Esperanza Street

by Niyati Keni

  She’d left a pile of things on top of her own case: a china figurine of two European children kissing coyly, a photograph, an empty silver-coloured picture frame that had been my parents’ wedding gift, a cutwork tablecloth, a set of glass bowls. Her luggage would be heavy on the way back and I thought of her struggling with it, the boys whining at her side. ‘What are you so happy about?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Elisa came back in. She pulled a sour face at me, ignored Luisa. ‘Let’s go see the Pastor,’ she said.

  ‘Take a box each,’ Luisa said, but Elisa stayed by the open door, staring at me. I followed her out.

  In the courtyard, Lorna kept her back to us as we passed. ‘You’re not responsible for her and her baby,’ Elisa said sulkily when we were out of earshot. ‘She said that too.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘She wants me to ask Pastor Levi about adoption.’ There was nothing accusatory in her tone. It was a practical solution that I hadn’t considered but, even so, hearing her say it jarred on me.

  ‌Bumper Stickers

  Pastor Levi and his brother, Cesar, with eleven kids between them, lived together on the same plot: Cesar in the house that had belonged to their parents and Levi in a house that he’d built in the garden. Pastor Levi’s house was much smaller and, when he built it, Cesar’s wife, Loring, complained about him building all over her rose garden. There was nothing for it though: Pastor Levi’s wife was expecting their first child and there was no money to buy another plot. Besides, Levi had turned down the chance to go to medical college and make some real money to follow his dream of entering the seminary, so arguably had God on his side; the rose garden had to go. It worked out fine anyway. The children, close enough in age, played happily together and after a while everyone else learned to get on.

  I’d never been inside the Pastor’s house before, though I’d passed by it enough times. It smelled familiar, of oil lamps and fried fish. It was dark inside, the windows small and cluttered with things. Those that didn’t have the family’s belongings heaped against them had stickers of Jesus or the Virgin Mary further obscuring the little light that came through. They were stickers like one might find on a car: God Is My Co-Pilot; Are You Following Jesus This Closely? Each room seemed to encroach upon the next: the chairs and television were in the hallway, so close to the front door that it didn’t open fully; the refrigerator stood just inside the doorway of the bedroom nearest the kitchen. When we entered, Gregorio, Levi’s eldest son, got up from one of the chairs, nodded at me, switched the television off and retreated wordlessly to another room.

  Pastor Levi sat us down and offered us both a drink. I shook my head. Elisa took a glass of cold water and sipped at it steadily. Levi looked at me gravely and asked how I was. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Luisa wondered if the church wanted some of his things.’

  ‘Will you not keep them, Joseph? Dante might have preferred it.’ I felt like telling him that I knew better than he did what my father might have preferred but I didn’t.

  Elisa spoke up now. ‘I also need to discuss something with you, Pastor,’ she said. ‘About Lorna and her baby.’ Pastor Levi looked at me, and I pretended not to notice. Instead I stared straight ahead. On the wall above the television was a calendar with his name and his wife’s name on it and a small photograph of the two of them holding hands and smiling. The picture must have been taken some time ago because they both looked younger in it and Eveline more slender than I’d ever seen her. Underneath the photograph were the words: Jesus is the head of this household. He is the unseen host at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation. I thought about Gregorio’s apparent obedience at home, though he had as foul a mouth as any of the older boys at school. I wondered whether he felt that at least at school he didn’t have to worry about Jesus eavesdropping on him.

  ‘She wanted me to ask you about adoption,’ Elisa said and I could tell from her voice that she knew she had my attention as well as the Pastor’s, though she didn’t turn to include me. I guess Pastor Levi had already given this some thought because he didn’t seem at all surprised and was quick to answer. The church had connections, he said, with agencies that might be able to place the baby with a couple or a family, perhaps even overseas. He talked plainly, looking at each of us in turn, but I couldn’t hold his eye. Eventually he said, ‘I’ll come by later, talk to her and look over your father’s things,’ and he put a hand on my shoulder, turning away again before I had to acknowledge him. He insisted on saying a prayer for us before we left and when he closed his eyes Elisa began drumming her fingers on the arm of the chair, before stopping and balling her hand when she realised I’d noticed. If Pastor Levi heard it, he didn’t falter.

