But the fag lotería guy was right. The day began to surprise them. First, Don Fabio calls them in. Special assignment: they are to report on this Garcia doctor’s comings and goings. Next thing Pupo knows Checo is driving the jeep right up to the Garcia house and doing this whole search number that is not following orders. Point is, though, that if something comes out of the search, their enterprise will be praised and they will be decorated and promoted. If nothing turns up and the family has connections, then back they go to the prison beat, cleaning interrogation rooms and watering down the cells the poor, scared bastards dirty with their loss of self-control.
From the minute they enter the house Pupo can tell by the way the old Haitian woman acts that this is a stronghold of something, call it arms, call it spirits, call it money. When the woman arrives, she is nervous and grasshoppery, smiling falsely, dropping names like a trail of crumbs to the powerful. Mostly, she mentions the red-haired gringo at the embassy. At first Pupo thinks she’s just bluffing and he’s already congratulating Checo and himself for uncovering something hot. But then, sure enough, the red-haired gringo appears before them, two more doll-girls in either hand.
“Who is your supervisor?” The gringo’s voice has an edge. When Checo informs him, the American throws back his head, “Oh, Fabio, of course!” Pupo sees Checo’s mouth stretch in a rubberband smile that seems as if it may snap. They have detained a lady from an important family. They have maybe barked up the wrong tree. All Pupo knows is Don Fabio is going to have a heyday on their already scarred backs.
“I’ll tell you what,” the American consul offers them. “Why don’t I just give old Fabio a call right now.” Pupo lifts his shoulders and ducks his head as if just the mention of his superior’s name could cause his head to roll. Checo nods, “A sus órdenes.”
The American calls from the phone in the hall where Pupo can hear him talking his marbles-in-his-mouth Spanish. There is a silence in which he must be waiting to be connected, but then his voice warms up. “Fabio, about this little misunderstanding. Tell you what, I’ll talk to Immigration myself, and I’ll have the doctor out of the country in forty-eight hours.” On the other end Don Fabio must have made a joke because the American breaks out in laughter, then calls Checo to the phone so his supervisor can speak with him. Pupo hears his comrade’s rare apologetic tone. “Sí, sí, como no, don Fabio, inmediatamente.”
Pupo sits among these strange white people, ashamed and cornered. Already he is feeling the whip coming down like judgment on his bared back. They are all strangely quiet, listening to Checo’s voice full of disclaimer, and when he falls silent, only to their own breathing as the hand of God draws closer. Whether it will pick up the saved or cast out the lost is unclear yet to Pupo, who picks up his empty glass and, for comfort, tinkles the ice.
While the men were saying their goodbyes at the door, Sandi stayed on the couch sitting on her hands. Fifi and Yoyo clustered around Mami, balling up her skirt with holding on, Fifi wailing every time the big fat guard bent down for a goodbye kiss from her. Carla, knowing better as the oldest, gave her hand to the men and curtsied the way they’d been taught to do for guests. Then, everyone came back to the living room, and Mami rolled her eyes at Tio Vic the way she did when she was on the phone with someone she didn’t want to talk to. Soon, she had everyone in motion: the girls were to go to their bed-rooms and make a stack of their best clothes and pick one toy they wanted to take on this trip to the United States. Nivea and Milagros and Mami would later pack it for them. Then, Mami disappeared with Tio Vic into her bedroom.
Sandi followed her sisters into their side-by-side bedrooms. They stood in a scared little huddle, feeling strangely careful with each other. Yoyo turned to her. “What are you taking?” Fifi had already decided on her baby doll and Carla was going through her private box of jewelry and mementos. Yoyo fondled her revolver.
It was strange how when held up to the absolute phrase—the one toy I really want—nothing quite filled the hole that was opening wide inside Sandi. Not the doll whose long hair you could roll and comb into hairdos, not the loom for making pot holders that Mami was so thankful for, not the glass dome that you turned over and pretty flakes fell on a little red house in the woods. Nothing would quite fill that need, even years after, not the pretty woman she would surprise herself by becoming, not the prizes for her schoolwork and scholarships to study now this and now that she couldn’t decide to stay with, not the men that held her close and almost convinced her when their mouths came down hard on her lips that this, this was what Sandi had been missing.
