by Oscar Lewis
The piece finished and nobody had invited me to dance. There I was, wanting to dance so badly I could hardly stand it! I kept thinking I wouldn’t get to dance and pressed my arms together tighter. It was becoming very serious when a young man came over and asked my brother’s permission to dance with me. I found myself in the arms of Sergio, a boy who lived in the middle courtyard of the Casa Grande. At the touch of that young man’s arms, I felt bothered and I wasn’t able to follow his steps. My whole body trembled. I was stiff as a stick. He did his best to lead me but my feet were clumsy.
The piece was over and I thought, “What a fool! I couldn’t even move. I guess nobody will ask me to dance now.” I held on to my brother’s arm. Another piece began. It was a very fast and rhythmic tune in vogue then, “Chinito, chinito, toca la malaca,” etc. I was happy when I saw the same boy coming to ask me to dance again. The steps he took were new to me but I warmed up a little. My stiff muscles relaxed and I began to dance with spirit. All the boys watched me. I was new there. I saw some of them go over to my brother, then turn to look at me with a serious expression on their faces. At the third piece, my brother Manuel came over and took me out to dance Nereidas, the danzón. I managed to dance it with a lot of self-confidence. I relaxed my body and let the music take it. I danced eight or nine numbers with my brother and that boy.
There were dances continually after that and I fought for permission to go out, but with no luck. My father wouldn’t allow it. “No sir! Begin going to dances? Nothing doing!” I would get angry and refuse to go to bed. They would turn out the lights and I would sit there against the door frame in the dark kitchen crying, until my legs got numb. When I heard a piece I liked, what a fit I would have! It would make my head ache. But there was nothing to be done.
The fact that my father and Antonia went to her mother’s house every week made things easier for me. Roberto was almost always home at that hour, but I would sneak out to the dance. Manuel hardly ever came to the house, so I didn’t worry about him. But I had a real hatred for Roberto. He would come over while I was dancing and say, “Get home, brat.” I obeyed him because I was afraid and ashamed of making a scene in the courtyard. I was also afraid he would tell my father.
Sometimes my father didn’t go out at night and so I had to become tricky. First, I asked permission. Then I begged, cried, had tantrums. But I couldn’t get him to give his permission. One night I was sitting in the doorway of the dark kitchen, with my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands, feeling desperate. I wanted to dance so badly, I decided to sneak out. With a little effort, the wall pegs on which pails were hung could be used as a ladder to the opening in the ceiling. From there it was only a question of one step to the roof.
When I heard my father snore, I pulled over a chair with great caution, and holding my breath and carrying my shoes in my hand, I climbed up the pegs. I put on my shoes and there I was! Now, who would lend me a ladder to get down? Fortunately, Señora Yolanda appeared at that moment. I made a sign to her to keep quiet and asked for a ladder. Yolanda smiled when I came down the steps. “What are you doing, girl?”
“Shhh, be quiet, or my papá will hear us.” She took me to her house where I washed my face and combed my hair. I was ready for the dance and I wasn’t running any risk. Roberto was already asleep and so was my father.
I arrived at the dance and as usual it was full of boys. Some girls were sitting down and others standing up leaning against the wall with their arms interlocked. You could tell from their faces a mile away how much they wanted to dance. The boys of the older gang were all together in a rough circle. Some were moving their feet, some clapping their hands, while others were just watching and picking out their next partners. A group of younger boys were practicing steps. A bulb of about 100 watts lit up the spot were the phonograph was.
It was the custom to make a circle around the best dancers and clap hands to encourage them to keep on dancing. This was when the boys would cast glances and smile crookedly out of the evil thoughts in their minds. If the girl was a good dancer, those in the circle would send in another boy to show off what he could do. There really was atmosphere. Everybody tried to make himself stand out among the rest.
When I arrived at the dance, I stayed in a corner away from the light, in case my brother was around. This would give me time to get away. Besides, I didn’t like to go to the center where the best dancers were. Roberto’s friends were my partners: Hermilio, the Gorilla; Gustavo, the Night-Smell; Angel, the Dim Light, and Tomás, the Duck.
