How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (28 page)

Finally, Dona Charito marched us into her studio.

It was a big, light room in a wing of the house, all the windows thrown open to air out the heavy oil and turpentine smells. Cane chairs had been arranged in rows, drawing boards on each seat, a crate between every two chairs with a big jar of clear water and several ripped-up pieces of old toweling on top. (this must have been the "some supplies included" of the agreement.)

"Find yourself an accommodation," Dona Charito ordered. There was a scramble for chairs in the back rows, but I was not one of the lucky ones. I had hung back at the entrance, cagily I thought, waiting to see what would happen to the others before I followed. I ended up the one in the front seat right under Dona Charito's cavernous cobalt-blue nostrils.

The lesson began with physical

exercise.

"Mens sana in corpore sano,"

Dona Charito proclaimed. "Amen," we girls chanted, for the sound of Latin cued us for liturgical response. Dona Charito scowled.

"One, two. One, two. One, two," she commanded. We executed jumping jacks. We touched toes. We flexed our fingers "for the circulation" and worked ourselves into quite a state of calisthenic frenzy.

At last, the actual art lesson began.

Dona Charito demonstrated with her brush. "The first step, one must check the bristles for the correct alignment." Dona Charito dipped her brush into a jar of water and made all manner of finicky, tidying up, tapping noises on the brim, like a nursemaid spooning mouthfuls for a difficult baby.

Obediently, we did likewise.

She went on in her garbled Spanish we could barely understand. "The second step is the proper manner of holding the implement. Not in this way, neither in this fashion . .." She inspected, chair by chair. She mocked us all.

It seemed with so much protocol, I would never get to draw the brilliant and lush and wild world brimming over inside me. I tried to keep my mind on the demonstration, but something began to paw the inside of my drawing arm. It clawed at the doors of my will, and I had to let it out. I took my soaking brush in hand, stroked my gold cake, and a cat streaked out on my paper in one lightning stroke, whiskers, tail, meow and all!

I breathed a little easier, having gained a cat-sized space inside myself. Dona Charito's back was to me. The hummingbird on her Hawaiian shift plunged its swordlike beak between the mounds of her bottom. There would be time.

I jiggled my brush in the water jar. The liquid turned the color of my first urine in the morning. I stroked my purple cake, and a bruise-colored cat and then a brown stick cat darted out.

I was so much to myself as I worked that I did not hear her warning shout or the slapping of her Island thongs on the linoleum as she swooped down upon me. Her crimson nails clawed my sheet off its board and crumpled it into a ball. "You, you defy me!" she cried out. Her face had turned the muddy red of my water jar. She lifted me by the forearm, hurried me across the room through a door into a dark parlor, and plunked me down on a stiff cane-back chair.

Her green eyes glared at me like a cat's.

They were speckled

with brown as if something alive had gotten caught and fossilized in the irises. "You are not to move until I have given you leave. Is that comprehensible?" I bowed my head in submission. From the corner of my eye, I saw my frightened cousins obediently practicing their first brush strokes.

Dona Charito filled the doorway a moment with her large body, then she pulled the door to with a great slam.

I sat as still as one of her still lives that hung on the walls around me. I felt her presence in the dark, hushed, airless room. Her brush was poised above my head. She could paint over my hair, blank out my features, make my face no more than a plate for apples, grapes, plums, pears, lemons. I dared not move.

But soon, I began to grow restless. I could see these an lessons were not going to be any fun. It seemed like everything I enjoyed in the world was turning out to be wrong. I had recently begun catechism classes in preparation for my first communion. The Catholic sisters at Our Lady Of Perpetual Sorrows Convent School were teaching me to sort the world like laundry into what was wrong and right, what was venial, what, if you died in the middle of enjoying, would send you straight to hell. Before I could ever get to my life, conscience was arranging it all like a still life or tableau. But that morning in Dona Charito's house, I was not ready yet to pose as one of the model children of the world.