From the dark of the closet Carlos has heard tones, not content; known presences, not personalities. He wonders if this might be what he felt as a small child before the impressions and tones and presences were overlaid by memories, memories which are mostly others’ stories about his past. He is the youngest of his father’s thirty-five children, twenty-five legitimate, fifteen from his own mother, the second wife; he has no past of his own. It is not just a legacy, a future, you don’t get as the youngest. Primogeniture is also the clean slate of the oldest making the past out of nothing but faint whispers, presences, and tones. Those tenuous, tentative first life-impressions have scattered like reflections in a pond under the swirling hand of an older brother or sister saying, I remember the day you ate the rat poison, Carlos, or, I remember the day you fell down the stairs….
He has heard Laura in the living room speaking with two men, one of them with a ripply, tricky voice, the other with a coarser voice, a thicker laugh, a big man, no doubt. Fifi is there and Yoyo as well. The two other girls disappeared in a jabber of cousins earlier. Fifi whines periodically, and Yoyo has recited something for the men, he can tell from the singsong in her voice. Laura’s voice is tense and bright like a newly sharpened knife that every time she speaks cuts a little sliver from her self-control. Carlos thinks, She will break, she will break, San Judas, let her not break.
Then, in that suffocating darkness, having to go but not daring to pee in the chamber pot for fear the men might hear a drip in the walls—though God knows, he and Mundo soundproofed this room enough so that there is no ventilation at all—in that growing claustrophobia, he hears her say distinctly, “Victor!” Sure enough, momentarily the monotone, garbled voice of the American consul nears the living room. By now, of course, they all know his consulship is only a front—Vic is, in fact, a CIA agent whose orders changed midstream from organize the underground and get that SOB out to hold your horses, let’s take a second look around to see what’s best for us.
When he hears the bedroom door open, Carlos puts his ear up against the front panel. Steps go into the bathroom, the shower is turned on, and then the fan to block out any noise of talk. The immediate effect is that fresh air begins to circulate in the tiny compartment. The closet door opens, and then Carlos hears her breathing close by on the other side of the wall.
II
I’m the one who doesn’t remember anything from that last day on the Island because I’m the youngest and so the other three are always telling me what happened that last day. They say I almost got Papi killed on account of I was so mean to one of the secret police who came looking for him. Some weirdo who was going to sit me on his hard-on and pretend we were playing Ride the Cock Horse to Banbury Cross. But then whenever we start talking last-day-on-the-Island memories, and someone says, “Fifi, you almost got Papi killed for being so rude to that gestapo guy,” Yoyo starts in on how it was she who almost got Papi killed when she told that story about the gun years before our last day on the Island. Like we’re all competing, right? for the most haunted past.
I can tell you one thing I do remember from right before we left. There was this old lady, Chucha, who had worked in Mami’s family forever and who had this face like someone had wrung it out after washing it to try to get some of the black out. I mean, Chucha was super wrinkled and Haitian blue-black, not Dominican café-con-leche black. She was real Haitian too and that’s why she couldn
’t say certain words like the word for parsley or anyone’s name that had a / in it, which meant the family was like camp, everyone with nicknames Chucha could pronounce. She was always in a bad mood—not exactly a bad mood, but you couldn’t get her to crack a smile or cry or anything. It was like all her emotions were spent, on account of everything she went through in her young years. Way back before Mami was even born, Chucha had just appeared at my grandfather’s doorstep one night, begging to be taken in. Turns out it was the night of the massacre when Trujillo had decreed that all black Haitians on our side of the island would be executed by dawn. There’s a river the bodies were finally thrown into that supposedly still runs red to this day, fifty years later. Chucha had escaped from some canepickers’ camp and was asking for asylum. Papito took her in, poor skinny little thing, and I guess Mamita taught her to cook and iron and clean. Chucha was like a nun who had joined the convent of the de la Torre clan. She never married or went anywhere even on her days off. Instead, she’d close herself up in her room and pray for any de la Torre souls stuck up in purgatory.
