No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  “Didn’t you tell me you were officially retired?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Well?”

  “Okay, okay. You are permitted the honor of addressing me as Miss Robinson.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Maud said, and looked up at her friend. “Ms. Robinson.”

  “Girl, don’t you call me that. I am a Miss. That Ms. stuff sounds like some ole bumblebee’s loose on the lot. Miz this and Miz that. No wonder those gals look so unhappy, their faces all scrunched up like prunes and like a bee done stung them.”

  “Well, I’m sure they’d have a whole lot to say about you and your line of work all these years. You being underprivileged and everything and exploiting young girls for your gain.”

  “I’ve never exploited nobody and you know it,” Ruby said, genuinely affronted. “Every one of those girls was out in the street giving it away for nothing, getting bounced off walls by their pimps and catching everything there was to catch except the right bus. I took them in, gave them a home, clothed them, fed them, taught them about the world, and most important taught them about stocks and bonds so that at some point they could relocate to some place where nobody knew them and start over again.” She went into her pocketbook and extracted a letter and pushed it across the table to Maud. “Grace Pinder just wrote to me from La Puente in California. Open it up and take a look at the picture. That’s her home and that’s her husband and her two children. She does word processing right now. What was she doing when Nicki Braverman brought her in? Working at McDonald’s and turning fifty-dollar tricks for some pimp on the Upper East Side to keep herself high on drugs. Go ahead and open it up.”

  Maud opened the envelope, looked at the picture of the plain-looking, matronly woman and her balding husband and the two teenage kids in front of a ranch-style home. She nodded and then opened the rose-colored paper and shook her head. The letter opened with the words “Dear Mom.” Tears came to Maud’s eyes, and she said she was sorry she’d said anything.

  “They didn’t all turn out okay, but nothing and nobody ever does,” Ruby said. “Look at that Effie that your boy took a liking to. Sneaky little cuss. Do you know that she’d go to Philadelphia some weekends to visit relatives and turn tricks. She never infected anyone in my house, but she could’ve. She went one Christmas and never came back. A friend of mine in Philly said she’s doing time for stabbing a john.”

  “Yeah, I remember you telling me. About Dad?”

  “Yes,” Ruby said, not sure again of Maud’s response.

  “I think that would be fine if Dad’s willing,” she said.

  “We already talked and he’s all for it,” Ruby said, coyly.

  “You really like my old man, don’t you?”

  “He’s always been a sweet and kind man,” Ruby said. “And he don’t have hang-ups about color. He just loves a woman like no man I’ve known. We’re like candy to him.”

  “Candy?” Maud said, wondering if Ruby knew about Candy Donovan.

  “Yeah, sugar pops and bonbons,” Ruby said, innocently.

  “Well, I’m glad for the two of you. I don’t have to call you Mom, do I?” Maud said.

  “Oh, you dingbat, shut up and eat.”

  Matters once again on an even keel between them, the two women returned to their meal. While they were having their dessert, Ruby looked up from her cherry pie and had an expression on her face that Maud had only seen on the faces of young girls. She recognized it because she recalled how she looked in the mirror when she thought of Kevin, after their first date. They’d stood there on the porch after the long walk from the train station and she finally thanked him. Not knowing what to do, she reached up, kissed him, and held him for a moment, then broke away from the embrace and ran inside. Once inside, she stood by the window, parting the curtains slightly to watch him go down the steps. In the light from the porch she saw him again raise his hands in triumph. She took off her coat and in the big oval mirror by the coat tree looked at herself and couldn’t help smiling, and that is how Ruby looked.

  “What now?” Maud said.

  “You’re not gonna laugh, are you?” Ruby replied.

  “That depends, and wipe that silly grin off your face. You have cherry pie all over your teeth.”

  “Don’t laugh. Promise.”

  “I promise,” Maud said.

  “Well, it’s like this,” Ruby said. “Your father sings a special song to me,” she added.

  “That’s nice,” Maud said, touched by Ruby’s tenderness.

