I noticed her good handwriting and the shopping list written on a post-it note on the fridge was not lacking in accents. “You must have studied”, I said to Marita, who had recently been helping a relative with the household chores. He nodded with a smile and explained to me that his mother sat the children down to do their homework, “and no one got up from there”. She was a rare case, a literate woman in a village in Peru, who told them that only with education and good letters could they get out of hunger. She died when Marita was 15 years old and had almost finished a secretariat, but flocks of straw birds scared away her dreams and returned her to the ground, where she collapsed, gave birth, suffered. Once he had a network, he came to Spain and from there he sent the euros that returned bits of dignity to his people.
Like her, more than half a million migrant women work in our homes and take care of our children and parents, who still can’t be left with just any Roomba. Despite liberating technology, managing a home requires human hands to perform its ritual between scrubbers and window cleaners, beds and drying racks, pots and freezers. A job without a ladder or visibility, which we have been delegating to them so that we can go out and eat the world.
I will always remember what Antonio Triguero, Nabokov’s barman at Le Montreux Palace, told me: the writer would wander around the salons after cleaning and admire the sparkling shine of the mirrors, praising the staff. We should do this every time we sit at our shiny table with the empty bin.
Marita died on Sunday of a heart attack: she was my age, a few children, one 15, just like me. A week ago he showed me a message from the boy: he apologized for running away from school, and told him that he loved her, that she was the best mother in the world. He was counting the days to meet them. I feel that colorless but stony emptiness. The one of dying far away, with nails broken by ammonia, despite having such good handwriting.
