How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Page 20
“I thought I heard them here, Doña,” Florentino, the gardener, was saying. “I’ve told them to stay out. They could hurt themselves. But they won’t listen to me!” Liar, I thought. Mundín and I had shown him the magazine we’d found, and he’d sworn us to secrecy and said he would dispose of “that trash” himself. But it was always an uneasy look he gave us whenever he was summoned by an adult in the family.
My aunt stepped towards us; her broad shoulders gave her an official appearance, as if she were wearing epaulettes, and representing all our parents. “Fifi?” she called in a shocked voice at the sight of one of the family darlings. Then, with more conviction, she pronounced my name. She was the favorite of our aunts; I’d never seen her this annoyed. “What in heaven’s name are you girls doing here?”
Instantly, Fifi began to cry, so that right away, my aunt’s suspicions were confirmed: I had dragged my little sister against her will to this dirty place. My aunt’s scolding was now ad-dressed solely to me. “What are you—”
Just then, the door swung open, and my cousin popped in, the doll held aloft as if it were a trophy he’d won. It was painful to watch the transformation on my cousin’s face—from his usual cocky leer to a scared, crumpled, helpless look.
“Edmundo Alejandro!” Tia Carmen reached out and gave his arm a shake. The Human Body dropped from his hands, snapped open, and the innards scattered all over the dirt floor. My aunt teetered on the pieces as she dragged Mundín by the arm towards the door. “What are you doing here, young man?” she yelled.
“We were hiding,” I piped up in his defense, having had moments to collect my thoughts. Mundín’s eyes blinked with surprise and hope that there might still be a way out of our fix. “The guardia—” I began. I knew that in our family the least mention of the guardia got instant, unmitigated attention. I must have sensed the timing was right, for my grandparents had just returned from their trip, and the dictator’s raids would begin.
My aunt dropped my cousin’s arm. “!Guardia¡” she asked in a little voice. “The guardia were here?”
I nodded. “That’s why we hid.”
My aunt looked over at Florentino. The gardener was on his knees, picking up the little pieces of The Human Body. He looked up at me, his eyes boring a hole in my face as if he were trying to figure out what I was up to. Maybe he remembered the magazine, for he cast his lot on our side. “Those guardias,” he said, then cursed them, “they’ve tramped through the ginger hedge so many times, Senorita Mimí has given up on it.”
Smiling feebly, Mundín stood silent just when I needed him to bring in the cavalry and rescue my besieged story. His mother knew him well and sensed we were up to no good, but the guardia on the property meant no diddling with minor in-fractions: it was everybody to their houses, bureau tops cleaned off, portable objects battened down. My aunt ushered us out of that coal shed towards the big house.
We walked back in a quick single-file, my cousin leading, his mother right behind him so she “could keep a close eye” on him, then Fifi, then me, and finally, Florentino bringing up the rear. In each of his big worn hands, he carried the transparent halves of the cracked-open Human Body. We couldn’t spare the time now, my aunt said, to find all the little pieces in the dark. Later, when Florentino brought what he had retrieved to the big house in the hollow of his hat, most of the organs had been chewed out of shape by the dogs or bent by my aunt’s stepping on them. We couldn’t tell the blue kidneys from bits of lung or the heart from a pink lobe of brain, and though Mundín and I tried using the diagram, there was no puzzling the whole back inside the little man.
Still Lives
Sandi
Doña Charito took the lot of us native children in hand Saturday mornings nine to twelve to put Art into us like Jesus into the heathen. She was an Islander only by her marriage to Don José. She herself was cultured and from some place over in Germany and had been to the grand museums of Europe to look Art in the face. She had touched with the hand she held up to us the cool limbs of the marble boys, and those short blunt fingers had been shot through with artistic talent. There was no arguing with Doña Charito over the color of the vermilion coral in the umber depths of the aquamarine oceans. She grappled the brush from your hand and showed you how, all the while barking instructions in her guttural Spanish, which made you feel that you were mispronouncing your native tongue because you did not speak it with her heavy German accent.
