“Pity her parents,” my grandmother said, “but the girl was blameless.”
It was high summer. I had three days’ leave and was taking it at her place, where the countryside starts to deepen. This was harvest time and the crop had gone to market but a little was left to the farmers; often the neighbors brought their share here because everyone knew my grandmother had the best hand for guava paste. She spared us a bit of syrup from the huge boiling kettle to drizzle over platefuls of small bananas. The work with its inconsequential chatter to help the time pass was done and the dusk was coming and the women relaxed, and there wasn’t so much one could talk about freely.
I’d been out of the country when it happened and we were stopped from getting much news. But you can always freshen tragedies and scandals and the women didn’t mind a chance to be shocked and grieved again and besides, wasn’t it a courtesy to catch me up? Beatriz had been a national pride and even admired abroad and she’d come from us, our own people.
Still I was surprised I felt such grief. It seemed like a perversion of decency that I knew because of my training what Beatriz’s parents saw when they found her—the interior of her head, her stunning imagination, her warmth and generosity all reduced to a red and gray splatter across her worktable. Perhaps I could grasp their anguish too well.
…the girl was blameless.
The neighbors went silent when my grandmother said that. She wasn’t someone people liked to contradict.
***
The gods came with us, she told me when I was very small, concealing themselves from all but their true children. We kept their names under our tongues. The masters forced new names into our mouths but the gods knew our meaning when we spoke. They didn’t abandon us. In the houses of the masters we had our secret rooms and when we spoke the true names the gods answered us.
I teased my grandmother once when Beatriz was first becoming famous that the gods had given her the wrong grandchild.
“No,” she said.
It was true I’d made her proud. I was attracted to science and the beautiful symmetries of math and was unfailingly a top student. I valued sense and logic. I’d worked to make my professors and their bosses and later my own students trust me.
I never realized she wasn’t a tall woman until I grew big myself. She was built from rough angles but moved like water that cuts through rock. There were men in this place who most people feared and who didn’t like to anger my grandma.
Now, with the women gone back to their houses and the two of us sitting alone outside, a smudge burning to frustrate the mosquitoes and the stars bright enough so we didn’t need to light a lantern, I took out the small gifts I’d brought for her and laid them on the upturned crate serving us for a table. Among them were a few stones and pieces of sea glass I’d found on a beach in Ghana. Those I put in her hand and she examined them with great care and told me I’d chosen well.
“It’s not a simple thing,” my grandma said, “to figure out what the gods want. Beatriz tried to do it on her own. She never had a bad intention.”
***
While I was packing in the morning, my grandma gave me back one of the stones. She folded my fingers over it and squeezed them tightly and said it was mine; it had been meant for me.
I never had the chance to pay my respects directly to Beatriz’s family. They’d moved to the city when it was time for her to study art at a higher level. But I finally found words to put in a letter and mailed it before I went overseas again.
One morning I knew my grandmother was gone. No dream, no visitation, just a cold empty feeling. I never quite believed it could happen but I’d been careful to plan as if it might, and for reasons I can’t explain I always kept that little stone in my pocket.
I got out. I don’t know why I was so lucky. Eventually I could work again in my field and I found the sort of man for myself I wouldn’t have been uneasy to bring to that place I came from, to meet my grandma.
A couple of years later, I was locking up the door of my practice and decided to buy myself a little bagful of pastelitos to eat while I drove home. We were going out to dinner and I felt as naughty as a five-year-old sneaking a forbidden bite. I chuckled out loud; I couldn’t hold it back.
Then, I swear on my soul, I heard my grandma’s voice as if she were sitting there beside me, I felt her hand press my belly. Name her Beatriz, my grandmother said, and she will come back.
Quite a "story" -- "partly truth and partly fiction"? A suicide?
But know the feeling in your "I heard my grandma’s voice as if she were sitting there beside me". Memories -- a torment and a blessing.
I would say you did a brilliant job. I would have believed you’d written it from firsthand knowledge. Beautiful and sad.
I don’t have a NY Times subscription but found another article in the LA Times. I’d never heard of this artist. What a loss.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-belkis-ayon-20160912-snap-htmlstory.html