Locative Magazine

Content Warnings (click to reveal)

Depicted: domestic violence, miscarriage

Discussed: child death

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Los Santos Saben Todo | The Saints Know All

Making it to the end of December, 1956 meant that Felipina would have been in bed for exactly nine months and fifteen days. For the length of a pregnancy, Felipina cloistered herself in the room her husband Andrés had long moved out of. She didn’t mind, of course, having always wished herself a nun or better yet, an abbess. Something with a title that requested the respect of others and demanded her celibacy. It was this period of yellowed skin and unrelenting abdominal pain which helped her realise how she had always desired freedom from her husband’s crotch. God himself was squeezing his fist inside Felipina’s body. While yes, this divine hand did indeed hurt, it was cathartic, like she was being released from the trappings of the flesh.

The room was covered in her heavenly desires. On the walls were: a triptych that unfolded into a hasty reproduction of the Holy Trinity (commissioned from the same carpenter who did the pews for La Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón; he made this Jesus look like the medieval homunculus sort, but that was acceptable), an icon of San Antonio de Padua (Felipina’s mother had always told her they had Italian progenitors), a rather large ‘statuette’ of La Virgen de Guadalupe (she had consecrated herself to the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary the night before she married Andrés), another wooden icon of San Martín de Porres (she loved that he was the patron saint of mestizos; it made her feel better about her own skin), a reproduction of Sotomayor’s engraving of the ‘Lily of Quito’ (if only Felipina had been given the chance to publicly sacrifice her life for a city!), wood-carved roses lacquered in scarlet for La Santísima Rosa de Lima (as a baby, this saint’s face had transformed into a Castilian rose), and several crucifixes (the sweet epitome of all suffering). All four walls covered in the faces and attributes of Los Santos and Jesus Christ himself. Praying to her saints all hours of the day, Felipina willed them to heal her jaundiced body.

A dresser and a bed were pushed into the corner, where a chamber pot could slide out from underneath the mattress. At the foot of Felipina’s bed was a collection of consecrated statues she had sculpted from the red clay she found by banks of the Río Uruguay. She had spent most of her time and effort carving the faces of La Virgencita, San Martín, and La Rosa. Now the clay was dry, but she had no chance and no energy left in her hands to paint them. There her statues stood, uncoloured save for the redness of the earth from where they came.

Earlier in the year, when she had been bedridden only a few days, Andrés assigned his sister Jimena to care for Felipina. While he was away policing the middle-of-nowhere hamlet of Paso de las Piedras de Arerungá (every alternating fortnight), Jimena accompanied her sister-in-law in morning prayer and evening ablutions, and adjusted the position of Felipina’s arms, legs, and head lest she develop bedsores. Although Jimena’s care was always gentle and sincere, she was never able to convince her cuñada to take a break from the rosary beads that wound around her neck. Pressure wounds had appeared in angry blotches from the beads digging into the skin, the dangling crucifix scabbing her chest.

With her fingers clasped around the crucifix, Felipina used her daylight hours to recite the Apostles’ Creed and the Hail Mary in triple succession. When pain kept her awake at night, she made the Sign of the Cross, ritualised the prayers of the rosary.

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The hamlet of Paso de Las Piedras de Arerungá was about 50 miles from Tacuarembó and more than double that distance from Salto proper. The ‘Stony Pass of Arerungá’ had a population the size of two extended families and a commissariat the size of a bedroom. On horseback, it took the policeman Andrés another two days’ travel (both ways) on top of the half month he spent manning the station. Fair to say, his work took up more than half his life. While Andrés was well aware of his occupational burden, he didn’t think to disclose these prolonged absences when he proposed to the young woman of 16 he had met at the community dance hall. Felipina, her name was.

When they’d first partnered up for a dance, he asked if she was named after the Philippine dynasty. Then he made a joke about how she was lucky to not have the Habsburg chin. She looked at him with one raised eyebrow but laughed anyways. Andrés was 31 years of age and busy, so the courting period had been short. The fact that Felipina was enrolled in the secondary school down near the river crossing had never been an issue for him. She was youthful and pretty, and seemed the type to stay at home, raise his seed, and never give the neighbouring men a second look. Perhaps it was because she was still a high school student that Andrés was able to ply her affections with caramel sweets.

Felipina loved sweets, loved spreading chunks of dulce de leche on bread more than she did butter. Although they had firmly nudged her to attend Friday night youth group meetings and Sunday Mass each week, Felipina’s parents allowed her this one vice, as long as she made them herself. From the age of eight, she spent hours stirring milk, sugar, and vanilla over the stovetop, watching the water evaporate from the mixture and waiting for the sugar to brown and thicken. Membrillo was another favourite of hers, a combination of fresh quince meat and an alarming amount of sugar. It was sugar that was the most expensive component, and so she started to sell her milk jam and quince paste in leftover pickle jars. This sweet-tooth cooking was a skill that reminded her of the family cow – a little expensive on initial investment, but well worth the returns when properly nurtured and milked. Felipina made a few pesos first from the neighbours, and when they came back for more, she sold her desserts on weekends at the Mercado 18 de Julio. Señora Graciela, the tía of Gloria from the third grade was a baker kind enough to set up a corner desk for her. With this money, she bought more bags of sugar and started all over again.

