by María Ospina
Zenaida’s room was big and comfortable. But it was so close to the kitchen that it sometimes filled with smells. Back when her employer’s mother used to visit, she would poke her head in and tell Zenaida to always keep her door closed. She would repeat that garlic was an aphrodisiac and terrible for a woman’s health. Zenaida made Isabela eat a clove of raw garlic every time a new worm came out. To scare off the ones that were still inside.
“Come on, kiddo. Let’s go look for Más.”
She couldn’t promise they would see the dog today. For years, Más had kept the porter of the building across the street company on every afternoon shift. But he hadn’t shown up in days. The neighborhood security guard had told the children on the block that they’d taken him to a local pound where they electrocuted all the stray dogs they caught, but Zenaida tried to convince Isabela that he’d fallen in love and was just busy. Maybe he’d come back. Isabela had begun to suspect that Zenaida was lying to protect her feelings, but she still saved the hearts and wrinkled feet from the chicken stew for Más in a container in the refrigerator, awaiting his return. Some nights she cried for him, burying her face in the pillow so no one would know.
Zenaida put on a pair of jeans and unbuttoned her pale-blue maid’s uniform to pull a sweater over her head. She couldn’t understand how the women who worked in the other houses around the neighborhood weren’t ashamed to go outside in their pastel uniforms. From the bed, Isabela fixed her eyes on the white lace bra cinched around Zenaida’s back that day.
“Let me open it, Zena. Pleeease?”
Isabela had taken to standing on tiptoe and unfastening her bra through her uniform while she was cooking or doing the wash, leaving it to float under her clothes. Accustomed to these daily rituals, Zenaida responded with stoic patience, retying and refastening the knots and clasps the girl undid over and over again.
As they left the house, Isabel reached for her hand.
“Why is it so dangerous to leave the house by itself?”
“It’s not anymore, not with the new grates they put on the windows. And since they fired the porter over in that building, the neighborhood is going to be safer, I think. He stole even worse than the others.”
As they passed the security booth on the corner, the girl bent down to perform another ritual she had recently invented. She scooped up the chewing gum the afternoon watchman had spat onto the ground when he arrived for his shift. Having spied on him from the terrace for a long time, Isabela knew that after he put on his brown security-guard uniform and combed his hair, he would get rid of the warm, saliva-drenched bubble gum and start his workday. She took advantage of any outing to retrieve the dry, secondhand gum and soften it in her mouth.
“Isabela! What are you eating now, little piggie?”
“Gum.”
Isabela concentrated all her energy on moistening the stiff purple rubber she was fervently chewing.
“It fell out of my pocket. It’s grape.”
“That’s disgusting, Isabela. Don’t pick things up from the ground like that. You know, I have a friend who ate so much junk, grass, and dirt, like you, that she got pimples all over her face. She ended up looking like an ear of corn.”
Isabela considered spitting out the slimy lump, despite her almost overwhelming urge to swallow it whole. Instead, she focused on chewing it as they walked down the cobblestone street that brought them right to the supermarket.
After paying, Zenaida approached the bagger.
“I’ll see you soon. Call me.”
Isabela watched them angrily, dying to tell them she knew everything.
“The pimples your friend got, are they like the ones that man has?”
“No, sweetie. One day I’ll tell my friend to stop by so you can see what I’m talking about. And you won’t go near that junk ever again, that’s for sure.”
“I know stuff about you two, but I won’t tell you what.”
In the afternoon, after Robby got home from school, Isabela proposed making a cake. She’d decided to stop playing naked in the backyard after her brother said it was lame. Zenaida had taught her how to make marble cake, and Isabela had gotten the idea that she could sell slices around the neighborhood one day and buy her something nice.
“No, sweetie. I just cleaned the kitchen and I don’t want you making a big mess in here.”
Robby was singing the song Isabela hated most in the world. It always made her cry. It was a simple melody about a lonely donkey that carried his load into a thick forest in search of his master. The animal desperately wanted to find him, to make him happy. His master never appeared, and the donkey got lost in the fog and the woods.
