by Susana Aikin
She was also very sweet. She looked into Marion’s smashed-up eyes and said, “Poor darling, what a terrible heartbreak you are going through! But we will fix you, we will make your beautiful cheeks rosy again.” Marion looked at her with indifferent, dreamy eyes. She was stunned all day long after the latest increase in her antidepressant medication.
Then Aunt Kay asked Father if she could take us all with her for a few months. “These girls are English, James, you can’t keep them here forever.”
“You can take Julia if you like, but I’ll need Anna to stay with me.”
Julia protested. “I’m not English, I was born here, this is where I belong. I don’t want to go to London. I’m real busy at the moment.”
I also protested. “I’m the one who wants to go, let Julia stay. I’ll go with Marion.” Something in me sensed it was my single window of opportunity to flee, to find another life. I had just been accepted into the Literature and Theater program at Saint Martin’s School of Art. I wanted to study acting. I’d recently seen the movie Blue Velvet and I wanted to be like Isabella Rossellini. But Father wouldn’t hear of it.
I stayed. So did Julia, who was, unlike me, ecstatic about it. She was getting together with Alina and attending the Escuela de Bellas Artes, the official art school of Madrid where they had met, and that was enough for her. She saw no need to go anywhere. Alina was now her main thing. They had become inseparable all of a sudden, and after a few protracted sleepovers that lasted a good number of days, Alina actually moved in, not just into the house as a permanent guest, but also into our room, the large double bedroom on the second floor that Julia and I had always shared. She and Julia spent the nights whispering and tittering under the covers in Julia’s bed, ignoring me if I complained, colonizing the room further every day with their art projects, canvases, sticky, dirty materials, tools, and weird pieces of sculpture.
Finally, it was me who decided to move out.
I first tried Marion’s room, but it was too charged, not just the whole gamut of torero paraphernalia slapped all over the place along with her belongings, but there was a heaviness in the air that didn’t allow you to breathe. Sleeping in her bed gave me bad dreams, dreams about drowned horses, about toreros lifted up in the air by bulls’ horns. There was only one other room I could go to besides Nanny’s, where I didn’t want to die of nostalgia, and that was Mother’s old studio, the room where she had read and painted. It was now stripped of most of its original furnishings; a few bookcases, a round table, and a daybed were the only pieces left. Unlike my old bedroom, it had a window with a view to the mountains and I was happy with the idea of having my own space.
But I was unhappy at losing Julia.
Particularly at this time, when the household was still reeling with shock from recent events. It made me feel unbearably lonely. Julia and I had always been close. We knew each other’s secrets, backed each other up, had spent endless afternoons and evenings playing together, oblivious of the world. Our room had been our fairy-tale castle since time immemorial, even more so after Marion moved out into her own, beautiful, grown-up room. Then Julia and I were left back in the old nursery that now became our exclusive leonera, or lion’s den, as Nanny called it. Full of old toys, books, treasure chests stuffed with disguises and all sorts of strange and silly objects. Always cluttered, always a delightful mess. I remember poor Nanny picking up after us before bedtime, while we still ran around, impassioned by whatever the day’s imaginary adventure might be. As we grew into teenagers the room grew with us. Now it was dresses and shoes, makeup, sports gadgets, erotic novels hidden away from view. But Julia and I stayed besties, confided everything to each other, shared friends, social outings.
How did all that disappear?
I had become a stranger to my sister, someone she had to tolerate in the house, because all that mattered to her now was to be as close and as alone as possible with Alina. Doors would suddenly shut when I approached, backs turned. I was excluded from conversations and ignored at the table and the TV room. Alina had abducted Julia. The house was full of their whispers and giggles, they walked around hand in hand, swam together naked in the pool, roughhoused in delicate feminine fashion, tumbling over each other like kittens, punching and pinching each other’s boobs and crotches, and laughing, laughing. It was all fun and shamelessness.
