by Lily Tuck
How lonely she is!
To compensate, she looks after me with a concentration and an attention that I still vividly remember and can almost physically feel, like a presence. She hardly ever leaves my side—only at night, while I sleep, and on her day off, Wednesday.
We live in the upscale Miraflores district of Lima, in a rented house that has a large garden surrounded by a high stone wall, topped with sharp bits of broken glass. The garden is full of tall red flowers—gladioli. I once lop off all their heads and although, initially, I lie and blame the rabbits, in the end, I confess and get a hard slap in the face from my father, then almost a stranger to me. By then, too, I am five years old and I should know better. The war nearly over, my father has only recently joined us in Lima after spending time first, in a French internment camp for German and Austrian nationals in the Loire Valley, in France, then in North Africa, in the Foreign Legion: this last move not inspired by any spirit of derring-do or romance but rather made out of desperation and to keep from being deported back to Germany—but that is another, very different story. Now, he and my mother argue a great deal. I can hear their angry voices in the bedroom.
No one knew how long the war would last.
True, in the back of the garden, next to the kitchen, there are rabbits. A cage full of them. The rabbits are unusually large and belong to the cook and she raises them to sell and to eat. She feeds them leftover food and dandelion greens. I become fond of one rabbit, a brown one, and name him Pépé. Every day, I take Pépé out of the cage and fondle and pat him. One day, of course, Pépé is gone.
The cook, the maid, the gardener, and the chauffeur always talk about thieves—how, here, in Lima, all the thieves need to do is climb over the garden walls, at night, to rob the houses of the rich. They give examples: only two weeks ago, So-and-so only two houses down, the gardener says, pointing, was robbed. All the jewelry, all the silverware was taken. Another house, one directly in back of ours, the maid joins in, while the people were out—out at a movie, for only a few hours—but when they got home, every piece of furniture, the paintings, the curtains, everything was gone. My mother and her friends talk about how unreliable the servants are and how they are certain the servants are robbing them.
I am more afraid of thieves than I am of earthquakes.
Jeanne! I call out, crying, in the middle of the night if I am having a nightmare and she comes running into my room.
Ma petite chérie is what she calls me as she takes me in her arms and rocks me until I am comforted. It is then, too, in my darkened bedroom, that she talks about her family in Brittany and describes her brothers and sisters to me.
Tell me again about Annick, I beg her.
Annick is the naughty one, Jeanne begins. One day, instead of going to the boulangerie to buy bread the way she was told to, Annick . . .
Close your eyes, Jeanne says to me.
And tell me about Daniel, I say. I don’t admit to having a crush on Daniel.
Oh, Daniel, Jeanne whispers to me, you should see him. All the girls are in love with Daniel . . .
Jeanne even kisses me, once, twice, on the cheek, before I fall asleep.
But most of the time Jeanne is strict rather than affectionate; she is a disciplinarian. Rarely do I dare disobey her. If I try to play a trick or fool her in a silly way, she is not amused. For instance, I remember how once—and looking back, this event is so out of character, I am tempted to think I have made it up—while walking in the street with her one day, I notice a dog turd lying on the ground, brown, fresh, still steaming and perfectly formed. Look, I tell Jeanne, une saucisse, and, leaning down, I stretch out my hand as if I am going to pick it up. Yanking me hard by the arm—so hard, she leaves a red mark—Jeanne says she is going to tell my mother.
Looking back, I think Jeanne is humorless.
But then what does she have to laugh about?
Those Wednesdays?
What is there for a young French nanny who speaks little Spanish to do by herself in Lima on Wednesday?
In the morning, first thing, dressed in a dark skirt, a cotton, long-sleeved blouse, sensible brown shoes, Jeanne leaves the house to go to Mass. She goes to a red stone church called La Ermita, located in the Barranco district of Lima a few miles from Miraflores, which means that she has either to take public transportation, the crowded, dirty bus, or, if the part-time chauffeur is not occupied with driving my mother or, later, my father, beg a ride from him. The church, originally a fisherman’s shrine, feels right to her. A miracle occurred there—something to do with fishermen lost at sea in the fog who see a light. The light came from the cross on the church steeple and it guided the fishermen back to the safety of land. On her knees, on the cold stone floor, surrounded by burning candles, faded flowers and the ornately decorated plaster statues of saints, Jeanne, a scarf tied around her head, her eyes closed, prays for the safety of her family back in Brittany. Such a long time since she has seen any of them, she often has a hard time trying to imagine what her brothers and sisters look like. The younger ones, especially, Jacqueline, Didier and Nicolas must have changed and grown a lot since she has last seen them. No longer children, they are teenagers—Jacqueline is sixteen now, and Didier fourteen and—do they do well in school? Are they obedient to their parents? Do they help out at home—milking the cow, feeding the chickens? And what about her father? Is there enough petrol for him to still take out the boat named after her mother—Marie-Pauline—to fish? And the others? Has Daniel married Suzanne as he hoped to? Perhaps they have a child already—Jeanne smiles to herself at the thought. Is Catherine still teaching school? She can almost hear how the little village children call out excitedly when they see her—maîtresse, maîtresse! And Annick? Has she dyed her hair red the way she always threatens she will? Again, Jeanne smiles. She also thinks about her mother Marie-Pauline, whom she loves very much. All these questions and she prays hard to soon get some answers for them. Getting up from her knees on the floor, she lights a candle for each one of them.
