Miss Domicia wasn’t fond of me: she would wash my hands with boiling water; she would twist my toes when she put on my socks; when she rubbed my face with a handkerchief, she would squash my nose so hard that tears would well up. If I mention her prominently, it’s because she was the one who discovered my gift of second sight. I remember a rainy day in January as if it were today. We were not allowed to go out and play on the covered porch. From the living-room windows we watched the branches of the trees being whipped by the wind. Suddenly, in the midst of my games, I announced the arrival of Kaminsky the engineer.
Mr. Kaminsky had visited the ranch only once. His name and his height had made a vivid impression on me. With a careful pantomime I described his arrival, which occurred several hours later. Miss Domicia, her hands hard and dry, pulled the damp hair from my forehead, looked at my eyes with her spiderlike eyes, and said to me, “You scamp, you must be a witch.” What was a witch? I guessed that she was saying something awful about me. I suddenly pulled her hands away from my forehead. She insisted on brushing my hair, even as I struggled, kicking and screaming to avoid the touch of her hands. How long did the fight last? I don’t know. It seemed to me that it filled the whole of my life, that it would continue to fill it. We ended up shut in the bathroom. I had been injured. Miss Domicia wet my head and eyelids with cold water and punished me. She promised never to touch me again, a promise she kept religiously. On numerous occasions she said that it would have been better for everyone if the old woman at Las Rosas had taken care of me. She also said that my presence at the ranch bothered the adults and perverted the children. I tried not to hear her words or look at her face, a face that seemed to me like that of the devil. By mistake, a shameful mistake in my opinion, against all the teachings I had received, I imagined the devil as being female and not male (as she was dressed accordingly in illustrations, looking like a bat with a black cape instead of wings).
The old Las Rosas woman—that’s what they called Lucía Almeira because she lived at the cattle station at Las Rosas—took me in, or so they told me, the night I was born, and kept me in her house until I was three. Perhaps I’m confusing my memories with the stories I was forced to listen to. I don’t know. A room with a dirt floor: a sheepdog and five chickens and their chicks were lodged with me at Lucía Almeira’s house.
Lucía was thin, wrinkled, and dark. I never saw her sitting down. She was constantly moving from one side of the room to the other. She was so poor that her shoes had no soles. Why had she taken me in? How did she feed me? No one ever found out. Some people said that she planned to raise me to join the circus in town; others said that she loved children madly and that by taking me in she was realizing one of her dreams. In her hands, wrinkled and black, I remember the bits of bread she gave me; I also remember the straw mat with which she covered the open window to help me sleep, and the flatness of her chest where I could hear her heart beating.
Those silent days, days in which my memory barely glimpses a few tiny details of the world around, Lucía Almeira took zealous care of me—everything I’ve gathered agrees on this point. She took me to the Rivases’ three times a week when she went to do the washing. While she washed, I would play with torn old rags, pinecones, cats (until one of them gave me an awful scratch). Playing with the children in the house, I learned to walk. They got so used to seeing me that at nightfall, when Lucía said goodbye and picked me up to take me home, some of them would cry.
Lucía Almeira consented to my spending one night, on Christmas Eve, at the Rivases’. She allowed me to do so again on later occasions when the other children begged her. Little by little she grew used to what had once seemed impossible for her: letting me go. Perhaps the illness that was later to cause her death had so weakened her that it took away her desire to keep me and take care of me as if I were her daughter. Perhaps Esperanza’s enthusiasm for me made her jealous. Once, she didn’t come for me. After a long consultation, Mr. Ildefonso convinced her it was better to let me stay on forever at the ranch.
Esperanza liked my company. Mr. Ildefonso thought my stay at the house would make his daughter forget the puppy that she never parted from. Instead of playing with the dog, Esperanza would play with me.
Esperanza forgot the dog, and I forgot Lucía.
I don’t remember when I came to that yellow house. I feel as if I’ve always known it. Esperanza showed me its most secret corners: the attic and the mouse room, which is what we called a sort of dark cell where empty bottles and sacks were piled. The house had an enclosed courtyard and a cistern, a corridor with blue flagstones, and Gothic arches over the front door, a door decorated with panes of glass with white designs like lacework. The trees that surrounded it, mostly eucalyptus and Australian pines, were very tall and tangled.
Esperanza and I were the same height and the same age. When we ran races she always beat me, because she managed to cheat in some quick, tricky way. When we climbed trees she would insist that the highest branch I reached was much lower than hers, even when mine was much higher than hers.
Esperanza’s arms were covered with freckles. She was cheerful and bright; when she shouted, the veins in her neck would stand out and she would turn very red. She liked scratching. The marks of her fingernails were etched in my skin in purple lines that would last for days. Many times I thought she belonged to the cat family, and that that was why her favorite dog was so overjoyed when it was rid of her. I never could love her. I liked boys, no matter how boorish and unpleasant; they seemed superior to girls to me.
My bedroom was located in the wing of the house that faced the front. I slept with a nursemaid, Elsa, who would wake me up to ask if I had remembered to recite the Lord’s Prayer. She took care of me only at night.
