by Susana Aikin
“He’s an awful man,” Olga Morris interjected. “Did you hear what he did? He just filled a bunch of boats with all the criminals he had in prison and the crazies from the psych wards and shipped them off to the States. What kind of a perverted mind would think of that?” she added, drinking the rest of her wine with a gulp.
Alina sighed, struggling to choose her words. “It’s not like that. Castro took over a system totally corrupt and controlled by mafias. The revolution was the only way out of a government run through extortion, fraud, and crime. Batista kept people dirt poor and hungry, he tortured and murdered everyone who spoke out.” She talked faster and faster as she went. I could see the heat coloring her cheeks, hear the increasing shortness of her breath.
Father let her finish, and then said, “Really? So what’s the point of taking out one nail with another, as they say over here? Or was Batista so bad? I mean Castro also murders, throws people in prison, extorts private property from decent citizens, chases out people like your father . . .”
Alina’s face was now crimson with rage. “The revolution does not extort. It redistributes wealth, which is very different, excuse me.”
“No, you’re not excused.” Father’s voice was also in crescendo. “Don’t you come to my house telling me about the redistribution of wealth. That’s number one in nursery school. I’m all for the underdog, but if people want redistribution they need to go through the democratic process, they need to contact their political representatives, that’s how we do it in civilized societies.”
“And what of societies with no civilization?” Alina stressed her words by gesturing with her fingers. “Those packed with starving peasants, illiterate, living hand to mouth, dependent on despotic landowners and political crooks who profiteer by selling the nation off to gringo mafias.” Alina was panting now and so worked up I thought she might start to cry.
“If that is so, in the case of negroes or indigenous people, they need to be taken care of by responsible landowners and church ministers until they can step into their own power, don’t you think?”
“That’s always been the colonial argument, hasn’t it? The excuse to plunder and exploit other nations!” Alina was nearly shouting.
Julia got up from her chair and said, “This is a stupid conversation, I’m going back to my painting. Let’s go, Alina.” She grabbed Alina by the arm and they both left the table.
“Yes, go back to painting with your communist friend. See if Castro will allow you to paint freely, if he won’t throw you in prison for using the wrong color.” Father’s voice trailed after them.
“That girl is very misinformed. Let me reassure you, James, that the States only supports democratic governments,” Olga Morris said in her sloshed voice, but Father paid her no attention.
The war between him and Alina had been officially declared.
Many months later, after I’d already been working with Father for a while, and had immersed myself fully in his office politics, I came to understand their conflict from a new perspective. At least, from Father’s side of the fence. Spain was still in the throes of a political transition toward democracy. There was unrest in some business sectors, strife going on between unions and employers. All of a sudden, workplaces that had been meek and acquiescent to impresario rule during the years of dictatorship quickened into a new social awareness, became restless, and started making demands. Cocky representatives arose among employees, and the air was filled with threats of strike. This generalized unrest was palpable in Father’s business, maybe even more so for him because he was a foreign employer. So, yes, Father was troubled by all these changes and their underlying ideological fueling. But why take it out on Alina, a young, cheeky, self-proclaimed communist, a kid traumatized by her country’s diaspora after dramatic historical events had shaken her life?
I could only wonder.
Meanwhile, the house became overwrought with their strife. Lunchtimes became unbearable. A second time under siege, her family having put her through the first, Alina’s political discourse became intensified, almost obsessive, a torture to bear. And Father’s rebuttal arguments poured out nonstop, exhausting everyone around the table. Even Olga Morris began to display signs of impatience that no amount of wine could appease. The rest of us had given up on interfering in their sparring. Theirs was a single-combat encounter. It was impossible to leave the table, too. It was one of the unspoken rules of the house that Father decided when the table talk was over. I could feel the silent fury building inside Julia. Her relationship with Alina was beginning to show symptoms of stress derived from these conversations.