Then does she go to confession?
Mon père, j’ai péché . . .
What sins can Jeanne possibly have to confess?
That she lost her patience with me, when, instead of getting out, I was splashing around in the tub, the water already gone cold, and she spanked my fat little derrière?
She pretended not to understand when the cook told her to keep an eye on the water boiling for rice on the stove while she stepped outside to feed the rabbits and the water boiled over?
She let the part-time chauffeur kiss her last Wednesday on the way back from La Ermita but stopped him when he tried to touch her breasts.
Non, non, Hermano, she tells him as she pushes away his hand.
Laughing, Hermano leans past Jeanne and puts his hand against the door handle, thus forcibly, not letting her out of the car.
Un beso, Hermano demands in return for removing his hand and allowing her to open the car door.
Does it happen again the following Wednesday?
No.
It happens again in another way a month later, on a Saturday while my mother is away for a few days visiting Machu Picchu with her North American friends. My father has not yet arrived in Lima and the other servants may or may not be in the house. It is at night and I am in bed and asleep. Jeanne is sitting in the room we call the nursery, which is on the ground floor, off the kitchen; she is knitting a sweater for one of her brothers, for handsome Daniel—but Daniel, unbeknownst to her, has already been dead for quite some time from typhoid fever he contracted in a German prisoner-of-war camp; and not just he, but also her favorite sister, Catherine, who hemorrhaged to death several months ago, and, last year, Jeanne’s father, too, died—as she listens to the radio. The program is in English—it could be the BBC—and Jeanne only understands a few words: a word here like invasion or a word there like bombar
dment.
Hola! Hermano, the part-time chauffeur, says to her as he walks into the nursery.
Looking up from her knitting, Jeanne opens her mouth but does not answer him.
Hola, Jeanne! he says again and starts to laugh.
Is he drunk?
She is afraid all of a sudden.
Hermano walks over to where she is sitting listening to the radio and, bending down so that his face is directly level with hers, he makes a loud kissing sound with his lips. Then Hermano shouts something she does not understand.
Not quite true. She understands the word puta.
His breath reeks of pisco.
Jeanne holds up the knitting needles tight against her chest and, Hermano, as if he could read her mind, grabs them out of her hands and throws the needles, the ball of wool and the half-finished sweater for Daniel across the room. She hears the steel needles hit the wooden floor at the same moment that Hermano, with a backhand blow of his hand, knocks off her glasses and they, too, fall on the floor. And they break.
Poor Jeanne.
The only school I remember going to in Lima is a small private kindergarten run by an English lady that, after only a few weeks, shuts down because one of the students has contracted scarlet fever. Instead, Jeanne teaches me how to knit, how to sew and embroider. I embroider lots of doilies and half a dozen shoe bags for my mother who, in Lima, has acquired many pairs of high-heel, open-toed sandals that show off her pretty feet. (Later, my mother likes to tell the story of how she was at the movies in Lima one night, and how sitting in the theater she had taken off her shoes when all of a sudden there was an earthquake and everyone got up from their seats and ran out of the theater while she still sat there groping in the dark with her feet trying to find her shoes until the man she was at the movies with shouted at her: “Anna! Come on. Leave your shoes,” and she had had to leave off trying to find her shoes and had to run out of the theater in her bare feet. Then, the funny thing, my mother continues, is that when the earthquake was over and she and the man she was with returned to their seats in the theater, the very same seats they had before, she still could not find her shoes. She looked everywhere for them but the shoes were nowhere to be found. The shoes were gone.) All year long in Lima, my mother’s legs are tanned and she paints both her finger- and toenails red and wears a matching bright lipstick that leaves a stain on the cigarettes she smokes as she talks on the telephone, making arrangements to meet with her friends—most of them Americans. North Americans who are stationed in Lima. Her best friend is from Miami and the wife of a Panagra pilot. Like my mother, she is tall and blonde. My mother and the wife of the Panagra pilot, I hear people say, could be twin sisters. Gorgeous twin sisters! My mother’s real sister is a doctor and during all the time my mother lives in Lima, she, like Jeanne, receives no letter nor any news from her family. Only when the war is over and she returns to France does she learn that her sister is dead.
