Ilka Oliva Corado
In the early years, Filomena wrote down in Spanish in a notebook and with an English-Spanish translator translated the list to buy at the supermarket, all for kosher food. In her native Sibaná, El Asintal, Retalhuleu, Guatemala, she never heard of the Jewish religion and much less of kosher food, it was in Chicago in her first job where she discovered that world of food and rituals so strange.
At first they seemed like gringo tricks, like that of the Evangelicals with their horns blaring in their village on worship Sundays and the heaps of cucuruchos who, very saintly, carrying processions for Holy Week, but murdered their wives in their homes. Kosher food, said Filomena, but very stingy to pay the workers a fair wage.
In that job, Filomena had to dance on one foot: cleaning the house, washing clothes, arranging the children to go to school and cooking kosher food, children whom she loved and cared for as if she had given birth to them but who They were ashamed of her, of the Guatemalan maid who barely spoke English. Filomena knew that raw pain as an emigrant, which was the same pain as the majority of domestic workers and nannies who cared for and treated the children where they worked as their own.
At first everything was strange, the United States was another world, huge highways, trains, very tall buildings, parks everywhere, public swimming pools to the max. After thirty years living in the country, Filomena continues to be surprised by the number of so many different faces that she sees every day when she travels on the train to her work. She is amazed to see people from all over the world who speak such languages. different.
He has not learned to drive because in thirty years he sends the money from his work weekly to his family, at first for his parents and the five children he left behind, at present it is for his children and grandchildren, he bought all the children house and furnished it. Three times a year he sends them parcels in which he goes out of his way filling the boxes with clothes, shoes, toys, electrical appliances and everything that comes to mind for his children and grandchildren who send him lists with requests.
The last time she received a call for Mother’s Day was ten years ago, from just one of her children, Filomena hurts, but blames herself because she left them to go to work in the United States and she thinks she has no right to demand not even a phone call from them. They stopped remembering her birthday many years ago, for Christmas she is the one who calls.
As a recent arrival, she had the opportunity to marry a Lebanese immigrant who worked in a kosher bakery, he was forty-five and she was twenty-six, but she said no because she did not want to give her children a stepfather, aged fifty-six and thirty living undocumented, Filomena regrets not having married the Lebanese, perhaps she would have had a house with a garden and would not live in an apartment in Chicago with seven other Central American migrants.
I would have taken him to Guatemala to see the pashte mango and the chico zapotes. She might have known about Lebanon and the food from there, but she’s Malay, she tells herself when thoughts of her entertain her while she’s busy folding clothes at her job. When the pain in her swollen veins makes her cry, she thinks about how she could have had health insurance that undocumented immigrants don’t have access to. She shakes her head in thoughts of if she would have had that man as a life partner because she did like him, not the other drunks who invited her out of it.
Filomena has always dreamed of a garden, so when she bought her children’s houses in an exclusive area of Retalhuleu, she made sure they had plenty of land for a garden of tropical plants. She lives on the third floor of a building where, in winter, the stairs become slippery when the temperatures drop and the snow turns into black ice. During that season, Filomena misses the tropical vegetation and the climate of her native Sibaná the most. her.
At night he has a second job mending clothes for a laundry, he sleeps barely four hours a day, with what he earns there he pays the rent and his food expenses, but he does not lose hope that one day he will be able to leave that apartment and buy a house with a garden. In the summer, she would plant tomatoes, coriander, mint, sweet chili, some milpa plants, and she would sit in the shade of a maple tree to drink a carambola fresco, as she did in her childhood lying in the hammock under the pashte mango tree. . As a utopia, she does not lose hope that one day her children and grandchildren will come to visit her, she imagines them all eating as a family, she would introduce them to the Lebanese who continues to work in the kosher bakery and his Salvadoran wife, their only family in the United States.
Fuente cronicasdeunainquilina.com
