The German Girl (28 page)

I couldn’t understand why that woman was so determined to cover Gustav all over with talcum powder and to wet his head with cologne every time she changed him. He would start to cry the moment she sprinkled him with that lilac-colored alcohol.

“It cools him,” she insisted.

On this island, “cooling oneself” was a mania. Or rather, an obsession. The idea of “cooling yourself” explained the presence of palms, coconut trees, parasols, electric fans, and handheld ones, as well as lemonade, which they drank at all hours of the day and night. “Sit here by the window, so you can catch the breeze . . .” “Let’s walk on the other side of the street, where there’s some shade . . .” “Let’s wait for the sun to go down . . .” “Go and have a dip . . .” “Cover your head . . .” “Open the window so there’s some air . . .” Few things were seen as more important than cooling oneself.

Hortensia had my brother’s room painted blue and hung lace curtains on the windows that matched the white furniture. Gustav was little more than a pink blob in the midst of his blue sheets, and his freckles and reddish hair were just beginning to show. His only toys would be a wooden rocking horse standing unused by the window and a sad-looking gray teddy bear.

We talked to him in English, to prepare him for our journey to New York to live with Papa. Hortensia stared at us in bewilderment, trying to decipher a language that to her sounded harsh.

“Why do you want to complicate the life of a poor child who hasn’t said his first word yet?” she muttered to herself.

She spoke to Gustav in Spanish, with a maternal softness and rhythm to which we were unaccustomed. One morning, while she was changing him, we heard her conversing with him.

“What does my lovely little Polack have to say?”

Our eyes opened wide, but we said nothing. We simply laughed and let her carry on. That was the day I realized my mother had not had Gustav circumcised, violating an ancient tradition. I didn’t judge her: I had no right to. I understood she was doing everything she could to erase all possible traces of guilt—the guilt that led us to flee a country I once thought I belonged to. She wanted to save her son; to give him the chance to start again from zero. He had been born in New York, was for the time being in Cuba, and would never know where his parents had come from. It was a perfect plan.

But, circumcised or not, here Gustav would be just another “Polack.”

Without asking, Hortensia had given the boy a little jewel. This made my mother uncomfortable, because she did not know whether to thank her, give it back to her, or pay her for it. She also thought that wearing a pin on his nightgowns was dangerous, even if it was made of gold. The small bead dangling from a safety pin was always attached to his white linen gown, on the same side as his heart.

“It’s made of black amber, to ward off evil,” Hortensia explained to my mother very seriously. She wasn’t seeking Mother’s approval or disapproval, because she was sure we also wanted only what was good for the boy.

That black stone on his chest was to become his inseparable talisman. We accepted it because, if at least part of Gustav’s childhood was to be spent in Cuba, then he would have to learn to live with the customs and traditions of the country that had taken him in.

In a matter of months, my body began to change: curves and shapes began to appear where I least expected them. I started wearing loose-fitting blouses, mostly because of the heat, but one morning, when she saw me lifting Gustav out of the Moses, Mother seemed suddenly to
realize what was going on and immediately went off to the kitchen to have a secret chat with Hortensia.

I was not ready to become a woman. In my dreams, I still saw Leo as a child, and it terrified me to think that while I was growing up, he was still as small as I saw him in memory.

A few days later, Eulogio appeared with the delivery that was to change our lives in the Petit Trianon. It was a Singer sewing machine, together with a supply of material that was almost too big for the entrance to the dining room. I was delighted, because at least now we had something definite to do, and I set about organizing the different-colored rolls of cloth in a wardrobe, together with boxes of buttons, balls of yarn, silk ribbons, bundles of lace, elastics, and zippers. That wasn’t all: there were also long reams of tissue paper, measuring tapes, needles, and thimbles.

The small iron table contained what Hortensia called “the arm”: a mechanism containing a needle, a bobbin, and a pulley. At the bottom was a treadle I loved to operate whenever I was asked to rethread the bobbin, because I was the one “with the best eyes.” We called the machine simply “la Singer.”

Designer and seamstress spent their time measuring me and coming up with patterns for my new wardrobe, which we decorated with bows and lace. They forgot their worries and concentrated on tucks, flounces, and pleats. Soon afterward, Eulogio brought a mannequin that made my mother almost euphoric. I think that in those days she was happy, even if her new “Cuban uniform” gave the opposite impression: a black skirt with a white long-sleeved blouse, buttoned up right to the top.

The Goddess’s Berlin glamour had given way to the most discreet simplicity. The truth was she didn’t have the time or energy for nostalgia. Her beauty rituals had also been reduced to having her hair cut at home. Scissors in hand, Hortensia made sure her locks remained at shoulder length.

“Cut away, Hortensia, don’t be afraid!” she would encourage her novice hairdresser, who gingerly snipped off another inch.

Hortensia knitted cardigans for Gustav that he refused to wear, and put so much starch into his collars that he began to howl the instant he
saw them. To calm him, she would clutch him to her breast and sing him boleros about deaths and burials that made my hair stand on end, but which for some unknown reason seemed to soothe him.

By the time he was two and a half, Gustav was a curious child, restless and rebellious. He had none of the Rosenthal reserve: he was more than ready to show his emotions openly. He saw me more as an aunt than a sister; and, far from disturbing us, Mother and I were touched by his closeness to Hortensia.

