“Like a steer,” José added. It pained him to think of it. “Do they cut the thing off or—how do they do it?”
Sergio slapped José on the arm and almost fell off his chair shaking with laughter. José smiled so as not to spoil the caretaker’s fun, but the truth was that he took no pleasure thinking on the suffering of another man.
Surely that was why the lady had come to the mountains alone this summer: to recover from the grief of a husband missing a vital part. But then, why had she let him do it? According to María, the husband was already fixed up by the time the doña met him. Then why marry him? José had wondered. But the lady had not explained this to María although it seemed she had shared most of her private business as if María were a friend, not a servant.
For days afterwards, José could not get the castrated husband out of his head. He had not spoken about the matter to Xiomara, afraid of its effect on the son in her belly—and he knew it would be a son by the way she carried him low in the cradle of her hips unlike the high-riding girls. Rather a dwarf boy with everything intact than a normal-looking one with his manhood missing. He tried to put the matter out of his own mind because it offended him to think of a man coming to this eventuality.
But when the lady wandered into the yard one night, looking for company, the maimed husband was the first thing that came to José’s mind. She asked him to please sit down and continue his supper, and then, though she said she would be getting on, she herself sat down on the stone bench and began to question him. What was that smell in the air? It seemed to be coming from that bush over there. Did he know what it was called?
In the backyard floodlights that Sergio had instructed him to keep on all night, José made out the small, twining bush. “We just call it the bush with the strong scent at night, doña,” he told her, because the other name for it was not something one could say to a woman of her class.
“Doña!” She wagged her finger playfully at him. “Now, José, I’ve asked you all not to call me that. Why can’t you just call me Yolanda?”
He kept quiet, not knowing what to say. She had corrected him several times, but her bare name did not seem respectful enough. Finally, he recalled what Sergio always said when the lady made her unusual request. “You’re the one who knows—”
“If one more person tells me I’m the one who knows, I’m going to scream!” she threatened, fisting her hands. The silver bangles on her arms clanged prettily like coins in a pocket. For a moment he worried that the lady would become hysterical, but her face seemed only to be pretending to anger like the faces in the old people’s television. Then, as suddenly as she had scowled at him, she flashed him a bright smile. Maybe she was a little touched—these quick shifts of emotion. “Say after me, Yolanda,” she requested.
“Yolanda,” he said in his small voice.
“Louder,” she ordered. Each time he said it a little louder—for it was not his habit to allow his voice to go much louder—she laughed as if it were a trick he were delighting her by performing. José found himself enjoying making the lady laugh as if he were giving her pleasure even if it was of a different kind from the pleasure he had given Doña Teolinda years back. But then again he could not recall Doña Teolinda ever asking him to call her by her Christian name as this little lady had.
Nightly now she came outside and visited with him, talking for hours, asking him what he thought of this and that. It seemed suddenly that one could have an opinion about everything and anything on God’s green earth and even outside it. When he looked at the stars, did he see shapes or did he just see stars? Did he believe in God and who did he think God was, anyhow? What would he do if he had a million dollars? Did he believe, and tell the truth now, that men and women were equal? Did he think that what the country needed was a democracy—and painstakingly she explained what that was—or some version of socialism like they had over in Cuba? She had to explain that as well.
In the mornings, as he rode the mule up the mountain, his head spun with the many things that he had worked over the night before. It was like a drug, this thinking, affecting you in ways that made you not yourself. Or maybe this was who he really was, he pondered. At the door of the hut, Xiomara greeted him, each day looking bigger than she had ever looked. Or maybe now that he was so used to looking upon the little woman, it was his pregnant wife who seemed distorted.
“How is she treating you?” Xiomara asked him one morning.
“She is making me feel like a man,” he replied, without thinking. But as soon as he had spoken, he saw splayed on her features that flash of woman’s jealousy. “Ay, coño, not that, mujer,” he scowled in disbelief. “She asks for my opinion and we discuss things.”
But over the next few days as he prepared to go down the mountain for the night, he was aware that he was taking special care to dress in a clean shirt, to run his damp fingers through his hair and tamp it down, to polish his one pair of shoes and then, upon arriving at the gate, to dismount the mule and put them on so that he would arrive fully dressed in case the lady was still outside, walking in the garden. Perhaps Xiomara’s jealousy was not so far off the mark. It was a kind of entering and knowing a woman, even if you were at the other end, inside her head instead of between her legs. And the truth was that he, José, knew more what the lady thought about any number of things than he knew what Xiomara thought about a handful of things—but then again, he and his mujer were not in the habit of wasting talk. Except in love making. Then, he would whisper the palabritas Xiomara liked to hear that would make her open to him. With this lady, all he had to say was her name, pure and simple, Yolanda, and she smiled warmly back at him.
But still it bothered him that her husband was castrated. She never brought it up, and observing her closely, he could not see that she was especially morose or that she clung to him with her eyes in that needy way of an unsatisfied woman. But she did pore over Elena’s girls and chase Sergio’s youngest boy around the yard with a water gun as if she were a child herself. That was how her hunger showed, José decided. She was starved for the child her husband could not give her.