  “It’s our song. It’s kind of personal. He sings it real soft and then I sing it with him. I never thought I could sing much. Yell real loud, but never sing. But I sing it with him. He says when he dies y’all should get someone to sing it at his wake. Maybe Granny, your blond-headed grand, who has a fine voice.”

  “Cookie.”

  “Yeah, Cookie. You know what the song is?”

  “After that buildup, I think you better tell me.”

  “I don’t even know the title, but it says ‘For love’s sweet dying ember,’” and Ruby hummed the tune in a really tiny voice that contradicted the bigness of her person.

  The tough madam, who by her own admission had let lie between her legs close to three thousand men, had managed the lives of two hundred girls as they plied their whoring trade, was now reduced to being a young girl in love again even though the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes betrayed her true age. Her eyes sparkled and were liquid with that look that signalled love.

  “You’re in love,” Maud said, her own eyes moist. “You’re very lucky.”

  “Yes, I am,” Ruby said.

  “And you know what, Miss Ruby Robinson?”

  “What?”

  “You’re still a silly old broad.”

  “Shut up, Maud Farrell.”

  They now laughed and carried on and ordered more coffee.

  34. Consequences

  Elsa knew something was up. She was a hundred percent sure something was brewing, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. How Vidamía managed to keep up her grades with so many trips into the city, she didn’t know. If she wasn’t on the phone with her sister she was in a huddle with Mrs. Alvarez. Barry was no help at all. The company was expanding and opening up offices in Florida and Puerto Rico, which required him to be away most of the time. On top of that, he and a business associate decided to form a partnership and launch a tax-preparation company. During the past year the new business had flourished beyond their expectations.

  At first Barry and his new partner, John Marrero, a Cuban M.B.A. and lawyer, with his many contacts in the Cuban community, thought of simply providing services in Florida and the New York metropolitan area. But after they did a marketing survey of the entire country, they found they could easily provide the services nationwide and give H&R Block a run for its money. They wanted to call the operation Latitax, but Elsa asked them to please reconsider the name since it sounded so much like Latex that people might think it was a paint store.

  “I agree with you, Elsa,” John said, before dinner at the Marreros’ apartment in Trump Towers. “We would have been the laughingstock of the business community. What would you say if we called the company Spantax?”

  “That’s certainly an improvement,” Barbara Marrero said.

  “Spantax,” Barry said, opening up his arms as if he were holding a banner. “We speak your language. Remember, we’re on your side.”

  “What do you think?” John said.

  “I like it,” Barbara said. “It’s a play on words. ‘Spanish’ and ‘tax.’ If the advertising is handled correctly it could catch on.”

  “Spantax,” Elsa said. “Like Spandex.”

  “Spandex?” Barbara said, with a questioning tone in her voice, even though she was intimately familiar with the material from her exercise classes.

  “You know,” Elsa said. “Spandex stretches. We’ll stretch your dollar.”

  “Oh,” Barbara said, slightly annoyed, while Barr
y and John looked at each other and considered Elsa’s observation as if she were being frivolous.

  “I think it’s perfect,” Elsa said, stretching her arms outward. “Spantax, we’ll stretch your dollar,” she chirped happily, then realized that the humor was lost on them. She was slightly embarrassed. “You have to understand,” she quickly added, unfazed by their lack of enthusiasm, “Spantax is much better than Latitax because the word ‘Latino’ has the wrong connotation for a serious business enterprise. People are going to be entrusting you with their personal finances. See, when you hear about something Latino, you picture tropical music, maracas and congas, tawdry women in bright clothes with flowers in their hair and men with thin mustaches and pointy shoes and everybody dancing, talking real loud and fast in some sort of corrupted Spanish. Gangs, drive-by shootings, drugs, crimes, infidelity, macho behavior. Those people are Latinos. But when you hear ‘Hispanic,’ it’s literature, fine music, painting, subdued tastes, intelligence, and culture.”

