Marisol Izar [District Eleven]

Marisol Izar -- eighty-six -- female -- District Eleven

Many things become easier with practice, and after more than eight decades, Marisol Izar—Marisol Cortes de Izar, had she been allowed to take a name in the style of her mother's—has had a long time to practice. Some things are harder now, it's true; she can still tell by feel alone when the corn is ready for harvest, but her bones won't weather long days in the heat anymore, and no matter how well she knows her well-worn paths around her part of District Eleven, every year she leans more heavily on her cane as she walks them. But others: the best sense of how to time a story so children will lean forward in anticipation, exactly how much ash to mix with boiled corn for masa, the tunes to songs she sung to herself as a child until they were etched in her lungs—those still come to her like breathing. There is joy both simple and profound, soothing and fierce, in doing these things the Capitol banned until they could pretend none of it ever existed at all. In teaching them to the next generation, then the next.

Loss is not one of those things. Oh, you learn the shape of it well enough, especially if you begin learning as young as Marisol, not even seven when her family was torn in half at the start of a new age. She is familiar with the space grief hollows in her heart. And she knows how to honor the dead; since she sat vigil in black and prayed the novena for her mother, as her mother herself taught her, she has done it for her sisters, her husband, her oldest child, now a full six of her great-grandchildren. She collects the stubs of candles from the vigils and hugs the parents, the remaining children, the friends who show up at the farm with food and condolences. But it does not get easier. If anything, it gets harder every time.

It is a bitter thing, for a parent to bury their child. For children to learn what death is by losing their brothers, sisters, cousins. Marisol would know.

"Para la suerte y la muerte, no hay escape," her mother said sometimes, a lament or a warning depending on the day. Marisol doesn't repeat it often, but she can't help but remember it sometimes when she thinks of all the children they've lost since Benat—wonders whether this is truly the random fall of slips of paper, or whether the Capitol's long memory has wrapped back around to the families of old rebels. It came back to her especially when Gabriel was taken, young Gabriel with his cards and dice who escaped six Reapings before that final gamble trapped him.

But Marisol's mother also used to say, as she passed on to Vasco just days ago, "al mal tiempo, buena cara." That's what she thinks of now as she prays aloud on the fourth evening, hands steady on her beads. Few among her family have ever believed as strongly as she does, but some sit with her anyway, whether to humor the possibility or simply for the sake of not sitting alone with their grief. No one interrupts as each repetition fills the room: ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Words to ease Gabriel's soul on his way, but also to remind those of them left alive that they are alone neither on earth nor in the heavens. Later they will eat together, perhaps with others who have no patience for prayer but still want to mourn in company.

There is, if not yet solace, something grounding in all this. For all they have suffered, it's a blessing for so much of their family to live together on this farm Marisol has called home for nearly as long as she remembers.

Put a good face up to bad weather. Stay strong in hard times. Gabriel lived up to that, his best foot forward the whole way as he looked after Gilly like a sister and fought when he had to but without being cruel.

"Amen," Marisol murmurs, and moves her fingers to the next bead.

---

Life, as it always somehow manages to do, moves forward. Marisol stays in mourning black through the long, scorching summer months; somewhere in the midst she turns eighty-six, a subdued affair. When the autumn breeze rolls in, grief still sits quiet and dense over the farm, but the harvest waits for no one. Ready or not, the Izars find their hands full once again.

Marisol is no exception. Certainly no one would blame her for wanting to rest, nowadays, but she has never let her hands idle in her lap while her loved ones work and she doesn't mean to start now. ("You have to keep busy at my age," she says when anyone tries to protest, "or you stop doing anything, and then what's the point?" Honestly. She's old, but her bones aren't in the ground yet.) In the mornings she works at home on whatever she can find to fill her time; in the afternoons, children—the ones who neither work in the fields themselves nor have somewhere else they'd rather be—gather there after school. She suspects some have been told they are charged with looking after her; she hears what's said about her around the District, as though the occasional slip of her memory is the first sign of total collapse. But the cane is for her aging legs, not her aging mind. She knows what she's doing as she finds a steady stream of things to talk to them about and fusses at the older ones to help her around the house.

Lately, most of the Izar children are old enough that she's moved well past the little stepping stone chores she finds for small hands, into teaching them in earnest: here are the plants that will kill you and those that will help you, here is the best knife for each task in the house, here is the story of how parts of your family came here from District Eight or from across the ocean. How much of it sticks depends. Over the decades she has seen children scattered all across the wide space between Salome, who might have taught the next four generations herself someday, and the McClaines, who shut themselves away in town as best they can. Some roll their eyes when she tells them to repeat themselves in Spanish but clamor for their favorite stories. Others wrinkle their noses at gallo pinto but light up from the heart when they dance.

