My mother and the rain

In Oaxaca, in September, the rain keeps a timetable. It arrives around five, once I am back from school, have eaten and washed the dishes. First the Fortín hill goes dark, then a wind rises that smells of warm earth, and finally it falls all at once, as if someone had tipped a bucket over the patio. My mother announces it before anyone else. She says, "Here it comes," and she is always right, even though she no longer remembers what day it is.

My mother's name is Amparo and she is eighty. She has lived with me for two years, since she fell at her house in Ejutla and it was no longer sensible to leave her alone. She has the room downstairs, the one that opens onto the patio, because stairs are no longer for her and because, she told me when she arrived, she wanted to see the plants. It is the only thing she has asked of me in all this time.

The porch

I have a covered porch facing a small brick-floored patio full of pots of every size. There are geraniums, a bougainvillea that climbed all the way to the roof on its own, a lime tree that gives small bitter limes, mint, epazote, an enormous aloe that belonged to my grandmother and a rosebush that never quite makes up its mind. In the rainy season all of it turns a loud, unruly green. The leaves shine, the snails go strolling across the pots and the brick changes color, from pale red to a deep red, almost the color of wine.

In the afternoons I bring two chairs out onto the porch. My mother sits with a deep bowl of beans in her lap to shell, or a basket of green beans, or nothing at all; sometimes just with her hands folded. I grade notebooks. The rain makes so much noise on the tin roof that there is no need to talk, and that is a rest for both of us.

What stays

There are things my mother no longer knows. Several times each afternoon she asks me where Rodrigo is, and I tell her Tijuana, and she says "so far away", each time with the same surprise. Some days she calls me by her sister's name. At first I corrected her. Now I answer as if I were my aunt Rosa, who was a very funny woman, and the conversation loses nothing.

But she does not forget the plants. That is what amazes me most. She looks out at the patio and names each one without hesitating, and not only the name but what it is good for. Mint for a stomach ache, epazote for the beans and for worms, aloe for burns, rue (which I don't have, and she holds it against me) for a bad wind. One Tuesday, in a heavy downpour, she pointed at a clump I had written off as a weed and told me it was chepil, to let it grow, that you make tamales with it. She was right. I had been pulling it up for months.

That Saturday we made chepil tamales. Well: I made them, and she told me everything I was doing wrong, with a precision I wish she had for remembering what she ate for breakfast. I laughed so hard the dough split.

Sometimes I think my mother's memory is like the patio in September: some things the water carries off and others grow stronger than ever, and you don't get to choose which. When the rain stops she gets up slowly, brushes off her apron and says, "It's gone." Then she goes into her room to watch her telenovela, and I stay a while on the porch, listening to the gutters drain, with the bowl of half-shelled beans on the chair beside me.