Las Christmas (13 page)

After a few hours my father came back, covered in dirt, his face gaunt and pale. He told us the city was in ruins. Losing control, he covered his face and collapsed onto a stool, sobbing like a child. By that time we had come to understand the enormity of what had happened. Managua had been built in the old Spanish style: colonial houses with thick adobe walls. It crumbled in the Richter 7.5. Then the market caught fire. Fireworks for the holidays, Christmas lights, bales of cotton to be used as fake snow. Poor wiring. A short circuit and everything went up in flames. The blaze traveled from block to block, unrestrained. The debris in the streets blocked the fire trucks. Now there was nothing left downtown but twisted and smoking rubble. Our city was no more.

“What about Don Jorge's store?” I asked.

“It burned,” my father told me. “It burned to the ground. So did ours. I've nothing left.”

“Yes, you do,” I protested, trying to help him out. “The new store, the one that just opened. That area is still standing.”

“People are beginning to loot. Everything will be stolen.” He began to cry again.

My father was a hardworking man. I had to get him to do something. I couldn't stand to watch
him
crumble, too.

“Let's go there first,” I said. “Let's go now and take out whatever we can. You'll have something you can use to start over. We can take the truck.”

Early that morning a friend of my father's had sent a truck from Léon to help us move out of Managua. People were leaving town, seeking refuge in nearby cities. The death count was rumored to be twenty thousand. There were no resources available to recover the bodies. No running water. No electricity. Pipes had burst. The main turbine at the power plant had been damaged. It would be days before these services could be re-established. Corpses would decompose.

“Let's take the truck and go right now,” I insisted.

It didn't take my father long to react. I knew he would. My husband was sitting with my mother, still dazed. Maryam was playing with the other kids, running around the empty lot. She couldn't grasp what had happened. She wouldn't understand until later, when she'd wake up in a strange house on Christmas Day, with no presents next to the bed. Then I would have to explain. I would have to tell her the truth. Now, though, she was happy. It was a big party, all the adults hanging out on the empty lot, talking and talking, letting the children run loose around them. I asked my mother to look after Maryam, then climbed into the truck with my father and the driver.

I will never forget driving through Managua that morning. The sidewalks in the badly hit neighborhoods were lined with coffins. Simple wooden boxes, big and small. The stunned, disbelieving faces of the living. The Christmas decorations mocking us. The broken store windows with their still-smiling Santas. The make-believe snow. The fallen lights. It was as if some cruel God had played a bad joke on us. Why did it have to happen right at Christmas? My head was buzzing from lack of sleep. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It had taken only one minute to throw our lives so wildly off course, to shatter all our certainties. I remembered my premonitions of the day before. This time, what had really happened was worse than anything I could have imagined.

THE SHOPPING CENTER was deserted. All the big windows were broken. There was glass everywhere. The building itself had sustained the impact, but inside the open stores, all the merchandise had been strewn over the floors. Shelves had collapsed, scattering their contents.

Next to my father's brand new shop there was a mattress store. The damage inside was minimal. Mattresses don't break when they fall. Posters on the wall offered a free life-size doll with the purchase of a full or queen bed set. Some of the dolls still sat upright on the mattresses; others lay tumbled in garish positions, their legs up in the air, rocking with the aftershocks—so many I had stopped counting. Because they were so big—my daughter's size, at least—the dolls looked like stranded girls, their blue eyes fixed on some dream landscape that kept them smiling. I couldn't take my eyes off them as I kept passing the store, carrying merchandise from my father's shop to the truck. It was sad to think of them abandoned there. No Christmas for them, either. No little girl to mother them, to give them a name, brush their hair. There was one I liked the most, a brunette in a flowered baby-blue dress. One shoe had come off. She was lying sideways on the bed. I began to see my daughter's face superimposed on the doll's.

