Caramelo (27 page)

—You’re crazy!

—Júrame
. Swear, swear to me it’s only me you love, my life,
júrame
.

—Te lo juro
. I swear.

—Again!

—Only you, he said.
Sólo tú
.

Only you. This would satisfy her. For a little. There is a saying: Drunks and children tell the truth. One afternoon when the sky was sorrel-colored, as if the world was about to come to an abrupt end, the nosy child of the cleaning woman was visiting Soledad’s room and
touching everything he could get his hands on, including the photo of Narciso, which Soledad had placed on a bedside table.

—And who’s that?

—That’s my husband.

—No, I mean who’s the lady sitting next to him?

—What are you talking about? Here, give me that, you little snot! Don’t you know better than to touch things that aren’t yours?

Soledad shooed the child out of the room and took a closer look at the bottom of the photo. She took it out to the balcony and looked again. She looked and she looked, said nothing, tucked the photo in her pocket, put her shawl on, marched over to the plaza, waited on a wrought-iron bench in front of the kiosk till the jewelry shop opened, then asked the watchmaker if she might borrow his jeweler’s eyepiece. —Just for a second, I promise I won’t drop it, of course, what do you take me for, if you would be so kind, thank you please, please give me a little privacy if you would please!

What she saw next to her husband’s boot was this. A dark shadow of flowered calico. The hem of a skirt!
¡Virgen Purísima!
A long thin pin in her heart.

When she came to, there was a crowd of busybodies pressing around her screaming, —Give her water! Give her air! Put her feet up. Someone pull down her skirt! And there was mixed in as well the angry shouts of the watchmaker, who was more concerned about his jeweler’s glass than the welfare of Soledad.

But how can one live like that, with a pin in one’s heart? How? Tell me.

Soledad sought out the only person she could confide in, the
anciana
who sold
atole
and
tamales
on a wooden table outside the church. Inside, the priest was hearing confession and sending out the guilty with a long list of useless prayers as penance. But outside, the
tamal
vendor gave out only sound advice, which was so sensible as to be mistaken for foolishness.

—Help me, I’m suffering, Soledad said after explaining her story.

—Ah, poor little creature. What wife hasn’t had your troubles? It’s just jealousy. Believe me, it’s not going to kill you, though you’ll feel like you’re dying.

—But how much longer will I feel like this?

—It depends.

—On what?

—On how hard you love.

—Holy Mother of God!

S
oledad started to cry. People often mistake women’s tears for defeat, for weakness. Hers were not tears of surrender, but tears for the injustice of the world.

—There, there, my sweetness! That’s enough. Don’t even think terrible things. It’s not good for the child in your belly. He’ll remember later when he’s born and keep you up nights with his crying.

—It’s just that … So much … Soledad managed to hiccup, —So much misery in the world.

—Sí, tanta miseria
, but also so much humanity to make up for the cruelty.

—Enough, but not too much.

—Not too much, but just enough, the old woman said.

She sent Soledad home with
hierba buena
tea and instructions to drink a cup in the morning, a cup at night, and to bathe herself in it as often as she felt sad.

—Patience. Have a little faith in la Divina Providencia, why don’t you. The fearful are those who don’t trust God’s plans. There is, after all, one cure for jealousy, you do know that, right?

—And what would that be?

—Oh, it’s very easy. Fall in love again. Like they say, one nail drives out another.

—Yes, and the second bullet dulls the pain of the first. Thank you. I must be going.

When one is young and just beginning one’s marriage, how can one believe the wisdom of someone as dried up and ugly as a roasted
chile poblano
?

—God closes doors so that another may open, the woman shouted. —When you least expect it, love will arrive with its Gabriel’s trumpet. Then you’ll forget all this sorrow. You’ll see.
Ánimo, ánimo
.

But by now Soledad was scuttling across the cobbled churchyard toward the wings of filigreed gates, pushing her way past resilient beggars and insistent rosary vendors, beyond the hobbled bundles of humanity seated placidly on the cool stone steps still and solid as gray river stones, hurrying without pause past a chorus of chirping voices calling
out to her to take a taste of their cool drinks and hot meals, shoving through the throng of the faithful and faithless clumsily tumbling in front of her to complicate her route to her room.