Anyhow, that last day on the Island, we were in our side-by-side bedrooms, the four girls, setting out our clothes for going to the United States. The two creepy spies had left, and Mami and Tio Vic were in the bedroom. They were telling Papi, who was hidden in this secret closet, about how we would all be leaving in Tio Vic’s limo for the airport for a flight he was going to get us. I know, I know, it sounds like something you saw on “Miami Vice,” but all I’m doing is repeating what I’ve heard from the family.
But here’s what I do remember of my last day on the Island. Chucha came into our bedrooms with this bundle in her hands, and Nivea, who was helping us pack, said to her in a gruff voice, “What do you want, old woman?” None of the maids liked Chucha because they all thought she was kind of below them, being so black and Haitian and all. Chucha, though, just gave Nivea one of her spelling looks, and all of sudden, Nivea remembered that she had to iron our outfits for wearing on the airplane.
Chucha started to unravel her bundle, and we all guessed she was about to do a little farewell voodoo on us. Chucha always had a voodoo job going, some spell she was casting or spirit she was courting or enemy she was punishing. I mean, you’d open a closet door, and there, in the corner behind your shoes, would sit a jar of something wicked that you weren’t supposed to touch. Or you’d find a candle burning in her room right in front of someone’s picture and a little dish with a cigar on it and red and white crepe streamers on certain days crisscrossing her room. Mami finally had to give her a room to herself because none of the other maids wanted to sleep with her. I can see why they were afraid. The maids said she got mounted by spirits. They said she cast spells on them. And besides, she slept in her coffin. No kidding. We were forbidden to go into her room to see it, but we were always sneaking back there to take a peek. She had her mosquito net rigged up over it, so it didn’t look that strange like a real uncovered coffin with a dead person inside.
At first, Mami wouldn’t let her do it, sleep in her coffin, I mean. She told Chucha civilized people had to sleep on beds, coffins were for corpses. But Chucha said she wanted to pre-pare herself for dying and couldn’t one of the carpenters at Papito’s factory measure her and build her a wooden box that would serve as her bed for now and her coffin later. Mami kept saying, Nonsense, Chucha, don’t get tragic.
The thing was, you couldn’t stand in Chucha’s way even if you were Mami. Soon there were jars in Mami’s closet, and her picture from when she was a baby being held by Chucha was out on Chucha’s altar with mints on a little tin dish, and a constant votary candle going. Inside of a week, Mami relented. She said poor Chucha never asked for a blessed thing from the family, and had always been so loyal and good, and so, heavens to Betsy, if sleeping in her coffin would make the old woman happy, Mami would have a nice box built for her, and she did. It was plain pine, like Chucha wanted it, but inside, Mami had it lined in purple cushiony fabric, which was Chucha’s favorite color, and bordered with white eyelet.
So here’s the part I remember about that last day. Once Nivea left the room, Chucha stood us all up in front of her. “Chachas—” she always called us that, from muchachas, girls, which is how come we had ended up nicknaming her a play echo of her name for us, Chucha.
“You are going to a strange land.” Something like that, I mean, I don’t remember the exact words. But I do remember the piercing look she gave me as if she were actually going inside my head. “When I was a girl, I left my country too and never went back. Never saw father or mother or sisters or brothers. I brought only this along.” She held the bundle up and finished unwrapping it from its white sheet. It was a statue carved out of wood like the kind I saw years later in the anthro textbooks I used to pore over, as if staring at those little talismanic wooden carvings would somehow be my madeleine, bringing back my past to me like they say tasting that cookie did for Proust. But the textbook gods never triggered any four-volume memory in my head. Just this little moment I’m recalling here.
