Because of her sweating forehed

When her life seemed to be condemned to slavery, she found the light, fought for her family, left to be illiterate, and even she was in front of the 264^th Pope.

 

Written and photographed by Luis Paucar Temoche

 

    

PIURA CITY, Peru – She didn’t finish to understand. The last time that Josefa thought what she did and where she became brave from to do it –the clock marked that the twilight began to fall—a handle of tears slided down through her chicks. And she didn’t finish to understand. The only she remembered is that sunny afternoon in 1985, she was told to be chosen –among all the farmer women—to give a gift to the Holy Father during his visit to Piura.

 

The news got her without warning. She was so nervous that, immediately, her ffeet started to tremble and a –more or less cold—sweat streamwent around her forehead. “How am I going to be, if I’m a farmer woman?,” Josefa wondered, who though that everything she heard was a joke. She was cooking rice and beef stew when they came in to give her that news seven days before one million people flooded the Pope’s Field, in Castilla City, next to Guillermo Concha Iberico Airport (PIU).

 

“Cheppa, congratulations – you are going to give the gift to the Pope, you’re the most adequate one!,” Father Vicente Santuc said her, sspeaking excited that time. Few days later, Josefa was standing up in front of a crowd giving to John Paul II, a chipped pumpkin, a letter written by a farmer from Mallarés, a poto (wood bowl)which the chicha is served, and a hat mmade of toqilla straw.

 

She was said, in second place, just to give the gift then going down rushly. And Josefa didn’t obey. She only inspired a little oxygen, pushed her punches, relaxed them, inspired again, and she reached to say him, pointing to the buttock-shaped bowl: “Holy Father, this is used for drinking chicha.” And the Pope answered with his hand on her soft chin: “The little farmer girl.”

 

Two and a half decadesafter turning in the symbol of the farmer woman, Josefa says me that giving that gift “was a unique luck, a beautiful, quite pretty thing compared to nothing. How was I to figure out myself, a poor farmer woman, carrying such a great gift to the one who was God for me? To be close to him, you imagine. What a great luck!,” she says, then she leaves looking at the weak twilight coming in through her window.

 

Doña Josefa

It’s Tuesday. 4:30 in an eclipsed afternoon in Piura, while I look for the Josefa’s address. The rheumed street of San Pedro Bourgh, that saw her to settle down 33 years ago are welcoming me with sand clouds and bumps everywhere. Here. Josefa Mena Villegas lives here. And her house is a one-floor building, with ochre-colored walls that, at first look, remains hidden on san Juan de Puerto Rico Street.

 

Nobody knows here as Cheppa. Everybody says her Doña Josefa Mena, and these three words impose respect. There is a front garden – three mango plants, cockades, and the rest are decorative.

 

Josefa lives here with her granddaughter and her daughter, and is up to be 80 years old. That’s the reason why she will say me later she has got two lives – one good and another bad, one misfortuned aand another full of fortune. “I hope to remember. There are so much things I have to tell.”

 

This afternoon’s weak light gets her calm, allowing a snoop to stop in her gestures: slanted eyes, aquiline nose, tied hair, polka dots, a mole on her forehead, the skin of a woman smashed by that life that we call hard, jealous hands. Today, Josefa wears a blue blouse, a beige skirt, and two pearls in each ear lobe. Ever simple. Ever submissive.

 

“How was we to think wearing those today’s clothes, if we wore little Bichy small skirts yesterday?,” she says me while she draws with her fingers, imagining. But that, as she says, it was before. Now, she has 33 grandchildren, 50 grangranchildren, and 5 children she worked on forbased upon one only thing – work.

 

“Wow, it were very hard times.” Josefa Mena Villegas born poor. Her father was a Lanconés-native peasant and her mother –ever smiling on the pictures—came from Lower Piura who migrated to San Miguel estate looking for a job. Like a life chance, Doña María Villegas met Don Cruz Mena there. They got married. They had 5 kids, and Josefa was one of them.

 

She began to work at seven by shepperding the herd of donkeys and pigs. And her misfortune –she says—was because of that, her bad luck was because of that. Punished to be a slave. A job. The only heritage the parents could inherit to their children, that times, was a job – peasant, farmer, servant, no matter if that was a job.

 

However, Josefa learned to do everything. She washed, sewed, cooked, served, gathered cotton, harvested, and she didn’t stop to do it until two months ago when she retired from the Center of Promotion and Training for Farmers (Cipca, as in Spanish) where she learned to read, and where –within everything—she got economically independent.

 

If before she raised 20 soles per month, now she raised 100. If before she was treated as a slave, now she was a free girl wwhom the city looked like another galaxy because an ill she didn’t heal until she was 42 years old – she didn’t know to read. “You know, I didn’t understand absolutely anything. Everything was different. In the end, I neither talked to the people. It was very ugly. You figured out, not knowing to read and coming to a city where there were signs – I was a sstranger.”