It takes a mixture of coaxing and hassling, and God knows she hasn't always gotten the balance right, but she never stops. The Capitol banned these things for much the same reason they ripped families from their homes so long ago: they want people to think that the way things are is the way things have always been, so that they can grind souls into the dirt. They want breathing ghosts with no way to fathom a world not centered on the Capitol. That will not be her family's fate. However many children they lose to the Games, however troubled their lives at home can be, they will never lose their history or their souls.

(Well. No more of them, Dios oiga Iago y el Diablo se haga el sordo.)

Besides, music makes the time spent husking corn pass faster. And it's good to have old jokes to share at the end of a tiring day or a soup that tastes like home. Life has been hard, these last eight decades—full of blessings, but hard, and not only at the hands of Gamemakers. Early as Marisol learned that her own parents could not always protect her, it still breaks her heart sometimes thinking of all the things she can't protect her own children from: crop pests, illness, drought, even strife within their own family. She hopes that along with everything else, she can give them things to find joy in, too.

Like now, with YaniMarie upset in the early afternoon, after the adults have finished lunch and before the older children have made it home from school. Marisol isn't steady enough to spin anyone around like she used to when her sons cried, and she can't make the day shorter or fix the stubbornly lingering autumn heat. What she can do is sit down, hold her great-granddaughter's hands, and sing, softly at first so that she can only almost be heard.

"Caballito, caballito, caballito nicoyano," she sing-whispers, until Yani's crying turns into confused sniffling and her little feet start to swing along in time. Marisol raises her voice steadily and begins to sway their linked hands in an approximation of dancing. By the time she reaches "tu relincho es de alegría—" Yani is cheered enough to giggle through a long pause and let herself be spun around once as Marisol finishes, "y te pones a bailar!"

Marisol pulls her in for a brief hug and smiles into her hair. It's cruel that this girl will never meet her oldest sister, and that brave, resolute Raquel, who always did right by Emmanuel and Sofia, never had the chance to fall in love with one more younger sibling. It's still a joy to see her grow and learn, racing into the world faster every day in the way that only toddlers can. Those two truths can coexist. For this family, they always have.

---

The cool breeze turns bitter eventually, and in the longest, darkest nights at the end of the year, as in the longest, darkest parts of Marisol's life, the family comes together. It's not quite like the celebrations her mother described and the ones she remembers faintly from her childhood, with red flowers and bright trees and children setting out figurines. Many of those things are out of reach now, and the context full of holes; if anyone still stewards a church somewhere in District Eleven, Marisol doesn't know about it. Nevertheless, she breaks out her most colorful decorations and her old favorite recipes and fusses at anyone who stops by to help her with them. As the daylight wanes and passes, everyone chatting or singing around the fire warms their hands on drinks touched with cinnamon. She teases the children, who by and large are old enough to know perfectly well that she will be the supposedly mysterious bearer of trinkets, until they put their shoes by the window anyway. Whatever might arguably be missing, it feels right.

She ducks out earlier than she used to. Leave partying until their feet give out to the young ones, whose bones don't creak in the cold and whose bodies won't demand they wake before dawn whether they like it or not. As a young woman she might have been disappointed, but now it's comforting, not sad, to give out her hugs and make her way to bed with the sound of voices at her back.

Her knees creak too badly to settle down at her bedside, but she doesn't expect God to mind if she says her nightly prayers at the same table where she sits to take down her long grey hair. It makes no difference as to the depth of her gratitude, for a manageable harvest despite the sweltering summer and for everyone who made it to the end of the year, or the warmth of her hope for peace for the departed.

"Bihar arte," she adds to Gero at the end, as she did when they slept side by side and will until they're reunited.

Talking to him is one of those things that make people whisper, as though she's forgotten his death in her old age, but that's not it. Missing him has simply never made her forget that they are still connected. She loves him as much as she did seventy years ago, when they were young—not children, never really children after the boxcars and the hangings, but young, stealing time to splash their feet in the river and discuss their pasts and their fledgling future. It's softer now, but steadier as well, less a flame and more a fixed point on the compass of her heart. She knows Gero will hear her, because she knows he watches over their family.

She finds comfort in that, as well as in knowing that she'll see him again someday. The rest of them, too: her brothers, whether she or they get there first; Reeve, for all their differences, and poor Clara, still not so long gone; Fonsa and her boy, though hopefully not for a long, long time; her father and uncles, who she'll know at last as more than anecdotes and faint impressions. Perhaps, once she's told the children they did their family proud—and did they ever, from Benat holding on to his brightness to Levi trying to help his mother to Raquel standing her ground—she'll sit down with her elders and have them teach her the card games she remembers watching all those years ago.

She's in no rush to get there, though. They'll all still be waiting when she's called. For now, as long as she has life, she has a family to spend it with and a purpose to continue fulfilling. She the sharp chill of her eighty-seventh winter to breathe in, and know for the blessing and the triumph it is.

Please listen to "Caballito nicoyano," it's a delight.

I know the thing about talking quietly to crying kids has stuck with me since reading it in a book as a kid but I can't find which book and it's bugging me. Half a year later I finally remembered this out of the blue, as you do--shoutout to When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park.