I sat as still as one of her still lives that hung on the walls around me. I felt her presence in the dark, hushed, airless room. Her brush was poised above my head. She could paint over my hair, blank out my features, make my face no more than a plate for apples, grapes, plums, pears, lemons. I dared not move.
But soon, I began to grow restless. I could see these art lessons were not going to be any fun. It seemed like everything I enjoyed in the world was turning out to be wrong. I had recently begun catechism classes in preparation for my first communion. The Catholic sisters at Our Lady Of Perpetual Sorrows Convent School were teaching me to sort the world like laundry into what was wrong and right, what was venial, what, if you died in the middle of enjoying, would send you straight to hell. Before I could ever get to my life, conscience was arranging it all like a still life or tableau. But that morning in Doña Charito’s house, I was not ready yet to pose as one of the model children of the world.
I lifted myself out of that uncomfortable chair and made my way out into the foyer, where our shoes had been lined up in a tidy row as if they were about to be shot for having mud on their soles. Just as I had found the pair that was mine, I heard a man’s voice, shouting and crying curses from the back of the house. Normally, I would have run in the opposite direction, but the curses he was yelling were ones I was muttering under my breath against Doña Charito. I was drawn to investigate.
The patio was deserted. The sky hung low, a cloudy canvas with swirls of dark purple and stormy greys. I crossed a high hibiscus hedge through an unlatched gate and came upon a muddy backyard, strewn with logs and stumps like a carpenter’s yard. Ahead stood an unpainted shed with one high window and one door clamped shut with a great padlock. The man’s shouts had come from inside, but what drew me now was another sound, a tap-tap-tapping like us girl cousins dancing for company. I wanted to find out something secret about Doña Charito. At my age, that is what I knew of revenge. What someone kept in a bedside drawer. What color was someone’s underwear. What did someone look like squatting awkwardly on a small chamber pot. Then, when that someone fell upon me with violent discipline, I could undo with a gaze: I know you, I know you.
The one window was a head above my head. I rolled a small stump over beneath the glass, climbed on top, and peered in-side. At first, I could see only my own face reflected back. I cupped my hands around my eyes and felt the glass hum with hammering as if it were alive.
Slowly, I made out the objects inside the shed. Giant, half-formed creatures were coming out of logs like the ones strewn in the yard behind me. Some logs had hoofs or claws, tails or horns; some had the beginnings of a face, a mouth or an eye; some had hands with fingernails. A sheep’s fleece curled from the bare nutty back of a pale stump, but the poor thing couldn’t baa without nostrils or a mouth. I put my hand on my own face to make sure I was intact.
In the middle of the floor, a woman’s figure reclined on two sawhorses, one at her feet, another at her neck, like my grand-mother hanging from the rafters in her sling when she’d broken her back. Sharp points came out of her head, the rays of the Virgin’s halo, though they could just as well have been the horns of a demon woman. Her hair coiled in complex curls over her shoulders like snakes. Her head was fully formed, but her face was still a blank.
Tap-tap-tap, the sound came from underneath her. Shavings of wood and sawdust were falling on the floor, where just this moment she was being given feet. Before my very eyes, the pale blond stumps distinguished themselves into heel and toe; the high arches made S’s of the bottoms of her feet. She could have stood upon those soles and walked all the way to Bethlehem.
When his brown head emerged from between her legs, I believed him at first to be one of his own creations. He was the same shiny mahogany color as his half-formed creatures. Around his neck was a halter, trailing a chain to an iron ring by the door.—And that was all he wore! He was a tiny man, my size standing on a log, perfectly proportioned, except for one thing. I had seen the stud bulls on my grandfather’s ranch during breeding season and witnessed their spectacles among the cows. Once, a saucy nursemaid had informed me that, in embroidered linens with the lights off and the fans going, my fine de la Torre mother had gotten me no differently. The little man grew big like those bulls on the ranch as he worked on the Virgin’s feet. When he was done with that end, he climbed on top, straddling her, his rattling chain settling behind him like a great tail. He touched the blank of the face, tenderly it seemed, planted his chisel at the forehead and was about to come down on her. I cried out to warn the woman beneath him.