The idea took shape as I walked past for the second, third, fourth, tenth time. We were about to finish carting off all the boxes and bags we had filled. A doll that size would make up for a lot of lost toys. I could just imagine Maryam's face when she woke up. It was a matter of faith. I wanted my daughter to believe in magic for a little longer. I didn't want her to think that Santa had perished in the earthquake along with the city, and I didn't want to have to tell her he didn't live in the North Pole surrounded by hardworking elves who labored all year to fulfill children's wishes at Christmastime. But how could I even think of doing something like that? My father wouldn't approve. Here we were, saving our belongings from the looters and I was considering stealing the neighbor's property.

What would it matter, though? Who would care? I went to the mattress store and moved the doll closer to the door.

“We have taken enough,” my father said. “Let's go.”

I followed him, looking back at the doll once more. I couldn't do it. Whatever the circumstances, there were things one just didn't do. I climbed back into the truck. Being good wasn't making me feel any better. I felt like a coward. I was trapped in a moral code that was going to deny my daughter her innocence, her fantasy. What could be more important than that?

The driver put the key in the ignition and started the engine. The sound startled me. It made me react. In a minute, I was climbing out of the truck, running into the building, shouting to my father to wait, there was something I had to do. I ran over the broken glass, suddenly exhilarated, knowing because of the way I was feeling that I was doing the right thing. Any mother would do it. My daughter's face, my father's hope, the belief that we would be able to overcome such hardship, were the only things that mattered now.

I grabbed the doll. As I passed the pharmacy, I stepped through the broken glass and pulled out two cans of powdered milk. When I got back to the truck, my father looked at me. I sat the doll on my lap, pulled a lock of hair away from my face and told the driver we could leave. Sometime during the ride back, my father hugged me. His eyes were moist. When the tears began to roll down my cheeks he patted my back. He understood. He forgave me.

A few days later, at my in-laws' house in another city, I watched Maryam on the floor, playing with the doll. She must have sensed my thoughts. She turned to me with the concentration small children show when they have thought about something long and hard, and said, “Mummy, it's a good thing there was no earthquake where Santa lives.”

Francisco Goldman

Francisco Goldman grew up in suburban Boston, Massachusetts. He is the author
of
The Long Night of White Chickens,
which won the Sue Kaufman Award for
First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and
The Ordinary Seaman
(both Atlantic Monthly Press). As a contributing editor for
Harper's
magazine, he covered Central America in the
1980
s. He has been twice nominated
for the PEN
/
Faulkner Award, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His
work has appeared in many other magazines, including
Esquire,
the
New York Times Magazine, and Sí. He is currently at work on his third novel.

IT'S MAGIC!

MY VERY FIRST MEMORY of life in the United States is a Christmas memory. I was born in Boston, but when I was still a baby my mother took my sister and me back to Guatemala, where we lived in my
abuelo
's house. We didn't return to Massachusetts until I was nearly four. So, for me, the beginning of memory itself seems to take place in the stone patio of that house in Guate, teeming and visceral as a medieval village square, with Indian servant girls killing and plucking chickens or frying potato chips on the outdoor stove; butterflies drowning in the brimming stone fountain; my first tricycle, which I rode round and round the patio; my fat, black rabbit; all the strong smells, rainy-season mildew and lemon-rind rot.

I have no Christmas memories of that time, though the family photo album does preserve a relic of a seasonal rite, a studio photographer's Día de la Virgen de Guadalupe portrait of me, my sister, and my cousin. A majority of the population of Guatemala is pure Mayan, so every December 12, to celebrate the Virgin of Guadalupe's Day, Guatemala City's non-Indian, mainly mestizo, middle-class children have the custom of dressing as
inditos
in honor of La Virgen, Patrona de las Américas, Queen of the Indians, the brown Virgin, who appeared in 1531 to the Indian Juan Diego on a Mexican hillside.

