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Only Sofia-Elisabete

Page 10

by Robin Kobayashi


  5. Evil Eye

  If only someone could have spoken with me, reasoned with me, to warn me before it was too late and I became consumed with all things love. For entire days, the selfish girl in me cared not for anyone else in the universe, not my beloved Tito, not my melancholy governess, not my ailing father, when Mr. Munro came near. I was loca de contenta—mad with joy! How I adored him and his elegant mind, his engaging manners and, oh yes, those soft plump lips of his. But more delightful than any of those kinds of things were his arresting freckles.

  I never really knew of freckles until I met Mr. Munro. Apparently, everyone in his family has them, those flecks of brown adorning their faces, the way a flight of swallows dots a rosy summer sky. What a silly girl I was, determined to count his every freckle—eleven on each cheek, five on his nose, seven on his chin, if you must know. Each time he laughed and crinkled his eyes, his freckles teased me, distracted me.

  “Have you told your grandfather that I’m your novio?” Mr. Munro questioned me one day.

  “I might have done, sir.” The truth was I had claimed Mr. Munro as my sweetheart.

  He took a deep breath and then slowly released it. “Might have?”

  “Oh, Señorito Kitt, your brilliance dazzles me! Your freckles arrest me!”

  I clapped my hand over my mouth. Had I uttered those foolish love-struck words, or had I imagined saying them? Mr. Munro’s eyes shone with merriment.

  “I thank you for the compliments,” and his freckles teased me yet again.

  Ay me! He must have thought me a besotted fool. Quicklike, I struck a grown-up attitude.

  “I meant to say, sir, that you make me very happy. My mind is made up. I will surrender my heart to you.”

  With a sparkle in his eye, he explained, “It’s the established mode of courtship where I come from that the man, once he knows his own heart, must convince the woman of his merit as a man of sense. Then, the woman, if she has no positive aversion to his person, must convince him of her regard for him. After which, they must convince their families that they are a good match.”

  To be sure, his teasing manner put me on the fidgets. Did he know his own heart? Had my violet love potion worked?

  But then, he said in a serious tone, “For someone like me, only twenty, and dependent on my father, his approval is essential.”

  My head drooped. “You must think me unsophisticated in love, a regular frothy female.”

  “Nothing of the sort. You are enthusiastic and sincere.”

  “If you wish, sir, we could try again. I could conceal my ardent feelings … and labor with reservations … and argue with myself that I could not possibly be in love.”

  “Your emotions, being brimful, have already spilled. But are you constant?”

  Stammering, I said, “Oh yes … I am.” I blushed to own it, that ever since the days of El Munrodor, I hadn’t been true to Antonio. I’d rather be true to Mr. Munro.

  “You’re a belle of Cádiz, young, beautiful, salada, and you will attract many novios in Andalucía—some of these young fellows with freckles more arresting than mine—”

  “I am not like Doña Marisa!” Stamping my foot, I struck a pose of defiance, my arms akimbo.

  Immediately I was sorry for it. His raised chin, his questioning brow—one needn’t guess from his demeanor what he thought of my outburst. It occurred to me that I needed to include “cease foot-stamping,” “cease striking attitudes” and “cease acting saucy” to the list of things that I must address so that I could become a demure and proper young lady.

  He then advised me he would attend a tertulia this evening at the home of the English Consul, where he and his companions would sit and smoke cigars and talk of matters of moment and other manly things. My lovesick heart sank upon hearing this, because I had wished him to be mine this evening. ’Twas my punishment, I believed.

  “I promise to share everything I’ve learned about politics.”

  “Oh, do. Then I can tell Tito.”

  “The two of you seem so congenial, yet you argue about politics.”

  “We never argue; we just explain why the other person is wrong,” I replied in earnest.

  He laughed in his friendly manner.

  While Mr. Munro was away, Madelina took pity on me. She invited me to join her and her brother on the Alameda, it being a special occasion for some reason. Tito said I could go, but Felipa must accompany me, and he gave my dueña strict instructions to frighten away any suitors. He said one novio was enough for me.

  “Do not disappoint me, Felipa,” he warned. “You must repulse them with your ugliest glare, or you’ll be banished to the marshes to catch a million frogs for Don Fulano’s dinner.”

