by Susana Aikin
Delia’s handbell rings on the second floor, accompanied by singing. Where in the house can I retreat to, to be as far away as possible from all this? To one side of the kitchen, at the end of the corridor, is Nanny’s old room. We still think of it as her room, even so many years after she’s been out of the house.
The room is small, with whitewashed walls, and sparsely furnished. The bed, pushed against the wall underneath the window, consists of a smallish mattress and box spring with a metal headboard, the type found in the pueblos, the old villages in the countryside. It’s now covered by a shabby flowery bedspread festooned at the edges with thick, yellowed wool fringes that fall to the floor. A narrow, hand-carved piece of stripped pinewood serves as a bedside table. On top of it stands an old brass lamp ending in a bare bulb, and inside its only drawer, a tattered picture card of the Our Lady of Covadonga taped with scotch tape to the bottom. This had always been Nanny’s patron, the virgin who inspired Christian warriors to fight against the Moors in the Reconquista of the Spanish Peninsula from Islam.
At the foot of the bed stands her old Singer sewing machine on ornate iron legs and treadle. Opposite the bed is the little white wardrobe that had for so many years belonged to the room Julia and I shared. I stand for a moment facing its mirrored doors, its silver linings so deteriorated that they only reflect images as abstract collections of colors and shapes. I observe my head as a splash of pinkish flesh topped by a blob of short black hair, my lower body in thick brushstrokes of green fabric over muscular legs. Along the beveled rim on the upper-right corner, the darkened opaque surface is still dotted with small islands of silver lining that reflect jagged images. For an instant, I watch fragments of my face reflected on these patches. A pointed cheekbone, the dip in the middle of my upper lip, a pale blue eye with tiny wrinkles at the corner; its pupil, contracted into that wistful look I so dislike, now stares back at me, a little peeved. What do I expect to find in this room?
I grab hold of the handles and open the wardrobe doors. Inside, on top of a darkened shelf, sits a moldy stack of old linen, on top of which is Nanny’s frayed apron, neatly folded. Unbelievable that such an old relic should have endured. I reach out to touch it. Its coarse cotton feels thin, eroded. I take it out and lift it to my face. It smells musty, like mildewed kitchen rags. I unfold it and stretch it out before me. One string is missing, the other threadbare and torn. A tune creeps into my mind, and with it, the words of a Spanish children’s song,
When I stepped on board,
the boatman said to me,
pretty girls go for free.
I am not pretty,
nor do I want to be . . .
followed by the sound of a skipping rope and small feet jumping on the patio floor. Marion and Julia singing, taking turns at skipping and swinging the rope with Nanny. And I, too young to skip, watching impatiently to the side, begging to be taught, and pulling Nanny’s apron strings loose as the only way to get her attention and boycott the game. Well, surely not this very same apron, but I swear, an identical one. Nanny always wore the same clothes. Year after year she bought the exact same items for day-to-day wear. Only on Sundays she wore a different dress when going to mass, a dark, silky garment buttoned up to her neck with small pearly studs.
I return the apron to the wardrobe and sit across from the bed in the room’s only chair, another sober piece of simple wood that has been here since my earliest memories. On the wall beside me hangs a black-and-white picture of the three of us sitting with Nanny in some meadow, having a picnic. How old she looked even then, when she must have been only around fifty, seeing how small we were in the picture. I couldn’t have been more than five years old, Julia eight and Marion ten. Nanny’s hair was already totally white and pulled back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, her brown eyes horribly augmented behind thick glasses, and her large matronly figure covered by the white apron, with thick chunky black shoes at the end of heavy legs. I always remembered her like that, as if she hadn’t changed one bit in all the eighteen years I lived with her.
