Abuela Elena’s Story
When someone older tells you about a love they lost, they are telling you not to lose yours.
Elena || Catalina || History | Love
The full story of Catalina Fuentes came out on a January evening, when Dad was at the restaurant and Abuela Elena and I were in the living room with hot chocolate and the tin box open between us. She had waited, she told me, until she was sure I was ready to receive it. She was right about the timing — I would not have received it fully before Christmas, before telling Dad, before the coat. Now I received it completely. She told it in the careful way she told the important things, attending to each piece, not rushing toward the conclusion but building toward it the way you built toward a thing you needed to be fully present for.
She had met Catalina in 1973, in Oaxaca City, at a market where Elena had been working in her father’s stall and Catalina had come to buy fabric and had asked Elena’s opinion on a color and Elena had given it and they had talked for an hour while Catalina’s fabric waited in her arms. They had become friends. Inseparable friends, the kind that the older women in town would have called very close and understood exactly what they meant without saying it. In those years, in that place, you did not say it. You were very close. You visited each other constantly. You kept each other’s company in the specific way that people who loved each other kept company. You were careful, always, about where you let the love be visible. “But we knew,” Abuela Elena said. “Between us, we knew exactly what it was.” She held her hot chocolate. The tin box was open between us with the photograph on top, Catalina mid-laugh, Elena looking at the camera with the unguarded happiness. “She wanted to leave,” Elena said. “Go to Mexico City, somewhere bigger, where there was more space for people like us. She was brave like that. She always said: the space you need doesn’t appear on its own. You have to go find it, or make it.” She paused. “I wasn’t brave enough,” she said. “My family, my father especially — the expectations. I had brothers and sisters who needed the business. I had the life that was expected of me.” She looked at the photograph. “I chose the expected life. I married your grandfather, who was a good man, who I respected, who I was never — ” She stopped. “He knew,” she said. “He knew I had loved someone before him. He didn’t know who or how, but he knew. He was a good man. He didn’t ask.” She touched the edge of the photograph. “Catalina went to Mexico City. We wrote for five years. Then the letters stopped. She had found her life — I heard from a mutual friend, years later, that she had been happy. That she had found a partner. I was glad.” She said this in a way that was genuine and also cost something. “I was glad for her. And I missed her every day for forty-seven years.” She looked at me across the hot chocolate and the tin box and the photograph. “You understand why I’m telling you this,” she said. “Yes,” I said. “You’re telling me not to choose the expected life at the cost of the real one.” “I’m telling you that the cost is very high,” she said. “Forty-seven years is a long time to think about a choice.” She closed the tin box. “And I am also telling you,” she said, with the direct eyes, “that you are braver than I was. I can see it. You have been finding the courage. Don’t stop finding it.” I looked at the closed tin box and thought about a twenty-five-year-old woman in a market in Oaxaca and a forty-seven-year accumulation and the specific cost of choosing the expected over the real. I thought about the photograph face-down in my drawer — I had turned it face-up, before Christmas. It was a photograph of me and Jamie at the regional qualifier, taken by Priya, in which we were both laughing at something off-camera. I had not put it in my drawer face-down. I kept it face-up on my desk. This was new. This was the right direction.