by Alix Shulman
“Say dirty words,” he ordered, mounting me.
“I don’t know any,” I laughed.
“In inglés. Say them in inglés. I will say to you the names in español, and you will say to me the names in inglés. Then we will see.”
It was too ludicrous to be humiliating. I was a new, important person. We called each other dirty names until his erection dissolved in our laughter and we went to sleep.
Each morning after the company nightcap at three A.M. or so, Manolo and I would get into bed, taking with us wine, my Lucky Strikes, the Spanish marijuana he called “yerba,” and my dictionaries. Then we would start to talk. Manolo wanted to know everything about me and America. Mostly I told him about New York, for which he had a passion, but we talked also about Spain, Franco, the Church, evil, everyone in the troupe, Broadway, words, my husband, Manolo’s fiancée María, prices, prostitutes. He taught me Spanish songs and I taught him English ones. For the singing lessons sometimes Pepe and Pilar and Tonio would come into our room and sit on the sagging bed with us—all the rooms seemed to belong to everyone—and then the next night we’d march through the dusty village streets with a crowd of children behind us, chanting our songs. Pepe could never learn to pronounce the “j” in “Jingle Bells,” as I could never pronounce the “y” in oye.
“Sasha, oye,” he would say cornering me hopefully, while everyone got ready to laugh. “YYYYingle bells?”
“No, Pepe, oye. JJJJingle bells.”
Once Manolo and I retired to bed, there was no idea or subject we were willing to forsake for lack of vocabulary. Instead we wore out the dictionaries. Manolo would perch my reading glasses on his nose and attack the pages of the dictionary until it yielded up his meanings. He would curse loudly if his word wasn’t there, then try a substitute word instead. For both of us our English was getting better and better, while my Spanish remained nonexistent. “Wait for Madrid,” he’d say. “There you will see a dictionary!”
When we woke at dinnertime, Manolo went straight to the washstand in the corner of the room where earlier a black-frocked maid had placed a fresh pitcher of water; then picking up the heavy pitcher and pouring a hard stream over his black hair, he would let out a mocking scream. I would wake to wash more decorously, splashing water first into the basin and from there to my face. He laughed at my strange Martian ways, but sometimes he copied me, as sometimes I copied him. Neither of us had a corner on virtue, though the maid, glancing back at me sprawled naked in bed across Manolo in the middle of the afternoon, found only me, to our amusement, wicked.
Week after week of one- or two-night stands, long days in bed, going out for air only at night, hour after hour of teaching camp songs to Pepe and Pilar and the rest of the troupe, nights of finding where the gypsies sang on the stark edges of Castilian villages, making endless love, coming and coming—it was all very romantic in retrospect or in a letter. But at the time it was positively unhealthy. I was suspended over Spain like a puppet: no will, no baths, no drinking water, no clean underwear, no daylight. I began to neglect myself, then to languish. There was nothing for me to do but tag along. Help with the sets? No energy. Write a play? No discipline. Learn Spanish? No necessity. I taught Manolo English, but when it was time for him to teach me Spanish, we’d make love again. The troupe performed twice every night, at nine and again at midnight, and went to sleep at dawn. Knowing no Spanish, it was too boring for me to sit through the plays. But I couldn’t read, either, in the dark. The villages we played were seldom listed in the guidebooks. They almost never had churches worth looking at, and when they did, we’d leave before I could see them. The Spain I had crammed for was as distant as Frank. The post office was never open when we were awake. And what else was there for me to do in Spain but write letters and look at churches?
I was superfluous. Learning Spanish or helping out with the sets was hardly different from rearranging the furniture or adopting a new hair style. Or buying a dress, giving a dinner party, having a baby. Love was always supposed to be enough, but it could hardly even replace sightseeing.
If there had not always been that promise of Madrid, maybe I would have found it in me to leave. Several times I checked the train schedule and once I packed my bag. But there was always next week in Madrid. And Manolo.
We traveled around Castille for more than a month before Veronica finally announced we were going to Madrid, and a seance Pepe held that night confirmed it.
