The Children of Sanchez (22 page)

The first time I attended catechism was after we moved to the Casa Grande. One afternoon, while Elena and I were having coffee and
were looking at a comic book, I heard a little bell ring. I looked out and saw some children running, each carrying a little stool. I asked no questions but suddenly a heavy figure appeared dressed in black, her hair combed in a bun and a rosary on her breast. She passed close by me ringing a little bell. “Aren’t you coming to catechism?” I smiled and nodded.

I asked my father’s permission. He agreed and sent all four of us. How glad I was to gol There I was, running through the courtyard with a little chair in my arm. My sister and two brothers also carried their stools. The
señorita
was speaking to the seated children. I had never before heard anything like what she was saying. Elena had taught us Our Father and the Ave, besides a prayer to the Angel, but it wasn’t the same thing.

They always gave us candies as we went out. That first day, we all tore off at a run to show my
papá
what they had given us. I really felt happy. All by myself I began to take on the obligation of going to catechism. It made me very angry that Roberto and Manuel didn’t come. I told on them to my
papá
.

One time I saw the
señorita
with a group of older girls around her, answering in chorus. When the
señorita
had finished, I asked a girl, “What was that?” She answered, “You mean you don’t know! Those were God’s Commandments.” I was embarrassed and didn’t say anything. Besides, I was afraid that the girl was going to hit me.

When catechism was over I told the
señorita
that I wanted to learn the Commandments. “But they are preparing for the first communion,” she said. It was like a ray of light breaking over my head. I said nothing, but from that time all I wished for was to make my first communion and to die. I don’t know why this desire came over me. I didn’t even know the meaning of the first communion and I didn’t ask.

Then the
señoritas
didn’t come to teach us any more. We waited in vain with our little stools. I went back home angry. My
papá
asked me, “What’s wrong, daughter?”

“Nothing, nothing is wrong with me.” But I felt as though nobody remembered me any more. We were left quite a long time without catechism but I memorized all that I had learned.

Santitos, Elena’s mother, and her three youngest children came to live with us. They all slept on the floor. Santitos was very religious. She was always dressed in black and prayed every night, which seemed unusual to me at that time. When I saw Santitos praying with her
rosary in her hands and her face so serious, I thought it must be because she was going to die. One afternoon when Santitos was praying with her rosary, I asked her what my Lord Jesus Christ was like. With all the good will in the world, she set herself to teach me. How difficult it turned out to be. And how I respected Santitos! She taught me the
Señor Jesucristo
and the
Yo Pecador
. I asked my
papá
to buy the book with which to make my first communion. He agreed and in it I read how you were supposed to act before the priest.

The only bad memory I have of Elena is that she was the one who disillusioned me about who the
Santos Reyes
(Three Kings) were. When I was about eight years old I still believed in the Three Holy Kings who came bearing presents to children on January 6. I resisted believing the truth for some time. Even my brothers had told me a lot about the
Reyes
. During the Christmas
Posada
season, as evening would begin to fall, Roberto or Manuel would sit with Marta and me in the doorway, and would show us the three most brilliant stars in the Big Bear constellation. “Look, little sister, do you see those stars there? Those little stars are the Three Kings.” I remember how every year a little before falling asleep I would look at the sky and it would really seem to me that the stars were coming closer. In my imagination I surrounded them with an intense light that dazzled me even after I was asleep. On the next day I would find the toys.

This year I decided to spy on my father, to see if Elena was right. At night Marta and I made believe we were asleep. Finally my father was satisfied that we were sleeping and I saw him put some toys in our shoes. It was true! My dream was over and I felt sad. The next day when my father got up to go to work, he said the same as every year. “Hurry, daughter, go and see what the
Reyes
brought you! Go on!” I looked at my presents but I no longer saw that magic thing that had surrounded my toys. This was the only time I did not like Elena.