“And no one ever, never ever, saw him agaaaaaain.”
Robby held the last note for a few seconds, in the high pitch of a child just entering the sadistic phase. The donkey’s bravery tormented Isabela. She’d asked Zenaida why the donkey was alone if he was so kind. Who had loaded him with fruit just to let him get lost? Why wasn’t anyone waiting for him? Why didn’t anyone go look for him? Zenaida hadn’t been able to answer any of these questions.
“I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you.”
Zenaida had shown Isabela how to cover and uncover her ears quickly and talk in a loud voice when someone was bothering her. It was the most important piece of advice she’d ever received.
“Give me a break and don’t make her cry, will you? Come on, sweetheart, come keep me company while I get dinner ready.”
Isabela sat down at the kitchen table and started scratching the color off the fruits printed on the plastic tablecloth with a knife. Little by little, she forgot about her grievance. She told Zenaida that they were going away for the weekend and her mother had said she could invite a friend.
“So I’m going to tell her I decided to invite you. Want to come? There’s a pool. Sayyessayyessayyes.”
“I can’t, sweetheart. I have plans. Why don’t you invite someone from playgroup, or your cousin Karina?”
Isabela imagined Zenaida spending the weekend with the bagger from Olímpica and made herself shudder.
Her mother’s car announced itself with the sound of a buzzer the girl had learned to identify. Zenaida ran out to the garage. She opened the locks, removed the chain, pushed back the bar, and swung open the gate to let her pass. From the doorway, Isabela saw her mother sitting in the car, taking longer to get out than usual. She noticed the heat coming off the motor, the fan running under the hood, the smell of cement and gasoline. She waited for her to come inside, ready to tattle on Robby for the song. She wanted to say, “Tell him, Mom, tell him he can’t never sing me that song again.” But her mother stayed in the car, carefully drying her eyes so her makeup wouldn’t give her away. Until she finally got out and Isabela heard her heels clacking over as if nothing were wrong.
They ate in silence. Robby happily devoured the meat on his plate. Isabela put hers in her mouth, chewed it a little and pretended to swallow, then slipped it into her napkin, hoping to give it to some dog. When Zenaida cleared the table, she heard her employer on the phone, explaining the tears she’d been hiding.
“He was on the plane with the bomb. They released the list, and his name was on it.”
On Tuesday, Robby told Isabela that Raimundo, that friend of their mom’s who sometimes invited them to his country house where the parrots could sing love songs, had been on the airplane that blew up. Zenaida knew some of those songs too. That afternoon, Isabela helped her wax the floor, using her feet to scooch a rag across the parquet.
“Zena, have you ever had a friend die in a bomb?”
“No.”
Zenaida thought about all the explosions that must have gone off around Marcela in the mountains and almost said, “Maybe.”
Out on the terrace, Isabela broke up the lumps of dirt in her shake between her teeth. She looked for some sign of Más on the block, imagining him turning up suddenly on some corner, with his wise gaze and confident walk. She gulped do
wn the final and most prized sip of her shake to run and answer the telephone.
“Zeeeenaaaa. It’s some guy named Jairo for you.”
“Tell him I’ll be right there.”
Isabela made herself shudder. She left her ear glued to the receiver the way she’d done with all of Zenaida’s calls since Robby taught her how to spy without getting caught.
“How are you?”
“I’m okay. Every little thing sends me running to the bathroom. The worst is, I don’t even throw up. I still haven’t been able to say anything to my boss.”
“But you told your sister?”
“Yes, this morning. She said I should get ready because men always split when they get this news. Promise me you won’t disappear on us when the baby comes.”
“My love, I’ve told you a thousand times. I’ll do my part.”
On Wednesday, Isabela kept Zenaida company while she ironed, before the others got home. They watched Decisions: Real-Life Stories. A woman had a baby and decided to give it up for adoption to another woman who paid her a lot of money.
“Zena, does that baby have two moms, then?”
She explained that no, only one.
