My poor madrina’s faith was unshakable; no misfortune that ever befell her could change it. Only recently, when the Pope came here, I got permission to take her from her nursing home to see him; it would have been a shame for her to miss seeing the Pontiff in his white habit and gold cross, preaching his indemonstrable convictions in perfect Spanish and Indian dialects—as demanded by the occasion. When she saw him advancing down the freshly painted streets in his fishbowl of bulletproof glass, amid flowers, cheers, waving pennants, and bodyguards, my madrina, who is now absolutely ancient, fell to her knees, persuaded that the Prophet Elias was on a tourist’s trip. I was afraid she would be crushed in the crowd and I tried to get her to leave, but she would not move until I bought a hair from the Pope’s head as a relic. Many people seized that opportunity to become righteous; some promised to forgive their debtors and, to avoid saddening the Holy Father, not to mention the class struggle or contraceptives. In my own heart I had no enthusiasm for the illustrious visitor, because I had no happy memories of religion. One Sunday when I was a little girl, my madrina took me to our parish church and made me kneel down in a curtained wooden box; my fingers were clumsy and I could not cross them as she had taught me. I became aware of a strong breath on the other side of the grille: Tell me your sins, the voice commanded, and instantly I forgot all the sins I had invented. I did not know what to answer, although I felt obliged to try to think of something, even something venial, but I could not dredge up a single transgression.
“Do you touch yourself with your hands?”
“Yes . . .”
“Often, daughter?”
“Every day.”
“Every day! How often?”
“I don’t keep count . . . many times . . .”
“That is a most serious offense in the eyes of God!”
“I didn’t know, Father. And if I wear gloves, is that a sin, too?”
“Gloves! But what are you saying, you foolish girl? Are you mocking me?”
“No-no,” I stammered in terror, at the same time thinking how difficult it would be to wash my face, brush my teeth, or scratch myself while wearing gloves.
“You must promise not to do that again. Purity and innocence are a girl’s best virtues. You will pray five hundred Ave Marías in penance, so God will pardon you.”
“I can’t, Father,” I answered, because I could only count to twenty.
“What do you mean, you can’t!” the priest bellowed, and a rain of saliva sprayed over me through the grille. I burst from the box, but my madrina nabbed me and held me by one ear while she consulted with the priest on the advisability of putting me out to work before my character was even more warped and I lost my almighty soul forever.
After my mother’s death came the hour of Professor Jones. He died of old age, disillusioned with the world and his own learning, but I would swear that he died in peace. Faced with the impossibility of embalming himself, thus assuring a dignified eternity amid his English furniture and his books, he left instructions in his will for his remains to be sent to the distant city of his birth. He did not want the local cemetery to be his final resting place, to lie covered with foreign dust beneath a merciless sun, and in promiscuous proximity with who knows what kind of people, as he used to say. He spent his last days beneath the ceiling fan in his bedroom, steaming in the sweat of his paralysis, and with no company but the man with the Bible, and me. I lost my last fear of him when his thundering voice changed to the unrelieved shallow breathing of the dying.
I wandered freely through that house closed to the outside world, headquarters to death ever since the doctor had begun his experiments. The servants’ discipline collapsed the minute the Professor could no longer leave his room to threaten them from his wheelchair and harass them with contradictory orders. I watched them, every time they left the house, carrying off silverware, rugs, paintings, even the crystal flasks containing the Professor’s formulas. The master’s table with its starched tablecloth and spotless china stood unattended; no one lighted the crystal chandeliers or brought the Professor his pipe. My madrina lost interest in the kitchen and served up fried bananas, rice, and fish every meal. The other servants gave up on the cleaning, and grime and mildew advanced along the floors and walls. No one had tended the garden since the incident of the surucucú several years before, and the consequence of this neglect was an aggressive vegetation threatening to devour the house and overrun the sidewalk. The servants slept through the siesta, went out at any hour of the day, drank too much rum, and played a radio all day long, blaring boleros, cumbias, and rancheras. The miserable Professor, who in good health had tolerated nothing but classical records, suffered inexpressible torment from all the racket, and tugged unceasingly at his bellpull to summon a servant, but none came. When he was asleep, my madrina climbed the stairs to sprinkle him with holy water she had filched from the church; it seemed a sin to let the man die without the sacrament, like a common beggar.