Alina wouldn’t yield either. Every day she came to the table with renewed energy and fresh arguments. It was this persistence that most annoyed Father. And a part of me started admiring Alina for this staunchness, for the fact that she didn’t give in, a David in the form of a small, round Cuban brunette stepping up daily to an insurmountable Goliath.
The foil work only got hotter. “The thing about a revolution is not just about social and political reorganization,” Alina said another day. “It’s also about creating leaps in human consciousness, shortcuts in history. It’s about new possibilities. Just consider Julia’s painting. She’s gone from nondescript watercolors to exuberant depictions, and she’s done it by taking a quantum leap, not just in linear progression. Now, that’s revolutionary.”
This new argument was too close to the real sore between them and took Father’s rage to a boiling point. “It’s hypocritical to talk about revolutions and the wonders they might do for art, without mentioning gulags and concentration camps, don’t you think?” Father snapped. He was realizing that Alina was a tough kill.
And then it happened.
One Sunday afternoon, I heard the front doorbell, and when I opened it I found Ventura standing there, his large overcoat puffed up by a blast of whirlwind swirling dry autumn leaves about the porch. He was the office accountant, a tight-lipped, lean, spindly man with a pair of thick glasses he was always wiping off with his handkerchief. He requested to see Father, and I took him to the study. Father closed the door behind them, commenting on the surprising timing of his visit. Sundays in Spain were sacred family-gathering time, never infringed upon. I knew instantly something major had brought him to the door. They spent a few hours locked up in the studio, and then the police came. After another long while of deliberation, Julia and I were asked into the studio to answer questions. Checks for hefty amounts of money had been cashed last week at the bank. Father’s signature had been falsified. The checks could have only come from the filing cabinet in Father’s studio at the house. Of course, Julia and I were clueless.
But Alina was arrested.
* * *
“Hey, wake up! Your phone has been ringing nonstop for the last twenty minutes.” Julia walks toward me, my cell phone in her hand. Behind her, Constantine carries coffee paraphernalia on a large tray. He sets it down on the low table by the chaise, while Delia yawns and stretches out her body. “Constant, you can be a true angel when you try,” she says, picking up one of the cups.
Julia hands me my phone, which has started to ring again. I push the hang-up button and put it on the tray.
“Bravo,” Julia says, stirring sugar into her coffee. “But my experience of these calls is that they’re a matter of insistence, and sooner or later . . .”
“Let’s all just mind our own business for today,” I snort.
The phone rings again. Everyone looks at me. Exasperated, I pick it up.
“Anna, listen. Please.”
“Sorry, Marcus. Not this time. I’m taking care of something crucial.”
“I’ll pay you anything you want, I’ll do anything . . .”
“Don’t make promises you mightn’t be able to deliver.”
“Anna, this is not a joke. I really need you here!”
“Okay, but I already told you you’re going to have to find someone else to help. I’m busy today. I have to run. Bye.” I
push down the power button until the phone goes dead. Julia sighs.
Everyone drinks their coffee in silence. Delia sips hers staring out toward the terrace. Then she puts down her cup. “Well, what can I say? A little romance in the air always cheers up company on a hot afternoon like this.”
I look up at her, annoyed, but she goes on. “Do you know that Constantine makes the best love spells in the whole region? Totally guaranteed, no matter how impossible the situation. Isn’t that right, Constant?” Delia breaks again into that thin smile that looks like it’s trembling with muzzled laughter.
“You’re too flattering, Delia,” Constantine says, blushing.
I eye Julia with fury. Has she dared to share my private life with Delia? But Julia returns a no-I-haven’t look. I get up. I hate to admit to myself that I’m fuming. “Where’s Marion?”
“She’s up in some bedroom,” Julia says.
I make for the house.
“Don’t forget your phone,” Delia says.
I stomp off, while she turns to Constantine. “Let’s prepare for the library and the study next. We’ll need all the salt. And the big bags of sage.”
