La Llorona’s Child ©

by Lauren Elise Daniels

My cheek rested against the coarse olive carpet in the livingroom as I eyed the shafts of sunlight and illuminated dust motes drifting like milkweed. It was a late Sunday morning, after Church, some 25 years ago. The smell of garlic, olive oil, pork, fennel and the tang of green horn-shaped peppers filled the house. An oven door opened and closed amidst the hiss of frying, while I marvelled at Beethoven. His Moonlight Sonata spun on the turntable, dust and scratches snapping rhythmically into the speakers, the piano trickling scales like strands of reflected moonlight on ocean skin.

I contemplated my name. Elise. My father told me I was named after Beethoven’s music. Lying prostrate on the livingroom floor, a child in my old family home in Rhode Island, I heard Beethoven in my name, and felt him in my belly as his notes breathed against the floor. At the time, I knew very few facts about this man, but I knew his moods and they were mine. Through his music I saw him as clearly as I saw myself. Moonlight Sonata into Pathetique into Les Adieux into Appassionata, from peace to storm, isolation to connection, contemplation to anxiety, rage to surrender, acceptance to self-loathing, fear to relief. I heard the shaking of empty hands at the heavens and a lowering of hands to lap.

At seven years old, I had no concept of vanity in this belief in knowing the Maestro. To claim to know Beethoven, to believe that I understood him or his music, as a child, was not proud. I had no perception of how bold, how brazen that was. I only sprawled with my cheek to the floor, looking into the shafts of sunlight, smelling my mother’s cooking and contemplating my name.

I pushed up from the floor and went to the kitchen and asked my father to please play Fur Elise. He put the Sunday paper down. My father squatted at his record collection, combed his fingers across the titles and found the album. Beethoven’s fierce portrait in oil glared from the cover, pen poised, hair wild, with his clenched jaw and great forehead that I could kiss like an uncle’s. My father lifted the needle on the turntable, blew away a tiny wad of dust and placed it gently on the record. When the music began to pour from the speakers, he lifted me in his arms and whirled me. I swam with joy in my father’s arms, wearing a grin so big it burned my cheeks. The livingroom walls melted and disappeared letting sunshine fill the air. Beethoven watched from his portrait, perturbed but steady and beloved. The whole world sparkled as I discovered Beethoven and he discovered me. I was part of his music, a note in an endless stream spilling through time. For a moment, as I perceived it with the heart of a child, the world was a deliciously rich and elaborate place.

Twenty-five years later I am standing on a balcony at midnight in Australia listening to a woman scream, somewhere, off in the distance, somewhere from between these rows of terracotta tiled roof and peak, of lawn and jacaranda tree, a woman is shrieking. But a mist contorts the sound, it bounces and leaps, weaving from many directions at once. I am on the phone with the police. They will send a car, the woman on the line says, and the officers will listen for the screams. She tells me it’s all right, to go back to bed. There is a kindness in her voice. I lie and tell her I will do as she says. I hang up and wait for the cruiser. The woman stops. This has happened over the last three nights. Between 12 and 1am. And each time I awoke messy and confused with sleep, sitting upright in bed and thinking at first it was a catfight, mewling, shrieking in heat. I thought it for only a moment, before I heard the words. “Somebody! Somebody-eee please, help me!”

The police cruiser pulls slowly up the hill, spotlight slicing through the mist, the engine breathing. I watch from the balcony with my husband. Trevor says, “Come inside or the cops will think it’s you.” I whisper, “Come on lady, let her rip now, scream, would you! Scream!” but only silence in response. Trevor lies in bed and calls me.

