Borrowed Finery: A Memoir Page 8
In the latter part of the day, a breeze would spring up and rustle among palm fronds and grassy fields, blowing the temporary curls off of my forehead. I was always stirred by the cooling of the day.
When the weather changed and the heat intensified, torrents of rain fell for two or three hours every afternoon. The meetings with other children in the García kitchen continued. We listened to records played on a phonograph, songs and dances that were popular in Havana. One of us would wind the arm of the phonograph when the record ended.
During a rare hailstorm, I and my friends ran shrieking with excitement onto the cracked cement of a tennis court, unused for years ever since Tía Luisa’s son had grown too old to play the game.
I went home before dark. My supper awaited me on a tray in the kitchen. The servants were rushing about as they prepared dinner for Tía Luisa, Eli Ponvert, my grandmother, and themselves.
La Gallega stopped to pat my shoulder, and Emilio winked at me as they went about their tasks, Emilio carrying trays of covered platters on his way to the dining room, the seamstress on her feet, hastily mending a tear in a linen napkin. Later, I would go to my bedroom, tiptoeing along the hallway like a shadow.
I had begun to belong to the plantation but not to the people in the grand house—who had not, in any case, asked for me. It was in the evenings that I most missed the minister—and books.
* * *
I heard often from Uncle Elwood. But one time he didn’t write for weeks. When a black-bordered envelope arrived for me, I knew it contained the news of the death of his mother, Emily Corning.
* * *
One Sunday I went with my grandmother to the chapel. A visiting priest was holding a special mass to pray for the return of Tía Luisa’s health and sanity. It was extremely hot; the heat had a sound, the rustle of the palmetto fans with which people tried to cool their faces. We rose to recite the stations of the cross. I didn’t know the words so I muttered gibberish. Suddenly, I felt queasy and lightheaded.
The congregation, stupefied by heat and their own droning, didn’t notice that I had fainted in the aisle. When I came to, they were still praying, and I crawled to the chapel entrance. A man was passing on the road, pushing a wheelbarrow. He looked at me and said, “Get into my ambulance,” and I crawled into it. He took me to the wooden building where the plantation doctor had his office.
The doctor laughed as he lifted me out of the wheelbarrow. He was short and fat and elderly, a specialist, I had been told, in machete cuts and internal parasites. His small office smelled agreeably of cigar smoke. I rested on a couch while he scribbled at his desk. I must have fallen asleep. No one was in the office when I woke. I ran all the way home, got there in time for my lunch, and fed it to the monkeys.
* * *
My grandmother and I traveled to Cienfuegos, a port town on the Caribbean, just south of the plantation. We had an appointment with a doctor. In the kitchen, I had been complaining about pains in my stomach after Emilio found me feeding the monkeys. The news had reached my grandmother. It was the first time we’d been together in weeks, except at night when we were both sleeping. I asked her what she did for Tía Luisa.
She said she was her companion. I had seen that word in stories. One went on one’s travels with a companion. Later, I discovered she was paid for it, $200 a month, which continued for years, even after Tía Luisa was dead. I knew she was a kind of servant to the old woman. Everyone on the plantation was a servant, except Tía Luisa and her son.
The new doctor’s office was filled with instruments of which I could see he was proud. He began nearly every sentence with, “What we have here is a great advance in medical science, a fluoroscope”—or a special X-ray machine, or an implement to be used in surgery. I stood in front of the fluoroscope, a glass oyster-colored screen where he could peer at my innards. “Nervous indigestion,” he pronounced.
On the train returning to Santa Clara, the plantation’s district, my grandmother sighed and said my mother’s perpetual stomach troubles had begun with nervous indigestion. Ever since I had lived with her, I had heard about Elsie’s gut. I was instantly haunted as always by my grandmother’s stories—and her infrequent advice such as, “If you don’t dry between your toes after bathing, you’ll bring on an attack of appendicitis.” One of her stories from the time she lived on my grandfather’s plantation, Cienegita, was about a tapeworm excreted into a toilet by one of the maids. The tapeworm was wound around and around, filling up all the space. Every time she spoke of it, the worm lengthened.
