Secrets of the Casa Rosada

by Alex Temblador

  Abuela was one of the last few honest curanderas in Laredo. It was fake curanderas and Señora Gallos’ fear that were making things difficult for Abuela and annoying as hell for me.

  After I stepped into her living room, I gave Señora Gallos the bag with the remaining herbs to make the birth control tea.

  “Muchas gracias, these save my life.” She held on tightly to the bag and closed her eyes for a moment. She looked relieved. “Men. Stay away from them . . . they just want to give you children and then no money to feed them, verdad?”

  I nodded and said, “Verdad,” as if I really knew what she meant.

  “I have a bag of plantains for your abuela, fresh from Mexico. I’ll go get them.”

  I told her thank you, but Abuela would decline if she were here.

  “Nonsense!” she said. “I insist!”

  When patients offered to give Abuela something in payment, Abuela always refused and had told me to do the same. However, it was rude to not accept the gift if the patient insisted—a cultural thing I had only learned when I continually said “no” to a customer one day and was berated by Abuela after the patient left the house. She told me Mexicans are proud, and we must not hurt their pride by refusing their gifts.

  Couldn’t they just be like normal people? Then maybe we wouldn’t have to go through the traditional “No, thank you—I insist” two step. However, I couldn’t complain too much. I think it was how we got most of our groceries.

  As I stood waiting, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned, almost called out, because I wasn’t expecting someone to approach me from behind. I caught myself when I saw the girl’s expression in front of me. It was Señora Gallos’ oldest daughter, Leta. She was a freshman at my school, but I had never spoken to her.

  “I have to ask you something before my mother returns,” she whispered, her eyes darting to the doorway where her mother had disappeared. “I moved the plantains, so it’ll take her a few minutes to find them. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Yeah, what is it?”

  Leta looked on the verge of crying.

  “Are you okay?”

  Her hands nervously jumped around her. Pushing her hair back. Grabbing her arm. Cracking her knuckles. “You’re not a bruja, are you? Everyone whispers. Do you know anything, really? I don’t know if I should talk to you.”

  “No, I’m learning to be a curandera. Not a bruja. Totally different. Do you need something or not?” I could have been nicer, but I was only sixteen, and little things like this annoyed me.

  Leta nodded but didn’t appear to want to say. “If I tell, you have to keep it a secret, yes? Not tell anyone? That is your job? Not even to your abuela, right?”

  It was the first time someone had asked me to keep a secret as a curandera. “Yes,” I said, fearing Señora Gallos would return before I was given this chance to keep my own curandera-patient secret. I momentarily forgot my loss of faith in curanderismo and was once again excited.

  “Okay, I haven’t, you know,” Leta paused, cringing, then said, “had my period in two months, and sometimes I get dizzy and I’m always hungry. And the last few days, I’ve been throwing up every morning. Am I . . . ,” she leaned forward and whispered, “pregnant?”

  I first thought, yeah, of course, if those are your symptoms, then you’re probably pregnant, but I would need to check to make sure. I was about to give her my answer, when something else occurred to me. Journal: . . . thought she was going to throw up or faint . . . moody all day . . . Rosa and Jorge arguing. I hope Mamá finds out?

  No . . . it couldn’t . . . but it made sense . . . I mean . . . holy shit! It was there in the diary. . . . It had been in the words of the diary. Holy hell . . .

  “Martha? Hurry, am I or am I not?”

  I swallowed, feeling a small amount of spit coat my throat as it made its way down. “I . . . uh . . . yeah, I think so. But I would have to check to make sure.” I couldn’t breathe. This wasn’t happening. My thoughts shifted back and forth from the present reality to a disturbing realization.

  Leta was on the verge of crying. “I’ll let you know.” She ran off through a different doorway, taking fast, deep gulps of air. As soon as she disappeared, her mother walked into the room.

  “I found them! I thought I had put them in the pantry, but they were under the table. I . . . ” She stopped when she saw the strange look on my face. “Martha? ¿Todo bien?”

