Hermana Tere November 17, 2021
Her ethereal lightness and twinkling eyes remind me of my second-cousin, Mary Blandine, who was a nun from Cork and the splitting image of my mother. She was some kind of spiritual seeker that found the answer early in life, and devoted her life to it, much like Tere, who giggles, yogi-like, almost as if she hears my thought. As if she could understand English.
Forty years ago, I am told, Tere’s evangelism was insufferable, and her family paid a price. 4 am meditations, 7 am lessons, everyday, despite the terrestrial demands of the secular world. However, her hard-won peace and gentler circumspection in later years have helped to heal the familial rifts and deepen her empathy. During her brief stay with us, she is utterly kind to me, a stranger from the conquering lands, and she reassures me that God loves me even if I do not care. How considerate.
78-year-old Tere is undaunted by the night denizens. Though wobbly, she is happy to take to the unlit streets, leaning on me when the weather-polished cobblestone grows rough. She has her Brahmin Kumaris meditations to sustain her, some revised Hindu feminism that must have seemed so anti-modern in the 20th-Century. However, to her credit, anti-modernism is increasingly becoming an imperative in these parts.
My septuagenerian walking companion does not do so well on these tight sidewalks, which can suddenly become ramps, or giant steps, at least when they are not crumbling into blackness altogether. Some of the holes could swallow a leg.
Tere is not swallowed but tripped. The culprit on an otherwise flat stretch of smooth stone is an inconspicuous rebar handle on a utility lid. Her sandal kicks the metal and she begins to stumble. In slow motion, one correction leads to a second stumble, and then—bang—she is suddenly prostrate on the slab.
I gasp, imagining how I will get this nice old lady to the hospital, or where I can buy a bag of ice for her knee, which struck the stone particularly hard. I am hoping she did not strike her forehead, since she is face down, but, remarkably, her only injury is a superficial abrasion.
I know none of this when I first approach her, and other witnesses assume the woman is alone and run to her aid. One seems to be a nurse, because she responds professionally, asking targeted questions of Tere, examining her pupils and limbs, and insisting that I keep my distance. I say to her that the injured woman is my aunt, in Spanish, which makes no sense to anyone.
To my great relief, Tere sits up, completely coherent. Seeing my face, she says, “Lo siento, Ken, lo siento.” The woman is apologizing to me—me!—for almost crashing her skull on a busy street in a foreign city. I want to get her home and elevate her leg, but she resists my coddling. She knows I like to walk, and she is not about to be the third wheel.
Then a parade arrives only to block our forward progress. I cannot keep track of the feast days in this city, but this one seems to commemorate either the shepherd-visionary Juan Diego, the lustful artist Diego Rivera, or the hapless San Diego Padres. We retreat from Guadalupe Real to a side street, away from the noisy crowd of Diego-lovers. There we hear faint intellectual chatter flowing from the Pulqería on Cristóbal Colon y Paniagua.
The small event taking place inside is Cervantino, an international festival to celebrate the creation of Don Quixote and his defiant artistic offspring. Tonight’s presentation is entitled “Resistencias Creativas,” por January Vanessa Gómez Ortega. Tere finds a seat among the young people in attendance, as they agonize over their fears—losing their land, their clean water, their freedoms, their future. Through this creative resistance, Tere smiles serenely and folds her hands against the cold and bitterness. She becomes the picture in a lyric I once wrote:
You looked at a light, and the light set you free,
Sister Tere, bright eyes, what did you see?