How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (25 page)

Papito took her in, poor skinny little thing, and I guess Mamita taught her to cook and iron and clean. Chucha was like a nun who had joined the convent of the de la Torre clan. She never married or went anywhere even on her days off.

Instead, she'd close herself up in her room and pray for any de la Torre souls stuck up in purgatory.

Anyhow, that last day on the Island, we were in our side-by-side bedrooms, the four girls, setting out our clothes for going to the United States. The two creepy spies had left, and Mami and Tio Vie were in the bedroom. They were telling Papi, who Four

Girls

was hidden in this secret closet, about how we would all be leaving in Tio Vic's limo for the airport for a flight he was going to get us. I know, I know, it sounds like something you saw on "Miami Vice," but all I'm doing is repeating what I've heard from the family.

But here's what I do remember of

my

last day on the Island. Chucha came into our bedrooms with this bundle in her hands, and Nivea, who was helping us pack, said to her in a gruff voice, "What do you want, old woman?" None of the maids liked Chucha because they all thought she was kind of below them, being so black and Haitian and all. Chucha, though, just gave Nivea one of her spelling looks, and all of sudden, Nivea remembered that she had to iron our outfits for wearing on the airplane.

Chucha started to unravel her bundle, and we all guessed she was about to do a little farewell voodoo on us. Chucha always had a voodoo job going, some spell she was casting or spirit she was courting or enemy she was punishing. I mean, you'd open a closet door, and there, in the corner behind your shoes, would sit a jar of something wicked that you weren't supposed to touch. Or you'd find a candle burning in her room right in front of someone's picture and a little dish with a cigar on it and red and white crepe streamers on certain days crisscrossing her room.

Mami finally had to give her a room to herself because none of the other maids wanted to sleep with her. I can see why they were afraid. The maids said she got mounted by spirits. They said she cast spells on them.

And besides, she slept in her coffin. No kidding.

We were forbidden to go into her room to see it, but we were always sneaking back there

to take a peek. She had her mosquito net rigged up over it, so it didn't look that strange like a real uncovered coffin with a dead person inside.

At first, Mami wouldn't let her do it, sleep in her coffin, I mean. She told Chucha civilized people had to sleep on beds, coffins were for corpses. But Chucha said she wanted to prepare herself for dying and couldn't one of the carpenters at Papito's factory measure her and build her a wooden box that would serve as her bed for now and her coffin later. Mami kept saying, Nonsense, Chucha, don't get tragic.

The thing was, you couldn't stand in Chucha's way even if you were Mami. Soon there were jars in Mami's closet, and her picture from when she was a baby being held by Chucha was out on Chucha's altar with mints on a little tin dish, and a constant votary candle going. Inside of a week, Mami relented.

She said poor Chucha never asked for a blessed thing from the family, and had always been so loyal and good, and so, heavens to Betsy, if sleeping in her coffin would make the old woman happy, Mami would have a nice box built for her, and she did. It was plain pine, like Chucha wanted it, but inside, Mami had it lined in purple cushiony fabric, which was Chucha's favorite color, and bordered with white eyelet.

So here's the part I remember about that last day.

Once Nivea left the room, Chucha stood us all up in front of her. "Chachas-was she always called us that, from

muchachas,

girls, which is how come we had ended up nicknaming her a play echo of her name for us, Chucha.

"You are going to a strange land." Something like that, I mean, I don't remember the exact words. But I do remember the piercing look she gave me as if she were actually going inside my head. "When I was a girl, I left my country too and never went back. Never saw father or mother or sisters or brothers. I brought only this along." She held the bundle up and finished unwrapping it from its white sheet. It was a statue carved out of wood like the kind I saw years later in the anthro textbooks I used to pore over, as if staring at those little talismanic wooden carvings would somehow be my madeleine, bringing back my past to me like they say tasting that cookie did for Proust. But the textbook gods never triggered any four-volume memory in my head. Just this little moment I'm recalling here.

Chucha stood this brown figure up on Cork's vanity. He had a grimacing expression on his face, deep grooves by his eyes and his nose and lips, as if he were trying to go but was real constipated.

