I preferred the lives of saints they bought us at home to the comics (as we called the cartoon books and story magazines) that other girls used to read. On the other hand, my sisters reckoned they were boring, and as soon as they could, on the sly, they bought Dennis, Superman, little Heidis, titles banned from home, and didn’t even read the front cover of the Exemplary Lives.
I devoured them. Not that I enjoyed them, I didn’t at all, but I followed them passionately, as much or more than the other books Dad brought me.
As they had no other success at home, I lent them to Grandma after I’d read them. When I visited her, she’d read them to me again or retell me the stories: at stitch one Rita was confessing to her parents her desire to become religious; by stitch two they don’t give her permission because they’re old; by three she doesn’t know whether to fulfill her desire or stick to her parents’ wishes; by four she obeys her parents, back to stitch one where they marry her to a hard man who abuses and beats her; by two Rita doesn’t lament, follows Jesus’s advice and grins and bears it; by three he’s also bad-tempered outside the house; by four he fights men from the village and they kill him; back to one. She was crocheting beautiful white tablecloths for when my sisters, cousins, and I got married. Although Grandma shared my admiration for the saints, I never thought of asking her to judge the stigmata the Romans had inflicted on my body, so after one boring game with my petticoat, I put it away in the drawer next to the colored pencils.
One day I tied it to a stick and made a tramp’s bag to collect pebbles from the yard next door.
(I feel surrounded on all sides by loose ends of memories I’ve invoked when telling you my story. They all rush up, want my hand, as if they were children, shouting “me first,” and I don’t know which to take first, for fear that one will rush out, decide not to come back in a fit of pique. I lecture them: “Memories, be patient, let me take you one at a time to consider you more favorably, please understand that if you come at the right moment you’ll shine better in my eyes, you’ll burst and liberate all the treasures hiding on the backs of your roan mares.”
Grasping a loose end to weave into the next story, the chosen memory then smiles. Which makes me happy! You’d think it loves me, that as it passes, courses through me, it feels affection for the girl who one day (when it participated in an anecdote) shaped it.
When I decided to tell you this, to invent you in order to tell this, and by having an interlocutor to have words myself, I didn’t imagine the bliss my memories would bring. Though I can exaggerate slightly my epiphany, I might say I’ve come alive again.
The others, the memories I didn’t choose to take their turn, fierce and faceless, sidle behind my back and mock the loneliness I inhabit, my opacity and my sadness. I’m not worried by their jokes because soon, if you’re patient, they’ll become generous smiles.
The enclosure I suffer I find comforting. I’d never have believed it! Comfortable, warm, propitious. Only here can I weave my story with such pleasure, without the memories breaking off when summoned, because only their pleasure takes place.
I’m sorry I can’t retain in a single moment everything told here, can’t feel in sequence everything I wanted to reach your ears!
Do you remember? With difficulty! For you, just one more story! So many to wile away your time with…I envy you. I only have memories and what I imagine I might have experienced between the memories.
If only I could write what I relate and devote eternity to reading it…)
The pebbles that I “collected” from the neighbors’ yard were small, white, and were used by them to decorate the window box adorning the front of their house.
Collecting them was an adventure because they were just beyond our reach and because they were “cultivated” pebbles, “pedigree” pebbles and not stones from the street, so nobody should see us when we got them.
This wasn’t difficult in our neighborhood.
Back home, we washed the pebbles, polished them with an old toothbrush, and used them to play with: tokens for snakes and ladders, to decorate school models. They forced me to repeat one piece of work because I took in geometric plasticine shapes (a blue cylinder, yellow tetrahedron or something similar, and a green cone) decorated with pebbles.
My schoolmistress must have found the inlay too eclectic: a woman with a mass of reddish hair and thick bangs who wore an enormous scrunchy the color of her dress on a ponytail drawn up on her crown.
She was stumpy (some sixth graders were her size), vigorous, and energetic. I can still remember the face she pulled when she saw the figures:
“What’s happened to your work?” she half-complained, half-asked.
I couldn’t see what had happened. “Did it get chicken pox or fall in a load of dirt on the way to school?” She accepted an illustration (even congratulated me on it), though it had Brasil with a z (obviously, the encyclopedias at home, written in English, printed it like that, though the z was all I got from them because reading them gave me a headache)…
The pebbles on the plasticine figures, on the other hand, were cruelly rejected: I had to throw them in the classroom trashcan at the teacher’s insistence.
How humiliating! Those pebbles fished from next door’s window box, carried in the depths of a holy petticoat, the source of so much happiness (the games I mentioned and a much bigger one I’ll mention in a minute), had no future at school.
My sisters and I invented countries with the white pebbles: on the floor or in the garden we made maps of nonexistent lands, in the center of which we crowned each other, in elaborate ceremonies, queen of the countries they marked out. The crowns were gilt or silvery plastic wigs, inside which our heads sweated and enjoyed their trying beauty. Wearing Esther’s high heels, we recited lofty hymns in praise of the modest fantasies of power we represented in our respective kingdoms. Never has there been such a resplendent coronation as the one when I was crowned queen of my own kingdom, perched on a rickety chair on my bed, wrapped in a sheet. With the pillows tied in a bow to my waist, my sisters had wrapped around my slender body an expanded dress without need of any crinoline. The nylon petticoat (a rag by this stage) hung down pretending to be the train of an imaginary gown. What glory was mine! From dizzying heights I contemplated the white frontiers of my territory, as much as the ample wig and my untidy fringe allowed me: the pebbles drew a misshapen o around the bed. Malena had asked Esther for shepherds from the Nativity: kneeling down below, their arms reached out in supplication toward me. Next to them two over-white ducks looked on respectfully, keeping close to the mirror from Esther’s bag, a lake where the ducks would water their muddy lineage…
“Watch out!” “You’ll fall off!” And so the game ended. I didn’t in fact fall but stripped off my royal garments because Inés was calling us to the bathroom, and then in full domestic mode, we cooked enfrijoladas dowsed with cheese, stuffed with chicken.