My name is Margarita Torres. In the town of San Isidro, nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental in the state of Chihuahua, they knew me as “the mad widow”—the sixty-year-old woman who decided to build a two-meter-high stone wall around her ranch when everyone believed grief had driven her insane. But madness, like heavy mountain snow, is sometimes just a matter of perspective.
The day I began working on the wall marked exactly six months since we had buried Guillermo. It was a cold, clear October morning, the kind that steals your breath in these highlands. My hands—soft and careful for forty years—now moved clumsily around a wheelbarrow loaded with quarry stone. Each stone weighed as much as a memory. Each swing of the mallet was a heartbeat, trying to convince my heart that it was still alive.
The neighbors watched from a distance. Doña Dorotea, my lifelong neighbor, was the first to break the silence. She approached the property line in her flowered robe, wearing that look of false compassion I so deeply despised.
“Margarita, woman, for the love of God,” she said, clutching her head. “What madness is this? You’ll kill yourself carrying those stones. Don Guillermo, rest his soul, would never want to see you like this—turned into a construction laborer.”
I paused. Sweat ran down my forehead, mixing with the stone dust. My heart pounded—not just from the effort, but from the rage and sorrow that had crouched in my throat since the funeral.
“Doña Dorotea,” I answered hoarsely, “I know exactly what I’m doing. My husband left clear instructions.”
She snorted, unconvinced.
“Instructions? Marga, dear, listen to yourself. Guillermo is gone. These ideas… these obsessions with walls won’t bring him back. You have to accept reality.”
I clenched my fists until my knuckles turned white. It wasn’t the first time my sanity had been questioned. Half of San Isidro had already decided grief had driven me mad. But no one knew about the letters.
I found the first one a week after the burial, inside his old toolbox in the shed. Alongside it were meticulously detailed plans for the wall. Guillermo’s trembling handwriting—my beloved retired meteorologist—read:
“My beloved Marga, if you are reading this, it means I am no longer here to protect our home. Build the wall exactly according to the plans. It will seem like madness, I know, but trust me as you always have. Something big is coming.”
I kept working. The sun climbed and warmed the stone, but inside me there was a cold no fire could chase away.
That same afternoon, Beatriz arrived—Guillermo’s sister. Always a city woman: ash-blonde perfection, designer handbag, and the look of someone who found the countryside picturesque but inconvenient. At fifty-five, she had never hidden her belief that I, a village girl, wasn’t good enough for her “intellectual” brother.
“Margarita, we need to talk. This has gotten out of hand. You’re the talk of the entire region,” she said without greeting me.
We sat in the wicker chairs on the porch, facing the adobe-and-stone ranch Guillermo had restored with his own hands forty years earlier. The property sat high above the valley, surrounded by pines and oaks—far from the tourist center of town. It was our private paradise.
“Beatriz, you can’t keep up this obsession. Guillermo died. You need to accept it and move on. This wall thing is… grotesque.”
“I accept that he died, Beatriz. I accept it every morning when I wake up and the bed is empty. But that doesn’t mean I’ll ignore his last wish.”
“What wish, for God’s sake? You’re talking about a man who was very ill in his final months. The medication, the pain… maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly when he wrote those so-called letters.”
A hot spike of anger pierced my chest.
“Guillermo’s heart was weak, yes. But his mind was brilliant until his final breath. He was a meteorologist, Beatriz—one of the best. He was always obsessed with climate patterns.”
“Yes, I know. But in his last years he spent hours staring at old data and making calculations no one understood. That’s not science, Marga—that’s senility.”
“Respect your brother’s memory!” I snapped, standing up.
She sighed condescendingly.
“Marga, there’s no need to be rude. I’m trying to help. I’ve spoken with Roberto. He’s coming this weekend. We’ve been talking… maybe it’s best if you sell this ranch. It’s too big for you alone. You could move to an apartment in Mexico City near him—or to an assisted living facility here in town.”
“I will not sell this ranch!” I shouted. “This is my home. My life is here.”
When Beatriz left, I returned to the wall. It was already nearly a meter high. According to Guillermo’s plans, it had to exceed two meters and encircle the entire property. Months of work still lay ahead.
On Saturday, Roberto arrived. City clothes, shoes unsuited for dirt, and the serious expression of someone who came to “solve a problem.”
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, son. What a surprise.”
There was no hug. He stared at the wall rising before the ranch.
“Mom, what is this madness?”
“It isn’t madness, Roberto. It’s your father’s instructions.”
“Mom, please… Dad was sick. Very sick.”
“His heart was sick, Roberto. Not his mind.”
“And this?” he pointed at the wall. “You’re building a colonial fortress! You’re thin, filthy, your hands are covered in wounds!”
“I’m working.”
“For what? To protect yourself from what?”
“From the winter that’s coming.”
He looked at me as if I’d said I saw Martians.
“Winter? Mom, it’s October. The sun is shining. And even if it snowed—why a two-meter wall?”
“Your father discovered that this year completes a cycle.”
“What cycle? He’d been retired five years!”
“He never stopped studying.”
That night, Roberto saw a car parked on the dirt road—lights off, two men watching the ranch. When we turned on the porch light, they sped away.
“You were right,” he said. “Something strange is happening here—and it’s not just the weather.”
From then on, we worked together.
Two weeks later, the sky turned black.