Painting Their Portraits in Winter

by Myriam Gurba

  She enjoyed kissing the life out of drunks. It was easy. She enjoyed killing children. That was even easier. Stumbling down the powdery street, runaways from the orphanage would spot her sunning herself near a donkey or smiling at lunatics arguing with mosquitoes. She’d give the runaways the kindest smile they’d seen in a lifetime, and their hearts would crack open a little. A hairline crack in that child-size gold locket was all she needed.

  Her serenity and bread-white teeth seemed so trustworthy, and like stray kittens rediscovering human warmth, they crept to her with hope. Their skin made her smile. Once their hands touched, she walked them behind the cantinas, along homes with chocolaty doors with rusty hand-of-Fatima knockers, towards the cemetery behind the paupers’ hospital. Nameless people got tossed into mass graves there, and the heat and humidity melted them into human bread pudding.

  As an orphan would catch a whiff of the cemetery flowers and that unique dessert, Death would turn to watch. She held her breath as her orphans lost their moisture, shriveled, became husks, and turned into crunchy brown calla lilies. They crumpled into little versions of her, little deaths, and she held their brittle hands, amazed that she had the power to turn a child — everybody’s hope for everything — into fine, fine ash that wind could blow across a straw mat.

  Their father drove the car towards the orphanage. His daughters — Faith, Charity, and Esther — watched the cantinas, hookers, and donkeys go by. A servant held the baby, Rose.

  “Where are we going?” Faith asked her father.

  “On a vacation,” he lied.

  He’d been fighting with their mother about not getting enough, and after she’d left that morning, to go to a client’s house to take her measurements, he’d told their daughters, “Grab whatever you feel like you can’t live without for the next couple of… days.” Esther had grabbed her mother’s mother-of-pearl combs. Charity had grabbed a blanky she liked to sniff. Faith had grabbed Rose. Their father herded them to his sedan.

  They were cresting up the hill from which the orphanage exuded shame. Founded by a bishop when the country was still Spain, the facility looked like the bastard child of Versailles and the Alamo. Its ramparts overlooked the red light district. Sparrows preened on its dome. The sight of parents placing children on its stone steps and running downhill offset the place’s palatial quality.

  The sedan pulled up to the entrance. At the foot of the steps, a mother with a baby secured to her chest by a rebozo paced. The stones burned her bare soles but whatever psychic agony she was going through numbed her to the heat. The car idled near her.

  “Out of the car!” the father yelled. The pacing woman gave a start.

  A matron with a bob haircut counted the girls as they spilled out, “… three…four…”

  Her hands hung at the pockets of her gray smock. The father strutted to her. He handed her an envelope. She reached for it, and he pressed it into her square hands.

  “This is for my daughters,” he said. “Don’t, I repeat, don’t let their mother see them or you will lose your job. My daughters live here now, and they don’t have a mother. My daughters get their own room. They will eat food I send. Tutors and teachers will come give them private lessons. I will send them gifts that are to be delivered straight to their room. I don’t want them playing with disgusting children, and I don’t want them getting worms, dysentery, or head lice. Understand?”

  The matron nodded.

  He turned, bent, and kissed each daughter on her third eye. The servant handed Rose to the matron. With tears in her eyes, the servant scrambled back into the car.

  “See you later!” he called to his daughters and got back behind the wheel. He pulled away, coasting downhill.

  The matron thought, Now I can buy a razor! She peered into the cash-stuffed envelope. She thumbed through the bills. They felt as smooth as her sideburns were going to feel.

  The pacing woman stared at the matron. She felt like shit. She had nothing but a baby to press into the woman’s hands. As if to remind her of this, her baby shook the seedpod she was clutching. It went tsa, tsa, tsa.

  The woman turned and swung her arms as she stomped downhill. The thought, I wonder if I’ll ever get hungry enough to eat her, came to her. She shook her head, trying to shake the thought out, but when you try to shake ugly thoughts from your head, you give birth to more. I wonder who would taste better, she thought, a very young person or a very old person. She shivered. Her stomach growled.

  From the entry of a billiards club, Death watched her. She smiled. Death knew what she’d been thinking. She could hear her appetites.

