My name is Margarita Torres. In the town of San Isidro, nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental, in the state of Chihuahua, I was known as “the crazy widow,” the sixty-year-old woman who decided to build a two-meter-high stone wall around her ranch when everyone thought grief had turned her brains out. But madness, like the heavy snow at high altitudes, is sometimes just a matter of perspective
The day I started working on the wall, it had been exactly six months since we had buried Guillermo. It was a cold, clear October morning, the kind that takes your breath away in these highlands. My hands, which for forty years had been soft and cared for, now moved clumsily around the wheelbarrow loaded with quarry stones. Each stone I lifted weighed like a memory. Each blow of the sledgehammer was a heartbeat trying to convince my heart that it was still beating.
The neighbors watched me from afar. Doña Dorotea, my lifelong neighbor, was the first to break the silence. She approached the property line in her flowered dressing gown, wearing that expression of false compassion that I so detested.