We called her Nanny but she was everything: maid, cleaner, cook, nurse, mother. She had come with Mother from their native city of Vitoria in the Basque Country, north of Spain. She had worked as a maid at Mother’s family house since she was a girl, seen Mother grow up from infancy, and then joined her in her newly married life in Madrid. After Mother passed away, she stayed to bring us up. I have more memories of Nanny than of Mother. I grew up mostly in the kitchen and in Nanny’s bedroom, slept many a night in this bed, hugging her body of solid flesh that smelled of bread soaked in milk.
In this room I’d always sit in this same chair, watching her do chores while asking endless questions. I remember her in the evenings standing at the ironing board by a tall pile of clothes, listening to soap operas on the radio, tear-jerking stories with names like Simply Mary or The Subway Ticket-Seller. Always stories of high drama, with young, beautiful, and innocent working-class women ravaged by social injustice and demon lovers. These radio shows were sacred, not just in Nanny’s room, but in the whole country. Six in the evening was the moment when households would become paralyzed, and all housewives, maids, and nannies resorted to sewing, darning, or ironing clothes in solemn silence, glued to a nearby radio.
Although I never saw Nanny shed a tear, these were her tenderest moments. Otherwise, she was not a demonstrative woman; in fact, rather stiff, and sometimes even standoffish. She was, by her own definition, “a girl from the north,” a tough matron from the highlands, from a country entrenched in timeless matriarchal tradition that not even the Romans had managed to subdue with their war-savvy legions and overwhelming technology.
“For centuries,” she used to say, “women would face troops and marauders, knife and pitchfork in hand, having first safely hidden away their daughters in large ceramic pots used to store oil or wine in cellars.”
But Nanny’s life had not developed, at first appearance, along the lines of heroic legend. She started as a servant at the age of twelve, she had a sweetheart for a few brief months before he was killed in the Civil War by some macabre “friendly fire,” and thereafter continued to work as a maid all her life. She never had children, never owned anything, left very little behind. However, in the real story behind all that, Nanny was, while she lasted, the custodian of our house. She ran the whole operation; she brought us up following the very complicated requirements of our household. It was a mystery how she adapted to a mostly English-speaking family, a wonder how fiercely she endorsed our manifold education with foreign schools, music lessons, ballet, and whatnot. She was the bedrock on which we all rested. She was the land, the peasantry that pulls along like an ox, carrying the weight of a motley, erratic, supposedly sophisticated crowd on its back.
Father was, of course, some sort of British version of the reincarnation of all those troops and marauders that her ancestors had fought, knife and pitchfork in hand. He was the impossible daily challenge Nanny had to contend with. To begin with, Father was the pickiest eater I ever knew. It didn’t matter how much Nanny strived to produce delicious food for our table, he always complained. Especially if she ventured into British recipes, such as roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, or shepherd’s pie, there was always some blemish to be found. The objections that became legendary were mostly against the most rooted elements in Spanish cuisine: olive oil and garlic. To Father, the smell of garlic and the strong taste of olive oil were daily maddening encounters, unbearable components of indigestible third-world food unfitting for the more delicate, evolved British digestive tubes. He told all kinds of stories about English travelers getting the runs as soon as they hit the greasy medieval-style casseroles and extravagant rice dishes.
Mealtimes were the hardest moments. The three of us sat around the table frozen with trepidation: Marion to Father’s left, I to his right, and Julia by my side. Nanny would come in with the food and go around the table serving us individually. She always started with Father, and then stood bac
k behind him, waiting for approval. All our eyes would be on Father as he began the ceremony of tasting the food. If the verdict was positive, he made no comment whatsoever, and after a moment everyone sighed with relief and started to eat. However, if the verdict was negative, he immediately put the plate aside, indicating with a wave of his hand that it should be taken away and substituted with something else. If the second offering was neither to his taste, he joked about living in a house with an empty pantry in spite of working so hard to make a living. Then he usually went into one of his favorite diatribes against backward countries.
“Do you know that when I arrived in Spain in the late fifties, people were so poor that they walked around in alpargatas?” he would say, as if denouncing an inexcusable historical situation. Alpargatas were a sort of espadrilles or sandals made with thick grass classically worn by peasants and poor farmers years ago. But what did that have to do with anything?
