by Lucia Berlin
She stayed mostly in bed now. She was intimidated by the Santiago social scene, was comfortable only playing bridge with an English couple called the Mortimers or poker with a group of Jesuit priests.
At the back of the downstairs was a large room that opened onto a flagstone terrace. We called it the family room but I was the only one who used it, for bailoteos every week with my friends from school, Chilean and English girls, and boys from the Grange, an elite Eton-type academy. We danced to tangos and rumbas. “Night and Day,” “Frenesi,” “Adios Muchachos,” Charles Trenet’s “La Mer,” “My Foolish Heart.” We never danced cheek to cheek, never held hands, and surely never kissed unless we were pololeando, or going steady.
I was very pretty, wore beautiful clothes, and all of my friends were as frivolous and pampered as I was. We went to dressmakers and hairdressers and cobblers, out to lunch at the Carrera or the Ahumada, to lavish teas at the Crillon or at each other’s houses.
We skied in Portillo all winter, spent summers in Algarrobo and Viña del Mar. We watched rugby and cricket matches, played tennis and golf, swam at the Prince of Wales Country Club. On weekends there were movies and nightclubs and balls; we often ended up at El Bosque’s early Mass in evening clothes. When Molly and I woke up every morning we rang for our breakfast. One push was for café con leche, two for cocoa, with our fruit and toast. At night Rosa put hot bricks inside the sheets, at the foot of each bed, and laid out our school uniforms for the next day. Dark green wool with crisp starched white collars and cuffs, brown stockings and sturdy shoes, brown blazer and round brimmed hat with a ribbon. A clean starched white apron, more like a lab coat, that we wore over our uniforms at school. We carried book bags on the long walk to school along the tree-lined streets, past beautiful houses and gardens. This was many years before the revolution; opulence and ease enveloped our world then.
Molly and Lucia, 1952
Santiago College was a fine old stone building with three large wings under red-tiled roofs. It had wisteria-covered arches, shining tile floors on the verandas, was built around a vast rose garden with benches, raked paths. On a lower level was a theater and a gymnasium, a field for hockey and badminton. There were many elm and maple trees, fruit trees, another large garden with a fountain outside the Upper School.
Classes were hard; all but English were taught in Spanish. Except for Spanish literature we had no books. The teachers would lecture without a break for an hour and we wrote down every word. For months I did this, then corrected what I had done from another girl’s book, in order to write it out word for word on the tests. I did well in history and philosophy exams long before I understood what I wrote. School was very difficult. We had English and French, chemistry, math, and physics. In our Spanish class we read more Spanish and South American novels and poetry than I did later in graduate school. We read Don Quijote for two years, discussing the chapters in detail every day. One day in class, I read a passage where one of Cervantes’s characters, in an insane asylum, says that he could make it rain whenever he felt like it. I understood in that moment that writers could do anything they wanted to do.
Santiago College, December 1953. Beatriz Reyes, Gail Yarborough, Lorna Gladstone, Consuelo “Conchi” Capellini, and Lucia.
(Photograph courtesy of Lorna Jury Gladstone)
We had earthquake drills once a month, when we put on our hats and gloves, lined up two by two, and marched swiftly and quietly down to the rose garden. About every two or three months we had a real earthquake, never a bad one, but the teachers all remembered the bad one. Señor Peña, the physics teacher, knocked me down once as he bolted for the door.
University of New Mexico, 1954
Years later a number of my classmates died during the revolution. Some were killed fighting in it, others committed suicide later because the world they knew had vanished.
Hokona Hall, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico
A pretty campus with big cottonwoods and elm trees, old adobe buildings. The rugged mountains and desert opened out, like Texas, with faded-denim sky all around. I had a roommate called Suzanne whose mother sent Kotex from Oklahoma every month. I didn’t know the English phrase then but I wrote to my Chilean friends the equivalent of “She’s not our sort.” She and I agreed on green curtains and green chenille bedspreads. I put Van Gogh’s sunflowers on my wall, photographs of Jutta and me in Pucón, Conchi and me on skis, the Grange rugby team.
