by Rita Indiana
Niurka’s chaotic entrance with the supermarket shopping bags called him back to the present. He got up to help her, but she wouldn’t let him, gesturing in the way he had seen his grandmother do before. Like help from others was an insult. He followed her to the kitchen and watched her put everything away as she shared the details of an amusing little drama at work with him. He took out the bag of weed Charlie had given him and showed it to his aunt, winking. She responded by passing him a book of cigarette papers that was lying on top of the refrigerator.
Argenis crumbled the contents of the packet on top of an old National Geographic magazine. A sunken treasure at some Caribbean port was on the cover. The underwater photo brought stories of pirates and dark curses to mind. After having thrown some spaghetti into boiling water, Niurka turned up the volume on the radio she had in the kitchen and “La Cima del Cielo” by Ricardo Montaner came on. His aunt was capable of enjoying Björk and Alvaro Torres back to back. If only I had such a capacity for joy, thought Argenis, laying the weed on the little paper path, rolling it with a single movement into a joint which he then sealed with the glue of a damp lick. They put it under a lamp to dry and sat down to eat in silence. Niurka ate slowly, as if it took great effort to select the combination of elements the fork would bring to her mouth, and from the corner of his eye Argenis looked at the San Miguel costume that hung from the shelf.
“It’s your grandmother’s,” she said when she had finally finished her food, then added, “I suppose you’ll inherit it,” as they went up the stairs to the rooftop to light the joint.
“What do you mean, inherit?” asked Argenis.
“Mijo, misery inherits misery,” she responded even more cryptically. Argenis took a deep drag and held his breath. When Niurka began to speak again he let the air and the smoke out slowly.
“Your grandmother serves the mysteries. She’s San Miguel’s horse. In our family, the youngest child inherits this condition. It was my turn, but I went off to Spain. I’d had enough already, what with being black, Dominican, and the daughter of a maid. Besides which I was also supposed to be a witch! The stuff of backward people. When I was little, Mami made me ring a bell to call the saint. Her eyes would roll back in her head and she’d speak with a different voice. It scared me.”
Niurka told him these things in a tone somewhere between annoyed and comical. The street lights did not illuminate her face, but they made her African profile stand out. The glow at the tip of the joint lit up her features and for a second Argenis saw a bruja, the sorceress his aunt had never ceased to be. She had used the word “condition” to name that thing. It was obvious she thought Consuelo was a crackpot. Either that, or calling her crazy was her way of freeing herself from the spell. Argenis told Niurka that one day the old woman had fainted when they were visiting her at Emilio and Renata’s house. It was in the days after the PLD’s first triumph and his father was dressed very elegantly, showing the first hint of the sparkle that power would bring out of him. José Alfredo held her head and called out, “Mamá, Mamá.” Renata brought her Bay Rum, the only time Argenis ever saw Renata do something for her servant. Consuelo was babbling something and his father turned his ear toward her to hear, then turned as pale as if he’d seen the dead, and crouched at her feet to rub them and get her circulation going. Later Argenis asked his dad what he had heard. José Alfredo pressed his lips together as if he were going to cry, and said, “Mujé salva gassó. Gassó traición mujé.” Woman saves man, man betrays woman.
Consuelo didn’t know that José Alfredo had left Etelvina. They’d hidden it from her so as not to worry her. What she did know was that one morning during Balaguer’s twelve years Etelvina’s brother, a marine, had saved both of them from being shot to death when he recognized them. That same day, Etelvina Durán and José Alfredo Luna married and abandoned the underground forever.
“San Miguel brings them,” Niurka said in a weird voice, since she was holding the smoke in. Argenis thought of the suit and imagined himself wearing it. His aunt’s voice made him laugh, and hearing him laugh made Niurka laugh. They laughed long, until they cried.