On Thursday, like she almost always did when Martica came to do her mother’s nails, Isabel spied on their conversation from the hallway, right beside the door. Martica’s brother-in-law was also on the airplane that had blown up. She’d needed to go to identify the body on the mountain where they found the wreckage.
“People started looting right away. Pocketing rings and jewelry off the dead, going through their luggage. I got to the amphitheater and went from one black bag to another, looking at all those organs and body parts, a leg here, a piece of an arm there. I started going through the bodies that were still whole, and I found my brother-in-law. Can you imagine, a woman and some guy were trying to claim him. I mean, there were lots of people there trying to grab a piece of whatever body they could, for the insurance. And so I had to fight for mine. The woman was pulling on the body, and I had to tell her, ‘No, miss, leave him alone, this body is mine so stop shaking it around.’ Imagine, me not knowing my own brother-in-law after doing his nails his whole life. I know these hands, I told the lady. They’d already stolen his wedding ring. Terrible.”
Isabela went to find Zenaida.
“Zena, what’s an amphitheater?”
She couldn’t answer the question.
That night, when Isabela called her mother in for her goodnight kiss, she wanted to ask if Zenaida could sleep with her one day in the caves she made in her room with blankets and chairs. But she held back, knowing that the answer would be no.
“Mom, Zenaida is going to have a baby.”
“Who told you that?”
“She told her boyfriend on the phone.”
“Don’t make up stories, Isabela.”
“It’s true. I think it was the guy from Olímpica who put the seed in her.”
Isabela thought of Jairo in the red shirt of his bagger’s uniform and the pin with his name spelled out on it, giving Zenaida a long, slow kiss. It grossed her out.
Zenaida came up with the glass of water she always left on her nightstand before saying good-night. Isabela looked at her belly. It was covered by the white apron she tied around her pale-blue uniform. She looked the same as always.
“See you in the morning, kiddo.”
“Zena, is your baby going to live with us?”
Isabela hid under the blankets, and when she came back out, Zenaida wasn’t there anymore to answer her question.
That was the first Friday Isabela didn’t complain about going to spend the day at her grandmother’s house. Zenaida had explained to her that repeating things and getting names mixed up was a disease old people got, that it had happened to her grandfather too. Since then, the anger she felt when she was with her grandmother, Chila, was less intense. It was wrapped in pity and fascination.
She slurped her oatmeal at breakfast, exaggerating the forbidden sounds and swooshing it around her mouth. Then she licked the milk from the bottom of the bowl to save Zenaida the trouble of washing it. For the first time, she carried her own plate to the kitchen.
“Would you like me to make you an egg?”
“No.”
From the car, she watched her mother give Zenaida money and shake her hand good-bye. She remembered an episode of Decisions they’d watched together, where a woman got pregnant by her boyfriend but he disappeared when they called him to say she was on her way to the hospital. Gone. Because most men are like that, Zenaida had answered when she asked. And she remembered Jairo’s voice on the phone. Jairo had called her my love. She trembled, trying to make herself shudder. She lay down across the back seat of the car and started picking off the pink polish Zenaida had painted on her nails. She covered her ears when she saw her standing at the window, saying good-bye as the car pulled out of the garage.
“Mom, why can’t Zenaida’s baby come live with us?”
Her mother looked at her with the stiff expression and clenched jaw that signaled the end of any conversation.
When she got home that night, she went through Zenaida’s room, opening every drawer all the way, wishing she were less certain she would find them empty. There wasn’t anything under the bed either. On the bare mattress, the caseless pillow still had that smell of lemon soap and firm skin that was always around Zenaida. Just like when Doreni had gone and there had been a little echo of her in the room for a week. Until her mom had made a bunch of phone calls and found Zenaida. Zenaida, the best one of all.
On the kitchen table, Zenaida’s notebook and the dictionary. And a phone message taken in her clumsy handwriting, which no one had corrected. Isabela carried the notebook up to the terrace and slipped it between two planters until she figured out a better hiding place, somewhere the rain couldn’t get to it. She desperately wanted one of her dirt shakes, but for the first time, she didn’t let herself.