  I wanted to shake my head no. No, everything was not okay. But I didn’t do that. I nodded and then said, “Yes, I’m fine. Thank you, but I need to go.”

  I turned and walked out the front door and didn’t stop, even when Señora Gallos yelled, “Wait, the plantains! You forgot them!”

  I didn’t care about the plantains. I walked and walked, not sure where I was going to.

  Diez

  I WALKED PAST DOÑA CRISTELIA’S HOUSE. I didn’t know if Abuela was in there or not, but I couldn’t look at her yet. I couldn’t look at anyone. My tennis shoes slapped hard against the concrete as I walked by colored house after tacky-colored house after tackier-colored house. The noise of my shoes was the only thing I could focus on, had to focus on. I kept walking faster and faster, until finally I started to jog and then run at a full sprint. I kept running and running until I finally saw the pink house. I ran up the stairs onto the porch and stopped. My breath was coming hard as I stood panting for air, my shirt sticking to my back and chest.

  I turned around and hit the house with the side of my fist. When I pulled my hand back a few pieces of pink paint flakes had come off. I wiped my hand on my shorts and sat down on the porch with my knees bent and my forearms crossed over the tops of them.

  My fists were clenched and shaking. I was shaking.

  My mother had been pregnant. That was it. That was the secret all along. It made perfect sense. She had been hiding her pregnancy from Abuela.

  Even worse, though, was that she hadn’t been pregnant with me. The journal hadn’t had dates or anything, but it had been clear that this was my mother’s senior year. Unless my mother had been pregnant for almost two years, then it couldn’t have been me. I wouldn’t have been born until about a year and a half later, maybe two years later.

  Did she have the baby? Did Abuela find out, or did my mother get rid of the baby with an herbal remedy or her own hands? If she had the baby, where was it? Somehow I had a feeling that Abuela had found out about it. That had to be why my mother left. And Jorge had to be the father. He had known! That’s why he had refused to speak to me. That had to be it. And he didn’t even tell me. Or did my mother keep the baby a secret from him and he was just mad at her for leaving him?

  Oh, God. I had a freaking brother or sister. How the hell was this kept from me?

  I put my head into my hands.

  “Martha!”

  I looked up. Abuela was wobbling toward the house and she didn’t look too happy.

  “Why didn’t you meet me at Doña Cristelia’s? What happened? Are you okay?”

  I pushed myself up so that I was standing when Abuela reached the porch. I opened my mouth to respond but closed it when I couldn’t think of something to say.

  My hands were still shaking.

  She finally made it to the top step and looked me over. “What’s wrong with you? ¿Qué pasó? What happened?”

  Her eyes searched my face for an answer. What had she done when she had found out?

  “I . . . I just didn’t feel good,” I finally responded.

  She squinted and I knew she was looking me over with her don, but she wouldn’t find anything. Had she done the same thing to my mother? Looked her over one day with her don and realized? How long had it taken until Abuela could see the truth?

  “Get inside.” She walked inside the house, holding the door open for me. All of a sudden, I did feel sick. Sick at the thought of what I had discovered. Sick at the thought of what I would find, because I couldn’t just stop now. I had to know what happened to the baby and to my mother.r />
  After entering the house, I walked straight to my room and lay down on my bed. I heard her in her workroom, rummaging through things. Minutes later, she was in the kitchen throwing things around. A little later, when I felt like my whole body was breaking apart and I couldn’t breathe, she trudged into my room and forced me to drink something green that smelt like dirt and eggs.

  I made a face after the first sip, but before I could push the drink away, she put her hand on the bottom of the cup and tilted it upward so that I was forced to drink the foul-smelling liquid. It tasted worse than dirt and eggs. When I had finished, I started coughing as I handed the cup back to her. If anything, I felt worse. I wanted to puke, and didn’t know if it was because of the drink or because of the secret.

  She took the cup and looked at me. I ignored her and fell back down onto the bed, turned onto my side, pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them.

  “What, no complaints?”

  I shrugged.

