by Oscar Lewis
I couldn’t imagine, when I first took a disliking to the Casa Grande, how much more I was going to hate it and to suffer there. I thought that Elena would always be with me, but it wasn’t like that. There in the Casa Grande she died, and after her death came the disorganization of the family, the gradual hardening of my father from day to day, the growing hostility of my brothers toward me, and a series of sufferings, brought on perhaps by my own lack of character.
Before Elena died, my troubles were not so great. I felt that I had everything, my father’s love and Elena’s. Though my brothers hit me, they did not do it all the time, and besides, their blows were not always hard. I had never even minded the fact that my own real mother was not alive. For instance, when I was in the third year of school, the teacher taught us a hymn to mothers and there were grand preparations to entertain the mothers with dances, recitations, and drawings. It hurt me. At that time, for me there was nothing so sublime as father. I thought: “Mothers, mothers … why do they make so many fiestas for mothers if fathers count for so much more? My papá buys us everything and never abandoned us. They should make a celebration for fathers and then I would go out dressed up in an Indian costume or in anything else.”
But then Elena began to get sick. Later we learned that she had tuberculosis. She would stay seated for hours in the sun so that it would strike her back. Her hair in the sun looked reddish-blond. She had gotten thin and had fainting spells even though she took lots of medicines and went from one doctor to another.
My father was very worried and pampered her more and more. He had always bought her nice dresses and shoes with high heels, even a little fur jacket, and he took her wherever she wanted to go, but now he brought her presents every day.
As Elena got sicker and sicker, she took the advice of her doctors and went to the hospital for a long stay. My father was very sad. Every afternoon, now, he was a little later in getting home because he went to visit her. He would pat my head and say, “Do you miss Elena, madre? There, there, she’ll be back.” And I saw how a tear would appear. On Wednesday, La Chata’s day off, my papá would bathe us, give us our breakfast, wash our socks and have the boys do the housework.
But the house was no longer the same; little by little it began to decline. I regretted particularly that our plants were dying. My father complained a good deal about this. Sometimes I would hear him shout: “Caray! We can’t keep anything here! It’s a shame! It doesn’t seem possible that there isn’t anyone to take care of things.” La Chata kept quiet; Santitos also.
La Chata tried to keep the house clean but we children jumped on the beds and on the table and messed them up. When we had quarrels or just in fun we would grab chunks of charcoal from the carton under the sink and would throw them at each other, making black smudges on the walls and floor. La Chata grumbled and scolded us in coarse language and put us out into the courtyard. We, in turn, would complain to our father that all she served us was stale bread and potatoes with eggs. When Elena had been with us we all ate well, but La Chata hid the milk and fruit and made special dishes only for herself and for my father. She wasn’t nice to us at all but when we told my father he would shut us up.
Perhaps because he needed money to take care of Elena or because he liked to be in business, my father began to sell animals. He started out with fifty birds, which he kept in wooden cages of all sizes. My brothers cleaned the cages twice a day but in spite of that the house began to smell and to look dirty. The walls and floor were always spotted with birdfood and droppings. At first my father had only small birds, like parakeets and thrushes, but later he bought parrots, pigeons, pheasants, and once a large, ugly bird that ate only raw meat. We had turkeys and even a badger tied to the legs of our chiffonier. Almost all the wall space in the bedroom and the kitchen was hung with cages. My father got rid of the plants to make room for boxes of chickens. He put in another shelf for some very fine cocks. We children had to collect the eggs and put them in the dish closet.
When Elena finally was to come home from the hospital my father had the rooms whitewashed and bought a few plants once more. But she was still very ill and went to live in Room No. 103 in the last courtyard of the Casa Grande. With her went the dressing table, the bed and bedspread, the curtains, the flower vase, the remaining lamp shade, any many of the nicest things in the house. We were not allowed to enter Elena’s room but once in a while Santitos would open the door and let us see her from the courtyard. When she felt well, Elena would go up to the roof and I would talk to her from below and show her my sewing.
After Elena had moved into her room, Antonia, my older half-sister, arrived. I was asleep the night my father brought her. The next day I found a new face in the house. She was lying next to me in my bed. “Why don’t you greet your sister?” my father said. My brothers talked to her but not I. I didn’t say a word to her. I watched from afar. I was extremely jealous. I never before had seen my father with anybody. How was it possible that Antonia existed? But I didn’t dare ask my father and he gave me no explanation.
Several days before he brought her, my father had told us just this much: “I am going to bring your sister. She is a señorita already. She has finished the sixth grade.” At that time, the word “señorita” meant to me a young woman with long wavy hair and eyeglasses, dressed in a dark tailored suit, someone to be respected, so I was really eager to meet my sister. But when I saw her she was very different. Antonia’s face was thin and her eyes somewhat pop-eyed; her straight hair was tied with a ribbon and she wore an ordinary dress. I was partly disappointed and partly satisfied because she made me feel less discontented with my own appearance.
At first Antonia was very kind, and little by little, began to win our confidence. She fixed up the house and made it look nice again, with curtains in the doorway and flowers on the altar. But later she made the four of us suffer very much. What made me begin to hate her was the distinction my father made between her and the rest of us. He seemed to change completely.
