The women are gorditas and flacas. They wear gold rings, gold chains, gold bracelets. They walk around their homes in housedresses and chanclas. The women are black, blanquitas, brown, yellow. Some are episodes of Sábado Gigante with the volume turned all the way up. Others are thick Spanish-English dictionaries, quiet and serious. To reach them, we take the bus down Bergenline Avenue, down that glorious stretch of sixty blocks crammed with banks, panaderías, shoe stores, liquor stores, and the cabinas to call Latin America. La Viejita María lives off of Bergenline, and so do Conchita and Ana and Juana.
My mother and my father and Tía Chuchi believe these women know something we do not, like why my father’s stomach hurts and when the factories will open again. We don’t visit the women very often, but somehow there they are—at the center of our lives.
There is a peculiar power to naming a person. It is unlike anything else we do in this life, this tattooing of a word on another person. In Spanish, we constantly name each other. Usually, it is a descriptor: el moreno, la gordita, el cabezón, la gringa. Sometimes the names refer to family roles or character traits that manifested early in life. A man in his sixties is still called El Niño, or the one who threw temper tantrums as a toddler remains El Terremoto, the earthquake, into his thirties.
With the women who read cards, however, no one can decide on a name. One of my aunties calls them brujas, insisting the women know nothing. “Those women are nonsense,” Tía Dora says, scowling. “They’re witches.”
“They are brujas,” Tía Rosa confides to me in her bedroom, her thin lips whispering because she thinks the neighbors in the apartment next door can hear. “I know they put curses on me. I went to a woman and she told me.”
My father skips the formalities of names and defines the women by the work they do: Ana, la que echa cartas.
My mother, always firm in her practice of not stating the obvious but still discussing the subject at hand, refers to them as the women who know. When she returns from seeing one of them, she murmurs, “Ella sí que sabe.”
Tía Chuchi nods, pulls from her pocket another story: “There was this family I knew en Colombia, and they took their daughter to a woman, because the girl was sick, pero muy enferma of a broken heart, except no one had touched her heart. But the woman—she knew. She pulled up the girl’s skirt, y allí, right there was a piece of black cloth.” Tía Chuchi pauses, looks me in the eye. “Someone had pinned the fabric to the girl’s falda to bring sickness upon her.” She clicks her tongue. “That woman knew.’”
But not always. They don’t always know. That’s the problem.
It is the day after. Or maybe two days after. The cuts on my legs are still open. My shorts feel like a shard of glass against my skin. I am four or five years old, and the police have arrived.
The two men are tall and light-skinned, and they carry revolvers strapped to thick, black belts. Someone has called them. Maybe my mother, maybe a neighbor. We are still living in Union City at the time, on the first floor of an apartment building, and we know everyone there. In the hallway, near the front door of our apartment, the policemen peer down at me, and the lady who lives across the hallway interprets for us, her mouth finding the words in English to describe my father, my legs, our broken places.
She can’t explain it all, of course. She cannot tell the police that it had been late in the day and I had awoken in my bed, alone and wanting my mother. That I had been trying to open the front door of our apartment to reach Mami on the front stoop. The neighbor doesn’t know that my father emerged from the kitchen then, his thick eyebrows furrowed and his voice growling at me to get back to bed. (She can’t possibly know that the growling is a part of my father, like his head of dark curls and his bony hands and his beer belly, that he growls the way some birds sing: a low guttural melody.)
The neighbor can’t tell the police that I insisted on my mother. I was four or I was five. I did not know yet that the world had sharp edges, that men and even women could shift so quickly under the weight of earlier years. The neighbor cannot explain the shock when the belt appeared, all leather and treacherous, and my father turned into a crow, his left hand like a beak snatching my wrists, his ears deaf to my screams and to the women and my mother, all of them banging on the locked door, yelling at him to stop beating me, to open the door.
