Caramelo (14 page)

Poor Soledad. Her childhood without a childhood. She would never know what it was to have a father hold her again. There was no one to advise her, caress her, call her sweet names, soothe her, or save her. No one would touch her again with a mother’s love. No soft hair across her cheek, only the soft fringe of the unfinished shawl, and now Soledad’s fingers took to combing this, plaiting, unplaiting, plaiting, over and over, the language of the nervous hands. —Stop that, her stepmother would shout, but her hands never quit, even when she was sleeping.

She was thirty-three kilos of grief the day her father gave her away to his cousin in Mexico City. —It’s for your own good, her father said. —You should be grateful. Of this his new wife had him convinced.

—Don’t cry, Soledad. Your father is only thinking of your future. In the capital you’ll have more opportunities, an education, a chance to meet a better category of people, you’ll see.

So this part of the story if it were a
fotonovela
or
telenovela
could be called
Solamente Soledad
or
Sola en el mundo
,
or
I’m Not to Blame
,
or
What an
Historia
I’ve Lived
.

The unfinished
caramelo rebozo
, two dresses, and a pair of crooked shoes. This was what she was given when her father said, —Good-bye and may the Lord take care of you, and let her go to his cousin Fina’s in the capital.

Soledad would remember her father’s words.
Just enough, but not too much
. And though they were instructions on how to dye the black
rebozos
black, who would’ve guessed they would instruct her on how to live her life.

^*
The doomed empress Charlotte was the daughter of King Leopold of Belgium and wife to the well-meaning but foolish Austrian, the Archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg. Emperor Maximiliano and Empress Carlota were installed as rulers of Mexico in 1864 by disgruntled Mexican conservatives and clergy who believed foreign intervention would stabilize Mexico after the disastrous years of Santa Anna, who, as we recall, gave away half of Mexico to the United States. The puppet monarchs ruled for a few years, convinced that the Mexican people wanted them as their rulers—until the natives grew restless and France withdrew its troops
.
   
Carlota left for Europe to seek Napoleon III’s assistance, since he had promised to support them, but France had enough problems. He refused to see her. Abandoned and delirious, Carlota suffered a mental collapse and began to suspect everyone of trying to poison her. In desperation, she tried to enlist the aid of Pope Pius IX, and is the only woman “on record” to have spent the night at the Vatican, refusing to leave because she insisted it was the only safe refuge from Napoleon’s assassins
.
   
Meanwhile, back in Mexico, Maximiliano was executed by firing squad outside of Querétaro in 1866. Carlota was finally persuaded to return to her family in Belgium, where she lived exiled in a moated castle until her death in 1927 at the age of eighty-six
.
   
I forgot to mention, Maximiliano was ousted by none other than Benito Juárez, the only pure-blooded Indian to rule Mexico. For a Hollywood version of the aforementioned, see
Juarez,
John Huston’s 1939 film with the inestimable Bette Davis playing—who else—the madwoman
.

^†
The
rebozo
was born in Mexico, but like all
mestizos,
it came from everywhere. It evolved from the cloths Indian women used to carry their babies, borrowed its knotted fringe from Spanish shawls, and was influenced by the silk embroideries from the imperial court of China exported to Manila, then Acapulco, via the Spanish galleons. During the colonial period, mestizo women were prohibited by statutes dictated by the Spanish Crown to dress like Indians, and since they had no means to buy clothing like the Spaniards’, they began to weave cloth on the indigenous looms creating a long and narrow shawl that slowly was shaped by foreign influences. The quintessential Mexican
rebozo
is the
rebozo de bolita,
whose spotted design imitates a snakeskin, an animal venerated by the Indians in pre-Columbian times
.

22.

Sin Madre, Sin Padre, Sin Perro Que Me Ladre

      A
unty Fina lived in a building that would appear lovely only after demolition, surviving in a nostalgic hand-colored photograph by Manuel Ramos Sánchez, the Mexican Atget. In rosy pastels it seemed to rise like a dream of a more charming time …

It was never rosy, and it certainly wasn’t charming. It was smelly, dank, noisy, hot, and filled with vermin
.

