“Go on.” María scowled. “There is a belly there, or a broken heart.”
Sergio shrugged, draining the last of his cafecito and putting his hat on. He could not afford a longer chat today. “I am only telling you what Don Mundín said,” he concluded. That was always his amen when anyone in the village questioned something he did not care to defend or explain.
All her life María had been mounted by the santos, so that people always came to her with their problems and hopes and fears, and she procured for them the help of the spirit world. The santos would descend on her shoulders, and trembling all over, her eyes rolling as if they were marbles inside her head, María would speak in a voice not her own. The pretty Ruth must deposit a box of talcum in the crotch of a samán tree for Santa Marta if she wanted to find a good man. Porfirio better light a candle to San Judas of lost causes if he wanted his cock to win.
But after her boy drowned, the santos stopped speaking to María. It was her doing at first, as she refused to receive them in order to leave a space open for Pablito to come through that narrow shaft to her. Daily, she implored him to calm a mother’s heart and let her know he had made the crossing safely. But after a year, Pablito had still not spoken to her, and when she tried to contact her santos for news of the boy, all she heard was an immense silence from that other world.
Still, her neighbors kept coming to her, and María could not just turn them away to suffer without hope as she herself was doing. And so she maintained her pretense of being in touch with the santos who could help them. After a lifetime in the village, she knew everybody’s business, and just from looking clear-eyed at their predicaments, María could tell them what they should do to ease their suffering. Recently, she had begun to think that her boy’s silence was God’s punishment for the deceit she had been practicing on her fellow villagers.
This morning her sister-in-law Elena had summoned her for help with the bad times her family was having. Her husband Porfirio had lost his job working on the grounds of Los Pinos Hotel, which was finally closing. In the last year, tourism had been going steadily downhill. Everyone was leaving in droves, the less desperate for the capital, and the rest for Miami and Puerto Rico in rowboats. It was as if with the death of the boy all good luck had drained out of the village.
But perhaps a reversal was about to begin. Just as María was lighting a candle to draw good luck down on Elena’s family, Sergio had arrived with an answer to the petition they had been making: a lady was coming to the big house. Somebody was needed to do the cooking and cleaning starting right away.
Sergio had looked directly at her, his eyes asking if she wouldn’t put her grief aside at last and resume her old job. But the news of a guest at the house made her feel that knot in her heart that she could not untie. María had not been able even to look at the place since that horrible day, no less enter it and serve the patrones or their guests. Why not have Elena do the cooking and hire Porfirio to help out on the grounds? The santos were finally responding to María’s entreaties, filling her head with their high, windy voices. Perhaps they would bring news of Pablito, the faintest touch on her cheek, a whisper from the row of cypresses that lined the south side of the street.
On the grounds of the big house, Sergio was following the lady around, answering her many questions. What was that tree over there called? Where was his wife and did he have any children? As they talked, they walked through the grounds, up to the tennis court and stables, then around the nursery where Doña Gabriela had cultivated her swinging baskets of orchids. They ended up at the pool.
“Wow,” the lady exclaimed, “Mundín didn’t mention a pool.”
They were standing at the edge, looking down into the turquoise bottom littered with leaves and trash. For the last year, the pool had been used as a giant receptacle. Today during his instructions, Don Mundín had delicately avoided mentioning it, but of course, Sergio understood that the pool must be readied, too.
“Can we clean it and fill it?” the lady wanted to know, crouching down as if to look more closely at the trash below.
“The filter is broken.” Sergio hesitated, seeing the lady’s face fall. If the lie should get back to Don Mundín, Sergio would be roundly scolded for not having told the patrín that the swimming pool needed fixing. “But I will get the part,” Sergio added.
Indoors, it fell to Sergio again to show the lady around. Certainly, he knew more than Elena, who had only been to the back door of the house before today. As he followed the lady, Sergio had to keep wiping his forehead with his hand. The summer was going to be a hot one all right. But the lady seemed not to feel the heat. She went through every room, looking out every window on each of the three floors, trying to decide which room had the best view.
Finally at the topmost floor, a tower room with windows on all four sides, she cried out, “This is it!” Far below, Sergio could see the little village, the crooked streets winding uphill, the belltower on the tiny chapel. The mountains loomed above, the river tumbled down. The combination of height and heat made Sergio feel dizzy.
“There is no bed here,” Sergio noted, once he had recovered from his vertigo by looking down at his feet. “Begging your pardon, doña, I do not know that we could fit a bed in here.”
“Don’t beg my pardon,” the lady insisted, smiling. “Of course, we could fit a bed here, Sergio. We’ll just put the mattress on the floor so-so.” She swung her arms, outlining where the bed could go.
“You’re the one who knows,” he said quietly. It was not for him to contradict the lady. Still, Don Mundín would be displeased if his caretaker didn’t take good care of his guest. “One must remember there are no screens and there are mosquitoes.”
“But look at the view!” the lady exclaimed.