I am told now to lift my shorts so the policemen can see the evidence, and I pick up the fabric careful not to graze the wounds. I stare at the men’s shoes, and my mother says that no, she will not press charges. The policemen withdraw, two pairs of black-laced shoes retreating down the hallway.
She stops talking to my father. My mother, that is. She treats him, not as if he were a terrifying bird but rather a mousetrap in the kitchen. He is a contraption of wire and wood that you have to tolerate, that you glance at every now and then to check on its progress. She is angry and afraid, not so much of my father perhaps, but of knowing that there is no other place for us to go.
After the police, a woman arrives. She knows my mother and father. She is a big, brown lady with a red scarf and a wide smile. I hate her immediately. She is too happy. Too unafraid.
The woman talks to my father in the kitchen, then my mother, and finally, it is my turn. She comes into the living room and I am placed before her. Grinning, the woman begins in Spanish, “You have to be a good girl with your father. You have to be quiet and not bother him.”
My breath leaves. The woman turns into her red scarf. The entire world is the red scarf, and a fire snakes into my arms and I have the burning impulse to grab the red scarf and strangle the woman, to find the soft place in her throat and to scratch her there. But my mother is nearby, and she is silent and so am I.
The words flood me then: this woman knows nothing. I feel it inside of me sin duda. She knows nothing. It is not a string of words but a solid and weighty stone at the back of my chest. It is as if there was someone else inside of me, not the girl with her cut-up legs but another girl, a girl who cannot be beaten or lied to, a girl who, like a river, cannot be caged.
“That must have been Juana,” my mother answers, her lips tightening.
I am in my thirties now, and she is upset that I have asked her about that time in our lives, about the red scarf and Juana, who was a santera, my father’s religious godmother.
When I ask her for more details, my mother hesitates, as if she is opening the door of a house she does not want to visit. She squeezes her thin lips so hard they almost vanish into her face, and I change the conversation and shut the door for us both.
According to books at the public library in New York City and the libraries at New York University and the New School, I am not the first person to think about the women who know. Historians have studied these women, not La Viejita María or Juana in particular, of course, but these kinds of women, and they have found the following:
The women engage in a kind of folk Christianity.
Or the Afro-Cuban religion Santería, also known as Regla de Ocha.
Or Espiritismo, talking with the dead.
Or any of these religious practices mixed together.
In short, the historians know little. To be fair, it is difficult to study a subject that shifts for migration, for necessity, for colonization. It is impossible to put under a microscope a group of women who have no central authority, who protect themselves by not naming themselves, who change the rules depending on whose home they walk into.
Many of the women only know one truth: envidia.
My mother goes for a consultation because the factories are paying so little, because my father owes some back taxes, because it is always good to check in with these women about what we don’t know. The answer is the same. “The woman said it was envidia,” my mother whispers to Tía Chuchi at home. “But why are people going to be envious of us?”
Tía Chuchi points to the home my parents own, the fact of having any job at a time when so many have none. Tía nods her head. “The woman is right. Es envi
dia.”
And so the floors are cleaned by rolling coconuts over them with a broom and my parents wash in baths of Florida water and white carnations. My mother urges me to not tell anyone our business because this much is true: any little good you have someone else covets.
Envidia is the primary way we have to talk about what we want. While my mother would deny she ever envied another person, I can hear it in her voice, in the tone of the questions she and the aunties pose to each other:
Did you hear they went down the shore?
And he bought a new house where?
She never worked a day in her life and now she’s collecting. Te imaginas?
No one here can afford to believe in dreaming, in planning, in the pursuit of happiness. The good stuff in life is bestowed by God, by luck. Everyone knows that one call from Colombia can mean that money being saved for a vacation will now be sent to a brother in jail. Or that this could be the afternoon when the factory forelady will say, “There’s no work tomorrow.” Or that next week, immigration officials could show up at the factory and haul away an auntie, a cousin, a father. It happened to my mother’s friend. It could have happened to her.
The good moments come to us by chance, and if this is the case, all we are left to feel is envidia.
