“Aw, you kiss my foot,” she said.
All the time she was in Havana she lived in that alcove with only a screen in front of the glass door to the court. Tony and the boys were always out. They’d never take her anywhere. The worst of it was when she found she was going to have a baby. Day after day she lay there all alone staring up at the cracked white plaster of the ceiling, listening to the shrill jabber of the women in the court and the vestibule and the parrot and the yapping of the little white dog that was named Kiki. Roaches ran up and down the wall and ate holes in any clothes that weren’t put away in chests.
Every afternoon a hot square of sunlight pressed in through the glass roof of the court and ran along the edge of the bed and across the tiled floor and made the alcove glary and stifling.
Tony’s family never let her go out unless one of the old women went along, and then it was usually just to market or to church. She hated going to the market that was so filthy and rancidsmelling and jammed with sweaty jostling negroes and chinamen yelling over coops of chickens and slimy stalls of fish. La mamá and Tia Feliciana and Carná the old niggerwoman seemed to love it. Church was better, at least people wore better clothes there and the tinsel altars were often full of flowers, so she went to confession regularly, though the priest didn’t understand the few Spanish words she was beginning to piece together, and she couldn’t understand his replies. Anyway church was better than sitting all day in the heat and the rancid smells of the vestibule trying to talk to the old women who never did anything but fan and chatter, while the little white dog slept on a dirty cushion on a busted gilt chair and occasionally snapped at a fly.
Tony never paid any attention to her any more; she could hardly blame him her face looked so redeyed and swollen from crying. Tony was always around with a middleaged babyfaced fat man in a white suit with an enormous double gold watchchain looped across his baywindow whom everybody spoke of very respectfully as el señor Manfredo. He was a sugarbroker and was going to send Tony to Paris to study music. Sometimes he’d come and sit in the vestibule on a wicker chair with his goldheaded cane between his fat knees. Margo always felt there was something funny about Señor Manfredo, but she was as nice to him as she could be. He paid no attention to her either. He never took his eyes off Tony’s long black lashes.
Once she got desperate and ran out alone to Central Park to an American drugstore she’d noticed there one evening when the old women had taken her to hear the military band play. Every man she passed stared at her. She got to the drugstore on a dead run and bought all the castoroil and quinine she had money for. Going home she couldn’t seem to go a block without some man following her and trying to take her arm. “You go to hell,” she’d say to them in English and walk all the faster. She lost her way, was almost run over by a car and at last got to the house breathless. The old women were back and raised Cain.
When Tony got home they told him and he made a big scene and tried to beat her up, but she was stronger than he was and blacked his eye for him. Then he threw himself on the bed sobbing and she put cold compresses on his eye to get the swelling down and petted him and they were happy and cozy together for the first time since they’d come to Havana. The trouble was the old women found out about how she’d blacked his eye and everybody teased him about it. The whole street seemed to know and everybody said Tony was a sissy. La mamá never forgave Margo and was mean and spiteful to her after that.
If she only wasn’t going to have the baby Margo would have run away. All the castoroil did was to give her terrible colic and the quinine just made her ears ring. She stole a sharppointed knife from the kitchen and thought she’d kill herself with it, but she didn’t have the nerve to stick it in. She thought of hanging herself by the bedsheet, but she couldn’t seem to do that either. She kept the knife under the mattress and lay all day on the bed dreaming about what she’d do if she ever got back to the States and thinking about Agnes and Frank and vaudeville shows and the Keith circuit and the St. Nicholas rink. Sometimes she’d get herself to believe that this was all a long nightmare and that she’d wake up in bed at home at Indian’s.
She wrote Agnes every week and Agnes would sometimes send her a couple of dollars in a letter. She’d saved fifteen dollars in a little alligatorskin purse Tony had given her when they first got to Havana, when he happened to look into it one day and pocketed the money and went out on a party. She was so sunk that she didn’t even bawl him out about it when he came back after a night at a rumbajoint with dark circles under his eyes. Those days she was feeling too sick to bawl anybody out.
When her pains began nobody had any idea of taking her to the hospital. The old women said they knew just what to do, and two Sisters of Mercy with big white butterfly headdresses began to bustle in and out with basins and pitchers of hot water. It lasted all day and all night and some of the next day. She was sure she was going to die. At last she yelled so loud for a doctor that they went out and fetched an old man with yellow hands all knobbed with rheumatism and a tobaccostained beard they said was a doctor. He had goldrimmed eyeglasses on a ribbon that kept falling off his long twisted nose. He examined her and said everything was fine and the old women grinning and nodding stood around behind him. Then the pains grabbed her again; she didn’t know anything but the pain.
After it was all over she lay back so weak she thought she must be dead. They brought it to her to look at but she wouldn’t look. Next day when she woke up she heard a thin cry beside her and couldn’t imagine what it was. She was too sick to turn her head to look at it. The old women were shaking their heads over something, but she didn’t care. When they told her she wasn’t well enough to nurse it and that it would have to be raised on a bottle she didn’t care either.
A couple of days passed in blank weakness. Then she was able to drink a little orangejuice and hot milk and could raise her head on her elbow and look at the baby when they brought it to her. It looked dreadfully little. It was a little girl. Its poor little face looked wrinkled and old like a monkey’s. There was something the matter with its eyes.
She made them send for the old doctor and he sat on the edge of her bed looking very solemn and wiping and wiping his eyeglasses with his big clean silk handkerchief. He kept calling her a poor little niña and finally made her understand that the baby was blind and that her husband had a secret disease and that as soon as she was well enough she must go to a clinic for treatments. She didn’t cry or say anything but just lay there staring at him with her eyes hot and her hands and feet icy. She didn’t want him to go, that was all she could think of. She made him tell her all about the disease and the treatment and made out to understand less Spanish than she did, just so that he wouldn’t go away.
A couple of days later the old women put on their best black silk shawls and took the baby to the church to be christened. Its little face looked awful blue in the middle of all the lace they dressed it in. That night it turned almost black. In the morning it was dead. Tony cried and the old women all carried on and they spent a lot of money on a little white casket with silver handles and a hearse and a priest for the funeral. Afterwards the Sisters of Mercy came and prayed beside her bed and the priest came and talked to the old women in a beautiful tragedy voice like Frank’s voice when he wore his morningcoat, but Margo just lay there in the bed hoping she’d die too, with her eyes closed and her lips pressed tight together. No matter what anybody said to her she wouldn’t answer or open her eyes.
When she got well enough to sit up she wouldn’t go to the clinic the way Tony was going. She wouldn’t speak to him or to the old women. She pretended not to understand what they said. La mamá would look into her face in a spiteful way she had and shake her head and say, “Loca.” That meant crazy.