And so, they carted a mattress up to the tower room and somehow crammed it lengthwise under the eastern windows. When the sun was low on the mountains, the lady called Sergio up from the yard. Elena had already been summoned from the kitchen where she was making the lady a bean soup. “Hurry, you’re going to miss it!” They galloped upstairs and stood breathless at the tower landing watching the view. “Ay,” the lady kept gasping, as if a man were pleasuring her.
Even after the sun was down and the shadows lengthened across the room, the lady stood a while longer. She wore a listening look on her face as if she were hearing in some far-off room her own baby crying. She had already confessed to Sergio that she had no children, that she was unmarried and meant to stay that way. Sergio had not dared comment.
“It is so so beautiful up here,” the lady finally spoke up. “Don’t you think so?”
Sergio looked out again at the village he had known all his life. Perhaps it was beautiful, but he was not sure. Beautiful was a word that one heard in the boleros on the radio or in the mouths of novela stars on the television at the bodega. “You are the one who knows, doña.”
“Ay, Sergio.” The lady’s tone made him look her in the eye in spite of the habits of deference he had been taught by Don Mundín’s family. “Do you really think I am the one who knows?”
Sergio hesitated. It was going to take some practice, talking to this lady.
That night María was surprised when both Elena and Sergio showed up after supper. In the past when Don Mundín and Doña Gabriela came for weekends and longer vacations, María and Sergio had moved into the house with their children, in order to be there providing service around the clock.
“We do not have to work nights,” Sergio explained. He laughed when María opened her eyes wide at this news.
“The Virgencita has sent the answer to our prayers.” Elena clapped her hands together and rolled her eyes heavenward. “¡Ay, Dios santo!”
“She is treating us like Americans,” Sergio added. “You know how the Americans can only work from this hour to this hour, and if you make them work more, you have to pay them double.” Of course, he would not take advantage. For one thing it might get back to Don Mundín.
“Did she pay you?” María was eyeing the uncapped bottle of rum Sergio had brought in with him.
He nodded sheepishly.
“Ay, ay”—María shook her head, smiling all the while—“collecting twice!”
“I told her she didn’t have to,” Sergio explained, “but she says it is just a tip. She says if she were staying at a hotel she would be paying a lot more.”
“All I did today was prepare her a soup,” Elena added. “She says she must not touch meat. She wouldn’t even let me put a bouillon in the beans.”
“Maybe it is part of her religion?” María suggested. “Maybe she made a promesa because of a great sorrow.” Suddenly, her own sorrow flooded the room: the boy, his little shirt, his socks floating in that big blue cauldron. They were silent a moment.
“All we have to do is talk to her, it seems,” Elena concluded.
“She will end up asking for a lot more, you will see.” María’s voice was thorned with bitterness.
“Ay, María,” Elena pleaded. “If you meet her, you will see she is not like the rest of them.”
“It would be good if you came to be introduced,” Sergio added, capping the bottle to give sobriety to his point. “She asked many times after my wife, and how many children we have, and how old they are, and what do I feed them, and are they going to school.” He laughed in a strained way.
“You did not tell her?” María’s look was fierce.
Sergio steeled himself. “She would not stay. She would leave.”
“He is right,” Elena said, sweeping to her brother’s defense. “It is past time you put this behind you.”
María cast her eyes upwards. “Dios mío, give me patience. Even our sorrows have to be put aside for them.”
Later that night María slipped out of bed and walked out in the yard. In the vague light of a thumbnail moon she could make out the samán her little boy used to climb. The branches were broad and low to the ground. She stood under it now and called him down, “Pablito!” But there was no answer.
All this talk of the big house and the lady had stirred up that old grief again. Before the tragedy she had worked for Doña Gabriela, cleaning house, cooking, listening to her complaints about how boring it was in the mountains without her friends. Somehow Doña Gabriela had found out that her cook received spirits and could read the future in the coffee stains on a cup. “María, come tell me what’s going to happen to me today,” Doña Gabriela would call from the sunny, covered patio where she liked to eat her late breakfast.
One day, gazing down at the patrona’s cup, María saw the small body floating on top of the new swimming pool. She had thought, of course, that the warning was meant for the patrona’s two boys, and she had cautioned Doña Gabriela to be careful of her children and still water. “You’re getting me all upset,” Doña Gabriela complained. “Tell me something happy. Don’t you see something good in there?”
It still pained María that she had been so preoccupied with the patrona’s happiness, and house, and children that she had not seen the danger her own child was in. Not even when the santos had tried warning her through Doña Gabriela’s coffee leavings.
Now she wandered out of the yard and down the dark road that twisted past Elena’s house towards the center of town. A dog tied outside the mayor’s house barked at her, but after she spoke the Saint Francis’s charm, he quieted. The village was so still, she could hear the breeze stirring in the cypresses and far off the roar of traffic on the road to the capital. “Pablito!” she called, and the dog commenced its tiresome barking again.
At the corner, she turned right, and the big house she had avoided all year came into view. Up in the tower room, a light was shining. She could see the lady sitting at a table working at something. “Pablito!” she shouted and the lady’s head lifted. For a while, she sat, her head cocked, as if she, too, were waiting for his answer.
