Beyond the Snows of the Andes

by Beatrice Brusic

  I work for Sophia off the books but will I be able to get another job like that without getting caught? The thought of getting caught and sent back, terrifies me. I have a social security number, which will come in handy looking for another job, but what can I say about the accent I have tried so hard to get rid of? I have practiced reading aloud for hours; I have brought tapes from the library and repeated the words over and over incessantly, but the minute I open my mouth people ask me where I come from and I’m right back to where I started from.

  Aunt Clarissa, who has a lot of difficulty with the language, thinks I’m brilliant because I learned English so fast, but I’m never satisfied. I hate the way I sound. I want to fit in, I want to sound like an American born but I might as well be asking for the moon because on my deathbed the priest will be asking me where I come from before giving me last rites.

  Frustrated with myself, I join a class at Queens College called “English for the Foreign Born” but I’m forced to drop out after a few sessions. The majority of the students there sound like they just got off the boat and I feel like a genius in their company.

  “Accept your accent,” says Aunt Clarissa, laughing when I tell her the stories. “It’s part of you.”

  C hapter Ninth

  It’s Sunday and I come to Manhattan by myself to take in a movie. It’s a foreign film with Romy Schneider and I really enjoy it but and I can’t believe how far I’ve come from the girl I once was. It is in French with English subtitles and I still think she is beautiful and has one of the most expressive faces in the movies, but I’m no longer awed by her. I still love her but in a different way.

  The realization is bittersweet because I miss the feeling of passion and urgency I had about the movies. Where has that feeling gone? Have I grown up? I’m still fascinated by Marilyn however, and probably always will be. I find myself in good company. The whole world is fascinated by Marilyn, and she probably has more biographies written about her than anyone else in the planet.

  I’m full of these thoughts walking down Thirty Fourth Street when I pass by Lerner Shops, and on an impulse ask the salesgirl inside if they have any positions available. She directs me to the manager and he asks me if I have any experience. I find myself answering that I was a salesgirl in a boutique in Puerto Rico before moving to New York.

  “That explains the little accent,” he says, ushering me into his office. He is a short, stocky man with a crew cut hairstyle. “Fill up these forms and you can start tomorrow.”

  I walk out of there flying on air. He didn’t ask me for any papers and hired me on the spot; that was the answer to my troubles, from now on I would be from San Juán, Puerto Rico. I tell Aunt Clarissa what I’ve done and she laughs and laughs saying that I’m a survivor through and through, and that I should be really proud of myself. But I’m not so proud, I wish I didn’t have to lie, I wish my uncle had done things the right way and brought me here as a resident. Now I’ll have to hide and lie for the rest of my life, and that’s not a good feeling.

  They assign me to the underwear department and my job consists in arranging slips, girdles, panties and bras in neat little rows before the customers come and mess them up. It’s more money and better working conditions. In no time at all I learn to scold the customers for ruining my work of art, and they give me bemused looks, ask me where I come from, or ignore me all together. I’m entitled to two breaks and a half hour lunch, which I spend reading.

  Here too I encounter older women who have been doing this kind of work for decades sustaining themselves with thoughts of early retirement. I see them putting their feet up during breaks, rubbing their legs, complaining of cramps due to standing all day. It is painful to watch them during the big sales when customers invade the store in droves, and they have to get out of the way quickly to avoid getting run over. I see their weary, wrinkled faces and slightly bent bodies furtively moving away from their respective stations.

  Resignation and endurance is written all over their faces, it is the history of millions of workers who make the fabric of the country, who get up early every morning and perform their jobs diligently regardless of their station in life.

