Daughter of a prosperous landowner and a lady fond of card games who had already given birth to four children, my mother was born the day Hitler’s Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. They called her Doris Mary. I believed that her parents chose those names inspired by the actress and singer Doris Day. It was not so. That year Doris Day was not yet famous.
A pious student at a nun’s school who did not miss a single day of classes in primary or secondary school, Doris Mary knew that her parents loved her, she did not doubt it, but she was always in the care of her nana María, because her Father preferred life in the country, overseeing the good progress of his orange and apple farm, a vast property four hours by car from the city, and his mother could not cope with so many young children and understandably met with her friends. to play cards and share the latest salon gossip. It is not an exaggeration to say then that Doris Mary grew up with the unmistakable feeling of being in the shadows, or of being an invisible creature in the eyes of her parents, or of having more or less absent parents and a devoted lullaby, always present.
Two virtues adorned the character of the girl Doris Mary and would accompany her the rest of her life: courage in the face of all forms of danger and incorruptible religious piety. Not because she was a girl, she was afraid of the things that girls used to fear in that gray, melancholic city, lapped by a sea that seemed sick. She was not afraid of the biggest waves, the treacherous currents, she was not afraid of drowning on the high seas. She was brave and fearless, so much so that she almost seemed suicidal. Being a teenager who attracted attention for her beauty, she entered the white waters of the Pacific Sea, accompanied by her numerous suitors and unrequited lovers, crossed the surf naturally and then, to the amazement of all of them, her admirers, she sailed through the waves. on the chest or on the mat, with natural dexterity and Olympic grace.
She was also surprisingly self-confident, and did not seem to worry about the risks of a fall, accident or injury, when she rode horses at the equestrian club where, from an early age, she made a career as an equestrian, champion showjumper. She tamed the clumsiest horses, guided them with authority and made them jump the most dangerous obstacles, the highest fences. Sometimes she fell and got hurt, of course, but she immediately shook herself off, smiled and got back on her mare or her horse. In the seconds in which she and her most beloved mare crossed the obstacles, overcoming them as if they were suddenly flying, she Doris Mary seemed immortal and perhaps she was.
That girl who was born to ride waves and jump horses, and who loved spending weekends in the countryside, on her father’s estate, was distinguished mainly by the religious faith that burned like a volcano in the very center of her soul. She had been born this way, it was an essential trait of her character, the black box of her personality, her identity. None of her brothers or sisters were as religious as she was, and there was no rational explanation to understand why Doris Mary loved God, the Virgin and the Holy Spirit as she would love them her entire life. After school, and accompanied by her faithful nanny, María Ramírez Quinto, whom she cared for until she was an old woman and helped her die in a nursing home, Doris Mary attended mass, took communion, and prayed the rosary. Nobody forced her to do it. It was her most genuine and enduring vocation, that of loving God, that of serving God. She was never confused in a season of doubts, silences or reproaches. She was a girl, and later a young woman, who spoke with God, the horses and the sea.
When she finished convent school, she did not attend university. Her older brothers did, but because she was a woman, they told her to find a husband and have children. Doris Mary was left with the curiosity of being a doctor or a nurse. Had she been encouraged by her parents, she would have studied medicine in some of her forms. But her parents did not expect her to be a professional and earn an independent living. They wanted her to get married, leave home and have children, many children, all that God sent her. That’s why, at barely twenty years old, Doris Mary, who had not succumbed to the temptation of allowing herself a boyfriend on the beach or at the equestrian club, finally fell in love, suddenly and suddenly, with a strong man who rode a horse. motorcycle at high speed, he fired firearms, his name was Jaime and he was five years older than her. When I asked Doris Mary why she fell in love with Jaime, she told me:
-By his hands. I saw his hands moving the radio dial in the car and in that moment I fell in love with him forever.
