In my last post I mentioned the letters… (the package of letters and memorabilia that my husband had kept and which, through the kindness of his second wife and my children, reached my hands last Xmas). Well there was much more than letters. I could hardly believe finding the menu of the dinner served at the dance where Fernando was my blind date with my then phone number written on the back along with the name B R I A N D A in capital letters!!! He kept it all those years. I didn’t know, I knew nothing of this secret cache, nothing until my kids put it into my hands. To say the least: it has been one hell of a belated Christmas gift.

Before we were married and while I was still studying Social Work at a school near his house, Fernando used to leave small messages for me on the windscreen of my blue jeep (yes, I had a baby blue jeep that I bombed around Mexico City in, a gift from my father who figured that in an accident, the jeep would come out on top, and the day I had one, it did[1]). Little mementos… I can’t believe he kept them. Even today I can watch the movie of me leaving the building where I studied and seeing –across the street- the small slip of paper under the windshield wiper, and running over to find the day’s missive. A smile comes to my face and tears to my eyes… so long ago and we were so young!

Another unexpected discovery was that not only did he keep all my letters to him, but also all his letters to me, each one numbered so they can be read in succession. I have no idea when he scooped them up and stashed them away, or where for that matter. Mine are mostly typewritten (I carted my little Baby Hermes around everywhere) and his are in that clear, even script so undoctor-like that was characteristic of him.

First there is the series of letters back and forth from Mexico City to Acapulco that first Xmas after meeting each other. They go from the 24^th of December 1961 to the first of January 1962 , and what should I discover but that he had made original drafts of these letters which he then corrected and copied onto letter paper. He kept both (which goes to show how difficult it was for him to throw anything out) so that the draft of the first letter –which had gotten lost in the mail and I never received- is there and now I can read them all complete (even twice if I want to find out what he crossed off in the drafts).

Carefully folded and lost amongst the envelopes is a slip of paper with a note that he sent with 3 dozen red roses and one white one the 14^th of February 1962. On the 10^th of that month we had broken up after a dinner at his sister-in-law’s house where she introduced me as his “girlfriend or novia”[2] ; I was 19 years old, very confused and unsure of my feelings for him (or my feelings about anything, for that matter) and he was getting serious. I remember saying that I couldn’t imagine him as the father of my children (as if I could even imagine having children at that point) and that I wanted to just be friends. He said we couldn’t be friends because he was in love with me, so we broke it off. The note with the roses said: With a thousand and one reasons and at the same time with none, I beg you receive this bouquet. Fernando. By that time, I had been crying for three days since our separation so, of course, I called him immediately and suggested we give it another try. A little over 5 months later, the 31^st of July, he came with his parents to ask for my hand in marriage; I found amongst his papers a note I wrote him that night to accompany the crucifix I gave him[3] to mark the event. The following day I turned 20 and, although I had managed to finally leave my tormented teens, I was none the wiser.

At the end of the month of October, 1962, I went to New York with my mother to buy my wedding dress and there was another volley of letters back and forth, this time between Mexico and New York. Mushy, icky sweet, full of I love you’s and I miss you’s and I can’t wait to see you’s and I’ll be yours forever’s; mine always trying to be a bit humorous, his never… If anything, they are boring and certainly of no interest to anyone, not even to me anymore. My first one, written on Eastern Airlines note paper, starts: Darling, I have only been in the air 15 minutes and already I miss you…” and anyone can take it from there.

    

The papers and mementos continued: wedding invitation, menu served, newspaper announcements and religious wedding certificate. Amidst all this official stuff, a letter written to me by my grandmother that perhaps he kept because she says how handsome she finds him. Later, two more letters from my grandmother show up, a letter from my half-brother, Manolo, and a poem written to me by my father on my 23^rd birthday. After our marriage, missives map our moves, to Hermosillo, Sonora and then back to Mexico City; up to Framingham, Massachusetts where an innumerable pile of letters from his father urging him to come back to Mexico reminds me how desperately I wanted to stay in the USA and how I resented my father-in-law’s pull over my husband. We did go back however, some five months after arriving and with our three month old little boy.

