Читать книгу Speaking Like An Immigrant - Mariana Romo-Carmona - Страница 5

Every city must have a river, a river like this, with cemented banks and bridges aglow by the street lights… dirty brown waters that don’t look so brown when the city is in full bloom. But, look! Now it’s a live Stieglitz in the rain. People with umbrellas walking on the sidewalks. In the Spring the scene is a Van Gogh, craft fairs, art exhibits, flowers, balloons, bright colors sliding from one brush stroke to the other… look down, now. See the waifs, the hoodlums. La clocharde de Cort·zar inhabits the banks wrapped in newspapers, an eternal picnic, sordid little fires, heating tea in a can… Marisa shook her head, shook her visions off, shook the water off that had pillowed in her hair as she stood by the river in the rain. She walked toward the diminutive cafe that looked steamy and warm in the late afternoon. Inside, she used her scarf to soak up the rest of the water from her hair. She placed her hands on the cold surface of the marble. With a still damp finger she traced the green swirls on the little table, looking up as if in a dream to the face of the older woman, to ask, “té con leche, por favor, y unos mantecados.”

She felt frail since being released from the jail that wasn’t a jail, from the arrest that was never an arrest, and surviving the experience she must never mention again. Miraculous. Her release was miraculous, owing to friends she didn’t know she had, her survival and everything that surrounded her now, like new life in a new body, although vulnerable, and unused to the new curtness of people under curfew.

The woman returned with a generous cup of steaming tea and a plate with three round mantecados, freshly baked. Marisa always put a whole one in her mouth. The thick shortbread pastry dusted in powdered sugar filled her mouth, and it was a test each time to conquer its sweet dryness without letting on that it might be too big a mouthful. It was a childhood habit of taking that deliberate walk to the mysterious shop near the school to buy one mantecado. It meant squeezing through the wrought iron gates of the school

with the younger girls, the steady formations of little girls in white dusters over their uniforms, with only a few extra minutes to buy the pastry, to run back to the bus, meeting the girls from her own grade, and to sit, triumphantly, with a mouthful bursting with powdered sugar, reaching for the crumpled hankie in her pocket, catching the inevitable cloud of laughter and sugar.

Marisa reached for the paper napkin and wiped her mouth. Outside, the rain had stopped and the steady stream of umbrellas began to close their inverted petals, revealing their pedestrian stems. Marisa allowed one more reverie. She stood at the gates of the school on a rainy afternoon. Sixty fourth graders surrounded her in neat files of five abreast. The gates opened and Marisa gasped. Around the stone steps, the parents had gathered in the most colorful array of open umbrellas, a semi–circle of flowers, striped and swirled patterns, enhanced by the rain on them. The girls swarmed around Marisa who awoke from her dream and took one last sip of tea.

On a plate by her cup remained two mantecados. There was something upsetting about eating more than one, more than one gobbled–up–one on the bus, on the way home from school when you’re nine–years–old.

Raquel

Raquel rose late on Sunday. Having slept badly, she received the repetitive winter morning with resentful, tired eyes. At work at the embassy’s kitchen the day before, she’d found out Marisa was alive. For eight months, she had mourned Marisa, based on the rumors around the embassy that the piano teacher had been arrested, tortured, and found floating in the river. At first, retaining in her mind the image of her unlikely friend, the piano teacher, with a whisper of a voice as she sang the scales with her pupils, the spoiled children of the consul, Raquel had refused to believe it. Until one day, like all the other disappearances in her neighborhood where people grew to accept them, Raquel accepted that Marisa was gone. No mourning anymore. Merely empty space in her gut.

When she saw the small Marisa, her dark hair in a braid draped over her shoulder, Raquel knew it was one of those things one keeps quiet, that this is how it’s done in one’s small, remote country. One does not react. She was sitting alone on the piano bench, then rising to kiss her good night on Christmas Eve, and timidly slipping the silky green package into her hands, she said, “For you, Raquel, open it after midnight.” Marisa was alive, and she still knew nothing about her.

Raquel wiped the steam from the kitchen window and gazed outside, where her little sister played with her kittens. Unable to forget her dreams, mysteriously suggestive dreams about Marisa, she closed her eyes. Raquel had turned over and over in her narrow bed in miserable wakefulness, but images invaded her tired body, more like threads of visions: scenes of a room furnished in dark wood appeared before her. She dreamed she waited with many people, young people, women like herself, in this room that looked like the embassy. Marisa sat before a dressing table. The milicos waited outside the door, pounding their rifle butts on the heavy wooden door– “Tell that slut to hurry in there!” they yelled, and the other young women looked on avidly, while Marisa pulled jewels and silky things out of the drawers, pulling them off her own body, and handing them out, one by one.

Raquel turned over restlessly, half awake, half asleep, apprehensive, protective of Marisa, yet in curious alliance with the other women. Wearing a satin bodice, Marisa sat on a brocade stool. Light green satin, tightly fitting her body. She found a yellow pendant and handed it to a young girl who took it hungrily. Marisa’s face remained impassive, her skin pale, chiseled out of a cold light. “More!” yelled the women, and Marisa pulled lace from curtains, from her own garment. Satisfaction. Apprehension. With a kind of adoring hatred, an expectancy that bordered on desire, Raquel looked at the lace ripping, revealing more of Marisa’s flesh around her tightly bound breasts. The pounding of the milicos, the greedy clamoring of the women, the rain tapping loudly on the windows… Raquel woke and remained cold, sitting up in her bed for a long time, trying to understand her dream.