Everything about the United States was strange to me. Most of my classes were enormous and superficial. I was allowed to take upper-division Spanish classes, with one of my favorite writers, Ramón Sender, a Spanish exile.
I majored in journalism by mistake. I wanted to be a writer, not a journalist. I loved my job as a proofreader, though. I had my own key to the dorm and was allowed to come in late.
Lou Suarez was the sportswriter. He was one of the few Mexican-American students then. He was thirty, in school on the G.I. Bill. At first I was just happy to talk in Spanish with someone kind and funny and sharp, but then we fell in love.
Most people think that their love is more wonderful than any other love has ever been. It was my first love. I thought all people felt like we did when they were in love. It was only later that I realized ours was more wonderful than any other.
Tomás and Elena, the janitor and his wife, gave us a key to the broom closet. We locked the door and climbed a ladder to the roof where we had a mattress under a canopy of cottonwoods. We made love and talked between classes, after work, all night until I crept back to the dorm before the housemother woke up. The building was surrounded by old cottonwoods. We lay beneath their branches, saw glimpses of stars and the moon. The ledge around the roof also hid us and the ice chest for beer, a lantern to read and study by. We invited Tomás and Elena to candlelit dinners, with Hamm’s beer and hamburgers from the Pig Pen across Central (Route 66).
Our bower went undetected even when winter came and we had to crawl across the roof to our tarp-covered bed. We made love and talked and talked, read aloud to each other for many months.
The housemother found out somehow. She sent a telegram to my parents telling them that I was having sex with a Mexican on the roof. Stop.
They flew up on New Year’s Day, stayed for two days. They decided to take me out of school after summer session to spend a year in Europe. My father offered Lou money not to see me anymore. Lou spat in my father’s face. But then he and I had a horrible fight. He wanted me to marry him right then. I was seventeen, wasn’t ready to yet, I said, and he pushed me out of the car.
I kept hoping that he would call me, that any day he would appear, but he never did.
Lead Street, Albuquerque
I met Paul Suttman a few months later, married him just before the SS Stavangerfjord was to sail for Europe. At the time I thought I was in love, didn’t think I was marrying him so as not to go to Europe. I didn’t feel toward Paul the trust and tenderness I had for Lou. I was awed by him. He was a sculptor, a brilliant, dynamic man.
Mr. and Mrs. Paul Suttman, 1956
Albuquerque, 1956
I held the hot part of the cup and gave him the handle. I ironed his jockey shorts so they would be warm. I always tell these things and everybody laughs, but, well, they are true.
I dressed as he told me to: always in black or white. My long hair was dyed black, ironed straight every morning. I wore heavy eye makeup and no lipstick. He made me sleep lying facedown on the pillow, hoping to correct my “main flaw,” a turned-up nose. Of course there was the big flaw, my scoliosis. The first time he saw my naked back, he said, “Oh God—you are asymmetrical.”
As we sat in restaurants or at bars, or even at our modern teak table on hard teak chairs, he would arrange my body parts. Tilt my chin up, or turn it slightly to the left, take my hands off the table, have me leaning on one elbow with one hand open, as if testing for rain, cross or uncross my legs. He said that I smiled too much and that I made too much noise during se
x.
Paul chose all the furniture in the house. Black and white and earth colors. Java temple birds in a black cage had the faintest touch of pink on their throats. Mondrians on the wall, pewter Nambé ware ashtrays, Acoma and Santo Domingo pottery, a fine Navajo rug. Our dishes were black, our stainless a daring modern style. The forks had only two tines, so it was difficult to eat spaghetti.
We had our first child to keep Paul from being drafted. I accidentally got pregnant again when Mark was only a few months old. Paul said the only solution was for him to leave, so he did. He had a grant, a patron, a villa and foundry in Florence, and a new straight-nosed girlfriend.
Lucia with first son, Mark, born September 30, 1956
Baby Mark
Paul Suttman
The morning he left, the first thing I did was to give the birds to an old lady across the street. I took down the Mondrians, put up my sunflowers and an Elvis poster, tossed a gaudy Mexican blanket over the ecru couch. I put on pink lipstick, braided my hair into pigtails.
