The Moths and Other Stories (2 page)

Aura, the old female character in “Neighbors,” leads an isolated and solitary existence. The arrival of the strange woman disrupts the silent bond which she has formed with Fierro, her old neighbor, and heightens Aura's solitude. She spies on them, envious of their laughing and dancing to a tune which takes her back to her youth. She goes to bed after watching them, “cold under the bleached, white sheets.” At first she attributes her feelings of weakness and uneasiness to the medication she was taking during her illness, but realizes the hollowness in her stomach is caused by the presence of the strange woman: “Aura's heart sank like an anchor into an ocean of silence.” The youths of the neighborhood take their revenge on Aura for making the mistake of calling the police; she decides that since she is totally alone she must take care of herself. She gets the gun and sits with it facing the door, terrified, “because she refused to be helpless.” Her mind goes back to the rattlers her grandfather taught her how to kill, which she identifies with what is “out there” menacing her: the youths who have sworn to “get her,” but also the stranger who has disrupted the pattern of her existence. Ironically, Aura's refusal to be passive leads to the armed confrontation, not with Rubén or Toastie, but with the strange
woman who has destroyed the one tenuous relationship Aura has with her “neighbors.”

Olga Ruiz, in “Snapshots,” is a middle-aged woman who has been trapped by the meaningless routines of a wasted life. She has spent thirty years in total self-abnegation, trying to fulfill the role of perfect wife and mother. The gap between the ideal and her reality is captured by the “snapshot”: “If it wasn't for the burnt cupcakes, my damn varicose veins, and Marge blubbering all over her day suit, it would have made a perfect snapshot for him to keep.” Hers is a story of unfulfillment, having dissipated her life in the hopeless pursuit of cleanliness:

How can people believe that for years I've fought against motes of dust and dirt-attracting floors or bleached white sheets to perfection when a few hours later the motes, the dirt, the stains return to remind me of the uselessness of it all? I was always too busy to listen to swans slicing the lake water or watch the fluttering wings of wild geese flying south for a warm winter. I missed the heartbeat I could have heard if I had just held Marge a little closer.

Her divorce and her alienation from her daughter have opened her eyes to the time she has lost. She rebels, letting the dust collect under the bed, “as it should be.” But she substitutes her previous frenzy of meaningless activity with non-activity, not with productive action: “To be quite frank, the fact of the matter is I wish to do nothing but allow indolence to rush through my veins with frightening speed.” Olga Ruiz describes her obsession with the albums of snapshots as an addiction to nostalgia and searches them for lost time, for the past that never existed which has taken away her future. The snapshots are ghosts she can no longer recognize; she herself has “faded into thirty years of trivia.” The distance and lack of affection between her parents, between her and her parents, and between her and her daughter is mirrored in her attitude toward her sexuality. She viewed sex as something to be done privately and efficiently, not necessarily for pleasure, and when her husband searched her eyes the next morning, she says she “never could figure out what he expected to find there.” She desperately searches for meaning in the snapshots, yet knows they are unreal, frozen moments of time. Olga wishes Marge would “jump out of any snapshot,” break out of
their programmed patterns of relating as mother and daughter. She fears that Marge is turning into another “Olga,” blending into nothing. Her panic over losing her identity drives her to the snapshots, but she is equally horrified by what they reveal. The story ends with her torn between her rejection of the snapshots and her need for them: “It scares me to think that my grandmother may have been right. It scares me even more to think I don't have a snapshot of her. So, I'll go through my album, and if I find one, I'll tear it up for sure.”

In “The Long Reconciliation,” Amanda is almost a child when she marries. She is considered wild by her family, “like the jackrabbits, timid, not strong, but strong-willed.” After discovering her sexuality on her wedding night, Amanda has come to think of sex as one of the only pleasures in her life. The priest tries to force her to accept sex only for procreation, but she refuses to give it up: “Sex is the only free pleasure we have. It makes us feel like clouds for the minutes that not even you can prevent. You ask us not to lie together, but we are not made of you, we are not gods.” She experiences pregnancy as a threat to her meager survival resources: “To awake and feel something inside draining you. Lying on my back, I can almost see where all my energy is going.…I stroke it to calm its vulgar hunger, but it won't be satisfied until it gets all of me.” Her defiance of the taboo against abortion costs her the love of her husband Chato and the expression of her sexuality. After the abortion, Chato shuns her, rejecting her attempts “to make him love her again. Each time she touched him, he saw his child's face and would jerk away from her grasp.” Her affair with Don Joaquín, the hated landowner who has sold Chato a piece of worthless land, causes her great sadness and guilt because she still loves Chato and longs for him to forgive her. She ends the affair too late, for Chato finds out about it and stabs Don Joaquín. Amanda herself takes a savage revenge on her ex-lover for telling her husband, ripping open his wound and stuffing it with maggots to hasten his death. Chato is unable to forgive Amanda, accusing her of acting like God by daring to change their destiny and insisting that in killing Don Joaquín he acted like a man should. When he tells her that he has killed for honor, Amanda replies that he acted in blind obedience to his concept of his role as a man:

…I killed for life.…Which is worse? You killed because something said, “you must kill to remain a man.”…For me, things are as different as our bodies.…But you couldn't understand that because something said, “you must have sons to remain a man.”

The carousel represents Chato's dreams for the future, dreams dashed by the poverty of the land, the oppression of Don Joaquín and Amanda's decision to abort their son. The difference between Chato and Amanda is captured in the scene where he attempts to console her, not realizing that her anguish is caused by her pregnancy:

She heard him fumbling through some boxes in the closet and turned to find him holding the carousel. “Children die like crops here,” she said, but he could not hear her for the bells of carousel music came forth sounding like an orchestra in the silence of the night.

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: