Caramelo

by Sandra Cisneros

  When I hear the key scratching at the lock, my heart spirals. I swallow Ernesto with my arms and my legs and my mouth. I want to dissolve him inside me again. I want to be him and for him to be me. I want to empty myself and fill myself with him.

  —No, don’t. Don’t, don’t, don’t … Ernesto says, pulling me off him by the wrists. —Don’t, he keeps saying over and over.

  His mouth shaking. A little tree before rain.

  —What’s the matter? Hey, don’t, Ernesto, please. Don’t cry.

  But it’s hopeless to talk him out of it. His face crumples, and he hiccups into a long uncomfortable seizure. I don’t know what to do. It’s like he robs the tears from me. And now I have to fish a crumpled Kleenex from the bedside table and hand it to him.

  —Here, I say. —It’s not too dirty. He bugles away.

  Too late. No use getting words out of this one. I watch and wait and wonder.

  Then he tells me a story so unbelievable you’d think I made it up.

  —Lala, you and I, we can’t … Ernesto says between sniffles. —I can’t marry you.

  My mouth crimps like if he’d hit me with a stick. —What are you talking about? I try to sound tough, but it comes out thin and squeaky. I look at him carefully, like if I’d never seen him before, and in a way, I haven’t. He’s radiant, glowing, like if he’s emitting light. I try to sit close to him, on top of him even, but he’s the one pushing me away this time.

  —Now just let me talk, Ernesto says seriously, without looking me in the eye, almost as if he can’t look me in the eye. He moves to a chair opposite the corner of the bed, like a lawyer about to deliver bad news. —I went to mass across the street, and before mass they were hearing confession. And then the next thing I know I’m talking to this priest. About how we came to be here, me and you. And how my mother doesn’t know where I am right now. And he got me thinking.

  Ernesto pauses here like he’s having a hard time putting his thoughts into words. Then he just delivers his blow: —So we’re a sin, Lala. You and me. We can’t just run off and then expect to marry and make it all better. Sex is for procreation only. The Church says so. And we’re not married yet. And the fact is, I can’t marry you; you’re not even Catholic.

  —It’s your ma, right? Your ma’s behind all this. Your ma and that twisted religion that thinks everything’s evil.

  —Don’t make fun of my faith, Ernesto says, getting mad. —Anyway, Ernesto continues, pulling himself together and looking at his hands, —the padrecito made me realize … understand stuff.

  —Like what kind of stuff? I say, trying not to flinch, because by now I can feel my face getting hot.

  —Stuff I’d been feeling. Been mixed up about, only I didn’t want to scare you, Lala. And what he made me see is this. My mother is like la Virgen de Guadalupe, and I’m her only son, and now I’ve hurt her. I just understood everything. Then when I asked for forgiveness, it’s like I’ve become myself again. I decided to maybe think about religion first. Practice celibacy maybe.

  —Like become a priest?

  —Well, no, yes, maybe. I don’t know. But at least for now. I made a vow to quit putting unholy things inside me, like pot and shit.

  —Or putting yourself into unholy things, like me, right?

  Ernesto shakes his head. —You just don’t get it, Lala. You just don’t want to get it, is all.

  —Oh, I get it, all right. You just had to get God’s permission to get you off the hook. You’re scared. You’re too chickenshit to think for yourself and become a man. So you have to ask the Church to tell you what’s right and wrong. You can’t brave listening to your own heart. That would cost you too much. After all, we wouldn’t want to upset your mother.

  —That’s what I mean, Ernesto says angrily. —We don’t have the same spiritual values. How can we get married if we don’t even believe in the same things? Don’t you see? It’s just a disaster waiting to happen, Lala. Look, I still care about you …

  —Care! I thought it was love a few hours ago.

  —Okay, I still love you. Look, this room’s already paid for till the end of the week. We can, I can still stay here with you, if you want me to. Do you want to? As friends?

  —Friends? What’s that?

