Johanna had been at Greengates for several years, so she was not as far behind as I was. She laughed a lot, and when she laughed, she tossed her hair. All the boys loved her. Having Johanna for a friend helped me make other friends. One day at recess six of us snuck into a dark storage room in which four mattresses stood on their sides making two V-shaped spaces into which we crawled. It was like being in a huge sandwich. A boy who was my age but smaller than me started caressing my calf. I pretended not to notice. He was a nice boy, and I didn’t want to be mean to him, especially because his face was scarred from having been burned. Also, I liked having my leg tickled. When the bell rang for classes, we all rushed out into the light-filled yard. No one looked at anyone else. It was as though nothing had happened.
Soon after we moved into our Mexico City apartment, a new man came into my mother’s life, a Spanish refugee who, my mother told me proudly, was Basque and had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Carlos Basurco was smaller than Edmundo, perhaps half an inch taller than my mother. He had black hair combed straight back from his high forehead, sharp features, and small, black eyes that seemed so tightly wound up they might explode. His playing the violin with an orchestra in Bellas Artes (the Palace of Fine Arts) brought prestige but not much money. To support himself he fixed watches. The bedroom next to mine became his watch repair shop. I do not remember any client bringing a watch for Carlos to fix, nor did I ever see him working on a watch. Edmundo had been more fun than Carlos. Edmundo was ebullient, and his eyes revealed the feelings that went with what he was saying. Carlos, on the other hand, had a face like an obsidian mask. Something was hidden behind the smoky blackness.
Carlos Basurco, Mexico City, c. 1951
My mother thought we needed a dog, and she gave me a two-month-old Welsh terrier. I named her Chata. My job was to walk Chata in the park below our building. The park was bleak and mostly empty. The only playground object was parallel bars that were too high for me to reach and that were usually occupied by young men who spent hours pulling themselves up. I steered clear of them. They were just the types that would tease an American girl, especially one struggling with a pedigreed dog. Chata was stubborn. She wouldn’t go where I wanted her to go. Sometimes she made me furious, and I had to stop myself from yanking at her leash. I didn’t want to choke her, so I followed her lead, and in the end, I usually picked her up and carried her home. At night Chata slept on one side of me and a stuffed animal slept on the other. I loved her dog smell and the feeling of her body breathing in and out against my side.
26 With Family
Chata came with us when Blair and I joined our father and Mougouch, Maro, Natasha, eight-month-old Antonia, and a French au pair girl named Mayette at the Turkey Houses in the beginning of July 1951. When I first arrived at the pond, I was jealous because Maro and Natasha had been given the turkey house that I thought of as mine. But I soon got used to the middle cabin. Flanked by two cabins on either side, it felt safe. Also, Chata could protect me. We spent part of every day at the ocean dripping wet sand through our fingers to make shapes that looked like spruce trees; building fortresses to keep the tide back; and making cone-shaped, hollow mountains at the bottom of which we lit fires so that the smoke coming out looked like an erupting volcano. In our pond we competed about who could make the most graceful underwater somersault. I still liked to catch things, turtles of course, but also minnows that I could scoop up in cupped hands. Right beside the real pond, I dug out a minnow pond, maybe two feet in diameter. I always ended up digging a channel to the real pond so that the minnows could swim back to their homes.
Breakfast at the Turkey Houses: me, Natasha, and Blair, 1951
Andrea Petersen, Blair, Maro, Natasha, Antonia, Mayette (mother’s helper), and me (standing right), 1951
Me doing a cartwheel, 1951
Blair, age fourteen, summer 1951
Me, Maro, Blair, Andrea Petersen, and Natasha, 1951
That September Blair was sent to a girls’ boarding school in Northhampton, Massachusetts, a preparatory school for Smith College. Our father and Mougouch decided not to go back to Europe. Instead, they would live with Gaga while they looked for a house to buy in Boston. I was to live with my mother in Mexico City, but for some reason, I do not remember why, soon after I got there, my mother decided that I should not stay. After giving Chata a tranquilizer so that she wouldn’t mind being in a crate in the plane’s hold, my mother put me on a plane to Boston. When I arrived at Logan Airport and let Chata out of her crate, she was so drugged she couldn’t walk. My father was there to meet me, and he was not pleased to see that I had brought my dog.
