Oy, Caramba!

by Ilan Stavans

  Two kids who ride the school bus to the Roma neighborhood began fighting; they had said a lot of bad words in Arabic to each other on the bus.

  “I hope you swallow an umbrella and it opens up inside your stomach,” said one of them.

  “I hope you live 120 years in a hospital,” said the other.

  “A curse on the ship that brought your father here!” replied the first one.

  I get scared when my daddy speaks Arabic to someone. He learned it in the Lagunilla Market and he speaks it from time to time, but not at home, of course—well, whom would he speak it with? Fortunately, no one at school has ever heard him speak it.

  “Because of Queen Esther, we Jews were saved,” said my mommy. It just so happens that the king of the Philistines, who wasn’t Jewish, fell in love with Esther. As the king, he had all the young girls of the kingdom brought to him, and he chose her. Even though his prime minister did everything he could to prevent him from marrying her, it was her beauty that saved the people of Israel. And now we honor that marriage with the Purim celebration in March; at school we have a kermis charity bazaar with costumes; the mothers distribute bread and marmalade called hamantaschen, and they give us wooden rattles to liven things up.

  They pick two candidates from each room to play the role of Queen Esther. On the day of the kermis, when they crown the queen, everyone really gets excited. Even the parents get drawn in to it—they buy lots of votes so that their daughter will be elected the queen. How fortunate the chosen one must feel! They’ve never even considered me; besides, my dad wouldn’t ever buy any votes. But still, when they come around to choose the candidates from each room, I always get a little nervous because they just might say my name. But it’s never happened. I guess I’m not that pretty. And it’s always the same girls. Last year, Dori lost by one hundred votes to the daughter of the school president. After the coronation, I like to go to the charity raffle, because the parents who own stores or factories always donate neat gifts. Then they reenact the moment when the king chooses Esther. Out on the patio, we dance horas in a circle around a bonfire. Then we eat. My mommy usually makes a huge bag of popcorn because she was assigned to a food table.

  I wet the bed again, and my mommy had taken me half-asleep one last time to the bathroom. I still do it, and I don’t even feel it. I guess she has gotten used to it, because she doesn’t scold Clara or me; she just leaves the sheets on the bed all week and the stain begins to look really horrible. Whenever we get a new maid, I’m always embarrassed, but then I shake it off—there’s no way I can hide in my own house, so I just act like nothing’s happened.

  My sister and I sleep in either of the two beds and when we realize that we’re wet, we just change our pajamas and get into the one that’s dry. Zelda just frowns at us and complains that our beds stink; she thinks she’s unlucky because she has to sleep with us. We don’t do it because we want to, and I’d never be able to invite anyone to spend the night, and I’d never dream of going to someone else’s house. Just think what would happen if everyone at school found out! My mommy’s right in loving Moshón more than us. He’s really clean. These kids that don’t wet their beds—how do they do it?

  Freddy wets his bed too. We could try putting those of us who wet our beds together in one room, and those who are normal in the other. We can do it, if my mommy wants to; if not, Zelda will have to make sure she doesn’t get her bedding mixed up with ours; then she’ll have to stop bothering us.

  I was going to say that out of the three closest aunts I have, the one I like the best is Chela, although my mommy’s sister who lives in Monterrey is nice too. I was sent to stay with them during vacation. I even went to my cousins’ school, which I really liked, because everyone wanted to know who I was, and my cousins would act like they were important, saying I was from Mexico City. Just outside the school gate they sell jicama, oranges, cucumber slices with chile, crisp pork rinds, yo-yos, baleros, paletas, chocolates, pinole, well, you know, all the things my dad says are no good for you—ah, and some caramel-covered apples that you suck on until you reach the apple part. Sundays are the same for me as for anyone else: I love to buy, buy, buy. But it’s not the same in Mexico City. There’s nothing to buy because when we get out of class, the buses are waiting inside the school yard, and even if they are selling things outside the gates, we don’t ever see them.

  Alegre is five years older than I am. She has a bedroom all to herself, and I like being her cousin. And she has so many friends! She does things the way she wants to, she wears checked shirts that have the necks and sleeves like a man’s shirt, and she has a wallet for her money just like my dad’s—ah, and she wears pants too. On Saturdays, she invites three or four friends over to spend the night; we haul mattresses, pillows, and blankets down to the living room, turn up the record player, and stay up as late as we want. What a great life! At home, if we make any noise after my mom turns out the light, she yells at us, “Enough! Be quiet. Or I’ll give you all a good whipping.”

  Aarón asked me if I wanted to swim; I thought he meant in a swimming pool, but no, he meant on the terraced roof behind the kitchen. We put a board in front of the kitchen door to keep the water from leaking inside. We started filling up the patio at eight o’clock in the morning, and by eleven it was up to our knees. Even though it was freezing cold, we swam in our underwear. I can’t believe I even opened my eyes underneath the water and I could see the bottom. It was a fantastic day! When my aunt came home, I got scared, but she didn’t get mad. She just laughed, put a towel around me, and said, “Girl, you’re so crazy. Just look at you! Really, you do some of the silliest things.”

