The first version has a woman abandoned.

She’s by the water because the water is an ear that can listen to her losses. She looks down at her reflection in the still river and sees what will become a face in perpetual mourning; a forever stricken, panicked face whose tears will flow endlessly, whose girlhood and original name will be lost to history. The weeping woman, the one who cries. These are her names now.

#

I.

A reflection is a strange and powerful thing.

For Narcissus, his love of it lured him to take his own life. For La Llorona, the hate of her own reflection was the lure. She gathered her children, which were more pieces of her mirror, and threw them into a larger one, the clear blue river.

In this story, the father left with another woman. This is the version my abuela knows by heart. She who was cheated on throughout her marriage has recited this tragedy to me as often as Cinderella.

“La Llorona was afraid,” she told me.

Folklore cast her as murderous, but my abuela focused on the words afraid and desperate. A desperate woman is capable of many things, she said. She can be a miracle, or she can be a monster. When I grew up, I learned that one night my abuelo came home from one of his many love affairs and finally gave my abuela herpes.

She was young. Almost totally ignorant of venereal diseases, she went straight to the doctor in secret. She didn’t tell me the details about her shame and pus and blisters and I didn’t ask. But she did tell me how the doctors looked at her, how they spoke to her.

“Nadie me creyó,” she said. “They looked at me like I was just a dirty lady.”

When she came home, she cooked dinner, laid out the plates steaming hot for her children and her husband. If she wept, only La Llorona saw her. I can imagine it if I try. La Llorona, drenched in river water, holding my abuela’s face in her hands.

#

II.

The way my mother tells it is different.

For her, La Llorona is a spirit in denial. She is one woman or every woman who has lost her child. Wandering in the night, she appears as an echo or a yell. She has no body anymore, only her question: “Where is my child?”

She doesn’t and can never understand the whole truth.

“She’s like me,” my mother says, and I know it’s because I was removed from her custody before I turned one.

The story goes that my tío had wanted to visit and bring me some toys. When he reached my mother’s apartment, he found her front door half-open.

Lying on the floor was my mother.

She almost looked dead. She was sprawled in a corner with her eyes closed, and here is where his memory is inconsistent. Sometimes it sounds like she was drugged up; other times she’s drunk; other times she’s just lying down with wet hair covering her face and my tío doesn’t want to get close.

There were strangers there too, still unconscious on her bed. I wasn’t anywhere until he found me naked and crawling on the bathroom tiles. He lifted me and that was the last day I ever spent under my mother’s supervision.

#

It’s a strange and confusing thought to me still, how a parent can cease to be your parent but never cease to be your mother.

Without waking her, my tío carried me in his arms and took me away. I lived with my abuela and tío for the rest of my childhood, at first, only vaguely wondering who this woman was who called in the night and cried on the phone.

She knew my name and the way she said it sometimes frightened me, like she’d take me away one day, though she never did.

Now, I understand her a little more, but as a child I made a folklore out of my mother. And she wasn’t just “La Llorona” to me. She was the act of crying itself. She was all unanswered questions. The mystery and echo of womanhood I heard in the dark.

#

III.

The third version, I tell myself.

There is somewhere wandering an abandoned woman inside of me. Her hair is long and she loves the water. I sense her lonely eyes on me every time I’m near a river, then my shower. Then all I have to do is look at myself, the briefest nudity, and I can hear her. Any morning reflection is a reminder of the young man I’m still pretending to be.

When I’m sixteen, I slip out of my window, and head to the river at night.

Its walking distance so it doesn’t take me too long to reach the dark green water of my childhood. It’s just that it’s different now.

There’s a thick fog tonight, and it feels like the kind of dark you can fall into.

I stand there silently, waiting to hear something.

A whimper, a wailing. But nothing like that happens. Instead, a tall boy I used to like holds me from behind. I told him I’d be at the river around midnight and that was enough. He looked for me in the fog and now proudly pressed against my body in the dark.

I didn’t love it, but I invited him. And the fog and the night made his hands feel less real.

I closed my eyes, and at first, it was like he was still just a part of the dark. I let him kiss me and I just listened as if my whole body was an ear for her, my crying woman.

He pulled down my pants quickly, a bit too eagerly, and I imagined what she would think if she found us now? Would she think we were her sons, her lost dead boys?

Could even she possibly see past my boyish body and sense what I was really doing with it? That I didn’t want his aggressive touch and that I didn’t want to move this fast. But that I was young, and I wanted so much to feel womanly somehow.

I was still very limited in what I thought that meant for my body.

I let him continue until I didn’t, until I didn’t, and in great anger he left me by the water. I laid there like a child knowing he wouldn’t speak to me anymore. Yes. But I was alone now, half naked by the river, and I thought I could finally hear someone crying from far away.

There are legends that say that the farther her cries sound, the closer she is to us.

#

When I’m seventeen, I drop out of high school.

My abuela is in the other room weeping. She doesn’t know why I’m throwing opportunities away, and to a certain extent, neither do I.

I stay in my room so we can’t see each other but the sounds still echo in my ears. The sound of the one who raised me finally losing her composure. I’m sorry, I want to say, and much more. I want to slide my skin off and lay it on the kitchen table for us to pray for. Forgive it for its confusing manhood if it forgives me for not eating enough, for the various kinds of hurt I’ve introduced it to.

For a moment, I think I feel a wet hand on my shoulder. In the dark, she looks like my abuela, but I know it’s the mother of all losses. I reach out and let La Llorona hold me. She smells like the rain and her rhythmic wailing finally comforts and doesn’t scare me.

She calms down briefly, whispers in my ear.

At first, I think I don’t understand. I assume only a real woman can understand her. But the story she tells me is both specific and universal. It’s familiar like a song I’ve always known, this tale of betrayal and abandoned women. It is a sad, ugly story, and yet it makes me feel stronger when I hear it. It is a story of a woman back by the water again. But instead of looking for drowned children, she’s finally looking for herself.