The street he knew was gone. Gone were the wide sidewalks lined with jasmine, tamarind and almond trees, the modern houses built in 1950 by local architects who had recently returned from Mexico and Paris, the buildings made up of two or three apartments with high-ceilinged rooms and cool granite floors, the silence interrupted only by the calls of a passing street vendor and, from time to time, by student protests when they came off campus. Emilio’s and Renata’s was the only house on the block that hadn’t yet been sold and carved up to accommodate low-rent shops. Microbusinesses stuffed into four square meters that announced their services in vulgar typefaces printed digitally onto vinyl banners. Color or black-and-white photocopies, internet cafés, and barber shops. Fake nails, Chinese cell phones, and second-hand clothing. Boarding houses for Haitian and Pakistani students, Serbian strippers, and male prostitutes. The dreaded slum that Renata had so often mentioned as a distant inconvenience had exploded right at the door of her house. But Renata was no longer there to complain, to send Consuelo to shut the French doors that opened onto the entry hall, because the street was full of nasty people; because, as Renata had yelled during her last weeks in the house, she had never seen so many ugly people in one place in all her life.
The doors that opened onto the street remained shut in spite of the definitive absence of the lady of the house, and Argenis had to bang on them with his fist several times before his grandmother came to ask “Who is it?” in a frail, frightened voice.
She couldn’t hear over the megaphone of an evangelical preacher and the insistent speakers of the minibuses that came down from Correa y Cidrón Avenue, so she asked the same question three times before her grandson’s answer reached her. The preacher’s pickup truck went away along with its apocalyptic shouting and Consuelo, overjoyed by the visit, squealed like a girl. The wavering voice of a few seconds before now filled with vigor and a youthful scorn. Argenis heard her clanking around with a noisy key chain until she was finally able to open the door, a solid slab painted white, on whose surface one could still see the marks of the rocks Autonomous University students had thrown at the police during the conflicts of the seventies.
She had her habitual green handkerchief tied around her head so tightly that it looked like the knot was preventing a spill of some toxic substance. Although she was as skinny and wrinkled as a raisin, she always stood up straight and elegant.
The house was extremely tidy, just like her, and lit only by the doors that opened onto the courtyard. Argenis wondered if Consuelo still slept in the little servant’s room out there, or if, now that Renata had left her the house, she slept in one of the family’s bedrooms. Probably the woman was still attached to her monastic cell, as if any other space would cave in on her. A few pieces of hundred-year-old mahogany furniture had been reclaimed by Renata’s sisters “for their sentimental value.” Without the dining room table and the gigantic, mirrored armoire Argenis and Ernesto had hidden in as children, the space was even bigger and more extravagant for a single woman who still insisted on wearing her servant’s uniform, even though her bosses only appeared in the two or three photos that still hung on the walls.
The television was on and the electronic music that signaled the beginning of the afternoon news streamed from it with a stubbornness like Consuelo’s own, a stubbornness that Argenis interpreted as pride, the ascetic’s sin. “See me here, virtuous and mortified,” he imagined her saying, challenging God to find any desire in her, stubbornly covering herself with the infamous blue cloth she used to elevate herself above the material world she had always despised – or which, as Argenis thought, she had never understood.
The lights were off and Argenis dared to turn one on without asking permission, so that Consuelo could at last see the coconut and sweet-potato candies he had brought in a paper bag.
“Look. At. What. I. Have.
Here,” he said, raising his voice and enunciating each word. “They’re sweets for your San Miguel.”
“Be quiet, fool,” she said, going into the kitchen to put the obligatory coffee pot on the stove. “You think I’m deaf or something?”
Argenis wondered if his grandmother’s other faculties were in as good a shape as her hearing. She hadn’t been possessed for ages. Her body had weakened, and she now suffered greatly with the visits of her saint: her nose bled, her bones hurt. Watching Consuelo refilling her empty sugar bowl at the back of that kitchen, Argenis thought that San Miguel had abused his horse, like those officers in the wars of independence who rode theirs until they dropped dead.