But it was his elf face which shot up. He looked about the room, bull’s-eyed on my face against the window, then lunged in my direction. His chain grew taut. But before he could reach the window, open it up, and yank me inside, I threw myself off my perch and landed hard on the ground. I was too terrified to feel pain, but I heard the little bone in my arm crack as I hit the ground.
His face appeared at the window. He studied me, and an inane grin spread across his lips like a stain. Tap-tap-tap, his hand beat on the glass as if to hold my attention so he could study me a little longer, tap-tap-tap. There was no need for that; my eyes were riveted to his face, and my mouth opened in a voiceless scream. At last, sound came to my terror. I screamed and screamed even after his face had disappeared from the window.
Soon the Art Lesson came running from the house, Doña Charito leading, cousins on stockinged feet, the old woman in tow, towards the muddy heap in the yard. I did not think there would ever come the day when I would be so pleased to see her.
“What has transpired?” she cried, but her voice betrayed genuine concern. “Why were you not supervisioning her?” she said, accusing the old woman, then turning to me, she accused me: “What have you committed upon yourself?” She shot a worried glance down to the bottom of the yard. Tap-tap-tap came the sounds from inside the shed.
I lifted up my throbbing arm, an offering of broken bone. She could have my face smeared with tears, my body soiled with mud like a creature’s, the small wet sobs coming out of my mouth. “I broke it,” I wailed. But I knew it was best not to confess what I had seen inside her garden shed.
One could not say her face softened, for softness was not in her repertoire of expressions. She knelt beside me and reached for my arm. But even her lightest touch made me wince with pain. “Brrroke?” She gazed down at me. I now saw that the speckles in her eyes were splinters of bones, shards of things she had broken over the years.
Meanwhile, without supervision, my little cousins had begun balancing on logs, patting mudcakes, enjoying the holiday of smearing their dresses and darkening their white socks. A pair of explorer cousins marched towards the shed with sticks. Doña Charito stood up and sounded the alarm. “Attention! Back in the studio this instant, every one!” They scurried back. The rain began to fall, big sloppy drops as if someone were shaking out a paint brush.
She lifted me in her arms. I clung to her as if I were her own child. I laid my head above where her heart should be and thought I could hear, as if inside a conch shell, the dark Atlantic, the waves thrashing in high winds, the vast plains of central Europe. She knew the world was a wild place. She carried a great big brush. She made pinwheels of the whirling stars that had driven many a man mad. She could save me from the crazyman in the shed. I hung on.
But that was the last I ever saw of Doña Charito. The cars came screeching to a stop in the driveway; my mother hurried into the house; I began to cry to convince her of the seriousness of my condition. And as the shock wore off, I did feel a piercing pain in my arm as if someone were driving a chisel through the bone. At the hospital everyone’s suspicions were confirmed: my arm was fractured in three places.
I wore a cast for months, and when it was sawed off at last, the arm was discovered to have healed crookedly. There was no help for it but to break the bone again and reset it. This was considered a major enough operation that I was given gifts and a little overnight case to tak
e to the hospital with a lock, the combination of which was the month, day, and year of my birth. A mass was said at the Cathedral for my quick recovery, and I was allowed to have dishes of ice cream between meals to make me brave and—it was explained to my envious cousins—“to give her added calcium.” I was sure that I was about to die and that’s why everyone was being so kind to me.
I did not die. And the bone did finally heal, almost perfectly. But for a year on and off, I carried my arm in a sling. The cast was signed by several dozen cousins and aunts and uncles, so I seemed a composite creation of the de la Torre family: Gisela de la Torre, Mundín de la Torre, Carmencita de la Torre, Lucinda Maria de la Torre. There were notes and rhymes. Some of the messages were smart-aleck remarks and skull-and-bones by cousins who resented me for getting out of lessons inflicted on them because of me. For though my own art career had come to a crashing halt, my girl cousins had to spend their Saturday mornings drawing circles, then on to ovals, before finally these ovals were allowed to ripen into apples. Months later, they graduated to utensils—a pitcher, a basket, a knife. The final project was a still life with all these objects in it as well as a small hunk of plastic ham. Bitterly, they complained: they hated art; they did not want to take lessons. But American dollars, they were informed, did not grow on Island trees. Art lessons it would be for the next year.