Chucha stood this brown figure up on Carla’s vanity. He had a grimacing expression on his face, deep grooves by his eyes and his nose and lips, as if he were trying to go but was real constipated. On top of his head was a little platform, and on it, Chucha placed a small cup of water. Soon, on account of the heat, I guess, that water started evaporating and drops ran down the grooves carved in that wooden face so that the statue looked as if it were crying. Chucha held each of our heads in her hands and wailed a prayer over us. We were used to some of this strange stuff from daily contact with her, but maybe it was because today we could feel an ending in the air, anyhow, we all started to cry as if Chucha had finally released her own tears in each of us.
They are gone, left in cars that came for them, driven by pale Americans in white uniforms with gold braids on their shoulders and on their caps. Too pale to be the living. The color of zombies, a nation of zombies. I worry about them, the girls, Doña Laura, moving among men the color of the living dead.
The girls all cried, especially the little one, clutching onto my skirts, Doña Laura weeping so hard into her handkerchief that I insisted on going back to her bureau and getting her a fresh one. I did not want her to enter her new country with a spent handkerchief because I know, I know what tears await her there. But let her be spared the knowledge that will come in time. That one’s nerves have never been strong.
They have left—and only the silence remains, the deep and empty silence in which I can hear the voices of my santos settling into the rooms, of my loa telling me stories of what is to come.
After the girls and Doña Laura left with the American zombie whites, I heard a door click in the master bedroom, and I went out to the corridor to check for intruders. All in black, I saw the loa of Don Carlos putting his finger to his lips in mockery of the last gesture I had seen him make to me that morning. I answered with a sign and fell to my knees and watched him leave through the back door out through the guava orchard. Soon afterwards, I heard a car start up. And then the deep and empty silence of the deserted house.
I am to close up the house, and help over at Doña Carmen’s until they go too, and then at Don Arturo’s, who also is to go. Mostly, I am to tend to this house. Dust, give the rooms an airing. The others except for Chino have been dismissed, and I have been entrusted with the keys. From time to time, Don Victor, when he can get away from his young girls, will stop by to see to things and give me my monthly wages.
Now I hear the voices telling me how the grass will grow tall on the unkempt lawns; how Doña Laura’s hanging orchids will burst their wire baskets, their frail blossoms eaten by bugs; how the birdcages will stand empty, the poor having poached the tortolas and guineas that Don Carlos took so much trouble to raise; how the swimming pools will fill with trash and leaves and dead things. Chino and I will be left behind in these decaying houses until that day I can see now—when I shut my eyes—that day the place will be overrun by guardias, sm
ashing windows and carting off the silver and plates, the pictures and the mirror with the winged babies shooting arrows, and the chairs with medallions painted on back, the box that makes music, and the magic one that gives pictures. They will strip the girls’ shelves of the toys their grandmother brought them back from that place they were always telling me about with the talcum powder flowers falling out of the clouds and the buildings that touch Damballah’s sky, a bewitched and unsafe place where they must now make their lives.
I have said prayers to all the santos, to the loa, and to the Gran Poder de Dios, visiting each room, swinging the can of cleaning smoke, driving away the bad spirits that filled the house this day, and fixing in my head the different objects and where they belong so that if any workman sneaks in and steals something I will know what is gone. In the girls’ rooms I re-member each one as a certain heaviness, now in my heart, now in my shoulders, now in my head or feet; I feel their losses pile up like dirt thrown on a box after it has been lowered into the earth. I see their future, the troublesome life ahead. They will be haunted by what they do and don’t remember. But they have spirit in them. They will invent what they need to survive.
They have left, and the house is closed and the air is blessed. I lock the back door and pass the maid’s room, where I see Imaculada and Nivea and Milagros packing to leave at dawn. They do not need my goodbyes. I go in my own room, the one Doña Laura had special made for me so I could be with my santos at peace and not have to bear the insolence and annoyance of young girls with no faith in the spirits. I clean the air with incense and light the six candles—one for each of the girls, and one for Doña Laura, whose diapers I changed, and one for Don Carlos. And then, I do what I always do after a hard day, I wash my face and arms in agua florida. I throw out the water, saying the prayer to the loa of the night who watch with bright eyes from the darkened sky. I part the mosquito netting and climb into my box, arranging myself so that I am facing up, my hands folded on my waist.
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Page 18
