fiction, first edition 2012, English
“She´d talk your ear off if you let her, and was way too honest: within a week she´d told us her whole life story. How her father had died when she was young; how for an undisclosed sum her mother had married her off at thirteento a stingy fifty-year-old (which was how she got her first son, Nestor); how after a couple years of that terribleness she got the chance to jump from Las Matas de Farfán to Newark, brought over by a tía who wanted her to take care of her retarded son and bedridden husband; how she had run away from her, too, because she hadn´t come to Nueba Yol to be a slave to anyone, not anymore; how she had spent the next four years more or less being blown along on the winds of necessity, passing through Newark, Elizabeth, Paterson, Union City, Perth Amboy (where some crazy cubano knocked her up with her second son, Adrian), everybody taking advantage of her good nature; and now here she was in London Terrace, trying to stay afloat, looking for her next break. She smiled brightly at my brother when she said that.
They don´t really marry girls off like that in the DR, do they, Ma?
Por favor, Mami said. Don´t believe anything that puta tells you. But a week later she and the Horsefaces were lamenting how often that happened in the campo, how Mami herself had had to fight to keep her own crazy mother from trading her for a pair of goats.”
(Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her, p 101 – 102)
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