Eccentric Neighborhood (14 page)

Even as a child, Mother was obsessed with perfection. She was very neat; her clothes were always freshly pressed, her shoes were never less than spotlessly clean, and she brushed and braided her own hair. She did her homework by herself and never got anything less than an A. She believed in the power of the mind and always finished what she began.

Clarissa was forever scolding and lecturing her sisters. Siglinda was too affectionate, kissing and hugging everyone; Clarissa called her “the sticky blob.” Dido was a dreamer who floated around like a lost cloud. Artemisa was a
comesanto
, a sanctimonious holier-than-thou who never stopped praying and asking Miña to take her to Mass. Lakhmé was a birdbrain who lived for clothes and thought only about boys. There was no alternative but to make them do what
she
wanted, since she was the one who always knew best.

Abuela Valeria paid hardly any attention to Clarissa, so busy was she with her younger children. But Abuelo Alvaro idolized her, and he often took her along when he oversaw the farms, sitting her in front of him in the large western saddle that swayed to and fro across the cane fields like a rocking chair. When she was ten he bought her a pony and Clarissa became an excellent rider. She learned to love the land. “Never sell our farms,” Abuelo said to her. “If things go wrong and you can’t make ends meet, you may get rid of everything: the house, the silverware, even the
central
Plata—they are all replaceable. But once you sell the land, you can’t start over, because you will have sold your heart.” Clarissa promised that she would never sell it. And when Abuelo saw her gallop across the fields at his side, wearing jodhpurs, her hair cropped short over her earlobes, he cursed his luck that she hadn’t been born a boy.

T
ÍA SIGLINDA WAS BORN
one year after Clarissa, and Miña became her wetnurse too. Miña’s milk was the best, Abuelo Alvaro said, and it was better if all the Rivas de Santillana children suckled from the same breast. This made them
hermanos de leche
, siblings in milk, as well as
hermanos de sangre
, siblings in blood. Alvaro hired Urbano as the family chauffeur, and Urbano moved in with Miña. They lived above the carriage house in an apartment Abuelo Alvaro had built for them. Miña was often pregnant, but she always had to send her own babies away to her sister in Camarones, who brought them up with the money Miña gave her. Miña’s children lived together in a little wooden cottage by the Emajaguas River that Urbano bought for them, with a corrugated tin roof, a balcony facing the Guayamés road, and an outhouse in back, a luxury very few truckdrivers were able to afford at the time.

Miña was secretive and guarded. She seemed to be made of wood, so slow and sure were her movements, but she never made a blunder or left a chore undone. She never spoke unless spoken to, except to her parrot. She had high cheekbones and her gaze was like an eagle’s; it seemed to assess you from a distance, as if measuring your strengths and weaknesses.

Miña got along very well with Clarissa and my aunts, but she couldn’t stand Tío Alejandro. When he kicked his sisters or pulled their hair, Miña would stand in front of him, arms akimbo, and say: “You think that little prick of yours is your scepter because you’re Emajaguas’s prince. But you’re no different from my other children. You’ve suckled my milk and gone to sleep in my arms, just as they have. There’s a part of you that was born in the Camarones barrio and has slept on straw mats on the floor, four persons to a bed and four mats to a room, and has gone barefoot like I have, so you have no reason to get high and mighty and abuse other people.” And Alejandro would bow his head and slink out of the room.

Miña was up before dawn because she was in charge of the cleaning and the laundering. Every Thursday she would set a huge cauldron over an open fire and sit patiently in front of the boiling soap and water, churning and swirling the family’s underwear and bed linen with a long pole. I’m sure that was why Miña knew so many of our family secrets: because she was in charge of our dirty laundry. She always knew when Abuelo Alvaro and Abuela Valeria had made love, for example, and when a new child was on the way. And she also knew when they
didn’t
make love and things were tense. Because she scrubbed the toilets, she knew when there was trouble at the mill: strikes gave Abuelo Alvaro diarrhea. She knew when my aunts became
señoritas
even before Abuela Valeria did, and she also knew when Tío Alejandro began to have wet dreams and to hate girls because none of them liked him. Miña also had to clean the bathtubs, so she knew when Alejandro stayed out late drinking at the bars in town, because the next day he always shunned baths.