“And do you know what was the first thing they did to the girls who came from villages to be servants in households? They’d scrub their nails and their fingers, thoroughly. Teach them to wash their hands. Please translate to Nanny, I’m sure she has her own story about it.” The three of us would sit paralyzed with embarrassment and pain for Nanny.
It wasn’t that Father couldn’t speak Spanish, he could. Despite his most ludicrous accent and making the most awkward grammatical mistakes, he got by. But he liked to do this kind of thing when he wanted to make inconvenient statements. In those moments Nanny, conscious of some abstract humiliation directed at her, would retreat into the kitchen and we would continue to eat in silence.
“Of course, that’s not to say that Nanny doesn’t have a noble heart, even if she has no education,” Father would add, in a weak effort to diffuse the foul atmosphere he’d created. “You can always tell a genuine soul from a person’s eyes. You can be honorable, even if you come from a lower class. And Nanny is like that. Why do you think I kept her after your mother died?”
In reality, it had been the other way around. Nanny had decided to stay and support Father after our mother died. A few months after the passing, her widowed sister had called from Vitoria and asked her to move in with her and help her with her own bunch of small children. Nanny thought about it carefully, and in the end decided her commitment was with us.
“She has our other sisters,” she explained. “You have no one.”
We really had no one. Estranged from Mother’s family and far away from our Manchester relatives, we had no close blood relations to nurture us in such terrible moments. Father was devastated. He lost weight, he was sick frequently; he eventually took refuge in his work, two or more packets of cigarettes a day, and tall glasses of whiskey on the rocks in the evenings. He became a consummate workaholic, would leave very early in the morning with his briefcase and a cigarette dangling from his lips, and return late at night, shriveled, ashen-faced, stinking of tobacco and stale office furnishings. Sometimes, if he wasn’t totally exhausted, he would sit by our three little beds and tell us stories. He was a good storyteller. His best tale was called “Anna and Her Toys,” and in it, when we went to sleep, my dolls and teddy bears would come to life and wake me up. Then, I would dress up like a boy and go to a different world, sometimes taking my sisters with me, where we underwent countless adventures in which I was the heroine disguised as a miniature Robin Hood. I remember being magnetized by the tale, while my sisters smoldered with envy and wondered why he always favored this story above others. I guessed he was most sad for me. I was only five years old.
Those had been hard years for everyone. I only remember them in permanent autumnal or wintery mode. Dark, gray skies, short days and cold nights in which I would always migrate to Nanny’s room.
On weekends, Father would sit alone in the living room, surrounded by papers and letters from his office, and work his way through them hour after hour. Meanwhile, we would sit downstairs in the TV room watching American television series, or hang around in the kitchen with Nanny. At one point or another, Father would ask for tea and the four of us would begin the hopeless task of making a cup of tea that would meet with his approval.
Poor Nanny, measuring up to the alchemical grind of producing a perfect, not just British, but specifically Mancunian, cup of tea. Even Mother had never mastered the necessary proficiency in all the strict but apparently necessary steps. There was the boiling of the water, not in any pot, but only in the designated kettle. Then the exact measuring of the tea from the tin decorated with Chinese figures, followed by the careful pouring of the water into the teapot, first in the empty pot to heat it up well, and then once again over the small mound of tea leaves at the bottom of the teapot, not forgetting to let it steep for exactly five minutes. And finally, the most challenging part was not just pouring the tea and not forgetting that the milk and two spoons of sugar were first to be deposited in the cup, but the act of delivering the full teacup without spilling any of its contents onto the saucer.
At that point Nanny needed to mount the stairs to deliver the cup to Father. She would haul her heavy body up the steps, one hand grasping the banister and the other holding the jittering cup of tea. Many a time, she would return to the kitchen in silent dejection, the flooded tea saucer still in hand, after Father had refused to drink the wreckage.