  “Frogs!” she shouted in disgust, because, in her superstitious world, frogs existed to absorb the poison of the earth.

  That evening, under a sunset dipped in blue and gold and violet, we promenaded on the upper walk of the Alameda, where the Cádiz belles, executing their graceful alluring gait known as el piafar, commanded the attention of every male onlooker. No one noticed me bungling el piafar, what with Madelina near, and I was glad of it.

  Her austere brother, Gil Lucena, slowly paced beside her, his sole purpose being to scowl at her many admirers, particularly one who ghosted us—Ramón Lara, the rejected suitor and a most persistent admirer nevertheless. This Lara, a largish man, not handsome, gripped the stag-horn handle of his knife in a menacing way. Exasperated by Madelina’s aloofness, he whirled upon her brother.

  “Lucena, will you not invite me to your tertulia tomorrow evening?”

  “I cannot, Lara, because we shall attend another tertulia.” Gil Lucena nodded curtly to him, and we resumed our stroll.

  “Whose?” Lara blocked our path.

  A shadow darkened Gil Lucena’s face. “Don Luis de Luna’s, if you must know.”

  Only an Andaluz knows how to speak with a cloak. Lara flung his into a tornado, wrapping himself in its angry folds ere he stalked away. Free of him at last, I believe we all breathed easier. Madelina confided to me that she and Julián Paz had fallen in love and that, after the tertulia tomorrow, she would withdraw completely from the public eye to prepare herself for marriage.

  “You mustn’t tell a soul yet.” She placed a finger to her lips.

  “Oh, Madelina! I wish you happy together.”

  Her brother growled.

  “Gil always dislikes my admirers. It is my brother’s way,” and she smiled at him behind her fan.

  “Lara is a hothead, and Paz too trusting,” he declared.

  At my return home, Tito demanded to know why that scoundrel Ramón Lara wished to attend my birthday celebration. Apparently, Lara, with his abominable impudence, had secured an invitation to our tertulia. Tito could not refuse him.

  “I told Lara, ‘my house is yours.’”

  I groaned aloud. “Tito, why did you invite him?”

  “And risk his evil eye? One must give a madman and a bull a clear way, do not stop them or stand in their way.”

  “Ave María purísima!” cried my dueña.

  “Felipa,” he snapped at her. “Why did you not give him a thousand ugly eyes?”

  “I swear to you that I did,” and she crossed herself.

  Tito grumbled out, “Lara is a rogue. His father is a rogue. Two rotten eggs could not be more alike—nothing but stinking trouble.”

  In a foul mood, he told me to go to my room, though the clock had struck only eight. I dared not disobey him.

  Having gone to bed, I was in the middle of a midnight dream when a peal of rollicking laughter awakened me. “Sleep’st thou, or wak’st thou, fairest creature,” someone sang sweetly. I drew aside the mosquito curtain. Stumbling in the dark, I groped my way to the window, where I opened the shutter. In the well-lit plaza below, two young men poorly disguised as majos—their red sashes tied slap-dash, their sugar-loaf hats askew—tottered about in drunken merriment. Boon companions they were, their arms wrapped round each oth
er’s shoulder. They bumped their heads together to plan something.

  The conspirators approached Tito’s house, one carrying a posy, the other twanging a guitar with a broken string. The taller stood below my window and, with a gallant sweep of his arm, he placed his sugar-loaf hat over his heart. “It is a dream, the best of dreams,” I whispered in excitement, hastily covering my bed-gown with a shawl. I ventured out to the balcony half-dressed, my head dizzy with love, my heart a-flutter. Oh, to be serenaded for the first time, albeit in the Scottish way.

  O luve will venture in where it daur na weel be seen,

  O luve will venture in where wisdom ance has been;

  But I will down yon river rove, amang the wood sae green,

  And a’ to pu’ a Posie to my ain dear Sofia.

  The primrose I will pu’, the firstling o’ the year,

  And I will pu’ the pink, the emblem o’ my dear;

  For she’s the pink o’ womankind, and blooms without a peer,

  And a’ to be a Posie to my ain dear Sofia …

  Suddenly, a gush of water drenched my Scottish majo. He shook himself like a dog.