A dwarf lived and worked in Olmiguero. When I first saw him, I thought he was a misshapen child. Upon closer inspection, I realized he was an elderly man. He was sweet-natured and amiable, and let us all touch the hump on his back as we said “Enano” for good luck.
* * *
One evening, a movie was shown in the Olmiguero community hall. I was sent to see it by my grandmother, accompanied by the same man who had taken me to the chapel to attend school. He was as silent as he had been that day. When we came to the hall, he left me at the entrance, muttering he would return to get me when the movie was over.
The interior was filled up with scissor-legged wooden chairs upon which were sitting what seemed like the entire population of Olmiguero, even the dwarf. There was an air of great expectation among people. Something rare, something out of the ordinary, was about to happen.
Words suddenly appeared on a screen: THE WAY OF ALL FLESH. I looked back at the ray of dusty lunar light that threw the image above our heads to the screen. The star of the movie was Emil Jannings.
The story begins. It is Christmas. A happy family circles a decorated tree. They live in a small happy town. The father is sent to the big city by his company. The first night, he goes into a bar, orders a nonalcoholic drink. A powerful drug is slipped into his glass. He passes out, comes to, finds himself lying across railroad tracks. A corpse lies a few feet away. He’s killed a man! What horror! A shattered creature, he staggers up a bank. Every neon sign turns into MURDERER! or KILLER! Years pass. His circumstances are so reduced, he is forced to gather trash in a public park. His beard is long and white.
It is winter again. He makes his way on foot to the little town, finds the house he once lived in, looks through a frosty window at his family, gathered for another Christmas. His children are now grown up, although his wife hasn’t aged at all.
I was struck down by the movie, so overcome with sorrow at the old man’s plight, I sobbed all the way to the house. I couldn’t spare a glance at the man who accompanied me, keeping his distance across the road, and whom I’d found waiting for me outside the hall, hunched over, looking down at the ground.
* * *
One afternoon after the rainy season, I was on my way to Señora García’s house. I was surprised to see cane cutters gathered in groups on the dirt road, agitated, angry, some of them gesturing with clenched hands at the sky.
That day, Señora García was not her usual welcoming self. Her husband was home, a tall thin man in a suit with a thatch of gray hair over a stern face. By then I knew he worked in the plantation’s administration office.
There were no children in the kitchen; the tin tub was resting on its side in a corner. I was bewildered and apprehensive. Señora García glanced at me for a second, gave me a hurried smile, turned to her husband, and they went on with their conversation in low voices.
I left the house and made my way past the cane-filled freight cars, the chapel, the mill, to the stone portico of the big house. I rarely entered the house by the front doors. A dozen rocking chairs were lined up along the portico, empty, seeming to wait. I went down a corridor to the kitchen and found the servants sitting at a big table, their heads bent, talking to each other in alarmed voices. I waved at Emilio, who looked at me without seeing me. Then he started. “Ay! Paulita!”
I knew an event was forming itself as black clouds form in a menacing sky. When my grandmother came to bed that night, I asked her what was happeni
ng. She answered by saying that we were all returning to Havana in a day or so.
* * *
Dr. Babito, my grandmother, and I stayed with Tía Luisa at the Hotel Nacional in Havana. The servants were quartered in smaller hotels in the city and had to rise early in the morning to get to the hotel before my ancient cousin waked.
My grandmother was always with her, while I wandered along the corridors and the huge lobby. I was under the illusion that the hotel staff were now my caretakers, and that the permission of the bell captain was required before I could use the swimming pool in the gardens.
“May I use the pool today?” I would ask him. He would close his eyes, appear to ponder, then arrive at a decision. “Yes, but only this morning,” he would answer, in a tone of reluctant judiciousness.
There were American tourists staying at the hotel, and one descended in the elevator with me. He leaned against the elevator paneling, cushioning himself with both hands.