I returned by way of the roof with the same care that I had left. My father had not awakened. I did this whenever my father wouldn’t give me permission, or didn’t leave the house. But one night I began to climb up the pegs, as usual. Suddenly, I felt a smack on the legs. That whack was followed by two more. I turned around and saw my papá and I felt my blood run cold. “Get down off there, fast!” When I came down, I expected to be hit some more. But fortunately, no.
Then I had my fifteenth birthday. How many things my friend Angelica Rivera and I dreamed about! Sometimes, sitting in the courtyard, we told each other what we wanted for that day. She imagined, just as I did, the courtyard all decorated and clean, with a canopy over it in case of rain, a gate that permitted only guests to enter, and chairs all around. I saw my father and brothers in dark suits, and, above all, me in a long blue dress, with spangles to make it shine. My little sister would have a long dress, too. And finally, a small orchestra would be playing. How pretty I would look to Fermín. What a couple he and I would make as we danced the waltz, with everybody’s eyes on us—my father watching me from the table and thinking that his daughter was now a señorita. Those were the dreams Angelica and I used to have. She would always say, “God willing.” But I would say that it had to be, that my father couldn’t let that day pass by unnoticed.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t like my dreams. The day I was fifteen I didn’t even realize myself what day it was at first. I went to work; later it seemed to me that there was something I had to do that day. What a bitter taste to remember that it was my fifteenth birthday, the most important one in a girl’s life! I sat on my bench, with an apron on, my hands all stained from the shoe dye, in the dust that flew from the machine where I had been planing the soles. I was cleaning some white satin shoes. I just sat there caressing them. I felt like crying, but held back. “Some day I’ll have the money to buy the things I want. Some day my father will have to realize that I am not as bad as he says. Some day—” I finished cleaning the shoes, but when I saw the white sheen of the satin and the elegant workmanship, I couldn’t control myself any longer and went out to the toilet to cry. My soul ached to think that nobody cared about me.
I left work very late, with almost no desire to get home. I took the bus all alone. On the way I wondered why I should have such luck. Maybe I wasn’t even the daughter of my father. Maybe that was why he didn’t pay any attention to me. As I entered the tenement, I met Roberto who said, “Come on, we’re waiting for you to cut the cake.”
I brightened up and regretted all the things I had been thinking. I hurried to the house. Sure enough, there was a cake on the table, and it had an ear of corn on it made of cream. But it looked so poor to me in comparison with Antonia’s that I was at the point of feeling humiliated. Antonia, smiling, said, “Go on, there’s your cake.”
I didn’t answer. My father told me to cut it. “I don’t feel like it now. I’m tired. Put it away.” Roberto gave me a dirty look; Marta and he told me again to cut it. Roberto handed me the knife, put the little candles on it and lit them. When I saw how happy Roberto was, I relented and blew out the candles. My wish was that I should be able to study later on. The next day I went to work and who wanted ever again to think of the night before?
I was a señorita now and I didn’t want to play in the courtyard any more. It didn’t look right for me to be running about outdoors and I didn’t want to leave my father alone. Besides, Tonia and her friends almost al
ways were in the courtyard talking about things that embarrassed me. She liked to play rough games like burro, and the one night I did play, I jumped on Tonia, who was the burro, and it was the embarrassment of my life when she stood up unexpectedly and I remained hanging by one foot from her shoulder. I wanted to weep with rage, but I took it quietly and planned to get even. Several days later, Tonia and I began to argue and when she took a kick at me, I caught her foot and lifted it up so high I made her lose her balance. She fell and covered her face to hide her tears, because it had hurt her very much. She took it, too, and said nothing to my father. And so we were even.
On another occasion we were eating, and I was going to sit down. Whether intentionally or not I don’t know, but Tonia pulled the chair from under me and I fell. My soup went all over me, burning my stomach. Tonia laughed, but then from the bottom of her heart begged me to forgive her. I said nothing, just turned and looked at her with my face very serious, making everybody laugh. Later I got even when I pushed her cup quite hard just as she was bringing it to her mouth. I chipped her tooth and the edge of the cup bruised her nose. It made me laugh just as much as she had. Tonia, however, got mad. “Ay, how rough you are!” she said.