I lifted myself out of that uncomfortable chair and made my way out into the foyer, where our shoes had been lined up in a tidy row as if they were about to be shot for having mud on their soles. Just as I had found the pair that was mine, I heard a man's voice, shouting and crying curses from the back of the house. Normally, I would have run in the opposite direction, but the curses he was yelling were ones I was muttering under my breath against Dona Charito. I was drawn to investigate.

Hie patio was deserted. The sky hung low, a cloudy canvas with swirls of dark purple and stormy greys. I crossed a high hibiscus hedge through an unlatched gate and came upon a muddy backyard, strewn with logs and stumps like a carpenter's yard. Ahead stood an

unpainted shed with one high window and one door clamped shut with a great padlock. The man's shouts had come from inside, but what drew me now was another sound, a tap-tap-tapping like us girl cousins dancing for company. I wanted to find out something secret about Dona Charito. At my age, that is what I knew of revenge. What someone kept in a bedside drawer. What color was someone's underwear.

What did someone look like squatting awkwardly on a small chamber pot. Then, when that someone fell upon me with violent discipline, I could undo with a gaze: I know you, I know you.

The one window was a head above my head. I rolled a small stump over beneath the glass, climbed on top, and peered inside. At first, I could see only my own face reflected back. I cupped my hands around my eyes and felt the glass hum with hammering as if it were alive.

Slowly, I made out the objects inside the shed. Giant, half-formed creatures were coming out of logs like the ones strewn in the yard behind me. Some logs had hoofs or claws, tails or horns; some had the beginnings of a face, a mouth or an eye; some had hands with fingernails. A sheep's fleece curled from the bare nutty back of a pale stump, but the poor thing couldn't baa without nostrils or a mouth. I put my hand on my own face to make sure I was intact.

In the middle of the floor, a woman's figure reclined on two sawhorses, one at her feet, another at her neck, like my grandmother hanging from the rafters in her sling when she'd broken her back.

Sharp points came out of her head, the rays of the Virgin's halo, though they could just as well have been the horns of a demon woman. Her hair coiled in complex curls over her shoulders like snakes. Her head was fully formed, but her face was still a blank.

Tap-tap-tap, the sound came from underneath her.

Shavings of wood and sawdust were falling on the floor, where just this moment she was being given feet.

Before my very eyes, the pale blond stumps distinguished themselves into heel and toe; the high arches made S's of the bottoms of her feet. She could have stood upon those soles and walked all the way to Bethlehem.

When his brown head emerged from between her legs, I believed him at first to be one of his own creations.

He was the same shiny mahogany color as his half-formed creatures. Around his neck was a halter, trailing a chain to an iron ring by the door. -And that was all he wore! He was a tiny man, my size standing on a log, perfectly proportioned, except for one thing. I had seen the stud bulls on my grandfather's ranch during breeding season and witnessed their spectacles among the cows.

Once, a saucy nursemaid had informed me that, in embroidered linens with the lights off and the fans going, my fine de la Torre mother had gotten me no differently. The little man grew big like those bulls on the ranch as he worked on the Virgin's feet.

When he was done with that end, he climbed on top, straddling her, his rattling chain settling behind him like a great tail. He touched the blank of the face, tenderly it seemed! planted his chisel at the forehead and was about to come down on her. I cried out to warn the woman beneath him.

But it was his elf face which shot up. He looked about the room, bull's-eyed on my face against the window, then lunged in my direction. His chain grew taut. But before he could reach the window, open it up, and yank me inside, I threw myself off my perch and landed hard on the ground. I was too terrified to feel pain, but I heard the little bone in my arm crack as I hit the ground.

His face appeared at the window. He studied me, and an inane grin spread across his lips like a stain. Tap-tap-tap, his hand beat on the glass as if to hold my attention so he could study me a little longer, tap-tap-tap. There was no need for that; my eyes were riveted to his face, and my mouth opened in a voiceless scream. At last, sound came to my terror. I screamed and screamed even after his face had disappeared from the window.

Soon the Art Lesson came running from the house, Dona Charito leading, cousins on stockinged feet, the old woman in tow, towards the muddy heap in the yard. I did not think there would ever come the day when I would be so pleased to see her.

