—Look, you can come and work for us. Why don’t you? I’ll talk to my mother. It’s all right. The girl’s been run off and we need somebody. Come right away if you like. There—it’s settled.
Soledad said neither yes nor no. It was dizzying to decide one’s fate, because, to tell the truth, she’d never made any decision regarding her own life, but rather had floated and whirled about like a dry leaf in a swirl of foamy water. Even now, though she thought she was making a choice, she was in reality only following the course already set out for her. She would go live with the Reyes del Castillo family.
Soledad leaned over the balustrade to watch Narciso skip down the stone steps two at a time and sprint across the sudsy courtyard where the neighbor woman was still bathing babies. The damp smell of wet stone rose in the air, and Soledad shivered from a chill that had nothing to do with the coolness of the morning. She shouted down to Narciso just as he reached the heavy Mexican colonial doors and uncorked the little door within a door.
—But where am I to present myself?
Narciso stood hunkered in that tiny door frame a moment, one foot on each side of the high wooden threshold. Behind him that shimmering white light of a Mexico City morning; in that epoch it was still transparent and silver as a polished coin. The racket of the street bustle—street cleaners, merchants with all of their merchandise on their back, chairs, baskets, brooms, the fruit vendor, the sherbet vendor, the charcoal vendor, the butter vendor, whistles and shouts, rattle of wheels, clip-clop of horses, hum of electric trams, hoarse, sad cries of the mules hauling streetcars, slap of guaraches, click-click-click of hard boots, the unmistakable Mexico City morning smell of hot oatmeal, orange peel, fresh-baked bolillo bread, and the ripe tang of sewer foulness. He stood half in that world and half in the cool shadow of the courtyard, a pretty profile in his military cadet uniform, hesitated for a second, and she thought, though she couldn’t be sure, he puckered his mouth into a kiss. Then he reached over to tug the little door behind him, and only just before it thumped shut, tossed his reply over his shoulder like a white flower of hope …
24.
Leandro Valle Street, Corner of Misericordia, Over by Santo Domingo
Soledad Reyes arrived on the 24th of June. She remembered the date because it was the feast day of Saint John the Baptist.
The day one customarily wakes before sunrise and bathes in the river.
At least it was the custom in the provinces back then. Nowadays, the citizens of Mexico City no longer bother with the river, but bring the river to you, dousing each other with water buckets or even water balloons.
In my day they cut one’s hair with a hatchet, and everyone with their rosaries and scapulars chanting, San Juan, San Juan, atole con pan …
The Reyes del Castillo family lived in the corazón of the capital, off la plaza de Santo Domingo in an apartment with two balconies overlooking Leandro Valle Street, apartment number 37, building number 24, corner of Misericordia. In other times the building was a monastery for friars from Santo Domingo Church.
The very ones who directed the Santa Inquisición in the time of the colony. No, it’s true, I swear to you. May the Devil come and yank my feet if I’m lying. Ask around if you don’t believe me. And before it was a monastery, it was the site of an Aztec temple. They say the building stones came from that original building. Look how the walls are a meter thick after all. It might be true. Just as the stories of some pobre buried inside them might be true too. Well, who knows, that’s what they say. But I don’t like to tell stories.
What was certain was the building’s convenient location, only a stone’s throw from the main plaza, the Zócalo. Tailors, printers, stationers, dry goods shops, jewelers, businesses of all kinds were housed in the street level of the old mansions built by the conquistadores and their children. Once Indians dressed in livery had stood at attention in front of these colonial doors. Once the pearl-and-diamond-adorned daughters and wives of las familias buenas had traveled to church in tasseled sedan chairs carried by West African slaves. Long ago, the finest days of these residences were already history. Slouched from the spongy shifting of the earth and scuffed from centuries of neglect, they still showed something of their former opulence, though seasons of rain and sun had faded their original brilliance like a gilded dress washed ashore in a tempest.