I was smoking cigarettes borrowed from next door, my bare feet were up on the table. The dishes were unwashed. Mark crawled around in a soaking-wet diaper, pulling pans out of the cupboard. Joe Turner was singing the blues on the hi-fi when Paul came in the door. He had only been gone for about twenty minutes when his car broke down. He didn’t think it was funny at all. We didn’t see him again for sixteen years.
Corrales Road, Alameda, New Mexico
I met Race the night before Jeff was born. I had gone to the Skyline Club with friends to hear Prince Bobby Jack’s blues and jazz band. Ernie Jones was on bass and Race Newton on piano. When we were introduced Race asked, “Do you believe in prenatal influence?”
Jeff was born the next morning and Race came with my friends to the hospital. I saw him often in the next few months. He helped a lot, playing with Mark, going to the store.
He wanted to marry me, to take care of me and my children. “I’m going to take care of you,” he said.
We lived in an old adobe with thick walls, wooden vigas, and pine floors, wavery old glass in the windows. It sat in a grove of cottonwood trees, faced an apple orchard, fields of corn and alfalfa, the majestic Sandia Mountains. There were green fields all around us alive with red-winged blackbirds, thrashers, pheasants, and quail.
The house had no refrigerator and no sink or stove. There was a woodstove that worked fine but it made the kitchen really hot. The hard part with two babies in diapers was not having running water. I bathed them in a tub out by the pump, boiled water for dishes on the stove. We had an outhouse that we shared with Pete, who lived in a small house next to us. Pete, well.
The adobe house with a tin roof, Corrales Road, Alameda
Second son, Jeff, born April 26, 1958
Race showered and changed at Ernie’s house. I bathed in the metal tub on the kitchen floor, washed diapers at Bobbie’s in her wringer washer, or at the laundromat on Fourth Street.
Bob and Bobbie Creeley lived down the road from us. Staying with them were Ed and Helene Dorn who had just come from Washington. Bob and Ed were poets. The three men talked about music and poetry while Bobbie, Helene, and I cooked, folded laundry, tended to the children.
We all talked and laughed for hours over Gallo wine. Other writers and musicians came through Albuquerque. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gerry Mulligan, Dick Twardzik, Percy Heath. John Chamberlain, the sculptor, came, so did Stan Brakhage, a filmmaker. We all felt that we were part of an exciting era, for poetry and painting, jazz. We listened to John Coltrane and Miles Davis, tapes of readings by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Lenny Bruce in performance.
Mark and Lucia
Most of the time, though, the boys and I were alone in the white house, fending off Pete when he came home drunk but calling on him when I had no water to prime the pump. (He used Hamm’s beer.) Buddy Berlin used to play saxophone with Race and Ernie Jones in the afternoons. Hot afternoons, when Race was gone, Buddy often came to take me and the boys out for root beer floats. Sometimes he brought a big thermos of frozen daiquiris. He and I would listen to Charlie Parker or Lester Young, sitting on the back stoop.
Jeff and Mark, Corrales Road, Alameda
Canyon Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Boxy little house, surrounded by sage and lilac tamarisk. It had a kitchen with a good gas stove, a washing machine, and a fireplace. It was big enough for the Dorns and their three children as well as us.
Helene and I read Beatrix Potter to the children, baked bread, sewed and ironed while Ed and Race were at work. Race played piano, Ed was headwaiter at Claude’s on Canyon Road. It was the “in” restaurant then for the Santa Fe artists and witty rich people who collected santos, Indian crafts, and jewelry.
Helene and I woke up when the men came home, their tuxedos smelling of cigarette smoke. The children would all be asleep on the living room floor near the fire while we sat at the kitchen table, drinking wine, eating still-warm just-baked bread and cheese. The two men counted their tip money and ranted about the Santa Fe art snobs, about Claude herself. She looked like Charles Laughton in drag. Velvet Navajo shirt, squash blossom necklace, squaw boots. The food at Claude’s was excellent and of course the music and service were exceptional. Oh, they hated it. Imagine Ed Dorn calling anybody “sir” and Race playing “Shine On, Harvest Moon.”
