As If You Were Listening

A thoroughly useless short story

Words & images © Paul Ransom

NB: This story is rooted in reality, although (almost) none of the events depicted happened in the manner described.

Rosalita was a rebel. From a very young age, she wanted something other. Not the lot reserved for the poor. Or for girls.

She watched her parents closely, scoured her aunts and uncles for clues, listened attentively to her grandparents. In the people around her she noticed the telltale signs of struggle, saw clearly the compensating strains of acceptance. On repeat, she heard their exhausted logic, their mixed mantras of faith and futility.

When, as an indignant child, she would raise her voice, they scrambled to console her. This, they declared, was the way of things. It was not good, they concurred, but the boat they were in was best not rocked. Too fragile. Not made to withstand rough weather.

If the storm isn’t listening, don’t waste words on the wind.

Yet still Rosalita wondered: what if there was another way? A road to somewhere else. For whenever she lifted her gaze from the tight circle of the village, she noticed in the distance a different kind of life. Big houses and smart hotels. Fast cars and elegant clothes. Dinner dates and diamond rings. Some even marched in the streets, daring to defy, while others left their mark in the moondust, writing their names in the sky. They had choice. Power. By what law, she demanded, was it being kept from her?

As she grew towards womanhood, though, the narrow channels of her existence began to feel more like the trappings of God’s will. Her cards pre-dealt. Leave school, earn a wage, find a man, make a baby. Repeat cycle. Teach children to do the same. Don’t grumble, grow old, die.

However, in her heart, her cage, a rage unquieted. She screamed at the heavens. Why?

Meanwhile, beneath her, in shoes often scuffed, never fashionable, her feet trod a beaten path. A sleepwalk. The way of least resistance.

Then one day she woke to find a child on her hip, another in her belly. She looked at her husband, a boy like her, too young to be numbed and worn; but in his stare, defiant, an unbroken line of horizon. The same one that stretched like a thread of possibility in her.

A month later they were on a bus. One way tickets. The wide and curious stare of their firstborn.

In the big, dirty city they toiled. Anonymous migrants adrift, eyes flung wide. Hungry. They witnessed, up close, a shiny new world. The shop window of another future. Rosalita pressed her hand to the polished glass, left the faintest impression. A smear. I was here.

If at first things had seemed different, they were soon shown to be the same. Taller buildings simply cast longer shadows, funnelling the wind, knife like, through the valleys between them. Rubbish swirled at their feet. At night, when the workday was done, the time clock punched, their doors were locked fast. Guarded. Treasures in the vault. Money in someone else’s account. 

Rosalita and her husband were still servants.

But she was busy taking notes, mastering the art of servility. She softened her voice, made herself useful, more valuable. Over time, she perfected an acceptable language of gentle wisdom. Maternal, eternal. Salt of the earth. Safe.

Her reward? Eventually, bigger crumbs fell from the table, more doors were left ajar. She found herself welcomed in rooms that felt bigger than any she had previously known. There, she shook the hands of people once untouchable. It was like a movie, in which the world seemed to open out for her, a blossom for a honeybee.    

She played the part so well that it started to become her. Before she knew it, she was someone else. Rosalita reborn, with brand new eyes, seeing things differently.

With this sharpened vision came crystal insight. New opportunities, new friends, new challenges. Old enemies in disguise. She detected them, hovering, whenever the mask slipped. The rough corners of her poor girl voice and the subsequent thinning of smiles. A certain cooling of shoulders. Questions sidestepped, injustices explained away.

There was a limit, invisible but detectable. She was replaceable. Approval conditional. Always in the gift of others.

At home, something similar. Different voices, same meaning. There, the familiarities of love swirled with an under-scent of gathering distance; one measured in veiled resentment. A rarely voiced, yet often felt jealousy. The higher she climbed, the more she grew strong in herself, the louder her family and friends applauded. Yet, for all their boisterous acclaim and copious thanks, a hesitancy she could not ignore. A disbelief, as though she were an imposter. A traitor. Even her children’s brows were seen to arch. Accuse.

Yet, somewhere in the middle, stranded between origin and destination, Rosalita began to intuit the underlying pattern. It took years to emerge into the clarity of conscious thought – during which time her family’s fortunes were steadily transformed – but eventually it became impossible to deny.  