But what really let Miña in on family secrets was the beautiful multicolored ball of soap she kept on a glass dish on top of her washbasin. She had fashioned it through the years, sticking together all the scraps of soap she had saved from the slivers she found discarded in the family’s bathrooms. I saw it for the first time one afternoon when I went to visit her in her room. We had just arrived from La Concordia and I scampered up the dark wooden staircase of the carriage house and hid in the bathroom, wanting to give Miña a scare. I saw the soap resting on its dish, all shiny and larger than a softball. I picked it up, and it smelled of every single person in the house: of Abuela Valeria, Tía Siglinda, Tía Dido, Tía Artemisa, Tía Lakhmé, and Tío Alejandro. I turned it around slowly, inhaling everybody’s secrets: Abuela’s anger when she bickered with Clarissa, Siglinda’s desire when she thought of Tío Venancio, Dido’s excitement when she was writing a new poem, Artemisa’s devotion when she was praying in church, Lakhmé’s delight when she wore a new dress. And above all, Miña’s smell, which held all the scraps of soap together in one marvelous perfumed globe. But I never dared ask Miña about the soap ball. I put it back gingerly in its dish and ran down the stairs and out of the carriage house.

W
HEN TÍO ALEJANDRO WAS
born in 1904, Abuela Valeria let out a sigh of relief. She was afraid she was going to have to have a baby every year, because Abuelo Alvaro wouldn’t be satisfied until he had a son who could be president of the
central
Plata. Tío Alejandro was the fourth child of my grandparents, and his arrival was duly celebrated at Emajaguas with a party. Champagne flowed, and all the hacendados of the region and their families were invited.

Tío Alejandro was a difficult child from the start. When he was born, Abuela Valeria asked Miña to nurse him, but Miña had just had a son of her own and wanted to go home. Abuelo Alvaro offered to pay her more because Alejandro was a boy, and finally Miña said yes. Miña was cautioned, however, not to overdo it. She was simply to feed the baby; his parents would provide him with affection. Miña didn’t have any trouble with the arrangement. She never liked Tío Alejandro much; he made her breasts sore because he could never get enough milk.

Alejandro had inherited Bartolomeo Boffil’s height and solid physique, with a broad chest and strong legs. His name was an unfortunate choice, though, because in spite of being named for Alexander the Great, Tío Alejandro never grew to be taller than five foot three. His schoolmates laughed at him and nicknamed him Pepin the Short. What hurt Alejandro the most was that the girls in his class wouldn’t look at him, and this made him bitter. Abuela Valeria told him not to worry, he was simply one of those late bloomers who would spring up all of a sudden in his teens. But Tío Alejandro never did. Valeria sent Miña to school every day with a special
ponche
for Tío Alejandro, a shake made with eggs, cinnamon, and cream, but even that didn’t help.

Alejandro was Abuela Valeria’s favorite child. When he was a baby Abuela called him her Apollo because he brightened her day. But in Clarissa’s opinion Alejandro had very little in common with the god of harmony and light. When he grew up and went to school, Alejandro often got into fights and came home with cuts and bruises. He was tough, though, and never cried.

When Abuela Valeria realized that Tío Alejandro’s height gave him an inferiority complex, she ordered special shoes made for him with leather platforms at the bottom and steel tips in the toes, which made him three inches taller and gave him a stiff, martial air when he walked. At school he loved to click his heels against the polished floors when he sauntered past his schoolmates, like a Fascist Italian prince. This made him feel better, and the steel tips were very effective when he got into fights because he could kick his opponents sharply in the shins.

If Tío Alejandro’s height got him into trouble, he also had a lot of difficulty learning to read. Words were scrambled before his eyes as if he saw them reflected in a mirror.
Raw
became
war
, and
rat
became
tar
, and soon he was stuck in the alphabet’s inky maze, unable to understand a thing. He felt awed by his sisters, but especially by Clarissa, because she was so good with words. He was afraid of her because she was smart and also very outspoken. It took Tío Alejandro two or three minutes to answer when he got into an argument. Clarissa’s tongue was like a blade that could cut you to pieces in no time at all.

