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The nuns believed silence a weapon, teaching the girls that only with it could they discover the depths of their interior without being servants to the temptations of this world.
“I believe it was your desire for justice that led you to do an awful thing. But you badly injured a man. You could have blinded him.”
Talia considered how people who do horrible things can be victims, and how victims can be people who do horrible things.
When she was small Talia often asked her father the meaning of the word. Home.
“Maybe,” he once told Elena, “we are creatures of passage, meant to cross oceans just like the first infectors of our continent in order to take back what was taken.”
People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics—the elements most likely to ruin a life. They’re wrong. It’s love.
He wanted Elena to feel as safe with him as he felt with her.
“Why don’t we go home? We have a house to live in. We have the lavandería to run. I feel so alone here. We never should have left.”
“Here we will always be foreigners,” he told Elena. “We’re Colombians. So is our daughter. It’s where we belong.”
“I’m tired of moving, always being strangers, having people look at us like we’re a plague,” Elena said. “We didn’t come here for this kind of life. Let’s go home.”
Elena was uneasy with how the nurse spoke of her babies as burdens. She never thought of them that way.
Only women knew the strength it took to love men through their evolution to who they thought they were supposed to be.
“I’ve had a premonition,” he whispered, wreathed in muted light. “Better things are coming for our family. I feel it as certain as the sunrise.”
Elena thought gringo households were full of unnecessary objects. Children had more toys than fit on their shelves. The wives’ and daughters’ closets overflowing with clothes and shoes. Husbands and sons with more cables and gadgets than a laboratory.
