by C. M. Mayo
Many a time Lupe climbed up to the flat-roof, to the bedroom she shared with Chole and the other maids, and threw herself on her blanket and cried. But if Chole or any of the other girls were in there, they would tease her, so Lupe stayed out on the flat-roof and hid herself among the sheets and clothes hanging there to dry. She hated being up there, alone, exposed like a rabbit under the open sky. The sight of snow on the volcanoes made her feel so cold. The dog that was tied up on the flat-roof next door would snarl and bark at her. She would scream at it, “Devil take you!” She kept a supply of pebbles to throw at it.
Chole was Lupe’s cross to bear. At the orphanage, the nuns had taught her, The Almighty has given each of us a station in life. It is His will that you obey your superiors. Faith in His wisdom is as necessary to your salvation as the air you breathe is to your earthly body.
Sometimes Lupe would gaze up at the crucifix on the wall above the bed, or the crucifix over the big iron pot, or the crucifix in the hallway to the drawing room (certainly, crucifixes were not in short supply in the Gómez Pedraza house), and she would remind herself, whatever she was suffering, was it nails being driven through her hands and feet? She wore no crown of thorns; there was no blood running down her face. She was not being lashed and stoned by soldiers and Hebrews! This house had Chole in it, but the fact was, the Gómez Pedrazas’ was a decent, God-fearing house. Don Manuel and Doña Juliana spoke to all with respect: one another, their relatives, their friends and guests, their servants. For the servants, there were always beans and tortillas, and even if just the calf’s head, or the tripe, or the overcooked and gristly bits—the servants did eat meat every day but Friday, and on Fridays plenty of eggs, and cheese, too.
The meek shall inherit the earth. This was the promise of the Heavenly Father, and the idea never ceased to seem wonderful to Lupe, wonderful as the orphanage’s chapel had been, ay, with its soaring, light-swollen dome and the altar covered all over with golden cockleshells, and the vanilla-pudding faces of saints and angels. And the Templo de la Profesa, the church that the Gómez Pedrazas and their servants went to, it was bigger, with ten golden chandeliers that cast their shadows on a shrimp pink marble wall and the long line, all up the nave, of pictures of the Stations of the Cross. There were many of suffering saints, and suffering prophets, too. When the priest and the altar boys swung the silver censers, out wafted plumes of the most fragrant smoke, the same, Lupe was sure of it, that Our Lady of Guadalupe was sniffing in Heaven along with bouquets of her beautiful roses.
Her tattered grease-stained shawl over her head, Lupe would come home and shuffle into the gloom of the kitchen.
“Boil the water for the señora’s tea!” When it wasn’t fast enough, Chole would pinch Lupe’s eyebrows or smack her with the wooden spoon.
“Bitch,” Chole might say, and not even for anything.
Twenty years went by. One day, the Demon made Lupe whisper, “Who talks?”
Chole, at the washtub shelling peas, whipped around and glared at her. “What did you say?”
Lupe’s heart raced in her chest. She dropped her eyes. “Nothing.”
Lupe should be meek, she scolded herself, again and again. The nuns had slapped it into her: Obey. Obey your mistress, obey your betters, and above all, to obey your superiors is to obey God. Or else, burn in the flames of Hell.
Pride stained the soul, and so maybe then it was Chole, she was the one who would burn. This idea pleased Lupe very much, and soon, whenever she might be, say, carving up a watermelon, she would imagine Chole not there at the washtub shelling peas, or pulling the meat off a boiled hen, but with her hands roped behind a stake. The pile of logs and twigs beneath her feet would begin to spiss and smoke; soon Chole would be screaming, writhing, sobbing, Mercy! Have mercy on me! But Lupe would watch the flames lick up her ankles, and then her calves. Chole’s skirt and apron would bloom into fire, and then it would race up the sleeves of her blouse, and then, with the most beastly stink, her braids would shrivel, her flesh sizzle . . . a smell like bacon . . .
Hee hee hee! Lupe would rinse off the knife, wipe it dry on her apron, and begin arranging her work on a platter.
“What’s so funny?” Chole would ask.
“Nothing.”
At first Lupe confessed her unclean thoughts to the priest, and in penance, said her Hail Marys. Ten Hail Marys, one hundred Hail Marys, five hundred Hail Marys . . . But the Demon insisted. Over the years, the wicked scene played out in her daydreams ever more vividly. One time Lupe imagined herself standing there before the bonfire with a pail of water. Chole’s voice squeaked through the black billows of smoke: Mercy! Lupe, I beg you, pleeee-eee-ease! Lupe dipped the wooden spoon—the spoon Chole smacked her with—into the pail of water. Lupe flicked just a teaspoonful. It landed on Chole’s blistering red thigh, zuzz! and gave off the tiniest cloud of steam.