Now she brewed tea mechanically. She imagined herself to be part of a black and white movie that contained a pot of steaming brown tea. She stood in the cold kitchen balancing her weight on the sides of her feet, not wanting to touch the cold tile floor. Warming one hand on the sides of the tea pot, she reached with the other into the pocket of her robe. Marisa’s gift to her was there, the yellow topaz set in silver. The screams of her sister Beatriz out in the yard brought her quickly to the window.

Beatriz and a neighbor girl were coaxing two black kittens to board a makeshift boat floating in a puddle of rain water.

“Beatriz!” Raquel called her sister, “come over here, please!”

Beatriz looked up from her game. “Do I have to?” The two girls looked at each other in distress. “Hold these guys, Rosita, I’ll be right back!” Forcing herself to look serious, Beatriz ran to the kitchen window, where Raquel expected her.

“Beatriz, what are you doing to those poor animals?”

“They wanted to go for a ride,” answered the girl.

“But cats hate the water, silly! Let them go,” said Raquel.

Beatriz offered a dazzling smile, mirroring her sister’s wide mouth, her high cheekbones, her shining black eyes: “That’s why we put them on the boat, Raquel!”

She turned swiftly, wasting no time to get back to the kittens. Returning to her pot of tea, Raquel told herself she must be appreciative of the willfulness of the young,her sister and her friends, the boys in the neighborhood, for who else would live through this dictatorship, and flourish in the end?

Presentiment

She broke her fall on the tile floor with both hands, palms outstretched, and took the kicks to the kidneys in silence, lips tightening in panicked determination … checking, painfully lifting hems to apply cool fingertips to bruises, cigarette burns… her lower lip lapping tears, a runny nose and the thinner, saltier, blood … confirming in whisper that the woman next to her was also raped with electrodes (don’t let them know you suspect what they might do, they cut me, the bastards), she spit out the words, a warning to Marisa, offering moist tea bags to soothe the burned skin, while waiting, waiting, knees turned to dough and still waiting. Marisa shook her hair away from her face, her hand was captured again by Don Jorge, his kind eyes attempting to penetrate her own, murmuring concern. She pressed her face against his chest, pushing the memories, why now? She could postpone the feeling of warmth her employer offered in the large room between the piano and the fireplace. She should close her eyes just like this and detach herself from his touch to be there, in that other place, remember everything over again, and feel nothing, nothing. Or she could open her eyes and be in her bed, absorb herself in the embrace of this kind man who had saved her life, in tracing kiss by kiss the surface of his face, ignore the shock of intimacy as she would ignore the memories of that other place, and follow the feeling of her body being caressed without actually being there.

How did it happen? Did she sit too long by the piano after Raquel left, touching the keys lightly and knowing she had waited only for her to come, the notes reverberating against the vaulted ceiling, crying a little, perhaps, because she was so happy that Raquel knew? Was it when Jorge spoke her name in a question, the precise intonation, that her battered body turned, her face open to him, so glad to be alive. But then came his caress, his gentle kiss, her soft words wanting to end the mistaken preamble.

Released again from her thoughts, Marisa in turn released her hold of time and lay unmoving on her bed. Outside, the newspaper bundles hit the sidewalk, the metal doors rolled up and businesses came alive. In the distance, she thought she heard the purring of Jorge’s gray Chrysler, but that could have been hours ago, when her eyes registered everything that happened to her in black and white, when she lifted her hands to her face again and felt it, wet with tears, and she heard her voice, very steady, sending Don Jorge away. With the comfort of the noise outside her window, and the light streaming in, Marisa slept.

Fate

At the end of August the weather breaks. In the Plaza, magnolias burst open and birds sing in desperation, claiming a branch or the eaves under the round band shelter for themselves. But there is no band. Old people are prohibited from feeding the pigeons because they will interfere with the general’s parade. Children cannot be allowed to run, and dogs are out of the question. Mothers must perch a small tricolored flag on baby carriages. Preparations for September’s festivities, the once raucous celebration of independence, are now carried out with unnatural order and decorum.

Braving the curfew, Marisa huddles in a doorway. She doesn’t know where she is, exactly. The neighborhood is not familiar to her. But this is the bus route that Raquel always took when she left her job at the embassy, it has to be the way. As light fades, the scent of eucalyptus grows stronger, and Marisa tries to take hold of her own steps, to root herself somewhere. Can she ever again trust a body that doesn’t belong to her? She runs another block, deeper into the neighborhood where she sees lights, and vegetable gardens surrounded by cement walls painted pink.

An owl hoots, a human owl, giving the signal that there’s an unknown pedestrian in the neighborhood. Teenaged boys run to peek out of doorways, to slide carefully along the sidewalk from doorway to doorway. Raquel joins the search as she hears the second owl hoot, indicating the stranger is friendly and unarmed. At the corner she sees the boys surrounding Marisa. She knows it’s Marisa, her heart pounds out her name. The boys push the newcomer toward safety, toward any open door, and Raquel reaches for Marisa, taking possession of her body in this embrace, pulling her into the sanctuary of the darkened garden, murmuring thanks and blessings. The boys scatter, laughing nervously. The owl hoots three times.

(1978)