trevor’s dictionary of lost words

trevor’s dictionary of lost words

Pietà

He closed his good eye.

The room went dark and quiet save for an old lullaby his mother sang softly as she held him close to her.

Duermete mi niño,

Duermete mi amor,

Duermete pedazo mi corazón.

Tu mamá te quiere,

Tu papá tambien,

Tudos en la casa te queremos.

(Sleep my boy,

Sleep my love,

Sleep piece of my heart.

Your mother loves you,

Your father too,

Everyone in the household loves you well.)

He reached out his hand, battered and bruised from the fight, and found her hand to hold. 

He tried to bend his fingers around hers but they were too stiff and sore to move. 

She turned her hand around and opened it so he could rest his palm on hers.

He took a slow, deep breath through his mouth into his tired lungs. 

He couldn't breathe in through his nose. 

His opponent broke it in the second round with a left hook.

His fight doctor stuffed it with gauze. 

"Oh well," he thought, "I'm just a farm kid and a boxer. My face doesn't matter. Only my heart and my hands do." 

He breathed out through his swollen, cracked lips and sighed.

Something happened then that had never happened to him before. 

As he held his mamí’s hand there in the simple room beside the boxing ring, her eyes became his eyes, her ears his ears, her heart his heart.

He saw the world as she saw it, felt the world as she felt it, when she was his age, when she was a girl.

She held her papa's hand and they walked together by a large window of a hotel restaurant on the main street of the town. 

Her papa stepped off of the sidewalk, took his threadbare, tattered hat into his hand, held it to his chest, and bowed his head in silence as the owner of a large sugar plantation passed by and opened the door to the hotel.

The powerful man sat down with his wife and daughter at a table by the glass window looking out onto the street. 

The daughter appeared to be her age and was dressed in the most beautiful dress she had ever seen in her life.

The daughter held a silver fork in her right hand.

On the fork was a piece of steak cooked to perfection by the finest chef in the town.

That morning, Gabby had eaten a single corn tortilla and a spoon of refried beans.

She would eat the same thing that evening.

The time was between the harvest of the previous year and the harvest of the present year.

The hunger time.

Her already poor family was now desperately poor and hungry.

For a moment, the girl's eyes behind the glass met Maria’s eyes, but she quickly looked away. 

Gabby felt the pain of hunger. 

It was deep and aching in her empty stomach.

It moved out into her arms and legs.

It moved out into her mind and heart. 

A lump formed in her throat.

She closed her eyes.

A tear rolled down her cheek and onto the dust and dirt of the sidewalk.

Salito felt the pain of her hunger.

He felt the emptiness deeply in his own stomach and heart.

A tear formed in his own eye and rolled down his cheek and onto the dust and dirt of the floor of the dark, quiet room.

He knew then, deeply and clearly, why his mamí worked the fields in bare feet, why she wore the same dress day after day and year after year. 

He knew why she ate so little of the food she prepared for her family. 

She did these things because she never wanted him to be hungry as she had been hungry then.

She never wanted him to know the hunger time.

He realized how simply and how much his mamí loved him, and how simply and how much he loved her.

He realized his mamí was beautiful.