Читать книгу A Thousand Forests in One Acorn - Valerie Miles - Страница 12

A THOUSAND FORESTS

FROM LAS PRIMAS

(THE COUSINS)

[A NOVEL]

A disabled childhood

My mom carried a pointer when she taught and wore a white dustcoat and she was very strict but she was a good teacher in a suburban school for not the brightest kids from middle class families on downward. The best one was the grocer’s son Ruben Fiorlandi. My mom rapped the ones that acted up on their heads and sent them to the corner wearing the colored cardboard donkey ears. The misbehavior was rarely repeated. In my mom’s opinion a little blood makes any lesson stick. The third graders called her the third grade miss but she was married to my father who left her and never performed the obligations of a pater familiae. She worked as a teacher in the mornings and came home at two in the afternoon where dinner would be waiting because our small dark housemaid Rufina did the cooking. I was sick of stew every day. A chicken coop clucked behind the house and in the yard squash sprouted miraculously and unruly golden sunflowers stretched from the earth to the heavens next to violets and stunted roses that gave that miserable heap its perfume and that’s how we ate.

I never admitted that I learned to read time when I was twenty. That confession embarrasses and surprises me. It embarrasses and surprises me for reasons that you’ll find out later and lots of questions come to mind. One I remember especially: What time is it? Honest truth I couldn’t tell time and clocks frightened me just like the sound of my sister’s wheelchair.

She was even more of an idiot than me but she could read the face of a clock even though she couldn’t read a book. We weren’t typical, never mind normal.

Vroom . . . vroom . . . vroom . . . murmured Betina my sister wheeling her misfortune around the garden and the stone courtyards. The vroom was usually wet with the idiot’s drool. Poor Betina. Freak of nature. Poor me, another freak, and my mom weighed down by abandonment and by monsters even more so.

But everything in this awful world passes. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to dwell too much on anything or anyone.

Sometimes I think we’re a dream or a nightmare relived day after day that at any second will stop that won’t appear on the screen of the soul to torture us any more.

Betina suffers from a mental disorder

That was the psychologist’s diagnosis. I don’t know if that’s all it was. My sister had a crooked spine, from behind in her chair she looked like a tiny hunchback with puny legs and massive arms. The old lady who came to darn the socks said that someone had done something to my mom during her pregnancies, the worst during the one with Betina.

I asked the unibrowed mustachioed lady psychologist what a mental disorder was.

She said it was related to the soul but that I wouldn’t understand till I was older. But I supposed that the soul was something like a white sheet inside the body and that when it got stained people became idiots, Betina a lot and me a little.

I started noticing when Betina wheeled around the table with her vroom that she was dragging a little tail that stuck out through the back of the wheelchair seat and I told myself it had to be her soul coming untucked.

When I asked the psychologist this time if the soul had anything to do with being alive she said it did and even added that when it was missing people died and the soul went to heaven if it had been good and to hell if it had been bad.

Vroom . . . vroom . . . vroom her soul dragged more and had more gray stains every day and I decided that it wouldn’t be long before it fell out and Betina would be dead which didn’t matter to me because she made me sick.

When it was time to eat, I had to feed my sister and on purpose I’d mistake the orifice and I’d put the spoon in her eye, in her ear, in her nose, before finally her cakehole. Ah . . . ah . . . ah . . . moaned the filthy creature.

I would grab her hair and put her face in her food and then she’d be quiet. Why did I have to pay for my parents’ mistakes? I thought about stepping on the tail of her soul. The thing about hell stopped me.

Reading the catechism had burned the “thou shalt not kill” into me. But with every little bump today and again tomorrow, the tail grew and no one else saw. Only I did and I rejoiced.

The institutes for different students

I wheeled Betina to hers. Then I walked to the one for me. Betina’s institute was for treating very serious cases. The pig-boy, puffy-faced, thick-lipped, and pointy-eared. He ate from a gold plate and drank his soup from a gold cup. He held the cup in his stubby cloven hooves and made a sound like a gush of water down a well and when he ate solids his jaw and ears moved and he couldn’t chew with his canines, which jutted out like a wild boar. Once he looked at me. His tiny black beady eyes swimming in a pool of grease wouldn’t look away and I stuck my tongue out and he roared and threw his dish. The attendants came and to control him they had to tie him up like an animal, which is what he was.

While I waited for Betina’s class to end I’d wander around the corridors of that coven. I saw a priest come in followed by an acolyte. Someone had dropped their sheet, their soul. The priest was sprinkling water and saying if you have a soul may God receive you in his bosom.