Such were Lupe’s sweetly secret consolations, as years passed by, the one the same as the next it seemed, but when she thought back on it, ay, there had been many changes. In the Year of Our Lord 1822, Don Manuel was made Commander of Mexico City. What a splendid uniform! The house had a parade of people coming and going, dinners, entertainments, and sometimes in the dead of night important men would come to meet with Don Manuel. The servants knew they were important because, from the flatroof overlooking the street, they could see the bodyguards, shadowy in the lamplight, smoking and throwing dice on the steps. There were always a lot of military officers at the dinner table. From the kitchen the maids could hear the rumble of their voices, the sudden bursts of loud laughing, first one, then all together, To Don Manuel! and the clinking of glasses, Salud! Salud!
In the year 1828, Don Manuel was elected president. What a beautiful celebration dinner the family had—aunts, cousins, first, second, third cousins, such a lot of relatives Lupe had never seen before in this house. First there was a consommé with sherry ladled over a boiled quail egg in each bowl. There were four turkeys and two hams, and for dessert, a mousse of papaya (didn’t that give Lupe a sore shoulder!), pineapple fritters and “buttons” of egg yolk, nata, and sugar. But right away, a cabal of generals got up a revolution. From the Plaza Mayor, just a few blocks yonder, they could hear the boom of cannon and from the next alley over, crackles of rifle fire—the servants covered their ears and lay down on the floor. Later, Doña Juliana came into the kitchen to tell them, just as cool as you please, not to worry, as soon as things settled down, Don Manuel would return. Which was exactly what happened.
And in the year 1832, once again, Don Manuel was made president. Because the palace had taken so many cannonballs and been used as a jail, Doña Juliana refused to set up house there; her household stayed right where it was and, anyway, Don Manuel was president for only a few months before Santa Anna came back. And the Yankees came, and then the Yankees left. Most of the servants, all Chole’s relatives, went back to their village, San Filomeno de Cuaujimalpa. Lupe was the only one in this house who had never set foot in San Filomeno de Cuaujimalpa, and she never would.
With only Chole to share it with, the bedroom on the flat-roof seemed much colder. They would have to pluck and cook only one chicken, not four or five. One day after dinner, while he was reading the newspaper in his wing chair by the window, Don Manuel asked Lupe to bring him his shot glass of tepache. When she returned with the tray, she found her master slumped over to one side. His lips had turned blue! His pale eyes stayed wide-open with their pupils staring blackly. His spectacles lay on the carpet. Lupe did not dare touch the señor’s shoulder; she ran for the feather duster, and held it before his lips. This was how she knew: General Don Manuel Gómez Pedraza, whom the Lord had granted sixty-three years on this earth, was in peace.
For a long time the house was as quiet as a tomb.
It was only a few years later, however, that Doña Juliana let out the top floor of her house to Don Angel de Iturbide, the son of that emperor. Don Angel and his brothers had come back from the north, everyone was a-twitter, the
shoeshine boys and the watchman, and the boys who sold the newspapers and pamphlets, the broom-maker, the water-seller, the rag-picker, and the knife-sharpener, all sorts would linger near Doña Juliana’s front door for a glimpse of the prince. Don Angel de Iturbide had a barrel-chested military kind of bearing, a wonderful mustache, and he wore ruffles on his shirt-cuffs and a stovepipe hat. From the front steps to his waiting buggy (his coachman would bring it around front), he walked with long, quick strides (unless he happened, as he sometimes was, to be afflicted with the gout). Later, their spinster sister, Doña Pepa, arrived. She was stout and had so much gray in her hair that many people mistook her for their mother, the empress, Doña Ana.
But Doña Ana had died in the north. Lupe got that straight from Doña Pepa, and Lupe made sure to inform the watchman, the shoeshine boys, the broom-maker, and whomever asked, as well as many people who didn’t think to. Ay, a queen, just like her mother, Doña Pepa wore a ring with a black pearl. When she went outside, she wore butter-soft kid-leather gloves and, rain or shine, carried a coal black silk parasol.
