The Moths by Helena María Viramontes

First published: 1985

Type of plot: Magical Realism

Time of work: The 1980's

Locale: Los Angeles, California

Principal Characters:

• The narrator, an adolescent girl
• Mama Luna (Abuelita), her grandmother
• Amá, her mother
• Apá, her father
• Her sisters

The Story

When the narrator was fourteen years old, her elderly grandmother Abuelita (Mama Luna), who was dying of cancer, asked her to help take care of her. The girl felt this was a reasonable request, because Abuelita had taken care of her through illnesses, whippings, a broken arm incurred in the process of following a dare, her first lie, and puberty. Though she denies a special connection with her grandmother, it is clear that one has developed and that her grandmother has offered her a level of understanding that she never received at home.

Within her own nuclear family the girl was the odd member. She was too tomboyish for the girls, too rebellious for her father, and a trial for her mother. Although her sisters were ultra-feminine, with delicate hands and manners and fine embroidery skills, the narrator was awkward and large. She was violently defensive and boyish in her ways (she once struck a sister with a brick hidden in a sock when the sister teased her about her big hands). Throughout her childhood, her father, Apá, criticized her and beat her for not conforming to his notions of what a docile girl should be and for not attending church regularly.

The narrator's father directed some of this anger over his daughter's behavior at her mother, whom he blamed for poor parenting. To protect her mother from his wrath, the narrator sometimes dressed as if she were going to church, when she was actually going to Mama Luna's house, where she helped the older woman prepare food. As they worked together in the kitchen, tears streamed down her cheeks as she peeled and crushed chili peppers. On some days, the narrator's mother sent her out of the house to save her from a whipping by her father, and she went to Abuelita's to help her plant seedlings in coffee cans that were later transplanted to the grandmother's beautiful garden.

Now Abuelita, whose own hands have rubbed and healed and nurtured so many, is dying. She lies in her bed and looks out the open window at the Bird of Paradise blooming without. Her eyelids remain partly open even when she is sleeping, show-ing her one gray and one brown eye as if she is watching and remembering everything around her. The narrator has never kissed her grandmother but has held her hand for hours.

One day she goes out to the market and on the way stops in at a chapel, feeling utterly alone in its cold, vacant marble interior. After purchasing the few items that Abuelita needs at a store, she returns to the house to find her mother crying in the kitchen. She puts the cans of soup away in the cupboard, without kissing or comforting her mother, then stiffly pats her on the back, aware that her relationship with her mother is hampered by all the quarrels and beatings in their household and by her own feelings of oddness and helplessness. She goes and sits on the porch swing until her mother departs and the sun begins to set, then goes into the kitchen to prepare soup for Abuelita's evening meal. She notes the defiance of the sun just before it changes color and finally sinks below the horizon in the moment of illumination when sun and earth meet. She switches on the kitchen light as darkness falls—the very moment at which Abuelita passes away.

The narrator finds her grandmother lying dead on her side facing the window, her mouth open as if she is about to speak. "I heard you," she assures the dead woman, and strokes her cheek. She carefully undresses and bathes Mama Luna's body with a basin and towel, then fills the bathtub with steaming water. Stripping down to nakedness herself, she lifts her grandmother and carries her into the bathroom, lowering both their bodies together into the tub. There she cradles Abuelita, assuring her again that she had been heard, and comforting her with rocking motions as one would a child. The water from the tub overflows onto the floor, and moths flutter up out of the grandmother's mouth to the light of the bulb in the ceiling of the bathroom. The granddaughter wants to assuage the loneliness of dying. She wants to return to the womb again with her grandmother so as never to be alone. She wants her own mother. As the bathroom fills with moths the girl begins to sob, crying for herself, for her mother, for her grandmother, feeling the misery of being half-born, and in rocking and comforting the dead Mama Luna, comforting the traumatized child in herself as well.

Bibliography

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Saldivar-Hull, Sonia. "Helena María Viramontes." In Chicano Writers, Second Series. Vol. 122 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1992.

Viramontes, Helena Maria, and Maria Herrera-Sobek, eds. Chicana Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American Literature. Rev. ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Viramontes, Helena Maria, and Maria Herrera-Sobek, eds. Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1996.