Who or what was he talking to?

I got close and saw an important family from Adrogué. On a table there was a silk cloth and a cannelloni. If it hadn’t been a cannelloni but something that a human womb had expelled the priest wouldn’t have done a christening.

I asked a nurse who told me that every year a prominent family brought a cannelloni to baptize. That the doctor had urged them not to have any more children because it wasn’t working. And that they’d said that because they were very Catholic they had to keep procreating. Even with my disability I could tell this was a nauseating situation but I couldn’t say so. That night I was too sick to eat.

And my sister’s soul got longer all the time. I was glad my dad had gone.

The development

Betina was eleven and I was twelve. Rufina said it’s the age they’ll start developing and I pictured something from inside coming out of me and I prayed to Santa Theresa that it wouldn’t be cannelloni. I asked the psychologist if she thought I was developing and with a red face she suggested I ask my mom.

My mom got red in the face too and said that at a certain age girls stopped being girls and became young ladies. That was all she said and I was left in suspense.

I already said that I attended a handicapped school, less handicapped than Betina’s. One girl said that she was developing. I couldn’t tell any difference. She said that when it happens blood comes out between your legs for several days and that you don’t have to take a bath and that you have to use a rag so your clothes don’t get stained and be careful around boys so you don’t end up pregnant.

That night I felt the place she’d said and couldn’t sleep. But it wasn’t damp so I could still talk to boys. When I was developed I’d never even look at a single boy if I didn’t want to get pregnant and have a cannelloni or something like it.

Betina talked or blabbered and everyone understood. So it happened that one night during a family gathering that because of our manners they didn’t let us come to, we ate alone and my sister started squawking like a trombone: Mamá I’m bleeding from my cookie! We were in the next room over from the dinner. A grandmother and two cousins came in.

I told my cousins to stay away from the blood because they could end up pregnant.

Everyone left in a huff and my mom gave us both the pointer.

At the institute I told them that Betina was developed even though she was younger than me. The teacher stopped me. The classroom is no place for immoral talk like that and she covered me with moral and civic lessons. Everyone in the class was suddenly worried especially the girls who every so often felt for any possible dampness.

Just in case I stopped talking to the boys.

Margarita came in radiant one afternoon and said “it came” and we knew what she meant.

My sister left school in third grade. There wasn’t any point. Actually for either of us there wasn’t any point and I left in sixth grade. I did learn to read and write, but with terrible spelling, everything without an H because if you didn’t pronounce it what was the point?

The psychologist said I had dyslexia. But she suggested I’d improve with practice and she forced me to do tongue twisters like María Chusena her shack she was thatching when along comes a thatcher who asks Miss Chusena your shack are you thatching or stocking the shacks dear my shack I’m not thatching nor shacks am I stocking only thatching the shack for María Chusena.

My mom watched me and when I couldn’t untwist it she’d hit me over the head with the pointer. The psychologist made sure my mom wasn’t there for María Chusena and I untwisted better because if my mom was there when I tried to finish María Chusena I’d make a mistake in my rush to avoid the pointer.

Betina wheeled around, vroom, opened her mouth and pointed into it because she was hungry.

I didn’t want to eat at the table with Betina. It made me sick. She drank her soup straight from the dish without a spoon and scooped up the solids with her hands. She cried if I insisted on feeding her by putting the spoon in every orifice on her face.

They bought Betina a high chair with a tray attached and a hole in the seat to piss and defecate through. She’d get the urge in the middle of the meal. The smell made me vomit. My mom told me not to act so delicate or she’d send me to the lunatic asylum. I knew what the lunatic asylum was and from then on I ate my meals perfumed by my sister’s feces and misted by her piss. When she farted I’d pinch her.

After dinner I’d go to the garden.

Rufina would disinfect Betina and sit her in her wheelchair. The idiot would nap with her head on her breast or breasts because now her clothes showed two very round and provocative bumps because she’d developed before me and even though she was a horror she was a young lady and from then Rufina had to change her rags every month and wash between her legs.

I took care of mine myself and I could tell that I was still skinny as a broomstick or like my mom’s pointer because my breasts weren’t growing. And like this the birthdays came and went, but I was taking a drawing and painting class and the teacher thought that I’d be an important visual artist because being half crazy I was drawing and painting like the extravagant visual artists of the day.

The art exhibition

The professor told me, Yuna—that’s what they call me—your paintings should be part of an exhibition. One of them might even sell.

I was so overcome with happiness that I threw my whole body on the professor and attached myself to him with all four feet and legs and we fell together.