  Sometimes we take the subway together and the older women get shoved in by the crowds roughly, mindless of their age and frailty. Desperate to get home, crowds make no distinction whatsoever but there is acceptance and endurance in their tired eyes, and they seem to have made peace with the fact that the system is not geared towards comfort but rather towards transporting the daily masses in the fastest, most efficient manner. I understand that premise but I can’t help but feel that on the human level, a high price is paid for it too, because elderly, pregnant, sick and disabled people are offered no reverence, and everyone is pushed aside roughly in the race for coveted seats.

  ~~~

  The peace, serenity, acceptance and nurturing I enjoy with Aunt Clarissa is coming to an end. Her octogenarian mother, who is the reigning monarch of the family, is getting bored again and making noises about going back to Bolivia permanently. Her fickleness and capriciousness are legendary, and everyone in the household knows that in another six months at the most, she will be shouting about returning to America. Her limit seems to be six months; she is a truly bicoastal person who can afford the luxury of living in two different continents due to her overindulgent children.

  The thought of losing Aunt Clarissa makes me crazy and I hate her. Reina is a tyrant who throws fits and picks her face till it bleeds when her demands aren’t met. She is a short, heavy set woman with wide hips and heavy legs who has a passion for chocolate and the finer things in life. Aunt Clarissa is under the obligation to get her two bars of Milky Ways daily, and whenever she forgets or brings her the wrong kind, Reina cries like a child and throws tantrums till her exasperated daughter runs to the store to get her the right chocolates. Once she has them in her hand, Aunt Clarissa cuts them into little pieces with her knife so they won’t pull off Reina’s dentures. Sometimes she cuts them too big and Reina throws them on the floor shrieking obscenities.

  I watch her in fascination because her face turns beet red, she drools, and angry tears appear in her small, slanted eyes. She still possesses a full head of reddish curls which needs weekly maintenance at the beauty parlor, and a great wardrobe which includes stylish hats and dresses that make her look like a little doll.

  She had once been a pretty woman despite her uneven features, and it shows when she dresses up for church or to go out with her other daughter, Olga. Reina has a wide forehead, a small nose and fat cheeks which give her a porcine appearance but there’s something endearing in her when she isn’t having fits of rage. There is a huge beauty mark in the middle of her eyebrows that has hair in it and that she likes to constantly pick at it, especially when she is mad about something. Now she has decided that it’s time to go back to Bolivia and nothing will persuade her to stay.

  Aunt Clarissa’s youngest sister, Olga, who has always ruled and controlled the family with an iron fist, has ordered Aunt Clarissa and her brother to go back as soon as possible to please their mother and they will do so without delay. Reina knows how to manipulate her with tears, ailments and the weight of her years. Olga is a dark haired, tough businesswoman who is the manager of a store in Manhattan, and she has always helped her family financially. She is married and has a son who is going to college in Virginia. She is a very ambitious woman who has always been the bred winner in the family so everyone tiptoes around her, including Reina, who treats her lot better than she treats Aunt Clarissa. I know Aunt Clarissa wants to stay in New York, she likes living here, but she has to do what she is told. She tells me we will live together again when her mother tires of Bolivia, but I’m heartbroken and sense that will never happen.

  As the time approaches for her departure, Aunt Clarissa starts looking around for a place for me to live. She knows that going back to Uncle Jorge is out of the question because he doesn’t even speak to me in the street, but she has a friend, Teresa Bar
rios, who legally changed her name to “Terry Bauer,” and has talked to her about renting me a room in her house. Terry is a divorced woman who lives with her daughter, Cindy, in a big, comfortable house in Forest Hills. She is a senior paralegal for a top law firm in Manhattan and makes a lot of money. I meet the lady and she agrees to rent me a room as a favor to Aunt Clarissa, but she is cold, distant and remote, and I already know that I will be very lonely there.

  I say goodbye to Aunt Clarissa with tears in my eyes. I hate to cry in front of her but I can’t help myself. She accepts the fake diamond ring I buy her as a memento of our life together, and she tells me she will always wear it with pride. She tells me she won’t have much time to write because of her mother, but I will never be out of her thoughts. I understand, Uncle Berto never wrote me either, yet I’ve never doubted his affection for me.

  She tells me to remember that I can do anything I set my mind to, that if things get tough I should always remember I have the tools to succeed within myself. Her words bring on more tears because she had given me a lot of confidence unselfishly, and I can’t get over the huge sense of loss I feel.

