She was always old. At least so it seemed to me, since when I met her at the age of seven, she was 90 years old. Her name was Victoria Zumbado de Rodríguez, but everyone called her Mamita Toya, which roughly translated means “little mother Toya. Toya was a nickname for Victoria.” She lived her whole life in Heredia, a small city about fifteen miles north of San José, the capital of Costa Rica, in Central America. She was my great grandmother.
I was raised by my maternal grandparents. When I was seven, my grandparents and I left Michigan and moved to Costa Rica, my grandfather’s native country. We lived a couple of miles outside of Heredia in a house my folks built on a small coffee plantation.
Mamita Toya, my grandfather’s mother, lived a block and a half away from the elementary school that I attended, and her daughter, my great aunt, Natalia – Tala, as we called her – lived across the street from her. Every morning, my grandfather dropped me off at school, and after classes I walked the short distance to Mamita Toya’s house and waited either there or at Tala’s house for him to pick me up after his chores on the coffee plantation.
Mamita Toya’s house was a huge, old, rambling building made of adobe and laid out in typical colonial Spanish fashion – rooms winding around a large open patio in the center of the house and only a couple of windows and a door facing the outside world. The open, central patio permitted sunlight to filter throughout the house and gave tropical breezes access to all the rooms. The front door, which faced a straight, long corridor, was always open during the day. Immediately to the right of the corridor was a large sitting room with a rocking chair in one corner, strategically placed to offer a clear view of the front door and the sidewalk beyond it. Mamita Toya could be almost always found sitting in that rocking chair, either holding court for whatever visitors dropped by throughout the day, reading a newspaper, praying the rosary, or napping in between Hail Marys. The wall opposite the rocking chair was lined with four or five straight chairs at the ready for the many people who stopped by to chat with her every day.
My arrival at my great grandmother’s door was always acknowledged with a warm smile and her usual greeting of “Oh yes, Juancito’s little girl.” Juancito is the affectionate term for Juan, my grandfather’s name. She would then gesture for me to sit in one of the chairs and ask me the same series of questions every day:
– “Does Juancito know that you’re here?"
– “Yes, Mamita Toya, he knows that I’m here.”
– “Where is Juancito?”
– “Probably working on the plantation or running errands.”
– “How’s María?” (María was my grandmother).
– “Mami is fine” – “Is Juancito going to pick you up?”
– “Yes Mamita, probably in about an hour or so.”
– “That’s good, that’s good.”
After the question session our routine would vary. Sometimes I entertained myself by doing my homework. At other times we would talk, or rather, I would sit quietly and listen to her talk. Her monologues were astonishingly detailed reminiscences about events that happened in her youth and people long since dead. A few minutes into her story she would turn her head away from me, gazing at some distant place beyond the wall or the present time and continue her narration, no longer talking to me, but rather, back in her youth remembering people long since dead and events alive now only in her memory. After a while, she would stop talking and fall silent, still staring at that place and time long ago where her memories had transported her back to. She would remain this way for an indefinite span of time. I would sit as quietly and still as I could manage, allowing myself only to breathe and blink, afraid that any sound or motion would interrupt her trance. Then, eventually something would draw her back to the present and she would turn her head and look surprised to see me sitting there. She would then start the same litany of questions regarding my presence at her house and my grandfather’s whereabouts and plans to pick me up. It was usually at this point when she would pull her rosary out of her apron pocket and tell me it was time to pray. Since praying the rosary was not one of my favorite pastimes, I would make up some excuse about having something I needed to talk to Tala about and I would scoot across the street to my great aunt’s house. 
Tala, like her mother, would always receive my arrival at her door with a friendly and warm smile. In addition, she would always offer me some sort of homemade tasty morsel from her kitchen. She was a wonderful cook, probably because everything that she cooked was a labor of love. I can still remember the taste of her “cajeta,” a wonderful milk fudge that she made sure she always had on hand to offer me on my daily visits.
(Picture of Mamita Toya and her children -- my great uncles and great aunt. Pictured standing from left to right: Ismael, Juan, Manuel, Eduardo, Benedicto -- Sitting: Bernardo, Mamita Toya, Natalia)
Both women always treated me with warmth and kindness. I don’t remember ever being made to feel unwelcome or in the way. Both, mother and daughter always seemed genuinely happy to see me and made me feel like I belonged and could walk into their home at any time and remain there for as long as I wanted. I have no recollection of ever receiving a reprimand or a look that was other than one of warmth and acceptance from either of them. I was part of the family. Even though I was only a child, I was one of them. During those six years of elementary school I got to spend a lot of time with my great grandmother and to learn much about her. She told me that her family, though not rich, had been well to do. As a young woman she had attracted many suitors who wanted her hand in marriage. I suspected this was not an exaggeration on her part since, even in her 90’s her fine, classic, Spanish features were still apparent. If you looked beyond the fair, wrinkled skin you could still see the outline of a beautiful face: high cheek bones that slanted upwards and formed an invisible triangle with the thick, straight eyebrows that rested over her oval, brown, eyes, and a long, thin nose that protruded proudly over thin, delicate lips.
