Excerpt from the novel, Magdalena, by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, all rights reserved.
Prologue of Magdalena, a novel by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard
Soon after I found out I was
pregnant, I decided to write my mother’s story. I never actually knew her
although all my life I’d heard about her. She was not someone real, but was the
nighttime stories of my grandmother, the wistful anecdotes my Tiya
Estrella would sometimes relate. She
was the faded photograph of a cautious-looking woman
with a wistful smile, good-looking, yes, but with a strain around her eyes and
lips. She was the bundle of letters, photographs, and journals that my
grandmother kept at the bottom of her armoire. She was bits and fragments of
words and paper and cellulose — ethereal, a ghost I could not pin down.
I’d grown up knowing my mother
died at the delivery table, and it wasn’t until I was in school when I realized that the other children’s
mothers hadn’t died during childbirth. Once I had asked my grandmother about
that; I had asked her if I’d killed my mother. “No,” she had said. “No, it was
not your fault.”
“Then whose fault was it?” I
asked.
“Her father’s family is to
blame.”
I was young then and spent a lot
of time wondering how my grandfather and his family killed her. I used to
badger my grandmother for information about the Sanchez family, but all I got
was that they were a wealthy bunch. Before she died, my grandmother did tell me
the truth about my mother’s real father. Finally, I understood the reason
behind her lack of forthrightness, why for decades she had kept this a secret.
A secret has tremendous power.
My grandmother had used her secret as a weapon, but the strange thing is the
secret in turn possessed her, held her captive. For years, she guarded her
secret carefully, never thinking, never expecting that her own daughter would
have the same sort of secret.
My mother’s secret had to do with who my father was. For years my
grandmother refused to talk about him. She looked at men as irrelevant in the
matter of childbearing — I sprung from my mother’s womb, and my mother had
sprung from hers. But I knew early on that I wasn’t just my mother’s daughter,
that someone else’s blood coursed through my veins. I could see it in my pale
skin and the hazel sparks of my eyes; and I could see it in the faces of people
who stared at me in a knowing way. Sometimes when I glanced at the mirror in
semi-darkness, I could see his shadow flitting across my face and sometimes I
tried to catch him, but my hands met only the frightened face of my mother’s
daughter. My Tiya Estrella gave me pictures of my
father. From her I learned my father had been an American captain stationed in
Mactan during the Vietnam War; and I found out that his plane was shot down
while on a mission in Vietnam.
When I felt life within me, I knew it was time to turn their
secrets into stories. And so I started writing. I started out writing about my
mother, then my grandmother, and to my surprise about other family members.
They would come to me in dreams and thoughts, when I least expected it, begging
to have their stories written, to have their secrets revealed. Even they must
have realized it was time to release those festering secrets once and for all.
I have done
my best; I have used whatever guile in storytelling I know to record their
stories. It is done. I am ready. When this child in my belly will come to me
and say, “Tell me…” then he can have it all, everything I know about these
people whose blood he carries within himself.
Juana
~~~Read also
Fiction: The Syrian Doctor in Paris by Cecilia Brainard
Chapter from Cecilia Brainard's novel The Newspaper Widow
Tags: Philippines, Philippines, Filipino, writing, novel, fiction, stories, books, writers, authors, novelists
This is all for now,
Cecilia
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