(UFRGS 2023)
1. ........ our first year in New York, we rented a
2. small apartment with a Catholic school nearby,
3. taught by the Sisters of Charity, hefty women in
4. long black gowns and bonnets that made them
5. look peculiar, like dolls in mourning. I liked them
6. a lot, especially my grandmotherly fourth grade
7. teacher, Sister Zoe. I had a lovely name, she
8. said, and she had me teach the whole class how
9. to pronounce it. Yo-lan-da. As the only
10. immigrant in my class, I was put in a special
11. seat in the first row by the window, apart from
12. the other children so that Sister Zoe could tutor
13. me without disturbing them. Slowly, she
14. enunciated the new words I was to repeat:
15. laundromat, cornflakes, subway, snow.
16. Soon I picked up enough English to understand
17. holocaust was in the air. Sister Zoe explained to
18. a wide-eyed classroom what was happening in
19. Cuba. Russian missiles were being assembled,
20. trained supposedly on New York City. President
21. Kennedy, looking worried too, was on the
22. television at home, explaining we might have to
23. go to war against the Communists. At school,
24. we had air raid drills: an ominous bell would go
25. off and we'd file into the hall, fall to the floor,
26. cover our heads with our coats, and imagine our
27. hair falling out, the bonnets in our arms going
28. soft. At home, Mami and my sisters and I said a
29. rosary for world peace. I heard new vocabulary:
30. nuclear bomb,radioactive fallout, bomb shelter.
31. Sister Zoe explained how it would happen. She
32. drew a picture of a mushroom on the
33. blackboard and dotted a flurry of chalk marks
34. for the dusty fallout that would kill us all.
35. The months grew cold, November, December.
36. It was dark when I got up in the morning, frosty
37. when I followed my breath to school. One
38. morning as I sat at my desk daydreaming out
39. the window, I saw dots in the air like the ones
40. Sister Zoe had drawn random at first, then lots
41. and lots. I shrieked, "Bomb! Bomb!" Sister Zoe
42. jerked around, her full black skirt ballooning as
43. she hurried to my side. A few girls began to cry.
44.
45. But then Sister Zoe's shocked look faded. "Why,
46. Yolanda dear, that's snow!" She laughed.
47. "Snow."
48.
49. "Snow," I repeated. I looked out the window
50. warily. All my life I had heard about the white
51. crystals that fell out of American skies in the
52. winter. From my desk I watched the fine powder
53. dust the sidewalk and parked cars below. Each
54. flake was different, Sister Zoe had said, like a
55. person, irreplaceable and beautiful.
Adaptado de: ÁLVAREZ, J. Snow. In: Castillo-Speed, L. Latina – Women’s voices from the borderlands. New York: Touchstone, 1995.
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