Tarnished Beauty

by Cecilia Samartin

  Tomas gave me an encouraging shove and began to sing quietly, so that only I might hear him. It was a simple hymn he’d heard me sing many times before, and my voice joined his until I was transported beyond my petty self-consciousness and was singing with all my soul. I felt an inexplicable love surging within me, and my spirit soared as the pure melody of my song flowed through my lungs and throat like a mighty river.

  When my song was finished, I felt a strange yet familiar sensation throughout my body, as one does after taking a long, hot bath, and changing into clean clothes. At that moment I glanced down at my hands, and was stunned to see that they were clean, and that the thin black line of dirt packed under my nails was completely gone. My clothes too were spotless, and as fresh as the day I had put them on at the start of our journey. Mystified, I looked out upon the silent crowd that mirrored my reverie, and then came a thundering applause and an explosion of cheers from all corners of the square. I managed a hasty bow, and the people cleared to let me pass, as I was eager to find my companions.

  As many people congratulated me, and complimented my singing, I looked all around for them, but Tomas and the others seemed to have been swallowed up by the crowd. I headed toward the cafés, certain I’d find them there. All the while I was shaking hands with many as I went along, then suddenly I stopped. The throng of road-weary pilgrims around me became silent. It was as if they had all disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  I stood alone in the middle of the square with a woman I mistook at first for an angelic statue. She wore a red shawl over her head that slipped to her shoulders, and revealed a dark-haired beauty with eyes the color of the sea. I do not know what captivated me more, the perfection of her face, or the mysterious aura that surrounded her.

  In the moment that it took me to blink and confirm that she was in fact real and not a vision, I was lost.

  Jamilet had been listening with her eyes closed, for in this way she found it easier to picture every detail of the story, but she opened them to find that Señor Peregrino had fallen asleep. She looked closer and noticed that for once there was color in his normally ashen face, and she became aware of a warm feeling in her own. She stood and began preparing the breakfast tray for removal, then paused again to look upon Señor Peregrino as he slept. No doubt he had once been a handsome man, as he claimed, perhaps even striking to behold, with those eyes, so dark and intense. Even now, at his advanced age, they seemed to possess uncommon strength and boldness.

  She tore her mind free from the imaginings that held her. It was time to get back to work.

  12

  THERE WAS LITTLE DOUBT in Jamilet’s mind that the best time to ask her aunt for anything was in the evening, after she’d had her second beer. Before that, she was far too irritable and filled with complaints to listen to anyone. She’d complain about the idiotic places they put gas meters in some houses, making them impossible to find and read, and she’d complain about her boss, who expected all his employees to answer the phone with a smile, and about her fellow employees who got all the best assignments. And then there were the complaints about her constantly aching back, miserably sore feet, and incessant heartburn. If her workday had been tolerable, then she’d find something else to complain about—the fact that the grass was green, the sky blue, and the earth round instead of square. Of course, if Jamilet waited until after Carmen had consumed her third beer and more besides, she’d agree to almost anything. The problem was that the next day she wouldn’t remember what it was she’d agreed to.

  On the afternoon Jamilet decided to ask her for a favor, she waited until the second beer was downed, and posed her request directly, feeling a bit odd as she did so. When she asked her aunt a question, it was usually for the purpose of doing something for her, and not the other way around.

  “Tía, would you like extra cheese on your tacos?”

  “Tía, do you want me to change your sheets?”

  “Tía, will you need your jeans washed for tomorrow or can you wait for the weekend?”

  But now it was, “Tía, will you take me to the library?”

  Carmen flipped through the TV guide without looking up. “Yeah, sure…where is it, anyway?”

  “It’s only a few blocks away. We could even walk.”

  Carmen tossed her empty can at Jamilet. “Why do you need to go there?”

  “I just want to learn something about Spain.”