Gaga came to the door of 63 Garden Street wearing a finely knitted cherry-color dress that showed off her slender frame. She hugged me and then she looked at Chata. “And who is this?” she asked. Mougouch bent down to pat Chata. “Good heavens,” she said. “Why didn’t your mother let us know? Let’s take her into the garden.” As soon as I put her down on the grass, the no-longer-sedated Chata raced around as if she were crazy.
That night and every night Chata slept beside me. I did not miss my mother at all. I had learned not to miss the people I was not with. I liked being part of a family. My father seemed glad to have me back, and Mougouch seemed pleased, too. Even though Gaga’s house had five big bedrooms on the second floor, all the children lived on the third floor along with Annie and Bessie. We used the back door that gave onto Linnaean Street instead of the grand front entrance, and we used the narrow back stairway instead of the lovely carpeted front staircase with its banister perfect for sliding. I suspect that my father thought that if he kept the children’s visibility to a minimum, Gaga would not feel invaded.
Maro, Natasha, and I were enrolled in the Buckingham School where Blair and I had gone when we lived with Gaga two years earlier. The first day of school, we stood with my father on the stoop outside the back door of Gaga’s house and waited for the school bus. When the bus pulled up, a chorus of girls’ voices shouted out the window, “Look at that handsome Harvard boy!” My father looked up to acknowledge the praise with his charming half smile. Since I had such a good-looking father, I felt sure that I would be able to make friends at Buckingham.
For Thanksgiving we went to my great-aunt Martha’s enormous Victorian house in Jamaica Plain, just outside of Boston. All along the length of the dining room table were bowls of walnuts and tangerines. At least twenty-five places had been set. All the guests were relatives—aunts and uncles and cousins, most of whom I hardly knew. Some of Aunt Martha’s creepy sons would turn up. Maybe they seemed creepy because of the scandal that ensued when Aunt Martha’s husband, Andrew Peters, who briefly served as mayor of Boston, seduced an eleven-year-old girl who was a relative of Aunt Martha’s. Maybe they were just born creepy. Blair remembers that once one of them spied on us while we were taking a bath.
Besides Aunt Martha, and of course Gaga, Blair, and my father, the person I loved best at these gatherings was my father’s younger brother, Arthur. He had the deepest dimple and a twinkle in his eyes, both of which he must have inherited from Gaga. Uncle Arthur showed me how to crack open a walnut by squeezing two of them together or by placing one nut between my thumb and forefinger and then squeezing hard until the shell split apart. Uncle Arthur really loved his beautiful redhead wife, Betty. With their three children, Marion, John, and Elizabeth (who was born later), Uncle Arthur and Aunt Betty made the perfect family.
All the cousins ate so much that, to make room for pie, we were allowed to run around the table between the turkey course and dessert. After lunch we were sent upstairs to nap, each in our own room. Aunt Martha gave us small note pads with paper in three different pastel shades—pink, blue, and yellow. We could draw on as many sheets of paper as we wanted. We could even take the pads home. After nap time, in order to walk off all the food, our father took us to the Arnold Arboretum, where he told us the names of different kinds of trees and shrubs. I loved that he was knowledgeable, but I didn’t pay much
attention. Mostly, I just liked being with him.