  I go back to my new living quarters and try to get along with Terry and her daughter but it is a difficult task, they are both lonely, withdrawn people, and we eat our meals in awkward silence, quickly retreating to our respective rooms when the tension filled meals are over. Terry has made it a point never to speak Spanish at home, and she enunciates each word in such an exaggerated manner that her English sounds phony and affected.

  Her fourteen year old daughter is a thin, vivacious girl with enormous brown eyes, curly hair and freckles; who rolls her eyes and laughs at her behind her back, mimicking her to perfection. She doesn’t dare to do it in her presence because Terry has a mean temper and she tolerates no nonsense, her sense of propriety and self-righteousness allows no room for levity. They make a lonely pair, each focused in their own routines, each filling the void with television sets which they have in every room, including the bathroom.

  The house, with its dark, heavy drapes and old fashioned furniture, depicts their joyless, monotonous existence. White couches are covered with heavy plastics that never get pulled, and there is one big portrait of a solemn looking Terry hugging Cindy, in the center of the room. There are no pictures, plants, knick knacks, or animals in the house. She is very strict about cleaning, however, and if Cindy as much as drops a crumb on the floor, she has to pick it up right away with the small vacuum cleaner she has in the kitchen.

  I have a hard time during meals because the atmosphere is austere and suffocating with only the sound of the big clock she brought from Europe marking the minutes because Teresa has a rule that meals should be quiet and one shouldn’t have to hear about rapes, murders and other distressing news when one is dining.

  “It ruins the digestion,” she tells Cindy, whenever she complains. “And you will do as I say.”

  The more I think about it, the more I hate Reina, who robbed me of Aunt Clarissa, and wish I had choked her in her noisy sleep. The fidelity of Reina’s children confounds me. She had left them when they were small to make a new life with another man. She had disappeared for a decade while she traveled the world over with her new lover. The scandal had been huge and the children had suffered greatly because of it, but her rejected husband had never condemned her, he had simply raised his three children by himself, and when the wayward woman came back to him because her lover threw her out, Aunt Clarissa’s kind, gentle father had taken her back without rancor till death prematurely claimed him of a heart attack at fifty five years old.

  Reina loved to travel, and she would often talk to us about France and Rome with misty eyes, nostalgically recalling the happiest years of her life. Her selfishness and vitality were incredible; she loved to sing and dance, shifting her weight uncomfortably from side to side as she swayed to her favorite music. In her youth, she had loved music, wine and nightclubs, and she would often tell me that the young today didn’t know how to live.

  She hated discos and called them “antros de perdición.” [“Houses of ill repute”] I couldn’t understand how a selfish woman like her had given birth to three wonderful children, but Aunt Clarissa told me that Reina loved her children in her own way, and that her beloved father had taught her never to judge her.

  Aunt Clarissa adored her father and blessed his memory, calling him the finest, most spiritual man in the world. A deeply religious person, he had lived his life only to serve others, and I often wondered how a man like that could have been attracted to a dynamo like Reina, but Aunt Clarissa told me that it was precisely her vibrancy, her life force, he had worshipped.

  I already knew Aunt Clarissa resembled her father because her life was not her own, she was living for others, same as her father had done. During our long conversations at night, when her mother was asleep, Aunt Clarissa would talk to me about life, the choices people make, and how destiny always takes you on unexpected routes. She told me she always regretted the fact that she never had a child, something she could call her own. She had been in love a couple of times, and had enjoyed some long term relationships but for some reason they had never led to marriage and she had been left barren. I told her she would have been a wonderful mother and her eyes filled with tears.

  “That’s the regret of my life,” she said quietly. “But we lived in different times then, a single mother would have been a huge scandal.”

  I ventured to ask if she had ever been pregnant and she replied that she hadn’t, but she had practiced birth control and wasn’t even sure she could have had children.

  “You have children in a way,” I told her, affectionately. “You adopt young people like me.”

  She smiled sadly and blew me a kiss, turning off her lamp. I laid there thinking how ironic it was she had come into my life when I most needed her. Perhaps motherhood had never been meant for her but helping others along the way was, lonely and unfair as it seemed. She touched and influenced lives, and without her guidance and help, I wouldn’t have been able to leave my abusive uncle.

