However much I twisted it (my head, naturally, I wearied of looking at the ceiling and counting the blobs) I could find no better game than the boring search for Esther and Dad among the dots. But how could I know who they were? The television reproduced in black and white; Esther and Dad were not the only ones wearing hats, but all the heads showed up identically. I read repeatedly the advertisements on the barriers and would have preferred to do anything but sit watching television.
But we stayed in front of the television set, my sisters bored like me, and Juanita who I suppose was very young and white as a lizard’s belly, fresh from the Opus Dei training school for domestics. Poor Juanita was a donkey (I can’t really find a better word, or more measured term to describe her). She couldn’t cook (in the training school she’d been convinced what she did in her house was not “cooking”), couldn’t sweep, or so she said, because she wanted to use the vacuum cleaner in the garden and on the terrace, and revealed her character in a strange proclivity: she was fond of the mixer, which she would play with, empty, sitting there, relaxing, an oilskin top over the glass, yanking on the control handle to hear it “sing,” as Juanita herself put it to me.
She did concentrate on the bullfight. Malena, Fina, and I–I don’t know who started first— climbed a staircase of words escaping boredom like agile acrobats:
tequila
late
tea
ear
artistic
icthysaurus
usual
allow
owed
The last two letters of the word had to be the first two of another not previously used in the game. It was my turn to recite one that would begin in “ed” (it would have been edify) when I noticed how Juanita, quite unaware, was resting her hand on her embroidery needle that they’d erroneously not expunged from her — I mean the skill or the enthusiasm — in the “training” school classes. I could clearly see the needle penetrating her skin and Juanita still staring at the screen, her arm continuing to push her hand so the needle went further in…
“Your go!”
“Your go!”
“Come on or you’re out!”
I had to blurt out “Lift your hand up!” pointing at Juanita, as in my view and my sisters’ the needle slowly, inexorably kept going in until it came out the other side of her clean palm, without a spot of blood. Malena lifted Juanita’s hand: a wooden palm, covered in stucco: a saint, pierced, a needle transfixing incorporeal flesh, engendered by abstinence, fasting, and hair shirts.
We rushed to the telephone to speak to Grandma, incorrectly dialed 16-17-50. A man answered, recriminated, told me to take more care, a man with an opaque voice whom I guessed was fat, heavy, and, no doubt, miserable. “I’m sorry.” The argument started with my sisters over whether we should look for the number in the white or yellow pages, first carefully leafing through impossible pages full of abbreviations: a coded language over which we argued without a clue as to how it worked till in a temper we screwed up and tore the inscrutable pages.
Juanita had followed us. In front of us she clenched the eye of the needle between her teeth and pulled it out cleanly, as if it had pierced material rather than entering flesh.
We three looked at each other, I swear with the same unblinking look, parties to something beyond our understanding.
When Dad, Esther, and Don Pedro arrived, they found us washing in the tub (Malena and Fina were washing and doing my hair at the same time, trying to fix my soaking hair with some of the big, pink curlers Dad had brought Esther from the United States with the innovation that they avoided the use of hairgrips to keep them in place, since there was a kind of plastic mold in the same color to keep the hair shaped), while Juanita, in the kitchen, listened unthinkingly engrossed to her favorite concerto: suite for mixer and wooden table. We caused such a flood we almost wet Juanita’s shoes without her even noticing.
The following morning, Esther packed Juanita off in the return bus to Michoacán to the same training school, surely to take more classes that would teach her to do nothing, to hold in contempt all that was her world with a greater degree of perfection.
8
My school motto was serviam (the hymn said: serviam, forever serviam, though life may lead us faraway). We were told ad nauseam that serviam meant serve, to work toward the glory and veneration of God, and to be of service to one’s neighbor.
The word was written on the lower part of the school shield that lived with us daily on the white blouses and gray sweaters of our uniform: green and gold, embroidery thick like a growth, superimposed like a second heart of unerring goodness. It was at Esther’s suggestion that they organized a drawing competition for possible interpretations of the school motto.
This wasn’t Esther’s first intervention; now, as on other occasions, she had interfered out of a sense of indignation: las monjas, the mothers, the sisters, or las madres (depending on who it was) had allowed a fifth-year teacher (my teacher) to set up a doll contest: the girl with the prettiest doll would win. The idea hugely annoyed Esther: Why reward something that didn’t depend on a girl’s will but was something brought from a shop? All the girls (except ourselves because we came empty-handed to signal Esther’s protest) arrived with brand-new dolls competing with the most expensive, the one nobody had ever seen before, the doll from the most distant land with a designer brand.
The dolls were paraded before the eyes of the teachers who’d been elected as competition judges, who observed them perched on the hands of owners who’d never played with them, never changed their clothes, never cradled them, and never combed their hair so they would have a chance to win.
As an act of protest Esther proposed a competition in which the girls’ skills would be valued and “not their parents’ money or travels.” She spoke to la madre Gabriela (being Cuban, she wasn’t a Mother; being vigorous and intelligent, she wasn’t a nun) and convinced her: “sensitivity,” “intelligence,” “work,” “the value of work”—what other arguments did she use? I picked out these words from their conversation on the sunny terrace when Esther handed her a drawing that she gave as a present because she liked her so much: who knows how long they’d talked before I saw them, but they certainly loved each other dearly.
The graphic representation of serviam opened Esther’s studio — for my sisters and me — on a single afternoon.
It was a spacious room. The light was what first caught your attention when you went in: a huge French window in the back, two skylights, windows on three walls, a large, vertical mirror — in which two people could be reflected if one stood on the other’s head — as long as the wall and almost reaching the ceiling, bringing into the room a stream of light I would describe (now that I remember it) as scientific—a light seemingly able to illuminate anything. It smelled of eucalyptus branches, their transparent fragrance filling the open field of the room, the endless blue sky melding with our city air in the study, revealing volcanoes and mountains.