The professor said that I was really pretty, that when I grew up we’d get engaged, and that he’d teach me the most beautiful things like drawing and painting but not to tell anyone our secret which actually was his secret and I guessed that he meant another more important exhibition so I grabbed him and kissed him again. And he kissed me too, a blue-colored kiss that affected me in places that I won’t name because it wouldn’t be proper and so I grabbed a big canvas and without drawing I painted two mouths in red joined together, inseparable, musical, and two blue eyes above them crying tears of glass. Still on his knees, the professor kissed the painting and he was still there when I went home.

I told my mom about the exposition and because she didn’t understand art she said that those shapeless blobs on my boards would make everyone at the fine art school laugh but if the professor wanted me to it didn’t make any difference to her.

Two of them sold when I showed my pieces with some from other students. Too bad that one of them was the kisses. The professor christened it First Love. Which seemed fine to me. But I didn’t completely understand the meaning.

Yuna is a prodigy the professor would say and I liked this so much that every time he said it I would stay after and throw myself on him. He never stopped me. But when my breasts came in he said not to jump on him because men are fire and women straw. I didn’t understand. I stopped jumping.

The diploma

So when I was seventeen I got my diploma in painting and drawing from the fine arts school, but because of my dyslexia I’d never be able to teach classes or private lessons. When I could buy boards I kept painting because the paints were a gift from the professor who’d often visit us.

Betina and her vroom chair circled the professor until he was dizzy but my mom never left me alone with him and once she slapped me maybe because she saw us kiss but on the cheek not on the mouth like the movie stars on screen.

I was afraid she’d keep the professor away. But she didn’t so long as we didn’t go around kissing because if the devil put his tail in it and the professor put some other part of his male anatomy in mine I’d end up pregnant and the professor would never marry a disabled student.

Betina wheeled around more than ever when the professor came for my private lessons and examined the boards and canvases piled up along the wall intended for the art exhibition in Buenos Aires.

One time it got late and my mom invited him to dinner which he accepted. I trembled thinking of the disgusting sounds and emanations coming from the pile known as Betina. But as the captain commands, the sailor obeys.

Rufina had cooked cannelloni. And on top of that I remembered the cannelloni from the lunatic asylum. I wanted to paint to calm down. I painted a board that no one else understood. A cannelloni with eyes and a hand blessing it. In mente I whispered: if you have a soul may God receive you in his bosom . . .

The dinner

Rufina set the embroidered tablecloth that my mom kept away and the nice plates that she kept too. Whenever she set the table like that her eyes would mist over because they were wedding gifts. It must’ve been the memories of when her marriage unraveled and my dad gone. It never hurt me because I didn’t love her.

Let her cry . . . my dad must have found someone better without a pointer. My dad must have had normal children not idiots like the ones she had and which were us.

In the middle of the table was a smart ceramic statuette of a pair of villagers embraced on a thicket under a willow. One day I’d paint what that scene made me feel because at seventeen every girl wants to be embraced in a thicket under a tree.

We ate on the fancy china because the everyday things were chipped and stained from use. The silverware was also the good ones that my mom was careful with because she said it was the set from her marriage. The crystal came out after several years away and looked like solid water. It didn’t seem like the same stew dressed up in such luxury.

There was even sweet wine. Not the other kind because there wasn’t money for it. In the water pitcher there was water, of course.

My mom sat down first at the head of the table and next to her the professor who arrived exactly on time and with candies.

Across from the professor, me, and next to me Betina.

My mom said first something to pick at. I wondered where she was keeping a pick and if that was some other kind of utensil we never saw it, but that wasn’t what it was but actually some plates of salami and cheese with tiny swords in them.

My mom said serve yourselves and she put wine in the adults’ glasses and water in mine and Betina’s and when the bell rang and in came Aunt Nené my mom said it was the surprise she had for us.

Rufina went back and forth busily. Now Aunt Nené helped her.

The main dish arrived delivered by the hands of Nené. The same chicken stew as always but in a silver dish and dressed up with the vegetables that Nené brought it seemed like an offering to a king.

And so the meal began, each one as best they could. My mom watched us without her pointer but I knew she had it within reach under the table.

Betina struck a visible and frightening note. Brutish resonant belches chased by my mom’s apologies that the poor thing at sixteen had the mental age of a four year old as a result of the disability according to the tests that they’d given her.

Aunt Nené concluded the melody with poor Clelia—that was my mom’s name—two retards for daughters, and immediately stuffed a piece of breast meat in her letterbox-red mouth.