About this time Tonia ran away from home. I don’t know if she had tried to do it before or not, but Roberto had had orders to keep an eye on her wherever she went. On this particular morning, Antonia told me that we were going to the baths and that she would pay for my ticket. I noticed she was putting a lot of clothes into a bag, and asked about it. She said she was going to have them fixed. We started for the Florencia baths, which were far away, but Antonia explained that the señora who was going to fix her dresses lived around there.
The bathhouse was very crowded because it was the day of the week when prices were lowered. We had to wait in line for our compartments. I undressed in the tiny enclosed space, hung my clothes on the hook, wrapped my self in a sheet and went into the hallway to look for Tonia. She wasn’t there, nor in the shower room where lines of naked women and children were waiting their turn. The smell was bad there and children were crying, so I went into the steam room, walking carefully over the slippery floor. I had fallen several times in the bath house … Marta had too … and was afraid of being hurt again. There were only some very fat women in the steam room, and an argument was going on because one lady wanted to lower the heat and another wanted to raise it. Tonia wasn’t in the swimming pool either, so I finished bathing and dressing and waited for her in the entrance hall.
A long time passed and Tonia didn’t come for me. I got bored and asked the man in charge if he had seen her. He told me she had already gone. Angry, I ran home, thinking she had played a dirty trick on me. When I asked for Antonia, Roberto got so scared he jumped up from his chair. “No, she hasn’t come.” He immediately left his breakfast and went to look for her. She wasn’t at her mother’s house or in the streets. Roberto looked everywhere. I guess someone let my father know because he came home early. Roberto paid for his carelessness; my father hit him very hard.
It was night before they found her at the railroad station with some other women. My father dragged her home. She didn’t seem to be scared, but I was. I was afraid she would be beaten to within an inch of her life, and as a matter of fact, she was. After the beating, my father locked her into the room where Elena had died. We had been forbidden to enter that room before and the ban was all the more strict now. My father ordered her food to be brought to her. She was not to be allowed out for any reason. Sometimes, when my brothers and La Chata weren’t looking, I went to see her. I felt sorry for her. All she could do was poke her head out of the little opening above the door. She told me what had happened. “When I left the baths, I met two señoras. I told them I needed work and went with them.” What none of us knew until much later was that these women ran a house of prostitution.
That night my father had cried a lot, when he thought we were all asleep. It hurt me very much to hear him cry. I would never have given him such pain, no matter how much he shouted at me. After all, if he was mad at somebody he had to work off his anger. I wouldn’t mind if he took it out on me, so long as he didn’t get sick. Anyway, my father was right about everything. I was very foolish and inept. I wanted to wait on him always but I could never do anything well. I would just get dazed and go round and round. And it was bad that Antonia had run away, because people would look down on her. I was never going to let anyone have a bad opinion of me! How far I was then, in my imagining, from what was actually going to happen years later.
Antonia was finally permitted to come back to live with us. In spite of the fact that I would talk to her and we kidded around every once in a while, I couldn’t get to like her. She spent a lot of time with Señora Yolanda, who would tell me everything Antonia told her. Once Yolanda said, “Look after your father. Antonia has said she hates him and all of you and that she is going to make you pay for everything she suffered when she was a child.” She wanted vengeance and planned to take our father away from us by getting him to move to her mother’s house.
Yolanda also told me that when we were all out of the house (Roberto and Manuel at the glass factory where they had jobs and Marta and I at school), Antonia would do witchcraft with a neighbor, Señora Luz. Barefoot, Antonia would put the chairs up on the bed and sweep the floor very carefully with the twig broom. Then she went to Luz, who was of a different religion, Evangelist or Spiritualist, and both of them would come back to our house carrying bottles of water, herbs and flowers under their aprons. They would lock the door and stay inside for about a half-hour.