  John and Barbara Marrero were now nodding their agreement. Barry was looking at her admiringly. Her clear, straightforward analysis had returned Elsa once again to her position of “equal” among the Marreros of the world, meaning the wealthy Cuban exiles, completely white and adapted to the United States. Everyone had nodded, but suddenly she felt stupid and left out again. Who was she kidding? She was a Latina. Look where she’d come from. She was sure the Marreros held it against her that she had African blood. When she returned home, she had to take two sleeping pills to fall asleep.

  All she could think about was being at Hunter College and reading La Vida by Oscar Lewis and being furious that the book had been printed at all. In it the author describes La Esmeralda, a slum by the sea inhabited by the worst kinds of people. But it was all a deception because Oscar Lewis was talking about La Perla, one of the worst slums in all of Latin America and all of it in the shadows of El Morro Castle, that great symbol of Puerto Rican culture. She read the book and she was preoccupied for weeks as if she were reordering her childhood memories. It was like she was reading about her father’s family, the African shadow pursuing her. She recalled visiting Puerto Rico as a little girl, before her father left, descending into La Perla and walking on the narrow streets with houses built on stilts above the seashore and waves pounding constantly at the wood so that the houses seemed to rock.

  “Esta es tu abuelita, Chela,” her father had said, introducing her to his mother, who was very dark and had frizzy white hair. “Mami, te presento a Elsa, tu nieta.”

  “Un besito pa’ güelita,” the woman had said, picking her up.

  The toothless old woman had wanted a little kiss, and she had dutifully kissed her. Her grandmother smelled sweet to her, and then she realized that she had been making dulce de coco, and shortly afterward Elsa had been given a big wedge of coconut candy, which she loved. Güela Chela, which her grandmother insisted the children call her, was the color of a caldero, the black cast-iron pot in which Puerto Ricans cooked rice. All little Elsa could do was stare at her, mute. They had stayed in the little house that night, sleeping on canvas sacks on the floor, and her mother and father talked with her grandmother by a kerosene lamp, the sea pounding the shore and the cool breezes making her feel strangely happy. But her father had deceived her and when they returned to New York she’d asked her father why his mother was so black. Her father had insisted that his mother was trigueña, which she later learned was the euphemism for dark and really came from the word trigo, which meant wheat.

  In a Puerto Rican Studies class at Hunter one day the professor began lecturing on the Negroid tradition of poetry in Puerto Rico, and for the next week she had to endure a discussion of race, which she hated hearing about. Eventually, the professor assigned a poem which she had tried to forget over the years but which still turned up in her recollections. Written in the black Puerto Rican patois, just like what her grandmother spoke, the poem angered her. What the hell was the writer trying to prove by spelling words that way? He had written a whole book of poems in that style. What was the name of it? It bothered her that she couldn’t remember, and she suspected she was unconsciously repressing it.

  And now, about a week after the Marrero dinner, Elsa happened to be in the library in their house and saw that Vidamía had brought that very book home and had written a translation of the poem. There it was, Dinga y mandinga by Fortunato Vizcarrondo. She opened the book, saw that it was first published in 1946, and then as she turned the pages, out fell a sheet covered with Vidamía’s handwriting. She had copied the verses and then attempted to translate the poem. It was a rough translation, but the impact was still there in English and she wanted to take the sheet of paper and tear it into little pieces. ¿Y tu agüela aonde ejtá? the African pronunciation thick, instead of the normal Spanish ¿Y tu abuela dónde está? “And your grandma, where is she?” She felt pride that Vidamía was so diligent, but in the next instant, an intense hatred replaced that feeling. Vidamía had crossed out “where is she?” and had translated it in the black vernacular as “where she at?”

  And Your Grandma, Where She At?

  Yesterday you called me black

  And today I’m going to answer

  My mother sits in the living room.

  And your grandma, where she at?

  I have hair like steel wool

  Yours is nothing but silk

  Your father’s is very straight

  And your grandma, where she at?

  Your color came out white

  And your cheeks a rosy red

  Your lips are very thin

  And your grandma, where she at?