  Before I went to sleep, she said to me, “Tell me, have you heard the stories about crazy Ishodotro of Yojá? They used to tell them to us when we were little kids in Istanbul.” I adore the way my aunt laughs. And she has that mischievous look in her eyes. It seems a little strange to me because grown-ups don’t do pranks. I wanted her to tell me the stories, even though they’re the same ones my mom tells us.

  What a strange aunt! If she lived in Mexico City she might get along with my mom, and then maybe my mom would be easier on us.

  This year, I’ll finish sixth grade. It’s the year when they start taking most of the girls out of school—this is the year they begin to live at home with their mothers. They take sewing lessons, they learn how to cook, make desserts, and who knows what else; but all of a sudden they become pretty and get married. The boys are allowed to continue their studies. Oh, heaven forbid! What if they do that to me? What am I going to do at home all day long?

  There are two bakeries near our house, but we always go to the one on Nuevo Leon, even though it’s farther away. My mom likes their bread better. The only bad thing about it is that to get there we have to walk past Rosi’s house, and every time her mom’s standing at the window, and when she sees us walking by, she yells out, “Are you going for bread, honey? For the love of your mommy, get me a couple of loaves too.”

  And there’s no way you can say no to her, right? So she’s always taking advantage of my brothers, or me, and as a result, she always gets fresh bread brought to her door. And yesterday, when I brought her the bread, she had even more nerve: “Honey, dear, could you please help me move this table, and that plant, and this pot?”

  And she asked Moshón to bring her some soft drinks from the store across the street. We’re definitely not going to walk by that old bat’s house anymore. No wonder they call Rashelica the brazen old . . . I mean, well, she has some nerve! Even though it takes longer, let’s walk all the way around the block, and besides, why doesn’t she send Rosi dear, as she calls her, to do those things?

  Sitting at the window that looks down to Piedad Street, Aunt Cler helps while away the hours. She is accompanied by the sounds corning from a large oval-shaped radio. This afternoon we listened to the comedy programs on Radio XEW and XEQ. Between programs they play songs by singers such as Avelina Landin and Amparo Montes—“I’m walking down
that tropical path / my eyes are full of passion and my soul feels like crying”—or something like that. And at six o’clock, Doctor Heart. It’s a neat program that helps people solve their problems. I love hearing about things that I never knew existed. I’d like to write her an anonymous letter with a fake signature so that my mom wouldn’t find out, but I bet they’d never pay any attention to an elevenyear-old.

  “So long as you’ve got your health, the rest is unimportant; you should be thankful to God that you’re not an invalid, blind, or an orphan,” says my father. “The people who write to her have nothing else to do; they’re just vain.”

  And do they have problems! I’d like to ask her what I need to do to quit wetting my bed or to stop my mom from yelling at me.

  “Dear Friend . . .” she’d probably answer. But what a lovely lady! How I wish someone would say that to me sometime! My father says people who talk like that are hypocrites and he doesn’t trust them.

  Is that really true? Maybe so.

  While we listen to the programs, I watch Aunt Cler sew and sew, and I see that she’s concerned about what’s going on in the soap opera—if they had caught Esmeralda or if the daughter had deceived her father. Silently she changes the color of the thread, finishes the last stitch, and happily admires the juicy purple grapes that grew from her hands on the throw pillows that will adorn her couch in the living room.

  My mom goes into the kitchen to fix that tasty dessert that old Aunt Cler makes from rolled orange rinds. Her maid is off on Mondays, that’s why we go to see her on those days.

  “She can’t be left alone; what would she do if someone comes to the door or she needs to go to the bathroom? If no one is around, what would she do? Heaven help me if something were to happen to her. And, to top it off, she’s in a wheelchair. Poor thing! She can wheel around a bit. Uncle David, thank God, will come this evening.”

  And that’s the way it’s been for two years, and ever since her daughter died, she’s been paralyzed.

  This Monday my mother couldn’t visit Aunt Cler, so she sent me with the keys instead.

  “That’s very nice of you, child. Stay for a while! Let’s talk, take your mind off things, you poor dear.”

  As soon as the train starts along Piedad Street, I try to spot her window from my seat. In that building, there’s a window curtain with that starched pride and the elegant hand-stitched lace, behind which I spot aunt’s little face with straight hair. I climb the stairs, taking a short rest on each floor; the stairwells and hallways are so wide that you could dance a hora in each one. I think: once she walked up those stairs for the first time, and she’ll go down them on the last day of her life. I get the keys out and I’m in the living room. I look around everywhere, there are embroidered doilies all over the place, and you can see the work of her hand in every throw pillow, in every corner. I cross through the sitting room and reach the door of the little room where the sound of the dark wood radio fills the house and my aunt’s life. I know that she’ll be surprised to see me because she never knows which niece has been designated to visit her that day.

  “Ah! Is that you?” she says without cracking a smile.