  She didn’t say another word, just left me to myself.

  Abuela tortured me for the next few days. She thought she could pull me out of whatever crevice of depression I had fallen into. At first, I was only allowed to eat chicken broth and crackers. I wasn’t really hungry, so I didn’t care. The following days, she made the dishes I disliked the most: mole, menudo and a lot of meals with nopales. She knew I hated the slimy texture of the cactus. That was what she was counting on: for me to complain. But I didn’t. I didn’t have the energy, didn’t care. Why should I? School was a blur too. I didn’t speak up much in class those days.

  She also made me drink that nasty concoction twice a day, morning and night. And I was only allowed to take cold showers, no hot water. She even made me watch novelas with Gloria when Saturday came around while she went out to do the rounds.

  Even Gloria noticed I wasn’t my natural self. “Hey, girl! What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “¿Nada? You with your trompas frowning all the time and walking around as if everyone should ask you what the matter is. Mira, when I was your age . . . ” She kept talking but I stopped listening.

  After a week, when all that didn’t work, Abuela did una limpia, a cleansing, on me, because she thought I had susto, a disease caused by the loss of soul. For three days in a row, she changed and washed my sheets, replaced them with fresh ones and then placed a cross made of cenizo herbs—a purple-colored sage—under my pillow. Before I went to sleep, she made me lie on my stomach while she swept sage over me from head to toe as she recited the Lord’s Prayer, and then proceeded to put Holy water on my joints. I had to turn over so she could repeat the process on the front of my body. And to top it all off, I had to drink anise tea with some honey at the end of each sweeping.

  I think Abuela was frustrated after the limpia was done because nothing happened. I hadn’t lost my soul, it was still there inside of me, dormant perhaps but then again I wasn’t interested in reviving it yet. You have to want to be cured to be cured. And I just wasn’t ready yet. The things we do as curanderas don’t work if the person doesn’t believe, and I didn’t believe it could work for me. And perhaps, Abuela was blinded herself . . . just like doctors can’t treat their own kids. Well, Abuela shouldn’t have tried to cure me.

  I wasn’t sure why I was so upset. Perhaps it was because it was yet another thing I hadn’t known about my mother. A big thing I hadn’t known about her. An older brother or sister? Maybe I was a little jealous. My mother had given birth to someone else besides me. I wasn’t the only one in her life or I hadn’t always been. And that bothered me.

  I had been in my depressive state for almost three winter weeks. Not much of a winter, though: it was still ninety degrees outside. I managed to stay in my slump until Christmas, when Abuela dragged me to midnight Mass in the ugly, green velvet dress that I’d been fitted for those weeks before. I still hadn’t said a word to anyone about the secret. Part of me wanted to confront Abuela, and another part wanted to confront Juanita. If I could, I would have confronted my mother. But in the end, I kept it all to myself. It was my secret, the only one I had and if everyone was going to have their secrets, I was going to have mine too, damn it.

  Church was a mix of poofy green, red, gold and silver dresses and black, blue, white and brown suits to match. It was always packed, but tonight, the rest of the city who didn’t attend Mass regularly was there to get their yearly blessing. And yet, our seats were still waiting for us.

  Mass lasted three hours instead of one. There were four baptisms, five catechisms, but Communion took the longest. Hundreds and hundreds of people to be given bread and wine by only three priests, while the rest of us knelt on wooden benches waiting for the lines to end. My knees were numb when we finally stood up. I guess kneeling for almost an hour was supposed to remind us of how Jesus had suffered.

  I was now able to get Communion. A month or so before, Abuela took me up to the church on a Saturday. I got baptized in the pool of water to the left of the altar. Then I received my First Holy Communion. I discovered much later that most people have to go through catechism classes, but for some reason, I had skipped them.

