How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

by Julia Alvarez

  How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

  by Julia Alvarez

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  For Bob Pack

  and, of course,

  the sisters

  Contents

  I

  Antojos

  The Kiss

  The Four Girls

  Joe

  The Rudy Elmenhurst Story

  II

  A Regular Revolution

  Daughter of Invention

  Trespass

  Snow

  Floor Show

  III

  The Blood of the Conquistadores

  The Human Body

  Still Lives

  An American Surprise

  The Drum

  Reader's Guide

  About the Author

  Preview of Julia Alvarez's latest book, A Wedding in Haiti

  Also by Julia Alvarez

  Special thanks to

  Judy Yarnall

  Shannon Ravenel

  Susan Bergholz

  Judy Liskin-Gasparro

  The National Endowment for the Arts

  Research Board at the University of Illinois

  Ingram Merrill Foundation

  Altos de Chavon

  Bill

  compañero

  through all these pages

  I

  1989-1972

  Antojos

  Yolanda

  The old aunts lounge in the white wicker armchairs, flipping open their fans, snapping them shut. Except that more of them are dressed in the greys and blacks of widowhood, the aunts seem little changed since five years ago when Yolanda was last on the Island.

  Sitting among the aunts in the less comfortable dining chairs, the cousins are flashes of color in turquoise jumpsuits and tight jersey dresses.

  The cake is on its own table, the little cousins clustered around it, arguing over who will get what slice. When their squabbles reach a certain mother-annoying level, they are called away by their nursemaids, who sit on stools at the far end of the patio, a phalanx of starched white uniforms.

  Before anyone has turned to greet her in the entryway, Yolanda sees herself as they will, shabby in a black cotton skirt and jersey top, sandals on her feet, her wild black hair held back with a hairband. Like a missionary, her cousins will say, like one of those Peace Corps girls who have let themselves go so as to do dubious good in the world.

  A maid peeks out of the pantry into the hall. She is a skinny brown woman in the black uniform of the kitchen help. Her head is covered with tiny braids coiled into rounds and pinned down with bobby pins. “Doña Carmen,” she calls to Yolanda’s hostess aunt, “there are no matches. Justo went to Doña Lucinda’s to get some.”

  “Por Dios, Iluminada,” Tía Carmen scolds, “you’ve had all day.”

  The maid stares down at the interlaced hands she holds be-fore her, a gesture that Yolanda remembers seeing illustrated in a book for Renaissance actors. These clasped hands were on a page of classic gestures. The gesture of pleading, the caption had read. Held against the breast, next to the heart, the same interlaced hands were those of a lover who pleadeth for mercy from his beloved.

  The gathering spots Yolanda. Her cousin Lucinda leads a song of greeting with an off-key chorus of little cousins. “Here she comes, Miss America!” Yolanda clasps her brow and groans melodramatically as expected. The chorus labors through the first phrase and then rushes forward with hugs, kisses, and—from a couple of the boys—fake karate kicks.

  “You look terrible,” Lucinda says. “Too thin, and the hair needs a cut. Nothing personal.” She is the cousin who has never minced her words. In her designer pantsuit and frosted, blown-out hair, Lucinda looks like a Dominican magazine model, a look that has always made Yolanda think of call girls.

  “Light the candles, light the candles!” the little cousins say, taking up a chant.

  Tia Carmen lifts her open hands to heaven, a gesture she no doubt picked up from one of her priest friends. “The girl forgot the matches.”

  “The help! Every day worse,” Tía Flor confides to Yolanda, flashing her famous smile. The cousins refer to their Tía Flor as “the politician.” She is capable of that smile no matter the circumstances. Once, the story goes, during who-knows-which revolution, a radical young uncle and his wife showed up at Tía Flor’s in the middle of the night wanting asylum. Tía Flor greeted them at the door with the smile and “How delightful of you to stop by!”