Felipina’s family trusted her with little other than food and maintaining the ofrenda to La Virgencita, which funnily enough, was an altar that required a constant upkeep of food offerings. It was also Felipina’s job to come home during the lunch break and prepare food for her brother. Alfonso, born eight years earlier at a time when their mother had more energy to care for a child, possessed double Felipina’s age and double her meanness.

One lunchtime at the age of eight, Felipina was stacking morcilla into a bread roll for him when she accidentally ruptured the sausage’s intestine casing. At the sight of his blood pudding scrambled across the plate, Alfonso stood up from the kitchen table, and in a rage, pulled down on Felipina’s ears until blood flushed across her whole face. She remembered that moment of pain distinctly, for the redness stayed around for another fortnight.

She hid herself away for those two weeks: genuflected before the Virgin’s ofrenda in her family home, then sitting in the confession booth at the Parish of Nuestra Señora Del Carmen where Padre Bizcocho insisted that she needed to graciously submit to her older brother. He prescribed Felipina ten Hail Marys, diagnosed the crimson flush as a sign that she had sinned against both Alfonso’s and God’s authority. And when that didn’t work, she went down to the banks of the Río Uruguay, hoping that the river’s frigid waters would wash the red away. But her face remained a dull crimson until her first period came – Felipina returned to her natural, morena complexion when the blood between her legs was done.

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When Felipina lay in bed for those last months of her short life, she often wondered if it was their mother’s three miscarriages that came between them or the disappointment of Felipina’s sex that made Alfonso hate her. By the end, he hadn’t come to say goodbye and the last she heard was that he had three kids of his own, albeit by two different mothers, in the neighbouring department of Tacuarembó.

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She was indebted to Alfonso for one thing however – that one period of violence-induced red in her youth brought her close to her saints. It was during her seclusion by the river shore when, hiding from her own ruddy face instead of going to class, she ran her finger through the red soil under which Uruguá snails made their home. When the tides had come up high enough, the soil turned to clay. On the third day of her isolation, she brought a milk pail down to collect the burnt-red clay.

Stashing a simple butter knife from the kitchen drawer, Felipina processed the clay between the outhouse and her bedroom. She washed it, filtered out pieces of gravel and river rocks, and dried the clumps by her windowsill. Repeated until the red clay was smooth and malleable enough to build her saints’ likeness by hand; she then carved their features and divine garments with that stolen knife. The first few had their habits skewed, their eyes etched a little too far from a much-too-upturned mouth.

But Felipina often went back to the riverbank, home of the pomella snail, and deepened her practice over the years. Exchanging the pesos from her dulce de leche for pots of acrylic paint (the art shop on Calle Uruguay shipped this new, synthetic product in from Montevideo), Felipina breathed in hues of blanco, celeste, rojo, dorado and exhaled life onto her icons. Santísimos. Holy holy holy.  

When, at the age of 16, Felipina was finally courted by a man with enough gravitas (his occupation as a sergeant on horseback made his marriage proposal seem more serious than a high school crush), her parents were only too happy to part with her. Del padre al esposo, they said. For a woman, the father to husband pipeline was the natural order of things. After Andrés had rolled Felipina onto her back for the first time, she felt the dunes of her body. They curved of course, came up and down like all things did, but they were all dry. The first three months of marriage left her desiccated, like she had scattered pieces of herself in every room of Andrés’ doorless house. She thirsted often during this time, and was only quenched by Padre Bizcocho’s weekly eucharist at Sunday morning mass.

After the 90-day honeymoon period had ended, Felipina felt further satiated when she clocked the prolonged reality of Andrés’ absence. It was during his half-monthly absences in Paso de Las Piedras that she discovered the grace of God. Truly alone for the first time in her life, she worshipped Our Father in Heaven with unmatched fervour. She picked up more clay, pottered more saints, and handed them out to passers-by. Felipina went to confess to Padre Bizcocho twice a week, but she only ever recounted two sins: first, that she kept her mother’s butterknife (the continued sin being that she refused to return it), and secondly (and perhaps more importantly), that she enjoyed her husband’s absence more than his presence. Becoming frustrated with the repeated mundanity of Felipina’s confessions, Padre Bizcocho doled out more and more Hail Marys in the hopes that ecstatic prayer could occupy her thoughts to the point that she would forget to confess. It didn’t work.