There we are, little Frankie and Barbie Goldman and our cousin Leonel Molina, posed before a studio photographer's backdrop of an Indian hut, all of us dressed in the ceremonial traje of K'iché Maya Chichicastenango, the boys with little charcoal mustaches drawn on their faces. It was Abuelita, on behalf of herself and her husband, who mailed this token religious holiday cheer to my Jewish father in Boston, writing on the back, “Here your two little Indians. [sic] With our very best wishes for a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year . . . Francisco y Hercilia.” What could my father have thought when he opened the envelope and looked at that picture for the first time? It was possible that his family might never live with him again. Now, here were his little Catholic mestizo “Indians.”
Oy vay!
Merry Xmas.

Within the next year, my sister and I contracted tuberculosis. This saved us from having to grow up in Guatemala (a country that I still ferociously love-hate and feel compelled to visit as frequently as I can—though it terrifies me to think what might have become of me had I grown up there). My mother took us back to Boston, in part for the better medical care, and my parents resolved whatever had temporarily separated them. My father was waiting for us in a suburban ranch house. I don't think that the rest of us— mother, sister—had lived there before. It was Christmas. I was nearly four.

I remember a big orange-and-black steam shovel, so big and tall it practically came up to my waist. The shovel could be manipulated by chain and lever. I stood by this toy in a happy bewildered state, while Daddy grinned down at me. There must have been a Christmas tree. For some reason, my memory always situates this scene where it seems unlikely to have occurred, in an unpaneled corner of the basement, in front of the terrifying, rust-hued, monster robot that lived down there: a roaring furnace.

I spoke more Spanish than English. I've heard a tape recording from that time, in which I recount a trip to the zoo, sounding like the inventor of Spanglish, my accent strongly
chapín.
In little more than a decade, that accent would become just as thickly Bostonian—so much so that during my freshman year in college my advisor confessed that he'd thought I had a speech impediment until he heard my father talk. I always thought Daddy sounded just like Tip O'Neill, with the same Boston blue-collar crustiness and integrity.

My father's family had fled the Russian pogroms. He and his youngest siblings were born in the United States. Two decades older than my mother, my father was born in 1910. He became an American Jew. He was never very religious, though his sense of Jewishness is strong—essential to who he is, despite the fact that he married a Catholic. In our family, it was Christmas that we celebrated, not Hanukkah. We celebrated my mother's holidays and of course all the American holidays, and every Passover we went either to my uncle Hy's or my auntie Mimmie's or auntie Lee's.

Still, I've always thought of Christmas as my father's holiday. Not that he was in any way undignified about it. He never, for example, would have thought of accompanying my mother, my sister, and me to midnight mass. Christmas for my father, I think, had almost an Old Testament meaning, because to him it marked the return of his family from their “unholy” wanderings—the return of his son! I don't think I've ever seen my father looking so happy as he does in a photograph taken that first Christmas, holding his wheezing, tubercular, Daddy-besotted little boy in his arms.

Our Christmases were celebrated, for the most part, in the American suburban way. It may be because my family in Guatemala owns toy stores, but the Molinas, like many middle- and upper-class Central Americans and Mexicans, celebrate Christmas in the American suburban way, too: Santa Claus, toys, strong family sentiments and nostalgia, tree, eggnog, and (on the religious side) nativity, crèches, church, the beautiful Bible story, and occasionally the feelings of holy wonder and tenderness. But Christmas is about children, and for many of us it's really the mystery and magic of a child's world that is celebrated.

All countries have their folkloric traditions. My mother, a schoolteacher, liked to make a big deal of these. Her enthusiasm strikes me now as incredibly sweet, but it embarrassed me then, when I was growing up, just wanting to be another “American.” Guadalupe Day, dressing like Mayas, eating tamales and drinking
atole,
trailing behind the
tica-toca-tic
sounded out on a turtle-shell drum—these things were a lot of fun for my mother and her Spanish Club students. They appeared every year on local public television to show New Englanders how the holiday was supposed to be celebrated in Guatemala—and probably it was, before shopping malls and the universalization of American consumer Christmas. With her Irish and WASP and even Jewish students all dressed like Mayas, my
mamita
would cradle a hollow turtle-shell drum in one arm and with a stick beat out the
tica-toca-tic
rhythm, holding a pretend
posada,
imitating Mary and Joseph's journey as they went from house to house asking for shelter on their way to the manger of Bethlehem. In the TV studio or wherever the Spanish Club Christmas party was being held that year, they'd just march around a bit and then stop to eat. But in Guatemala, you were supposed to be given tamales, hot chocolate
atole,
and other treats at the houses where you stopped, like Christmas carolers.