On top of his head was a little platform, and on it, Chucha placed a small cup of water. Soon, on account of the heat, I guess, that water started evaporating and drops ran down the grooves carved in that wooden face so that the statue looked as if it were crying. Chucha held each of our heads in her hands and wailed a prayer'over us. We were used to some of this strange stuff from daily contact with her, but maybe it was because today we could feel an ending in the air, anyhow, we all started to cry as if Chucha had finally released her own tears in each of us.

They are gone, left in cars that came for them, driven by pale Americans in white uniforms with gold braids on their shoulders and on their caps.

Too pale to be the living. The color of zombies, a nation of zombies. I worry about them, the girls, Dona Laura, moving among men the color of the living dead.

The girls all cried, especially the little one, clutching onto

my skirts, Dona Laura weeping so

hard into her handkerchief that I insisted on going back to her bureau and getting her a fresh one. I did not want her to enter her new country with a spent handkerchief because I know, I know what tears await her there. But let her be spared the knowledge that will come in time.

That one's nerves have never been strong.

They have left-and only the silence remains, the deep and empty silence in which I can hear the voices of my

santos

settling into the rooms, of my

loa

telling me stories of what is to come.

After the girls and Dona Laura left with the American zombie whites, I heard a door click in the master bedroom, and I went out to the corridor to check for intruders. All in black, I saw the

loa

of Don Carlos putting his finger to his lips in mockery of the last gesture I had seen him make to me that morning. I answered with a sign and fell to my knees and watched him leave through the back door out through the guava orchard. Soon afterwards, I heard a car start up. And then the deep and empty silence of the deserted house.

I am to close up the house, and help over at Dona Carmen's until they go too, and then at Don Arturo's, who also is to go. Mostly, I am to tend to this house. Dust, give the rooms an airing. The others except for Chino have been dismissed, and I have been entrusted with the keys. From time to time, Don Victor, when he can get away from his young girls, will stop by to see to things and give me my monthly wages.

Now I hear the voices telling me how the grass will grow tall on the unkempt lawns; how Dona Laura's hanging orchids will burst their wire baskets, their frail blossoms eaten by bugs;

how the birdcages will stand empty, the poor having poached the

tortolas

and

guineas

that Don Carlos took so much trouble' to raise,-

how the swimming pools will fill with trash and leaves and dead things. Chino and I will be left behind in these decaying houses until that day I can see now-when I shut my eyes-that day the place will be overrun by

guardias,

smashing windows and carting off the silver and plates, the pictures and the mirror with the winged babies shooting arrows, and the chairs with medallions painted on back, the box that makes music, and the magic one that gives pictures. They will strip the girls'

shelves of the toys their grandmother brought them back from that place they were always telling me about with the talcum powder flowers falling out of the clouds and the buildings that touch Damballah's sky, a bewitched and unsafe place where they must now make their lives.

I have said prayers to all the

santos,

to the

loa,

and to the Gran Poder de Dios, visiting each room, swinging the can of cleaning smoke, driving away the bad spirits that filled the house this day, and fixing in my head the different objects and where they belong so that if any workman sneaks in and steals something I will know what is gone. In the girls' rooms I remember each one as a certain heaviness, now in my heart, now in my shoulders, now in my head or feet; I feel their losses pile up like dirt thrown on a box after it has been lowered into the earth.

I see their future, the troublesome life ahead.

They will be haunted by what they do and don't remember. But they have spirit in them. They will invent what they need to survive.

They have left, and the house is closed and the air is blessed. I lock the back door and pass the maid's room, where I see

Imaculada and Nivea and Milagros packing to leave at dawn. They do not need my goodbyes. I go in my own room, the one Dona Laura had special made for me so I could be with my san-tos

at peace and not have to bear the insolence and annoyance of young girls with no faith in the spirits. I clean the air with incense and light the six candles-one for each of the girls, and one for Dona Laura, whose diapers I changed, and one for Don Carlos. And then, I do what I always do after a hard day, I wash my face and arms in

agua florida.

I throw out the water, saying the prayer to the loa

of the night who watch with bright eyes from the darkened sky. I part the mosquito netting and climb into my box, arranging myself so that I am facing up, my hands folded on my waist.

