd legs, turning her face to the window so that she could watch the Bird of Paradise blooming or smell the scent of clove in the air. I toweled her face frequently and held her hand for hours. Her gray wiry hair hung over the mattress. Since I could remember, she’d kept her long hair in braids. Her mouth was vacant and when she slept, her eyelids never closed all the way. Up close, you could see her gray eye beaming out the window, staring hard as if to remember everything. I never kissed her. I left the window open when I went to the market.

  Across the street from Jay’s Market there was a chapel. I never knew its denomination, but I went in just the same to search for candles. I sat down on one of the pews because there were none. After I cleaned my fingernails, I looked up at the high ceiling. I had forgotten the vastness of these places, the coolness of the marble pillars and the frozen statues with blank eyes. I was alone. I knew why I had never returned.

  That was one of Apá’s biggest complaints. He would pound 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 goddamn 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? Then he strategically directed his anger at Amá for her lousy ways of bringing up daughters, being disrespectful and unbelieving, and my older sisters would pull me aside and tell me if I didn’t get to Mass right this minute, they were all going to kick the holy shit out of me. Why am I so selfish? Can’t you see what it’s doing to Amá, you idiot? So I would wash my feet and stuff them in my black Easter shoes that shone with Vaseline, grab a missal and veil, and wave goodbye to Amá.