I hadn’t called the police until now. After three nights. I think of that psychological phenomenon on a city street, someone gets attacked and no one does anything because they all think someone else will. I lie in the dark ashamed. There was a story in the paper yesterday, Trevor tells me, someone was caught in Sydney for keeping a woman chained up in his garage for three years. She escaped. She got out by herself. She slept on a flap of cardboard, was fed once a day, and hosed down every two or three. I feel horror. My stomach rolls, my urge is to run. Head for the mountains where there is no devil, or so I think until I get there and somehow sniff him out. I think of La Llorona, the ghost of the weeping woman heard all over wilds of the Southwestern United States and Mexico. A centuries-old legendary ghost mother weeping for her children, whom she drowned in an effort to spare them from an approaching enemy, any given enemy depending on the telling. Some say white settlers, some Conquistadors, others say Native Americans of one tribe or other, but all say this enemy was bent on the slaughter of the innocent. Only this enemy never arrived, and the mother realized she made a terrible, horrific mistake and ended her life. The stories say that La Llorona is doomed to wander a landscape of anguish, mourning the children she murdered and the enemy that she herself became.

I wonder for a moment if I only think I heard it, if the screaming woman is indeed, inside me, that I only think I hear her out there. But no, my husband heard her tonight, too. He stood out on the balcony with me, listening to her pleading, trying to discern the direction of her cries. I roll over. I must get back to sleep. I have to work in the morning.

But I can’t sleep. I listen to the night instead, ready to redial the police if I hear her as my redemption for ignoring her before. I think of all the things that could be happening to that woman. My mind delves into the ugliest of places, smeared with blood, infection and bodily tears. I am chilled to the bone and watching as the world outside slowly grows lighter. As I lie in bed, I am shivering, terrified of the world. I listen. But the night air is damp and silent.

A couple of weeks later on a rainy afternoon in the neighborhood grocery store parking lot, as I drop a bag of groceries into the trunk of the car, green peppers spilling from wet plastic bags, rain running over their shiny skins, I hear that voice. My head spins. It’s her. I scan the parking lot in the downpour that pelts the pavement so hard it rises back into the air with a smart hiss. I see her. She is standing on the corner, trying to cross the street, her frame and face familiar, her hair soaking wet like mine and hanging like ropes. She shakes her empty hands at the rush-hour traffic and screams again, “Somebody help me! Please! Somebody-eee!” Another woman runs up to her and puts an arm around her. She squeezes her shoulder and helps her across the street. They enter an apartment building and disappear as I squint, watching in the rain.

I am soaked to my skin as I slam the car door and watch the rain slide in sheets down the windshield. The parking lot outside distorts into a swathe of bleak colours and melting shadows. I had seen her before, trying to cross the street, screaming, even plunking down onto the curb and crying into her hands. Using the crosswalk with streetlights only a block away didn’t occur to her. I turn on the radio and hear Beethoven, the second movement of the Ninth Symphony, his Molto vivace with its seething layers of violins and thunderous echoes of percussion and I feel foolish. The barrel of my own anxiety is pointed right at my face. I hadn’t heard her at night again, but I’d listened. Waited. Slept with the local police phone number next to my head. Jerked from sleep, I twitched at the sound of sweet-faced bush possoms in the trees. I had imagined her mangled and buried in a hasty backyard grave. I’d scanned strangers as I walked to the train, looking for predatory ticks. The neighborhood had darkened, and something in me along with it. All this fear, while a woman carried her own burden of helplessness. Sitting in the car, I felt twisted, confronted by a creeping stranglehold of cynicism and terror.

Believing that the world is terrible will make it so. The psychopathic and violent will fill every dark corner as the heart becomes a recluse assuming the worst. Beethoven becomes deaf and mean and the music gets lost in a dusty CD rack while the six o’clock news chants its mantra. And fear, a trickle at first, slowly begins to flood, drowning us before the enemy actually arrives.

For a moment in the rainstorm, it seems that I am no longer simply sitting in my car listening to Beethoven. I am also face to face with La Llorona. Her hair sticks to her cheeks. Her eyes are wild and in her trembling hands she holds a child, coughing and wet. Slowly, I take the dripping child from her. I feel the small, fragile body of my own sense of wonder, bruised and soaked but still breathing, uncurl her fingers and wrap her arms around my neck.

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Published in The Portable Muse, April 2003