The Weeping Woman

The year I turned nine, my father’s company posted him to a small city in central Mexico. A narrow, slow-moving river ran along the edge of town, and our house was an old two-story place two blocks from the water.

The first person to speak to me — a boy who didn’t know a word of Spanish — was Diego from next door. We became friends before we could understand each other. At that age, a soccer ball is a language of its own.

Diego’s grandmother — Doña Lupita, whom every child in the alley simply called Abuela — came out at sundown each evening and herded the children home, one by one. And to the foreign kid who had just moved in, she taught the rules of the neighborhood. Rules my parents never did understand.

“First: never go near the river after dark. Second: do not cry at night. If you cry, she will hear you. Third — and listen well, child, this is the one that matters — if you hear a woman weeping in the night, you needn’t be afraid. It means she is still searching. What you must fear is the moment the weeping stops. When she finds what she is looking for, she does not cry.”

I think I laughed. To a nine-year-old, it was a fairy tale. Abuela did not laugh. And night after night, laying marigolds before the statue of the Virgin at the mouth of the alley, she told me the story.

Long ago, a beautiful woman named María lived on this river. She fell in love with a man of high birth and bore him two children — but one day he married a lady with a proper dowry. That night, out of her…