One night after hearing her speak at length about Elena’s girls, he blurted out the question he had been meaning to ask her. She, who was so good with children, would she not want one of her own?
Instead of the usual smile of pleasure at being asked a question she could talk about, her face became serious. “Why?” she asked him, and before he could answer her, she went on, “Do you know of someone?”
He did not quite know what her meaning was. “Someone to . . . give you one?” he hesitated. What would Don Mundín say about one of his relations coming up to the mountains to go behind the palms with one of his workmen?
“Yes,” she nodded, “I’ve been wanting to adopt. But my husband, he’s not so sold on the idea. Still, I’m sure if I found a baby who needed a home, my husband would reconsider.”
José nodded, finally understanding. She wanted a child to raise, the way Xiomara was raising her dead brother’s boy, the way that Consuelo had taken in her daughter Ruth’s mistake. What a lucky child that would be, raised by this lady and her husband, living allá in the land of money with every convenience and nice clothes and a mind sharp and alert like this lady’s. Now José could see why the lady was here for the summer. “So, you have come to find a child.”
“No, no.” She was shaking her head, smiling again as if the cloud had passed that had made her face so long and sad. “I’m working on a new book, writing, you know.”
He nodded, though no, he did not know. But he did not want to tell her so. Just as having no children and a husband who could not pleasure her might be her shame, not knowing his letters was his.
“But if I found a child . . .” She closed her eyes and breathed in like a lady he had seen on television smelling her sheets. “A child who needs a home . . .”
He spoke before she had even finished, before he himself had thought through what he was promising. “I know of a child,”
he said in his quiet voice.
She reached out and touched his arm. “Ay, José, do you really?” She was looking at him with such naked need, as if she were no longer the mistress of the house, but a woman, like other women, wanting something from him.
“A man should be proud to please a woman like you,” he began, testing to see if she would say something about her need for a man that was not being satisfied. When she remained quiet, he understood that he had stumbled upon some border she was not ready to cross. “I mean no disrespect,” he added. And then to get her talking again, he asked about the work that she was doing. What was it exactly she was writing?
As if he had unstoppered a bottle, the words flowed out of her mouth. She was a writer of novels, stories, essays, and her favorite, poems. Did he know what they were? He shook his head no. Quickly, in one of those sudden shifts of mood, she stood up and recited something she called a poem she had known when she was a child. The same soft look was on her face as when she talked about Elena’s girls or Sergio’s two boys. “That is very pretty,” he agreed. He was surprised to see her suddenly look away with color in her cheeks as if it were she, not the poem, he had complimented.
They spoke a while longer about her work. But before turning in that night, she again brought up the other matter. “Let me know, José, about that child.”
“I will see what I can do,” he said, looking away. He did not want her to see the worry that had entered his head—he had promised her a child, but of course, he could not give away his son without first asking Xiomara.
José had never seen Xiomara as furious as she was the following morning when he made his suggestion.
“¡Azaroso! ¡Hijo de la gran puta! What do you think a child is, something you can buy and sell—” She threw the slop bucket at him and wouldn’t let him come in the hut, so that finally, in his exhaustion, he sent his oldest boy inside to get him the hammock to string up between the two samán trees by the river.
But even as he lay cooled by the breeze coming up from the river, he could not sleep. He was in a fix now for sure. His mujer had thrown a fit that would mark that child so that even if Xiomara could be convinced to give it up, the lady would not want it. And what a fool he was to even breathe the thought, if Xiomara could be convinced. Wasn’t it obvious how women were worse than a hen with her chicks! It went beyond reason, really, because if Xiomara sat down and thought about it—as these last few weeks of being asked so many questions had trained José to sit down and think about things—Xiomara would see that this was an opportunity that did not come in a lifetime to most people. Their child could be raised with all the privileges and comforts of los ricos. Their child could receive an education and help his poor padres and brothers and sisters.
But there was another part José could not explain to Xiomara. He, José, would like to give this lady the pleasure her husband had not been able to give her: replacing her barrenness by placing his own flesh and blood in the cradle of her arms.
Through the weave of the hammock he saw that a visitor had arrived. Xiomara came out, a hand at her forehead, and motioned the dwarf on his mule to where José still lay resting by the side of the river. Just watching the dwarf riding up on the path made José uneasy. What bad news was the town sending up to him now?
But it was a message from the lady. “She says to forget what she spoke to you about. She says the whole thing is off.” He shrugged as if to say—before he could be cuffed—that he did not know what the lady meant by such a remark.
José sat up. He was released from his predicament, but instead of relief, he felt a great disappointment. Already he had seen his boy driving a big car up the mountains to the farm he had purchased for his brothers and sisters.
“She sent you for this?” José asked the boy, who threw out his undersized chest proudly. His head was far too big for his narrow shoulders. But gazing upon him, José did not feel his usual disgust. His own son might turn out like this. He might as well accustom himself to looking upon a disproportioned thing.