“Now,” proclaimed Manolo, projecting his voice to the sky, “I will show you Madrid! Now you will know España!”
It was going to be worth all that waiting. We would bathe, walk the broad avenues “as grand as those of Paris,” sit in the luxurious parks, eat the renowned seafood which trucks rushed to Madrid from the coast every morning to delight a populace of very particular taste. We would tour the churches, the palaces, the museums. “Now you will see,” said Manolo, lifting me in the air.
The first day in Madrid I had a bath and Manolo got his motorbike out of hock. After that he had no money left, not even for gasoline.
On the road the company had paid for his bed, board, and bus or train fare from town to town (I, of course, had always paid for my own), and he had needed money only for wine, cigarettes, and dope. But in Madrid, unless he stayed with his family, he needed money to live, and unfortunately his meager pay was such that to live with me for only a week he would have had to be three actors. It was fine for me to pay my way as Martians might, but not his way too. Yet he had had to spend his entire accumulated wage in a single night, just getting his moto and showing me his old hangouts. Now he had no choice but to accept money from me.
It ruined everything. By his standards of honor we were no longer on a par. Now he faced my dilemma.
We checked into a cheap hotel near the railroad station. It was understood that I would finance everything. Then we drove all over the city at top speed on the moto, Manolo calling back the sights to me. As we whizzed past the Prado, circled the Royal Palace, and bounced through the serenely beautiful Plaza Mayor, where, I remembered from the books, Ferdinand and Isabella had held their court, Manolo shouted back the names and drove on. It was useless; even Madrid was beyond my reach. I looked, but saw only an enticing city receding at the rate of fifty miles an hour. Though I didn’t complain, Manolo felt my disappointment; he even resented it. Without the troupe, we were but one more poor madrileño and one rich tourist, living off each other.
We began to hurt each other like ordinary earthly men and women. Manolo sulked and refused to bathe with me. I brooded, and planned to go sightseeing without him. With my cleanliness restored, I wanted more than ever to go to the Prado, to the Royal Palace, to Goya’s chapel, to a bullfight. Now that my urine was under control I wanted to go out clean early in the morning with guidebooks and an itinerary, and come back to bathe at dinnertime. But though we fought, I couldn’t leave. We were afraid that if we broke the spell even for a day we would discover feelings we didn’t want to acknowledge. Hoping to recapture what we had had on the road, we stayed in bed with our wine and dictionaries until hunger drove us out, and then we simply sat around in a café or tore through the streets of Madrid on the moto. In two months I had seen nothing of the land but the buff dusty hues visible from a bus window, and nothing of the towns and cities but the insides of cheap hotels. I hadn’t managed to visit a single museum. The longer I stayed, the more desperately I needed to leave. But our efforts pulled us deeper and deeper into our dilemmas, like quicksand, and we clung to each other.
One evening in a well-lit bar off the Puerto del Sol where the whole company reassembled to plan the next tour, suddenly everything was settled. After he had ordered our wine and I had paid, Manolo looked hard at me and said, “Sasha! You are growing mostachos! Oye, Pepe!” he called across the room. “Ven a ver los mostachos de Sasha!”
I showed no emotion at the time, but when we reached the hotel later that night, I packed my bag for good.
“Do not go, please
,” said Manolo sitting quietly on the bed watching me pack.
“I have to go.”
“Please stay.”
“I can’t.”
“Porqué?”
“You know why. My husband is waiting for me. And I want to go to Italy.” I thought: hypocrite.
“Stay. One day we will go together to Italy.”
“I can’t.”
“Stay until Thursday. We will see all the sights. I promise it. We will go to El Prado tomorrow at ten o’clock in the morning. Thursday we will go to Escorial. There are storks sitting on the chimneys. I swear it on my mother. I will take you there. On the Virgin. Thursday. You will see it. Please do not go.”
But it was no use. I had to leave.
On the train Manolo sat across from me in my dim compartment until the last moment. We held onto each other’s hands, already turning to memories.