  “Quita de ahí—away with you!” Tito shouted from the window above me, waving an empty basin.

  “Por favor, Tito, I want to hear more about the posy he is gathering for me—his own dear Sofia.”

  “Go to bed at once, niña mía.”

  My serenader tossed up the wet posy to me. As he retreated, walking backwards, he warbled out another verse. I thought him brave for risking Tito’s ire.

  I’ll pu’ the budding rose, when Phoebus peeps in view,

  For it’s like a baumy kiss o’ her sweet, bonnie mou;

  The hyacinth’s for constancy wi’ its unchanging blue,

  And a’ to be a Posie to my ain dear Sofia.

  “Constancy! Impetuous youth,” and Tito slammed his window shutter closed.

  A ghostly shadow darted to the side of our house, and I wondered who had been watching us. It unsettled me. For the next few minutes, I remained rooted to the window, waiting for the apparition to return, but it didn’t, and I eventually fell asleep.

  Later that night, I suffered a fit of haunting dreams, a strange dream inside a dream, where I dreamed of a specter dreaming of me, and in its dream, it gave me the evil eye. I never told a soul about it out of fear that Tito would cancel our tertulia and say that I had gone mad, which, in a way, I suppose I had. They say that every person suffers madness once in twenty-four hours, because if you were to act during waking hours the way you dream at night, you would surely be sent to the asylum for lunatics.

  One can’t hide dreams and sensations from Zia. She can feel evil or smell a witch’s scent from ten leagues away. I happened upon her the morning next, as she was weaving more of the consecrated palm leaves onto my balcony to guard against the evil eye. She peered at me, with her lynx-eyes. “Ave María purísima!” and she made the sign of the cross, having sensed my troubled sleep. She tied a stag’s horn tipped in silver round my neck, with a cord braided from the hair of a black mare’s tail.

  “Oh, Zia.” I huffed. “Only children wear these horns.”

  “Foolish girl.” She gave me instead an amulet known as a higa, a piece of jet shaped into a fist with the thumb protruding between the pointing and middle fingers. For double protection, she fastened a linen pouch of cut-up garlic round my neck, this amulet emitting a sharp disagreeable odor.

  It was the third of June, my birthday, but no one took much notice of me after that. Tito had disappeared in his laboratory, Zia in her kitchen, Emmerence who knows where. Even Don Fulano avoided me.

  Felipa drew back in fright upon seeing my amulets. In a panic, she bustled me to church, where I was made to humble myself for my sins, to beg God’s forgiveness for offending Him and to pray for His mercy. I had been uttering my prayers, with one eye popped open, when I espied Mr. Munro saying his rosary.

  “Felipa, I am of a mind to take a tour on my knees.” I knew this would please her to see me torture myself.

  “Sí, sí,” and she waved me away.

  Shuffling about on my knees, I prayed intently in my forbidden language that the heavy incense inside the church would mask my garlic odor. As soon as Felipa closed her eyes and bent her head in prayer, I hastened to where Mr. Munro knelt upon a straw mat, his rosary between his fingers. He wrinkled his nose.

  “Why are you wearing garlic?”

  “It will protect me from evil eye.”

  “Is that customary on your natal day?”

  I sighed. “Zia made me wear it. She can be quite forceful about such things, and I dare not quarrel with her. She might refuse to reveal her potion formulas.”

  “Then you are wise.”

  Smiling at me, he reached into his pocket for something.

  “A happy birthday to you.”

  It was a small delicate comb of tortoise-shell, shaped like a butterfly.

  “A thousand thank-you’s,” I half-whispered.

  No sooner had our eyes met briefly, as though to acknowledge the significance of his gift to me, when someone, most probably Felipa, uttered a loud “ahem.” With an inward groan, I resumed hobbling on my knees to complete my crippling tour, from one chapel to another.

  Later, at the dinner hour, it being a fish-day, we were eating ajo blanco, a white gazpacho made with almonds and garlic, when Zia approached Tito to whisper in his ear. He turned to me with a grave air. “Smoke her,” was his command to Zia. Emmerence and I exchanged a look of alarm.