She had met Don José in Madrid during a tour of the Prado. The young man was abroad on a medical school scholarship, although he had no intention of becoming a doctor. Every year, the government awarded European scholarships, each one earmarked for a certain needed profession, and if you won one and were poor, you accepted for the chance to eat three meals a day, one of them hot. Between meals, Don José sketched rather than dissected the cadavers and caught up on his sleep on a bench below a Gauguin and alongside several Van Goghs in the Prado. His lodging stipend Don José spent on art supplies.
Three years of sleeping with sunflowers and starbursts and Tahitian maidens had done what a decade of Academy training could not do. Don José came into his own: “a high rococoprimitivist church-sculpture style,” our Island art critic later proclaimed it. Great brown angels with halos of hibiscus blossoms descended from heaven, pulled down by their enormous gourd breasts and ripe honeydew bottoms. Don José also came upon Doña Charito one late afternoon in the Prado as she was copying the garment folds on a Grünewald martyr. He was impressed with her big white slab of a body like an unfinished sculpture. She with his quick sketch of her as Madonna ascending in folds upon modest folds of garments. They married and returned to his island home where there wasn’t anything to do—Doña Charito griped in her gutturals—but get one’s work done.
On the outskirts of the capital they built a storybook cottage, two stories, fretted with eaves and little porches and window boxes, an incongruous Alpine look in the tropics. There they lived for over twenty years out of the swing of Island social life. They would have been totally ignored, in fact, had it not been for their strange house, which parents took their children to see on Sunday afternoon drives in the countryside. “There’s the Hansel and Gretel house.” If the curtains were drawn back and a figure peered out of one of the innumerable little windows like an eyeball trying to find a fitting socket, the children wailed, “The witch, the witch, there she is!”
You can imagine my amazement, then, when one Saturday morning of my eighth year, I was deposited on the doorstep of that house in the company, fortunately, of thirteen of my cousins for our first art lesson. It was really my doing, or rather my drawings, that had brought us to this brink. Up to this point, I had been an anonymous de la Torre child, second daughter to a second daughter of my grandparents, Don Edmundo Antonio de la Torre and Doña Yolanda Laura Maria Rochet de la Torre. I was born to die one of the innumerable, handsome de la Torre girls, singled out only when some aunt or other would take hold of my face in her hand and look intently at it, exclaiming that my eyes were those of my great-aunt Graciela, that my mouth was Mamita’s exactly! So, you see, even these minor distinctions felt like petty theft. Whatever I, Sandra Isabel Garcia de la Torre, was, personally, was as a dolly on wheels to roll that illustrious de la Torre name from social gathering to social gathering. But then, one Epiphany, boxes of crayons and tablets of paper were distributed among the children, and it was discovered that some small, anonymous hand was capable of capturing likenesses, dotting vision into eyes and curling hair upon a head so you ached to touch it.
“Who drew that baby? Whose cat is that?” they marveled. The artist was discovered at the bottom of the yard drawing the nursemaid Milagros’s boy with a brown and a gold and a purple crayon. “Gifted” descended upon my hitherto unremarkable shoulders like a coat of many colors.
A few days after my gift was discovered, Milagros cast me a worried look at dinner. She made a pretext of cutting up my meat, and as she cut, she whispered in bite-sized phrases: “P
lease … Senorita … Sandi … you must … come to … my house.” After the meal, I snuck out to the forbidden part of the property where the servants’ families lived in their little shanty shacks. Her boy lay moaning on a cot. Holy candles flickered on a shelf. Milagros had soaked the child in holy water after taking him to high mass at the Cathedral, but still he was feverish and wailed, as if he were mourning his own death before going.
“Please, please, Señorita Sandi, you must release him,” Milagros pleaded, taking my drawing off the wall where she’d hung it beside a crucifix.