The smell of the sea came through the window. Its proximity had already rusted out a couple of Nedoca refrigerators and this latest one only shut when Consuelo put her old bench in front of it to block the door. That wooden bench with its rounded seat, where Consuelo had sat sideways for decades to clean rice, peel plantains, and listen to the radio while awaiting her orders, had not changed at all. This was not the case with the cabinets, sculpted by termites, and the silver forks Renata’s sisters hadn’t taken away, which now sat in the drying rack with tines as greenish and twisted as the relics of a medieval saint. Argenis sat on the bench, following the tracks of the insistent memory of his grandmother sitting on it, pulling stones out of some long-grain rice. Although it worked well enough to keep the refrigerator door in its place, the bench creaked under his weight.
“Get off that, boy,” his grandmother shouted. “That thing’s got termites.”
When the coffee was ready, she served it in two large mugs with boiling milk, placing them on the tray that had once belonged to her masters, and setting the whole thing on an ottoman with a Star of David, which sat between two rocking chairs facing the television. Argenis sat down with the old woman, who was spreading butter on a cracker without taking her eyes from the news, making loud comments about the reports with the same passion and ignorance she used for the twists and revelations of the telenovelas. It doesn’t matter, Argenis thought; she has watched history pass her by just as passively as her telenovelas. It had never occurred to her to intervene, to rebel, to poison her oppressors.
As soon as he realized how closely he resembled his grandmother, he was full of contempt for himself. He was so arrogant. In that, he also resembled her. His father, on the other hand, even if he was a hypocrite, had at least tried to do something to change things. What had Consuelo done? Put up with it. Put up with it like Rocky in the first Rocky. Put up with it without being KO’d by the fifty years of greasy pans and someone else’s dirty panties.
Argenis took advantage of the hypnotic power the television exercised over his grandmother to observe her thoroughly. Her Milky Way-colored skin was plowed with wrinkles as precise and as deep as the marks left in an old folded letter. Her eyes were still beautifully happy, young, curious, and without eyelashes, full of a generosity his Aunt Niurka had inherited. Without removing them from the screen, she took Argenis’s now-empty mug from his hand and told him to get the sweets and bring them to San Miguel. He followed her to her room and confirmed his suspicions. At night the house was as empty as the run-down museum of a long-gone middle class, while its strange curator returned to her room off the courtyard, to the same rusty bed frame with a new mattress Consuelo had only recently accepted, reluctantly, from her children.
The servant’s room was smaller than Argenis had remembered, and it belonged to an era even more remote and absurd than Trujillo’s or Balaguer’s. The walls were bare except for a cross Renata had brought back from her trip to the Holy Land. There was no mirror, no hairbrush, no lipstick, no perfume, no curlers. She picked the bell up off an altar full of empty glasses in order to call her saint. She rang one, two, three times, with little ceremony, bringing the sweets to her mouth and chewing them with difficulty. Argenis was anxious to witness the prodigal spirit that had been the protagonist of so many stories.
“Do you smoke?” his grandmother asked. Argenis offered her the open pack of Nacionals and some matches. Consuelo took one out and lit it, but the flame didn’t touch the unlit one-peso candle on the altar. She stood up without even looking at the image of the saint and parted the towel that acted as a curtain over the room’s only Persian blind.
“I used to pass food through here to your father when he would come to see me in the middle of the night,” she told him. “They were hunting him down to kill him. If you could only have seen him. He looked like a skeleton.”
It hadn’t been Argenis’s lot to live in the time of gods and heroes, he had been born too late, but they had existed, and here was the rusty aluminum blind to prove it. He got up ceremoniously and touched the window with his open hand, just as the pilgrims in Higüey touch the glass covering of Our Lady of Altagracia. He felt a strange force pushing inside him, a kind of spiritual nausea. The atmosphere had become strange: it was pulling everything down, pulling him toward his grandmother’s cot, with a stench of sugar, or something like it. And with his eyes closed, he felt his father’s panic – the desire he’d had back then to change the world, with death nipping at his heels.
