¡Live Soledad!

Live, Soledad!

Soledad was not only her name; it was her sentence, carved by fire into the cracks of her hands from the burns of the griddle where she made tortillas, and chiseled into the permanently sorrowful shape of her mouth. Her fifty-some years had found her adrift, stranded on the shore of a life that was supposed to be full. Age, more than advanced, felt like a heavy burden. It was not only the physical exhaustion of endless days, but a fatigue of the soul,that kind that eats away from within after years of battling against the tide of bad luck, or perhaps that first wrong decision.

Her worries were not ghosts, but creditors with names and faces a mountain of debts growing stubbornly like weeds. Illness had nested in her body, the result of sleepless nights and chronic stress: uncontrolled diabetes and joint pain from neuropathy that woke her in the middle of the night, begging for truce. Yet there was no time for illness; life demanded its daily toll.

Her existence had become unbearable in her parents’ house. The old folks, equally burdened and full of ailments, depended entirely on her not with gratitude, but with the authority of those who feel entitled. Her mother, Doña Elena, was strong-willed despite her frailty, and Don Alfredo, her father, quieter but just as relentless. Every small mistake of Soledad’s a plate too bland or too salty, a wrinkle in a sheet, a silence too long became the pulpit for the daily sermon.

“Is it so hard for you to add the salt on time, Soledad?” Doña Elena would scold sharply, her voice slicing through her daughter’s fog of fatigue. “With the life you lead, at least do well the little you do.”

Then came the stab the same one that had followed her since youth, the one her parents could never forgive. Like a blade, they reproached her for the shame she had brought them.

“If you had studied, life would sing you a different song! But you ran off with that good-for-nothing man, and now you’re here living off your brothers’ charity and under my roof!”

Soledad clenched her jaw, swallowing the surge of pain and injustice. It wasn’t true. She had come back, yes, for love but also from a crushing sense of duty. Her lover had vanished under pressure, or perhaps after realizing what life with her truly meant. Whatever the reason, she stayed. Now she was a servant to her own morals. The reproaches repeated with the monotony of a pendulum, marking the slow, agonizing rhythm of her days.

Day after day, between tears of bitterness that she quickly wiped away before returning to the stove, Soledad clung to the faint hope of a different tomorrow even though the certainty that nothing would change weighed more heavily.

She later married again a good man, kind and gentle, who liked to help others and had infinite patience with his in-laws. In her younger years, she worked hard to give her family the best. They had three children: the eldest was already married another “failure” in the eyes of others; the middle one had earned a nursing degree but struggled to find steady work, as was common in her country; and the youngest worked while studying, determined to become the architect of his own life.

Soledad’s only refuge was not a place but an activity: cooking. She had been born with a special gift in her hands for dough. Her bread, with its crisp crust and soft heart, was the one thing in her life that always turned out right though sometimes she lost ingredients to a failed batch or an unfixable mistake.

Each night, after putting her parents to bed, the kitchen became her workshop. The soft yellow light from the ceiling lamp fell on the flour scattered across the board. The sweet, yeasty scent of sourdough was her only perfume. She kneaded first with fury, venting all her frustration and resentment, then with an almost maternal tenderness, shaping the loaves. Her hands, calloused from caregiving and housework, became those of an artist.

Soledad’s bread was not just food; it was her art, her resistance, and her only source of income.

She sold bread to her neighbors, to the ladies coming from mass. There were good days when the aroma filled the street and everything sold out before noon. In those moments, Soledad felt a small breath of relief. The debts seemed smaller, the pain quieter. But the relief never lasted long.

Just when her little notebook’s balance looked less red, when she thought she saw light at the end of the tunnel, something would strike again, an expensive medicine for her father, a broken pipe, a cruel scolding that stole her appetite to sell and everything would collapse again.

In those moments of despair, Soledad only wanted to disappear. She silently cried out to be rescued from her trap. She felt locked in a prison with double bars and chains too heavy to break.

Her husband, Roberto, loved her that much was undeniable. But his love was clumsy, ineffective. The years had caught up with him too, and he could no longer work as before. His age and the country’s economic hardship kept him from being the strong provider the family needed. His efforts to help often brought more tension. He didn’t understand that what Soledad needed wasn’t money or quick fixes, it was emotional escape, recognition for her sacrifice. He saw her sadness as an illness that his simple love could not heal.

He always defended her when someone hurt her without reason, even their own children when they spoke harshly to her.

Her siblings loved her too. They carried in their hearts the memory of the big sister who had cared for them as children, who had worked so they could buy an ice cream or a sweet. They helped her buy food when they could, but they couldn’t rescue her from her debts.

It hadn’t always been this way. There had been a time of glory and prosperity, a period that passed so quickly it felt like a feverish dream. They once owned their own home, not a mansion, but a warm house with a small garden and the smell of stability. They had a new car, even a small transport business that filled their lives with purpose. Was it pride? Was it true happiness? No one, not even Soledad, could point to the exact moment when it all fell apart.

A crisis? A scam? An illness that drained their savings?

One day, they simply woke up to this new, cold reality. Prosperity had vanished, leaving only the echo of what once was. That ambiguity, the absence of a clear villain made the pain more insidious. It had been a silent collapse, no visible earthquake, only rubble.

In those endless nights, when silence was broken only by her father’s groan or the creak of the old house, Soledad stared at the ceiling, pleading to heaven not for a miracle, but for peace. “I need salvation,” she whispered, a desperate prayer.

The pain would wrench her from sleep not only the pain of her body, but the dull ache of her existence. She didn’t allow herself to cry aloud. She waited, tense and quiet, for dawn the promise of another identical day.

And as the gray morning light seeped through the window, Soledad gazed at the horizon, the last comfort of a woman who only waited for the moment of her death, for that final rest free of debts and reproaches. The oven waited with it, the weight and fragrance of a life that refused to let her go.

She was still waiting to be rescued.

By: Yanet Trujillo