As for Don Angel’s wife, Doña Alicia, she was a Yankee, but a decently mannered one and pretty as a doll. She had a heart-shaped face, and hair the color of clover honey that she wore somewhat loose, and the daintiest, most precious shoes. They had rounded toes, not like the shoes with buckles that Doña Juliana wore. No, not a one of the señoras in Mexico City wore shoes like Doña Alicia’s.
Don Angel and Doña Alicia wanted a cook, and so whom did Doña Juliana send upstairs?
The worm had turned!
Chole was wild with envy. And for Lupe—Doña Lupe as the vendors in the market began to call her—oh no, she wasn’t just marchantita (customer) anymore—there was no nectar sweeter than to trounce into the kitchen, for it was the same kitchen, they shared it, and in a loud voice command Chole: “Move aside, Don Angel wants his breakfast.”
Lupe was delighted to let Chole know that in the Iturbides’ upstairs apartment, where their pantries were kept, only the wine cabinet had a lock. That’s right, Lupe could eat whatever she wanted, bacon, sugared almonds, raisins, five boiled eggs for her breakfast, nobody counted.
Doña Alicia had showed Lupe how to make pies of apples, but you could make them, Doña Alicia said, with strawberries, apricots, sweet potatoes. That was something to see, when Doña Alicia turned up her sleeves and rolled out that dough herself, and sprinkled so much flour on it they both sneezed! The secret to perfect dough, Doña Alicia explained, was to work it just to the point, no further, where a little piece of it, rubbed between your fingers, feels like your earlobe. Lupe, to demonstrate this principle to Chole, gave her own earlobe a tug. And Doña Alicia had a cookery book as fat as Doña Juliana’s Bible. It had colored pictures of pies. Lupe giggled. “Yankees, that’s all they eat. Pies.”
Through all of this, Chole sat on her stool, quiet like a toad.
Chole had little to do other than make tortillas, rice pudding, and to fret boiled vegetables through a sieve. Doña Juliana’s digestion could tolerate little else. The fancy dinners were years in the past. Other than Sundays, when there was a stew to cook for the relatives who came to visit, and Tuesdays, her at-home day when she wanted a cake and such for her visitors, Doña Juliana spent her days in the wing chair by the window, knitting baby sweaters for her grandnieces and grandnephews and the orphanage. Her house was dark, and the drawing room smelled of old leather and mildew.
But upstairs, on the top floor where the Iturbides lived, the furniture was all bright, the air fresh and sweet. Don Angel wanted chunks of raw coconut with lime and chili powder, chilaquiles smothered in a tomatillo sauce so fiery it could make your nose run, and raw pineapple spears and orange sections peeled and arranged in spirals and sprinkled with toasted walnuts. They had their walls repapered in mango stripes on sunflower yellow. And Lupe helped Doña Alicia hang the new drapes, made from cloth she had brought from her country. It was as soft as deerhide. The Iturbides had brought many things from her country: a piano, and a music box with a brass bee on its handle, and a grizzly bear hide, which they used as a rug in Don Angel’s library, and, for the dining room, a wee fluted bell. Whenever it was time for Lupe to bring in the next course, or to clear the dishes, Doña Alicia would tinkle that bell.
Lupe often thought it must be sad for Doña Alicia to be so far from her country. When Doña Alicia arrived, her Spanish was no better than a child’s. Doña Alicia did learn to speak Spanish, but at first, she was always having to ask, what was a word. In the market, Doña Alicia would point.
“¿Cómo se dice?”
Chícharos, Lupe would say for the peas, or huitlacoche for the baskets heaped with corn smut. Doña Alicia scrunched her nose at that, but Doña Lupe showed her: for the Iturbides’ Sunday supper, she made Doña Juliana’s recipe for crepas de huitlacoche, and Doña Pepa said it was the best dish she had tasted in many a year. Crepas de huitlacoche was, Don Agustín Gerónimo said, the most toothsome dish in Mexico.
Don Angel said, lifting his glass of wine, “Exquisito, Lupe.”
And Doña Alicia said, “Gracias, Lupita.”
Lupe bowed her head and bent her knees a little, too, for she felt sure, if she didn’t keep her huaraches flat on the floor she would float to the ceiling! She murmured: “Para servirle, niña.”
Niña: Child, that was how older servants called their mistresses, if they were fond of them.
Chole did not call Doña Alicia “niña.” And Chole would have told Doña Alicia the wrong word, just to hear a Yankee use it, then she could laugh behind her back.