I disliked Alina from the start. Her slick looks, her suave Cuban drawl, her proud, round shape as she walked everywhere behind Julia like a bodyguard, her mouth turned up into complacent grins. But I had to admit I’d never seen Julia so happy. That shroud of invisibility she had worn since a small girl, the look of misery in her elusive eyes, her constant retreat into far-off corners to read or draw, all that was gone. And instead there emerged a shining Julia, as if she had finally opened up, as if every pore had unfolded and she’d stepped into her full womanly beauty. Her strawberry-blond hair glowed around her golden skin; her amber glance filled rooms with the serenity that beautiful, self-assured women bring into spaces.
It wasn’t only her physical beauty; that might have come of itself just due to her age. She’d turned twenty-one; she’d reached her full growth after having been a scrawny child most of her life. But it was mainly her painting. In a few short months she went from painting small watercolors of still-life motifs, landscapes and flowers, to taking on large canvasses. Filling them with thick strokes of vibrant colors, red, green, bright orange, turquoise, to create abstract luminous landscapes or massive voluptuous female nudes with splayed legs and open lips in the shape of volcanic craters. It was a radical leap from any work she’d produced before. Teachers and students talked about her in the art school. A gallery owner approached her to take part in a collective exhibition.
Julia was flying.
At first, Father didn’t seem to notice any of these changes. After all, the house had become unstructured with the Fernando scandal and Marion’s departure, and, most of all, Nanny’s absence. To begin with, there was no one to cook, clean, or run the house. There was havoc in the kitchen for weeks—none of us knew how to prepare food, or do any housework. We lived on sandwiches, canned soups, and the like. The place grew dirty and untidy; dust filled bookcases and shelves, cobwebs populated every nook and cranny. Everything became chaotic: the laundry room, pantry, cellar. Plumbing failed in bathrooms, moths invaded the bedding closets. For the first time ever there were leaks from the roof.
In the midst of this turmoil, Julia and Alina’s relationship thrived, locked up in their atelier bedroom, rapt in their intimate world of love mingled with art. Julia’s sense of herself as an artist flourished. She walked around the house in grunges splattered with paint, no shoes, no bra—and, I suspect, no panties either—her hair tied up in a careless knot, eyes consumed with inspiration. And Alina, always behind, the smug muse, adoring; but most of all, controlling.
This domestic turbulence also brought another person to the forefront of our household. Olga Morris. Olga Morris—whom we never ceased to call by her first and family names together, as a sort of defensive tactic against the persistent threat that she might enter our lives for real—stepped up to the task of trying to organize the house, initially at Father’s request and eventually following her own agenda. She started by filling the refrigerator with Bimbo, the Spanish version of Wonder bread, cold cuts, peanut butter spread, Coca-Cola, ginger ale, TV dinners, and a whole range of American fast food she obtained through the PX, the grocery store at the military base in Torrejón, where she had friends. She hired a number of housekeepers, marched in plumbers and exterminators, hired and fired a few gardeners. But most of all, she tried to make herself agreeable, to gain our trust, and be admitted into our confidence, because the way she was moving in on us required that kind of strategy. She’d already become close with Father, having stood up for him in front of detectives and police. During the aftermath of Fernando’s death, when Father was distraught over Marion’s reaction to the whole affair, Olga Morris had silently moved into a
higher position of power than she had been given when hired, and ended up acquiring substantial influence over Father and his business.
There was also the drinking. She brought with her shipments of booze, and made sure she had Father under the influence by dosing him generously during the languid evenings spent at the house, drinking cocktails in the garden or by the fireplace, listening to jazz. We were sure she was a long-standing alcoholic, and we hated the way she rolled her eyes when she was drunk, throwing back her head on the couch, her short platinum hair limp around her egg-shaped head, while she half whispered in her slurred, lazy drawl, “Oh, James, this is all so interesting! You have so much going for you.”
