The vines crawling up the cracked, white adobe walls make the house look older than it is, and when the setting sun softly illuminates the rooms inside, it leaves deep, purple shadows that make the house look not only old, but mystic, too. When the wind comes and shakes the trees, the fading red of the sun dances across the cheeks of everyone inside- the stage is set for storytelling in my grandfather’s house in Queretaro, Mexico.
“While on a walk with me, my friend saw this little four year old boy,” my aunt began, “and turned away, pale. Shaking, she said to me, ‘Carmen, that boy is going to die. I can’t look at him, that boy will die very soon.’ Three days later, the boy dropped some folders under the bus after school and went after them. Then the bus backed up…” The room was quiet. Aunt Carmen shook her head. “After that, I told her that if she ever saw in me whatever she saw in that boy that day, she shouldn’t let me know.”
I don’t only love this house, but the legends and stories my aunts, grandmother, and cousins tell of at every summer reunion in that spacious living room with the dancing sunlight. There I take in as much as I can- after all, this only happens once a year. We are a very superstitious lot; we tell of demons and ghosts we’ve seen, of those who can predict death, and of spiritual dreams that foretell the future or send messages from departed relatives. My godmother once told of a dream where she walked into a room with two cribs, a baby each inside. One baby was tan, dark haired, and a boy. The other was a girl, fair and blue-eyed. She told the dream to her sister, my mom, and neither thought much of it until August 13th, when my mom had twins that fit that exact description.
The stories don’t end there; my grandmother told of the time she was miserable after her mother’s death, until my great grandmother visited her in her dream and told her not to worry, to “instead use the love she had for her on the world instead”. I sat there, during all those stories, mesmerized.
It was mesmerizing not only because of the mystical quality of the dreams, legends, and the house itself, but of something else. It’s really who tells those tales. My great-aunt was one of the first women to study medicine, a brave action in 1950’s Mexico. My grandmother’s stories can be of odd demons or happenings in her childhood, but that woman is the most sensible and creative person I know, filling rooms with her paintings and books. My mother herself, top of her class and awarded with a full ride to the top technology school in Mexico, passes down legends her grandmother told her. This place taught me that no matter who you are, or how smart or successful you may be, it’s okay to believe in those things. There is no shame in believing in what cannot be explained- those are simply interpretations of the mysteries that lie undiscovered, perhaps forever, in this world. How much you believe in them is how true they are. The human mind is vast and makes this world vast, too, with its many interpretations of what goes on in this world. And interpretation is an art, and the stories told by women in a lonely house in Mexico only add more color to the rich mural this world is.