  He holds me in a strange awkward way, without our pelvis touching. I feel like laughing except I feel like crying. And I do cry, all day and all night, a hot oozing, like a wound that’s draining. Ernesto wakes up every now and then and hugs me and cries too. We sleep twisting and turning all night, like a bad mattress commercial, and that God that I saw when he touched me flies out of the room, and the little angel on top of the bed seems to smirk and is full of it.

  It’s only later, weeks, I’ll realize those tears, they’re the only honest thing he ever said to me.

  By the next morning, Ernesto is gone, leaving enough money for food for a few days and a bus ticket back to San Antonio, asking me to take care of myself, making me feel terrible about having begged him to “steal” me, because, after all, this was my great idea.

  I’m as evil as Eve. I feel sick and room 606 looks small and grimy, closing in on me. When I get up to pee, I realize my period has begun, and it’s as if my whole body has been holding its breath, and now it can finally release everything I’ve been holding inside. I gotta get out of here, I think.

  I get dressed, tie the Grandmother’s caramelo rebozo on my head like a gypsy, and start sucking the fringe. It has a familiar sweet taste to it, like carrots, like camote, that calms me. I wander downstairs and out into the downtown streets of the capital, walking this way and that, till I wind up in the direction of La Villa. I don’t stop until I find myself in front of the house on Destiny Street. But everything’s changed. They’ve painted it an ugly brown color like caca, which only makes me feel worse.

  The house on Destiny Street is ugly. A chubby woman walks hurriedly out the gate clutching a plastic shopping bag, but she doesn’t pay any attention to me. Those rooms we slept in, the patio where we played with la Candelaria, the street of our remembrances gone.

  I walk over to the basílica. The streets turned into trashy aisles of glow-in-the-dark Guadalupes, Juan Diego paperweights, Blessed Virgin pins, scapulars, bumper stickers, key chains, plastic pyramids. The old cathedral collapsing under its own weight, the air ruined, filthy, corncobs rotting in the curb, the neighborhood pocked, overpopulated, and boiling in its own stew of juices, corner men hissing psst, psst at me, flies resting on the custard gelatins rubbing their furry forelegs together like I-can’t-wait.

  The old church is closed. They’ve built an ugly new building with a moving escalator in front of Juan Diego’s tilma. Poor Virgen de Guadalupe. Hundreds of people ride the moving conveyor belt of humanity. The most wretched of the earth, and me among them, wearing my grandmother’s rebozo knotted on my head like a pirate, like someone from the cast of Hair.

  I didn’t expect this. I mean the faith. I mixed up the Pope with this, with all this, this light, this energy, this love. The religion part can go out the window. But I didn’t realize about the strength and power of la fe. What a goof I’ve been!

  A wisp of a woman sweeping herself feverishly with a candle. A mother still in her apron blessing herself and blessing her daughters. A ragged viejita who walked here on her knees. Grown men crying, machos with their lips mumbling prayers, people with so much need. Help me, help me!

  Everybody needs a lot. The whole world needs a lot. Everyone, the women frying lunch putting warm coins in your hand. The market sellers asking, —What else? The taxi drivers racing to make the light. The baby purring on a mother’s fat shoulder. Welders, firemen, grandmothers, bank tellers, shoeshine boys, and diplomats. Everybody, every single one needs a lot. The planet swings on its axis, a drunk trying to do a pirouette. Me, me, me! Every fist with an empty glass in the air. The earth throbbing like a field ready to burst into dandelion.

  I look up, and la Virgen looks down at me, and, honest to God, this sounds like a li
e, but it’s true. The universe a cloth, and all humanity interwoven. Each and every person connected to me, and me connected to them, like the strands of a rebozo. Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone. Each person who comes into my life affecting the pattern, and me affecting theirs.

  I walk back to the hotel. I walk past pilgrims who have walked here all the way from their villages, past dancers performing with rattles on their ankles and great plumed headdresses, past vendors hawking candles and night-light Lupes. I walk through the Alameda, green oasis, and sit down on an iron bench. A man carrying a pyramid of cotton candy floats by as ethereal as angels. A pushcart full of sweet corn rolls past and makes my stomach grumble. A girl and her young lover neck hungrily across from me. They remind me of me and Ernesto. Seeing them so happy only breaks my heart.