  Elisa was quiet when we left. She didn’t speak until we were back on Esperanza and then she said, ‘It wouldn’t be fair on you either, Joseph. She knows that.’

  I didn’t want to go back to the apartment so we cut through Prosperidad and out onto the coast road and walked along the sea wall away from the ruined market hall and jetty. The charred timbers of the jetty had been knocked away and replaced by makeshift ramps to keep the boatmen and jetty boys in business for a while. I didn’t want to speak to anyone there, didn’t want to have to behave in whatever way was expected of me by my father’s friends and co-workers. Elisa didn’t push me to say anything and we sat on the sea wall for some time in silence. After a while I said, ‘When we were young, I thought that one day you and I would get married.’

  ‘I’d only marry you if you were rich,’ she said, kicking her legs against the stone.

  ‘If Marisol went to a good family that would be the best thing,’ I said. ‘She’d get sent to school, maybe even college.’

  ‘You talk like it’s a choice,’ Elisa said, her legs suddenly still. She put a finger to her cheek, inclined her head girlishly. ‘Shall I wear the red one or the yellow one? Put my hair up or leave it down? Give up my baby or keep her?’ Her tone fooled me for a second and, on reflex, I made as if I was going to push her off the wall, like we were kidding around. Then, all at once, her words surrendered their meaning. I looked down at the water, the surface of it skimmed with rubbish and oil from the boats, the water beneath clear. I opened my mouth to defend myself but she wasn’t done yet. ‘You think poor girls miss their babies less than rich ones?’ she said. She didn’t want an answer and I didn’t want to give her one; anything I said now would infuriate her. Her words anchored us to where we sat. I couldn’t get up to leave; it would have ended the conversation and she’d have been doubly mad with me for, even though she said nothing more, I knew from her face that the subject was far from closed. So we stayed put, some distance from the broken jetty but close enough to make out the boats coming in and the figures of the jetty boys, their identities indistinguishable apart from Jonah. My throat felt thick. So what? I wanted to say. What’s it got to do with me anyway? High above us the sun reached its peak, blazing off the water.

  Back at the Bougainvillea I followed America round the kitchen. ‘She’s a hard worker,’ I said. ‘She kept Pop’s apartment real clean.’

  ‘Nothing doing,’ America said. ‘You can ask her yourself. You’re old enough and pretty soon I’ll be gone anyway and then you’ll have to handle everything without running to me to bail you out.’

  Aunt Mary was in the sala, seated at the piano. By her feet were piles of sheet music but on top of the piano was a stack of photograph albums and there was another on her lap. It looked as if she’d started one task only to be distracted by another. She smiled at me as I walked in. ‘How are you feeling, Joseph?’ She asked me this almost every time she saw me now.

  ‘We’re almost done at the apartment. Luisa will be gone soon.’

  Aunt Mary’s smile deepened. ‘We don’t choose our family, Joseph.’

  I asked if she needed any help with whatever she was doing and she laughed then. I looked down at the album on her lap. The page was half empty. In front of
her on the closed piano lid sat a small, neatly squared pile of photographs. On the otherwise empty music stand above it, a solitary picture: the girl under the yellow bell tree. Aunt Mary was making a space for her. I sat down on the mat near her feet and told her then about Lorna and Marisol and our visit to Pastor Levi, about whether there might be a way out that meant she didn’t have to lose her baby. ‘I could show her how to do everything the way you like it,’ I said.

  Aunt Mary listened to me patiently, frowning slightly the whole while. When I’d finished, she said, ‘I have to think about the boys. Dub will be gone soon, but Benny is only fifteen.’ She didn’t have to say any more. I understood what she meant. Lorna was only a year younger than Benny and me, but already a mother. I couldn’t press her; I knew my place. Aunt Mary was a woman who considered everything carefully, who rarely if ever spoke in haste. Perhaps she’d even considered it already and decided against bringing the unknown, the unknowable, into her house. I didn’t blame her for it. It wasn’t her problem. It wasn’t anybody’s.

