The bougainvillea and the roof

The bougainvillea has been on my to-do list for months. Not a real list, on paper, but the kind you say out loud every time you walk past the problem: "I really have to prune that bougainvillea." I said it in June, when it started creeping in between the metal sheets of the porch roof; in August, when a branch scratched my face while I was hanging laundry; and in September, when the gutters filled with leaves and the five o'clock rain spilled over my mother's flowerpots like a hotel waterfall.

Nobody planted it there. My grandmother had one in Ejutla, and many years ago someone brought me a cutting in a chili can. I put it in a pot by the back wall and forgot about it. The bougainvillea forgot nothing: it climbed the wall, crossed the stair railing and reached the roof, where it now lives like a neighbor who stopped paying rent long ago.

The Saturday of the shears

This Saturday it didn't rain. In Oaxaca, in mid-October, the afternoons go still all at once and the sky turns that clean blue that lasts until March. It felt like a sign. I took out the pruning shears Rodrigo gave me three Christmases ago, still with the cardboard on, a pair of leather work gloves that belonged to my father, and a school cap that says "Reading Week 2019". I went up to the roof by the spiral staircase nobody uses, with the determination of a woman who has made herself the same promise far too many times.

My mother sat in her chair on the porch below, with a glass of hibiscus water. I thought she was going to watch. She was not going to watch: she was going to direct.

"Not that one," she said, before I had cut the first branch.

"Why not?"

"Because it's about to flower. Can't you see the little tips?"

I bent down to look. She was right. At the end of nearly every branch there were tight little buds, a purple still tinged with green, like pinches. Bougainvilleas bloom when the rains end; I have known that since I was a girl and I had forgotten it, the way you forget things that were never your job to remember because there was always someone else who did.

The negotiation

We spent the next hour in a negotiation that would have impressed any trade union. From above, I pointed at a branch; from below, my mother said "that one yes" or "that one no" with an authority she no longer has for much else. Twice she asked me what I was doing up on the roof. Both times I told her I was pruning the bougainvillea, and both times she answered "about time", as if it were my idea and she thought it a very good one.

In the end I only cut what was blocking the gutter and what had pushed in between the roof sheets. A bundle of branches the size of a sheep, which I dragged down the stairs and which left a trail of dry little leaves all the way to the front door. The rest stayed. The bougainvillea still takes up half the roof, but at least now the water has somewhere to go.

Among the branches I found a nest. Small, made of straw and colored threads, abandoned since who knows when. One of the threads was red and looked for all the world like the yarn we use at school for the Mother's Day crafts. I have no idea how it got up there. I brought it down carefully and gave it to my mother, who held it in her palm for a while without a word and then put it on the shelf in her room, next to the Virgin of Solitude.

Daniel's drawing

That night, showered and with my arms covered in scratches, I went up to Daniel's room, the one with the ironing board. Among the drawings I left taped to the wall when I finally got around to tidying up there is one of the front of this house, seen from the sidewalk across the street, which he made when he was fifteen. The bougainvillea is there: a tiny plant, barely peeking over the wall, with four flowers drawn in pencil and colored with a purple marker that has since faded.

I sent him a photo of the drawing and another of the roof, with no explanation. He answered half an hour later: "What happened to the house?" I told him nothing had happened, that this is how things grow when you are not looking at them. He sent back a laughing emoji and then another message: "Don't cut it all, Ma. I like it."

I didn't cut it all. In a few weeks the roof will be purple, and my mother will sit in her chair and look at it as if she had planted it herself, which in a way is true.