Every day when we returned home from school, Gaga served tea. Just as she had two years earlier, she wore a velvet floor-length tea gown and she still favored Hu-Kwa tea. To my delight, there on the tea tray were the buttered, thinly sliced white bread and Bessie’s cupcakes with white icing. One day I came home from school and Chata was not waiting for me. I looked all over the house and garden. I sat on the back stairs and called and called. No Chata. Instead of Chata, my father came down the stairs. “Chata is not here,” he said. “She had distemper and we had to put her to sleep.” I said nothing. I pushed past my father, ran upstairs, and flung myself on my bed. I cried so hard—but silently—that I was afraid my throat would fall out. It was as though a part of my body had been ripped off. I remembered how frisky Chata had been that morning. She did not have distemper. I was sure of that. She was just an inconvenience. I never let on that I didn’t believe Chata was sick. It might have been Gaga or Mougouch who decided to put Chata down, but I blamed my father. He always ended up doing what the women in his life wanted.
27 Without Blair
In January, I flew back to Mexico City to be with my mother. Being there without Blair was sad. I needed her to give me a picture of the world. My own view of what was happening in our lives depended on the way she saw it. Now our Parque Melchor Ocampo apartment was an immense empty space. Noises sounded like echoes.
My old room was not going to be my room anymore. My mother told me to move my belongings into Blair’s room, but I didn’t feel like it, so I sat on my bed and rearranged my fuzzy animals. Then I did move my belongings. Blair’s room was nicer than mine. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. Although I missed Blair, there was a tiny part of me that thought, Now I have my mother all to myself. During the next months, I began to feel that for sure my mother loved me best. She must have known how much I missed Blair because she bought me another dog, this time a fox terrier. I named him Pancho. Carlos was furious. He didn’t like small dogs, and he didn’t like puppies. Having a dog made me feel I really lived where I lived. I was home. Now I belonged in Mexico and I began to wear my hair in braids that I looped up behind my ears and tied with magenta woolen ribbons. Sometimes, if I was not in a hurry, I wove the ribbons into my braids. This, I was certain, made me look totally Mexican. When Johanna and other Americans living in Mexico talked about the United States, they called it “the States.” “I’m going to the States,” they would say. Or, “She brought it from the States.” It made our country seem far away and not at all important.
With Blair gone, I had to walk to and from Greengates alone. I didn’t mind. There was the candy seller on the corner, about a block from school. On a square piece of oilcloth laid on the sidewalk this old woman had rows of round wooden boxes about two inches in diameter and filled with cajeta, a caramelized goat’s milk. To eat it you used part of the box’s top as a scoop. She also sold another kind of candy that tasted like nougat and came wrapped in foil. When you opened the foil, the powdery candy crumbled in your fingers. Each candy’s foil wrapping had a different decorative pattern. Every time I ate one, I would smooth out the wrapping and add it to my collection.
After I moved into Blair’s bedroom, I tried to make it look as though it had always been mine. Over my bed was a long shelf where Blair had kept books and Kleenex and bracelets that she took off at night. On this shelf I arranged all my stuffed animals and the Toni doll that my mother’s sister, Aunt Carolyn, had sent for my birthday. The doll had washable hair and tiny pink curlers. She came wearing a fancy blue dress, so I made skirts and blouses for her out of scraps of fabric. Still, I loved Buttoneyes best. I had had him for such a long time that his brown fur was wearing thin, especially around the metal ring that made his belly play Brahms’s lullaby. When I was lonely, I would turn the ring as far as it would go without breaking, and I would press my ear to my bear’s belly so that the music felt as if it were inside my head. Even though Buttoneyes was my favorite, I knew that I should not let the other animals feel neglected, so I made a schedule to tell me which animal I should sleep with on which night and Scotch-taped it to the wall beside my bed.
On Sundays, Carlos took my mother and me to bullfights. He was an expert: he had seen a lot of bullfights in Spain, and he told us which matadors we should watch closely. The bullfights opened with a procession of bullfighters walking around the ring to the rhythm of bullfight music. I was enraptured by the men’s embroidered jackets and their tight silky pants, and I daydreamed that one day a bullfighter would fall in love with me. Carlos expressed disgust with clumsy picadors. Cowardly matadors sent him into a rage. If a bull was killed with speed and grace, Carlos would roar his approval along with the crowd. The sword was supposed to go down through the back of the bull’s neck and straight to the heart. If a bull’s death was drawn out, the crowd shouted insults and threw things into the bullring. After a fight, when horses dragged the dead bull away and men came out to sweep new earth over the blood-soaked ground, I was sad.