The strongest impression remaining with me of that period was of a night when we came home from the movies. Generally my
papá
would carry Marta, while Elena took me. On this particular night everything was very dark, and suddenly the grownups were absolutely silent. As he opened the lock, my father told Elena to hold on to me. My head was pressed very tight against her skirts. They told me to close my eyes and Elena carried me. I didn’t hear a sound, not my father talking nor the key in the lock—nothing. When I could open my eyes, I was already in bed. I asked why they had made me
close my eyes, but my father only said, “Go to sleep. It’s late now.” I went to sleep, very curious; the next day, Roberto told me that they had seen ghosts, nuns walking on the wall with a priest in front of them. I don’t know whether it was true or not. My father never told me anything.

I always seemed more afraid of things than my brothers and sister. Once, when I was eight or nine, Roberto gave me a terrible fright by throwing a sackful of mice at me. The shock was so great I fainted. After that I had a horror of mice and rats, more than anything else in the world. Every time I saw one of them, dead or alive, I would scream and run.

I remember one morning in the Casa Grande an ugly old rat came out of his hole. I was asleep but pretty soon I woke up enough to hear something gnawing under the bed. I opened my eyes wide and hardly breathed, expecting the animal to climb up on the bed. As the sound got closer and closer I began to call to my father, at first softly, then a little louder. When I actually heard the animal at the head of my bed I gave a wild scream. My father got up like a flash and put on the light. The animal started to run. I kept screaming, “The rat! the rat!” My brothers jumped up from their bed on the floor and chased the rat with sticks. But this animal was hard to catch; he kept escaping and they couldn’t kill him. When finally they succeeded in hitting him (I still get goose pimples all over when I think of it) the animal squealed and I screamed. I kept hearing his horrible, piercing cries. Every time they hit him, I would jump. After that, my father had a new floor laid.

I couldn’t imagine, when I first took a disliking to the Casa Grande, how much more I was going to hate it and to suffer there. I thought that Elena would always be with me, but it wasn’t like that. There in the Casa Grande she died, and after her death came the disorganization of the family, the gradual hardening of my father from day to day, the growing hostility of my brothers toward me, and a series of sufferings, brought on perhaps by my own lack of character.

Before Elena died, my troubles were not so great. I felt that I had everything, my father’s love and Elena’s. Though my brothers hit me, they did not do it all the time, and besides, their blows were not always hard. I had never even minded the fact that my own real mother was not alive. For instance, when I was in the third year of school, the teacher taught us a hymn to mothers and there were
grand preparations to entertain the mothers with dances, recitations, and drawings. It hurt me. At that time, for me there was nothing so sublime as
father
. I thought: “Mothers, mothers … why do they make so many
fiestas
for mothers if fathers count for so much more? My
papá
buys us everything and never abandoned us. They should make a celebration for fathers and then I would go out dressed up in an Indian costume or in anything else.”

But then Elena began to get sick. Later we learned that she had tuberculosis. She would stay seated for hours in the sun so that it would strike her back. Her hair in the sun looked reddish-blond. She had gotten thin and had fainting spells even though she took lots of medicines and went from one doctor to another.

My father was very worried and pampered her more and more. He had always bought her nice dresses and shoes with high heels, even a little fur jacket, and he took her wherever she wanted to go, but now he brought her presents every day.

As Elena got sicker and sicker, she took the advice of her doctors and went to the hospital for a long stay. My father was very sad. Every afternoon, now, he was a little later in getting home because he went to visit her. He would pat my head and say, “Do you miss Elena,
madre
? There, there, she’ll be back.” And I saw how a tear would appear. On Wednesday, La Chata’s day off, my
papá
would bathe us, give us our breakfast, wash our socks and have the boys do the housework.

But the house was no longer the same; little by little it began to decline. I regretted particularly that our plants were dying. My father complained a good deal about this. Sometimes I would hear him shout: “
Caray!
We can’t keep anything here! It’s a shame! It doesn’t seem possible that there isn’t anyone to take care of things.” La Chata kept quiet; Santitos also.