The Reyes’ quarters were on the third floor, a huge apartment with high ceilings and too many bedrooms. Later in life Soledad would remember it as having so many bedrooms she couldn’t remember how many. What she never forgot, however, was her first meeting with Narciso’s parents. Señor Eleuterio began by making polite inquiries, but it was obvious who was the boss when la Señora Regina burst into the room, a woman dark and feral, with eyes that seemed to burn.
—I thought you said you were bringing someone to help me with the house. This escuincla looks like I have to help her put on her calzones. I bet she still wets the bed. You, do you wet the bed?
—No, ma’am.
—Well, you’d better not even think of it, little girl. Don’t make more work for me. How old are you?
—Almost twelve.
—Almost? You mean one day you’ll be twelve. Turn around. Your chest is as flat as your back, and your belly more curved than your ass. If they didn’t see your face, people would think you were walking backwards! Ha-ha! Poor thing. Pobrecita. You can’t help it you’re not a beauty, right? Well, that’s all right. We just need somebody who’s willing to work. God can’t be kind to everyone, no?
But God had been kind to la Señora Regina. As dark as a cat, she was no taller than Soledad, yet she held herself like a queen. Though Señora Regina had grown thick through the years, it was easy to see she had always been beautiful and used to being treated accordingly. Even now Soledad felt a little afraid having that ferocious woman watch her so intently. If Regina had a nagual, an animal twin, it would have to be a jaguar. It’s the same face you see in the Mayan glyphs and everywhere in the Mexican Museum of Anthropology. Snarled lips and slanted jaguar eyes. Often this face is seen even now driving an M&M-colored taxicab or handing you a corn-on-the-cob on a stick. This face, ancient, historic, eternal, so common it doesn’t startle anyone but foreigners and artists.
And so, Narciso’s mother found herself obliged to take in this little mosquito Soledad, since she had just run off “the girl” for pilfering cookies.
—Well, you certainly don’t look like you would eat too much, you’re all bones. And so, niña, tell me, what do you know how to do?
—I’m good at braiding hair. I can count, add, subtract, and divide; this I learned from braiding and unbraiding the fringe of a rebozo. And everyone says I’m excellent at picking head lice. I can peel potatoes and cut them into little squares. I helped my aunty with the children and with hanging the wash. I mop and sweep, and I know to scrub the patio with a bucket of suds and the broom. I make beds. I empty chamber pots. I can clean and trim the lamps. I was also taught to iron and to mend. I wash dishes and fetch water, and can run errands by myself. And I can write and read, but only if the words are small words. I know a little bit of simple embroidery, my basic Catechism, and all of a poem called “Green, White, and Red,” which I recited once at an assembly when the governor came to our town. Well, I know just enough of everything.
—But not enough of anything.
—Just enough, but not too much.
—Ask her if she can sing.
—You keep out of this. Pay no attention to my husband. He thinks only of wasting his time on the piano while I slave away. That’s how all los Reyes are. They live in the clouds. Always dreaming away their lives while the rest of us toil like burros.
It must be remembered that Soledad was a Reyes too, although of that backward, Indian variety that reminded Regina too much of her own humble roots,* a peasant Reyes from the country filled with witchcraft and superstition, still praying to the old gods along with the new, still stinking of copal and firewood. All the same, Regina
took pity on her.
—Pobrecita, you can have the girl’s room off the kitchen. And pull your weight by helping to keep the house in order. And doing occasional errands. And cleaning, it’s nothing really, just me and my husband. And Narciso. When he’s home from military school, which is hardly ever. Now, let me show you around. You’re to change the linen weekly. And remember to air the pillows and blankets on the balcony thoroughly, make sure they’re properly sunned. And if I find any dust under the bed …
—And when do you expect your other children to arrive, Señora Regina?
—My other children? I have no children other than Narciso.