Yolanda spied on them through a hole in her door across the way, and later, pretending to be hanging clothes, went to the roof where she could see down into our kitchen. She said she saw Antonia lighting a fire in the brazier and Luz sprinkling water from the bottles onto the walls and the floor, muttering something. When the fire was going well, Luz burned the herbs and flowers. She and Antonia stood by the blaze, watching it and saying something. When the ashes were cool, Luz scattered them about the room while Antonia made her evil wish.
Yolanda said that Luz would come out soon after that, with her paraphernalia covered up, and Antonia would lock the door after her to wait for the smoke to disappear and the water to evaporate. Later she would open the door and do her housework as though nothing had happened. I do not know whether or not this was true, but it was what Yolanda told me. Afterwards, Roberto also told me that Antonia was a sorceress and I do believe this about Antonia, because she really hated us and tried to do us harm.
I am not sure it had a connection with what Antonia did, but a little later, every week for three or four months my father went to Pachuca and returned with bottles of yellowish liquid with herbs in them. Sometimes the water was green, other times white or colorless. He put the bottles in the left corner of the kitchen and gave strict orders that no one should touch them. I never saw him drink the water or sprinkle it or anything like that, and however much I remained at home, I never knew what it was for. Perhaps he was using it as medicine to counteract the work of Antonia. Only Heaven knows. I did not understand it.
After that nothing was ever right for my father. He began saying harsher things to us: “I’m fed up with you bums! I am tired of working day after day and you lying around here like pigs, just eating and sleeping!” For me these words were like blows. I felt like running away, but I couldn’t. I just would lower my head and cry. This went on daily. Roberto very often didn’t come home for days. Just Marta, Antonia, and I remained at home.
The first time I talked back to my father (not saying anything rude, just denying something) was one afternoon when he accused me of taking chickens to give to “that witch,” my aunt. I answered, “It’s not true, papá. I never take anything.” I felt a smack full in the face, and I crouched in the corner of the brazier and the dish closet. Antonia was there and I was ashamed that he treated my family like that. How different it was with her family! When Elida or Is
abel came, he would say, “Tonia, serve your sister coffee. Sit down, Elida, let’s have a talk. Here’s change for the bus.”
Then Antonia began to get sick. She had been having trouble with her novio, a boy in the Casa Grande, whom she was crazy about. He had left her for another girl because, I think, Tonia had told him she was pregnant. I say this because she became ill with a bad hemorrhage and someone later told me that she had taken some strong herbs to get rid of a baby. Tonia nearly went out of her mind when she lost her sweetheart. The doctor told my father she was the kind of girl who must have a man or else she would get sick. A little later she began to have terrible attacks.
One day I came home from work and found the house very upset. I had gotten used to seeing the house messy and sad-looking but this day it was dead! Soiled dishes and casseroles on the table and in the sink, the floor unswept, the stove very dirty. The door to the bedroom was shut and my father and brothers were sitting despondently in the dark kitchen. Chairs and things from the bedroom were piled up on the floor. I started to speak and my father shut me up. “Sh, idiot! You will wake her up!” Tonia had had her first attack, breaking and throwing things, jumping almost to the ceiling, pulling her hair, making horrible noises. She woke and did the same thing until a nurse came and injected her with something to put her to sleep. This went on for days. Then she was sent to a sanatorium, where she stayed several months.
Later, things happened as Yolanda had told me they would. When Antonia got out of the sanatorium, she and my father went to live at Lupita’s house, leaving us alone in the Casa Grande. One afternoon my father said unexpectedly, “I’m moving to Rosario Street. That’s where I’ll be. I’ll come to see you every day. Do you want to come or stay?” I said I didn’t want to go. My pride prevented me from telling him that I would go wherever he went, that I wanted to be where he was. When I saw him carrying his blue box on his shoulder and heard him say to Roberto, “Open the door,” I felt as if I were going to fall and I supported myself on a chair. When he was gone, my brother and I looked at each other. We didn’t know what to say. Roberto went into the toilet to cry and I felt a bitter liquid rise in my throat and eyes, but not a word or a sob left my lips.