Corazón

Mica Comal slipped out of his coffin, grabbed a cane from a nearby rack, and ambled toward the front door. Episcopalia, the blind Costa Rican woman, stopped him at the door of the church and asked, “¿Tienes corazón negro?”

“No, señora, tengo un corazón de oro,” he replied. His smile was so wide and genuine the old woman could feel its warmth caress her face. In her mind, she could see the old man’s leather face, his wrinkled walnut skin bronzed and polished by eighty years tending crops and watching sunsets across the still waters of the lake.

Episcopalia Frontera was born in Sámara, Costa Rica in 1936, but her memories of the place were dim. She moved with her family to La Magdalena, a tiny village on the eastern shore of Lake Chapala, when she was fifteen.  Moving to join her father’s cousins in La Magdalena would have been easier on her a year earlier, before she fell in love with Miguel.

In spite of having spent the majority of her life in Mexico, Episcopalia considered herself Costa Rican and asserted her nationality regularly to remind the people around her she was not Mexican. Many people in the village, even her family, took offense at her nationalism, taking it as a denunciation of Mexico and Mexicans. Mica Comal, though, thought it a little comical and endearing.

[Taking a break from writing something else that has become boring. I’m trying to understand who Episcopalia and Mica are and why their story, whatever it is, appeals to me.]

 

About John Swinburn

"Love not what you are but what you may become."― Miguel de Cervantes
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