She told me how the first time she saw her husband was through a keyhole. He was one of the many young men who came to ask her father for her hand. “I didn’t love him” she told me. “I don’t know why my father chose him to be my husband. He was poor. I had other suitors who were rich and even better looking. But for whatever reason, my father liked him, so he gave me away in marriage to him.” Her husband’s name was Nicolás. From the only picture that I saw of him, he was a good looking man.
Picture of Nicolas, my great grandfather
She was wed to Nicolás and bore him twelve children. Three died at birth, and nine survived – two daughters and seven sons. One of the daughters, Evangelina, died of tuberculosis sometime in her twenties. The rest of her children, like her, were all long lived. Tala was 96 when she died, two of the brothers were in their late 90’s, my grandfather was one month short of his 101st birthday, another brother died at 104, and as of this writing I have a surviving great uncle who is in his late 90’s.
What Nicolás lacked in wealth he made up for with hard work. Nicolás died in his 50’s of a pneumonia he contracted after getting caught in a rain storm while working in one of the fincas (farms). But, at the time of his premature death, the family was well on its way to wealth. He had accumulated several coffee plantations and a number of fincas. I don’t know how large the family’s total land holdings were, but from everything I learned from Mamita Toya and from the rest of the family, they were considerable.
Widowed for almost half of her life, my great grandmother never remarried, or, to my knowledge, ever had another suitor after her husband’s death. She still lived in the same house where she had given birth to and raised her nine children. A whole wing of the house now laid empty except for a few pieces of abandoned furniture. Once in a while, I used to go and play in that section of the house. The empty wing consisted of a corridor that led to four or five large rooms. Even though I found the abandoned wing terribly spooky it, nevertheless, held a certain fascination for me. Almost holding my breath, afraid of disturbing whatever ghosts might be living there, I would tiptoe through the long hallway. The only things that lived in those rooms were shadows and silence. But it was the silence that seemed almost to be a living thing in those desolate rooms. The tiniest sound I made would reverberate throughout the deserted wing, making the echo sound like a reprimand for my daring to intrude into this quiet and unmoving world.
Mamita Toya and that old house are inseparable in my mind – each seemed so much a part of the other. Like the house, Mamita Toya was a remnant of the past. With few exceptions, she had no use for anything modern, including her clothes. She dressed as she had always dressed. It was almost like a uniform. She wore a floor-length, long, black skirt; a long sleeved, black or white, high necked blouse; and, over it all, a full apron with large pockets where a handkerchief and her rosary always lived. She also kept a ready supply of change in her pockets that she dispensed to her three or four regulars – beggars who had been stopping by her house every day for years.
Every day, Mamita Toya made the journey across the street to visit for a while with her daughter, Tala. She walked slowly with the aid of a cane with small, deliberate steps. Without bothering to see if any cars were coming, she would carefully manage her way off of the sidewalk curb and, step by step, undertake the pilgrimage to Tala’s doorstep across the street. I once told her that she should be more careful and watch out for cars when she crossed the street. Her reply was one that I have never forgotten: “I was here before the cars were even invented. It’s my street. Let them watch out for me.” And watch out for her they did. Every day, drivers waited patiently for however long it took her to make her way across that street and back.
One of the funniest memories I have of her is of a time when my grandmother, María, gave Mamita Toya a bottle of cologne as a birthday present. Mamita Toya opened the bottle, lifted it to her nose and smelled it. She then looked up at my grandmother and, giggling like a school girl, started to splash the entire contents of the bottle all over herself. After disposing of the cologne in this fashion she carefully screwed the lid on to the empty container, and then, with a satisfied look and a warm smile she announced: “thank you, that smells pretty, it’s very nice... very nice. Now, would you please put the pretty bottle on my dresser in my bedroom?” Without saying a word, my grandmother took the empty cologne bottle and obeyed Mamita Toya’s instructions.
When I was ten years old, my natural mother, Virginia, came to visit us in Costa Rica for the first time. Mamita Toya had never met Virginia, her granddaughter. My mother was excited at the prospect of finally getting to meet her grandmother. We entered the sitting room and my mother walked over to Mamita Toya who was sitting in her rocking chair. In her broken Spanish, my mother said: “hello Mamita, I’m Virginia... Juan’s daughter...your granddaughter.” Mamita Toya looked up at her. Without taking her eyes off of my mother, she lifted herself out of her rocking chair and stood facing her granddaughter for the first time. Mamita then grabbed my mother’s arms, and with her eyes now welled up with tears and visibly shaking, she cried: “my God, it’s like looking at myself when I was young.” The two women embraced for the first time. That embrace erased the gap of time spanning three generations.
Mamita Toya died in 1965. I was visiting family in the States when she died. We had returned for a number of months because my grandfather needed to have surgery. He preferred to have the operation performed in the States because he felt the medical facilities and treatment at that time were better in the States than in Costa Rica. He was convalescing when we received the news of Mamita’s death. She didn’t die of anything, that is, of anything in particular. She just died because she was old.
From what I was told, practically all of Heredia showed up to pay their respects at her funeral. I still wish that I, too, could have been there to say good-bye.
By Cynthia Nill