  I didn’t return to the apartment that evening as I’d planned. Instead I worked and read at home. I didn’t want to be there when Pastor Levi came to pick through my father’s things or see Luisa flattering him and offering him refreshments while ordering Elisa or Lorna to fetch them. When I did return it was late the following morning and, as I turned the corner past the general store, I saw that the courtyard was empty. The House-on-Wheels had gone.

  ‌Cutwork

  Upstairs, Luisa was making ready to leave. ‘Where were you last night?’ she said irritably.

  ‘Did Pastor Levi come?’ I said. I looked around the flat. The boxes containing our father’s life were still there.

  ‘Yes, he came. Spent more time talking to that girl than to me,’ she said. ‘Private talk. Quiet talk. Like she can discuss her affairs in my house and it’s none of my business.’ I imagined Pastor Levi sat in a corner with Lorna, his voice dropping if Luisa made to busy herself nearby. ‘Landlord doesn’t want to buy the furniture,’ she continued. ‘I guess you can give it to the Pastor. I can’t be bothered with it any more. Miguel will only drink the money anyway. You’ll have to move all those boxes when the Pastor’s ready for them. I’m leaving this afternoon.’ She looked at her watch and then, looking up at me, added, ‘No need to look so pleased about it.’ She pulled a face but I could see that it was a relief for her too. I suppose we only knew how to be our old selves in each other’s company.

  Luisa knelt down to pull the boys into their clothes. They were sluggish in the heat and uncooperative. I started to collect their toys. ‘Lottie and Lando have gone then,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The House-on-Wheels.’

  ‘That junk heap in the courtyard? Yeah, they’ve gone. The girl was at Bina’s just earlier.’

  ‘Lorna?’

  Luisa regarded me shrewdly. ‘Yeah. Your wife.’

  I didn’t bite. ‘And the baby?’

  Luisa shrugged as she finished dressing the children. ‘With her. Why, you thought maybe she’d eaten it? Or lost it playing Tong-its?’ I was surprised at the sudden tempest I felt then, which was as much relief as it was dismay. I pinched my nephews’ cheeks gently but they turned away without smiling, pushing their faces into their mother’s breast, her neck. Luisa rested her cheek against the youngest’s hair for a few seconds. ‘I miss him, Joseph. I miss her too,’ she said. I was annoyed with her for wanting to open such a conversation now, at the eleventh hour, not knowing what memories she might exhume and leave me to contain on my own. I moved to the door, gathered up her luggage and walked out. I heard her fuss at the children as they started after me, one for walking too slowly, the other for not waiting. I stacked the bags at the base of the stairwell and went in search of a cab.

  When I returned she was chewing her lip and she looked away from me as I stepped out of the taxi. She looked sour, her eyes bright, the lashes clumped and wet. She settled the children into the cab, kissed my cheek before climbing in after them. When the cab pulled away, she stared straight ahead, not permitting me even at the last to look into her eyes.

  Aunt Bina’s door, like most of our neighbours’, was often left ajar and, as always, I walked in without announcing myself. Marisol lay on her back on the mat, her limbs playing in the air above her, her eyes intent on the brightly coloured strips of cloth tied around her wrists and ankles. Beside her, carefully, clumsily, Lorna stitched away at something. She looked up as I came in and smiled. Elisa and Bina came through from the kitchen, dragging between them a large sack. Bina pulled a handful out of the sack and scattered it over the floor: old clothes, offcuts of fabric.

  The women sat down to stitch and I sat with them, sorting the fabric into piles of different colours, running the softer ones over Marisol’s face to make her smile. I thought how bright her eyes were, how hard she worked at taking everything in. An unwritten story, I thought; in her eyes the clarity of a life rich only with beginnings. I wondered how long it might be before that clarity was lost. And I understood then, quite suddenly, how Lorna and her baby might be for me too, as much as they had been for my father, a second chance. It dawned on me that in some way I’d just been reprieved, for if Lorna and Marisol had not been at Bina’s, if they’d already been pulled back into the world of the House-on-Wheels, I would never have found it in myself to pursue them out onto Esperanza and on down the coast road while the sea turned indifferently on one side. Despite my daydreams of heroism, I’d have been struck by the same paralysis that stopped me on the night of the jetty fire, fastening me to the spot while others around me acted, while my father hurried towards his own death. But Lorna and the baby were here and all that was required of me was to make a choice that was being presented to me once again. Yet even as I made my choice, as I decided the kind of man I was going to be, my heart was far from quiet.