The morning the Protestant pastor was shown in by a maid dressed only in underpants and brassière because of the sweltering heat, I suspected that order had sunk to its lowest point and I had nothing left to fear from the Professor. I began to visit him often, at first peering in from the threshold, then going farther and farther into the room, until finally I was playing on the bed. I spent hours with the old man, trying to communicate with him, until I was able to understand the mumbling blurred by both his stroke and his foreign accent. When I was with him, the Professor seemed temporarily to forget the humiliation of his decline and the frustration of his paralysis. I brought books from the sacred bookshelves and held them for him so he could read. Some were written in Latin, but he translated them for me, apparently delighted to have me for a student, loudly lamenting the fact that he had not realized sooner I lived in his house. I may have been the first child he had known, and he discovered too late his vocation as a grandfather.
“Where did this girl come from?” he would ask, his gums chewing air. “Is she my daughter? My granddaughter? A figment of my sick mind? She has dark skin, but her eyes are like mine. Come here, child. Come close so I can see you.”
He was unable to connect me with Consuelo, although he remembered very well the woman who had served him loyally for more than twenty years and once had swelled up like a zeppelin following a bad attack of indigestion. He often talked about her, certain that his last days would have been different if she had been there to care for him. She would not have betrayed me, he used to say.
It was I who put wads of cotton in his ears so the songs and dramas on the radio would not drive him mad. I washed him, and slipped folded towels beneath his body to prevent his mattress from being soaked with urine; I aired his room, and spooned pap into his mouth. The old man with the silver beard was my doll. One day I heard him tell the pastor that I was more important to him than all his scientific discoveries. I told the old man a few lies: that he had a large family waiting for him in his country; that he had several grandchildren, and a lovely flower garden. In the library there was a stuffed puma, one of the Professor’s earliest experiments with his miraculous embalming fluid. I dragged it to his room, put it on the foot of his bed, and told him it was his pet dog—didn’t he remember? The poor animal was pining for him.
“Write in my will, Pastor. I want this little girl to be my sole heir. Everything is to go to her when I die.” I heard him say this in his half-language to the minister who visited him almost every day, ruining the pleasure of his death with threats of eternity.
My madrina set up a cot for me beside the dying man’s bed. One morning the invalid awoke more pale and tired than usual; he would not accept the café con leche I tried to give him, but did allow me to wash him, comb his beard, change his nightshirt, and sprinkle him with cologne. Propped up on his pillows, he lay absolutely silent until midday, his eyes on the window. He refused his strained food for lunch, and when I settled him for his siesta, he asked me to li
e down beside him. We were both sleeping peacefully when he stopped living.
The pastor arrived at dusk and took charge of all the arrangements. Sending the body back to Professor Jones’s homeland was not at all practical, especially since no one there wanted it, so he ignored those instructions and buried the Professor without fanfare. Only we servants were present at the dismal service; Professor Jones’s reputation had been eclipsed by new advances in science, and no one bothered to accompany him to the cemetery, even though the notice had been published in the newspaper. After so many years of seclusion, few remembered who he was, and if some medical student referred to him it was to mock his head-thumping for stimulating intelligence, his insects for combating cancer, and his fluid for preserving cadavers.
After the patrón was gone my world crumbled. The pastor inventoried and disposed of the Professor’s goods, using the excuse that he had lost his reason in his last years and was not competent to make decisions. Everything went to the pastor’s church, except the puma, which I did not want to lose; I had ridden horseback on it since I was a baby and had so many times told the sick man it was a dog that I ended up believing it. When the movers tried to put it on the truck, I kicked up a fearful row, and when the minister saw me foaming at the mouth and screaming, he chose to yield. I suppose, besides, that it was no use to anyone, so I was allowed to keep it. It was impossible to sell the house; no one wanted to buy it. It was marked by the stigma of Professor Jones’s experiments, and it sits abandoned to this day. As the years went by, it was said to be haunted, and boys went there to prove their manliness by spending a night among scurrying mice, creaking doors, and moaning ghosts. The mummies in the laboratory were transferred to the Medical School, where they lay piled in a cellar for a long time. Then, one day, there was a sudden resurgence of interest in the doctor’s secret formula, and three generations of students industriously hacked off pieces and ran them through different machines, until they were reduced to a kind of unsavory mincemeat.
