The Laughter of White Lilies
- May 31, 2019
- 3 min read
by Socorro Venegas, translated by Toshiya Kamei
The girls left their homes very early. It was so early that the sun was still asleep and the roosters flapped their wings getting ready for their war song, the most powerful announcement.
Sara is still inside her house, asleep. She’s dreaming of white lilies.
The village streets are quiet, a full moon high up in the dark sky. The girls walk fast, with rebozos knotted around their shoulders, with bright eyes, looking for each other. “Let’s go,” they tell each other. “Let’s go” is a greeting and at the same time an invitation to walk together. They carry buckets full of cooked maize—kneading it into dough is their early morning task. They rush off to the mill, their light steps barely raising dust. A short while later their parents and brothers will go out to work in the fields.
While the path to the mill is covered with a tingling thicket, Sara falls down onto a white field. As great joy sparks in her chest, she feels that she’s dislodged, that all of her will jump and become dust among the flowers. Her laughter echoes endlessly as an indecipherable mystery. But there, suddenly, while she wallows among delicate buds, someone shakes her.
He lifts her up, puts her on her feet, throws a rebozo over her head and, after placing a bucket of cooked maize in her hand, pushes her into the street.
It’s already possible to discern the sun in the sky. Sara walks, as small as a five-year-old, even though she’s seven. She wraps herself in her rebozo against the cold, although it betrays her with several holes on her back. She looks at the path without resentment. Girls are nowhere in sight. All of them must be waiting for their turn at the mill. In any case, no one joins her. No one tells her “let’s go.”
As she follows the uphill path, she can see the volcano, as big as the sun or even bigger, because it covers it.
The air envelopes her face like a mask, and she feels her skin stretched. Along that same stony, dusty path, another girl walks far ahead. Sara wants to hurry and catch up, but she can’t: her strides are small and she must be careful not to step on glass shards and sharp stones. Only once has she had shoes, and her mother let her wear them so few times that she did not finish them. Now they are kept in the shack, in an altar next to the Virgin. Those holy shoes are not for Sara’s feet.
She reaches the mill, the poorest of all. No one speaks to her. The other girls hardly notice her arrival. She discreetly enters stooped, maybe embarrassed to be the last. She settles the bucket between her legs and crosses her arms to wait. Then she closes her eyes and frowns, her dusky face revealing the effort she makes trying to remember the rumble that came from her chest in her sleep. With one hand she touches her throat. She squeezes her eyes shut, concentrates, and then sees the field again. She feels her stomach tighten and then loosen. Something flows up into her chest, then into her throat. She screws up her face and sheds tears. Sara laughs with her whole body, with all her soul. She convulses and throws herself to the ground, and all the girls look at her with fear, because her laughter sounds deep and secret, as if coming out of a clay pot. Sara, who has never spoken or heard, roars with laughter, scrapes the earth, and plucks a handful of white lilies.
Socorro Venegas was born in 1972 in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. She is the author of the story collections La Risa de las Azucenas (1997), La Muerte Más Blanca (2000), and Todas las Islas (2002), as well as the novels La Noche Será Negra y Blanca (2009) and Vestido de Novia (2014).
Toshiya Kamei holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Arkansas. His recent translations of Latin American literature include books by Claudia Apablaza, Carlos Bortoni, Ana García Bergua and Sara Uribe.