  And then what happened? I hear my mother asking me. And then I felt as if I’d swallowed a spoon, like something had lodged itself in my throat, and every time I swallowed, it hurt.

  Me duele, I say softly to myself, I hurt. But sometimes that’s the only way you know you’re alive. It’s just like Aunty Light-Skin said. I feel like I’m soaked in sadness. Anyone comes near me, or just brushes me with their eyes, I know I’ll just fall apart. Like a book left in the rain.

  I get back to room 606 at the Hotel Majestic just as the sun is slanting, sending deep shadows along the downtown buildings, making the buildings along the other side of the hotel, the Presidential Palace and calle de la Moneda, glow like the paintings you see of Venice. But I’m too tired to appreciate the light.

  I throw myself on the bed and fall asleep immediately. I sleep like I’ve been swept away by rain and river. And just before waking, I dream this dream. The night sky of Tepeyac when the dark is fresh. And in that violet ink, I see the stars tumble and nudge and somersault until they assemble themselves into the shape of a woman, into the shape of the Virgin. La Virgen de Guadalupe made up of stars! My heart floods with joy. When I wake up, the pillow is damp, and the sea is trickling out from my eyes.

  Always remember, Lala, the family comes first—la familia. Your friends aren’t going to be there when you’re in trouble. Your friends don’t think of you first. Only your family is going to love you when you’re in trouble, mija. Who are you going to call?… La familia, Lala. Remember.

  The twinkling lights strung outside the balcony are lit. In that carnival of darkness and light, I fumble for the phone and hear my voice ask for a long distance line, please, por cobrar.

  —Do you accept?

  —Yes, yes! I hear Father’s voice say desperately. —Lala! Lalita? Mija, where are you, mi vida?

  My mouth opens as wide as a fatal wound, and I hear myself howl, —Papá, I want to come home!

  81.

  My Disgrace

  In the lobby of the Hotel Majestic, I wait with my bags ready for Señor Juchi, Father’s compadre, the one I used to call Coochi when I was little. Every now and then, I peer out on Madero Street, expecting a car to stop at any moment for me. But when Señor Juchi finally appears, it’s from the direction of el Zócalo, and on foot, with a woman he introduces as his señora.

  Father sent them. Until Father can get here himself, I’m to stay with Señor Juchi and his wife at their apartment in Barranca del Muerto. It’s a short metro ride from el Zócalo with only one change of trains. I’ve never met la señora till now. I like her. I like her way of calling me mija and walking alongside me arm in arm, the way women do here when they walk together, with a lot of affection and protection radiating from them like the sun.

  Señor Juchi and his wife pretend not to stare at me on the subway ride to their place, but I can feel their eyes on me. Their faces filled with worry and something else, which I can only call heartsickness. A look of absolute pity mixed with shame. I ought to know. I feel it too, but not for myself. They act like I’ve been in the clutches of Jack the Ripper and not someone I love. And how can I tell them any different? People only believe what they want to believe sometimes, no matter what story you’re ready to tell them.

  Señor Juchi is all talk, just the way I remember him, with those green eyes of his staring holes into your soul. He acts like he’s a cop or something. That this, and that, and this. —When we call the authorities … ese muchacho can’t get away … and do you know where he might be hiding?

  Christ Almighty! Maybe he thinks it’s for my own good that he should tell me how evil Ernesto is. How he’s going to split him open with a Collins machete and beat him till he’s chicle, or whatever else they do with men who run off and don’t fulfill their obligations. It’s such a corny old plot, isn’t it? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  That’s a lie. Just as soon I get to their apartment and am installed in their guest room, I do know. I throw myself on the narrow twin bed and begin. Father’s friends must think I’m crying because of mi desgracia, but it’s not that at all. How can I explain, and even if I did, they don’t want to hear it.

