Читать книгу The Three of U.S.: A New Life in New York - Peter Godwin - Страница 29

After consulting our battalion of liveried doormen, we have finally hired a cleaner. She is a short, hefty, middle-aged woman with brightly hennaed hair, called Margarita. Her work uniform is an appliqué T-shirt, black leggings, Nikes and dayglo pink rubber gloves. She arrives with another maid to negotiate her fee.

‘Eighty dollars,’ states her colleague baldly. ‘That is the rate.’

This seems a little steep to me. In London we paid our cleaner £30. Given that Margarita says it will take three hours to clean our apartment here, $80 works out at nearly $27 an hour. The minimum wage in this country is $5.45 an hour, so we will be paying her almost five times that.

‘Sixty dollars?’ I suggest. ‘That’s twenty dollars an hour – a good wage,’ I say hopefully. I am a terrible negotiator, the thrills of shopping at the souk are not for me.

But Margarita will not budge. There is to be no negotiation. The two women stand there arms folded over their bosoms regarding me sternly and I cave in. It’s a deal. As they leave, Margarita’s colleague informs me that laundry will be extra.

Margarita comes from Ecuador and though she has been in the United States for twelve years, she speaks no English. Well, that’s not entirely fair. She speaks three words of English: ‘No thank you.’ She deploys this phrase in differing intonations, depending on the situation.

‘Margarita, can you clean the windows?’ I ask her, miming cleaning the grimy windows. ‘No thank you! No thank you, Mr Peter!’ she bellows back, nodding vigorously and smiling broadly so that her gold tooth winks in what little light has made it through the panes.

When I introduce Margarita to our stock of household cleaning materials and equipment – all the usual fluids and unguents and sprays, and my newly purchased vacuum cleaner – her brow knits in disapproval and she scowls. ‘No thank you, Mr Peter!’ she says firmly, and this time she means just that. I am mildly offended. I went to some trouble choosing the vacuum and it seems perfectly adequate.

‘Look,’ I appeal to her, ‘it is the latest Panasonic, the Jet Flo 170. It’s got 170, um 170 suck power, or something.’ But she is not impressed.

Today Margarita arrives with her own preferred condiments of cleaning, evidently chosen with the loving care of a commando’s specialized weaponry, and her own vacuum, all loaded on to a shopping trolley pushed by her taciturn teenage son.

‘This,’ he says, translating his mother’s Spanish, ‘this, my mother says, is a real vacuum.’

It doesn’t look like much, an ancient beige drum vacuum, its grubby plastic casing bound with masking tape. Margarita fires it up and sweeps the nozzle along the floor, where it immediately sucks most of a small kilim into its mighty vortex, and its tone changes to a strangled high-pitched scream. She rattles off another Spanish command and her son says to me, ‘Go on, pull it. Pull the rug.’ I grab hold of the kilim and tug it. Margarita takes up a wrestling stance and holds the vacuum pipe in both hands. We tussle this way and that for a while, but I am quite unable to dislodge the kilim until she switches off the power and I finally stagger backwards, kilim in hand.

‘That’s a hell of a vacuum,’ I am forced to concede.

‘No thank you, Mr Peter,’ says Margarita graciously and smiles a victory smile garnished with another flash of gold tooth.