She convinced Father to turn the library into an office so he could work more at leisure in the home, instead of spending his days confined to his downtown office. Consequently, she herself could also hang around the house all day long. And that’s exactly what she did. She came early in the morning with the excuse of supervising the housekeeper, stayed for lunch, sat in front of the typewriter in the library, half dozing all afternoon, and served Father drinks as early in the evening as possible, so they could hang out in the living room pretending to discuss the business of the day. But she herself started drinking much earlier. And could the broad hold her liquor! We never saw her display any of the classical symptoms of deep intoxication. We only got to hear her slur her sentences while her small, flabby body sunk listlessly into chairs and sofas, and her crocodile eyes checked out everything under thick drooping lids. I’ll say for Father that come ten at night, he would always get up and dial for a taxi to come take Olga Morris back to her place.
“Do you think he’s sleeping with her?” I asked Julia once. She shrugged her shoulders, a thick paintbrush in her mouth, reluctant to pull away from her canvas and engage in insoluble hypotheses on Father’s sex life.
“Of course he is,” Alina said. “Why else do you think he can bear to have her around day and night?”
“She doesn’t spend the night here,” I replied.
“How can you be so sure?”
It was one of those rare moments in which I had been given access to my former room, and sat around with Julia and Alina in what had become their exclusive territory. I was annoyed at having Alina comment on the situation; I wanted to hear Julia’s thoughts. But Julia never said anything these days, just allowed Alina to represent her as official spokesperson. I was becoming worried at how much power Olga Morris was gaining over Father and over our lives. Not to mention Alina’s over Julia. Our household seemed to be going through a radical transmutation, both in form and content, and I was afraid there would soon be no place for me in the new order that loomed ahead. What would I do then? Or some sort of a civil war might erupt between Alina and Julia against Father and Olga Morris. Would I be forced to take sides?
“That’s such a classic within the hetero world,” Alina continued. “The women gain power through sleeping with the men. It’s totally degrading, but then, what choices do they have if they buy into the male-dominated system?” She always talked like this; her feminism thrived on putting down men and heterosexual women. Later she’d be hostile toward Father, and display a friendly front toward Olga Morris. Of course, Father took no notice, because to him Alina was a nobody who was temporarily in the house to somehow help out, to accompany Julia, to fill the absences of Marion and Nanny. So he tolerated her, and paid her no heed. Even though he didn’t witness all that went on between Julia and Alina, he had seen them occasionally kissing and sunbathing naked in the pool, and knew they were inseparable. But the idea they were lovers hadn’t entered his mind. And if it had, it must have been stashed away instantly as a piece of ridiculous chimera.
“H-o-m-o-s-e-x-u-a-l-s? I’ve never met any in my life. I’m afraid they don’t really exist; maybe a sick boy or two in boarding school or the army barracks, but they soon come to their senses when they grow up and get in the way of family,” he said, laughing one day at lunch. “Who would want to bother with that, seeing it’s already so complicated to be a normal man or woman? Preposterous!”
“There have been well-known poets,” Alina started, disguising with difficulty the bitterness in her voice. “You’ll be familiar with Oscar Wilde, or Sappho, even Federico García Lorca . . .”
“Nonsense! It’s mostly yellow press! They might have had a crush or two, but, h-o-m-o-s-e-x-u-a-l-s? I really don’t think so. People are ignorant, you see? They cannot understand passionate poetry, so they degrade it with base explanations.”
Alina bit her lip. I saw Julia take her hand under the table as she said out loud, “C’mon, Alina, let’s go have a siesta and read passionate poetry,” and got up from the table to leave.
But if Julia having a lesbian affair more or less in the open didn’t seem to touch him, something else did. Her painting. The moment he discovered the work Julia was producing, he pounced on her. I remember the first time he entered her studio room and saw one of her big canvasses. It was a picture in ochers and greens. In the middle lay the shape of a large yellow dog, belly up, basking under an emerald sun, its limbs dissolving in the surrounding sienna earth, while the saliva from its long protruding tongue collected into a green puddle on the side.
Father froze as he took in the dramatic sweep of the image. Then after a moment he said, “Julia, what happened to your beautiful watercolors? I mean, this is an interesting exploration, but it doesn’t hold a candle to your other work. I think you might need to go back to your mother’s pictures and take stock of how she worked. She was a true artist.”
