Beyond the Ties of Blood Read Online Free PDF Page A

she was entering adolescence—or was it simply that she noticed it then for the first time?—Papa reached his breaking point. He began coming home late almost every night, missing dinner. Sometimes he didn’t come home at all. She knew now that he had begun seeing other women, though at the time what she noticed most was Mama’s tears at the dinner table, or the late-night arguments. Of course, at the time she could not have understood that, in addition to being angry that he was being unfaithful, Mama was also upset because she was unable to choose her husband over her family.
    When Papa finally fell in love with someone else, he packed up his bags and left. It seemed the woman really loved him, too, since she accepted him with nothing, no hope for a new marriage or a legitimate family. There would be no formal separation; Mama’s family simply would not hear of it. So after pumping a great deal of his own resources into her family’s farm, he left with nothing more than his clothes and his engineering connections. The moment he shut the front gate on his way out of the house, Mama retreated into the bedroom and closed the door. Aside from trips to the bathroom, she stayed in the room, blinds drawn, for six months. She opened the door to accept the tray of food their maid Teresa put there, on the floor, three times a day. Shortly afterward, the tray would be back outside the door, plates empty, ready for Teresa to pick up and return to the kitchen.
    As Irene spent more and more time out with her friends, Eugenia had nowhere else to go. She would help Teresa in the kitchen, or read books in the living room. She knew that Irene also talked to Papa almost every day, since she heard the phone ring and occasionally picked up the other receiver in time to overhear snatches of their whispered conversations. Irene was more like their father in so many ways, from horseback riding to her stellar grades in chemistry. Eugenia, on the other hand, had no one to turn to, her father having abandoned her and Mama barricaded in her room. She became obsessed with the short stories of Borges, and devoured García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad when it first came out. Although she knew she could not write fiction, she began to dream about becoming a journalist.
    By the time Mama emerged from her room, her hair had turned completely white. Her friends urged her to dye it back to its original color, but she refused, wearing it proudly, it seemed, as a badge of her suffering. Upon her reentry into the world, she spent most of her time keeping track of her daughters’ movements, at precisely the moment in their lives when they needed more independence. When they got home from school, she had tea with sandwiches waiting for them at the table, and then required that they sit down and tell her every detail of their day.
    â€œWhere are you going now, Irene?” she asked every afternoon when Irene would get up from the table to change out of her uniform, substituting the pleated plaid skirt, white blouse with tie, navy blue sweater, and beige knee socks for the blue jeans that were becoming more popular among the girls their age.
    â€œI’m meeting some friends downtown, Mamita,” her older sister answered, in that excessively patient tone so typical of late adolescence.
    â€œWhat about your homework? You can’t let your studies slide now, you know, less than a year before the academic aptitude test.”
    â€œI don’t have any.”
    â€œThat’s not possible, hijita , you’re in eleventh grade now, there’s always homework in eleventh grade.”
    â€œMamita.” Irene’s tone would become tight. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times. I’m in the advanced science program. I have time in the early mornings, when I’m watching the experiments in the lab. Why do you think I’m out of the house by seven, usually before you