  Carmen looked up from her TV guide, and scrunched up her nose, as though she detected a foul odor. “Spain?” Then she narrowed her eyes. “Does this have something to do with that old pervert you’re looking after?”

  Jamilet hesitated to answer, not quite sure of her own motivation. “He’s not a pervert, Tía. It’s just that he’s been telling me things about where he came from, and I…I just want to know if they’re true and if he’s really crazy.”

  “Of course he’s crazy, and you are too for working with him,” she said before starting on her third beer. She glanced up at her niece’s hopeful eyes. “Okay. If I’m not too tired, we’ll go tomorrow after I get home from work.”

  The next day Jamilet waited anxiously for her aunt to get home from work. When she heard the car in the drive, she watched through the window as her aunt walked to the door, her gait heavy and lumbering from side to side. The keys slipped from her hand to the ground, and she kicked them all the way to the steps, putting off bending down for them until the last minute. It had been another bad day at work, and Jamilet could well imagine the long list of complaints she’d be subjected to that night. Swallowing her disappointment, she opened the front door before her aunt got to the steps and reached down for the keys herself. On bad days like this, Carmen’s back pain was absolutely excruciating.

  “You’re a lifesaver, Jami,” Carmen said with a sigh.

  Jamilet didn’t bother to remind her aunt of their plans to go to the library, but later that evening, after the dishes had been washed, and Carmen and Louis were engrossed in an episode of Starsky and Hutch, Jamilet slipped outside the house through the side door, and made her way to the tree where she’d met Eddie before. She waited for him to pass by, as she knew he would, between nine and nine thirty, after kissing Pearly twice and giving her a firm pat on her bottom.

  He approached right on schedule, hands stuffed into his pockets, shoulders hunched forward against the fresh night air. She waited until he was a few feet beyond her hiding place, and then stepped out. “Eddie,” she called softly.

  He whirled around, squinting with alarm into the darkness. When he recognized Jamilet, he relaxed, but only a bit. “What are you doing there? You scared the shit out of me.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you again, I just need a favor.”

  Eddie’s face went stiff. He didn’t seem to appreciate any reminders of how badly he’d been spooked before. He said nothing.

  “It’s not a big favor,” Jamilet added, taking a cautious step toward him.

  “What is it?”

  “I need you to go with me to the library. I already asked my tía Carmen, but she gets too tired after work.”

  Eddie stared at Jamilet as if she were speaking Russian or Chinese. When he was certain he’d understood her correctly, he flicked his head to the left without moving his eyes away from hers. “The library’s just around the block. You don’t need my help to find it.”

  “I need you to go with me so I can look up some stuff about Spain…”

  “Look,” Eddie said, his irritation mounting. “I got a girlfriend, in case you didn’t notice.” He lowered his voice, and stole a glance at her porch.

  “I don’t want to cause trouble for you, Eddie, I just need you…”

  “Why can’t you go alone?”

  Jamilet felt her face get hot as she considered how best to answer him. Her eyes watered, and she was grateful for the darkness. “I can’t read,” she muttered.

  “What?”

  “I can’t read,” she repeated, raising her voice as though to ban
ish the shame. “I don’t know how—not in English or Spanish. I can’t—”

  Eddie held up both hands to shush her. “I heard you. Shit, they heard you in Canada.”

  Jamilet felt her heart beating furiously and waited for it to slow down before saying anything more. “So, now that you know, will you go with me?”

  Eddie stuffed his hands in his pockets, but said nothing.

  Jamilet stepped in closer to him. “Will you go with me, Eddie?” she asked again.

  He shook his head slowly. “I’m really sorry, but I can’t take the chance that Pearly will find out. You don’t know how jealous she gets.”

  “You must love her a lot,” Jamilet whispered, but her heart was pounding again worse than before because of what she was contemplating to say next. She hadn’t realized until that moment how desperate she really was, and the feeling was at once completely alien, and yet strangely familiar to her. The words that came out of her mouth had been borrowed from another life it seemed, and when she spoke them she felt the thrill and power of breathing fire. “If you don’t go with me,” she said, “I’ll tell Pearly you took me to the hospital that night.”