In Old English, the word knowledge means to identify, to recognize. It is taken for granted that knowledge is information based on observation, on investigation, on questions asked and answers tested. It is exactly what I want now.
I want knowledge that can be placed on page forty-six of a thick volume, knowledge that can be typed up, indexed, handed out to people, made permanent. Here’s how you know if the girl gets to go to college. Here’s how you know if she made her father beat her up. Here’s how you know if another woman knows or doesn’t know. Here’s who you can trust and who you cannot.
My mother would not say it this way, but this is what she knows: cups of water talk. They ferry messages between us and the santos and the dead. They carry our prayers, our deseos, our fears.
Our house is full of vasitos de agua. There is the cup on my parents’ bedroom dresser. It sits next to a picture of la abuelita and her long white braid, because my mother would like to dream of her own mother more often. There is the cup of water for Santa Clara, because the saint offers the clarity needed for new jobs, new caminos. There are three cups with paper notes floating in the water, because, in her best cursive penmanship, Tía Chuchi has written the names of my cousin who has cancer, a friend’s mother who’s in the hospital, and my cat who is half blind. Their names are paper islands in the water, and my auntie places those three cups at the feet of the San Lázaro statue, hoping the santo with his holy crutches will restore the ones we love to health.
It must have been a Saturday evening. My father is watching television. My mother is giving me a bath. I am six or seven. When she turns off the water, I am expecting a scratchy towel, but instead my mother pours a bucket of warm water filled with cologne and the petals of white carnations over my head.
“It’s to get rid of las malas energías,” my mother explains. This, apparently, is what she was told by a woman who knows.
I reach for the towel, but my mother shakes her head. Evil energies can’t be rubbed off. They need a few minutes. I protest, so sure Mami will give in, but she doesn’t. I stand in the tub for two or three minutes, shivering y esperando. The white petals sit haphazardly on my arms and legs like soft bandages. Some begin to fall off. Others, we peel away.
When I finally emerge from the bathroom, the cologne lingers in my hair. My father hugs me in the kitchen, kissing the top of my head, his lips still wet with beer. His eyes are a bloody red and squinting, and I see for myself that the perfumed bath has worked. The cerveza is still there with all its evil, and so is my father, but I feel better. I feel clean. I smell good. The cologne in my hair is almost as strong as the acrid stink of the beer.
This is how it begins: faith. It bloomed there that night, all gorda and heavy along with my doubts about the women who know. I could still hear that other me, the girl like a dark river who said I was not to blame for what my father did, but alongside that river something new began to rise up, a stretch of land and pine trees, because the flower baths felt good, because after Juana’s visit, my father did not hit me again, not for another five or six years, and the second time—here I pause, I should pause—the second time was not as bad.
My father, as far as I know, never hit my mother or my sister, and in some way, the two of them—my mother with her delicate smile, my sister with her button nose—receded to the edges of our lives, so that for a time it was only my father and me, the two of us with our large eyes, our thick, unruly hair, our quick and stubborn tempers.
By the time I was ten, I decided to do what every white child in the after-school television specials had done: run away. I declared my plan to my mother in the kitchen on a summer day, and then I marched to my room where I filled my backpack with T-shirts and stuffed animals. I had no money, no phone numbers, no place to go.
My father appeared in the doorway. His hairline was receding. He was in his mid-forties by then, working nights at a textile factory a few blocks away. He laid his left hand on my shoulder and smiled. He looked not like a raging bird or an unwanted mouse even, but an owl, his eyes soft as wounds.
“No te vayas,” he urged. “We need you here. What would we do without you?”
His words, all of them in Spanish, tumbled around me like feathers. I looked up at him, his lopsided smile, and agreed to stay.
The women who know never tell us to leave or to make demands. They accept that we are trapped in cages, bound to this man, this country, these factories. And yet, they teach us to make the cage tolerable. Going to these women is like going to my father, like living with a mousetrap.