  Lorna put her sewing down on her lap and stroked Marisol’s foot lightly. ‘Maybe in a couple of years there’ll be enough for you and Elisa to go to college,’ she said eagerly. Bina glanced at her but not at me, and I thought how open Aunt Bina’s face had always been, how unsuccessfully she hid her thoughts.

  Neither Aunt Mary nor America was in when I returned to the boarding house. I attended to my chores taking more care than I usually did, carrying out each task slowly, more purposefully, as if to imprint the textures of each movement, each object. I started to polish the piano, though there were other, more pressing jobs. The house was empty and I lifted the lid, ran a finger lightly to and fro over the surface of the keys before depressing a single key in the centre of the keyboard. The sound, louder than I’d expected, filled the still house and, shutting the lid quickly, I listened to its ghost die away in the afternoon air. It had barely faded when I heard keys in the front door, and Aunt Mary and America walked into the hallway.

  I went out to them and took their bags. ‘Has your sister left yet?’ Aunt Mary said as the women followed me into the kitchen. I was glad she’d asked; it would be easier to turn the conversation to what I had to say.

  She was quiet as I told her and for a moment or two afterwards. As I watched her, waiting for her to speak, it occurred to me for the first time since I’d come to her house how lonely Mary Morelos must have been, how losing her money had marooned her. If she was surprised by what I’d said she didn’t show it. I thought she looked a little sad. She didn’t try to change my mind. ‘I’d have liked to see you finish high school,’ was all she said.

  Later, in my room, I looked about me at everything I’d thought of as mine in the world. Like my father, I thought – no great love of things. The room that had contained much of my life for the past five years appeared to me as it really was: small, empty. I would miss it, but only in the way of a bird whose cage has been left open and who hesitates, momentarily, to leave.

  ‌Oleander in Bloom

  When I was six or seven my mother found a mouse’s nest in our kitchen, in a pail inside the low cupboard on to
p of which she often prepared our food. She was surprised, and yelled, and my father came running. The mouse had just had a litter and the three baby mice, blind and naked, squirmed around the mother, who pushed herself up against the sides of the pail, her fur bristling, aware of the threat of us. Seeing the mouse and her brood, my father took off his slipper and raised it over his head, but my mother caught his arm and, pressing it down towards his breast, looked hard into his eyes. My father ran his hands through his hair, uncertain what to do. The mice couldn’t stay, my mother knew it and she smiled at me, stroking my head when I asked if I could keep them. Eventually, my father picked up the pail with the mice inside and took it down to the courtyard, tipping them out, gently, behind a white oleander bush. He looked up to where I peered over the railing, my mother’s hand on my hair. Afterwards my mother was quiet and I asked her if she missed the mice. She laughed then briefly. My father said, ‘They’ve got a new home under the adelfa. They can smell its flowers all summer.’ All summer, though I never caught sight of them, I imagined the baby mice growing up in the garden and thought how much better that might be than living in a pail in our kitchen. I laughed softly when I thought about it now and remembered too how my mother had also told me it was bad luck to move a spider away from the place it had chosen to spin its web. ‘It won’t just spin another web,’ she said. ‘It will die because it has been torn from its own life.’

  ‌Esperanza Street, October 1981

  I stood at the boarding-house gate looking out over Esperanza Street. The rains had stopped now and the ground was dry. The garden behind me was lush with the green of fresh growth. At the top of the hill, towards Salinas Boulevard, Concepcion, one of the fish vendors, leaned forward on her stool. She rummaged for a while between the folds of her breasts before drawing out her tobacco tin. With her other hand she continued in her rhythm of sluicing the fish with water from a pail at her feet: lines of crab and milkfish and groupers. Nearby, the cycle rickshaw drivers fidgeted in the heat, fanning themselves with newspapers or their palms, pulling the visors of baseball caps low across their faces, settling back on their passenger seats as if asleep, feet up on the saddles.