she waited for my mother to make up her mind whether she would go as well or not. Since for most of her life my mother’s mind, belonging first to her father and then to her husband, had not been hers to make up, she was finding it difficult to come to a decision.
‘Lucia,’ she sighed, ‘why do you keep bothering me with this question? Does it matter what I want? Since when has it mattered what I want? So why should it start mattering now? Do you think I wanted to be impregnated by that old dog? Do you think I wanted to travel all this way across this country of our forefathers only to live in dirt and poverty? Do you really think I wanted the child for whom I made the journey to die only five years after it left the womb? Or my son to be taken from me? So what difference does it make whether I have a wedding or whether I go? It is all the same. What I have endured for nineteen years I can endure for another nineteen, and nineteen more if need be. Now leave me! Leave me to rest.’