Who’s telling this story, you or me?

You
.

Well, then.

Go on, go on
.

It had withstood several centuries of epidemics, fires, earthquakes, floods, and families, with each age dividing its former elegance into tiny apartments crowded with ever-increasing inhabitants. No one is still alive who remembers where this building stood exactly, but let’s assume it was on the Street of the Lost Child, since that would suit our story to perfection.

Nonsense! It wasn’t like that at all. It was like this. At the back of a narrow courtyard, up a flight of stairs, in the fourth doorway of a wide hallway Aunty Fina and her children lived. To get there you first had to cross the open courtyard and pass under several archways …

 … that gave the building a bit of a Moorish feeling?

That gave the building a bit of a dreary feeling
.

Although the walls were damp and rust-stained, the courtyard was
made cheerful with several potted bougainvillea plants, rubber trees, camellias, and caged canaries.

How you exaggerate! Where you get these ridiculous ideas from is beyond me
.

Lined up along the walls were large clay water urns filled daily by the walking water carriers. And abandoned in front of a doorway or on the stairwell—that Mexican obsession, the pail and mop. The roof housed a skinny half-breed watchdog named el Lobo, several chickens, a rooster, and rows of clotheslines fluttering with bright laundry. Here on the roof, in that holy hour between light and dark, just as the stars blinked open, it was possible to find a little respite from the chaos of the world below, and here it was most often possible to find Soledad Reyes examining the horizon of the city.

Exactly! In that era, the capital was like the natives themselves
,
chaparrita
,
short and squat and hugging the earth
.

Only the volcanoes and church towers rose above the low roofs like the old temples in the time of the many gods. There were no skyscrapers, and the tallest buildings did not exceed eight stories.

If you wanted to kill yourself you had to find a church
.

In much the same way that victims had been sacrificed at the summit of a temple pyramid, they now sacrificed themselves by leaping from temple bell towers. At the time of Soledad’s arrival, so many women had sought out churches for this express purpose that a proclamation was signed by all the bishops in the land and an edict issued that absolutely prohibited anyone from taking their life on church property. As a result, access to bell towers was strictly prohibited, except for bell ringers, masons, and priests, but even these had to be closely watched for signs of excessive sighing and dramatic outbursts. But let us take a look at this Soledad.

It’s about time!

If this were a movie from Mexico’s Golden Age of cinema, it would be black-and-white and no doubt a musical.

Like
Nosotros, los pobres
.

A perfect opportunity for humor, song, and, curiously enough, cheer.

—
L
et children be children, Aunty Fina says from behind a huge mountain of ironing. Aunty Fina is a huge mountain too. She
has the face of a Mexican geisha, tiny feet and tiny hands, and everything she does she does slowly and with grace, as if she were underwater. —Let children be children, she says, the thin, high brows of her pretty geisha face rising even higher. She remembers her own childhood, and her heart becomes wide for these
pobres criaturas
she has brought into this world. This is why her children are allowed to do what they desire, and why she has room in her home and heart to take in Soledad.

One of her
pobres criaturas
is wearing nothing but a soiled sock, one is under the table breaking eggs with a hammer, one is lapping water from the dog’s water bowl, one, old enough to chew, is demanding and receiving
teta
, and all whimpering, whining, squealing, squalling like a litter of wild things. Aunty Fina doesn’t seem to notice or doesn’t mind.

—Hey hey lady.

—That’s not a lady! That’s your cousin Soledad.

—Hey, hey, you. What’s your favorite color?

—Red.

—Red! That’s the Devil’s favorite color.

This strikes them as terribly funny. A girl drinking a mug of milk spits it up from her nose and starts them on another fit of grunts. They all look the same to Soledad, these cousins, big heads, little pointy blue teeth, hair as raggedy as if they’d chewed it off themselves. At first they stand close to the wall and stare without speaking, but once they get over their shyness, they poke and pinch and spit like children raised by wolves. Soledad doesn’t want to be poked at with a finger that’s been who knows where.

—Go play, go on.

But they don’t want to leave her.