The professor said I wasn’t retarded but a dreaming visual artist and that I was exhibiting paintings in Buenos Aires and that in the city I’d already sold two.

Aunt Nené

Aunt Nené painted too. She’d frame her canvases and hang them all over the walls of the house she lived in with her mother who was my grandmother and my mom’s mother. Two paintings signed “Nené” hung in our house, portraits of ladies with perfectly black eyes, like cows, and these big faces that frightened me. One had a mustache. Nené said she liked being a portraitist and she said it to the professor who asked her where she’d studied the art of manipulating oils and the rest, she confessed that she was an amateur, that she didn’t need anyone holding her hand because the pictures poured from her heart like water from a spring.

The professor didn’t respond. Nené looked at one of my boards and said the lines didn’t mean anything, that she didn’t like the new painters and that once she’d laughed at Pettoruti’s absurd cubism. The professor lurched and because he was looking at Nené’s painting it collapsed onto the floor.

Then Aunt Nené said that my squiggles might make sense to me, what with my cognitive deficiencies, but can we even know what the handicapped think and feel, she said in the form of a question.

The professor insisted that I was the best student at the fine arts school, that I’d graduated and was going to exhibit soon, and Aunt Nené asked what must the other students be like and the situation started to sour.

My mom added that my painting was kids’ stuff and it would soon pass.

The cow eyes Nené painted stared out at us from between the wood frame. Suddenly I said something that would earn me a few lashes later: It’s like a cow is staring at me wondering if I’m going to eat her because this painting is boring like a cow face and ugly like an ugly woman’s face.

Nené screeched like the monkey in the zoo and screamed how long was her sister going to put up with me and that it was about time they sent me to the loony bin.

The professor said his stomach hurt and please excuse him he had to go to the bathroom to vomit. I felt as happy as if they’d given me a prize at an exhibition.

Total silence until my mom told Nené that she’d overstepped and to remember that it made me feel good to paint those things on the boards and canvases that the professor gave me. Nené pounced like a wasp: can’t you see that man looking at the girl with bad intentions, she said in the form of a question and my mom scolded her for her dirty mind and added that she agreed that such big eyes couldn’t fit in any woman’s face unless she was a cow.

I sensed that my mom accepted me and I held back a tear that was at the point of crashing to the ground because it would’ve been the most giant tear I’d ever cried since I could mostly understand the basics of conversations between so-called normal people like my mom and Nené were. The professor came back from vomiting and started saying something that she interrupted immediately, which was the following:

Miss, he began and she said that she didn’t go by miss and he begged her pardon and added that a woman as pretty at her age could never be called miss and that he was sure her husband must be pleased to have a painter at his side and she informed him that she was separated because her ex’s ordinary habits bothered her. The cultured and educated professor couldn’t stop himself from saying that it seemed like no one in that house was ordinary.

My mom could tell that the spoiled dinner bothered everyone but Nené. She brought a tray and the champagne glasses. She’d kept the champagne to celebrate the fifteenth birthday of one of her daughters which were me and Betina but she hadn’t opened it knowing that it didn’t make sense when our mental age didn’t keep pace with the hours and the days.

We went back to the table. Betina snoring, asleep in her chair. So ugly, so horrible, how could there be someone so ugly and horrible, buffalo head, moldy rag stink. Poor thing . . .

A toast to peace, Nené said, feigning intellectuality. And then she told the story of how her failed marriage weighed on her because of the guilt she owed to her lack of sexual education and sometimes she missed Sancho, which was the name of her ex.

She sat waiting for a question but no one asked her one so turning red she told how she spent the first night with her ravenous husband chasing her around the house and the marriage wasn’t consummated and he left. It freaked him out.

She filled a second glass with champagne and her listeners’ ears with the clarification that she was a married virgin, neither miss nor mistress or anything else and that was the reason she’d taken shelter in the art of painting.

The way my Aunt Nené was

She lived glued to her mother’s skirts, who was my mom’s mother too and also my grandmother and Betina’s. Our grandmother’s skirts were like a priest’s habit and her shoes were like a man’s and she wore her hair in a black bun because she didn’t have any gray hair because her mother had been a native and the natives never went gray probably because they didn’t think. My mom didn’t have any gray hair just like grandmother but she did think.

Nené could play the guitar by ear and when she did she wore a white headband and she hated gringos. So many ideas spill out when I try to describe her, so many and so stupid but I have to remember I’m talking about a character.

She liked to go dating and would kiss boys nibbling on their lips, she had about eight hundred boyfriends but she kept her virginity to the point of fleeing her marriage bed from the court house and the white church.