Once on the way out of the bullring, my mother bought me two pink banderillas. These are the spears, each about two feet long and ending in a barb, that picadors plunge into the bull’s shoulder to get him mad. Their curly tissue-paper decoration reminded me of the frilly toothpicks that American bartenders stuck into club sandwiches. Although banderillas look festive, their tips are sharp and cruel. Like Mexico itself, my mother observed, they mix joy with pain. My mother hung the banderillas over the foot of my bed. This gave my room a sophisticated touch: all my mother’s artist and writer friends decorated their houses with Mexican craft objects.
Although she was working hard at painting, my mother was an explorer. She was always looking for something new. She had friends she liked to visit who made silver jewelry in Taxco, a mountain town about two hours south of Mexico City. From them she bought a necklace with a big silver cross and earrings that looked like snails. We always visited the clothing shop of Tachi Castillo, where my mother bought me a wraparound circle skirt with an adjustable waistline. It would fit me for a long time, she said. After that, we wandered in the market. To my annoyance, at each stall my mother exclaimed at the beauty of the way the Indian women arranged their fruits, grains, and vegetables on cloths laid over the ground. At one point, she stopped in front of a man selling something fried that he scooped into paper cones. She bought a cone and offered me some. “Fried worms,” she said. “They are delicious.” I turned away in disgust.
From the market, we would make our way to Los Arcos, a bar from whose balcony we could watch the light change on the cathedral’s elaborately carved façade. For lunch, if we were feeling rich or if some wealthy friend invited us, we would drive partway up a mountain to the Hotel Victoria and dine looking down on Taxco and the wide valley below. I watched my mother’s face. She saw beauty everywhere. I tried to see it, too, but all I saw was land stretching into the distance.
On one of these trips to Taxco we spent the night with my mother’s friend, the writer Eleanor Perenyi. She was brilliant and witty—very certain of her ideas, but she could be unfeeling. Once when her son, Peter, and I were told to go to bed we discovered a scorpion on the wall next to Peter’s bed. We ran into the living room to alert the adults. Eleanor said to pay no attention. Brown scorpions were harmless, she insisted. Although the scorpion was gone by the time we returned to our room, neither of us could sleep. All I could think of was the scorpion crawling over my face in the middle of the night.
My mother made sure we went to Taxco for Easter to watch the nighttime ritual of the penitents, the All Souls Procession. From the cathedral on Taxco’s main plaza to a church higher up the mountain, men walked barefoot and with their feet chained together. Some of them walked on their knees. They wore black hoods and a black cloth around their loins. Tied to their bare shoulders and outstretched arms were heavy bundles of sticks with thorns that made the men look like Christ carrying his cross. Indeed, they were called encruzados. There were also flagel
lants who carried a cross and whipped their naked backs as they climbed. We stood leaning against the wall of one of the houses that lined the steep cobblestone street. I wished that the street was wider, because the men were so near that the ends of their prickly bundles almost touched my skin. Their backs glistened in the candlelight. Blood trickled through their sweat. Most of the penitents had smooth brown skin and well-muscled shoulders. They were young. I guessed that was why they had sins to be absolved. To my mother, the procession was an aesthetic spectacle. She was enraptured by the slow movement of bodies propelled upward by faith. To her the ritual was filled with elemental poetry. I saw it in more physical terms. The men smelled of sweat. Their knees were raw. Their shoulders were bleeding. Some of them cried out in pain. Some collapsed sideways onto the cobblestones. For me, pity was mixed with revulsion. Suddenly my knees would not hold me up. I knew I was going to faint, even though I had never fainted. In order not to fall, I crouched on the ground. I wanted to vomit. My mother said I must have eaten something bad. I knew I hadn’t. The horror of so many men hurting themselves because of faith was overwhelming.
Upper Bohemia Page 16