  You tell me I got big lips

  And that my hair is nappy red

  But tell me for goodness sake

  And your grandma, where she at?

  Cauze you have a white kid

  You show her off all the time

  And me wanting to yell at you

  And your grandma, where she at?

  You like dancing the foxtrot

  And I dance the plena with style

  You’re passing as if you’re white

  And your grandma, where she at?

  You’re a white only in name

  Rubbing elbows with the rich

  Fearing people will know

  The one your mama calls ma.

  Here, whoever doesn’t have dinga

  Has some mandinga … Ha, Ha,

  And that’s why I ask you

  And your grandma, where she at?

  Yesterday you called me black

  Trying to make me feel ashamed

  My grandma comes to the living room

  And yours is hidden in the back.

  The poor woman is dying

  Knowing you treat her so bad

  That even your dog barks at her

  If to the living room she comes.

  I know her well, I’ll have you know

  They call her Sina Tatá

  Cause there’s no doubt

  That she’s really very black.

  When Elsa had read La Vida she’d felt as if the author had been following her family around, recording everything they said. As for her grandmother, she felt bad that, years after her visit, her house had collapsed into the sea during a storm and she was never found. It was ironic that if anyone asked about her grandmother, she could extract enormous sympathy by telling the story, but that each time she told it, the only thing that emerged inside of her being was resentment at having to confront her grandmother’s negritude.

  Her thoughts returned to Barry and she once again admired her husband’s capacity for success. One quarter, the marketing survey; the following quarter, the business plan; and the next one, the real estate and staffing. After intensive local advertising campaigns on Spanish-language as well as English-language television and radio stations, they opened offices in Miami, Sarasota, Tampa, and St. Petersburg.

  The following month they opened six offices in California, and one each i
n Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston. By the beginning of March, when people were scurrying around to beat the IRS’s April 15 deadline, they were at full operational capacity in Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Michigan, and Indiana. From concept to providing tax services, in less than a year.

  She had looked at one of their marketing packages and was truly proud of what Barry and John had accomplished. She leafed through the booklet with the simple Spantax logo and motto, color pictures of bright offices and smiling Hispanic people, all the models very light-skinned and Caucasoid, here and there the slightest hint of Indian blood—for the benefit of the Mexican Americans and Central Americans. It was a good idea. They had found people with already established insurance or travel offices, offered to set them up in business, train a staff for tax preparation, and provide them with advertising and technical support. When the rush of the tax season was over, the staff was trained to sell insurance, arrange home mortgages, and handle other financial services. Everything was computerized, and new software had been developed especially for them by a company in Oregon.

  But the tax-preparation operation was a thing of beauty. The offices were attractive and new, everything following a standard design, so that if one walked into a Spantax office, whether you were in Newark, New Jersey, Gary, Indiana, or Dallas, Texas, you felt at home in the warm, adobe-like rooms with palm trees and bright prints of figurative art in scenes reminiscent of the ideal places your parents and grandparents talked about. Walking into a Spantax office was like walking into the home of a trusted relative. In middle-class and staid communities, where there was crossover business from white or black Americans, soft music reminiscent of a Spanish garden played imperceptibly and very wellgroomed and courteous Hispanic people spoke to you, offering to help you with any tax problem you might have. No salsa here, no merengue, or cumbia or corridos. This was serious business, and you didn’t want to be arrogant and loud with Uncle Sam. Respect. Always respect. You just sat at their desks and the neatly groomed clerks keyed in the information you provided them with and in a matter of minutes your taxes were being processed. In working-class neighborhoods where the pace was more hectic and the people didn’t yet have a firm grasp of why they were being taxed, many worried about their legal status in the country and their bogus social security numbers and identities as they sat nervously in the upscale offices. Whether you ate pastelas in the Bronx, arepas in Queens, or tamales in Corpus Christi, the staff worked diligently without a sweat, until, softly in the background, a Hewlett-Packard laser printer produced flawless IRS forms with all your information on them.