Unnamed Madonnas: Chapter Thirteen

 First letter: Easter 1950

“We were on a train for many days,” she wrote, in a beautiful handwriting. “We slept and ate on the train.  We saw mountains, open land unfolding for ever and ever, a cluster of houses here and there, then, out of nowhere, wild beasts rushing through the prairie, galloping faster than the train.  Nothing but land wherever the eyes stopped. I couldn’t  wait  to get to my destination, to go to Heaven.  Heaven is called Montana, close to God,  the clouds. wars."

Tina is very thin,   chestnut hair around dark eyes. I am tiny and with a frightened look. This was not a photograph I had ever seen.

The next letter is a month later.

            “I’m worried about little Silvia.  I’m so glad everything is behind us, the fights, the gossip.”

I savor each line, each connection.  Why she worried about me is not explained. I read carefully, and yet voraciously.

I  read and reread. I fall asleep. I wake in the middle of the night, turn the lamp by the bed, and I read some more.

Each letter is a stage of my life I do not recollect.

She talks about  the house, the animals, the planting, and then always about me.  “Silvia is getting along. I made the right decision.”

 I was reading with a fever pace, quickly, skipping lines, words I didn’t know, looking for something. I wanted to breathe in the life that was right next to me.  If a letter contained a certain incident I remembered, I read it again and again.

It was morning when I stopped reading.