  Since we sat so close to the altar, we were some of the first in line. I didn’t like everyone watching me. And I didn’t know how I felt about the priest placing a wafer on my tongue. Germs anyone? Still, it was kind of cool being included in this ceremony. Sort of like I was included in Laredo. Like I was Catholic enough . . . even though I didn’t really feel like it. I didn’t see myself consuming the actual body of Christ. Even though I had experienced some weird things in my curanderismo training, that just seemed a step too far. But what was too far in my world? Mostly, my ability to take Communion showed me that at least the Church saw me, recognized what I did with Abuela and how I helped the community.

  As we kneeled, waiting for Communion to be over, I watched people walk by us on their way back to their seats. I was supposed to be praying, but I could only pray for so long. As I watched the hundreds of people pass, a woman walked by, her head slightly bent. I might not have noticed her but something about her seemed familiar. It wasn’t the way in which she refused to look our way, barely peeking out from the sides of her eyes, then trying to look anywhere but at us. There had been many people who walked by that night that had done exactly the same thing. It seemed half the congregation respected Abuela and the other half feared her. Was this woman scared of the curanderas? It didn’t seem to be so.

  She wasn’t a patient. Maybe I had seen her at the market? I couldn’t tell because she refused to look at us straight on. Her profile wasn’t enough to place her face. As she walked by the pew she tripped on the carpet, stumbling for a second, but still didn’t look my way and continued walking. I finally lost sight of her among the other bodies there for Christ’s day of birth. I soon forgot about her as I continued studying the rest of the congregation.

  By the time Mass finished, my eyes hurt from the glare of the hundreds of burning candles and gold decorations. I was nauseated from smelling the poinsettias, the body odor from a packed hall and from a lack of eating in the last six hours, with the exception of the Communion wafer and a sip of wine. Once we left, Gloria dropped us off at Juanita’s. I didn’t know where Gloria had gone, but she’d said she had plans and told Abuela to stay out of her business when Abuela asked.

  Abuela didn’t have Christmas decorations at her house. She said she had them up year round. Statues of Mary, Jesus, Joseph, the manger scene, the three wise men. Very Christmas of her. However, Juanita had the full Christmas set up: fake Christmas tree with lights and ornaments, ribbons hanging on green garland around the doorways, red, white and green candles lit around the house, a plate of cookies, presents beneath the tree and stockings hanging around the door frame because there wasn’t a mantle or a fireplace to hang them from.

  Juanita had a stocking not only for Abuela but one for me, too. The stocking was green with my name stitched in red. My fingers lingere
d over the letters of my name.

  “I know it’s plain, but it’s something, right?” Tía Juanita said as she came up beside me and put her arm around my shoulder.

  I nodded, trying to swallow the tears in my throat. “My first.”

  Her arm stiffened at my response. Then she gave my shoulder a little squeeze.

  “Thanks,” I said as her arm dropped from my shoulder and she walked off. I kept my eyes from hers, not wanting to see her pity. Juanita invited me to stay the night on Christmas Eve. Abuela refused the invitation, saying that her own bed, compared to the one in Juanita’s guest room, was better for her back.

  I fell asleep on the couch, and in the morning Santa had come. Or that’s what my little cousins believed, and I played along. One year, when I was eight, I had woken up in the morning and had run to the living room. We had taped a picture of a Christmas tree I had drawn at school on the wall. I was looking for that one present, because usually my mother could afford one small present from Goodwill or some other cheap place, but that year there was nothing except for my mother and some old guy crashed out on the couch. When they awoke, she went to a party with him and left me in the apartment all by myself. She didn’t return until a day later.

  Most of my Christmases weren’t like that, though. Usually, Christmas was boring, and we were stuck in a dingy apartment all day because it was too cold to go outside. Plus we had nowhere to go even if we wanted to leave. But this year, I received presents at Juanita’s, and more than one at that.

  Aunts and uncles had sent gifts. I got a few shirts, a purse and some make-up from Tía Judith. I probably wouldn’t wear it just to make her mad. Tía Judith was always trying to say how pretty I could be if I just had a bit of “rouge.” As if anyone had used that word since the fifties. Gloria got me some pencils and a sketchbook. I guess the Devil has a soul.