“You have such honest gray eyes,” he commented.
“My eyes are blue,” I replied, not cheekily, only to set the record straight.
He bent forward to look at me more closely. “So they are,” he said.
When the elevator reached the lobby and the two of us walked out of it, several hotel employees sprang forward.
“Meester Keaton!” they exclaimed in unison. The bell captain whispered to me, “El Señor Buster Keaton,” but the name meant nothing to me.
“Can I swim today?” I asked him.
He nodded, his attention on Meester Keaton. I changed into my bathing suit in a small house beside the pool, a blue oblong of glittering water. I dog-paddled about.
On a morning a few days later, the bell captain said a resounding “No!” to my usual question.
I was startled and disappointed. He must have noticed because he added, more softly, “The revolution began today.”
The afternoon of the same day, young men came to the Hotel Nacional and hurled stones at some of the windows. I heard sporadic shooting. A day or so later, we embarked on a ship bound for Florida.
When we arrived in New York City, Tía Luisa, in the care of Dr. Babito and Prince, was driven to the Plaza Hotel, where she kept a suite, using it two weeks of the year. That same week my grandmother said that the president of Cuba, Gerardo Machado, had been overthrown. It was 1933. I was ten years old.
New York City
My grandmother and I boarded a Long Island train and were back in Kew Gardens after an absence of more than sixteen months.
Our suitcases on the floor beside our feet, we stared into the one-room apartment we had returned to, and for which my grandmother had paid rent for so many months. Dust covered everything. There was a stale smell in the air.
I began to choke. In a strangled voice, I managed to say, “It’s so small.…”
She took a step into the room. A high counter divided the living-sleeping area from the kitchen and dinette. We unpacked and put our things away in silence.
* * *
A few weeks later, my Uncle Fermin’s wife, Elpidia, came to stay for several days. She took my place alongside my grandmother in the Murphy pull-down bed that each night emerged like a mastodon from the closet where it lived. I slept in the bathtub while she was there, placing a heavy blanket on the porcelain and a hard cushion from the sofa for my head.
I don’t know why Elpidia came but I recall how relieved I was to go off to P.S. 99 in the mornings and escape the sounds of her deep sighs and the refrain that accompanied them, “¡Ay, Dios! Qué me ayuda!” Her face was always damp with recently shed tears. I tried to learn their cause, but her conversations in the kitchen with my grandmother ended as soon as I entered the dinette, and the wall muffled their words.
When she left, I returned to my side of the bed.
* * *
I slipped into P.S. 99 as though I’d only been absent one afternoon. There were new students, among them two boys. One was tall and horse-faced and cracked his knuckles constantly. The other was blond-haired, tall but slender, whom I thought beautiful. He wore white shirts open at the collar, and he had a stern, cool expression on his face. I thought of a boy alone on a mountaintop, looking down on the world. He erased Freddie Harrison of Balmville from memory and took his place for nearly a decade. But for a long time, he didn’t give me a tumble.
One afternoon he asked me for the time. I glanced at the Mickey Mouse watch my grandmother had given me and told him. He said, “That’s just a cheap boy’s watch.”
* * *
I went to the movies every Saturday afternoon. My friends and I exchanged the sepia-colored photographs of movie stars we cut out of magazines. There was little as satisfying as settling down on the floor in the bedrooms of other girls, a heap of magazines nearby and scissors close at hand.
One stormy night I was visiting a friend who lived in another apartment house. Her older sister came in, her hair tousled by the wind and damp from the rain, saying in an exuberant voice, “It feels like the end of the world outside!” These words struck me as original, profound, and elegant. I wished I had said them.
* * *
I was the recipient of a paper sack stuffed with discarded clothes from my cousin Natalie, the daughter of Fermin and Elpidia. Stained slips, wool stockings worn thin at the heels, garter belts with flaccid suspenders, and ragged brassieres were all wound around each other like sleeping snakes. At the bottom of the sack was a print dress made of some slippery material—rayon, perhaps. It had a ropelike belt with tasseled ends that looped twice around my waist. I wore it to school, though it was far too large, and its pattern of large, ugly green flowers made it, somehow, unseemly.