To him, Spanish was the language of affection, games, tastes, and smells. English meant order and discipline. Mother and I obviously were part of the latter.

Without our realizing it, Gustav, the ship captain’s name, slowly became Gustavo, and we accepted it. The Spanish version was better suited to that impatient young boy who almost always went around half naked and covered in sweat.

He had a voracious appetite. Hortensia fed him Cuban food: rice with black beans, chicken fricassee, fried plantain and sweet potato, thick soups full of vegetables and sausage, as well as the desserts I had learned to make like an expert. In the afternoons, I would help Hortensia prepare the sweets she used to spoil him with. In fact, she would have liked to have him all to herself; she spoke to him all the time in diminutives.

Gustavo had not inherited anything from Mother or me. We had not succeeded in transmitting to him a single habit or tradition of our own. We had no idea if one day he would discover that his first language was German, and that his family name was not Rosen but Rosenthal.

Gustavo was Hortensia’s. Still under the shadow of Papa’s absence, Mother gradually had less and less to do with his upbringing. Insecurity, misinformation, and the impossibility of being able to think of the future prevented her from focusing on a child she had not asked to bring into the world. Sometimes Gustavo even slept in Hortensia’s room, or went with her to spend weekends at her sister Esperanza’s house, where they also didn’t celebrate birthdays, Christmas, or the New Year.

For Gustavo, life outside the Petit Trianon existed thanks to a simple
woman whom we paid to look after us. At nighttime, Hortensia was the one who put him to bed, told him scary stories about witches and sleeping princesses, and sang him lullabies: “
Duérmete mi niño, duérmete mi amor, duérmete pedazo de mi corazón.
” That was her formula to make Gustavo capitulate until the next morning.

He was playful, even mischievous. He liked sitting on Eulogio’s lap behind the wheel of the car, pretending he was driving at top speed.

“You’ll go far in this country, my boy,” Eulogio would encourage him. “This boy knows a lot!”

This prediction terrified us. Who wanted to go far in “this country,” when all we wished was to get out as quickly as possible and settle as far away as we could from this interminable heat?

Three years later, I was as tall as an adult woman; too tall for the tropics. I was even taller than the boys in my class, who for that reason avoided me. They saw me as an ally of our teacher. Occasionally the poor woman did call on me for help in controlling that bunch of ignoramuses, who, because they came from rich families, thought they were better than her. They taunted me all the time: Polacks only married among themselves, they didn’t wash every day, they were mean and greedy. I pretended not to hear them: in the end, I thought, those idiots were never going to realize I wasn’t a Polack and that there was no way I would ever want to be accepted by them.

Mother continued to design and make her one black-and-white tropical outfit. Communication with Papa had been cut completely, and we had heard nothing about Leo and his father. What else could we have done? The Second World War was at its height: every night before I closed my eyes, I prayed for it to end. But in my innocent prayer, I never spoke of who might lose. What interested me was for order to be reestablished—and by “order,” I meant above all international mail service: I wanted to be able to receive and send letters to Paris, to hear news of our loved ones.

One Tuesday afternoon—it had to be a Tuesday!—in midsummer,
the worst time of year in this godforsaken city, the lawyer looking after our finances appeared without warning at our home.

That day, which was to be added to my list of tragic Tuesdays, I understood that Señor Dannón was one of us. Even though the tropics had softened his “impurities,” he was as undesirable as the Rosenthals, whom he helped for a monthly fee. He was never called a Polack, though, because his ancestors had come from Spain or possibly even from Turkey. Like us, his parents had fled and found shelter on an island that admitted his entire family. Without splitting them up, as they had done with ours.

In a gruff voice, Señor Dannón asked us both to take a seat in the living room. Hortensia took Gustavo out onto the patio to leave us alone. Even though she did not entirely trust him, she knew that the lawyer always brought important news.

I can’t reproduce what he said, because I didn’t properly understand it. Only the words
camp
and
concentration
made an impression on me. I found it impossible to understand why we still hadn’t finished paying for our guilt. I wanted to run out into the street and shout “Papa!” But who would hear me? What had we done? How long would we have to go on carrying this burden of grief? I buried my face in my hands and began to sob uncontrollably.
Papa! Papa!
I could at least shout his name silently inside and weep in front of Señor Dannón, even if Mother did not like it.
Papa!

In a sudden show of solidarity, the lawyer—who, after all, was nothing more than a stranger to us—told us that he had lost his only daughter. A typhus epidemic that had claimed the lives of thousands of children in Havana had kept her in bed until her tiny, frail body finally succumbed. That was why he and his wife had decided to stay in Cuba, close to their child’s remains.

I felt like saying to him, “We don’t have the strength to weep over an unknown girl. How stupid of me. We have so few tears left, señor. Don’t expect compassion from us. We still have a lot to weep over.”

“
Papa!
” It was more than I could bear, and I shouted his name out loud. Alarmed, Hortensia came bustling in. Behind her, Gustavo began to yell.

I ran up to my room and shut myself in. I tried to comfort myself by
thinking of Leo but avoided imagining him in Paris. I had no idea what his fate had been! Only the Leo I had known, the one I had run with along the streets of Berlin and the decks of the
St. Louis
, could be of any help to me at that moment.