For all the fine sentiments others expressed – the acts of kindness, the signs of trust – she understood that her value was not intrinsic. Not to loved ones or employers, nor to the world at large. She knew she was alone in this. Indeed, she sensed the reality of it in her own heart. It was not cruel, it just was. The way of things. Of people. Rich, poor. Man, woman. Parent, child. President, citizen.

One Sunday, in church, a confirmation. Revelation. As the priest talked, she heard it clear and unambiguous, as though it were the grind of a giant machine spinning its wheels mere inches beneath the surface. God’s true bottom line. Cold and clean and unappealable.

You work for me now.

Rosalita walked out, mid-sermon, and never went back. Done with kneeling. Pleasing. Being a mule.

Surveying the godless terrain before her, she carefully calibrated her next move. Now, a matriarch – hair turning silver, eyesight failing, a stick to help her walk – she recalled the grit of girlhood. Traces still beneath her nails, the baked-in black on the soles of her feet. Dirt, like the ash of a fire, testament to a passion. Cooled, mostly scrubbed clean, yet not forgotten. An encrypted whisper, like a secret language.

If speaking up proves useless, find another voice.

She thought about rain, prized for the life it brought to the fields. Of the soil, for what it grew. Of hands, for what they fashioned, what they carried. And of prayer, for its promise of promise. Everything, everyone, for sale in a treadmill economy. Fuel for an engine, ever turning, going nowhere, aspirated by vaporous hope, horrified by the apostasy of stopping.     

In practise, she mused, the value of a life was too often expressed in terms resembling that of a work contract; like a line of credit denominated in the currency of death.

Rosalita was not appalled by this. Neither did she feel the need to shout it from the soapbox; understanding that an audience of addicts would likely tune out all news of their addiction.

Rather, she purchased tickets for her and her husband, and the fast new train whizzed them back to the town they left half a century before. There, they walked slowly to the river, besides which they first kissed as teenagers. It was now a trickle, dammed and diverted upstream, but its voice could still be heard. She had to strain her ears but, beneath the busy drone of modern traffic, she sensed the age old murmur. More like breathing than speaking. Words not intended to reveal anything. Simply to be sound.

She was not sure if her husband heard it, but she resisted the temptation to make him try, to force her perceptions into him. For his value did not depend on his being a close copy of her. Nor was it tied to his labour, or the fruits thereof. Looking directly into his eyes, she allowed hers to soften – sharp to smudge – leaving space for the unforced return of his attention. In that moment, a meeting, a release. Soft, subtle, yet like the diminished river, still a river.

Only a river.

In the months that followed, Rosalita the rebel quietly shifted. If, like the once broad stream, she had been used to irrigate, to allow passage, to delineate territory, she would now just meander. Raindrops, directed by gravity, guided by hills and valleys, falling towards the sea. Not to serve the will of oceans. Rather, to be in flow.

In Rosalita’s estimation, water appeared to seek the shape of movement. As though it were a dancer.

The river, she realised, was not the harvest of the sea, and the sea was not the end of the river. Water was water, shapeless wellspring, ever cycling, form to form. Part of a trillion-trillion things, yet always itself, ready to dissolve its countless skins and be the naked rain once more.

Rosalita relished the metaphor. Asked herself: what if I was liquid? An unfixed entity. Not bound by these apron strings, nor confined by this age. More than a provider, than merely hard-working and dependable. Not simply the wise woman and whip cracker ruling from the throne of her renown. Neither would she fold down to fit the convenient box of pliable peasant girl; ready to bend, to put out fires with unthreatening nuggets of folk wisdom.

Without fanfare – and to the great surprise of the many well-meaning passengers who loved her more as a means – she scuppered the vessel assigned to ferry them to their ends.

Her final stand would be to sit down. She would serve no measurable purpose; would instead become the field not tilled, the tree not cut for timber. Her love, she decided, would quit the routines of duty, her wisdom retire from being on-call. From here on, she would just live. A simple circle of waking and sleeping, a sawtooth trend of breaking down. A person with a collection of bumps and scars and a catalogue of misremembered and exaggerated stories. A woman in a corner she preferred, bones warming in a patch of sunshine, allowing her thoughts to drift off grid. At last, useless. No plan to be a part of. Finally free.

Rio Rosalita, running without running, being without being, more presence than action. Grandma code gone rogue, glitching the usual program. Loved ones soon scurried around her – worried, spooked, disrupted – and as they ran hither and thither she thought once more of departed ancestors, and of their leaky boat.

If the storm isn’t listening, don’t waste words on the wind.