Ay, Chole was black as the inside of a goat and with a belly full of envy. Another person’s envy, Lupe believed, could make a body wither up inside. Chole wore an amulet of she-goat hair around her neck, and for troubles with a certain cousin named Mariqueta, she paid a bruja for a limpia, a cleansing with a chicken egg. But the nuns had taught Lupe that these “superstitions,” as they called them, were an invitation to the Demon. Pray to Holy Mary, Mother of God, and on your knees, that is all you need to do. They had taught her the magic words in the Divine Tongue of the Saints: Santa María, ora pro nobis . . .
Lupe did pray and with all her tiny might, and it seemed that, though it had been God’s plan that she suffer, in her new life upstairs she was becoming ever more blessed. One day, Doña Pepa said to Lupe, “What do you know about babies?” Lupe, startled, answered, “All that God wants me to.” Which is to say, nothing—but so it was settled: Lupe would be the nanny for Doña Alicia’s baby. They named him after his grandfather, the Emperor Don Agustín de Iturbide.
Lupe could not remember when she had last held a baby. Always, even in the orphanage, her place had been in the kitchen. It surprised her: he was light as a rabbit. His squeezed red face looked like an old man’s. She slipped her pinky beneath his fingers, so tiny, tiny. She had to share him with a chichimama, a wet nurse, but whenever her Agustinito needed his nappies changed, he came right back into Lupe’s arms. How she could drink in his sweet milky smell. She would wrap him in a blanket like a little tamale in its husk, but she loved to lift the edge of it and press her nose to his down-soft, golden hair.
Whenever Doña Juliana saw him, her eyes turned tender as if she were gazing upon the Holy Child Jesus himself. “Good morning, Lupita,” Doña Juliana would say warmly. She would lean over the perambulator. A wrinkled finger would emerge from the black lace mantilla to tickle his chin. “Who is this pollito, this little chick, is he Agustín, chiquitín? Is Lupita taking good care of my precious?”
“Yes, señora!” Lupe would chirp.
As he grew, Lupe’s old arms became muscled. He soon learned to stand, shakily balancing himself by holding onto her skirt, and then, holding her hand, he could toddle. Soon Lupe had to chase after him. He had a blue ball, and he was forever sending it down the stairs. This child, Atín, he called himself, all she wanted to do was hug him, sweep him up, and kiss him. How his face became a sun! She loved this little boy with eve
ry last piece of her soul, more than she had ever imagined it was possible to love. If Atín wanted to have his cheese with the tiny bacons, that’s what she made for him, and if he wanted to sing the piggy-toe song before bed, that’s what they did, and when he became fussy and sleepy, in her arms she would carry him to his crib.
But now these arms must be hacked off—for Agustinito was being sent to Chapultepec Castle, and that was how the news felt to Lupe. She knew, without it being said, an old galopina such as herself could not expect to set her huaraches in that place. No, her heart was to be ripped out, thrown to the dogs! Lupe tried to keep herself from trembling, but this susto! Her soul had been shattered. She could feel the pieces beginning to scatter, float away.
Doña Alicia said, touching her shoulder, “There’s no need to cry.”
For her tears and sobbing, Lupe could not hear what Alice saying. “Niña” Lupe said, pulling at her sleeve, “take me with you!”
“It’s impossible.” Doña Alicia had already spoken with Doña Juliana, she said. Lupe could stay right here, she had a place in the kitchen.
Under Chole? To scrub pots, to take slaps and beatings with a wooden spoon, after having been not only the cook to the Iturbide family but nanny of the grandson of Mexico’s own king! Lupe’s answer shot out of her mouth:
“I am going back to my village.”
“I understand,” Doña Alicia said. But no, Doña Alicia did not understand. Lupe had not seen San Miguel de Telapón in over sixty years. In truth, she was not sure it was a village; perhaps it had been only a ranchería, a few huts in a clearing. Aside from its name, Lupe remembered a stony pine-forested slope. She also remembered, dimly, watching chickens scratch among the shards of a bottle—from the post she was tied to by the ankle. A stooped old man would limp out back and chop wood, with a lot of noisy sighing and wheezing in between each swing of the axe. Always, she’d had a knot of hunger. At night, the howls of coyotes made her whimper. She did not know who this man was, if he was her father, or grandfather, or someone else. Even if she could find San Miguel de Telapón, perhaps not a soul would remember her. She’d heard that out in the country, the French (weren’t these the He brews who killed Our Savior?) were burning villages, torching the cornfields, stealing animals, abusing women. They shot the men they captured. The countryside was a hive for bandits and guerrillas, and who knew which was which, or which was worse?