By Christmas, the lessons were over. My cast was off. But I was a changed child. Months of pampering and the ridicule of my cousins had turned me inward. But now when the world filled me, I could no longer draw it out. I was sullen and dependent on my mother’s sole attention, tender-hearted, and whiney: the classic temperament of the artist but without anything to show for my bad character. I could no longer draw. My hand had lost its art.
I did have one moment of triumph during that year of art lessons. Christmas Eve, along with the rest of the de la Torre children, I was taken to the National Cathedral for the nativity pageant where the new creche was to be unveiled. We marched up the aisle to the altar, which was decked with poinsettias and candles and curtained off with red and green draperies.
At the stroke of midnight, the bells began to peal. The side doors of the Cathedral burst open and out came a procession of priests and nuns and acolytes, clacking their censers, sending up the fragrance of myrrh and frankincense the three kings had brought over with them from the Orient. Two of the altar boys drew back the curtains—
Before me were the giants I’d seen in Don José’s workshed! But these were sacred figures in rich velvet capes and glittery robes and shepherds’ cloaks beautifully stitched to look ragged with patches by the Carmelite nuns. Kings and sheep and whinnying horses and serving maids and beggar boys gathered together in the frosty imagined night. God was going through all the trouble of self-creation to show us how. The wind was up. Rain splattered on the Cathedral roof. Far away, a dog barked.
When the altar gate was thrown open, the congregation surged forward to touch the infant Jesus for good luck in the coming year. But my eyes were drawn to the face of the Virgin beside him. I put my hand to my own face to make sure it was mine. My cheek had the curve of her cheek; my brows arched like her brows; my eyes had been as wide as hers, staring up at the little man as he knocked on the window of his work-shed. I reached out my crooked arm and touched the hem of her royal blue robe and her matching cloth slippers. Then I too broke into glad tidings and joy to the world with the crowds of believers around me.
An American Surprise
Carla
All morning my sisters and I had waited around the house, so when our father finally walked in the door, we raced to him, crying, “Papi! Papi!” Mami held a finger to her lips. “The baby,” she reminded us, but Papi forgot himself and picked each one of us up with a shout and gave us a twirl. The chauffeur waited patiently at the door, a bag in each hand. “In the study, Mario,” Papi directed. Then he rubbed his hands together and said, “Do I have a wonderful surprise for my girls!”
“What is it?” we all cried, and I took a guess because last night at prayers Mami had promised that one day I would see such a thing. “Snow?”
“Now, girls, remember,” Mami said, and though I thought she meant Baby Fifi again, she added, “let Papi relax first.” Then Mami whispered something to Papi in English, and he nodded his head. “After dinner then,” he said. “We’ll see who leaves her plate clean.” But when our faces fell, he rallied us: “¡Ay, ay, ay! What a surprise!”
Sandi and Yoyo exchanged triumphant looks and skipped off, hand in hand, to tell our cousins next door that Papi was back with a wonderful surprise from New York City, where it was winter and the snow fell from heaven to earth like the Bible’s little pieces of manna bread.
But I was not about to wander off, for supposing, just supposing, Papi finished his drink and decided to open his bags right then. As the only one there, I’d get first pick of whatever the surprise was. If only he would give me a tiny clue!
But my father was no good for clues. He was sprawled beside my mother, his arms spread out across the back of the couch as if he were about to embrace everything that was his. They were talking in those preoccupied voices that grownups use when something has gone wrong.
“Prices have skyrocketed,” he was saying. My mother ran her hand through his hair and said, “My poor dear,” and off they went to their bedroom for a nap before dinner.
The house grew quiet and lonesome. I lingered by the coffee table, taking sips from what was left in the glasses until the ice cubes rattled down to my mouth, tattletales, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut with the burn of Papi’s highball. From down the hall came the sound of tinkling silverware and the scrape of a chair being settled in its place. Then Gladys, the new pantry maid, began to sing:
Yo tiro la cuchara,
Yo tiro el tenedor
Yo tiro to’ lo’ plato’
Yme voypa’ Nueva Yor’.