Ánimo, ánimo
. Soledad saw nothing, no one in that rush to regain her solitude. She was lost in her own thoughts, which were not thoughts of
ánimo
at all but of its opposite. That ugly squashed hat—despair.

40.

I Ask la Virgen to Guide Me Because I Don’t Know What to Do

      L
ies, lies. Nothing but lies from beginning to end. I don’t know why I trusted you with my beautiful story. You’ve never been able to tell the truth to save your life. Never! I must’ve been out of my mind …

Grandmother! You’re the one who was after me to tell this story, remember? You don’t realize what a tangled mess you’ve given me. I’m doing the best I can with what little you’ve told me.

But do you have to lie?

They’re not lies, they’re healthy lies. So as to fill in the gaps. You’re just going to have to trust me. It will turn out pretty in the end, I promise. Now, please be quiet, or I’m going to lose my train of thought. So where were we? And then …

A
nd then, each time Narciso returned to Oaxaca, he found Soledad suffering from a sadness without a name. Which is why he dreaded returning and avoided her when he did. She had gained so much weight her face was puffy, her neck thick and pink, and her chin had doubled. She had changed from a woman to a fat child dressed in baggy dresses with white embroidered baby collars. She had also done something strange to her hair, cut her bangs across the forehead so she looked like an overgrown toddler.
Why did pregnant women do this?
he wondered.

This is how Narciso found his wife, weepy, bloated, and barefoot because she said her shoes no longer fit. Since her husband’s departure,
Soledad swore her feet had grown a size bigger. In private, she took to walking about barefoot, but this made her husband angry. —You look like an Indian, he’d scold. —Don’t insult me by being seen like that; as if I didn’t have money to buy my wife shoes.

—Are you hungry?

—No, I’m not hungry. Would you stop that!

—What?

How could he explain?

How could she? His body was her body now. She worried whether he was tired, was he hungry, did he need to sleep any more, a sweater to keep him warm. It was as if her body extended itself to encompass his, another body with all its needs. Because this is the way women love. How could she explain even if she knew herself?

But men love in a different way. They don’t understand. They don’t set out a glass of water for their lover when they themselves are thirsty. They don’t hold a spoon to the lover’s mouth, and say, —Taste! —so close you can’t see what’s in it. They don’t. Unless they fall in love with their own child, as is often the case. —Who loves you?

It seemed to Soledad her husband forgot she was there. He walked in front of her lately, as if she wasn’t with him. What would’ve made her mad before drove her to tears now. Didn’t a man know? Did he have any idea how important it is to hold a woman’s hand when walking down the street with her? Did he realize when holding a woman’s hand his body was saying, —World, this is my
querida
, the woman I love, I am proud to be walking beside her, my hand in hers the flag of our love.

If only he would whisper a
cariñito
in my ear
, she thought, a sugary sweet, a word made holy by his warm breath on her neck. A kind word made the skin shiver. Did he know this, her Narciso? She didn’t know to tell him. He didn’t know to ask.

The final nightmare was her body. Holy Mother of God! A body that didn’t look as if it belonged to her. She was a disaster of buttocks and hips, as wide and heavy as the stone goddess Coatlicue. When she looked at herself in the mirror, it gave her a little shudder.

How to begin? Soledad could not explain without overexplaining. Her spine hurt, her ribs hurt, she was tired all the time, she couldn’t go out without always constantly feeling as if she had to pee, and:

—Did I tell you about my problems sleeping? I can’t rest, I can’t rest.

She would moan all night and then have to get up in the middle of the
night and sit down to catch her breath. She tried sleeping on her side, because when she slept on her back she felt she was choking. She was so big she could not sleep. She was frightened of childbirth, she confessed to the housekeeper:

—It’s because I don’t know what to expect.

But the housekeeper who had given birth eighteen times said, —Believe me, it’s worse when you do.

