This is called "Refugio's Hair."
Refugio was my grandmother's name.
It was also my great-grandmother's name
and my mother-in-law's name.
When it happens, it happens.
Refugio, by the way, if you don't know the name,
it translates literally as refuge, or as a name, Ruth.
In the old days of our family, my grandmother
was a young woman whose hair was as long as the river.
She lived with her sisters on the ranch La
Calera, the land of the lime, and her days were happy.
But her uncle Carlos lived there too.
Carlos, whose soul had the edge of a knife.
One day, to teach her to ride a horse,
he made her climb onto the fastest one bareback
and sit there as he held its long face in his arms.
And then he did the unspeakable deed for which
he would always be remembered.
He called for the handsome baby Pirrín,
and he placed that child in her arms.
With that picture of a Madonna on horseback,
he slapped the shank of the horse's rear leg.
That horse did what a horse must,
racing full toward the bright horizon.
But first, that horse ran under the álamo trees
to rid its back of this unfair weight--
This woman full of tears and this baby full of love.
When they reached the trees and went under,
my grandmother's hair, which had trailed her,
equal in its magnificence to the tail
of the horse, that hair rose up and flew into the branches
as if it were a thousand arms, all of them trying to save her.
The horse ran off and left her, the baby still
in her arms, the two of them hanging from her hair.
The baby looked only at her and did not cry,
so steady was her cradle.
Her sisters came running to save them.
But the hair would not let go.
From its fear, it held on.
All of it, all of it, from its fear,
it held on and had to be cut from her head.
From that day on, my grandmother wore her hair
short like a scream, but it was long like a river in her sleep.