“One suggestion, don’t fill the cup to the brim, comprende?” his voice would trail down the stairs, followed by, “Girls, please get her to understand.”
To Father, Nanny was the representative of the third-world country we were stuck in. Of course, there were others. The gardener, the deliveryman who showed up regularly at our doorstep, his company employees he contended with daily, and so on. But the most immediate one was Nanny, and therefore always symbolic of all the ills and tribulations that one had to put up with in this bloody country. Vignettes of my sister’s faces, exhausted and patiently waiting for him to wind down from his tirades against Spain, are etched in my mind. His unwavering lingo of vituperation will forever play itself in the depths of my subconscious. Talk of the goddamn nincompoop nation, the insolence and the laziness, the amateurish arrogance, the inefficiency, the imprecision of language, the loser’s-paradise attitude, and so on.
Maybe at the heart of his raging discontent was Mother’s death at a young age. Maybe the way her family had opposed their marriage because he was Protestant, and not Catholic like them. Maybe it had to do with the fact that after she died, he hadn’t mustered the strength to relocate back to England.
“Just that a woman, a young woman, could have died of pneumonia in the late twentieth century,” he would sometimes say, “that tells you how backward, how undeveloped this country can be. If we had been in England that would never have happened, she would still be with us.” But he never related the whole backstory, how Mother had been sickly all her life, how cutting off with her family in order to marry him had filled her with devouring grief.
Nanny had stood up against Mother’s brothers at the funeral and defended Father when they accused him of not taking good care of her. And then, once we all returned back home, she stood in her black garments behind his chair as he wept, and shyly placed one hand on his shoulder. But that had been a unique instance of physical tenderness between them.
They lived in opposite sides of the house, like opponent winds across the compass rose, flurry breezes avoiding each other at best, and blasting gales contending fiercely at worst. And although Nanny’s wind regularly seemed to be the passive, defensive force, the floodgate that could unbind her cyclone was any attack perpetrated against her most significant concern: any one of us, the girls she had kept safely hidden away in large ceramic pots used to store oil or wine in cellars.
The day after we found Fernando floating lifeless in the pool, a host of policemen and detectives had swarmed around the house until nightfall. When the last group left late in the evening after interrogating us for the third time, Nanny took Marion upstairs and tucked her into her bed and then went t
o the kitchen to warm up some milk and take a Valium from the medicine cabinet. After Marion finally went to sleep, she came downstairs and stood in front of Father in the living room, while Julia and I sat in silence on the long sofa across from his armchair.
“Mister James,” she said, “I know you did not push that boy into the pool, I will put my hand over the fire in any courtroom if I have to. But I also know how you destroyed him, how you broke him so he wouldn’t marry your daughter. I will stay for as long as it takes to nurse Marion back to health, and then I will pack my things and leave. I cannot work in this house anymore.”
The final battle of the winds was unleashed. A force like a typhoon erupted through Father, a blasting stream of chilling onslaught. Nanny withstood the squall, the spears from the bloodshot eyes, the throbbing impulses in the fisted hands. Then, at the first spaced silence, she turned away quietly and went downstairs to her room. Julia and I followed her, crying, and I stood in this room holding on to her heavy body and begging her not to go, to forget Father’s words, those cold, furious words with which he had thrown her out of the house. But Nanny had reached the end of her rope, her knives and pitchforks were blunted by years of defensive grind. Meanwhile, Julia sobbed, crouching on the floor over the old-fashioned suitcase that Nanny had already brought down from the top of the wardrobe and was meaning to fill with her belongings.
* * *
Constantine’s pouty face emerges behind the threshold of the door, or maybe it has been there for a while, observing my absorption. “Ahem,” he whispers, “sorry to bother you, but Delia is saying she needs five pounds of coarse sea salt. I’m imagining that you wouldn’t keep those amounts in the house, so . . .”