Nearly every day, my mother plays golf and bridge at the Lima Country Club. On Sunday afternoons, she watches the polo matches there. One Sunday, a few weeks after my fifth birthday and a few weeks before my father is due to arrive in Lima, because Jeanne is not well—all morning, she has been vomiting—and it is both the cook’s and maid’s day off, and, since the alternative is for my mother to stay home, she takes me to a polo match. I have to behave, she warns, and not wander off but stay next to her at all times. I have to hold her hand, she says. We watch the match standing directly on one side of the polo field, the side where the wives and friends of the players stand and where the grooms hold extra horses and equipment while, at times, no more than a few feet away, the game is being played. Horses gallop toward us, charge us, or so it seems, until, at the very last possible moment, snorting, their hooves clattering, the riders shouting, the horses stop short, wheel around, do an intricate quick dance of balance and of changing leads in midair on their slender bandaged legs, and gallop off again in another direction as their riders swing their mallets dangerously close to our heads. It is a hot day, the sun shines directly overhead, and my mother and I are wearing hats—she, a large straw hat, and I, an ugly cotton one. Once or twice, when the horses come galloping over to us, I am sprayed with flecks of sweat from their necks and, for some reason, this pleases me and I try to lick the sweat off my face with my tongue. Looking down, my mother frowns and says something I do not catch. Then she takes out a handkerchief from her purse and hands it to me but, instead of using it, I let the handkerchief drop to the ground and stand on it so my mother won’t notice. Each time, between games, when the riders ride over to where we are standing to change their horses, one of the riders, before dismounting, stops briefly and leans down to speak to my mother. The rider’s arms are dark and muscular and his teeth are very white.
Sí. Bueno. My mother answers, laughing.
After he dismounts, the rider takes off his helmet and wipes his forehead with a red kerchief, then, taking the bottle his groom hands him, he drinks a swallow from it and spits out another. I watch, shocked—spitting, I know, is forbidden—but I don’t say anything to my mother. He is wearing a green shirt and on the back of it is the number 1. Taking the reins of his new, fresh horse, a gray one this time, he mounts it with a single leap—a leap like a cat’s—and before he is settled in the saddle or has his feet in the stirrups, the horse is already turning, moving toward the field in anticipation at the same time that the rider waves his mallet at my mother.
This happens three or four times.
When the game is finished, the rider again rides over to my mother but, instead of dismounting, he reins in his horse and, pointing to me with his whip, says, La niña.
My mother starts to shake her head but I have already let go of her hand and am reaching up to pat the horse’s wet neck. Leaning down, the rider picks me up and, in one effortless motion, sets me down in front of him on the horse’s neck. The horse, sensing a foreign presence, shakes his head up and down, and the rider speaks sharply to him at the same time that he gives him a slight flick with his whip as we trot off onto the empty polo field.
Manuel! I hear my mother call out.
Manuel has his arm firmly around my waist as I bounce uncomfortably on the horse’s neck, but I don’t mind. I laugh.
Also, my cotton hat has come untied and falls to the ground and I am secretly glad that he makes no move to retrieve it.
Manuel! my mother calls out again. Already, she sounds far away.
Soon after, Hermano is arrested for drunken driving and spends a couple of nights in jail and I overhear my mother, on the phone, tell her North American friends that it serves him right because, anyway, she never quite trusted him or his driving and she hopes that this will teach him a lesson. My father arrives in Lima and, to keep busy and out of argument’s way, during the last few months of the war, he takes up golf. One day, he manages to hit a hole in one, apparently a cause for celebration, and, in accordance with the customs of the Lima Country Club, he is obliged to buy everyone in the clubhouse a glass of Johnnie Walker scotch whiskey—including one for Manuel, who happens that day to be standing, still wearing his jodhpurs and mud-caked riding boots, at the bar. When, at last, the war is over and it is time for us to go home, Jeanne, who by then is no longer able to properly button up her starched and spotless uniform—instead, she wears a loose, rough cotton housecoat she has purchased at the outdoor market located a few blocks from La Ermita—tearfully tells my mother that instead of going back to Brittany, she will stay on in Pérou, and, thus, as, years earlier, her grandparents had then thought it more than likely, she disappears.
Sure and Gentle Words
In 1911, Professor Solomon died falling out of a speeding train. Was it an accident or a suicide? Or murder? No one has ever been able to determine. Felix—for that was his Christian name, which, as everyone knows, means “happiness” in Latin—was thirty-one years old and taught
philology at the University of Bonn. His lectures on comparative linguistics were well attended and his doctoral thesis on the diachronic development in epic fiction had recently been published to much acclaim.
Felix was dark, handsome and had a roving eye. More than once, he was accused by a disapproving colleague of having had a dalliance with a female student—usually, a blonde student. In fact, one such blonde student whose name was Ursula but was known by her friends and classmates as Uli, happened to be on the train from which Felix either jumped, fell or was pushed. But Uli denied—vehemently shaking her pretty yellow head—having been aware of Professor Solomon’s presence on the train. Nein, nein, she told the authorities, she did not have the faintest idea and, of course, had she seen him, she would have right away greeted him as wasn’t he her very own professor at the university? She, Uli claimed, was on her way to visit relatives at their country estate and was sitting in her compartment—several other people were in the compartment with her and they all, no doubt, could vouch for her presence—and she was absorbed in her book. Yes, The Odyssey in, of course, Greek, for had she not just said that she was Professor Solomon’s pupil?—one of his star pupils she thought privately to herself with a certain amount of pride—when, all of sudden, the train, in the middle of nowhere, a field of some kind with cows munching contentedly in it, with a terrible shriek of brakes, came to a stop so abruptly that the book on her lap fell to the floor.