We read many books that winter. All of W. H. Hudson and Thomas Hardy. All my life, reading had been my private solace. I loved sharing books with Ed and Helene (Race was practicing or sleeping), reading passages out loud, talking about the characters, the places—Hudson’s pampas, Hardy’s Wessex.
Sometimes Buddy would drive up from Albuquerque. Helene would stay with the children and I’d go with Buddy to Claude’s to hear Race play. Ed handed us menus, poured the cabernet, hissed at me that this was a cheap and predictable situation.
Race Newton playing at Claude’s in Santa Fe
Mark and Jeff in New York
West Thirteenth Street, New York City
Race forgave me for the affair with Buddy, I think; we certainly never spoke of it. We were going to have a new life in New York. At first we lived in a laughably small studio apartment on Thirteenth Street, on the fifth floor. It was bright and sunny with windows opening out onto rooftops with vents like minarets. Pigeons and lost blue parakeets.
The first night I sat in the window, looking at a real fire escape and glimpses of pink sunset between the brick buildings. People in other apartments were screaming at each other or talking softly, sweetly. I was thrilled. This is life. This is New York! Then I realized that I was hearing people talking on television, which I hadn’t known before.
I got a job with an antiques dealer on the first floor, brushing prints with tea or vinegar, dotting them with tiny flyspecks to make them look older. Aside from him, the super, and Mrs. Armitage, the old lady beneath us, the children always running running above her, I never met anybody else. Well, Freddie Greenwell.
Race couldn’t join the union for a year, had to play strip joints in Yonkers, bar mitzvahs and weddings in New Jersey, Long Island. I made much of our money by sewing children’s clothes, had the idea of making bright woolen ponchos for babies and toddlers, sold them in a Village shop. They were a hit, so I spent hours sewing fringe on bright woolen fabric I got in scrap bins on Seventh Avenue.
The children and I left early in the morning so Race could sleep. We went to Washington Square or to Central Park, the Natural History Museum. We rode the Staten Island Ferry often, took subways, getting off at new stops each time, learning neighborhoods. Mark pushed Jeff in his stroller, loved the Guggenheim.
It took so long to climb the stairs to the fifth floor. Many trips up and down, carrying Jeff and the stroller, laundry, or groceries. While they napped, Race played the piano. It seemed that he slept or played the piano or was gone. He rarely spoke to me. At night I sewed or read, wrote to Ed and Helene, talked to Symphony Sid or to Buddy when he called.
Mark, Jeff,
and Lucia in Central Park
Greenwich Street, New York City
Wonderful. Race and I better now, making love again so sweet but still he rarely spoke to me. We went to many fine exhibits. Robert Frank, Richard Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko, Alberto Giacometti. We heard Miles, Bill Evans with Scott LaFaro, Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, many others.
Good musicians like Wayne Shorter, Jimmy Knepper, Freddie Greenwell came to jam with Race in our loft. He was sounding great.
All of us were happier here. Race could play, I could read or write with some space between me and the boys. The boys had room to run around, ride trikes, and play without waking him. Room for a double bed for us and a real round table to eat on.
Race Newton, Greenwich Village
Lucia, Greenwich Village
The loft was above a ham-smoking factory. It had tall windows all across one end facing the Hudson. It was in a spot that later would be part of the World Trade Center site. Then it faced Washington Market, which came alive every night with blocks and blocks of produce. Brilliant oranges, limes, apples, all sorts of fruits and vegetables were sold until six in the morning. Just across the street from us, and for many blocks around, were parking lots which were empty at night and all weekend. Mark and Jeff rode their trikes, played with their wagon or balls, sleds when it snowed.
Their room had been a machine shop. Race turned it into a playground complete with jungle gym, a slide, two swings. He also made them a fine wooden toy box, painted shiny red. God, what a good man he was, silently kind. His silence felt like a cruelty to me.
The previous tenants were painters and had left many of their enormous canvases, mostly swathes of colors, which we used to make walls, changing the place around like a dollhouse.
Jeff, winter 1960
