The Photograph
Some pictures don’t just show what was there. They show what was possible, and what was lost.
Elena || Photograph || History || Secret
Abuela Elena opened the tin box on a Wednesday evening, three weeks after her arrival, when Dad was at the restaurant and the house had the particular quality of a space occupied by only two people who were ready to talk. She called me from the kitchen where she was making hot chocolate from scratch — actual chocolate and milk and cinnamon, the way I had watched her make it every visit since I was small — and I came down and sat at the kitchen table and she set two mugs between us and sat across from me and placed the tin box on the table without opening it immediately. This was her method: she built toward things, established the space for them before filling it. I had, apparently, inherited this quality, which would have been useful information to have earlier.
The tin box was old — actually old, not decoratively old but worn and dented with the particular damage of something that had traveled and been handled for many years. When she opened it the smell that came out was dry and warm — old paper, and something floral that I thought might be dried flowers turned to almost nothing over time. Inside: letters, folded, written on paper that had gone the color of weak tea. A rosary. And underneath everything else, a photograph. She took the photograph out and set it on the table between us. It was black and white, slightly faded, the corners bent. Two people, a woman and another woman, standing in front of what appeared to be a market or a square in Mexico, squinting slightly against what looked like afternoon sun. They were standing close together — not touching, but close in the way that people who chose to be close stood close, the specific proximity of something intentional. One of them I recognized despite the age of the image and the youth of the face: Abuela Elena, maybe twenty-five, with the same direct look she still had, aimed at the camera with the unguarded expression of someone happy in the specific way that real happiness produced. The other woman was someone I had never seen before. She was laughing — not posed, actually laughing, caught mid-something. She was beautiful.
“Who is she?” I said. Elena looked at the photograph for a long moment before answering. “Her name was Catalina Fuentes,” she said. “We met in 1973. In Oaxaca City.” She said this in the careful way of someone unwrapping something they had kept wrapped for a long time, attending to each layer. “She was — ” She paused. “She was the most important person in my life for four years. From when I was twenty-four until I was twenty-eight.” The kitchen was warm and quiet. The chocolate was sweet. I looked at the photograph and then at my grandmother’s face, which was doing something I had never seen it do — not sadness exactly, but a complex emotion that had grief and love and time all layered into the same expression. “What happened?” I asked. “Life happened,” she said. “My family. The expectations. The things that were possible then and not possible. The things I was afraid of.” She looked up from the photograph and she looked at me — the full, seeing look that cut through surfaces. “I want you to understand something,” she said. “I loved her. I loved her completely. And I chose to hide it, and then I chose to leave it, because I was afraid. And the leaving cost me more than I understood at twenty-eight.” She touched the edge of the photograph. “I have thought about that cost every day for forty-seven years.” The kitchen was very quiet. I was holding my mug. My heart was doing something specific and fast. “Abuela,” I said. She waited. “Why are you telling me this?” She looked at me with the brown eyes that my dad had inherited and I had half-inherited and that had been seeing through people for seventy years. “Because you are carrying a river,” she said, repeating the phrase from the day she arrived. “And rivers are not meant to be carried. They are meant to run.” I looked at the photograph of the laughing woman. I thought about the cost she was describing — forty-seven years of thinking about a choice. I thought about my third index card, blank now, with the word Soon on it. I thought about the bravest thing I hadn’t done yet. “Thank you,” I said. She picked up her hot chocolate. “Finish the chocolate,” she said. “Then we can talk more.”