Before sleep, for a few minutes, I try to accustom my flesh to the burial that is coming. I reach up for the lid and I pull it down, closing myself in. In that hot and tight darkness before I lift the lid back up for air, I shut my eyes and lie so still that the blood I hear pounding and the heart I hear knocking could be something that I have forgotten to turn off in the deserted house.

The Human Body

AVA

Yoyo

B

ack then, we all lived side by side in adjoining houses on a piece of property which belonged to my grandparents. Every kid in the family was paired up with a best-friend cousin. My older sister, Carla, and my cousin Lucinda, the two oldest cousins, had a giggly, gossipy girlfrship that made everyone else feel left put. Sandi had Gisela, whose pretty ballerina name we all envied. Baby sister Fifi and my sweet-natured cousin Carmencita were everyone's favorites, a helpful little pair, good for errands, turning jump ropes, and being captured when the large communal yard we played in was transformed into the old West by cowboy Mundin and cowgirl me. We were the only boy-girl pair, and as we grew older, Mami and Mundfn's mother, Tfa Carmen, encouraged a separation between us.

But that was hard to effect. In our family compound, there was no keeping anyone from anyone else. When one cousin caught the measles or mumps, we were all quarantined together so as to get that childhood illness over and done with.

We lived in each other's houses, staying for meals at whatever table we were closest to when dinner was put out, heading home only to take our baths and go to bed (or to get punished, like the time the report reached our mothers' ears that Yoyo and Mundin had shattered Tia Mimi's crystal-ball garden decoration with their slingshots. "That's a lie," we defended ourselves.

"We broke it with the rake, trying to knock down some guavas!" Or the time that Yoyo and Mundin had used Lucinda's and Carla's nail polish to paint blood on their wounds. Or that time Yoyo and Mundin tied up Fifi and tiny Carmencita to the water tower near the back of the property and forgot them there).

Beyond that tower, through a guava orchard Tia Mimi had planted, lived my grandparents, in a great big house we went to for Sunday dinners whenever they were home. Mostly, they were far away in New York City, where my grandfather had some position in the United Nations. A kindly, educated old man with a big white Panama hat who worried mostly about his digestion, my grandfather entertained no political ambitions. But the tyrant who had seized power was jealous of anyone with education and money, and so Papito was often sent out of the country on a bogus diplomatic post. When Papito returned home, the property would be overrun by the guardia

in "routine searches for your own protection." Always after those searches, the family would miss silverware, cigarettes, small change, cuff links, and earrings left lying about. "Better that than our lives," my grandfather would console my grandmother, who wanted to leave the country again immediately.

But what did we kids know of all that back in those days? The height of violence for us was on the weekly television Western imported from Hollywood and dubbed clumsily in Spanish.

Rin Tin Tin barked in sync, but the cowboys kept talking long after their mouths were closed. When the gun reports sounded, the villains already lay in a puddle of blood. Mundin and I craned our necks forward, wanting to make sure that the bad guys were really dead. As for the violence around us, the guards' periodic raids, the uncles whose faces no longer appeared at the yearly holiday gatherings, we believed the slogan at station identification-"God and Trujillo are taking care of you."

When the UN. post was first conferred on him, my grandfather balked: he wanted no part of the corrupt regime. But, my grandmother's tyrannical constitution brought its own kind of pressure to bear on him; as she grew older, she was always ill: aches, migraines, moodiness that only expensive specialists in the States would know how to cure. The illnesses-so the underground family gossip went-were caused by the fact that Mamita had been a very beautiful young woman, and she had never fully recovered from losing her looks. My grandfather, whom everyone called a saint, pampered her in everything and tolerated her willfulness, so that the saying among the family was that Papito was so good, "he pees holy water." Mamita, furious at hearing her husband canonized at her expense, took her revenge. She brought home a large jar of holy water from the cathedral. One Sunday during the weekly family dinner, my mother caught her preparing my grandfather's whiskey-and-water with holy water from the jar. "Damn it!" my grandmother gloated. "You all say he pees holy water, well he's been peeing it all right!"