Thirteen Senses Read Free Page A

power! Not my father. No, he ran away. Then I saw my sisters do the same thing. It was never the men, mi hijita, who kept our families together. God as my witness, men fall apart when children are crying with hunger. Ask your grandpapa, Salvador; he will tell you the very same thing. It was his mother who got them through the Revolution, not his father. Please, do not ever believe all these lying, romantic movies of the men being so big and strong and the women being weak and scared and not knowing what to do.
    â€œDo you think for one minute that Salvador and I would have ever gotten this far and built this fine home here if I’d left things up to him? Why, it’s taken me these fifty years to civilize him, I tell you, and make him into the man he thinks he is today—a fine, great man with his airs of fine cigars and all his show-off ways.”
    â€œYou tell them, Lupe, you tell them!” shouted Carlota. “These girls need to know! All men are cowards and liars and no good! But what can we women do? A dog can’t give us what we want, so we’re stuck needing to do what we can with men!”
    The screeching that now erupted from the young women in the living room was so loud, it even startled the men in the next room.
    â€œCarlota!” said Lupe. “That kind of talk helps no one! What these girls need to know is that life was never meant to be easy, and especially not easy for us women, ever since God chose for us to be the carriers of life here inside of our bodies, and not the men. Oh, no man knows the joys of pregnancy or the pains of birthing,” added Lupe, “and so they can’t possibly have the respect and understanding of life that women have!”
    â€œExactly,” said Carlota. “This is why I chose to never have children, and I don’t care what any priest tells me—because priests are men, too, and they don’t know—I wasn’t going through all that suffering that I saw my mother and sisters go through just because they had a few moments of pleasure with a man, but the man—the no-good—can just run off abandoning what he created, and continue his own pleasure!”
    â€œOn this, I entirely disagree with my sister Carlota,” said Lupe. “But, I will say that I wish I could’ve spoken up fifty years ago as I spoke up to this priest today. Because life will continue to be—not just difficult for us women—but completely unfair if we allow people like this young priest to get away with getting us to use words like ‘obey’ and not the men!”
    â€œTell them, Lupe, tell them!” shouted Carlota, waving her cane in the air. “This is good! Really good! Now you’re talking! And girls, any time your husband says to you, ‘Oh, no, honey, you just don’t understand, because you’re a woman,’ the truth is that he is hiding something and trying to make a fool of you! Mark my words, I know. I had to steal money from Archie, just so I wouldn’t always be penniless, and I swear that I worked at our businesses as many hours as he did, or more!”
    â€œI’m sorry to say,” said Lupe sadly, “Carlota is right. But I never needed to steal from Salvador, because in our marriage, I handled all the banking and bookkeeping, but—oh, was I in for questioning when any monies were missing! Then, so help me God, every time it turned out that Salvador, himself, had spent that money, but it never stopped him from trying to blame me the next time.
    â€œI swear,” said Lupe, “I now realize that every marriage is like returning to the Garden of Eden, and there is Adam again, trying to blame Eve for his own shortcomings. So what you girls need to know is that it is absolutely not for any wife to obey her husband, and it has never been! It is for a wife to understand that above all else, she is a mother, and as a mother, ours is to attend to the survival of our