Across from my door, on the other side of the courtyard, was the boys’ room. Before they went to bed, they would try to scare us by banging on our windowpanes and imitating the hoots of owls. I often cried for fear, while Elsa stood before the mirror slathering her face with cold cream and curling her hair around slips of paper. Often I buried my tears in the pillow as I watched her close the shutters, after opening them just slightly to peer out.
For me, the stormy nights were the only calm ones. It seemed to me that the house, like Noah’s ark, was floating on water, and that nobody would come to trouble the sleep of a crew composed of evil men and good animals. I had forgiven the cat for her scratches, but I could never forgive Esperanza or Miss Domicia for their evil and devious deeds.
Ever since the day I had announced Mr. Kaminsky’s arrival, some people started treating me with respect. Soon I began predicting the weather, announcing early in the morning whether or not letters would arrive that day, whether the rabbits would die. One day, when Mr. Ildefonso was leaving for market, he asked me if his calves would sell for a good price. Without a moment’s hesitation, I gave an answer that later turned out to be the truth.
Mr. Ildefonso was stocky, his hair thick and black, and his green eyes would shine with extraordinary brightness; he wore a reddish straw hat with a leather strap and the top of which was full of little holes. He spoke in an emphatic way, pronouncing the last syllables of each word as if they were a threat. He always wore a handkerchief knotted around his neck and a tiepin with a little pearl set in gold. Everything about him indicated an orderly, neat, domineering person. I often heard people talking about him in respectful terms, terms much more respectful than those I heard applied to his wife, Celina, whose ill-apportioned acts of charity earned her some of the local people’s lasting resentment. Mrs. Celina seemed distant to me, like a portrait. Her precarious health forced her to get up late, to go out only briefly with a parasol, to take long naps, and to go to bed early. She always dressed in long white skirts, and looked very tall. Sometimes she covered the upper part of her face with a blue veil; on those occasions, her mouth, with its sweet smile, would receive all of my attention. Mrs. Celina allowed me to approach her without fear. She always wore gray gloves and took them off
only to close her parasol. After closing the parasol, she would straighten her ring so that the blue stone would show, then she would pass her bare hands over her forehead, as if the hands or the forehead were not her own. She would absentmindedly kiss her children one by one, and me, too, not without some feeling of aversion. Horacio, who was always the last one, would merit the longest, quietest kiss. I never knew whether that pause was intentionally directed to Horacio or whether it was part of an absentmindedness that automatically turned the last kiss into the longest one. Motionless, I always watched that kiss, a gesture that remained deeply engraved on my memory. It seemed to me that a secret form of voluptuousness always presided over such moments: it was a morning of sunshine and ripe fruit, an evening when the grass was covered with dew.
Celina Rosas incarnated all the virtues of sweetness and refinement for me. Her room, where the blinds were almost always shut, was a sort of altar forbidden to the rest of us mortals. When I passed the sometimes half-open door, I used to glimpse the floral patterns of the curtains and the mysterious bronze bed where she slept. I thought her life wasn’t in contact with other lives.
Esperanza and I ate in the pantry; Juan Alberto, Luis, and Horacio ate in the dining room. After meals, while they were serving the coffee, we would play cops and robbers, London Bridge, and tag.
During one of those lazy periods after dinner, while Mr. Ildefonso was smoking his cigar and Mrs. Celina was looking vacantly out of the window, with one cheek resting on her hand, a scene revealed the falseness of the calm that ruled over that house.
Mrs. Celina’s absence didn’t seem to sadden Horacio. It surprised me that those long kisses in the morning and evening had not left a greater mark on his heart. Horacio, with his penknife and his dog Dardo, was in the habit of going on outings in the morning. He would barely glance at me, and if he did so it was to demand something of me or scold me for something. His attitude, rather similar to that of Juan Alberto and Esperanza, didn’t offend me to the same extent. I admired him. After many subterfuges I managed to dress in a way that brought me luck. The clothing consisted of some short, baggy trousers of the kind the gauchos wear, a linen shirt, and some rubber boots I’d been given. One day, during Carnival, feeling the need to dress up, I put on that male clothing, which stood out more than Esperanza’s disguise as a gardener. Horacio began treating me as if I were one of his male friends. To treat me as one of his friends was at times to mistreat me badly. He would often invite me to go horseback riding. When he needed to pee, he would do so right in front of me, without hiding at all, while we watched the lines of ants going by. We had conversations we would never have dared to have in front of other people. Two or three times we went swimming in the round metal tank without telling anyone. To seem manlier I stripped to the waist. At naptime, in the afternoon, I would escape to his room to tell him and his brothers about the conversations I had overheard in the kitchen and to describe to them what Elsa did at night by the mirror before going to bed. I never thought that my intimacy with Horacio would prove so costly to me.