  “Let me tell you about the latest at my house,” Tía Flor goes on. “The chauffeur was driving me to my novena yesterday. Suddenly the car jerks forward and dies, right there on the street. I’m alarmed, you know, the way things are, a big car stalled in the middle of the university barrio. I say, César, what can it be! He scratches his head. I don’t know, Doña Flor. A nice man stops to help, checks it all—and says, Why, señora, you’re out of gas. Out of gas! Can you imagine?” Tia Flor shakes her head at Yolanda. “A chauffeur who can’t keep a car in gasoline! Welcome home to your little Island!” Grinning, she flips open her fan. Beautiful wild birds unfold their silver wings.

  At a proprietary yank from one of the little cousins, Yolanda lets herself be led to the cake table, festive with a lacy white tablecloth and starched party napkins. She dumb-shows surprise at the cake in the shape of the Island. “Mami thought of it,” Lucinda’s little girl explains, beaming.

  “We’re going to light candles all over,” another little cousin adds. Her face has a ghostly resemblance to one of Yolanda’s generation. This one has to be Carmencita’s daughter.

  “Not all over,” an older brother says, correcting her. “The candles are just for the big cities.”

  “All over!” Carmencita’s reincarnation insists. “Right, Mami, all over?” She addresses a woman whose aging face is less familiar to Yolanda than the child’s facsimile.

  “Carmencita!” Yolanda cries out. “I wasn’t recognizing you before.”

  “Older, not wiser.” Carmencita’s quip in English is the product of her two or three years away in boarding school in the States. Only the boys stay for college. Carmencita continues in Spanish: “We thought we’d welcome you back with an Island cake!”

  “Five candles,” Lucinda counts. “One for each year you’ve been away!”

  “Five major cities,” the little know-it-all cousin calls out.

  “No!” his sister contradicts. Their mother bends down to negotiate.

  Yolanda and her cousins and aunts sit down to await the matches. The late sun sifts through the bougainvillea trained to climb the walls of the patio, to thread across the trellis roof, to pour down magenta and purple blossoms. Tía Carmen’s patio is the gathering place for the compound. She is the widow of the head of the clan and so hers is the largest house. Through well-tended gardens beyond her patio, narrow stone paths diverge. After cake and cafecitos, the cousins will disperse down these paths to their several compound houses. There they will supervise their cooks in preparing supper for the husbands, who will troop home after Happy Hour. Once a male cousin bragged that this pre-dinner hour should be called Whore Hour. He was not reluctant to explain to Yolanda that this is the hour during which a Dominican male of a certain class stops in on his mistress on his way home to his wife.

  “Five years,” Tía Carmen says, sighing. “We’re going to have to really spoil her this time”—Tía cocks her head to imply collaboration with the other aunts and cousins—“so she doesn’t stay away so long again.”

  “It’s not good,” Tía Flor says. “You four girls get lost up there.” Smiling, she indicates the sky with her chin.

  “So how are you four girls!�
�� Lucinda asks, a wink in her eyes. Back in their adolescent days during summer visits, the four girls used to shock their Island cousins with stories of their escapades in the States.

  In halting Spanish, Yolanda reports on her sisters. When she reverts to English, she is scolded, “ien español!” The more she practices, the sooner she’ll be back into her native tongue, the aunts insist. Yes, and when she returns to the States, she’ll find herself suddenly going blank over some word in English or, like her mother, mixing up some common phrase. This time, however, Yolanda is not so sure she’ll be going back. But that is a secret.

  “Tell us now exactly what you want to do while you’re here,” says Gabriela, the beautiful young wife of Mundín, the prince of the family. With the pale skin and dramatic dark eyes of a romantic heroine, Gabriela’s face reminds Yolanda of the lover’s clutch of hands over the breast. But, Gabriela herself is refreshingly straightforward. “If you don’t have plans, believe me, you’ll end up with a lot of invitations you can’t turn down.”

  “Any little antojo, you must tell us!” Tía Carmen agrees.

  “What’s an antojo” Yolanda asks.

  See! Her aunts are right. After so many years away, she is losing her Spanish.

