The Woman No One Talks About

Before I left Chile, some friends were kind enough to ask me to tell them about the Lebanese woman: what are her hopes and her aspirations, and what important works she performs.

As a woman, I ought to begin by speaking of the elegant woman dressed in the long gowns of today's fashion, explaining to them how excellent she is, how beautiful and chic — the woman I saw in the salons and the public places in her modern dress and her superb elegance.

And I ought also to mention the woman of brilliant opinions, whose name recurs in the newspapers and magazines, displaying her learned capacity and her mature ideas.

But many have spoken of this woman and of that one; therefore I want to raise my voice so that it may pierce the seas and the mountains and be a faithful messenger, carrying the message of love and tenderness dictated to me by the heart of the woman of whom no one speaks, whose life represents the bitterest kinds of misery and wretchedness.

I want to tell you of the forsaken mother — she whom I have seen here living like one lost amid the clamor of the fading cities, or with the stillness of the villages buried in life among the green pines on the mountain heights.

This is the unknown mother, daughter of our country, my friend — she who might be your mother, or mine.

The land to which you took refuge treated you with kindness and filled your hands and your pockets with ringing gold, and in her tender bosom you founded your home and your life; but you did not return, and you preferred to forget your sacred duty toward the cause of your existence, and you never thought to write her a word that would restore to her life and the longed-for hope of meeting you again.

You may find me severe in speaking to you, but I cannot avoid it, for I look with the eyes of your mother, folded in upon herself under the weight of suffering.

Always and forever I saw in the eyes of these mothers what tells of the bitterest scenes of orphanhood and misery; their trembling hands ask for things hard to obtain. One of them said to me once: "Come near to me, my daughter — you have come from America? Then let me kiss your eyes, these happy eyes that have seen my son." And another, her reddened eyelids full of questions that have no answer, asked me: "What does this America contain, that it keeps us far from our children? Can the land be unwholesome, so that it hardens their hearts?"

Had America known — and do not forget that she too is a mother — that on the day she gathered you into her arms she would be tearing you from another's breast, she would not have opened to you her wide doors of hospitality. But now, while you are still alive and provided for, does not longing, full of tenderness and desire, stir you toward the land that caressed you when you were born?

Your mother may be the one to whom I told that you are wealthy and that your hand is open to help the poor. Help her, then — she who lives on public kindness and charity — and add her to the list of your righteous deeds.

Or your mother may be the one who showed me an old, tattered letter, hidden away among the folds of her breast, which you wrote to her long ago. Be assured, then, that she is content that we remember her with two words of comfort and consolation. And if your mother is the one who showed me your smile in your beautiful photograph — yellowed with the length of its years — then send her your picture as a man, that she may feel you have not forgotten her, and so win her blessing and her prayers.

Today you have a house, a fortune, a family, and every means of comfort — while she has nothing but your promise, which her motherly faith has kept for her as a hope pure and true.

Return to her, then, if only with a word of promise, or two gentle lines, or with a bit of help, or a gift; and let her cradle in her empty arms your memory and your softness, as yesterday she cradled the beauty of your tender infancy.