  Zia gathered her magic plants that had been blessed—the aromatic tomillo blanco, the tomillo sansero, the caña de San Juan—and she burned them in a bonfire in the outer patio. She directed me to pass through the smoke three times, during the third of which I suffered a fit of coughing. Worried, she returned to the dining-room. She whispered again to Tito, who was eating croquetas de bacalao, a salt cod dish and his favorite.

  “Smoke her with garlic,” said he, in between hearty chews.

  Emmerence nearly choked on her salt cod.

  “Garlic!” cried I. “Tito, surely you jest.”

  “I assure you I am not, niña.” He stabbed another croqueta with his fork.

  “Tito, I beg of you. I shall stink at our tertulia. No one will dare come near me.”

  “So be it,” he declared. “There is evil in the air, and we must protect you.”

  “Oh, Tito.”

  He drank down his wine. “Zia dreamed of a swan last night, and it sang to her. Ever since then, her ears have been humming.”

  “Whatever does it mean?”

  “A leaf of the tree of life will soon fall.” Tito fell upon his meal again. Death, and things related to it, always made him hungry.

  Zia burned strings of garlic five feet long, after which I reluctantly passed through the smoke of the bonfire nine times while she chanted prayer after prayer to a host of patron saints, including mine, Santa Isabel, otherwise known as Saint Elizabeth of Portugal. When she had done, she closed her eyes and held my hair, to test me for evil eye, and having found nothing to trouble her, she released me.

  Part of me believed in singing swans and their messages of doom, yet another part of me didn’t want to stink of garlic on my special day. I felt stuck between two worlds—one of reason, the other of superstition—and if I didn’t believe in the latter with a true heart, then some tragedy would surely befall me. In a petulant mood, I rejoined my dining companions, where I made a great show of pouting and grumbling and crossing my arms. Tito was finishing his mojama, the cured wind-dried tuna, thin slices of which had been drizzled in oil.

  “You must trust me, your own grandfather.”

  “Tito, I stink. No one will try a bolero with me on my birthday.”

  He sniffed me. “Dios mío! Your Tito shan’t either.”

  “Oh, Tito, but you must.”

  “Heh, heh, I’ve decided otherwise,” and he stole away for the afternoon siesta.

  Just then, Don Fulano cr
ept past me, his tongue darting in and out. Like other serpents, he had an aversion to garlic. He shot off like a rocket and up the stairs. “Don Fulano, I thought we were great friends?” I shouted after him to no purpose.

  My melancholy self returned to my bedroom, where, after taking a siesta, I scribbled in my note-book of potions, after which, I wrote a longish letter to my step-mamma in Scarborough, saying how much I sorely missed her and my father each day, most particularly this one, my fifteenth birthday. “Pray reply to my letter, to let me know if you are both in good health and whether my father is recovering. Have I made you unhappy in any way? Is that why you don’t write to me anymore?” But I knew it was hopeless—that she wouldn’t respond if I posted the letter.

  A maid-servant interrupted me to dress my hair with the tortoise-shell comb that Mr. Munro had given me. I stood at the glass, admiring how grown up I looked in my new French gown with short puffed sleeves, short petticoat and a hem bordered in a double festooned flounce. But no matter how much I pretended everything was good, it was not, because nothing, not even my violet love potion, could disguise my pungent garlicky odor.

  “It’s eight o’clock,” announced Felipa, standing at my door, “and time to welcome the guests.”

  She led me to the bottom of the stairs. Abruptly she stopped to cover the front of my gown with her shawl.

  “Open your eyes wide,” she ordered.

  “Why?”

  Before I knew what she was about, she squirted the juice of an orange into each of my eyes.

  “Aieeee! Are you a madwoman?” Oh, how my eyes stung!

  She pushed me in front of a mirror. “Mira! See how brilliant your eyes have become?”

  I wanted to strangle her.

  Meanwhile, a servant announced the arrival of Mr. Munro and Mr. Hopper.

  “A happy good evening to you, sirs,” said I, with my dazzling stinging eyes.

  They bowed and wished me a happy birthday. I admired Mr. Munro’s fortitude in not flinching at my “delicate perfume” of garlic.

  “Will you try a bolero with me later?” he asked me. “I have been practicing it for several days.”

 

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