I loved to hear Gladys’s high, sweet voice imitating her favorite singers on the radio. Someday, she was going to be a famous actress, Gladys said. But my mother said Gladys was only a country girl who didn’t know any better than to sing popular tunes in the house and wear her kinky hair in rollers all week long, then comb it out for Sunday mass in hairdos copied from American magazines my mother had thrown out.
Gladys’s singing stopped abruptly when I entered the dining room. “Ay, Carla, what a scare you gave me, girl!” She laughed. She was setting the table for dinner, taking spoons from a bouquet of silverware in her left hand, executing fancy dance steps before stopping at each placement and reminding herself, “Spoon on the right, wife to the knife.” In the absence of sisters or best-friend cousins, Gladys was fun to be around.
She stood back from the table and cocked her head critically, then tucked a chair in, gave a knife a little nudge like someone straightening a straight picture on the wall. She nodded towards the back of the house. I followed her through the pantry, where everything was in readiness for dinner: the empty platters were out, waiting to be filled; the serving spoons were lined up like a family, tall ones first, then littler and littler ones.
In the passageway that connected the maids’ room with the rest of the house, Gladys stopped and held open the door. “So! Your father is back from New York!”
I bowed my head with pleasure and entered past Gladys. The maids’ room was dark and hot. Most of the windows had been shut against the fierce, midafternoon Caribbean sun. A hazy, muted light fell from a high, half-opened window. On a cane stool, a humming fan turned this way and that.
Slowly, as my eyes adjusted to the dimmer light of the room, I made out the plastic statuettes and holy pictures of saints which cluttered the bureau top. An old mayonnaise jar with a slit in the bottle cap glinted with the coppery dregs of a few pennies. As the fan blew upon it, the flame of the votary candle swayed and flickered. Two of the three cots were occupied. On one, the old cook, Chucha, lay, fast asleep, her fat black face looking pleased at the occasional cool breeze. O
n another sat Nivea in her slip, head bowed, murmuring over a rosary as if she were finding fault with the beads that dangled between her knees.
As the door clicked shut, Chucha opened one eye, then closed it. I hoped she had fallen back to sleep, since the old cook liked to scold. In fact, old Chucha was growing so difficult that Mami had decided to build a room just for her. “You know your mother doesn’t like you back here,” Chucha started in. I looked to Gladys to defend me.
“No harm, Cook,” Gladys said cheerfully. She led me to her cot and patted a spot beside her. “Doña Laura won’t mind today, seeing as Don Carlos just got in.”
“Tell me the hen doesn’t peck when the rooster crows,” said Chucha with heavy sarcasm. She let out a grumpy sigh and turned herself over to face the wall. Softly, the fan tickled the pink bottoms of her feet. “I was changing Doña Laura’s diapers before you were born!” she quarreled. “I should know how the dog bites, how the bee stings!”
Gladys rolled her eyes at me as if to say, “Don’t mind Cook.” Then she said in an appeasing voice, “You certainly have put your time in.”
“Thirty-two years.” Chucha let out a dry laugh.
“I wonder where I’ll be in thirty-two years,” Gladys mused. A glazed look came across her face; she smiled. “New York,” she said dreamily and began to sing the refrain from the popular New York merengue that was on the radio night and day.
“Dream on,” Chucha said. And now she was laughing. The fat under her uniform jiggled. Her body rocked back and forth. “Your head is in the clouds, girl. Watch out for the thunder-bolt!”
“Ay, Cook.” Gladys reached over and gently patted the old woman’s feet. She seemed as unfazed by Chucha’s merriment as her bad temper. “Every night I pray,” she said, nodding towards the makeshift altar. Gladys had once explained to me how each saint on her bureau had a specialty. Santa Clara was good for eyesight. San Martin was a jackpot, good for money. Our Blessed Mother was good for anything. Now she picked out a postcard my mother had thrown out a few days before. It was a photo of a robed woman with a sharp star for a halo and a torch in her upraised hand. Behind her was a fairytale city twinkling with Christmas lights. “This one is a powerful American Virgin.” Gladys handed me the card. “She’ll get me to New York, you’ll see,”
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