“Write to me. I will come to you in Italy if you leave your husband,” he said. “Or maybe in the winter I will come to you in New York.”
“Okay.” I smiled. We had planned it so often. “I’ll send you my address in Rome.” But I knew that Franco’s rare passports went to higher-ups than Manolo.
The train started.
“Goodbye,” I said, clinging to his hands through the compartment window.
“Adiós.”
We looked at each other through the window until we were specks in the distance. At least, I consoled myself as the train entered the hills, I wouldn’t again be subject to such scrutiny.
Two
They say it’s worse to be ugly. I think it must only be different. If you’re pretty, you are subject to one set of assaults; if you’re plain you are subject to another. Pretty, you, may have more men to choose from, but you have more anxiety too, knowing your looks, which really have nothing to do with you, will disappear. Pretty girls have few friends. Kicked out of mankind in elementary school, and then kicked out of womankind in junior high, pretty girls have a lower birth rate and a higher mortality. It is the beauties like Marilyn Monroe who swallow twenty-five Nembutals on a Saturday night and kill themselves in their thirties.
Pretty or plain, by the time you survive puberty, your job in life is pretty much cut out for you. In either case, you must somehow wheedle back into that humanity from which you have been systematically excluded since you learned to walk. Among the ruling fraternity whose members can often barely hide their contempt for you, you must find one sponsor willing to brave ridicule for love of you. You must make him desire you more than manliness. For boys are taught that it is weak to need a woman, as girls are taught it is their strength to win a man.
When on the brink of puberty I emerged from behind my braces with a radiant smile, long black eyelashes, and a pink glowing skin, my troubles were only beginning. I suppose I should have expected a hitch: in the fairy tales too there was usually a steep price to pay for a wish fulfilled. The Blue Fairy had blessed my face all right, but suddenly there was my body. I loathed it. It frightened me, it was so unpredictable. It was nothing if not trouble. People were always ready to make fun of it. They made fun of it for not having breasts, and then they made fun of it for having them. It had once supported me in the trees and on the exercise bars, but I could no longer trust it. I hated walking on the street inside it. On the slightest provocation I blushed crimson, and then they made fun of it for that. My very blood betrayed me. What had my body to do with the me inside?
One day I got out of the bath bleeding down there, and from the nervous way my mother said it was “natural” after I screamed for her from the bathroom, I knew for sure I was a freak.
“Stay calm. I’m going to explain the whole thing to you,” she said. “It’s really nothing to get upset about, dear.” She smiled and patted my cheek as blood trickled down my rippleless thigh to my unshaven calf.
I was way past being upset. I was so horrified by my sudden wound that I was detached, as though I were watching a mildly interesting home movie of myself. My leg had known blood before—there were scabs and scrapes along the shinbone and around the ankles, and cinders permanently imbedded under the skin of both knees—but never blood before from there. That it didn’t burn or sting like other wounds only made it more sinister. I was sure my curious finger had injured something. I was probably ruined. It was likely too late even to confess.
“Sit down on the toilet and wait a minute while I go get something. And don’t worry, darling.” She sounded almost pleased as, leaving the room and closing the door behind her, she chuckled to herself, “Well, well, well.”
I examined the water still in the tub, lapping gently at the dirty ring. A faint trail of blood led from the tub to the sink where I, a good girl, had stood avoiding the bathmat. Was there blood in the bath water too? Oh, no! There was blood on my fingers and now blood smeared on the towel which other days polished to gleaming my sunburnt skin, cleansed in the chlorine of the public pool. What was taking her so long? Everything I touched was getting soiled.
Seated on the toilet, I looked down at myself. It was hard to see, not like my brother’s. The mysteries were inside—to keep us, I guessed, from seeing them. To use a mirror, even in this crisis, would have been suspect (suppose she walked in and saw me?), though indeed it might have helped, as my father had taught me it helped to watch the dentist in a mirror drilling out tooth decay. I had always hidden it so carefully, a mirror now would be doubly suspect. I could hear my father urging over the hum of the drill: watch and relax, reeeelax, let go, and the pain had somehow slipped away. But my father couldn’t advise me now. Anyway, if I relaxed now, wouldn’t the blood come streaming out? I tightened up.