Abuela Valeria was convinced Alejandro didn’t do well in school because he couldn’t see the blackboard. She asked the teacher to seat him in the front row, but Alejandro still didn’t learn to read. He had inherited Abuelo Alvaro’s love of heraldry and would hide behind his textbooks to draw the family’s coat of arms on a piece of paper—two swords crossed on a blue field covered with fleurs-de-lis. As the teacher droned on about multiplication tables, he’d fold it into an airplane and send it flying toward Mary Ann Cedros, the prettiest girl in the class and the daughter of the owner of the
central
Cambalache. But Mary Ann never paid him any attention.

Tío Alejandro loved to tease his sisters about the Rivas de Santillana name. When they got married, he’d say, they would all lose their last name and have to sign with their husband’s, but when
he
got married he would give his name to his wife and children, and the Rivas de Santillana lineage would survive—thanks to him.

Abuelo Alvaro was often upset about his son’s performance in school, but Tío Alejandro wasn’t concerned in the least. After all, he was going to be president of the
central
Plata when he grew up, and to do that, one didn’t have to be good with words
or
numbers; all one had to do was learn how to order people around. He didn’t care at all about the farmlands he would inherit one day, which Abuelo Alvaro insisted were both a privilege and a responsibility. He never enjoyed riding across the fields to see the cane ripple like water in the wind, as Clarissa did. He thought the
central
Plata should make more money, and if he had to sell some land to raise working capital, he didn’t see anything wrong with it.

What Tío Alejandro loved most was to go hunting up the Emajaguas River with the buckshot rifle Abuelo Alvaro had given him as a birthday present when he turned twelve. Every day after school he would lose himself in the river’s marshes and return home with a piece of game, usually a mourning dove, which he would bring into the kitchen and give to Gela, the cook. Sometimes, however, he would deliver withered herons, limp silver owls, and even
guaraguaos
—our local eagles—their snow-white chests dripping with blood beneath their brown feathered hoods.

Abuela Valeria didn’t like it when Alejandro brought dead birds into the house, but when he killed a blackbird one day and carried it to the kitchen and Abuela saw its crimson beak lying like wind-polished coral in the sink, she was furious. She made Abuelo Alvaro take away Alejandro’s rifle and he was forbidden to hunt again. But Tío Alejandro went on hunting with a slingshot. He would roast his birds out in the field over an open fire and eat them all by himself.

Abuelo Alvaro was terribly strict with Tío Alejandro because he wanted the future president of the
central
Plata to learn to be disciplined early on. While his sisters’ bedrooms had windows framed in frilly Swiss embroidery, Alejandro’s room had no curtains, and there were no straw mats at the sides of his bed, so he had to step barefoot on the cold tiles when he got up to pee at night. He took an ice-cold shower every morning, and his four-poster bed had a hard, thin mattress made of horsehair, which pierced the striped cotton cover and pricked his skin.

Instead of a glass chandelier like the ones that lit his sisters’ bedrooms, the lamp that hung over Tío Alejandro’s bed was made of iron and decorated with a black medieval knight riding a horse. This was the last thing Alejandro saw before he fell asleep at night. His sisters had all the clothes and shoes they wanted; Guayamés’s best seamstress was kept busy sewing gowns for them, and they often received charm bracelets, pearl necklaces, and rings from Abuelo Alvaro for their birthdays. Tío Alejandro had only two suits, one of coarse twill for every day and one of linen for Sundays, along with two pairs of custom-made platform shoes.

Abuela Valeria, on the other hand, spoiled Tío Alejandro behind Abuelo Alvaro’s back. If Gela cooked a flan, Abuela always saved him the largest portion and served it to him secretly in the pantry; if there was fried chicken for dinner, Alejandro always got the drumsticks
and
the breast while the rest was rationed among the girls. Tío Alejandro was the only one of the Rivas de Santillana children ever to get a car for a present, a red Ford coupé with a rumble seat that Valeria had wrapped up in cellophane and parked under his window at Emajaguas one Christmas morning when he was eighteen.

Alejandro would try to win Clarissa over, asking her into his room to look at his stamp collection or letting her play
bolita y hoyo
—hole in one—with his swirled colored marbles. Clarissa never liked to play with dolls; she loved shooting pool in Abuelo Alvaro’s game room and she could run faster than many of Alejandro’s friends. She would have given anything in the world to join the baseball team at the Shooting Club, just down the road from Emajaguas. But when she got a hit and was running from second base to third, Alejandro would always put out his foot and trip her. She never made the baseball team.