  If he’d half-expected something like this from Jamilet, Eddie might have smiled coolly and put her in her place without a second thought, but the shock gave him pause, as if Mickey Mouse had suddenly hauled off and socked him on the jaw. He shook his head in disbelief. “I was wrong about you,” was all he said.

  They met the following afternoon behind the first stack of bookshelves nearest the entrance. Eddie’s face was set in stone and he didn’t respond when Jamilet greeted him. She expected as much, and knew that she probably deserved it, but it was too late to take any of it back now.

  “Let’s get this over with,” he said, barely glancing at her. Jamilet struggled to keep up as he walked briskly through the building, looking for someone who might offer some assistance. But the proverbial librarian, sitting at her desk, eager to guide thirsty young minds in their quest for knowledge, was nowhere to be found.

  “Can’t we look for what we need ourselves?” Jamilet asked him after they’d passed through the same corridors three times. She pointed to the shelf nearest them. “Maybe we can start looking here.”

  Eddie rolled his eyes. “You won’t find anything that way,” he said.

  Jamilet shrugged, intrigued with the way his temper flared. He was still awkward with it, as though wearing shoes too big for his feet. But in spite of his sour mood, she enjoyed the fact that words were passing between them, and that his attention to her, however contrived it might be, made her feel alive and wonderful. Jamilet said, “Maybe if we just try.”

  Exasperated, Eddie replied much too loudly, forgetting where he was. “There’s probably more than a million books here. Who knows? Maybe a hundred million and you’re saying we should just start looking here…” He pulled his eyes back into his head, grabbed the book nearest him, and opened it like an angry professor who was sick to death of his ignorant students. His eyes focused and then refocused on the words he read. “This book here,” he said, looking up at Jamilet, who was nothing less than fascinated, “is about postdepression economics and all the things that have to do with that. It has nothing to do with Spain,” he said, pronouncing the “ain” in “Spain” in a long and exaggerated manner meant to emphasize his disgust with this whole business.

  Jamilet was clearly impressed with Eddie’s command of the written word, and his use of such sophisticated phrases. “What is…postdepression economics?” she asked.

  Eddie rolled his eyes, irritated once more by the need to explain something so painfully obvious. “It has to do with how people lose their money when they get sad, like when somebody in their family dies or something.”

  Jamilet thought it very interesting that a whole book should be devoted to such a subject, for she’d known many who’d suffered in just that way. They were widows mostly, like her grandmother who worked the land for a meager living as best she could and accepted the charity of good-hearted neighbors, and the money that her daughter and now granddaughter sent her on a regular basis. “I think I’ve known a lot of people with postdepression economics,” Jamilet said while nodding her head gravely and savoring the words on her tongue. They’d been in the library less than five minutes and already, she’d learned something very interesting.

  Eddie narrowed his eyes at her and slammed the book shut, causing Jamilet to jump. “You’re wasting my time. I got to be at Pearly’s in an hour and if I’m not there she’s gonna wonder why.”

  “Just tell her you were running late. Everyone has the right to be late sometimes, don’t they?”

  Eddie peered into Jamilet’s face, his eyes slowly widening as he did so. “I got it. I just figured out what this is all about.” He pointed his finger at her, and shook it. “You want to ruin my life. You woke up one day wherever it was you used to live, and decided to cross the border so you could ruin somebody’s life, the first poor bastard you laid eyes on. And I’m the lucky one. That’s the real reason you came north, isn’t it?”

  Jamilet smiled in spite of the small pain his suspicion produced. “That’s not the reason I left Mexico,” she returned softly.

  At that moment the librarian appeared, and promptly instructed Eddie and Jamilet to quiet down or take their conversation outside. Eddie took the opportunity to enlist her help. He tried to explain but Jamilet quickly took over, and in a matter of seconds, the woman was leading them to the far corner of the building. When she located the desired shelf, she retrieved three heavy volumes and laid them on the nearest table, reminding them once more to keep their voices down.