  ~~~

  After a couple of months at the store, I decide to get another job. I’m tired of asking people if they need help, and sick of arranging and rearranging merchandise all day long in an effort to look busy. I feel useless and unneeded here, and I’m sure I can get something better. I register with an employment agency and I’m happy to be offered a temporary assignment as a dresser for models in exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I accept on the spot feeling no qualms about leaving the security of the store for a temporary job. I have dreamed of visiting the Met when I could afford it, and now I will do it for free every day. The assignment will only last only three months but they should be the most exciting months in my life so far.

  I report to work on Monday morning, and I’m thrilled with the magnificent museum I have only read about in magazines. I already know how I will spend my lunch hour every day, admiring the famous paintings, getting acquainted with culture. I can’t believe I am going to be paid for this job and congratulate myself for leaving my boring job at the store. One cramped room, expertly hidden from the public on one side of the stage, constitutes my new working quarters, but to me it feels like a palace. I have to climb three steps to the stage and make my way to the room as inconspicuously as possible. There is a guard on duty who always teases me about becoming a model, loving to see me blush; and the music of the Supremes, which are the latest craze, happily fills the area.

  The clothes are magnificent and the models so tall and thin their bones protrude from their necks making me feel obese. I am awed by their beauty and discipline, they barely touch the food the museum sends them for free every day, and unable to pass up on good food; I end up having breakfast and lunch there. I can’t believe the variety of goodies they are offered, cheese Danishes, miniature croissants, and all kinds of delicious gourmet cheeses and cold cuts. For lunch they get hot meals, salads, eye popping steaks they merely nibble at, an
d the creamiest, most delicious pastries and ice creams I’ve ever tasted.

  The four models like me from the start, but the one that really takes me under her wing is Mindy Miller, a willowy, striking blonde with high cheeks and beautiful teeth who photographs a lot better than she looks. She has done perfume commercials on television and has appeared in tons of magazines. She isn’t the most beautiful model in the room but she is certainly the most successful, and she loves to talk, telling me all about her travels and adventures as a model.

  Mindy doesn’t like the food they send her and she frequently takes me to lunch at the main restaurant, where the elegant atmosphere of the dining room seems to be more to her liking, and where we sit close to the sparkling water fountains, listening to soft music and chatting amiably. I have to pinch myself that I’m not dreaming, that this is really happening to me, and I’m not at the factory gluing wigs or at the store arranging underwear.

  I have a window into their glamorous world now and I don’t want it to end. Mindy periodically invites me to dinner as well, and we often stop by her Park Avenue duplex where she orders take out food from her favorite restaurants, and we sit outside on her terrace with a drink at hand conversing and looking at the enthralling view of Central Park at night. I see her magazine covers in her scrap book and delight in the countless pictures she has taken with celebrities.

  I love her life and tell her she must be the happiest person in the world to be able to live in such luxury. She lowers her eyes and tells me that she has a lot of personal problems, and her life isn’t what it seems. I ask her to tell me what is missing but she says it’s very private and changes the subject. I can’t believe she spends so much time with me. She is a very interesting person who has singled me out as a friend, overlooking the fact that we belong to completely different worlds. She sends me home in a cab, and as I ride home I wonder what could be wrong in her life because at work she is always cheerful, always smiling, yet after a few drinks, she gets very pensive and her blue eyes well up with tears. Yet the next day, she is back to her jolly self again and we never discuss the incident. She sees me looking at a beautiful blue velvet gown with longing one day at the museum, and asks me if I want to try it on.