Читать книгу The Risk of Returning, Second Edition - Shirley Nelson - Страница 16

On Wednesday afternoon of that third week, Catherine suggested we stroll in the back garden during our plática, our informal chit-chat. We were alone, walking slowly side by side on the paths. So far, I’d had only a glimpse of the back garden. It was charming, with beds of flowers and paths laid out among evergreens and palmettos, an overgrown Eden. Behind a fence made of a prickly woven vine I could see green blades of corn, a small milpa in the middle of the city. From this point we could look down over the town, and beyond that to Volcán de Agua in its massive rise, gray green this time of day.

“Dígame lo que está pensando,” said Catherine, inviting me to present a topic for discussion. I stalled. I was reluctant to talk about the Ávilas again, but my head was full of what had transpired at another noon meal. This time it was today’s, just a while ago, and I hadn’t had a chance to write it out. I decided to wing it. Here is what happened and how I tried to tell it to Catherine.

In the absence of Doña Rosa, who was at a birthday luncheon, Juanita was left in charge of serving the food during her noon break from school. Don Francisco had already eaten and gone back to his store, so only Marco was at the table. He was passing me a plate of cold cuts, asking which I preferred, “cat or dog,” when Juanita flounced in from the kitchen, muttering, her ponytail bobbing.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Ella es imposible!” she said, pointing through the door, where I could see the maid cutting up a melon with a big knife. Her facility with the knife was awesome, but Juanita whirled back into the kitchen, saying, “No, no, no! Que te dije? Stop!”

She began scolding the girl so blatantly I wondered if I should intervene. Then it occurred to me it might be more histrionics for the sake of the gringo, with the servant in on the joke. But the acting was too good. Finally, Juanita came back to the table and plopped into a chair. “I don’t know is she stupid or maliciosa!”

“What on earth did she do wrong?” I asked.

“I keep telling her to wash the fruit first, you know, with the kill germs stuff, before she cuts it up. She never remembers. She’s going to make us all sick.”

“Sick? Ay, ay, ay,” gasped Marco, grabbing himself by the throat.

“Aren’t you being too rough on her?” I asked Juanita.

She screwed up her face. “What? Ruff? —Oh. No, no. I must make her listen. It is my job. My mother and I, it is something we do,” she said, twisting a corner of the tablecloth. “My mother is very, you know, modern. We train indio girls as muchacha...de servicio. Criadas. Maids, you know? It is their only chance to—.” She searched for a word. “You know, to get out of her village. Otherwise she will just start having babies.”

I was pretty sure this was not how her mother would have put it. “But must she be a maid?” I asked. “Can’t she learn another trade?”

“She has no education,” she said, in a loud whisper. “She doesn’t even speak Spanish.”

“Why don’t you teach her?”

“We are trying. But she is tonta. The dumbest one yet. And she smells.”

Whoa there! I considered saying that I liked the way she smelled—smoke, tortillas, dogs. I glanced out to the kitchen, wondering still if the girl was a party to a set-up. I couldn’t see her face. Only yesterday I’d heard Juanita chatting with her, both of them laughing. “Are you pulling my leg?” I asked, in English.

“What? No, no!” She was flustered. “What are you thinking? This is not—this is serious!”

“Serious? Oh, no, no,” moaned Marco, falling to the floor in a spasm.

“And she gets a look in her eye when I talk to her,” Juanita said. “Like she is putting a spell on me. She is not real Catholic, you know.”

“Heavens to Betsy!”

“No dobla la rodilla.“

“Qué?”

She genuflected with a little bob. “The other indigenas made, you know, la señal de la cruz. This one, she never crosses herself. She walks right by our crucifijos without even looking. She wears something around her neck, do you see that? To protect from witchcraft. They believe it, you know. Brujería, mal de ojo. Evil eye.”

At that, Marco escalated his poisoned act to dramatic heights, gargling in his throat as he went into a convulsion. I glanced out to the kitchen again, but all I could see was the girl’s solid back in its huipil as she stood at the stove. For a second I was taken visually by the dazzle of colors in that woven blouse. I saw nothing on her neck except a zigzag of lightning around the opening.

“My guess is she’s a little afraid of you,” I said to Juanita.

“That’s loco. We should be afraid of her.” She looked at her watch. “I must go. Do not eat the melon.” She gave Marco’s limp body a little kick as she left the room.

That was it. When I was done, Catherine said nothing. We just walked, following the paths in the garden.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked.

“Su reacción.”

My reaction? I was feeling deeply the need for her reaction, a little teacherly encouragement, maybe even praise, but I answered. “It was too literal, I think. I need more idioms.”

“I mean your reaction to what took place,” she said. “How did you feel?”

I looked up the word “bemused” and put it into a sentence. Aturdido. To that, she gave a barely audible snort. I cleared my throat. “The student would like the evaluation of the teacher.”