  And it’s like Aunty’s dream about the handkerchiefs. I have a lot of tears to spend, lots and lots. I cry for hours, even in front of Señor Juchi and his wife, who are like strangers to me. I can’t help it. I can’t stop. Even when la señora knocks on the door and brings me a cup of chamomile tea, that Mexican antidote to everything. I slurp it up between sobs, lie down still hiccuping on the little twin bed in the room that was once her son’s and, now that he’s married, is la señora’s sewing room, a room all done up in white now, like if it was waiting for me. And I’m thinking how when I was little Señor Juchi promised me a room of my own, a girl’s room just like this one. Isn’t it funny? That’s what I’m thinking when they finally shut the door, and I’m lying there in the darkness on the narrow bed with the slippery chiffon bedspread, white as a wedding gown.

  I know they’re talking about me on the other side of the wall. I know they’re tsking-tsking, and thinking all kinds of things, wondering how I could do such a thing to a nice guy like my father, and how it’s things just like this that happen to girls over there on the other side, and how glad they are they have no daughters where you have to worry about someone filling up their head with so much nonsense that they don’t believe the ones who really love them but are willing to throw themselves in front of the first one who so much as tosses them a pretty word.

  Oh, I can’t explain. I can’t in a million years tell them. I can’t tell anyone. A huge sadness rises up in the chest, heaves like an Acapulco wave, and takes me with it. I put my hand on my belly bubbling and gurgling with my period. How can I tell Señor Juchi and his sweet wife that I don’t want to talk about ese muchacho, that it doesn’t do a bit of good to try to close the door and talk to me a solas, woman to woman, that I don’t need to see a doctor, thank you, that I’m bleeding down there, and it would only embarrass me to have them examine me, no, thank you, I’m all right, honest I am, please.

  Instead, I ask to be taken to La Villa, to the basílica. I ask, but la señora’s sworn to my father not to let me out of her sight, and she’s so kind, I can’t argue. Father and Memo are on their way here, they tell me. They’ve been driving all night and should arrive pretty soon, if I know Memo. I’m relieved it’s Memo and not Rafa who’s coming for me. Memo I can handle. It’s Father I worry about.

  I feel so alone-alone.

  In first grade I remember feeling like this; so miserable, all I ever drew was pictures of my family. Every day the same thing. I began at the left and ended at the right, like writing my name—family portraits on sheets of thick cream-colored paper the teacher called “manila,” which I heard as “vanilla,” maybe because they were the same color as ice cream.

  First I drew me. Then I drew Memo, a step taller. Next to Memo, I drew a larger Lolo. Then Toto. Tikis. Ito. Rafa. Mother. And at the tallest end I drew Father with a cigarette beneath a thin mustache like Pedro Infante.

  I could never draw myself without drawing the others. Lala, Memo, Lolo, Toto, Tikis, Ito, Rafa, Mama, Papá. Father’s name in
Spanish with the accent on the end. Papá. The End. Tan tán. Like the notes at the end of a Mexican song that tell you to applaud.

  I’d never been alone in my life before first grade. I’d never been in a room where I couldn’t see one of the brothers or my mother or father. Not even for a borrowed night. My family followed me like a kite tail, and I followed them. I’d never been without them until the day I begin school.

  I remember I cry all day. And the next day, and the next. On the walk to school I drop my cigar box of crayons on purpose, or walk so slowly we get there after the doors are already locked.

  Ito complains. —If I come late one more time teacher says you have to come to school, Ma.

  Father solves everything. —I’ll walk her to school. She’s your only sister, he says, scolding the boys, especially Ito. —Don’t you know it’s a pleasure to walk your sister to school? But this just makes them groan.

  —Don’t tell anyone but you’re my favorite, Father says, winking, though it’s no secret.

  On the walk to school, I show Father the Chinese laundry on the corner where my friend Sam works. —Father, did you ever go to China?

  I make Father look at a house that has gold stars painted on the inside of a blue porch roof. —Who put that there?

  I point out the mean dog and the meaner crossing guard lady. It’s wonderful talking and not talking with Father next to me. I almost forget to feel sad until we get to the school door, then I make him promise not to leave me yet. —I don’t like it here. Please don’t leave me here, please don’t leave me.

  Father takes me home.

  Mother’s furious. —Take her back!

  —But she doesn’t want to go.

  —I don’t care! She has to go! Take her back!