Weeks went by, and Sergio had still to fix the pool. He tried steeling himself with swigs from his rum bottle, but every time he walked down the angled floor to the garbage at the end, he had to get out quickly, overcome by his feelings.
From the beginning, Sergio had been able to treat the whole tragedy with filosofía. In fact, that black evening when Don Mundín had called him into his private sitting room, it was the patrín who had wept, and Sergio who had done the consoling. “Don Mundín, you must not get like this.”
The young patrín had offered Sergio his arm. “You are right, hombre. We must go on with our lives.”
“We have to go on,” he had repeated countless times to María. “That is what Don Mundín himself said.”
It was not that he did not miss the boy, as María accused, his little bullcalf, the silly thing. But it was not the patrín’s fault that the boy had died. Don Mundín and the rest of them had their houses, their work, their own ways, and then Sergio and his family had their ranchitos, their work, their own ways, and these two worlds lay side by side, peaceably. But where they came together, there was a steep dropoff, and on that particular July morning, the boy, wandering off from the side he belonged on, had fallen down that dropoff into a swimming pool the holiday color of a summer sky. That is the way that Sergio saw it.
But now, a year later, at the bottom of that pool, a terrible sadness was welling up that would not allow him to finish the job. Several times the lady asked him, “What’s up? Did you ever get the part?”
“Tomorrow it comes,” Sergio kept promising. Many days, he took off early, leaving word for the lady.
Then one day, coming up the drive, he was stunned to hear the sound of water pouring into his son’s grave. The lady sat reading on a lawn chair by the rising waters, looking up from her book when she saw him. “Ay, Sergio, I decided to just go ahead and fill it, filter or no filter,” she explained. “Don’t worry, if I get sick, I promise I won’t blame you.” She was laughing, as if the look on his face had anything to do with her.
Later in the afternoon, Sergio watched from behind the croton hedge, dipping into his bottle of rum to steady his nerves. Back and forth the lady traversed the length of the pool, her head lifting and then dipping back down under the water, her legs kicking. How easily—like a dragonfly—she breezed through the nightmare waters. It was not just their money he envied, but the ways in which that money cushioned the rich from the sorrows of others. María had her santos, and he had his bottle of rum, but still the pain had seeped through as it was doing now. He did not care what Don Mundín had said—he, Sergio, and his mujer María had not gone on with their lives. Their loss was a weight they could not put down.
He reached for his bottle, but the rum was gone. Furiously, he hurled the empty bottle onto the pile of trash that had once filled the bottom of the pool. And for the first time since he had rushed down from the stables, summoned by María’s screams, Sergio wept for his son.
That night, María waited for Sergio under the samán tree. She was worried. According to her sister-in-law, Sergio was drinking at the big house—something he had never done. Many late afternoons, he sat behind the croton hedge where he did not think he could be seen and emptied a small bottle.
“The lady even asked me if Sergio has a drinking problem,” Elena confessed to María.
“It is not the drink that is the problem,” María said bitterly as if she were speaking directly to the lady.
“Perhaps it would help,” Elena said carefully, “if you lit a candle for him.”
But María knew candles would do nothing. The santos were not going to help her with her problem—just as they had not helped her with the problems of others for the last year.
“He is letting the bottle be his woman,” Elena spoke plainly. María had noted how over the course of this month at the big house, Elena had grown in self-assurance. “Rum has become your rival, María.”
Tonight as she waited, María found herself chanting the prayer to Santa Marta, over and over. She had worked herself into such a dreamy state that she jumped when she saw the
dark shape turning into her yard. She called to him softly, and instead of a gruff, drunken refusal, he came, his hands in front of him in the dark, drawn by the sweetness in her voice. Tucked under his belt, she noted the small bottle.
“I am going to the river tomorrow afternoon to wash the clothes,” María began. “When I get back, I will dress the boys and bring them up to meet the señora.”
There was a surprised intake of breath. He reached a hand out for her, and though it would have touched only the air, she groped for it and brought it to rest on her lap, where it began to investigate the folds in her dress.
“Ya, ya,” she laughed, stopping his hand. “Let’s not give the neighbors un show.”
Together they stumbled towards the dark house, but later, in bed, he was too far gone to give her any pleasure. She lay beside him, willing herself to stay and not prowl the streets calling for her dead child. She would climb out of her grief—if not for her own, then for her husband and her children’s sake. Elena had spoken harsh words, adding the worry of losing her man to the weight on María’s heart. Not that these admonitions hadn’t been spoken before, but today María’s bitterness had given way. Maybe all these tales about the lady’s easy ways were loosening the knot in María’s chest and making a space in her heart where the santos could descend and begin to speak to her again.
The next morning, Sergio was surprised to find the house open and no sign of the lady. He searched all the rooms calling out, “Doña?” and then headed down the driveway towards the village. He caught sight of her coming up the road, her head down as if she were contemplating something sad. In each hand she carried a loaded string bag.
Sergio rushed to help her. “The house was wide open,” he noted in an even voice so the lady would not think he was voicing a criticism. “There have been many robberies,” he added.
“I was just going to be a minute,” the lady explained. “I was shopping for vegetables for a stir-fry.”
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