She stopped in the path. “Wait a second. You tell that story and all you’re thinking about is how well you told it?”

“Of course not. But that’s sort of what I’m here for, right?”

“And you really don’t have anything more to say?”

Why should that surprise me? She wanted me to talk. “This is a language exercise, isn’t it?” I said.

“Actually, no,” she answered. “At the moment I can’t think of anything less important than how you speak Spanish.”

She said that in English. Until now I had been struggling—heroically, I thought—with Spanish. I took the liberty and abandoned it. “I bet there’s a message for me in there,” I said. I tried to read her face, but she was staring at the ground. “Why don’t you actually tell me what’s on your mind?” I asked.

“All right.” She looked up. “Juanita Ávila Espinosa is becoming a dangerous person.”

“Ooh. That seems like an overstatement.”

“On the contrary, it’s an understatement.”

“You’re talking about a kid. She acted very badly, but she’s just a kid, with her own problems.”

“I didn’t say it was her fault.”

“Something in the water?”

“In the blood. Ladino ceguera.”

“I don’t know the term.”

“Blindness.”

“Qué?”

“Cultural mindset. Isn’t that obvious?”

“It sounds like a stereotype to me.”

“Shoe on the wrong foot,” she said.

We had stopped in the middle of the path, like two cars just out of gas, and that was how I felt. The mid-afternoon sun was bright and the breeze had died down. My throat was dry and I wanted a drink, anything wet. But Catherine abruptly sat down on a bench and I joined her. We were under a tree, at least, a macadamia, I thought. I peered up into its spiny leaves and let my senses sink into the teeming little society around me, insects, butterflies, birds. A jay on a branch, two shades of heartbreaking blue, warned the world of our presence.

“Look,” I said to the bird. “I didn’t know this would be so inflammatory, this story. It was fresh on my mind and I wanted to see if I could tell it.”

“So you don’t think it’s important?” Catherine said.

I was wondering if she, too, had been clued in on a joke, a drama of the absurd, all for me. I held up my hands to the bird. “Are you in earnest?”

“Certainly,” she said.

The bird flew away. I looked at Catherine. No teasing smile. “Well then, really,” I said, “aren’t you overreacting?”

“Oh, overreacting, overstating! That’s so typical. The North American male academic, reasonable and distanced.”

“That’s not a bit nice,” I said, hoping it only half-masked my irritation. We sat in hot, uncomfortable silence while I thumbed through my dictionary, as if looking for a word that could rescue the moment. “Why don’t we go back to the patio and get a drink.” It seemed to me a kind and cordial suggestion. I stood.

“Chill out the fervor with a drink?” Catherine said.

“The fervor does seem out of place.”

“Fervor often does.”

A cloud of insects circled in on me. I batted my hat at them, turning my back to her. It occurred to me to keep on going, walk away, but instead I turned around. Catherine had also stood, behind me. I almost knocked into her, but she held her ground. “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” I said. “But I’m not some racist Yankee lunkhead.”

—Dear God, reel that one back in. Too late. She crowed. “Oh, yeah? Well, whoopdefuckindoo!”

I did walk away then, mostly because I’d embarrassed myself. I hadn’t gone four steps when she was directly in front of me, facing me and blocking the path. I was beyond exasperation. “What the hell is your problem?” I said.

“Tiny people is my problem, with their teeny, tiny agendas.” There was that self-important word, my own, from the first day. Doggone if she didn’t remember it. “Can’t see beyond their little miembro,” she said.

I dropped my dictionary in front of my crotch. Play the clown when all else fails. But that failed, too. If anything, her face was disdainful, cold. “Queen Jadis,” I muttered.

I said it more to myself than to her, but she heard me and shot back an answer. “Ah yes, the White Witch. What can I say? ‘Ours is a high and lonely destiny’.”

There we stood on the path, glaring at each other. She was glaring, that is, and I was staring. I was genuinely speechless. First because I’d insulted her outright, and second because she’d just quoted the White Witch herself, with what had been one of my favorite lines from the Chronicles of Narnia, a phony lament by users of evil magic: Sorry, just can’t help it, I’ve got this mystical power. It didn’t help to recall that Queen Jadis was seven feet tall and knock-down beautiful.

“We appear to be at an impasse,” I said.

“You give up easy.”

“I’ve been told that before. And right now I’m very thirsty.” I edged around her and continued up the path, but she passed me again and paced ahead, all the way to the inner courtyard. There we served ourselves from the glass jug of agua pura, gulping down repeated helpings in little paper cups, ignoring each other. At least it was cooler here. We were alone at this spot, though multiple voices drifted out from the peripheral rooms, where ceiling fans whirred. I let those sounds compose me while I watched the color fade on Catherine’s cheeks. I thought something should be said about acting like children. I ventured to do it, properly, in Spanish, but what the heck was the word for “childish”?