 

Josefa’s life was, since the beginning, a whole challenge. “Your daughter is also going to work for me,” the estate owner Calixto Romero told her mother, one of these days when the Sun allowed to see its most tiny and hot rays. Aside a hard life, Josefa’s parents had got a rectangle of crops what they survived from. They also own a house that didn’t look like such, a mud-&-straw rectangle rather, furnitureless –they just had a carob trunk to sit down—, applianceless, walls without a second hand, mud floor, without a bed.

 

“Our kitchen was mud cases, firewood. When we finished to eat, we went to the big jar to drink water. “ There was no tea. The supper was a little cancha (toasted corn) soaked in coffee, or for better, a zarandaha bean soup with salted fish. That’s the reason why Josefa grew up thinking that everything in life should be to fight although she suffered like a slave, although she loses the dignity.

 

But eberything was so. “Everything” means that if, for example, she did not gather the cotton good or she did not gathered the alfalfas, she was punished with a strong smash the most of times. But maybe what marked her a lot was not having education. Later, she realized their bosses, the Romero estate owners, did not want her to study for continuing to have her under their power.

 

She worked for them in two turns: from 6:00 to 12:00 and from 14:00 to 18:00. She raised 4.80 soles per week for all that, that equaled less than 20 soles per month. Her life was passing on that way. One year, and another, and other else, and her biggest worry continued to be ignoring to speak, to read, to understand.

 

“Blessed day, dad. Blessed day, mom,” she said, nothing else. She cleansed, had breakfast, went out to work. And she did not come back until the first afternoon lights began to set.

 

Two lives

Josefa says she has got two lives: the first, full of servitude and mistreating, and the another –through she goes—full of an unexplained happiness. Her last grandchildren born a year ago and she get happy remembering it, although her intuition says she will meet grangrangranchildren.

 

Her first life –the worst—finished at her 40s, then she began a new one instantaneously. “a light,” she says. “Do you realize? Two lives. 40 and 40 each one.” The last one began with the Juan Velasco Alvarado’s Agrarian Reform in 1969.

 

The Reform allowed that, for the first time –since the Spanish invasion (1532)—, the Peruvian farmers had access to own lands. The big estates and estates were replaced by agrarian cooperatives, and the farmer women wouldn’t have to serve the estate owners, to gather cotton, to plaw the soil when the Sun fell directly on their head tops anymore.

 

Josefa was one of these fortuned ones, especially when a morning in 1973 she had the proposal to join the Cipca as a cooker. “And the stuff was there – I accepted but I didn’t know what to cook to the farmers.” The first recipe she cooked was beef sawted. Then, she left without more recipes. The next day, she cooked rice, beans, and stew. The next ones were a copy from a restaurant from the city because Josefa went to Piura just to eat some recipe at night for remaking it over, the next day.

 

Until one time she felt that was enough and she decided to mix up the ingredients she had on the plate. Tac, tac, tac. She cut the meat, turned on the stove, put the cases, spiced, and after a time, she offered the baked chicken. The farmers congratulated her.

 

Secret tales

Josefa is discrete. That’s ehwhy she almost never has said she knows the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, that she went up until its second level, that she also flew to Spain, to Granada, to Sierra Nevada, and that, adding, she was in almost all Europe. She almost never has said it. That she was to Miskiyaco, Peruvian Jungle, that she was to Santa María de Nieva, peru. That even she is bored to see her photo album.

 

That she become a midwife looking at her grandmother, and that she assisted her first birth at her 14 years old. That she helped a neighbor up to die, that she put a hot-red knife on the umbilical cord to cut it. That it was so before. That she specialized later in short conferences, then she assisted the whole community of San Juan, Piura. That amid 1983 el Niño rains –when there was death, scarce, hunger, cold, eberything—she assisted her second patient. That amid these rains that buried the power, she ate yoopiceen, a dessert made of carob. She almost never has said it.

 

That she felt lucky when, during one of her trips to Spain, the first son of a count carried her baggages, that she didn’t imagined it. “That after living barefoot, poor, the son of a count carrying my baggages – the life’s so,” she says. That out there, in the Spain that she only watched on TV, she led the table. That was an outstanding experience. That being into an airplane was an entire epiphany. That she’s discrete, and that this one, she almost never has said it.

 

And the light was made

It was one of these afternoons when she was piecing the meat and crushing the garlics to spice the rice when a Jesuit priest realized she didn’t know to read. “Ma’am, why haven’t you noticed us?,” the father questioned. And Josefa stood voiceless, denying with her head.