The pastor dismissed the servants and closed the house. That is how I came to leave the place where I was born—I carrying the puma by its hind legs and my madrina carrying the front.
“You’re grown up now, and I can’t keep you. You’ll have to go to work and earn your living and be strong, the way it should be,” said my madrina. I was seven years old.
* * *
My madrina and I waited in the kitchen; she sat ramrod straight in a rush chair, her bead-embroidered plastic handbag in her lap, her breasts swelling majestically above the neckline of her blouse, her thighs overflowing the seat of the chair. I stood beside her, inspecting out of the corners of my eyes the iron utensils, rusty icebox, cats sprawled beneath the table, the cupboard with its fly-dotted latticed doors. It had been two days since I left Professor Jones’s house, but I was still bewildered and confused. Within a few hours I had become very surly. I did not want to talk with anyone. I sat in the corner with my face buried in my arms, and then, as now, my mother would appear before me, faithful to her promise to stay alive as long as I remembered her. A dried-up, brusque black woman, who kept eyeing us with suspicion, was fussing about among the pots of that unfamiliar kitchen.
“Is the girl yours?” she asked.
“How could she be mine—you see her color, don’t you?” my madrina asked.
“Whose is she, then?”
“She’s my goddaughter. I’ve brought her here to work.”
The door opened and the mistress of the house came in, a small woman with an elaborate hairdo of waves and stiff curls. She was dressed in strict mourning and around her neck she wore a large gold locket the size of an ambassador’s medal.
“Come here where I can see you,” she ordered, but I could not move, my feet seemed nailed to the floor. My madrina had to push me forward so the patrona could examine me: the scalp for lice, the fingernails for the horizontal lines typical of epileptics, the teeth, ears, skin, the firmness of the arms and legs.
“Does she have worms?”
“No, doña, she’s clean inside and out.”
“She’s skinny.”
“She hasn’t had much appetite lately, but don’t worry, she’s a good worker. She learns easy, and she’s got good sense.”
“Does she cry a lot?”
“She didn’t even cry when we buried her mother—may God rest her soul.”
“She can stay a month, on trial,” the patrona declared, and left the room without a goodbye.
My madrina gave me her last advice: don’t talk back; be careful not to break anything; don’t drink water in the evening so you won’t wet the bed; behave and do what you’re told. She started to lean over and kiss me, but thought better of it, gave me a clumsy pat on the head, and turned and marched purposefully out the servants’ entrance—but I knew she was sad. We had always been together; it was the first time we had ever been separated. I stood where she left me, eyes on the floor, fists clenched. The cook had just fried some bananas; she put her arm around my shoulders and led me to a chair, then sat down beside me and smiled.
“So, you’re going to be the new girl. . . . Well, little bird, eat,” and she set a plate before me. “They call me Elvira. I was born on the coast. The day was Sunday the 29th of May, but I don’t remember the year. All I have ever done in my life is work, and it looks like that will be your lot, too. I have my habits and my ways, but if you’re not sassy, we’ll get along fine. I always wanted grandchildren, but God made me too poor ever to have a family.”
That day was the beginning of a new life for me. I had always worked, but not, until then, to earn a living, just to imitate my mother, like a game. The house where I held my first job for pay was filled with furniture and paintings and statues and ferns on marble columns, but those adornments could not hide the moss growing on the pipes, the walls stained with humidity, the dust of years accumulated beneath the beds and behind the wardrobes. Everything seemed very dirty to me, very different from Professor Jones’s mansion where, before his stroke, he had crawled on all fours to run a finger around corners for dust. This house smelled of rotted melons, and in spite of the shutters closed against the sun, it was suffocatingly hot. The owners were an elderly brother and sister—the doña of the locket and a fat sexagenarian with a pitted, fleshy nose tattooed with an arabesque of blue veins. Elvira told me that for a good part of her life her doña had worked in a notary’s office, writing away in silence and storing up a craving to scream that only now, retired and in her own house, she could satisfy. She spent the day issuing orders in a piercing voice, pointing with a peremptory finger, untiringly haranguing and harassing, angry with the world and with herself. Her brother limited himself to reading his newspaper and racing form, drinking, dozing in a rocking chair in the corridor, and walking around in pajamas, slapping his slippers on the tiled floor and scratching his crotch. In the evenings he roused from his daytime lethargy, dressed, and went out to play dominoes in the cafés—every evening, that is, except Sunday, when he went to the racetrack to lose what he had won during the week. Besides the brother and sister, the inhabitants of the house were a maid—big-boned and birdbrained, who worked from morning to night and at the hour of the siesta disappeared into the bachelor’s room—the cook, the cats, and a scruffy, tongue-tied parrot.