“I should apologize,” she said, beating me to it. “But.” She paused at length.

“But you don’t know what for,” I said. “That makes two of us.”

“I know what for, but.” She braked again. More silence. “We must stop this right now and get back to Spanish.”

But we didn’t. We seemed locked into English, albeit in near whispers, and I had no incentive to change that. We sat down across from each other at a nearby table, where she pulled a pad from her bag and began to write. “A few idioms,” she said. I watched her, empty of interest in any language lesson, agreeing in some deep organic space that my Spanish was the least important matter in the entire world. Her fingers were long and she held the pen oddly, like chopsticks. Her nails were badly bitten. I suppose I had noticed that before, but it hadn’t seemed significant. I wanted to offer her something, a puff on a peace pipe. “I’ll make a deal with you,” I said. “Un negocio?”

“The proper expression is un trato,” she said, without looking up.

“Puta. I’ll tell you something about my teeny, tiny agenda, and then you tell me something about yours.”

“Oh, jinkies,” she murmured, still writing.

“What happened to whoopdefuckindoo?”

She raised her head, this time with a real smile. Whammo, the sun, just for an instant.

“I’ll tell you anyway,” I said. “In English.”

She glanced around. A couple of tutor and pupil pairs had begun to pace the courtyard, passing by us back and forth as they talked. She handed me her notepad. “Write it.”

Write? That suggested something worthy of record. What on earth did I think I would tell her? She was waiting me out, her eyes on my hand, poised with the pen. I printed: I’m here to find my father’s grave. I looked at my own words. True or not, what else could I say? If it exists, I added.

I returned the pad to Catherine. She read what I’d written, looked up at me quizzically, read it again, then scribbled an answer. I watched it go down in a big loopy handwriting, surprisingly girlish. Along with thousands of other people around here. I wish you luck. Along the margin she scrawled, How did your father die?

The bug, I wrote, my mother’s term to the childhood me, and I knew what she meant. In my eyes now it registered as a second class death, a sort of bad joke. Dysentery, I added.

Catherine nodded and flipped to a clean page. How old were you?

Seven.

She studied my face again, a long time, as if searching for the child. “Egg?” I asked, swiping my beard.

“Your parents,” she whispered. “They were missionaries, right?”

“Huh? Wild guess!”

Had I let something out, absent-mindedly? Bits of Scripture clung to my brain like pocket lint, left over from years of Sunday School and church, and sometimes they slipped into conversations, like “a burning bush” and “through a glass darkly.” Those were common parlance, of course. There were others, like “purge me with hyssop,” and “the widow’s cruse of oil”—and “Balaam’s ass,” a great story, good for a Sunday School giggle. But I certainly hadn’t ever mentioned Balaam’s ass to Catherine, or hyssop either, whatever the heck that was.

“All right,” I said. “I’m an MK.”

“What?”

“Missionary kid. But how did you know?”

“Just a guess. Something about you, I think.” Teasing smile. “Maybe it’s because you don’t swear.”

“Swear? I do so. —Buggers! There!”

“Hush!”

I grabbed the pad. “What do you want, blasphemy, scatology, or minced oaths?” I began printing. Fuck! Shit! Caca! Goddamit! Christ Almighty! It turned out to be a pathetically short list. I added a few from Shakespeare, gadzooks and bodkins. Catherine took over the pad and wrote vete al carajo, chinga tu madre, hijos de los chingados, filling another page.

I got the drift. I was beginning to enjoy this junior high stuff, passing dirty notes across the aisle. Then she scribbled another question in her awful handwriting. What kind of missionaries were your parents?

Kind?

What did they do?

They were teachers, I think.

Where?

In Mam territory.

You spoke Mam then as well as Spanish?

I suppose so. I don’t remember more than a word or two.

So what would you call your first language?

I don’t think there was a first. My parents spoke Swedish, too.

They were Swedish?

Second generation American.

Why haven’t you mentioned any of this before?

I guard my privacy. It’s a Swedish trait. I flipped to a clean page and handed the pad to her with ceremony. “Your turn,” I said. “Give me some facts, names, dates.”

This time she printed neatly:

BORN: Wisconsin, 1949

EDUCATION: Emory University

MARRIED: Martin Rodriguez Calderon, 1970

SON: Alex, born 1971

OCCUPATION: Read Narnia series to son. There. Are we even?

Not really. You still know more about me than I do about you.

That’s because I’m the teacher, silly.

How do you say touché?

Te caché.

Te? Isn’t that a form of the highly familiar pronoun tú?

Oh, sure enough. My mistake.

She tore the pages off the pad, balled them up and tossed them into a nearby wastebasket. So much for the story of my life, and hers, as well. She left then and I fished them out, those scribbled pages, smoothed them and saved them in the back of my canary pad. They became part of the journal, which I continued to keep in the days ahead.