  “Actually it’s not an easy word to explain.” Tía Carmen ex-changes a quizzical look with the other aunts. How to put it?

  “An antojo is like a craving for something you have to eat.” Gabriela blows out her cheeks. “Calories.”

  An antojo, one of the older aunts continues, is a very old Spanish word “from before your United States was even thought of,” she adds tartly. “In fact, in the countryside, you’ll still find some campesinos using the word in the old sense. Altagracia!” she calls to one of the maids sitting at the other end of the patio. A tiny, old woman, her hair pulled back tightly in a white bun, approaches the group of women. She is asked to tell Yolanda what an antojo is. She puts her brown hands away in her uniform pockets.

  “U’té, que sabe,” Altagracia says in a small voice. You’re the one to know.

  “Come now, Altagracia,” her mistress scolds.

  The maid obeys. “In my campo we say a person has an antojo when they are taken over by un santo who wants something.” Altagracia backs away, and when not recalled, turns and heads back to her stool.

  “I’ll tell you what my santo wants after five years,” Yolanda says. “I can’t wait to eat some guavas. Maybe I can pick some when I go north in a few days.”

  “By yourself?” Tía Carmen shakes her head at the mere thought.

  “This is not the States,” Tía Flor says, with a knowing smile. “A woman just doesn’t travel alone in this country. Especially these days.”

  “She’ll be fine.” Gabriela speaks with calm authority. “Mundín will be gone if you want to borrow one of our cars.”

  “Gabi!” Lucinda rolls her eyes. “Have you lost your mind? A Volvo in the interior with the way things are!”

  Gabriela holds up her hands. “All right! All right! There’s also the Datsun.”

  “I don’t want to put anyone out,” Yolanda says. She has sat back quietly, hoping she has learned, at last, to let the mighty wave of tradition roll on through her life and break on some other female shore. She plans to bob up again after the many don’ts to do what she wants. From the corner of her eye she sees Iluminada enter with a box of matches on a small silver tray. “I’ll take a bus.”

  “A bus!” The whole group bursts out laughing. The little cousins, come forward to join the laughter, eager to be a part of the adult merriment. “Yolanda, mi amor, you have been gone long,” Lucinda teases. “Can’t you see it!?” She laughs. “Yoyo climbing into an old camioneta with all the campesinos and their fighting cocks and their goats and their pigs!”

  Giggles and head shakings.

  “I can take care of myself,” Yolanda reassures them. “But what’s this other trouble you keep mentioning?”

  “Don’t listen to them.” Gabriela waves her hand as if scaring off an annoying fly. Her fingers are long and tapered; her wedding and engagement rings have been welded together into one thick band. “It’s easier this way,” she once explained, handing the ring over to Yolanda to try on.

  “There have been some incidents lately,” Tía Carmen says in a quiet voice that does not brook contradiction. She, after all, is the reigning head of the family.

  Almost as if to prove her point, a private guard, his weapons clicking, passes by on the side of the patio open to the back gardens. He wears an army-type khaki uniform, a gun swung over his shoulder. A tall wall has surrounded the compound for as far back as Yolanda can remember, a wall she believed as a child was there to keep the sea back in case during a hurricane it rose up to the hillside the family houses were built on.

  “Things are looking ugly.” Tía Flor again smiles brightly. In the Renaissance book of acting, this grimace of a smile might be captioned, The lady is caught in a smile she cannot escape. “There’s talk, you know, of guerrillas in the mountains.”

  Gabriela crinkles her nose. “Mundín says that talk is only talk.”

  Iluminada has now crept forward to the edge of the circle to offer the matches to her mistress. In the fading light of the patio, Yolanda cannot make out the expression on the dark face.

  Tía Carmen rises to approach the cake. She begins lighting candles and laying the spent matches on the tray Iluminada holds out to her. One light for Santo Domingo, one for Santiago, one for Puerto Plata. The children plead to be allowed to light the remaining cities, but no, Tía Carmen tells them, they may blow out the candles and, of course, eat the cake. Lighting is grownup business. Once the candles are all ablaze, the cousins and aunts and children gather around and sing a rousing “Bienvenida a ti,” to the tune of “Happy Birthday.”