"What has transpired?" she cried, but her voice betrayed genuine concern. "Why were you not supervisioning her?" she said, accusing the old woman, then turning to me, she accused me: "What have you committed upon yourself?" She shot a worried glance down to the bottom of the yard. Tap-tap-tap came the sounds from inside the shed.

I lifted up my throbbing arm, an offering of broken bone. She could have my face smeared with tears, my body soiled with mud like a creature's, the small wet sobs coming out of my mouth. "I broke it," I wailed. But I knew it was best not to confess what I had seen inside her garden shed.

One could not say her face softened, for softness was not in her repertoire of expressions. She knelt beside me and reached for my arm. But even her lightest touch made me wince with pain. "Brrroke?" She gazed down at me. I now saw that the speckles in her eyes were splinters of bones, shards of things she had broken over the years.

Meanwhile, without supervision, my little cousins had begun balancing on logs, patting mudcakes, enjoying the holiday of smearing their dresses and darkening their white socks. A pair of explorer cousins marched towards the shed with sticks. Dona Charito stood up and sounded the alarm. "Attention!

Back in the studio this instant, every one!" They scurried back. The rain began to fall, big sloppy drops as if someone were shaking out a paint brush.

She lifted me in her arms. I clung to her as if I were her own child. I laid my head above where her heart should be and thought I could hear, as if inside a conch shell, the dark Atlantic, the waves thrashing in high winds, the vast plains of central Europe. She knew the world was a wild place.

She carried a great big brush. She made pinwheels of the whirling stars that had driven many a man mad. She could save me from the crazyman in the shed. I hung on.

But that was the last I ever saw of Dona Charito.

The cars came screeching to a stop in the driveway; my mother hurried

into the house,-1 began to cry to convince her of the seriousness of my condition. And as the shock wore off, I did feel a piercing pain in my arm as if someone were driving a chisel through the bone. At the hospital everyone's suspicions were confirmed: my arm was fractured in three places.

I wore a cast for months, and when it was sawed off at last, the arm was discovered to have healed crookedly. There was no help for it but to break the bone again and reset it. This was considered a major enough operation that I was given gifts and a little overnight case to take to the hospital with a lock, the combination of which was the month, day, and year of my birth. A mass was said at the Cathedral for my quick recovery, and I was allowed to have dishes of ice cream between meals to make me brave and-it was explained to my envious cousins- "to give her added calcium." I was sure that I was about to die and that's why everyone was being so kind to me.

I did not die. And the bone did finally heal, almost perfectly. But for a year on and off, I carried my arm in a sling. The cast was signed by several dozen cousins and aunts and uncles, so I seemed a composite creation of the de la Torre family: Gisela de la Tone, Mundin de la Torre, Carmencita de la Torre, Lucinda Maria de la Torre. There were notes arid rhymes. Some of the messages were smart-aleck remarks and skull-and-bones by cousins who resented me for getting out of lessons inflicted on them because of me. For though my own art career had come to a crashing halt, my girl cousins had to spend their Saturday mornings drawing circles, then on to ovals, before finally these ovals were allowed to ripen into apples. Months later, they graduated to utensils-a pitcher, a basket, a knife.

The final project was a still life with all these objects in it as well as a small hunk of plastic ham. Bitterly, they complained: they hated art; they did not want to take lessons. But American dollars, they were informed, did not grow on Island trees. Art lessons it would be for the next year.

By Christmas, the lessons were over.

My cast was off. But I was a changed child. Months of pampering and the ridicule of my cousins had turned me inward. But now when the world filled me, I could no longer draw it out. I was sullen and dependent on my mother's sole attention, tender-hearted, and whiney: the classic temperament of the artist but without anything to show for my bad character. I could no longer draw. My hand had lost its art.

I did have one moment of triumph during that year of art lessons. Christmas Eve, along with the rest of the de la Tone children, I was taken to the National Cathedral for the nativity pageant where the new creche was to be unveiled. We marched up the aisle to the altar, which was decked with poinsettias and candles and curtained off with red and green draperies.