Juan Alberto said that dogs were like people: when one was harmed, all the others would pounce on him to finish him off. Luis said that dogs were much better than people, but that people were like monkeys imitating one another. Horacio said that each person resembles some animal, or that each animal ends up looking like a person, and that it was ridiculous to compare monkeys and dogs. Miss Domicia resembled a camel; Elsa, a rabbit; Mr. Ildefonso, in profile, a buffalo; Kaminsky the engineer, a donkey. Esperanza became indignant and, after some protests regarding her parents, said that men all resembled owls because they hissed at people at night to silence them. I said the only thing I could think of, that men were like cicadas, but I couldn’t explain why. Then, when nobody heard me, in the middle of all the shouting, I said that they resembled cicadas because they were so noisy.
The boredom I felt when I was with Esperanza made the time seem longer. I often felt that I was about to faint when Mlle. Gabrielle would take us to her favorite place under the trees to give us our lessons. There, in the shade of a linden tree, she would open a knitting bag and take out balls of yarn, pieces of fabric, cookies and thread, a broken book. Everybody knew that Mlle. Gabrielle was untidy: wherever she went she left behind bits of thread, fabric, wool, cookie crumbs. When she scolded us for dropping something she would blush, feeling she had no right to demand of others what she failed to do herself. She was good, blond, pale, and had a mustache. She taught me to read; she taught me some rudiments of French and mathematics; she also taught me some fables, which she forced me to recite for Mrs. Celina’s birthday.
Mlle. Gabrielle made us take turns reading aloud from a book she herself had illustrated. The days I had to endure these readings were unlucky ones for me. Some disaster always happened, the direct product of my ill humor or disaccord. One such day I intentionally destroyed the diary of Juan Alberto, who thought of himself as an adult, someone worthy of respect, simply because he had a diary. In the tiny pages I had read the ridiculous notes: January 22nd, I bought five packs of cigarettes and a tennis racket; January 23rd, had a shot of rum; January 24th, Luisita looked at me when I went past her door; January 25th, having a tooth pulled is horrible.
When he found out I had destroyed his diary he didn’t say anything, but I guessed his intentions by looking in the depths of his eyes: he intended to wait for the right moment and then take his revenge in some nasty way. All day long I tried to be friendly to him, to agree with him about everything, but I knew that whatever I did to avoid his vengeance would only help bring it about.
Juan Alberto was eleven years old. I think boys are the crudest at that age; girls start much earlier, at eight or nine, an age I hadn’t reached yet.
We awaited the arrival of Mrs. Celina. A telegram had announced her coming. I had not dared to say that she would return, something I had foreseen long before the telegram arrived. They began waxing the floors early in the morning. Mlle. Gabrielle, Esperanza, and I went to get flowers and peaches from the orchard. We put the peaches on a blue porcelain plate and the prettiest flowers in a crystal dish. We took advantage of the occasion to eat peaches, nuts, and two or three squares of chocolate, the kind that Mlle. Gabrielle had ordered several bars of to make the desserts that were such a success.
Those exceptional days, when one could eat at times other than regular meal hours, you might have thought I was crazy about any kind of food; it seemed as if food contained something that made me drunk, since when I ate I started laughing without being able to stop, with a high nervous laughter. The joy of seeing Mrs. Celina again manifested itself in numerous acts of absentmindedness, in the plates of food, and in the flowers that Mlle. Gabrielle picked.
To anyone who was willing to listen I described a doll I had imagined, with brown curls, blue eyes, a straw hat, and a light blue organdy dress. It said “Mommy” and “Daddy” over and over.
At siesta time I took advantage of the state of confusion that filled the house to escape with Horacio. Without our hats on, we walked beneath the afternoon sun toward the round metal tank where we were planning to swim. Horacio took off his sandals, his trousers, and his shirt; I had also stripped, but still had on my sandals and a handkerchief that I knotted around my head like a hair band. We climbed up on the corrugated metal to enjoy the dirty water before diving in; all of a sudden Horacio said he saw a snake and said that he would kill it. He jumped down to the ground, and I let myself fall down after him. The snake glided away and disappeared in the weeds. We searched for it on our knees. For some time Horacio had been looking for a coral snake to capture in a bottle: the one that afternoon was the first coral snake he had ever seen, besides those illustrations he had admired in books. We peed, I squatting down on a slope and Horacio standing next to me; then, squatting in the grass, in the same posture that Horacio said attracted reptiles, we waited to capture the snake. Suddenly, we heard a voice above us, “Here they are.” We turned around. There was Juan Alberto
, and a little farther off under a black umbrella was Miss Domicia. Motionless, without realizing what was happening, we looked at each other. Juan Alberto pointed at us and said, “They’re always up to the same thing.” Miss Domicia, whose face was hidden by the fabric of the umbrella, gave a sort of grunt and turned around, telling Juan Alberto to follow her. The solitude and the heat embraced us once more. Horacio shrugged and went back to looking for the snake. I got dressed, watching the dark threatening clouds in the sky. Without speaking to Horacio, I went running to the house; I went to my room and threw myself on the bed. I was unable to think about the doll!
Thus Were Their Faces Page 28