The woman had dreamy tits, round as melons and crowned by a Tibetan pendant that fell right down to her cleavage. Her hands were perhaps too delicate for a really good wank. Argenis knew that the more masculine a woman’s hands, the better hand jobs she gave. But her mouth was large and fleshy and Argenis imagined her stretching it out to the limit like elastic on panties in order to eagerly swallow his cock, and later opening her legs right there on the desk to offer him her shaved, juicy cunt. She was the director of SOLIDARIA, a Spanish NGO that worked on women’s health issues, and Argenis supposed she was probably gay, like the majority of the friends, whether female or “female,” of his aunt – or that she was at least “complicated.”
Niurka had gotten him the interview. They needed an art teacher to give workshops for victims of gender-based violence. The salary was not exactly generous, but it was enough to pay the rent, electricity, groceries, and phone bills. Besides which, Mar, as the woman was called, had spoken of a vacant space with its own bathroom on the top floor of the building, which he could use as a studio and which was even big enough to house monumental pieces. He walked with her through the facilities into a classroom with individual work tables and an enormous, modern, white marker board. In the center was a round table, perfect for a life model for the anatomical drawing classes. All that was needed was some decent lighting, but only in the afternoon, since the mornings would surely see enough light streaming through the row of east-facing windows.
The classroom was cool and the scent of the centuries-old eucalyptus on the sidewalk wafted through the Persian blinds. Everything was new in the offices; this was the way the motherland eased her guilt complex. They were filled with posters bearing commemorative feminist slogans or announcing some international conference. There were too many ornamental plants for a workplace, and behind every desk was a woman, except for the accountant, an effeminate Frenchman who was the only one to stand when Mar introduced Argenis.
They went up the granite stairs to the third floor which, Argenis guessed from its height and condition, was a recent addition. It was an open studio of about 200 square meters with ceilings three meters high. “In the future, we want to open a space here for art exhibitions and cultural activities, performances, theater, et cetera,” Mar said, turning all her Cs into Spanish THs. “In the meantime you can use it for your studio, perhaps for a year and a half or so.” The Spanish woman opened the door to the bathroom, which was also new and had a shower. Argenis imagined his host naked under the water.
They went out onto a little south-facing balcony with an iron railing, from which you could see the blue strip of the Caribbean and feel the salt in the wind. On one corner of the balcony was a stack of white plastic chairs. Mar took two down without asking for help and then unwrapped a pack of Marlboro Lights she�
�d had in her hand the whole time. She tapped the bottom of the box before opening it and after taking one out for herself she offered one to Argenis, who – like her – was already sitting with his feet up on the railing.
Mar’s sandaled feet were white with round, baby-like nails that made you want to put them in your mouth. His, smelly and hairy, were thankfully inside suede moccasins that one of Niurka’s lovers had left behind at her place. “You’ll have to work with women who have been through it all: physical abuse, rape, psychological abuse. We will give you two weeks of training so that you’ll be able to handle any situation that comes up during class, and so that you can prepare your syllabus. Rather than an art class, think of what you’re doing as occupational therapy.”
Mar’s Catalan accent made her even more attractive, and Argenis thought of the acne-filled face of his brother as a teenager in order to avoid an erection. The idea of wrestling with the emotional ups and downs of abused women didn’t appeal to him, but after four years without even picking up a paintbrush the prospect of a fixed salary and a workspace did. There, with the ocean breeze and the company of a beautiful woman, he felt content. In many ways, a job where he could show up in shorts and sandals, and through which he could be of some help, was ideal.
Mar got up, threw her cigarette into the street, and put out her hand to seal the deal at the same instant that Argenis’s cell phone started to vibrate in his shirt pocket. He took the thing out and asked his new boss for a moment with a gesture of the eyes and hand. It was Loudón, who was expecting him at his workshop to try on the suit. When he finished speaking, Mar had already dropped her hand. She accompanied him to the first floor and said, by way of a farewell, that he should look at the institution’s web page in order to familiarize himself with it.