In September of 1966, I went up to Larchmont, New York to bring my grandmother back to Mexico to live with us. She wanted to buy us a house and move in with us. There were letters every single day of the 15 I spent in the US, one of his and one of mine, all duly numbered by him and kept in their envelopes. They tell of a falling out between my parents and my husband; it was not the first and it would not be the last but, in the end, love would always retake its course and things would be fixed. My grandmother’s stay in Mexico lasted little over a year. My daughter was born while we were in the house she had bought, supposedly for us, but shortly after I had given birth there was a fight over something so simple as to be absurd and my grandmother stormed out, went to my mother’s and put the house up for sale. It was a painful end to what I had believed to be a dream come true but, as everything, in the long run it was for the best. My grandmother returned to New York and it was several years before I could forgive her. Today it is easy for me to see how that fight had nothing to do with us, how she was sorry for her decision to come to Mexico and didn’t know how to get out of what she had promised.

Mixed in amongst our correspondence, there were personal letters to me from friends of mine, both in the USA and in Mexico, and from a Spanish cousin now long deceased who at the time was studying to be a Jesuit priest and was doing summersaults of joy over my becoming a Catholic (he never became a priest and I left all religion behind two years later). There are many notes and letters from our son, Peter, to his father, to me and to both of us. There is a letter of ours to him that, I know not how, ended up amongst the others. And there is the letter from my son to me that I most treasure, where he thanks me for the work we did together on his dyslexia for months and months when he was in 3^rd grade, because he could read all the wonderful books he was discovering in College at that time.

Amongst the notes and envelopes, a handful of photos recall the past visually: There’s me on the terrace of our weekend house in Valle de Bravo (Mexico); me with Peter newly born in Framingham, Mass. and a snapshot that I gave Fernando when we first started dating so he could keep it in his wallet.

And then, at the end, after all the letters and notes and mementos that covered the better part of our marriage, there were three very personal documents. The first was a long, hand-written diatribe that I had sent to Fernando, basically claiming that neither I nor my children were getting the attention we needed and deserved; that he didn’t see or understand me and that every time I attempted to tell him what I wanted or needed, I found myself accused of trying to run his life and of being demanding and controlling. There is no date on it; I have no idea if it was before, after or during my psychoanalysis, but it very definitely predated the onset of our drinking together every night which led to our final alcoholism and breakup, as the drinking together every night was what I –at least- mistakenly saw as the way to get the attention and love I craved.

The other two were written by Fernando and both are about Love; in the first (and neither has a date so I can’t really know it is the first, but I intuit it) he waxes melancholic about his incapacity to love and gives himself all sorts of philosophical and poetic advice. It was the second one, however, that touched my heart to the very core. In it he begins by saying he wants me to love him because he loves me, but then he asks: “but do I really love her?” What follows is an analysis of what he considers might be his failings in our relationship and, then, Oh surprise of surprises: upon reading the next ten lines I felt for the first time that he actually saw me, saw me as I was, my longings and frustrations, my aspirations and needs, my despair in believing I had to be someone other than who I was in order to be worthy of his love. This simple but profound feeling of being seen as I was, brought a wave of love upon me.

At that moment, my heart filled with gratitude to that beautiful man who had married a woman the opposite of his self-denying mother and then demanded she turn into a self-denying wife, but who had been capable –god knows at what moment- to see this even if only briefly and admit it, even if only to himself… and then to truly see me as I was and wanted to be. What a gift!

After we were divorced, one of the things I did during my recovery (physical, emotional and mental) was to write him a letter begging his forgiveness for all the times I must have hurt him and thanking him for everything I had received from him. I remember thinking that I would have liked to receive the same from him and realizing, at that time, that he if he could have he probably would have written something similar. This small handwritten document is that letter even though it was not meant for my eyes… or perhaps it was, for it is to them it has finally arrived so many years later. Gratitude is love made gentle through true understanding.

                   

Thank you, my Love.

 

 

 

 

[1] It was at a cross-section in Mexico City: a car shot out of the street to my left and I hit its front fender head on. Nothing happened to the jeep, but the fender was ripped open as if by a giant iron can opener.

[2] In Spanish, novia which means ‘girlfriend’ is a term that in Mexico at the time applied to a serious relationship that was headed towards marriage.

[3] On March 26th of that year I had become Catholic and between then and when we married we had juggled pre-marital sex and confession, and that is stuff of another post.