  Death said, “Excuse me.” The mother quit stomping and looked. Death continued, “I know what you were thinking about doing, up at the orphanage. I saw you, and there’s no shame in wanting your child to live in a place where it will be warm and fed, and have brothers and sisters to play with.”

  Death gave a smile as warm as goat stew. Death delighted in the tears this brought to the mother’s eyes. The mother gave Death a crumpled smile.

  “Can I hold her?” asked Death.

  A tear scooted down the mother’s cheek. She handed her baby to Death.

  Death took her into her china arms and held her, and breathed that weird potpourri that she’d breathed onto the corpse. She and the baby looked at each long enough for a chicken to lay Monday’s, Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s eggs. She and the baby exchanged gazes of mutual understanding. Death looked at the mother.

  “I can’t have my own, “said Death, “but I would take very good care of a baby if I could have one.”

  The mother looked Death up and down. She’d mistaken her for a hooker but now realized she couldn’t be one. Her clothes had a freshly washed, sun-dried look. Her teeth sparkled way too white. The hookers who worked these streets were table scraps. Two of her sisters were table scraps. This woman you could put in a movie. Or a painting. You could use her face to sell cigarettes, cold cream, or cola. Her face inspired.

  “You can have her,” whispered the mother.

  Death smiled as if she’d already heard the offer.

  The mother bolted, running in the direction of the cathedral. Church bells peeled and somewhere a rooster that was being made to fight his brother listened to his sibling’s death rattle.

  Death’s skirt swished as she sang a serpentine lullaby to the baby, “Ssssssssss, ssssssssss, sssssssssss…” She carried the little one in the direction of the paupers’ cemetery. She stroked the little one’s black tuft of hair. She tugged her fleshy earlobes, and she and the baby tasted the air with their tongues.

  Faith, Charity, Esther, and Rose shared a room outfitted with new mattresses, pillows, and blankets. They loaded their clothes into a mahogany wardrobe and stood a gilded mirror on the mahogany desk.

  Their third night in the orphanage, Faith crawled across the stone floor and curled up on the rug next to Rose’s crib.

  “Can I have your bed?” Esther asked Faith.

  “Yes.”

  She pushed Faith’s bed next to hers and doubled her sleep space.

  On their eighth day at the orphanage, two men wheeled a dark German piano into the sisters’ room. They stationed it beside the window that looked onto the rose garden.

  Most of the time, the sisters stayed indoors but the matrons did herd them into the rose gardens after meals so that girls could play pretend or chase bees. After playtime on Tuesdays, an art teacher set up his easel by the crib. He set up still lives of fruits, nuts, and flowers for his students to paint. The music teacher tortured them on Fridays. A regular tutor bothered them every day except Sunday.

  During playtime, Charity would tuck her easel under her arm, carry it into the courtyard, erect it near the roses, leer at their buds, and attack her canvas with watercolors. The bushes barfed especially lush and vivid blossoms where the matrons sometimes stabbed the dirt with shovels at night. They could be seen schlepping brown sacks in the moonlight, heaving these into holes, and covering them back up wit
h loose soil. They returned in the daylight to water, trim, and weed flowerbeds.

  A weekly fruit basket arrived, and the matrons would set this treat on a teacart by the girls’ biggest window. They allowed the sisters to eat from it, whatever they felt like whenever they felt like it. They could eat guayaba, mango, banana, passion fruit, loquat, cherimoya, pomegranate, or mamey. The girls left their bedroom for the big meal of the day, a meal that combined lunch and dinner: linner. At linnertime, the matrons chaperoned the sisters into the high-ceilinged cafeteria with yellow and green tile floors. Long, long wood tables and benches striped the room. A matron bearing a cauldron filled with cooling pinto beans walked from sitting orphan to fidgeting orphan, scooping and slapping brown into clay bowls. Behind this broad, a woman toting a tortilla stack tossed a Frisbee at each orphan. Behind her followed a woman cradling a ewer of lukewarm water. She held its spout over each orphan’s clay cup and let the water level rise till it was half full.

  “Pssst,” Charity called to Maria Guadalupe, the orphan sitting across from her.

  “Yeah?” responded Maria Guadalupe.

  “Wanna trade?” Charity gestured at her plate. Pinto beans fried in lard blew steam at Charity’s chin. A hunk of bolillo the size of toddler’s lower leg flexed next to them. Champurrado swelled in her terracotta mug.