In the early thirties an Italian carpenter fell for Nené. I remember what a good guy the carpenter was—tall, blonde, always scrubbed, and perfumed with scented water. He came courting to the door of grandmother’s house which because it was just a neighborhood house wasn’t much. But since no one in the family worked they had to get by with what Uncle Tito who worked in the papers sent them.

Aunt Nené let him kiss her however he wanted. But they didn’t go any further because if she ever got married she wanted to be in a virgin state, which I didn’t understand. By wearing a medallion of the Virgin I thought I’d be saved from anything very sinful you got from pregnancy. Maybe when she got married she’d have to take off the medallion so that the Virgin wouldn’t see her, I don’t know what kinds of things the Mother of God shouldn’t be seeing. My head was full of enormous troubles that I poured out onto the boards which was how I painted a very thin delicate neck from which hung a chain for the Virgin of Luján, and coming from the shadows that I created by rubbing my finger over thick black strokes a huge man like the Basque milkman who brought the milk and always complained “arrauia” or something like that and from his bulk poured liquids that drowned the delicate little neck and the Virgin wept. To simulate tears I painted red splashes of damage that pained the lily-white necked creature.

The Italian boyfriend finished the bedroom with good woods, the bed, and the night stands. Then he finished the furniture in the living room and other knickknacks required of a decent house. I knew because I listened at the door that Aunt Nené laughed at the gringo: does that wop think I’m going to marry him for his pasta? Once I told her: better pasta than drinking café con leche all day.

She told me I had to help her throw the Italian off and I answered that no, that wasn’t right, no. She told me that my dad who was another gringo abandoned my mom. I asked her why she wasn’t ashamed to be lying that way to a good man and she said that wop lowlifes weren’t men and that night she left for Chascomús where one of her brothers lived, my uncle and my mom’s brother.

I didn’t hear anything else about that situation but Nené spent a year away from her maternal home out of fear that she’d bump into the Italian but I was happy to find out that he’d been disillusioned with Nené and had contracted marriage with a Genovese and that the woman was already pregnant and I thought that she wouldn’t be able to keep wearing her medallion for the Virgin because of the contact with her husband that the Virgin wasn’t supposed to see.

Soon after that Aunt Nené took up with an Argentine boyfriend from Córdoba. I liked hearing the lilt of his talk and I painted something along those lines.

With this boyfriend they sang and she played the guitar while a friend brewed the mate. It didn’t last. This man didn’t build furniture or anything. One afternoon in June when it darkens early he pressed her against a wall and she screamed like a morning rooster and the watchman came around the corner and pulled off the scoundrel—he had to peel him off because he was stuck to my aunt—and took him prisoner to the station.

It was a brief and scandalous romance. I think there were others, but from a distance, until Don Sancho showed up and conquered her.

I loved Don Sancho the Spanish republican because he looked like Don Quixote de la Mancha.

I had a hardcover book with an image of the Knight of Rocinante the horse and Sancho Panza, but my aunt’s boyfriend didn’t have a paunch, he was skinny as a rail and so well-spoken that I wanted them to come to our house, both of them, for tea and the cakes that the boyfriend brought. But I wasn’t interested in the tea but in hearing the voice of Don Sancho. He told stories of his distant country which inspired me to paint and my ears overflowed with names of places like Paseo de la Infanta, Río Manzanares, and I imagined a girl in white holding a crown of flowers between her arms and the waters of the apple orchards loaded with dancing apples in the waves like the heads of cherubs which I painted.

Don Sancho gave me a fine porcelain doll that I was supposed to call Nené, the name of my aunt and his beloved girlfriend. My mom suggested that I was turning fourteen soon and that dolls wouldn’t suit me anymore. I put her on my bed and at night we embraced.

I understood that my fate hung over a sad cloudscape of melancholy rain when my mom launched my doll Nené while shaking out the bed sheets, shattering her charms and leaving me with a fever that took a long time to subside. I grew after that illness. Something ruptured inside me hurt. Pieces of porcelain from my doll Nené stuck to my liver and caused a nervous hepatitis and on top of that I learned to cry.

And I cried when Nené left her husband Don Sancho. One day I asked her why she didn’t fulfill her marriage vows. She answered that it wasn’t right to discuss intimate matters with me because since I was her niece I owed her some respect that there’d be time later on for spicy and dirty things.

I said that her sister, my other aunt, did spicy and revolting things with her husband and she told me to keep my mouth shut.

Translated by Steve Dolph