CHAPTER 9
As I walk into the house, I hear a scream and a loud bang. A clatter of hard cascading sounds, as if a bunch of heavy objects were falling on the floor, follows. I hurry up the stairs toward the din that’s coming from Mother’s studio, my old adopted bedroom.
I push the door open. “Marion? Are you hurt?”
Marion is sitting on the floor surrounded by mounds of fallen books and a bunch of smashed wood shelves that seem to have collapsed on her. The room is thick with the smell of dust and old paper.
“I’m okay, I think. Just a bump on the head. I stood on a chair to reach up and everything came tumbling down.” She dusts her dress and rubs her head as I help her up.
Amazing, how the entire structure of the bookshelf has come down suddenly; a small gesture like the pulling of a book was enough to make it crumble into pieces. Is the whole house coming to this?
“Shall I get you ice?”
“It’s nothing. Look what I found. It’s been lost among these shelves forever.” She sits heavily on the daybed and opens the tattered cover of an old photo album. “Stop putting the books away and come sit with me,” she says, and studies my face while I finish stacking the last pile. “Are you all right? You look very pale. Did anything happen? Has Julia been saying things to you?”
“Nope. Just hot, tired, and starved. Didn’t get much lunch. But I’m not complaining.” I slump on the bed beside her.
Marion scrutinizes me for a moment longer. “You know, you’ve a way of bottling things up, like your job is to carry everyone’s stuff stashed somewhere inside you. It’s not healthy, you know?”
“Please, let’s not go there. I just want to get through the day.”
“Okay,” Marion says slowly. I know she is disappointed at my barring her from giving me one of those older-sister talks. But besides being chronologically a few years ahead of me, how is Marion older? She’s never taken any responsibility for family affairs, has never put out any fires. She has to be taken care of when she goes into fits, feels pathologically overwhelmed when any piece of bad news is reported to her. All of a sudden I feel a hundred years old as I watch her get back to the picture album with the keen, lighthearted curiosity of a little girl.
“I haven’t seen these photos in ages. Remember this one?” I glance over her shoulder and zoom in to the image contained in the black-and-white picture she points at. Mother and Father at their wedding, descending the stairs of the church of San José, a darkened stone façade carved with statues of apostles and saints. In the picture, Father is slim and elegant in his tuxedo, a long shock of light brown hair curling across his forehead, a beaming smile directed toward a small crowd of friends who throw confetti around. Mother stands by his side, her short, stylish black hair under a white pillbox hat adorned with a birdcage veil. She holds a bouquet of pale roses in her gloved hands, roses paler than the satin dress that runs tight along her slender body.
“How would our lives have been different if she’d stayed alive?” Marion says, something she’s repeated unceasingly over the years. For a moment I study the image of Mother in the picture, and notice the deep yearning inside her long almond eyes. Of all the people in the shot, she’s the only one gazing directly at the camera, and that makes this photo very strange to look at. As if Mother locks eyes with you, the viewer, with the intention of revealing something, of conveying a doubt, a sadness, a hidden piece of information.
How little we know about our mother, how few things she left behind. No diaries, no close friends, no friendly family members who could have informed us about what she was like, what she had hoped for, what made her heart quicken. Only her pale, watercolor landscapes. Our main direct source about her had been Nanny, since Father never talked about her; and as the years went by, Nanny’s stories reminded us more and more of the stuff of novellas, and sometimes, just fairy tales. At some point we realized she had stored Mother away in the realm of legend.