  Those big, deep eyes that I thought would light up just stare at me, giving me the shivers. I don’t appreciate her not saying something nice about me coming—not willingly, but here I am. I sit down in this small armless chair, directly in front of her, and I look toward the street. The sun is strong, but it’s partly hidden, so we put the blinds down. I like to leaf through her embroidery magazines while we listen to the radio programs. In one of the old magazines, Family Magazine, I run across a beautiful cross-stitch and she says she’ll show me how to do it. When she sends me to get the orange-rind dessert, I stop and linger in the living room without bothering her. My mom told me that Auntie cleans all of her decorations on the glass shelves herself. She doesn’t trust the maids, everything has to be carefully dusted, right down to the last little corner and crack; that’s why she gets them out. I take a peek into the bedrooms: I see a picture of her daughter, then a girl younger than me, and I get sad for my aunt who lost her daughter and for the girl who, had she lived, would have inherited the responsibility to take care of her sick mother. That daughter is with her when she’s embroidering, watching other lives from the window, listening to the radio, and watching the trains coming and going up and down Piedad Street.

  The Invisible Hour

  ESTHER SELIGSON (1941–2010)

  Translated from the Spanish by Iván Zatz

  First published in Indicios y quimeras (1988), this story can be read as a study of Bergsonian time or as a surrealist vision of eternity. Seligson manages to deal with several layers of time: clock time, calendar time, psychological time, and metaphysical time, thus the quote “Time is either an invention or nothing at all.” The anonymous narrator, the owner of a broken quartz watch, takes it to be fixed at a store unlike any other. What follows is an examination of life in and beyond time—a journey through a metaphysical universe in which the experience of time itself is abstracted.

  Blindness is a weapon against time and space. Our existence is nothing more than an immense and unique blindness, with the exception of those tiny bits transmitted to us by our miserly senses. The dominant principle within the cosmos is blindness. . . . Time, which is a continuum, can only be escaped by a single means: to avoid observing it from time to time. Thus can we reduce it to those fragments we can recognize.

  —ELIAS CANETTI, Auto-da-Fé

  “WELL, YES, SIR, we’ll have to keep it for observation.”

  “But how come? The only problem was that the glass fell off.”

  “We are a serious company, sir. We are specialists. Our obligation is to return it to you in perfect condition.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “The hands appear to be a little loose, and the face is somewhat dusty. It’s only logical, since it had been exposed for a while.”

  “And how long will you keep it for observation?”

  “Come back in ten days, please. Here you have your receipt. You can claim it with this piece of paper. You mustn’t lose it, under any circumstances.”

  And that is how he saw it disappear, in a dainty red velvet case, withdrawn by a pair of mysterious gloved hands coming from behind a narrow window with thin bars in front of it. Then, one of those so-called grave-like silences befell the place. Where could his watch have wound up?

  “This crystal is not for measuring time but rather for awakening in one’s everyday memory the flash of other instants that need to be urgently freed from their temporary prison.” That is what she said while giving it to him, that singular afternoon: a flat sphere, extremely white, the numbers barely marked by silver droplets. There was no need to wind it up, nor to touch or move it: it would tirelessly mark the time, without the slightest slowing down, with the merriment of mercury sliding through the fingers to reach the palm of the hand, lightweight, twinkling, and absolutely silent. The thin hands, silvery too, together with the second hand, would progress in little jumps that looked to him like the back of his Siamese cat when she was petted and the hair on her back would rise and then settle again, trembling slightly. Where could it be now, below the vaults of that old building with brown-grained marble staircases and high walls with straw-colored ornaments on the architraves and bondstone arches? Yes, an old edifice with enormous windows curling around metal volutes, through which the opaline daylight filtered with a milky luminousness. The receptionist would reply with the same chant to any client who approached the counter, “We are a serious company, sir. Our obligation is to return it to you in perfect condition.”

  She was stiff, without moving a single facial muscle, as if she were a perfect piece of clockwork. And the clients would exit through the revolving doors with the feeling that they had been dispossessed, defeated by an unknown force that could not be at all opposed: in there, one’s hours, minutes, and seconds would be sifted through until they were den
uded of time. But, doubtlessly, there would be clients who would stay there to wait; otherwise, what were those soft, tawny leather couches with ocher-colored buttons for? Long brownish counters flanked the walls of the room, and at the back wall there was a wide staircase, morosely carpeted in the same red color of the cases in which the watches would leave for an unknown destination. And it occurred to him that upstairs, behind the finely sanded mahogany doors, in the upper corridor, which could be seen through the convoluted metalwork of the bannister, one found the death chambers, the conservatories, the incubators, the urns, the capsules where the time-catching quartzes would be buried, embalmed, or simply allowed their recovering sleep; and, in the midst of all of that, his own would be there, that marvelous box into which he had deposited his consciousness of the fleeting, the days, weeks, and months that had slowly oozed along. What would he do in the meantime? How could he follow the pulse of his thoughts, that pendular sway that he had tied to the bursts of light given by those sparkles, which it was his task to rescue from the unlimited dullness of the everyday grind? Memories in the shape of an Argand lamp without oil or wick lay languishing in the empty recesses of his mind, left between one oscillation and the other. His work had been interrupted, an unavoidable setback in his mindful task; and only now had he begun to decipher the path along the labyrinth of gears through which he had to enter, a network of minute pins, of small wheels and pivots, crowns, springs, and anchors!