M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

Bientens for Maria Garrat
by Larry Day

The professor's mention of two nickels triggered it.  In an instant Eudora Welty's words patched themselves through to a dormant circuit in my memory, and a twenty-two-year-old missionary took the call.  The class had been discussing Welty's book on writing. In the book, Welty describes how her mother saved two nickels that had covered her baby sister's eyes at the viewing before the little one's funeral.  I lost track of the discussion at that point-I wasn't in class any more.

Artigas.  That's the name of a town on Uruguay's northern border.  Jose Artigas was the country's liberator-a kind of Uruguayan George Washington.  Up on that border, a meandering river separates Uruguay and Brazil. On one side of the river is Artigas, and on the other side is a Brazilian town whose name I can't recall.

But I do recall the baby's name-Maria Garrat.  And I remember, by extrapolation, what year it was.  I spent nine months in Trienta y Tres, three months in Montevideo, six months in Tacuarembo-that would make it January, 1956.

It was summertime, and it was hot.  We missionaries went door to door asking for an opportunity to share a religious message and offer a prayer.  This was called tracting, and in Artigas in the summer we tracted early in the morning and late in the afternoon.  Midday was for falling asleep over the scriptures.  Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun.  Some people in Artigas thought we were mad because we rode bicycles while wearing suits and ties and hats.  But we weren't crazy enough to try to knock on doors in Artigas at siesta time.

One scorching day Sister Eva Escadun came to be branch at siesta time. She rapped with the ponderous knocker that hung on the ten-foot door of the large house that the church had rented near the center of town.  The reconfigured house gave the saints a place to meet, and provided living quarters for missionaries. Eva was a thin, shy teenager. She, her parents, and her brothers and sisters were members of our small congregation. I answered Eva's knock, and stepped out into the glaring sun and closed the door.  Mission rules didn't allow unaccompanied young women in the house.

Eva looked down at her feet, and began to speak. Her sentences were short and direct. Down in the barrio where she lived, a two-year-old baby was sick.  The family lived across the street from the Uscuduns.  How sick? I asked.   Praying for sick?  Worse, she said. The doctor in Artigas had given up on her saying it was just a matter of time. Maria's daddy took her across the river to the Brazilian side.  A doctor there who said he could help.  They say he saved the baby of a friend of Señor Garrat's cousin Angelo.

Eva's laconic, ungrammatical narrative stopped.  She looked at her shoes for maybe a minute.  It seemed longer.  The sun bore down on our heads. Then Eva raised her eyes, looked into my face, and gave me the reason for her heat-of-the-day visit.  Money.

The Brazilian doctor wanted 4X Brazilian cruceiros, which was 2X Uruguayan pesos, which, as I calculated the rate of exchange in my head, was X U.S. dollars.  Less than the price of a movie, milkshake and a hamburger with fries back home in Idaho.

How were they going to get across the river?  Angelo's friend had a rowboat.  They wouldn't have to take the ferry. 

 
Eva came back  for money every there or four days. She'd say they needed 2X pesos for one more trip.  The Brazilian doctor kept assuring them Maria needed one more treatment.
A couple of weeks passed.  Then,  Hector, Eva's eight-year-old brother, brought  news.  Again it was in the heat of the day.  He didn't have to knock.  For some reason, I was sitting on a chair in the dark hallway. The door was open.  I saw Hector walking slowly up the sidewalk.
He stopped and peered into the darkened hallway. Seeing me, he spoke three words:  "Murio Maria Garrat."

"When?"
"This morning.  The velorio is tonight.  At the Garrat's house."  Hector turned and walked back down the sidewalk.

That evening my companion and I approached the house.  It was a slatted board structure on a deeply rutted unpaved street in the poorest part of the barrio.  A disassembled double bed lay in the front yard.  A mattress lay doubled over some rickety bedsprings.  The house had a thatched roof and dirt floors.   There were two rooms.  From the back room came the sound of wailing. The baby's mother, sisters and neighbors sat side by side and knee to knee in the cramped space.  In their midst, Maria lay in a tiny wooden casket surrounded by candles.  Two bientens, the smallest coin in the Uruguayan monetary system, rested on her eyelids.

My companion entered quietly stood in the doorway of the back room.  We spoke our condolences, then bowed our heads, and I offered a short prayer.  I reached out and touched the Maria's mother's shoulder.  As we walked away from the house, the wailing resumed, and was mingled with the barking of neighborhood dogs.

I was thinking, "Your gringo money didn't save Maria Garrat.  Two weeks ago, when Eva first came to the door, you could have saved her.  You could have flown her and her mother to a hospital in Montevideo, instead of letting them take her to some quack across the river.  You could have given her a blessing, you could have…"

I was still second guessing myself back there in Artigas in 1956 when something broke the circuit.  My eyes came into focus. The professor was still talking about Eudora Welty.

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