My mother retired from teaching this year, and it has been several years since she appeared on TV with her Spanish Club students. But whenever I go home, I see the turtle shell propped high on a bookshelf in the den, the drum-stick resting inside its hollow cavity. This funny turtle shell—with its aura as a famous TV prop—now retired.

At home, we didn't do that—march around with the turtle-shell drum. Though I remember my father, high on eggnog, performing an antic Bolivian handkerchief dance. Sometimes we had relatives over for Christmas Eve, though usually my parents invited friends: my mother's Latin American friends, my father's old Jewish neighborhood friends, who were so close to family we called them aunts and uncles. My sister and I would be forced into playing duets. My sister played the violin brilliantly. I faked and huffed and honked along on the clarinet so badly that, finally, I'd bite my reed in half, pretend it had been an accident, and then act dismayed to discover that there were no more reeds left in my clarinet case.

Sometimes, we'd make a short Christmas Eve trip to the house of one of my mother's Latin American friends to admire their Nativity crèche. They had an antique porcelain Christ child in its cradle, a family heirloom from colonial times, which had traveled with them from Bolivia to Boston. I remember standing around the precious doll singing carols.

But Christmas was my father's holiday, and so was Halloween and just about every other holiday except Easter. Perhaps it was because he'd married late in life and was so thrilled to have children. One Halloween while I was lying in bed I was suddenly awakened by a knocking at my window, where I saw a hideously masked face, and I screamed and
screamed!
The face vanished. Still crying, I gaped at the night-blackened window and heard the smash of rattled aluminum, then a deep groan outside in the backyard. Daddy had fallen backwards on the ladder. He was laid up for about a week after that with a hurt back. He was lucky he hadn't broken it.

I will never forget one Christmas moment. It must have been the very next year after that first Christmas Eve in Massachusetts. My father was holding me in his arms. It was snowing. And we were standing outside our front door. My father excitedly pointed at the sky and shouted, “Can you see them?! Hear them? See them, Frankie! Santa and his reindeer!” And he said it with so much conviction that I finally saw them, too, flying through the sky and the snow, high in the sky above the rooftop of the O'Donnell's house and the trees on the hill behind—Santa and his reindeer! I've never forgotten that sight. Who could ever forget seeing something like that?

(Gabriel García Márquez once told an interviewer that a key to his fabulous art is the understanding that “there is nothing more convincing than conviction itself.”)

More than three decades would pass before I would find myself again being persuaded in a similar way, filled briefly with that same sensation of hallucinatory enchantment and excitement as I listened to a similar-sounding conviction—and I understood, then, exactly what it was my father had given me that first time. I was visiting a friend in southern Spain for Christmas. His little daughter, Rosie, and I were out on the porch, just after dusk, gazing down the hill at the lights and the Mediterranean beyond, the night sky a beautiful luminous blue with a silver moon and the stars coming out. Rosie, in her nightgown, was explaining, her voice emphatic with the excitement of what she'd just figured out: how it is that Santa Claus and his reindeer can fly. “People say it's impossible,” she said. “They say it's impossible that he can fly.” And she widened her eyes indignantly. “But they don't understand!” Rosie shook her head as if it were all just so obvious, and held out her hands in an exasperated gesture of
can't you see how simple it really is?
“It's magic,” she said. “He can fly, because he's magic. That's why it's called magic. It's magic!”