The Blind Sisters

Maria and Guatelupe Xalcut Garcia
(A-55, A-61) Status: Sponsored as of Dec 18, 2012!
Needs:  food, maize (corn), home repairs
UPDATE: Dec 7, 2012: Maria and Guatelupe have recieved a large basket of food!

UPDATE: Dec 18, 2012:  They have received 2 new mattresses, 2 beds, 2 pillows & 2 blankets!

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Links to previous stories about Cayetana and her daughters can be found here

Cayetana, left, and Maria, the eldest

Cayetana died in the bed she’d shared with her daughter the whole duration of the daughter’s life. It had been a gift in the house where the old woman lived with her two blind daughters, one who also cannot speak, nor walk. The other daughter sleeps on some cardboard laid on bedsprings.

Some years ago they’d lost their father after he’d been hit by a car. Then they lost their house in a mudslide, and along with this, their possessions. They are glad to have a place to sleep that is not boards atop the earth, nor the earth itself.

The new house has two rooms whose doors face each other in a corner, where the sun, the only light, comes in. The kitchen is some pieces of tin sheeting around a stove, whose fire is put out each time it rains, when the ground becomes a pool where bowls and bottles float. Behind this, a closet with a tarp for one wall covers a hole meant for using the bathroom.

Above the bed hangs a portrait of Christ, next to a mirror that would be ordinary except for the knowledge that only one of the three women has ever seen her reflection in it. In the corner sits a wheelchair, unused. 

The mother made money sitting in front of a waterfall, begging from tourists who wanted to take her photo. She’d bring back loads of wood to use to cook and her earnings, and in this way the women lived. She became famously photographed. She led the blind to lunch each day. She dressed and washed the one who could not do it for herself.  

The day Cayetana said she could not breathe, and left the lunchroom, she led her daughters home, who pinched her sleeves, following. People came to visit: first the doctor, then others who came to say goodbye. Cayetana complained of pain and of not wanting to die, while one daughter banged two small teddy bears together and the other cried at her side. Sometime later she left her body in the bed and her two blind daughters waiting, for days, for help to remove it.

It was the daughter’s bed too, where the doctor said Cayetana would die of the swelling from her enlarged heart, and where she did die, bleeding through the mattress. The daughters, who did not have another, turned it over.  

What will we do for maiz? says the older sister, what will we do for food? My sister, she says, she can’t go out. She can’t walk. The two sit in the doorway and blink in the sun like those who have been underground awhile must adjust to new light, as if the gesture might allow them to see. They wait for something or someone to happen to them. They wait for a hand to lead them to eat. They wait for a hand to dress them. They wait for time to pass.