Mother had been a watercolor painter in her spare time. Her pictures were pale representations of garden motifs and languid landscapes in subdued pastel colors. They were very beautiful indeed, but sort of contained, their luminous transparency filled with a sense of anguish, maybe a projection of her exhausted lungs, in the style of romantic grief. She had never attempted any other medium of painting, she hadn’t even owned an easel. But Father had always compared Julia’s work to Mother’s, pushing her to follow in her steps, and then never conceding any real praise when she succeeded painting in Mother’s style. She was always one rung below. That was how he kept Julia under control.
All that was over now. Julia had erupted. Her awakening spurted out in dazzling colors and shapes that impregnated any blank surface within her reach. Paper, canvas, pieces of wood or carton, even the walls in her room. And Father started by giving her advice to pace her development, to go back to more classical techniques. He had never showed so much interest in her work, but now he would come up to her room every day and examine the pieces she had worked on. His tone soon became more nagging, badgering her about being careless, sloppy, hasty, until he started to criticize her openly. “This is not original, you’re just looking at some of the awful work that passes for art these days, and having a go at it yourself,” he’d say.
But for once Julia wouldn’t listen to him. She looked like she was sure of her process. And she had Alina behind her, which was all that mattered.
“What would he know, really?” Alina would say when he’d left the room.
“The English haven’t produced much decent painting, unless you’re into those fluffy countryside pictures of Turner and Gainsborough.” The awful thing was that Father knew. He was crazy about art. Not only did he collect every art book he came across, but he was a man who took art at the gut level as I have never seen anyone else do. He would take us to the Prado Museum and stand for hours in front of Giottos, Titians, and Albrecht Dürers. He would stand and quiver with emotion, travel along brushstrokes, fuse into colors, inside shadows. He would talk about the feelings the paintings sparked in him, how he got lost in Dürer’s pale blue landscapes, cringe with Goya’s nightmarish scenes, feel face-to-face with a Rembrandt portrait. It wasn’t just classical art, either. Father was passionate about Dalí, Rothko, Kandinsky, and of course, Picasso. Had he had a choice, he would have studied art, he always said. Painting was the panacea of human e
xperience.
So, why was he doing this? Even I knew that Julia was really on to something, that her work was strong. As I watched him go at her, I sensed his jealousy, his discomfort with her sudden glory. But soon I began to feel his deeper, darker jealousy toward Alina, the muse who had triggered these changes in Julia, who had pushed her through the doorway toward the discovery of her potential.
Lunchtime became Alina’s probing moment. Rosita, our fleeting housekeeper of those particular months, had been forbidden by Father to cook Spanish traditional food, because in truth her cooking was the greasiest and saltiest ever tasted at our table. So she just served whatever Olga Morris had brought along, mostly takeouts from the Madrid branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken, or hamburgers from a place called The Hollywood Café. I was surprised that Father, the ultimate scourge of Spanish cooks, never said a word about the awful American fast food or takeout menus provided by Olga Morris. Once set before him, he worked through whatever had been placed on his plate with sheepish tenacity. The rest of us got high on Coca-Cola and only picked at our plates, while Olga Morris kept refilling her glass with wine.
“So, do tell me again why your family left Cuba,” Father would start by asking Alina. “Did you say your father was working for Batista at some point?” He had homed in on the fact that Alina was excruciatingly ashamed of her family of Cubano gusanos, or anti-Castro Cubans in exile, and her radically opposed political views were one of the reasons she had moved in with us. She couldn’t stand her parents or her brothers.
“My father did work for Batista’s government, and then left Cuba after Fidel Castro came into power. He was promised they would respect his integrity if he accepted the new system,” Alina replied cautiously, knowing how easy it was for her to flare up when discussing Cuban politics, and how well Father knew it.
“Well, I’m sure he was clever enough to realize that those types of promises coming from someone like Castro are as good as nothing. After all, the man is a dictator, and has no respect for the basic rule of law, so why would he keep a promise made to a former enemy?”
