At home only my hair got brushed, as if they felt obliged to pamper me in some way. Otherwise, I was like a child who had wandered into the house by mistake, like the babies of the family of old Luz, who were dumped on us for weeks or months, except that they had abandoned me for much longer. They paid me almost no attention. And not even those tall tales, told by candlelight to keep away the flies — though it attracted moths — were intended for me. So I could do whatever I’d a fancy to, for nobody was keeping an eye on me.
The whole town knew about the presence of those abandoned babies, left with Luz in our house. I’m not sure by what quirk of fate one of the kids turned into a tattletale in the home of the Juarez family, but they said that he still hadn’t lost the stink of pee. And we all believed it was true. I had only to catch a glimpse of him to smell pee, though it wasn’t unusual on a market day for a man to urinate freely against any wall whatsoever, in full view of everybody, without a second thought. So much urination went on, all around, that nobody thought anything of this shameless activity. The stink seemed an inevitable part of life. It rose up spontaneously, with or without the aid of the Juarez’s tattletales.
I know for sure the smell of pee never left the bedroom of old Luz. Her room always smelled the same, whether or not it contained a squawking baby. I was strictly forbidden to enter there. Luz and my nanny, Dulce, slept there. My mother had firmly vetoed my entrance. I think it was the only order she ever gave me, and I obeyed it as far as I could. I’ve never displayed exemplary willpower, and so, without a word to anybody and without any fuss, I popped in now and then to check its condition. Disorder and slovenliness reigned supreme, unlike in other rooms of the house, unlike even in the cupboard under the sink, where we kept, among other things, the tops from broken jars, a fork that didn’t match any set, and the hand of a grandfather clock that nobody could get to stay on the clockface. Even that seemed a model of cleanliness compared to Luz’s room, where her stuff lay in slatternly confusion: a garter, a jar of cream, matches, a discarded price tag, the bedside lamp, a pencil, all higgledy-piggledy, along with a holy picture of the bleeding heart of Jesus, with Jesus himself pointing to it, pulling open his robes to reveal his own insides, like a wounded animal, skinned but miraculously alive, withstanding all the agony we sinners inflict on him.
Dulce, the nanny in charge of me, must have been around thirteen years old at that time. Now that I think about it I realize how young she was, but back then I considered her old. And I knew she was as tough as nails. She was a hard-nosed cop trained by Grandma. She had worked in the house since she was seven years old and had had only one year of schooling. In that time she learned to write numbers on a piece of paper, add, subtract, write her name and all the letters of the alphabet, and read by spelling out the syllables. That, she figured, was enough education. In the house she had learned to knead dough for tamales, and to dry and grind cocoa for the chocolate which Grandma made into little slabs, leaving her fingerprints all over them. She knew how to make a paste for almond milk by peeling the nuts in hot water and then grinding them in a mortar. In recent years they had even initiated her into the mysteries of fire. They now allowed her to stir the caramel paste in the copper saucepan and to watch the jams so that they didn’t stick to the pan or over-cook. She did all this while I was at school, or if school wasn’t in session, while I goofed off or buried myself in a book from Uncle Gustavo’s study, because, for sure, they weren’t teaching me a single damned thing. I felt like a stray kid in the house, while Dulce was their favorite grandchild. If I peeped into the kitchen, while Dulce was deboning a hen for a celebratory supper, she’d no sooner realize I was there than she’d be ordering me out with “You’re gonna knock over a pot,” though there wasn’t a semblance of a pot in sight, only the meat grinder on the corner of the table or maybe the rolling pin or the scissors. “Go on, get outta here, before you burn yourself on the stove,” she’d holler, though the stove was at the far side of the enormous kitchen. Or it was “You’re going to get your clothes dirty,” when my dress was already far dirtier than her spotless apron.
Dulce knew all the culinary secrets of my grandmother, stuff neither I nor my mother knew. She was not the cooking expert, however. That was still old Luz, who’d been top dog in the kitchen for as long as Uncle Gustavo had been alive. Now she was so old that she seemed incapable of motion. When she arrived at the house, her letter of recommendation said: “You can have this old woman. To look at her, you wouldn’t think she was worth a penny, but she does know how to make a stew and to get shirts whiter than anybody I’ve met.” But she was too old to beat the mixture for the meringue pie or put the heated spoon on the cream to make a caramel sauce. She couldn’t even hold it over the fire to get it red-hot. She did only a certain number of things and even today I’m surprised that a woman so slow on her feet that a superficial glance barely detected a sign of life in her could still do them. It was the ancient Luz, now past her hundredth birthday, who killed the turtle, first cutting off its head and then scooping it out of its shell, to make the black stew that only she knew how to cook. It was she who plucked and chopped up the ducks and chickens. She was the one who skinned the live iguanas. Only she made buns stuffed with beans, the best lentil soup in the world, with slices of banana and chunks of spicy pork sausage, and the refried beans which deserved a medal. (Their glorious condition owed much to the addition of vast quantities of corn oil.) Only she made tortilla pockets containing crunchy deep-fried pigskin, and meatballs flavored by a minute pinch of caramel, and almond chicken, and fluffy flan, and flawless chops in red wine, and cheese stuffed with two sauces of different flavors and colors, hollowed out with the point of a knife she never let leave the kitchen, because its edge, filed to a dangerous sharpness, was capable of slicing off your tongue. She could hardly walk a step, but, unlike Grandma, she never complained. She always said she was fine, that she’d never felt better. Sitting on her wooden chair, she spent hours working with her misshapen hands, midway between the sink and the stove, with a saucepan near her right foot and a metal bucket with clean water at her left side. And when she’d finished her labors, she’d clap her hands together, like a small child, with the fingers wide apart, while she chanted songs (with which she should have been calming the current baby, who would inevitably be howling in her room), songs with which she greeted my arrival in the kitchen, in a singsong all her own:
O where is my little Delmira?
Come nearer, my darling, come nearer.
I’ve kisses and cuddles to give you,
And sugar candies to feed you.
The song ended, there followed the obligatory distribution of caramel wrapped in shiny black paper, with a little white cow on it, announced by still other doggerel verses from this woman who shrank more and more each day. If Dulce was present, she’d confiscate my candy “till after dinner,” a till-after that rarely materialized. The candies, I suspect, ended up in Dulce’s own mouth.
Certainly old Luz was sitting there in her chair on the afternoon I’m talking about, but who knows what Dulce was up to, whether preparing something in the kitchen or rushing off on some errand for Grandma, while I was sitting on the rim of the fountain watching the bustle of the ants. Suddenly — I can’t tell you why — I raised my eyes from the fountain and saw her. The door of her room was ajar, so there was enough space for me to inspect her. Behind her, one of the balconies that overlooked the street was half open. The sunset had painted the sky a brilliant pink. The torsos of passersby and Mama’s figure were outlined with vivid sharpness. I could see not just her long, loose hair but every detail of the dress she was wearing, almost as if I could touch her, a flimsy shift of fine linen that stirred in the breeze, clinging to her body like a second skin, a body that was shaking with mild fits of laughter. She was clutching a water jug with a metallic base to her side. Drops of water dripped to the ground.