  Yolanda gazes at the cake. Below her blazes the route she has worked out on the map for herself, north of the city through the mountains to the coast. As the singing draws to a close, the cousins urge her to make a wish. She leans forward and shuts her eyes. There is so much she wants, it is hard to single out one wish. There have been too many stops on the road of the last twenty-nine years since her family left this island behind. She and her sisters have led such turbulent lives—so many husbands, homes, jobs, wrong turns among them. But look at her cousins, women with households and authority in their voices. Let this turn out to be my home, Yolanda wishes. She pictures the maids in their quiet, mysterious cluster at the end of the patio, Altagracia with her hands in her lap.

  By the time she opens her eyes, ready, a half dozen little substitute puffs have blown out all the candles. There is a burst of clapping. Small arguments erupt over dividing the cake’s cities: Lucinda’s two boys both want Santiago since they went gliding there last weekend; Lucinda’s girl and Carmencita’s girl both insist on the capital because that’s where they were born, but one agrees to cede the capital if she can have La Romana, where the family has a beach house. But, of course, La Romana has already been spoken for by Tía Flor’s little goddaughter, who suffers from asthma and shouldn’t be contradicted. Lucinda, whose voice is hoarse with disciplining the rowdy crew, hands Yolanda the knife. “It’s your cake, Yoyo. You decide.”

  The road up through the foothills is just wide enough for two small cars, and so at each curve, as she has been instructed, Yolanda slows and taps her horn. Just past one bad curve, a small shrine has been erected, La Virgen surrounded by three concrete crosses recently whitewashed.

  She pulls the Datsun over and enjoys her first solitary moment since her arrival. Every compound outing has been hosted by one gracious aunt or another, presenting the landscape as if it were a floor show mounted for her niece’s appreciation.

  All around her are the foothills, a dark enormous green, the sky more a brightness than a color. A breeze blows through the palms below, rustling their branches, so they whisper like voices. Here and there a braid of smoke rises up from a hillside—a campesino and his family living out their so
litary life. This is what she has been missing all these years without really knowing that she has been missing it. Standing here in the quiet, she believes she has never felt at home in the States, never.

  When she first hears it, she thinks it is her own motor she has forgotten to turn off, but the sound grows into a pained roar, as if the engine were falling apart. Yolanda makes out an undertow of men’s voices. Quickly, she gets into the car, locks the door, and pulls back onto the road, hugging her right side.

  A bus comes lurching around the curve, obscuring her view. Belching exhaust, the driver saluting or warning with a series of blasts on his horn, it is an old army bus, the official name brushed over with paint that doesn’t quite match. The passengers see her only at the last moment, and all up and down her side of the bus, men poke out of the windows, hooting and yelling, holding out bottles and beckoning to her. She speeds up and leaves them behind, the quiet, well-oiled Datsun climbing easily up the snaky highway.

  The radio is all static—like the sound of the crunching metal of a car; the faint, blurry voice on the airwaves her own, trapped inside a wreck, calling for help. In English or Spanish? she wonders. That poet she met at Lucinda’s party the night before argued that no matter how much of it one lost, in the midst of some profound emotion, one would revert to one’s mother tongue. He put Yolanda through a series of situations. What language, he asked, looking pointedly into her eyes, did she love in?

  The hills begin to plane out into a high plateau, and the road widens. Left and right, roadside stands begin appearing. Yolanda keeps an eye out for guavas. Piled high on wooden stands are fruits Yolanda hasn’t seen in years: pinkish-yellow mangoes, and tamarind pods oozing their rich sap, and small cashew fruits strung on a rope to keep them from bruising each other. Strips of meat, buzzing with flies, hang from the windows of butcher stalls. It is hard to believe the poverty the radio commentators keep talking about. There seems to be plenty here to eat—except for guavas.