 

“Since tomorrow, you are going to study, you are going to have teachers. After you cook, you are going to take copy books, you are goin to study,” the father spoke again and Josefa feared this time. “My God,” she said herself, what am I goin to learn?” In the first classes day, Josefa didn’t understand anything, and everything went by so until she learned the vowels, the alphabet, to write mom, dad, her name. She didn’t understand anything. She graduated from the first year of elementary school, then the second, and she stopped in third year because –“you know”—she already has learned all.

 

“How the life is – I thought I was not going to learn. When someone didn’t know to read, the life was mute – we only lived to work, to be slaves,” she reaches to say and sobs. And a tear appears in the end of his eye full of a blur tissue. “This sentiment won’t happen. It’s a wound that is open. All what we have suffered. Oh! Knowing to read make you clear, to know speak, to understand.” One breath and another else.

 

“The scorpions bit us before and we woke up with the puffy arm. All that has left very marked. It’s a wound I want to heal. That’s why I cry, because I compare my life. This is another world,” she says and breathes again, like who have found compfort breathes.

 

The fat tit

The afternoon begins to fall in Piura. It’s six, and an almost pristine light layer has covered this part of the Peruvian Northern. The dark for Josefa means what is posible to overcome, and effectively, after the hard life, the domestic violence slammed her very strong. Her first husband left with two kids she grew. The same happened to the three next ones.

 

But today Josefa is happy because all –but the elder female—have studied something: Roberto, for example, studied welding, Jorge, turnery, Víctor, electricity, and Gloria, nursery. Josefa paid their studies by sweating her forehead, and helped by her parents who got older.

 

She paid them because she was a woman who got overnight to find what she never lacked – work. One day, when she went to have her check, an employee –benicio Morales—said her: “Cheppa Mena, you suck a fat tit because you are hard-working.” And that was true. When she joined Cipca to work, the first she made after having her first salary was buying sweaters, shoes, and everything what their kids never have gotten.

 

“That’s why is said that mother is mother, and yes, indeed, the children are our heart, our flesh, everything.”

 

Face-to-face

In Josefa’s living-room, pictures of her in different cities float and a more or less big picture. It’s what she appreciate the most. It’s one what is framed with walnut-colored Wood and a pressed glass protects it from the greatest enemy of the bourgh where she lives – the dust. It’s one what the Pope John Paul II holding her chin and another what she puts a saddlebag on his shoulders.

 

It’s a picture what she wears a pink blouse made of satin. In her hair –a handle of threads milimetrically hairdressed—has a red roses accessorie. Plumped braids by earrings locally known as dormilonas. The threads threaded in them. In fact, an elegant outfit she ordered to make exclusively for that day.

 

• “And where is that dress?”
• “I gifted it to a niece who was going to dance marinera.”
• “And do you have any other souvenir of the Pope’s visit?”
• “Yes. The Holy Father gifted me a nacre rosary beads, too pretty.”
• “And where is it?”
• “It was stolen to me.”

 

A not too dark night, 12 years ago, three folks entered Josefa’s house and left it like the previous one – empty. They stole furniture, the TV, the DVD, everything. But what she feels much of that abrupt lose is the nacre rosary beads tthat the Holy Father gifted her when she gave the gift that morning of February 4^th, 1985.

 

“he took out of his pocket and he gave it to me. . Just there was when he said me ‘Oh, the little farmer girl.’ I almost cried.” Seven days before, Josefa was in the Cipca’s kitchen cooking the stew and the rice when she was interrupted. “Cheppa, you are going to give the gift to the Pope!,” Father Vicente Santuc said, excited. And Josefa began to tremble immediately. Few days later, Josefa went up to the stage, she gave the gift to the Holy Father. He smiled at her, gave the nacre rosary beads that she today only has in memories, and she ended proud.

 

“You know, the people touched me like I were God.” She went down from the stage almost annoyed, and the only she held from that meeting with the Peter’s Sucessor was two photographs, those together form a picture she shows today in her living-room. She has looked straight at it today, and she doesn’t end to understand what she did and where she took courage from to do it.

 

She just reach to say, with the face broken by the impression: “His face was like porcelain, one beauty, eyes like crystals, they looked like two blue balls. She looked at him and she didn’t stop to look at him because “My God! He was something compared to nothing. Pretty.” Then, I ask her if that was the most important thing she had in lifetime. “Yes, it’s that – the Pope spoke to me, touched my face, it was wonderful,” she continues. Then she looks at the twilight that comes in through her window. Each time weaker, each time frailer.

 

We thank Luis Lozada and Marlene Fernández for their collaboration in the production of this story. © 2012 por la asociación Civil Factor tierra, a nombre de Luis Claudio Paucar Temoche. © 2012 Asociación Civil Factor Tierra. All Rights Reserved..