The rooms upstairs

My house has two rooms upstairs that for twenty years were called "Rodrigo's" and "Daniel's". Now I don't know what to call them. My mother calls them "the boys' rooms", as if the boys might come down for dinner at any moment. When I go up to hang laundry or look for something, I catch myself saying "the one with the window" and "the one with the wardrobe", which are names for furniture, not for people, and that says a good deal.

Rodrigo left for Tijuana four years ago to work at a factory that makes medical equipment; he is now a supervisor of something he has explained to me several times and that I still don't fully understand. Daniel went to Mexico City to study design and stayed, the way almost everyone stays. Both of them call on Sundays. Rodrigo calls early, before his shift, and tells me about the weather as if it were news: there was fog today, Mom, you couldn't see a thing. Daniel calls at night, nearly always from the street, and I hear buses behind his voice.

This year's Holy Week

Neither of them could come. They didn't tell me at the same moment, but they did tell me in the same week, with the same sorrow in their voices, a sorrow I recognize because I used it myself with my mother when I couldn't visit her in Ejutla. I told them not to worry. I meant it, although afterwards I hung up and sat on the edge of the bed for a while.

On Holy Thursday I went to visit the seven churches with my friend Lupita, as we do every year. We walked from Santo Domingo to La Soledad, then on to San Felipe Neri, and at some point, among the crowds, the smell of candle wax and the ice creams outside La Soledad, I realized I had gone hours without thinking about the empty house. Then I got home and the house was just as empty, but by then I was tired, which is another way of being at peace.

What I did with the rooms

On Saturday I went up meaning to tidy. I carried black bin bags and the resolve of a woman who has watched too many television programs. In Rodrigo's room I found a poster of the Guerreros de Oaxaca, the baseball team, peeling off at one corner, a high-school public speaking trophy and a box of cables that connect nothing I have ever seen. In Daniel's room, drawings. A lot of drawings. Whole notebooks of faces, of hands, of the front of this house seen from the opposite sidewalk. I sat on the floor to look at them and the afternoon was gone.

I threw nothing away. I carried the empty bags back downstairs and folded them again.

What I did do was move the ironing board into Daniel's room, because it has the best morning light in the house, and set up the drying rack for underwear in Rodrigo's room for rainy days. Now I iron my school smocks by the window, with the radio on the ranchera station that used to embarrass Daniel so much, and every now and then I look up at the drawings I left pinned to the wall.

It isn't that the rooms belong to someone again. It's that they are no longer waiting. There is a difference, and it took me four years to notice it.

On Sunday Rodrigo called. I told him about the ironing. He was quiet for a second and then said: "Fine, Mom, but don't take down my poster." I promised I wouldn't. And I won't, even when it finishes falling off.