  “Really?” asked Maria Guadalupe.

  “Yes. Your food looks better to me.”

  Maria Guadalupe pushed her plate at Faith while Faith pushed hers at Maria Guadalupe. Maria Guadalupe snatched the bolillo, ripped it in half, and dug her fingernails into the white, hollowing the bread till she’d turned the crust into a cone. She shoved the white into her mouth, chewed, and reached for a spoon. She scooped beans into her freshly sculpted cornucopia and took a sniff of her creation.

  “Mmmm,” she groaned.

  “Later on,” said Faith, “if you pose for me, I’ll share my watermelon with you.”

  “Pose how?”

  “So that I can paint you. You’ll be my model. I’ll brings my paints in here and make your picture.”

  “Okay.”

  Maria Guadalupe took a bite of beany bread. The orphan sitting next to her (also named Maria Guadalupe, almost everybody in the orphanage was named Maria Guadalupe) whispered something into her ear. Maria Guadalupe nodded. “Yes,” she whispered at the girl.

  Maria Guadalupe leaned towards Faith and whispered, “Tonight, we’re busting out of this place.”

  “Why?” asked Faith. “I like it here.” She picked up a boiled bean and slid it under her tongue, letting its insides ooze out of their shell.

  “Yeah, well that’s because you don’t have to live like the rest of us.”

  Faith scrunched her mouth in embarrassment.

  “Don’t do that,” said Maria Guadalupe. “I wish I had what you have. We all wish we had what you have. Anyways, tonight, we’re leaving out a kitchen window. We’re meeting in the courtyard with the white roses. When you hear an owl call six times, be there.” She turned to the girl on her left and asked, “Are you gonna be there?” The girl nodded.

  The chief Maria Guadalupe pointed at the kitchen with her spoon. “We’re gonna go in there,” she said. “That’s where it’s gonna happen.”

  “How are you gonna get in there?” asked Faith.

  “Look under the table,” said Maria Guadalupe.

  Faith leaned back, bent, and stuck her head under the table. In Maria Guadalupe’s lap, she saw a metal ring holding three long keys.

  Charity was sitting at the desk. Candlelight illuminated the half-finished hummingbird on her needlepoint canvas. She stuck needle into wing and pulled green thread. Esther was in bed, her fingers at her eyelashes. They were busy tugging each hair individually till it popped free. Her eyelids smarted. Her green eyes stared at the ceiling. The pain warmed and distracted her. It replaced her mother.

  Faith was curled on the rug next to the crib, her hand rocking it back and forth. She listened for bird sounds.

  “Hoot. Hoot. Hoot. Hoot. Hoot. Hoot,” came from the courtyard with yellow roses.

  Faith’s hand held onto the cradle slats. She continued rocking it back and forth.

  I like it here, she thought to herself. Art classes. My sisters. Interesting kids to talk to. Rose gardens outside the window. No screaming. No breaking glass. Nobody pressing their hands against my mother’s mouth. Tomorrow I’ll paint the sun. I’ll paint him having fun.

  The next day, in the cafeteria, as the matron with the bean cauldron humped to the next table, Faith leaned towards a Maria Guadalupe sitting across from her. “Tell me about last night,” she said.

  Without even brokering the swap, Faith pushed her plate forward and scooted the other girl’s plate closer to her chest. She picked up her spoon and dug into the watery beans.

  The Maria Guadalupe said, “Well, maybe you heard it. Big Lupe hooted in the courtyard with the yellow roses, and we snuck out the windows and met her there. We tiptoed to the kitchen, and Lupe put the biggest key in the lock and turned it. We tiptoed into the kitchen and unlatched and cranked open the window by the tub. Big Lupe climbed up into it and dropped to the ground. She waited for me on the stone, and I got up onto the ledge, and I was ready to drop, but then I got scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Her.”

  “Who?” asked Faith.

  A different Maria Guadalupe chimed in, “The ghost who killed her babies!”

  “Oh.”

  The orphans were talking about their country’s most famous ghost. She lives in every one of its towns, cities, villages, and imaginations, anywhere there are people who understand and misunderstand women. Sometimes she’s young, sometimes she’s in the middle, and sometimes she’s ancient. She is, however, always a woman.