I believe, however, that she also fell in love because Jaime was lame, he had been since he was a child, he had fallen ill with an illness that ate away the bone in his leg, and Doris Mary had a vocation as a nurse or doctor. If he hadn’t been lame, perhaps she wouldn’t have fallen in love with him. The lameness had no cure or remedy, but Doris Mary set out to save the soul of that tortured man who, in his dark days, perhaps wondered why the hell God had punished him since he was a child, making him lame for the rest of his life.
They married and, as they were both very religious, she of daily mass, he of Sunday mass, Catholics of praying the rosary and confessing often, they entrusted to the infinite wisdom of God the number of children they would have. Naturally, since they loved each other unequally, him imposing her will, she subordinating herself, obeying him, humbly pleasing him as if she were his servant or his slave, in a few years they already had six children, two girls and four boys. The oldest of the women was named Doris, after her mother, and the oldest of the men, Jaime, after her father. Immaculate, pristine lives of incorruptible religious piety were expected of both, lives dedicated to moral virtue and even moral heroism. The girl Doris did not disappoint those expectations, as she grew up and, silencing her poet’s musical voice, she chose to be a cloistered nun in a convent in the Andes. The boy Jaime, on the contrary, turned out to be a loose cannon, a guilty sinner and yet a repeat offender, a crooked, crooked man, a concupiscent, lustful voice that said and wrote the things that the devil dictated to him.
Over the years, Doris Mary and her lame husband became, it was inevitable, so it was written by the ill-tempered gods who apparently ruled their lives, distant, ill-matched adversaries, merciless critics of each other, and, in the end, enemies. fierce, irreducible, who lived together, but no longer slept together, who lived together, but no longer loved each other or kissed each other or smiled or even gave each other a warm caress. Religious faith made them harsh, dry, tough to endure misfortune as if it were a test dictated by God, that comedian. They loved God, of course, although they no longer even went to mass together. They loved God, the Virgin, the Holy Spirit, but they no longer loved each other, and when they looked at each other, sitting at the dining table, he getting drunk and smoking, she avoiding his gaze, it seemed like they hated each other, and it wasn’t It is easy to understand why that couple, separated by a frozen ocean of resentment and misfortune, had had, what irony, ten children, no less than ten children, plus two pregnancies that she lost and even now considers as her children. That is to say that not because they had more children, they loved each other more or truly loved each other. Perhaps they ended up in a silent guerrilla war because each one had an improbable army: he, Jaime, the lame one, the regiment of his male and hairy children, the children who most resembled him, and she, Doris Mary, the troop of his tender, sensitive children, the ones who were most genetically similar to him.
When Jaime, the lame man, died at the age of seventy-one, his widow Doris Mary regained her freedom, smiled again and was once again a woman without fear, the graceful Amazon who feared nothing. She was calm, at peace, because she felt that she had fulfilled the devilish mission that God had entrusted to her: that of taking care of her husband, serving him, accompanying him and helping him die, and that of giving that man all the children that Providence sent them. . Then Doris Mary was once again comfortable in her bones and her nerves, she allowed herself a certain coquetry that her husband would not have tolerated, she finally slept peacefully without the fear that he would assault her at night, she began to travel the world with her friends and allowed herself to be loved, protected, pampered and entertained by her many children and grandchildren who adored her.
Furthermore, and as if the gods had wanted to reward her for a selfless life, marked by kindness, Doris Mary, who had spent almost half a century depending on the money that her husband gave her or did not give her, inherited a fortune from her brother. older, a fortune that perhaps his brother would not have bequeathed him had Jaime, the lame man, Doris Mary’s gunfighter husband, been alive.
Eighty-four years old, mischievous as a young girl, always attentive to the anniversaries of others to give them the most beautiful gifts with the most loving cards, certain that she has humbly fulfilled the destiny that God had in store for her, Doris Mary feels that she has not She has lived in vain when, overflowing with love, her eyes illuminated by an ancient and incessant tenderness, she contemplates her children, her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren, and serenely awaits the end, foreign to all forms of fear or trepidation, and without doubt that the best is yet to come.