Despite casting her eyes to heaven each Sunday afternoon, either when she was hanging up laundry on the line outside, or when she was beating her husband’s uniforms into submission by the river, Felipina never imagined what it would be like to be God; to cast one’s eyes down on all humanity. Although obsessed with divinity, she knew with an incandescent certainty that she was the furthest person from it. The highest altitude at which she could see herself looking on some mass of humanity was the mass led by Padre Bizcocho. She imagined herself watching the ritual of his Sunday morning eucharist, watching from the eaves like a devilish bat. If she aimed herself off the rafters just right, she could fall headfirst into the pews. It would feel like a stone flicked off a cliff, and when she landed into the conglomerate of people, their rosary beads, and the dust of unleavened bread, she would then be a pebble on the riverbed, polished by lapping tides.

She often had thoughts like these, and before she turned 19, began seeing the Blessed Trinity in all things. Vanilla, sugar, milk. River, rock, clay. White, Gold, Blue, like the cloak of La Guadalupana Poderosa, whom she also saw as La Virgen de los Treinta y Tres.

Whenever Andrés was home from his commissariat work, she felt more tired than usual. When her husband was home, he tried to fill her with the promise of offspring, but the children never took. They had come close once, but her period flushed the coin-sized babe out of her womb and into the toilet water. With her husband at home with her, she turned her attentions to him, listening intently to his whims as she would have done at the feet of Jesus. In the garden outside, birds burrowed into the fruit hanging on the tree – once-yellow quince left rotting in rusted brown rings. With the passing months, Felipina grew in her faith, but so too did her exhaustion grow. Each time Andrés returned from Arerungá, her face turned inwards, her cheeks hollower than the last conjugal visit. Over the passing months, the whites of Felipina’s eyes and the brown of her skin sallowed into the colour of decomposing corn, as if a cardinal finch had nested in her liver.

Towards the end of a jaundiced Autumn, Andrés called his little sister to care for Felipina, and then never touched his wife again.

***

By mid-December of 1956, Felipina often wondered if her sister-in-law resented her for having to care for her while she could not move. If Jimena ever did carry any resentment, she didn’t show it; she brought empanadas and polenta porridge and barbecued meats when Felipina could stomach it. Stuck in the dull candlelight of Felipina’s bedroom, they said little in the mutual acknowledgement that one man married them to each other. It was Andrés’ constant absence that tied these two women together. Although they both restricted conversations to either the weather or the will of God, Jimena knew her cuñada well enough to convince an annoyed Padre Bizcocho to spare an ordained assistant who delivered the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ Jesus to Felipina once a week.

In these months, whenever Andrés came back from Arerungá, he sighed when he entered Felipina’s room and found her blinking up at him, still breathing, still muttering to La Virgencita, to Jesús Cristo, to San Martín. Sometimes on the day of his return, Andrés found his little sister sitting by his sickly wife’s bedside. Calling Jimena out to the corridor, he would ask her the same question: ¿Cómo anda?, as if he were not waiting for Felipina to die so that he could marry someone strong enough to carry his seed.

On the fifteenth day of the ninth month of waiting for his young bride with jaundiced skin to come to her end, Andrés returned from his isolated commissariat and found himself wanting. There was Felipina, still weak and bedridden, with polenta grains dried on her chin and a stench of vinegar and sickly sweat around her. Unblinking, Felipina clasped her rosary beads and prayed to los santos who stared at her from the walls and from the foot of her bed.

‘Husband’, Felipina said upon hearing the sound of Andrés’ boots on the laminate floor. He did not return her greeting and instead, turned away from her, and found the largest crate from the garden shed. Stepping back into the room, he began to tear down the likenesses of all Felipina’s saints. First he threw down the triptych, for it was the biggest and heaviest icon of them all, then La Virgen, then Saint Anthony, San Martín, the Lily, the Holy Rose, and every single crucifix. From the end of her bed, he gathered every statue Felipina had sculpted from clay and threw them atop the disgraced pile.

 

No protest came, for there were no saints to save her now. When Andrés was done killing the messengers and martyrs of God, he looked at Felipina once more and saw that she was still. In the crate outside, consecrated statues of once-red clay bloomed canary yellow.

 

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Deborah Prospero is an emerging writer living, working, and studying on Dharug Country. Currently pursuing a masters in literature and creative writing, she is an intersectional feminist of Uruguayan and Chinese-Australian heritage with a keen interest in writing about people and their placemaking stories. With work featured in Refinery29, MoreThanMelanin, and the Mamiwatta Collections Journal, Deborah weaves her lived experience into cultural commentary. Deborah won the 2025 ‘My Place in Cumberland’ Story Competition and was a recipient of the 2024 Varuna x Whitlam Institute Essay Residency.

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