  Jamilet took her seat, and waited with chin in hand for Eddie to do the same. Reluctantly, he took the seat across from her and began flipping through the pages of the first book, turning on several occasions to glance at the clock on the far wall, and sometimes flipping through a fair number of pages while looking away entirely. He handled the pages with so much force that at times he nearly tore them out of the book as he muttered, “This is such bullshit…” and other things. He asked Jamilet to repeat what she was looking for several times, “The pilgrimage road to Santiago—in Spain.”

  He continued flipping the pages back and forth, and Jamilet wondered if anybody could possibly read so fast. She observed an older woman sitting near them. Her eyes serenely floated across the page. It took her a long time to turn the page (Eddie had flipped ten or more pages in the same time she took to turn just one), and when she finally did, her eyes landed on the next page like a falling leaf, grateful to have found its resting place.

  Eddie was already charging through the last of the three books, shaking his head resolutely, his eyes blank as the pages came and went before them. She anticipated his words, certain that he’d thrust his hands in his pockets as he stood to say them. He pushed his chair back, and was true to her expectations. “There’s nothing about that place here,” he announced. He even attempted an expression meant to resemble disappointment. “It’s probably not a real place.”

  Jamilet stacked the three books and placed them in front of Eddie, as they’d been before he began. “You didn’t read them.”

  “I did too.”

  She stared him down with every ounce of character she could muster, just like Tía Carmen did when she was angry, and Señor Peregrino did when she disturbed his papers. The effect on Eddie was the same as it was on Jamilet. His face burned, beginning with his ears, and a watery guilt began to glaze his eyes. He pulled his hands out of his pockets and sat back down with an audible thud. “Damn,” he said. “Damn, damn…,” he repeated, while looking through the table of contents more carefully this time, and eventually trading anger for concentration as his finger trailed down the column of topics and finally stopped midway down the second page. He opened the book and began to read, not moving or even bothering to glance at the clock for a full minute.

  “You found it, didn’t you?” Jamilet asked after almost five mi
nutes had elapsed.

  He nodded and turned the page like the older lady had done, as if time were hovering, and space had opened up to make the mind forget itself and flounder happily in a newfound dimension.

  Jamilet stayed quiet, although she sensed the thrill of his discovery and yearned for it as well. Eddie was able to read about the place in Señor Peregrino’s story. He was able to learn about this distant world because he knew how to transform those strange and beautiful little squiggled symbols into something meaningful. It was a wondrous thing, and he was all the more beautiful in her eyes because of it. She gazed openly at him, feasting upon this moment that she knew would pass too quickly. She noticed that his lips twitched slightly while he read and that there was a softness in his eyes that eased in along with the mysterious knowledge he was gaining. She wished to touch her fingers to his forehead and sweep aside a lock of the thick brown hair that seemed to impede his vision, but she kept her hands folded on her lap and waited. Finally, when she could no longer keep quiet, she asked, “Can you read it to me?”

  Eddie raised his head and shook it slightly. “Nah, I don’t read too good like that.” But his earlier apprehension was gone. Jamilet waited a bit more and watched as the expression in his eyes shifted from wonderment to concern and then back to wonderment again. “It’s a real place; all right,” he said, looking for a strong foothold to begin. “It’s old too, like nine hundred years or something…” He reached for the book again, as though to check his figures, and then thought better of it. “People started walking to this big church…a cathedral, because they believed that Saint James was buried there. You know,” he said, searching for confirmation in Jamilet’s eyes, “he was one of those saintly guys that hung out with Jesus, at church and in the Bible, and stuff.” He turned a bright shade of red. “I can’t believe I’m talking about this.”

  “Where did people start walking from?” Jamilet asked, ignoring his discomfort.