The trap sits in the corner of the kitchen. You love it and you hate it. You hate needing the mousetrap. You hate the idea of finding in its arms a squealing death, a fractured body. And yet, you are relieved to have the mousetrap. You feel a little less fear when you step into the kitchen. You are not at the mercy of creatures scampering along the baseboards behind the stove. You have that contraption of wood and wire as defense. You might step into the world with caution, but nevertheless you are coming and you are going, and at times, you even feel free.
The nightmares begin around the time I am sixteen or seventeen. If the women who know are right, it is because the dead are sneaking into my dreams at night. They want my time, my attention, the inside of my knees. My mother, however, knows the remedio. She learned it from the santeras, the old Cubans, my father’s padrino, La Viejita María.
When I am out of my room then, my mother fills a cup with tap water and slides it under my bed near the headboard. She does this without telling me, and when I hear about it days later from an auntie, I run to my room and kneel beside the bed to see if it is true. It is. The cup is short and fat and made of glass, and it is waiting there underneath the bed like a new friend, her hand open and ready to grab whatever silver shards might fall from my dreams.
At night, I lie on my belly on my bed and lean over the side to stare at the cup. In the half dark, the vasito is a tiny translucent urn. The water is quiet, steady. I glance at my pillow, then move the cup a few centimeters. No one has told me this, but I believe the cup should be directly beneath my head where the pesadillas, and apparently the muertos, crowd in during the night. Satisfied with the cup’s location, I close my eyes and fall asleep.
The familiar images return: men and women with blurred faces, their bodies darting around the edges of my mind, my own feet running for hours but never letting me escape. In the morning, the alarm clock cries out, and it feels like only an hour or two has passed.
Everything, however, has changed, because when I slide out of bed and kneel on the cold floor and see the cup, I do feel better. I have some power. I can fill a cup with water and slip it underneath my bed.
We are a year or
more out of high school when my best friend Geralen decides she wants her future read. Tía Chuchi is delighted at the news. She fancies herself an intermediary between the women who officially know and the rest of us, and it is with her that we take Geralen to see Conchita, who lives off of Bergenline Avenue in one of those apartments where the steps shift beneath our feet and make me wonder about public-safety regulations.
Inside Conchita’s home, the air is cool, a reprieve from the warm streets, and at the window, the curtains billow as a breeze passes through. Conchita ushers us in, waving big arms laden with gold bracelets. I have met her before and I am reminded now that I don’t like her. She reminds me of Juana, who blamed me for what my father did. It’s the way Conchita keeps her back so straight, the way her eyes fasten on us, the quickness of her lips. She reminds me of an exclamation point: arrogant.
Geralen and I sit on a bed across a table from Conchita. Tía Chuchi perches on the edge of the bed behind us. I am nervous. Geralen came here from the Philippines when she was a girl. She doesn’t speak Spanish, so I am here to interpret for her. Whatever the dead and the angels have to say will come through me, and I am worried that I will choose the wrong words in English.
On the table is a cup of water large enough to drown a hamster. Conchita closes her eyes. She prays in Spanish and Yoruban. She inspects the water, glances at Geralen, and then back at the water. In a booming voice, Conchita declares, “Aquí hay una mujer!”
I interpret in a low voice—“Here, there is a woman”—but this sounds odd, as if I have forgotten a word.
“Una mujer poderosa que la protege!” Conchita continues, her voice almost as deep as a man’s.
“It is a powerful woman,” I begin, raising my voice. “A woman who is protecting you.”
“It’s my grandmother,” Geralen says in a firm voice sin duda.
I share this with Conchita and my auntie, both of whom smile broadly. From there, Conchita goes on to talk about the dead grandmother’s help, the spirit of a man who is bothering Geralen, and a woman at work who is envious of her. As Conchita issues her declarations, I find my voice straining to match hers. My hands begin to gesture like hers as well, swinging up and out.
A Cup of Water Under My Bed Page 6
