They’d brought wonderful booty from Cuernavaca to dye and observe for days, and that’s all they seemed interested in.
As generous as ever, Malena alone accompanied me, but. unfortunately for me, the trip was to no avail. The neighbors had removed the pebbles from their window box and taken away the earth and plant which decorated it.
A couple of construction workers were putting up scaffolding to drastically reshape what was quite a horrific façade.
I asked them about the pebbles. “Which ones?” they answered. Malena described them and they shrugged their shoulders, said they didn’t have a clue. I went home distressed and fearful, while Malena tried to persuade me it wasn’t so important and rehearsed the delights we’d see under the microscope.
Nighttimes sharpened their nails, returned to mock and pursue me.
I only had to close my eyes (not even go to sleep) and the noises and steps tormenting me increased in volume. Nothing could replace the protective impact of the pebbles. I tried various substitutes and was scolded for spilling hair cream, moth balls, rubber…I also set up a line of straws, biscuits, and my skates next to my sisters’.
All to no avail.
7
Grandma’s telephone number was 16-19-50. Our house’s was much simpler: 20-25-30. The numerical irregularity of Grandma’s must be the reason why we always got it wrong when we tried to remember it, whether it was the housemaids, my sisters, or yours truly, who always thought she had a good memory. My sisters also vehemently maintained you had to look up Grandma’s number in the yellow pages, which was always the preserve of businesses, industry, professionals, services, and products, while the white section was for private individuals. The vehemence with which my sisters defended consulting the yellow pages was due to a television advertisement, made with cartoons, as if for children.
The advertisements were enigmatic. While a female chorus sang “consult (they paused here) the yellow pages” a single dramatic line linked Chinese restaurants with Quaker oats or any other chance coupling of elements, and their animated figures urged us to get the yellow pages, to use them whenever we had any telephone query though the extremely thin pages crumpled on hand contact, screwed up, tore. The commercials were not aimed at children and it was no surprise if their message went over our heads; nor did I ever understand the caricatures of Felix the cat, or — even less so — the tirades from a character called Chabelo, played by a big, fat adult actor, disguised as a child in shorts and Spanish-style sailor shirt, whining like a spoiled brat, showing off something that to my girlish eyes one should conceal at all cost even at the risk of seeming fatuous: stupidity. It wasn’t just his dreadful patter, it was also the way he spoke, the clothes he wore…I didn’t want to appear gauche and ridiculous like poor old Chabelo: this television anti-hero re-prioritized our longings, displaying the worse excesses of kids (he even belched in public!). If we watched him it was because he represented the defenseless child who could defend himself (because of his size), the silly kid who was loved because he was just that…It had nothing to do with any promised, sought-after world, I didn’t think of him as nice, nor did I understand him, but, like many other children, I felt for his immense vulnerability and extraordinary flab that pore by pore said I’m a kid, I’m silly and want to be loved, and if you don’t love me I’ll give you a thump.
All this is prompted by a memory I want to recount. It belongs to a year before the incidents with the petticoat, the medal, and even the one with Enela, probably 1962.
One Sunday afternoon Juanita, who’d just started working at home, stayed with us while Esther and Dad went with an “intellectual” friend of theirs to see Manuel Capetillo fight a bull. That’s what they said, “Don Pedro Vásquez Cisneros is an intellectual.” I didn’t understand what they meant: he wasn’t a young man with his long grayish beard and unkempt hair, he’d sit and smoke his pipe in an armchair that otherwise had no presence in our house, it was only noteworthy when Don Pedro came to flaunt himself in his gray beret, which heaven knows why he never took off, perhaps because he was bald or because he could imagine how much we coveted it, although I doubt that because I don’t think he had any intuition of us, we weren’t at all important to him. Esther and Dad felt a burning affection for this “intellectual,” pronounced with deep reverence his name and the label they’d assigned to him, and listened to him hold forth, open-mouthed, respectful, as if listening to a sermon in church. Shortly after his visits some blue stickers appeared on car windscreens with a drawing of a fish and the slogan Christianity, yes, Communism, no that someone had gone out of their way to plaster on shop and car windows.
I perceived in Esther and Dad’s voices (I’m not sure about on their faces, they were parking the car and we were in the back seat), if not the same kind of admiration they felt for Vásquez Cisneros, certainly the same volume of admiration, when they spotted Elda Peralta coming out of the Elizondo bakery carrying her bag of bread, and the admiring tone was not for her (discreetly dressed in low shoes, a gray woolen skirt, a very light pink sweater, or so I thought, like any lady, like my Mom, not slimmer or taller, in a skirt that didn’t allow her legs to open much but not so tight as to warrant small coquettish steps), but for the man she was linked to, a writer (called Spota?), one of those mythical beings whom Dad thought possessed the iron will he had always lacked to devote himself to the humanities as he would have liked, because his family persuaded him he must study something with an economic future, something to guarantee a seat at the banquet, at the grande bouffe the era would create from the magic of chemistry: chocolates made from next to nothing, jellies hardened by fresh air, sausage that never went bad, colorants and emulsifiers that enclosed in glass phials every possible tidbit, every morsel of food, mouthfuls of wealth, and not only that, also confidence in the abilities of men, intoxicated by a new renaissance that would poison the air, the rivers, the seas, the lungs of the workers in their industries, and, as if they weren’t enough, those living in outlying towns and big cities. But before they realized their devastating impact, they copied patents and invented others to fill our hitherto pure air with a new nation…We didn’t know then that fish were fleeing our rivers in search of water, their scales slimy with grease, that our jungles were cadavers of jungles, that the sea tossed detergent foam at the coast and dark patches of oil…
But I’m haranguing you with speeches that I’ve tried to understand and emulate, seduced by my visit to Raquel’s house a long time ago, from the position I now occupy…I was contracted (in a manner of speaking) to her apartment. I felt so happy surrounded by books and pictures, by paper and notebooks, by dogs and the light that poured through the window!..Raquel would take her glasses off and on when she heard me walking near her till she stopped and looked up when she heard my footsteps…“Raquel Tibol!” I called her by her first and last name. She didn’t attach the least importance to my voice. That was when I was told to leave her apartment. Not that Raquel considered anything I’m telling you here. Her father was certainly not an industrialist and she wasn’t worried by sand turning into chocolate or the bones of dead cows becoming sausages…But Raquel didn’t find out about me because she never stopped thinking. I didn’t want to deceive her as I don’t want to deceive myself when telling you what happened at home that afternoon. We were playing in the garden as if the afternoon would never end— I felt no wind could disturb our dolce far niente, absorbed in a dragonfly, hanging iridescent, sometimes bluish, on the still air, accompanying us, fluttering her wings beautifully, motionless, chewing (as in chewing gum) its place in the fresh air of the garden, ruminating on the wing, as much a sister to us as we were to her— till my sisters took me away to watch television. We turned it on: the bullfight appeared, not from the seats where Esther and Dad were watching it, as tiny as everybody else, defeated by a paternal eye, by an all-powerful eye, distant or near, as it suited. The screen seemed it would burst from so many people, so many olés, so much overexcitement vibrating in the crowd.