The first sign of this came one afternoon when he arrived home angry. He came in, saw a bench in the middle of the kitchen, kicked it to one side with his foot, and shouted at me: “Stupid, imbecile! You see things and just leave them there. Get that bench out of here, quick!” For a moment I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea where to put the bench. Finally I shoved it under the sink. I was shocked. My father had never before used words like that to me. To my brothers, yes, but never directly to me.
That night I refused to eat my supper, thinking that it would bring the results it had on many other occasions. If I refused to eat, my father would lovingly talk to me and ask me what it was I wanted and would send for delicacies. This time it wasn’t that way. I went to bed without eating anything and my father paid no attention to me. He began to read the paper to Antonia. I was under the covers holding back my tears. I was ashamed to cry before this new person who was my sister.
On countless occasions the taste of tears was part of my coffee. “Stop clowning and eat,” was what my father would say. It no longer mattered to him if I cried. The first time I heard Antonia answer him back I couldn’t believe my father’s reaction in not saying anything at all about her ill-mannered behavior. In our case we didn’t even raise our eyes when he scolded us, not even Manuel, who was the oldest, while she could shout at him freely. Whenever he bought a dress for Antonia, it always had to be better quality than ours. My father almost always gave things to her to dish out. All this made me feel like I was nobody in the house.
One thing my father had strictly forbidden us to do was to touch the radio. It always had to be set for the station that he had been listening to the night before. Also, the furniture could not be moved unless he had given permission, or he would yell, “Who shifted things out of their place? Don’t I count for anything in this house? Let’s put everything back.” So when I saw Antonia turning on the radio one morning, I told her not to or my father would get angry. She paid no attention and turned it to ano
ther station. This frightened the four of us but when my father learned about it he didn’t say a word.
One day my father gave Antonia a box of Max Factor face powder which she had heard advertised on the radio. She had told him to bring a box for each of us and when I saw him come home with one box and give it to her, it hurt me. Antonia took it and said, “Look, Consuelo, you take from here too.” But I said contemptuously, “No. What do I want it for? You use it.” Tonia was offended and went out.
I was serving myself some coffee when I heard the door slam and my father suddenly stood right in front of me with an expression on his face that made me tremble from head to foot. “What did you do to Antonia?” he demanded.
“Nothing, papá,” I answered. “I just told her that I didn’t want any powder.”
“Imbecile! Stupid, nasty girl! The next time you do a thing like that, I’ll slap you in the mouth. You’ll pick up your teeth halfway across the courtyard,” he said, clenching his fists. I only lowered my head and went to sit in the doorway. That night I went to bed without eating and in the darkness I cried and lamented that Elena wasn’t living with us any more.
The continual lying to us also began. In the afternoons when my father came home, Antonia was all dressed up and they would go out. They would say that they were going to the doctor but they went to the movies. I would see my father and Tonia walking across the courtyard. She would take his arm and the two of them would walk away together. When papá went out with us he always held us tightly by the arm and when we arrived home my arm hurt. As for my brothers, he never even let them come near him. Almost always they walked in front or in back, but never next to him.
I had a bad opinion of Antonia on other counts too. She put postcards of half-naked women and follies dancers around the mirror of her dresser. We were all worried about them, even Manuel who at that time stayed away from home all day and never took an interest in what was going on there. I finally complained to my father, demanding that he take away the pictures. He didn’t say anything then but two days later the pictures were replaced by portraits of Pedro Infante and other actors which Antonia showed to her friends.
That was another thing that seemed unfair to the four of us. My father would never permit our friends to come into the house. If he ever happened to come home and find them there, he would chase them out: “Outside, little girl. Go play with your mother. It is too late for visiting now.” But he never did this to Antonia’s friends and would converse and laugh with them.
We had never noticed our birthdays or saint’s days until Tonia insisted on celebrating my father’s Saint’s Day. It was his first party and for the first time, too, we had special glasses in the house for serving “Cubas.” On Antonia’s birthday, my father bought her everything, a dress, shoes, stockings, and even a cake. We had the pleasure only of seeing the cake, because my father and Antonia would take it to her mother Lupita’s house, where they made the party and cut the cake.
Perhaps because of pride or to avoid being scolded or to hold back our tears, we never asked for a piece of the cake. But it bothered us a lot. Marta would look at it from the bed and whisper to me, “They only buy a cake for her. Let them take their dirty old cake. It isn’t even good.” I once dared ask my father who bought Antonia’s cake and he said her mother did. I didn’t believe this because Lupita had hurt her hand at the restaurant and was not working at that time.
We all wanted birthday cakes after that but my father said, “What do you think I do? Sweep up money with the broom? I have to pay for the rent, the light and food. Where am I going to get it all?” It was that way every time I asked him for something that wasn’t for school.
There was something inside me that screamed, that wept, when my requests were rejected, especially when I saw how my half-sister was humored. I thought to myself “How can you make my papacito spend so much money. Poor little thing, he works so hard! Doesn’t it hurt you?” I would go to Yolanda’s house and tell her what I was thinking. I looked for consolation from her and she would tell me to bear it, not to say anything, that my father would have to notice how unfair Antonia was. But I waited and waited and he never noticed anything. On the contrary, I felt that my father was cutting himself off more and more from the rest of us.