Even with all those empty bedrooms, Soledad found herself without a real room of her own. She was given a cot in the pantry off the kitchen, behind a metal door with frosted glass divided into six panes, but only four of them were intact, and one of these was cracked. The door itself, once white, had yellowed to the color of Mexican sour cream, except along the edges where it was rusted. Because the house had shifted, the door couldn’t be shut entirely without scraping against the tile, but at the slightest grating sound Señora Regina would begin to howl that she was suffering one of her migraines. That was why Soledad was always careful to lift the door a little when opening or shutting it, though after a while she found it easier just to leave it open.
I remember the apartment had a big, dark salon with dusty striped drapes very much in fashion then, called the castillo style, and a dining room with a red-tiled floor that had to be mopped every day because la Señora Regina liked the tiles to shine, but it didn’t matter if you mopped them six times or sixty-six, as soon as they dried, they still looked dirty. And the kitchen! Big enough to dance in. The oven alone had six hornillas for coal! One of those old-fashioned types that had to be lit with an ocote stick bought from a street peddler.
Compared to Soledad’s, Narciso’s family lived in splendor. They preferred to think of themselves as one of las familias buenas whose coat of arms had once adorned the doors of these colonial buildings. After all, Señor Eleuterio was from Seville, as the family liked to remind anyone and everyone. But if the truth must be mentioned, though it seldom was—who would want to mention it?—los Reyes were far from wealthy, and just as far from real poverty. Although the Reyes accommodations were spacious, they paid rent and did not own the rooms they called home.
Señor Eleuterio Reyes was simply a piano player, who made his living as a music teacher at an elementary school—I once played for the president of the republic!—his wages no better than those of an unskilled laborer. But Regina was a clever woman.
—Let’s just say I have my little commerce. Friends brought her used items to sell, and on weekends she had a stand in el Baratillo market, though she did not like to talk about this. But it was Regina’s “little commerce” that enabled them to keep the apartment and keep the appearance that they were gente adinerada, especially during the harsh years to come when no one could afford to be proud.
The worst thing about living with Narciso’s family wasn’t the bones buried in the walls, or the too-many bedrooms, or the floor that never looked clean, or the room off the kitchen without any privacy, no. The worst thing was Señora Regina’s kindness.
Regina was so pleasant it was terrible. —Well, Soledad, how lovely that dress fits you. It suits you. Like if it was made for you, really. Too bad you need a haircut. But otherwise you look perfect, I swear to you. You and the girl before you must be the same size. No, of course she won’t be coming back for it. Because she’s too fat now. She called herself señorita, but who knows. Think nothing of it. You’re welcome. There is no need to. Thanks to la Virgen we’re rid of that lice-ridden, backward girl. Pobrecita. Poor thing.
The clothes, the gifts of things la Señora Regina didn’t want anymore made Soledad feel worse for having to accept and wear them. —Now, Soledad, you’ll see. There’s no need to thank me. You can’t help it if you were raised wiping your ass with corn shucks and wandering about without shoes. A girl of your category is unaccustomed to any other way of life. How lucky you must feel now, living here like a queen.
Of course, sadness always arrives in greater doses after dark. Can crying help one get past a grief? A little perhaps. But not for always. After crying the room was still there with the clubfoot door, the six panes with two missing glass, the crack in one shaped like a question mark. Everything as it ever was, ever had been, and ever would be. Now and forever-more. Amen.
* Because a life contains a multitude of stories and not a single strand explains precisely the who of who one is, we have to examine the complicated loops that allowed Regina to become la Señora Reyes.
Regina liked to think that by marrying Eleuterio Reyes she had purified her family blood, become Spanish, so to speak. In all honesty, her family was as dark as cajeta and as humble as a tortilla of nixtamal. Her father made his living as a mecapalero, a man whose job it is to be a beast of burden, an ambulatory porter carrying on his back objects ten times his weight—chifforobes, barrels, other human beings. Today their equivalent are the bicycle taxi-rickshaws of the Zócalo, inhumane and degrading, but, it may be argued, an honest labor, and practical in this polluted and overcrowded age. Back in Señora Regina’s times, however, it was sometimes necessary in the season of rain to hire someone like her father who strapped a chair on his back and for a small fee carried you across the flooded streets of the capital as safely as Saint Christopher transporting the infant Jesus across the raging stream. Regina should not have looked down too excessively on her neighbors, after all, since she had only risen in social standing by riding on the back of her husband, the Spaniard, in much the same way that her father’s customers had crossed to safe ground by riding on his.