La Chata tried to keep the house clean but we children jumped on the beds and on the table and messed them up. When we had quarrels or just in fun we would grab chunks of charcoal from the carton under the sink and would throw them at each other, making black smudges on the walls and floor. La Chata grumbled and scolded us in coarse language and put us out into the courtyard. We, in turn, would complain to our father that all she served us was stale bread and potatoes with eggs. When Elena had been with us we all ate well, but La Chata hid the milk and fruit and made special dishes only for herself and for
my father. She wasn’t nice to us at all but when we told my father he would shut us up.

Perhaps because he needed money to take care of Elena or because he liked to be in business, my father began to sell animals. He started out with fifty birds, which he kept in wooden cages of all sizes. My brothers cleaned the cages twice a day but in spite of that the house began to smell and to look dirty. The walls and floor were always spotted with birdfood and droppings. At first my father had only small birds, like parakeets and thrushes, but later he bought parrots, pigeons, pheasants, and once a large, ugly bird that ate only raw meat. We had turkeys and even a badger tied to the legs of our chiffonier. Almost all the wall space in the bedroom and the kitchen was hung with cages. My father got rid of the plants to make room for boxes of chickens. He put in another shelf for some very fine cocks. We children had to collect the eggs and put them in the dish closet.

When Elena finally was to come home from the hospital my father had the rooms whitewashed and bought a few plants once more. But she was still very ill and went to live in Room No. 103 in the last courtyard of the Casa Grande. With her went the dressing table, the bed and bedspread, the curtains, the flower vase, the remaining lamp shade, any many of the nicest things in the house. We were not allowed to enter Elena’s room but once in a while Santitos would open the door and let us see her from the courtyard. When she felt well, Elena would go up to the roof and I would talk to her from below and show her my sewing.

After Elena had moved into her room, Antonia, my older half-sister, arrived. I was asleep the night my father brought her. The next day I found a new face in the house. She was lying next to me in my bed. “Why don’t you greet your sister?” my father said. My brothers talked to her but not I. I didn’t say a word to her. I watched from afar. I was extremely jealous. I never before had seen my father with anybody. How was it possible that Antonia existed? But I didn’t dare ask my father and he gave me no explanation.

Several days before he brought her, my father had told us just this much: “I am going to bring your sister. She is a
señorita
already. She has finished the sixth grade.” At that time, the word “
señorita
” meant to me a young woman with long wavy hair and eyeglasses, dressed in a dark tailored suit, someone to be respected, so I was really eager to
meet my sister. But when I saw her she was very different. Antonia’s face was thin and her eyes somewhat pop-eyed; her straight hair was tied with a ribbon and she wore an ordinary dress. I was partly disappointed and partly satisfied because she made me feel less discontented with my own appearance.

At first Antonia was very kind, and little by little, began to win our confidence. She fixed up the house and made it look nice again, with curtains in the doorway and flowers on the altar. But later she made the four of us suffer very much. What made me begin to hate her was the distinction my father made between her and the rest of us. He seemed to change completely.

The first sign of this came one afternoon when he arrived home angry. He came in, saw a bench in the middle of the kitchen, kicked it to one side with his foot, and shouted at me: “Stupid, imbecile! You see things and just leave them there. Get that bench out of here, quick!” For a moment I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea where to put the bench. Finally I shoved it under the sink. I was shocked. My father had never before used words like that to me. To my brothers, yes, but never directly to me.

That night I refused to eat my supper, thinking that it would bring the results it had on many other occasions. If I refused to eat, my father would lovingly talk to me and ask me what it was I wanted and would send for delicacies. This time it wasn’t that way. I went to bed without eating anything and my father paid no attention to me. He began to read the paper to Antonia. I was under the covers holding back my tears. I was ashamed to cry before this new person who was my sister.

On countless occasions the taste of tears was part of my coffee. “Stop clowning and eat,” was what my father would say. It no longer mattered to him if I cried. The first time I heard Antonia answer him back I couldn’t believe my father’s reaction in not saying anything at all about her ill-mannered behavior. In our case we didn’t even raise our eyes when he scolded us, not even Manuel, who was the oldest, while she could shout at him freely. Whenever he bought a dress for Antonia, it always had to be better quality than ours. My father almost always gave things to her to dish out. All this made me feel like I was nobody in the house.