—Hey, hey, Soledad.

—Don’t you know you’re supposed to call me “aunty” before saying my name? I’m older than you.

—Hey, you, aunty. Why is it you’re so ugly?

Aunty Fina has so many children, she doesn’t know how many she has. Soledad counts twelve, but they all have the same fat face, the same rosary bead eyes; it’s difficult to tell them apart.

—But how many children do you have in all, Aunty Fina?

—Sixteen or nineteen or eighteen, I think.
Sólo Dios sabe
. Only God knows for certain.

—But how is it you don’t know?

—Because some were dead before they were born. And some were born
angelitos
. And some were never born. And some disappear until we forget about them as if they
are
dead. One, a boy with hair like a hurricane, sent us a postcard once from Havana, and another time, a little ship made of coral and seashells that I still have somewhere, but that was years ago. The others?
Sólo Dios
. Only God.

This is the way Aunty Fina explains it, though later Soledad will hear about the baby who died from swallowing the poison set out for the rats, the one whose head was sliced at the neck when he fell off the back of a tram, the one who had a child of her own and was sent no one knows where, the one run off for doing pig things with the baby sisters. And so it goes. But who can blame Aunty Fina. Stories like these are not for a mother to be telling.

At Aunty Fina’s there is a fury of smells doing battle with each other. In the beginning Soledad takes to breathing through her mouth, but after a while she gets used to the stinging cloud of laundry boiling in tubs of lye, the scorched-potato-skin scent of starched cloth steamed taut under the iron, the sour circles of cottage cheese stains on the shoulder from burping babies, the foggy seaside tang of urine, the bile of chamber pots.

Every day there is a never-ending hill of laundry to wash and iron, because Aunty Fina is a laundress. This is her penance for marrying for love. Her husband is a
morenito
with a moonlike face as smooth as a baby’s butt and a long Mayan nose with a little drop of meat at the tip like rain. —It’s that he’s an
artista
, my Pío, Aunty Fina says proudly, as Pío shuffles through the kitchen in his underwear and slippers. Pío plays the guitar and sings romantic ballads with a traveling show; his art calls him often to the road. On her dresser altar Aunty Fina has a sepia postcard of this Pío wearing an embroidered
charro
outfit studded with silver and an enormous
sombrero
cocked at an angle that shadows an eye, the striped cord of his hat just under his pouting lower lip, a cigarette between the V of a thick hand sporting a gold lady’s ring on the pinky finger. In a handwriting that looks like
The Arabian Nights
, Pío has personally dedicated the postcard “To the enchantress Anselma—affectionately, Pío.” But Aunty Fina’s name is Josefina.

It’s during the time just before the revolution. Mexico City is known as the City of the Palaces, the Paris of the New World with its paved streets and leafy boulevards, its arabesque of balconies and streetlamps
and trams and parks with striped balloons and fluttering flags and a military band in uniform playing a waltz beneath a curlicue pavilion.

Ah, I remember! Music from my time! “The Poetic Waltz,” “Dreamer Waltz,” “Love Waltz,” “Caprice Waltz,” “Melancholy Waltz,” “Doubt,” “Sad Gardens,” “To Die for Your Love,” “The Waltz Without a Name.”

But what does Soledad know of all this? Her world ends and begins at Aunty Fina’s. The only song her heart knows is …

“I Am So Alone.”

There was the mailman with his mailman’s whistle, shrill, filled with hope. Perhaps. That little leap the heart made when the whistle sounded. Perhaps. But there was never a letter for her. Not a note her father could have written himself, but at least something the scribe in the town square would’ve written for him.
My beloved daughter— Receive these salutations and kisses from your father. Hoping this letter finds you well and in good health. If God wills it, we will see each other soon. We are doing miraculously well and are ready to have you come back home to us immediately …
But there was no such letter. At times she would say, I am sad. Is my father perhaps sad and thinking of me at this moment too? Or, I am hungry and cold. Perhaps my father is hungry and cold at this very moment.
^*
So that her own body by extension reminded her of that other body, that other home, that root, that being whom she could not help but think of whenever her body tugged her for attention.