At first Marta didn’t seem to mind the change in my father. But later, when she was wild and wouldn’t go to school, he began to scold her and beat her with a strap. Then, she too began to blame Antonia, and to damn her. Marta’s words were music to my ears and I encouraged her. But most of the time there was a heaviness in my heart and my cheeks burned with shame when my father yelled at us and called us lazy bums.
Naturally, I asked myself a lot of questions. At night my head went round and round and I would get lost in the darkness of my room. Sometimes when I would cry, Antonia would try to console me, but I always rejected her. I wouldn’t accept her words or her caresses. “What’s wrong, Consuelo? Why are you crying? Did my father scold you?” This last question seemed so cruel to me that if I could I would have slapped her. At night when my sister would try to read us some story or the paper, I didn’t like the idea. I thought that she did it only to win over my father more, and so when she began to read, I would turn my back and make believe I was asleep.
I couldn’t understand that it was because Antonia was older that she was treated differently. I only knew that my father loved her more. I began to doubt that I was really his daughter. That is what I felt when I would see his indifference, not only toward me, but toward Marta, who used to be his pet. Now he hit her whenever he got a complaint from Antonia. He never hit me, but the words he said to me were worse than whiplashes. I never answered back. I couldn’t; the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. They only went to my head and made me want to get out of the place and not see anybody.
It was about this time that I had a nightmare which caused me to wake up sweating and crying. In it I saw my father in his faded overalls and trousers, with his sombrero on. He was beating and chasing the whole family without mercy. He hadn’t yet struck me, and I kept yelling to the rest, “Get out! Get out! Papá has gone mad! He’s going to kill us!” Everybody ran out. Chairs were knocked over, dishes broken. From the kitchen doorway I saw that my father had tied my sister Marta with a rope to the legs of the bed and was beating her with no concern for where the blows landed. He stood over her, watching the pleading look on her face, and even when she began to bleed he kept on beating her. Suddenly, one of the blows hit the brass spittoon which was always kept in the house, it overturned, and his feet got wet. I yelled at him. “Papá, papá. You’ve gone mad! Let her alone! You’re going to kill her!” But he paid no attention to me and kept on whipping her. While I was shouting I woke up. I went back to sleep, only to go on dreaming the same nightmare.
But this time in my dream my father had moved the bed and the shelf of the saints to a different wall. Manuel and Roberto were in the bedroom, Marta and I in the kitchen. One of the panels of the bedroom door was only half-closed and I looked in. I saw my father leaning over the bed, holding in his hands a heart, the heart he had torn from the body of a young painter, Otón, who lived in the same tenement. Otón was lying on the bed, face upward. I could see the cavity from which his heart had been torn. My father was holding the heart high and offering it to somebody. I had a terrible fright and awoke with the same cry that I always make when I dream. I have never been able to get rid of the sight of my father holding that bloody heart in his hands.
The day Elena died, Marta, Tonia and I were at home. My father came in and with tears in his eyes told us to go and bid her good-bye. The three of us ran to her room. On the way I kept saying to myself, “Ay, dear little God, it isn’t true, it isn’t true.” When we entered, Santitos was there holding her rosary. Elena was very pale, her lips purple, her hair spread over the pillow. Roberto was there crying; Marta and Tonia cried too. I had a big lump in my throat. Santitos took Elena’s hand and we received her benediction. Then my father
sent Marta and me home, where we cried like two lone coyotes.
At the funeral the next day we all cried, especially my father. He put his arms around me and said, “She has left us, daughter, she has left us forever.” Elena was buried under a pirú tree in the Dolores cemetery. When we arrived home my father immediately went to her room to dispose of her things. Most of them went to her mother, some were sold. Tonia followed my father and asked for Elena’s dressing table and her good coat, which he gave her. Later, I asked him for some remembrance of Elena and he gave me a little porcelain doll.
After that I began to feel horror toward my home. My father would turn out the light and make us go to bed right after supper. He would spend the evening out of the house with Tonia or would sit in the kitchen until very late. Roberto and I hated each other more and more. If he were in the courtyard, I would go into the house; if he were in the house, I would go into the courtyard. In the morning I would pray to all my saints that he would still be asleep so that he wouldn’t hit me. Sometimes I left for school without breakfast to avoid him, and I dreaded going home again.
To be sure, I was no angel. Knowing that it annoyed Roberto for the door to be open, I would open it. If he closed it, I would open it again and again, until we would fight. Roberto hated me so much that he would have killed me if he could. Once he tried to strangle me, banging my head against the headboard of the bed.
Another time, I’ll never forget as long as I live, I had my back to him as he was standing in the doorway and I felt a little breeze pass my left side. When I turned around to see what had caused it, I felt a kind of fogginess and a bitter taste in my mouth, for only a few centimeters from me, stuck in the wall, was a knife with a very sharp blade. All I could do was to turn around, look at my brother, and then continue searching for what I needed.