My name is Margarita Torres. In the town of San Isidro, nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental, in the state of Chihuahua, I was known as “the crazy widow,” the sixty-year-old woman who decided to build a two-meter-high stone wall around her ranch when everyone thought grief had turned her brains out. But madness, like the heavy snow at high altitudes, is sometimes just a matter of perspective
The day I started working on the wall, it had been exactly six months since we had buried Guillermo. It was a cold, clear October morning, the kind that takes your breath away in these highlands. My hands, which for forty years had been soft and cared for, now moved clumsily around the wheelbarrow loaded with quarry stones. Each stone I lifted weighed like a memory. Each blow of the sledgehammer was a heartbeat trying to convince my heart that it was still beating.
The neighbors watched me from afar. Doña Dorotea, my lifelong neighbor, was the first to break the silence. She approached the property line in her flowered dressing gown, wearing that expression of false compassion that I so detested.
“Margarita, woman, for God’s sake,” he said, putting his hands to his head. “What madness is this? You’re going to kill yourself carrying those stones. Don Guillermo, may he rest in peace, wouldn’t want to see you like that, turned into a construction worker.”
I stopped for a moment. Sweat trickled down my forehead and mingled with the dust of the stone. I felt my heart pounding in my ribs, not only from the physical exertion, but from the anger and sadness that had been lurking in my throat since the day of the funeral.
“Doña Dorotea,” I replied hoarsely, “I know very well what I’m doing. My husband left clear instructions about this.”
She snorted, incredulous.
“Instructions? Marga, darling, are you listening to yourself? Guillermo is gone. Those ideas… those obsessions with building walls aren’t going to bring him back. You have to accept reality.”
I clenched my fists until my knuckles turned white. It wasn’t the first time my sanity had been questioned. Half of San Isidro was already betting that the pain had driven me mad. But nobody knew the cards.