I stared at the little brown crayon face in my hand, then crumpled it up. The baby tossed. I put the scrap in her little cooking-stove, and then Milagros and I watched it catch and curl into yellow flames that looked like orange pencil-shavings.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” she murmured and thumped her breasts. The smoke made Baby cough. He looked up at me with glazed spirit eyes. By breakfast the next morning, Milagros gave me the nod. Her baby was cured.
I had less luck with my cats. I drew them on the front wall of our white house and was put to scrubbing the stucco for hours, then fed punishment supper—a small waterbread, the cleavage unbuttered, and a tall glass of warm milk, green from the vegetables pureed and blended in it. Afterwards, I was sent to bed early to contemplate my bad character. That night, the pantry and supply closet were overrun with rats. That settled it. The family decided they had to get me trained in art.
Phone calls were made. Did anyone know of someone who gave art lessons? Doña Charito’s name came up. The German lady, who lived in the two-story chalet at the edge of town. Don José’s wife, that poor woman. No one had seen or heard of him for a while now. Several years back, he had been commissioned to sculpt the statues for the new National Cathedral, but the dedication had taken place in an empty church. There were rumors. Don José had gone crazy and been unable to finish this colossal project. His wife was having to take in students in order to pay the bills.
As I understand it, at first Doña Charito was insulted at the de la Torre request: she was an artiste; she took on apprentices, not children. But paid in advance in American dollars, she made an exception in our case, our case in the plural be-cause the great female democracy of our blue blood dictated that all the de la Torre girls be given equal decorative skills. So, whichever of the girl cousins could control their bladders for several hours and would not try to drink the turpentine were enrolled in Saturday art lessons.
We were fourteen all told that first Saturday when we approached that house, nervously plucking at the gravel in the driveway, trying to tear off the door knob to see if it wasn’t a chocolate almond. But we ended up with nothing but the taste of real things on our tongues. Then, Milagros discovered a rope dangling down, she gave it a tug, and a little cowbell jingled above our heads. We all gave it a try.
The bell had rung over a dozen times, and I was going up on my toes for a second turn when the door flew open with such force, the bell jangled all by itself. Before us stood a mountain of a woman who looked even more imposing because of the brightly-colored Hawaiian shift she wore. Exotic crimson flowers and birds poked their pistils and stamens and bills every which way up and down her torso. Her face was a pile of white cloud afire with red hair. She looked like something a child who had not taken art lessons might draw.
“Roodness, roodness.” She growled the words out. “You!” She pointed at me. “You are the culpable one!”
I nodded and curtsied. We all curtsied. But it was more like genuflecting in her presence. Quickly, Milagros introduced us, handed Doña Charito a note, and fled back to one of the three black cars idling in the driveway like great, nervous, snorting horses. With a pelting of pebbles, they disappeared down the drive, and we children were left alone with Doña Charito to learn “the roodiments of art.”
She opened the note in her hand, sighing with great impatience at its folds. We waited quietly while she read, and our intake of breath when she at last lifted her head made her gag with laughter. There were spaces between all her teeth; nothing dared block that woman’s way even when she was smiling. “Ya, ya,” she said in a soothing voice. “I am good-hearted for all this.” She waved a hand over our heads, indicating the world, it seemed like to me.
“Now which of you is the little talent?” She pronounced a name. She repeated it several times before I raised my hand warily. “Ha! I might have guessed so.” She smiled, or rather her mouth hooked up slightly at the corners. It was more as if she were casting for a smile than that she had caught one.
“Enter, enter,” she said, suddenly out of sorts, “after removing the shoes, of course.” Of course, we removed and entered. I hoped it was the crust of mud on my shoes which made her glare at me as I passed by her.