* * *
The patrona ordered Elvira to bathe me with disinfectant soap and burn all my clothing. She did not shave my head, as they did to servant girls in those days to get rid of lice, because her brother kept her from it. The man with the strawberry nose spoke gently; he smiled often, and was always pleasant to me even when he was drunk. He took pity on my misery at the sight of the scissors and rescued the long hair my mother had kept so well brushed. It is strange that I cannot remember his name. . . . In that house I wore a dress the doña had sewed on her sewing machine, and went barefoot. After the month’s trial had passed, she explained I had to work harder because now I was e
arning wages. I never saw them; my madrina collected the money every two weeks. At first I anxiously awaited her visits and, the minute she appeared, clung to her skirt and begged her to take me with her, but slowly I got used to the new house. I looked to Elvira for help and made friends with the cats and the parrot. When the patrona washed out my mouth with baking soda to cure my habit of muttering to myself, I stopped talking aloud with my mother, but continued doing it in secret. There was a lot to be done; in spite of the broom and the scrub brush, the house looked like a cursed caravel run aground on a reef; there was no end to cleaning that shapeless florescence that crept along all the walls. The food was not varied or abundant, but Elvira hid the master’s leftovers and gave them to me for breakfast because she had heard on the radio that it was good to begin the day with something on your stomach: So it will go to your brain, little bird, she used to say, and you will grow up to be smart. No detail escaped the spinster: today I want you to scrub the patios with Lysol; remember to iron the napkins, and be careful not to scorch them; clean the windows with newspaper and vinegar, and when you get through I will show you how to polish the master’s shoes. I never hurried to obey, because I soon discovered that if I was careful I could dawdle and get through the day without doing much of anything. The doña of the locket began issuing instructions the minute she arose; she was up at the crack of dawn, dressed in her strict mourning, locket in place and hair intricately combed, but she would get confused about what orders she had given and it was easy to fool her. The patrón showed very little interest in domestic affairs; he lived for his horse races, studying bloodlines, calculating the law of probabilities, and drinking to console himself when he lost his bets. There were times his nose turned the color of an eggplant, and then he would call me to help him get into bed and to hide the empty bottles. The maid wanted nothing to do with anyone, least of all me. Only Elvira paid any attention to me, making me eat, teaching me how to do domestic chores, relieving me of the heaviest tasks. We spent hours talking and telling each other stories. It was about that time that some of her eccentricities began to surface, like her irrational hatred of blond foreigners, and her horror of cockroaches, which she battled with every weapon in reach, from quicklime to broom. On the other hand, she said nothing when she discovered that I was feeding the mice and guarding their babies so the cats could not eat them. She feared a pauper’s death, that her bones would be tossed into a common grave, and to avoid posthumous humiliation she had bought a coffin on credit, which she kept in her room and used as a catchall for odds and ends. It was a box of ordinary wood, smelling of carpenter’s glue, lined in white satin, and trimmed with blue ribbons she had taken from a small pillow. From time to time I was given the privilege of lying inside and closing the lid, while Elvira feigned inconsolable grief and between sobs recited my nonexistent virtues: “Oh, Most Heavenly Father, why have You taken my little bird from me? Such a good girl, so clean, so tidy—I love her more than if she was my own granddaughter. Oh, Lord, work one of Your miracles and return her to me.” The game would last until we both burst out laughing, or till the maid lost control and began to howl.
Eva Luna Page 6