Her husband said, —You’ll be all right once you have the baby. Everyone said motherhood was sacred, but all the everyones who said it were men. Soledad did not feel sacred. She felt more human than ever. She prayed the baby would hurry and be born so that she could have her body back. To this end, Soledad tried the women’s remedies, hot baths or walking all day through the town. Scrubbing floors on one’s hands and knees was also guaranteed to induce labor, but since it was the lazy girl who cleaned the rooms who suggested this, Soledad ignored the advice.

What was it? Lately when she entered a room Soledad found herself frantically searching the ceiling beams, always staring upward like the church paintings of the Madonna ascending into heaven. —What are you looking at? —Oh, nothing, nothing. She didn’t know when she began this habit, but it was something she did now automatically, as if she was looking for … What was she looking for? As if somewhere in those rafters and cobwebbed corners was an answer, a secret, an angel, a vision, that might descend from heaven and rescue her from herself.

It seemed as if her sense of smell was never as acute as during this period when she was waiting for the unborn Inocencio. In the mornings, when the street cleaners arrived with their branch brooms, there was such a coolness as day broke, a stillness just for a moment, when Soledad would be fanning herself on the balcony and just as suddenly drop to sleep there in her chair. The night that smelled of night, a velvety moistness that would give way to light and gradually the perfume of the laurel trees, and with this a terrible pain behind the bridge of her nose like the throbbing of a tooth, that wouldn’t go away until
siesta
. But any scent, the smoke from a cigar, the oatmeal boiling for breakfast, the damp-dog smell of the back streets, church incense so sweet it stank like urine, the steamy cooked-corn aroma of the corn-on-the cob man, all these left her dizzy. Once in the market while bending down to pick up a coin, she even fainted at a stall of
cilantro
, green onions, and
poblano
peppers.

Besides the heartburn, the taste for Manila
mangos
, the gagging
phlegm in her throat, the cramps in her legs, feet, toes, hands, added to all this calamity were the crying spells.

—¡Ay, caray!
said Narciso. —Not again. How could she explain to her husband it was more than a loss of control of her body, but also, her life.

In the dark coolness of the church of la Soledad, Soledad Reyes prayed daily to the wooden statue of the Virgin of Solitude draped in velvet and gilt edged robes housed in a glass case behind the main altar. Soledad was so big now she could hardly genuflect, and had to content herself with a half-squatting, half-sitting position in lieu of kneeling. She looked at the Santo Niño de Atocha housed in his own little glass case along the side, the Santo Niño with his shepherd’s staff and funny hat trimmed in fur, his lace dress embroidered with gold thread, the seed pearls that had no doubt dimmed a nun’s eyes blind. If her baby was a boy, Soledad vowed she would love him like la Virgen and name him Inocencio. She could not name him Jesús, unfortunately, because Jesús was the name of the lecherous man at
la farmacia
who wiggled his middle finger indecently in your palm when he gave you back your change. No, Inocencio was what she would name her baby if he was a boy, and she would love him with a mother’s pure love like la Santísima Virgen de la Soledad mumbling and grieving all alone while Joseph, well, where the hell was he when she needed him? Dependably undependable, like all husbands.

And when the pains began and the midwife was sent for, there it was, that feeling, that search in the rafters for, —Oh, my God, I don’t know. She did not call out to her husband, nor to God, la Virgen, or a saint.

When the labor began she felt her body lurch forward of its own accord like a piece of machinery, like a chariot, like a wild horse and she dangling from a stirrup. There was no going backward and no changing your mind. And your life a little flag fluttering in the wind. Your life nothing but a ragged bit of cloth.
—Muh
. Like all orphans and prisoners condemned to death, she heard a voice she recognized as her own call out from someplace she didn’t remember.
—Muh, muh, muh
, with every breath like a dagger.
—Ma
, she heard herself say, and it was as if she were all the women in history who had ever given birth, a cry, a chorus, the one and only, never-ending alpha and omega yowl of history, guttural and strange and frightening and powerful all at once.
—Ma, ma, ma …
Ma-má!