Our visit began with a tour of the house, which was more like a museum than a house. Doña Charito’s collected works hung on the walls: mostly pitchers and bowls of fruit, and violins or guitars, I couldn’t tell the difference, for we hadn’t had music lessons yet. There were two or three stampeding stallions, manes flaring, next to stormy seashores in her bed-room. But that was that, no tarantulas, no mangos, no lizards, no spirits, no flesh-and-blood people.
When we had finally gone through the whole house, the older cousins, who were more experienced in lying, said how much they’d enjoyed the paintings. The rest of us nodded.
“Goot! Goot!” Again, she laughed. I ached for the lesson to begin so I could draw and color in those ivory teeth with the purple muscle of the tongue showing between like some fat beast caged inside her mouth. But instead, she shepherded us out to an open patio at the center of the house. We were invited to sit down, but there were only two chairs, and none of us dared presume a seat.
A very old woman, whose face was so wrinkled it looked as if it’d been used as a scratch pad, came around with a tray of warm, sour lemonade, no ice, and all the sugar at the bottom, and no spoons to stir it with. We drank and winced and waited for the lesson to begin. But Doña Charito had disappeared into her kitchen, where we could hear her barking orders to the old woman—about how best to prepare us, I was sure. We girls eyed each other, suddenly aware we were frail flesh, fourteen mouthfuls crowding Doña Charito’s patio and drinking up her lemonade.
Finally, Doña Charito marched us into her studio. It was a big, light room in a wing of the house, all the windows thrown open to air out the heavy oil and turpentine smells. Cane chairs had been arranged in rows, drawing boards on each seat, a crate between every two chairs with a big jar of clear water and several ripped-up pieces of old toweling on top. (This must have been the “some supplies included” of the agreement.)
“Find yourself an accommodation,” Doña Charito ordered. There was a scramble for chairs in the back rows, but I was not one of the lucky ones. I had hung back at the entrance, cagily I thought, waiting to see what would happen to the others be-fore I followed. I ended up the one in the front seat right under Doña Charito’s cavernous cobalt-blue nostrils.
The lesson began with physical exercise. “Mens sana in corpore sano,” Doña Charito proclaimed. “Amen,” we girls chanted, for the sound of Latin cued us for liturgical response. Doña Charito scowled.
“One, two. One, two. One, two,” she commanded. We executed jumping jacks. We touched toes. We flexed our fingers “for the circulation” and worked ourselves into quite a state of calisthenic frenzy.
At last, the actual art lesson began. Doña Charito demonstrated with her brush. “The first step, one must check the bristles for the correct alignment.” Doña Charito dipped her brush into a jar of water and made all manner of finicky, tidying up, tapping noises on the brim, like a nursemaid spooning mouthfuls for a difficult baby.
Obediently, we did likewise.
She went on in her garbled Spanish we could barely understand. “The second step is the proper manner of holding the implement. Not in this way, neither in this fashion …” She inspected, chair by chair. She mocked us all.
I breathed a little easier, having gained a cat-sized space in-side myself. Doña Charito’s back was to me. The hummingbird on her Hawaiian shift plunged its swordlike beak between the mounds of her bottom. There would be time.
I jiggled my brush in the water jar. The liquid turned the color of my first urine in the morning. I stroked my purple cake, and a bruise-colored cat and then a brown stick cat darted out.
I was so much to myself as I worked that I did not hear her warning shout or the slapping of her Island thongs on the linoleum as she swooped down upon me. Her crimson nails clawed my sheet off its board and crumpled it into a ball. “You, you defy me!” she cried out. Her face had turned the muddy red of my water jar. She lifted me by the forearm, hurried me across the room through a door into a dark parlor, and plunked me down on a stiff cane-back chair.
Her green eyes glared at me like a cat’s. They were speckled with brown as if something alive had gotten caught and fossilized in the irises. “You are not to move until I have given you leave. Is that comprehensible?” I bowed my head in submission. From the corner of my eye, I saw my frightened cousins obediently practicing their first brush strokes. Doña Charito filled the doorway a moment with her large body, then she pulled the door to with a great slam.