Part Nine: What He Learned About Family
His mother wrote to him from prison. The letters arrived irregularly — sometimes two in a week, sometimes nothing for a month. He read them all. He read them with the same careful, sustained attention he had given to the recordings, the same commitment to not looking away from what was actually there.
The letters were not consistent. Some were apologies — or something that occupied the formal territory of apology without the full substance of it, apologies that named what had been done but located the cause in circumstances, in Valeria, in his distance, in the financial pressure that had felt, to her, like crisis. Some were recriminations — quieter than in person, but present, the persistent suggestion that he had been unfair, had been manipulated, had chosen the wrong side in a conflict that she had always framed as having sides.
Some were simply letters. News of prison life, reported with the dry practicality that had always been one of his mother’s characteristics — she was not a self-pitying person, or had not been, and she was not now. Reports on Rosa, who was in contact and who had, by all accounts, spent the months since the hearing in a serious examination of the life that had led her here. Questions about Santiago, about his weight and his development and his face — was he still making that face, that face he made when he was concentrating on something, the face that was the same as Miguel’s face at that age.
He answered those parts of the letters. He answered the questions about Santiago. He sent photographs sometimes.
He did not visit.
He had thought about it. Had sat with the question many times, in the evenings when Valeria was putting Santiago to sleep and the apartment was quiet, and worked through what he thought and what he felt. He had talked to Valeria about it — fully, honestly, in the way they had learned to talk about things that were difficult.
“What do you want?” she had asked.
“I don’t know,” he had said, which was true.
“What does she need?”
“I don’t know that either.”
Valeria had been quiet for a moment. “You don’t have to decide forever,” she said. “You just have to decide for now.”
For now, he did not visit. For now, he answered the letters that asked about Santiago, and did not answer the ones that asked him to reconsider who had been wrong. For now, he kept the distance that Santiago’s safety required and that his own clarity required, and he did not call it permanent because he was not certain it was permanent, and he was trying to be honest about the things he was not certain of.
Rosa had called him, three months after the sentencing. They had spoken for forty minutes — the longest conversation they had had since childhood, and one of the most honest. She had said things he had not expected her to say: that she had known, during those four days, that what they were doing was wrong, and that she had told herself the story his mother had always told — that it was for his benefit, that Valeria was the problem, that family loyalty required a particular kind of solidarity — and that she had told herself this story because believing it was easier than the alternative.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know that’s not enough.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not.”
“I know.”
“But it’s somewhere to start from,” he said, after a moment.
They were starting, cautiously, from there.