Pobrecita Señora Regina. She had not married for love. Once and long ago there had been a certain Santos Piedrasanta, a Judas-maker who killed himself for love of her. He made the papier-mâché Judas effigies burned on Sábado de Gloria, the Saturday before Easter, Judases to be strung up in the courtyard and exploded with fireworks into smoky bits of newsprint. During the rest of the year his business was piñatas—bulls, lyres, clowns, cowboys, radishes, roses, artichokes, watermelon slices—whatever you wanted, Santos Piedrasanta could make it. He was, in Señora Regina’s own words, “… muy atractivo, muy, muy, muy atractivo, pero mucho, ay, no sabes cuánto.”†
To tell the truth, she loved and still loved this Santos Piedrasanta. She had even lost a tooth once in an ugly beating, but if asked, she would say, —It’s that I fell from a eucalyptus tree when I was little. Only Narciso knew the truth. —Only you have heard this story, Narciso, only you.
How Regina had broken the Judas-maker’s heart when she ran off and married the Spaniard. How, for love of her, Santos had put a gun to his own head, how Regina had watched as he destroyed that unforgettable beauty. Then she would unlock her walnut-wood armoire, and there in a drawer, inside a lacquered olinalá box painted with two doves and a heart bound in a crown of thorns, there wrapped in cotton wool and a scrap of bottle-green velvet, a cheap black button, a keepsake from Santos Piedrasanta’s jacket.
And to see his mother chattering so animatedly, so stupidly, so childishly about a ghost who had once and long ago knocked out her tooth made Narciso realize how love makes a monkey of us all, and made him feel sorry for this woman, his mother, too young to be old, tethered to a memory and an aging husband who looked like the little brush used to scrub the pots.
When Regina first met her husband he was already old. She was just a fruit vendor at the San Juan market, sucking the sweet juice of a purple sugarcane stalk when he first laid eyes on her. —¿Qué va llevar, señor? What will you take, sir?—not realizing he would take her. Who knows how it was she fell under the spell of the piano player’s waltzes. I can’t pretend to invent what I don’t know, but suffice it to say she married this Eleuterio even though she didn’t love him all that much. He was like a big grizzled vulture, but so pale and hazel-eyed, Mexican
s considered him handsome because of his Spanish blood. She, on the other hand, thought herself homely because of her Indian features, but in reality she was like la India Bonita, that Indian girl, wife of the gardener, whose beauty brought Maximilian to his knees as if he was a gardener too and not the emperor of Mexico. In other words, Regina was like the papaya slices she sold with lemon and a dash of chile; you could not help but want to take a little taste.
† These words were actually Lola Alvarez Bravo’s, the great Mexican photographer, but I loved them so much I had to “borrow” them here.
25.
God Squeezes
And then, because I was an orphan, or, at least a half-orphan, that is, I lost my mother, which everyone knows is as good as being a full orphan since you have no one to advise you, especially if one’s father remarries. And so there I was, a good girl of good family, left just like the saying goes—sin madre, sin padre, sin perro que me ladre—after a typhoid epidemic swept through the town and left me motherless at an age when I still had trouble combing my own hair, and that’s why I went about despeinada, with my hair in terrible knots, so terrible it was impossible to comb and had to be cut off on the feast of Saint John the Baptist, which is the 24th of June, and on this day they wake you early to bathe you in the river before sunrise, and they cut your hair with a hatchet, and everyone with their rosaries and scapulars chanting, —San Juan, San Juan, atole con pan, —and the flowers for Saint John the Baptist Day are white-white like jasmine, but with a scent of vanilla, but what was I telling you?