Natalie, several years older than I, lived in a railroad flat with her parents, a grown-up sister, a younger one, and a yellow mongrel dog that bit everyone who came to the flat—or threatened to—except her father.
My grandmother and I made periodic visits to their flat in Spanish Harlem. It was a long journey from Kew Gardens on the new subway. My apprehension deepened as we neared the station in the city where we got off. Would Uncle Fermin be at home wearing a hat that hid his eyes? His skin was so white, his nose so like the blade of a knife.
On those long-ago Saturdays, when one of us managed to scrape up enough money for tickets, Natalie and I would spend afternoons at the Bluebird movie house on Broadway and, I think, 158th Street. Cartoons preceded the feature film, along with a serial, The Invisible Man, and were greeted by bursts of wild applause. Along with Olive Oyl and her long narrow feet and tiny head, I especially recollect Mickey Mouse, thin and worried-looking in those days, as if he’d just eluded a laboratory technician’s grasp, not as he looks today—plump, smug, and bourgeois.
And what movies we saw! All the actors and actresses whose photographs I collected, with their look of eternity! Their radiance, their eyes, their faces, their voices, the suavity of their movements! Their clothes! Even in prison movies, the stars shone in their prison clothes as if tailors had accompanied them in their downfall.
In the Bluebird, it was as though a woman sang stories larger than lives, about fate and love and evil enacted in shadowed rooms and wild landscapes I couldn’t enter, only glimpse from where I sat, rapt.
Some Saturdays, as we returned to the tenement where Natalie lived, we heard thumping and could feel through the soles of our feet the vibrations from my uncle’s radio, all the way down from the fifth floor to the sidewalk where we had halted. On Natalie’s face would appear a distressed, complicit smile, as though she held herself responsible for the noise.
It was not an ordinary radio. My uncle had built a plywood screen that covered the two narrow windows of the tiny parlor at the front of the flat, had fastened all the radio components to it in some way, and added two loudspeakers. Whenever he was in the flat, he turned up the volume as high as it would go.
The room felt ominous, as though something inhabited it that would, in the end, bring down the entire building. In summer, what bree
zes made their way up the street from the Hudson River a few long blocks away, were shut out by the plywood screen; in winter, wind and cold leaked in around its edges. My uncle sat in the only armchair in the room, wearing his coat and hat whatever the weather, except on the hottest days of summer, submerged in the uproar as though stupefied by it, the yellow dog at his feet growling, no doubt in baffled protest.
Neighbors stopped at the local police station to complain—only a very few tenants had telephones in those days—but the police never came. My grandmother would retire to one of the cell-like bedrooms, with its poverty-green paint on the walls, and lie on a narrow bed, one arm flung across her eyes and brow.
Elpidia had been born in Palmyra, a hamlet in Cuba, a few miles from my grandfather’s plantation. Fermin had run off with her, I was told by my grandmother—in a bland tone of voice that seemed to attach neither blame nor responsibility to him—to protest his engagement to the daughter of a neighboring plantation owner, an arrangement made by his father when Fermin was only a bad-tempered boy.
I puzzled over Elpidia’s reasons for marrying him. Perhaps she had been carried away by movie love or worship of some sort. Whatever it had been, she had come with him to the United States, el norte.
To escape the fearsome radio racket as much as I could, I used to go to the kitchen to watch Elpidia iron on a spindly board that resembled a grasshopper. Grimly, as though she were trying to kill it, she struck at it with a small black iron she had heated on the stove. Whatever garments were spread on the board’s surface often bore scorch marks.
On other days of our visits to the flat, I would find my aunt by marriage slumped on a stool drawn up to the kitchen sink, weeping intermittently and silently, one hand supporting her chin as she stared down at the cockroaches that came and went with their hideous broken speed, now a pause, now a rush.