The blood wasn’t flowing, exactly. Every so often, when I thought it had stopped and formed a scab, more would ooze out without registering as sensation at all. Like cells seen through a microscope, the blood moved slowly, surreptitiously. It wasn’t the familiar color, either—it was ominously deeper.
At last mother came back, carrying equipment. She locked the door behind her and shored me up with a smile. “Now,” she began. “This is called a sanitary belt.” She held it up. “It holds the sanitary napkin.” Like a stewardess demonstrating the oxygen mask, she held them up, the long bandage dangling by its tail from her index finger and thumb. Sterile.
“Stand up, dear. Now, slip the belt around your waist. The tabs in the front and back. That’s right. There. Now the napkin. It absorbs the flow. I’ll keep them in here now, with the towels, so you’ll know where to find them each month.” (She smiled for the future: “I always tried to be a good mother,” I would someday hear her say.) “I’ll put it on for you this time, but you’ll have to learn to do it yourself. The side with the blue thread goes on the outside, like this. First you fold in the edges, like this, test it to make sure it’s secure, like this, then turn it around to the back and do the other end the same way. Not too tight or it’ll chafe. There. Now turn around…. Good! Now let me explain.”
My mother’s textbook words droned on and curdled like sour milk. Every month? If it happened once a month for a lifetime, why had I never seen these bandages before? If it happened to everyone, why hadn’t my best friend Jackie, who had large breasts, told me about it? Now I knew I was an anomaly. One of my breasts was larger than the other, like one of my feet. Some of the girls had hair under their arms and between their legs, but not I. Instead of having hair down there I would have this awful bleeding. People would know. The sanitary napkin which hung between my legs was already molding to the shape of my thighs, a parasite sucking my blood. I shuddered. How could I possibly go out of the house wearing it?
“… and passes through the vagina.”
In our family we had never called it anything, and now she was calling it a “vagina.” Unutterable word. It was better than “cunt” or “pussy”—boys’ words—but for me they were all unutterable. Twelve years old and I had never called it anything but “down there.” Except for the one time I had furtively looked at it in a han
d mirror, I had never seen one. I had caught flashes of my mother’s large breasts, and a rare glimpse of her pubic hair, but that was all. I had giggled over the hygiene book of a friend’s older sister (we too would have hygiene in high school), but there were no pictures in it—only diagrams of inside organs, like liver, uterus, bladder, and tubes, all as invisible as lungs, and as disgusting.
Finished and self-satisfied, my mother put her arm around me and kissed the tip of my nose. “My sweet Sasha, one night you go to sleep a little girl, and the next day you wake up a young woman. You’ll be a lovely woman, Sasha.” But I knew I was not a woman. I was a child, frightened, unable to comprehend what was happening. Nothing had been explained; everything had at least two meanings. I tried to pass as normal, but inside I knew I was a freak.
Submerging myself in junior high, I found all my classmates plunging recklessly into the pulsing Baybury swim. They dived and surfaced and turned in unison with the precision of mackerel, as though their medium were the world. How was it, I wondered, that they all seemed to know exactly what they were about, following currents I never felt? They politicked at lunch hour, dipping their ears into one another’s secrets, living on lemon cokes and loyalty, while I, watching from the edges, a starfish clinging to a rock, waited for the current to slow down enough for me to get the feel of it. One week they decorated one Barbara for her “perfect” legs and another week another Barbara, and I, studying those imponderables, couldn’t even understand what they meant. Were my legs good or bad? There was no knowing. I pretended to understand, acquiescing in my classmates’ verdict that Barbara H.’s legs were the best there were, like Susan S.’s sense of humor, and I whispered with the others as they swam by. But to me a leg was a leg, and, unsure of myself, I remained mystified. If I were really pretty, why, I wondered, did boys ridicule me? Why did girls whisper when I walked by?