On Saturday, as she was coming back in from the terrace, her brother sang the song about the donkey, trying to make her cry. This time, she didn’t cover her ears. She listened all the way through that drawn-out last word. Who was waiting for who in the forest? Would the lost donkey’s journey ever end? The uncertainty disturbed her. Donkeys were so pretty, and most important, they made great friends, like dogs. Noble, Zenaida had said to her once. She hadn’t heard that word before.
It was already dark, but she went back out to the terrace to drink her glass of dirt. She didn’t have to hide it from anyone now. At least, not for a few days. While the occasion arose, while the new one arrived.
SAVING YOUNG LADIES
All worldly pleasures and the finest wooing Satisfying comforts and gratifying fun; More than elsewhere you will find this with nuns, So quiet your mind and taste their pursuing.
Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, Libro de buen amor
The first time she saw them, Aurora felt an urgent need to save them. They were leaving the old mansion framed by her picture window in gray uniforms and white shirts. She had a burning desire to know if they faced their suffering with resignation or rebellion, and whether they really aspired to take their vows or if that was just what the nuns who presided over their hermetic three-story residence were hoping. Aurora wanted to believe that the girls martyred their fingers by biting their nails to the quick, that they chewed the erasers on their pencils down to little nubs, that they impatiently plotted the moment when they could shed the sweaters that bound their bodies and make their escape. But neither the dozen girls (or would it be more appropriate to call them young ladies?) walking down the street nor the sign out front that intoned “Saint Theresa Home for Women” satisfied the conviction of her faith.
Right after moving into the furnished apartment she’d rented in Teusaquillo, Aurora watched for the young ladies from her window throughout the day. But she only caught sight of a nun leaving the house one morning. At night she noticed a reddish glow through a second-floor curtain, which she gu
essed was a Sacred Heart fed by an electrical current. A flower peeked out from a pot in one of the attic windows. Madonna lilies adorned the fence around the cobblestoned front yard. The reticence of that huge English-style house only fueled her conviction that some kind of excess lay within. Aurora remembered those houses that appeared on the news in the United States, stories of women who spent years locked in a basement by sinister couples whose neighbors never caught on. She gathered later that this probably wasn’t the case but sensed that her vigilance would reveal the fleeting moments when the young ladies appeared in the doorway or looked out the window, allowing her to observe just how high they pulled up their socks and what kind of frustration, apathy, or appetites were contained in their gestures. To decode their stigmata and figure out how to cure them.
Her first two weeks of surveillance bore no fruit. Until one morning the door of the residence, glass with metal grating, opened to reveal an austere entryway presided over by a statue that must have been the mystic Saint Teresa floating atop a silvery orb. From behind a decrepit nun emerged four young ladies in uniforms made of thick fabric that fell straight from their chests to their calves in a futile attempt to conceal their flesh. They wore matching scarves. Noticing the roundness budding in their bodies, Aurora concluded that they had entered that insatiable phase when girls want to gorge themselves on everything that crosses their plates. That moment of anxious appetites not satisfied by food. When she reached that age of abstract yearnings that concentrate in and cloud the body, not long after she moved to the United States with her parents, Aurora used to scrape the bottom of her yogurt cup in desperation, ashamed of her desire for so much more when it was clear there was nothing left, sensing that her distress meant something else, something wretched and essential she couldn’t put into words. She pictured them anxiously sucking down every last crumb of their breakfast rolls, aware of the need to hide their zeal, to feign austerity in front of the others and the nuns. Did they buy a sickly sweet chocolate every now and then at the corner store? Perhaps they licked it slowly, enjoying a pleasure with no witnesses. Did they steal from the pantry? When no one was looking, did they wolf down leftovers in the kitchen? Aurora wanted to believe they did. She imagined them pulling back the shower curtain on those cold Bogotá mornings to give the next one her turn. She wanted to know if they looked at one another with desire. Or maybe envy tinged with desire? She sensed that the intimate choreographies of that house passed through the charged territory of the gaze.