  There’s a version of the story that she had a family and her husband cheated on her — sometimes the cheating is with her sister, sometimes it’s a best friend. To get revenge, she takes the things that are half him to the river and dunks them. She holds them down till the bubbles and the thrashing stop. Gurgle, gurgle, and then only gur-. You can only imagine the -gle.

  In the patriotic version of the story, the drowning is merciful. Spaniards are invading Mexico and an Indian woman understands the apocalyptic nature of what’s going on. So that her kids won’t be raped or made into slaves, she holds their hands, walks them to a puddle — cranes and storks watch, eagles fly overhead with baby snakes in their beaks — and the Indian weeps. Her tears make a river she uses to ensure her children’s freedom.

  There are infinite versions of this story, you can make up your own version of this story, but the constant is that the creature who makes this story tick is a woman. A woman destroys. She creates a tiny apocalypse, the worst kind. Almost always, she uses water. Children die with moist lungs. They are held under, they thrash, they kick, they try to scream, and an axolotl, wearing a smile he can’t get rid of, watches from the lake bottom. As the small body stops moving, the axolotl continues to smile. He smiled so much his face stayed that way.

  “You were more scared of her than of staying in the orphanage?” asked Faith. Two Maria Guadalupes nodded so hard their faces blurred. “What did Big Lupe do?” asked Faith.

  A Maria Guadalupe replied, “She took off running in the direction of the ghost. We heard hooting. We looked up, and there was an owl watching us from a nest in one of the rafters. It had yellow eyes. Its back was to us but its head was turned completely around. There was a black butterfly hovering around its shoulders. The owl craned its neck to look closer at us, and it started to look like a man, so we shut the windows fast and left the kitchen and ran back to the dormitory. We don’t know what happened to Big Lupe.”

  “Where was she planning on going?”

  Maria Guadalupe shrugged.

  What do you call a reverse female orphan, the mother of a dead baby? Is she a black butterfly with a rainbow tongue? To her, does all the nectar taste sour?

  When Abuelita
was two weeks away from dying, my aunts and my three extra aunts came to the house for tostadas and wine from a box. Abuelito conceived these extra aunts with his mistress, and one of my regular aunts, Tía Pancha, was fine with the extra aunts being in the living room, gossiping, but Ofelia, the one who took me ice-skating in a pyramid, was not. Everybody dragged her chair and sat so that we formed a circle, and Ofelia and Mom listened to the extra aunts share stories about their father and their childhoods.

  I sat in the chair that Abuelito had liked to pontificate from. I listened. I could smell Abuelita’s dying process. She was dying on the other side of the house by the street but the smell carried. It crept down the hall, and it squatted with us in the room. It swirled around us, almost dancing. It was decrepit pussy with a unicorn beard, bedsores, and inertia.

  I could tell from the expressions on their faces that as the extra aunts talked about growing up, Ofelia and Mom were transposing timelines of their childhoods over their half sisters’ chronologies. You could tell that in their heads they were thinking stuff like, Now I understand why my father wasn’t around to wish me a happy birthday when I turned eight. Because he was at that bastard’s first communion.

  Abuelita was moaning very little that night. Maybe she was straining to listen to the stories, the stories that confirmed the horror and banality of my grandfather’s infidelity. As I watched the extra aunts’ mouths move, I saw Abuelito talking to me. It was my first time seeing these women whose existence I’d known of for decades. For about twenty years, their existence had been a shadow in my imagination but now Abuelito’s big ass nose was saluting me from their faces. His nose repeated over and over and over, and then I realized that the long shape of his face was there, too. He was haunting me through my extra aunts’ faces.

  The day after the three extra aunts came to eat tostadas, Ofelia took her daughter and her daughter’s daughter and me downtown to buy jewelry. We strolled the jewelry district which sprawled within view of where my grandmothers had lived, the orphanage.

  I announced, “I have a headache,” and everyone followed me into a convenience store where I plucked a 7-Up from a refrigerator. I carried it to the counter, broke my only bill, and carried my drink outside. I slid a plastic vial of ibuprofen from my purse, popped it open, and emptied two pills onto my tongue. I washed them down. My forehead still throbbed.