“Pepito,” he said after the boy had told him his name, “Pepito, let me ask you this. What would you do if you had a million dollars?”
The boy seemed stumped by the question. He sat on his mule, scratching his head and looking around him as if for a clue. But José did not have to think long what he would do with money like that. Lying here, gazing at the green rows of yucca plants, he had felt the hopelessness of his situation: he and Xiomara and his brood of children had nowhere to go once they left this land his father and his grandfather before him had farmed. Already he pictured the moving mountains of water released by the dam. By next year, this field he was standing on would be underwater. And the boy in Xiomara’s womb would know nothing of this loss but turn his little head and smile at the sound of his mother’s voice—whoever she was.
That evening when he arrived, the lady did not come out to greet him as she usually did. José watched and waited, curious as to what had caused the lady’s sudden change of heart that could not wait until that night for their talk. When Sergio stopped in the yard for a cigarillo on his way home, José mentioned he had not seen the lady stirring in the garden.
“The doña is not herself tonight,” Sergio agreed. “She was calling the husband this afternoon.” Sergio had the full story from Miguel, the operator at the Codetel office. There had been a fight on the phone. The lady was raising her voice and crying. “Maybe the husband is getting sick and tired of this separation,” Sergio suggested. “But you know how women are when you cross them.”
“Yes,” José agreed. After the dwarf had left, he had gone back to the hut and mentioned to Xiomara that the lady had sent word she did not want a child, after all. But this only made Xiomara angrier. What did he and this lady think? That money could buy the only thing the poor could have for free, their own children?
Later when Sergio and the others had left, José circled the house, craning his neck at the windows, hoping for a glimpse of the lady. Up in the tower room he could see a light was still burning. Finally, when it looked as if she would not be down at all, he entered the house and climbed the stairs, calling, “Doña,” to formalize his coming into the living quarters without permission.
She stood at the top of the narrow stairs, looking down at him on the landing. “¿Qué hay, José?” she asked just as she had asked him the first day. But tonight she seemed a much older lady, tired and sad. “Did you get my message?”
José nodded. “There was no hurry.”
“I just didn’t want you to tell someone and then have me disappoint them.” There was a pencil still in her hand, and her hair was gathered back as if she were focused on an important task, and even a lock of curl falling on her face would be a distraction. It was the way Xiomara bound her hair before she gave birth or beat the husks off the rice. “I hope you didn’t go to any bother.”
“No bother, no,” he lied. For the next few days he would be sleeping in the hammock. Then Xiomara would begin to take him back. In a month, the lady would be gone, and by the end of the year the guardias would escort him off his land. Yes, there was a great deal of bother coming, he wanted to tell her. But what could she do about his flood of problemas? Already her husband had refused her own plans. She herself could not get what she wanted.
As he was turning to go down the stairs, the lady called him back. “Come up here a minute,” she said, pushing the pencil into the gathering of her hair. From the front, it seemed as if the implement had been driven through the back of her skull. “I want you to see what I do.”
The small tower room had large, open windows on all four sides. Had it been day, José could have looked out to the south to the plateau in the mountains where his own hut sat amid the plowed fields. The table set up under these windows was stacked with books, more than he had ever seen all at once. A lamp shone on the sheet of paper on which the lady had been writing.
“My books are all in English, or I’d give you one.”
He said it straight out, what he had been ashamed to admit to her: “I could not read them. I do not know my letters.”
She looked at him with a pained expression. It was the same expression he had noted on Xiomara’s face when he first told her that the lady did not have any children. “You mean, you can’t read?”
He bowed his head and caught sight of his worn red loafers. How could he have thought these shoes would make him feel like a big man?
“Sit down,” she said, pulling up a chair she had emptied of her papers. “We’re going to start with your name, José.”
Every night she brought him up to the tower room or came down to the garden with her pad of yellow paper. First, she wrote down all the letters, so that he began to recognize some of them on signs in the village or on the boxes and cans of the bodega. Then she spelled now one, now another word, and left these sheets of paper for him to study the rest of the night and the days following. But though he tried to brand these marks on his brain, he had not made much headway by the time she was ready to leave in the middle of August. He still could not read the notice that he had stowed away in the hut under one of the eaves. He could not make out the sign in front of the post office that announced—so he was told—the death of Guerrerro. And when he brought the doña a small handful of soil from his farm for her to take back with her to the States in remembrance of her country, he could not read the sheet of paper she handed him.
“It’s a poem I wrote you,” she explained. “It’s got my address on it. Write me when you can read it.”
After she left, he was tempted to take it down to the village letter-writer, Paquita, or to show it to the wise María, but he did not want to share these words that the lady had given him. Even unknown, they were his only. And so he stuffed the letter together with the notice under the eaves of his hut. When his little girl was born, he named her Yolanda, because that and his own were the only two names he had learned to write by heart.