Of course, there was also Marion, who was ten at the time of her death and remembered many details about her. Often I would go to Marion and ask her to tell me things about our mother, or ask her questions about her lifestyle. What types of food did she like? What did she wear when she went out at night with our father? Was she vain, being that she was so pretty? Did she ever cry? And Marion would then talk about her, but for some reason, my older sister never quite succeeded in conveying a rounded picture of our mother or her way of life—it was as if her own collection of memories was also fuzzy and incoherent. Then there was Julia, who also had some memories, although hers were mostly related to painting. How mother had taught her to mix colors, to wield paintbrushes. The box of colored pencils she once gave her. There was one cute anecdote Julia recounted over and over, about the morning Mother had her paint faces on discarded breakfast soft-boiled eggshells turned upside down in their cups—a man’s, with a big moustache, and a little girl’s, with rosy, circular cheeks—and how later they had taken strands of colored yarn and stuck them on top of the shells to resemble hair. And what about my memories? They seemed very different from my sisters’. I remember a pale, recumbent woman in a large bed. Her eyes swimming with sadness as she looked at me, as she touched my face with soft, cold fingers. She became increasingly sick after I was born, and hardly ever took care of me. We were told her lungs were very weak. She needed to rest all the time, and not be disturbed by us children. I remember asking Nanny at the market to buy me flowers so I could take them back to Mother.
Marion turns the page and another large black-and-white picture appears. Father standing by his old Triumph motorbike, clad in a bomber jacket and tall boots, leather helmet in hand, hair ruffled by the ride, a grin on his face. Behind him, a range of white high-peaked mountains tower over the winding dirt road below.
“He must have been around your age here,” Marion says, pointing at the picture. “And he looks so much like you in this photo!”
“No, he doesn’t,” I snap.
“You always had the same eyes, and here it’s just so obvious, and the smile . . .”
I glare at her, annoyed. Marion lowers her eyes in silence. But when I return to the picture and take in again his blue gaze, half-wondrous, half-startled, hardened over with the determination to shield its brittle, pained surface, I do feel a pang of identification, a sameness. A sameness if only in the fact that I too, like him, always felt that the thin membrane of my corneas left the deeper self unprotected, dangerously exposed. I also have strived through the years to glaze it over, to conceal emotion, doubt, pain.
How can I begin to deny that of the three of us I was the one who most resembled Father? Not just my eyes, the shape of the high cheekbones, the thin lips, the slender, compact body; most of my physical traits come from Father’s family. Only the black, thick hair sets me aside. Not so with my two sisters. Down the ye
ars, as we learned to fear and hate Father, talk of this semblance between him and me became taboo among us, as if drawing similarities could result in some sort of defilement, in a contagion of his rage, of his tendency to inflict disquiet and torment in the lives of others. And now, why is Marion breaching this covenant?
“I’ll just say for the man, he was good-looking in his youth,” Marion says, and again it feels strange to hear this from my sister. We have for so long talked about our father with resentment, that his looks, his graceful figure as he stands by the mountain road, smiling at a companion, or just at the passerby who’s taking his picture, has not entered my consciousness. I now consider his tall, slim body clad in Lindbergh-style pilot garb, his dimpled cheeks and piercing blue eyes. He was a handsome man, not only in his youth, but throughout his whole life. Although not exercise prone, his body remained trim, his hair never totally grayed, and his face, despite developing wrinkles and deep creases from the dry weather and the hard sun, remained firm. Only his rage distorted his countenance, firing up his eyes and setting his jaw, and as time went by, his face assumed a more permanent distraught look. But he never ceased to evoke admiration, with his English country-style clothes and his classic demeanor. Even when he was in the hospital at the end of his rope, crazy and desperate, nurses would come in twos, and stand at the door looking in, saying to each other, “Look at him, isn’t he the most handsome man? He’s like a movie star.” Of course, we’re talking about a geriatric ward.
But still.
Many people had wondered throughout the years why a man like him, handsome, driven, successful, had not remarried. After all, he was only in his late thirties when he became a widower, and there was no shortage of interested women swarming around him. Not just Spanish women, who might have coveted a foreign husband, but also women belonging to the American and British circles of Madrid, more modern, independent women, also looking for matches. But Father had kept himself secluded in his island, that is, in the house with his three daughters, for as long as he could hold it all together. And he made sure to keep other women out of the small kingdom he had so carefully cultivated.
