Oye What I'm Gonna Tell You. Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés
have worked out.
Mami’s giving me the silent treatment; abuela would have been cursing me, my Haitian and my mulato nappy-headed brood by now and I almost wished mami would say something she’s twisting the lid so hard the veins in her neck ripple. I see no way out. No way to get Vital in. Nothing but hardship and I ask myself, why in the hell would this, us, work when all the evidence pointed to the disaster it became? I felt myself rehearsing the lie I’d perpetrate on him later. How we’re too different and that I planned on moving to the city with Ivette, that I was transferring to CUNY. How much I would miss his dazzling smile. How he’s too good for me. Later, I’ll cry when he wants to soothe me to make it better.
Alma grew up around whores and homosexuals. Because her mother was dead, she, along with her younger brother, Ricardo, lived in a boarding house run by their great aunt Lázara in a poor barrio in the east of Havana. Lala—as Lázara was known to all—was less indiscriminate than she was disinterested in the quality of the roomers who lived in the four single room apartments on the second floor, furnished with beds, hot plates and a shared toilet. Alma and Ricardo lived downstairs with tía Lala. They had three rooms—a big bedroom they all shared, a rarely-used sitting room, and a long, narrow kitchen with a back door leading to the toilet and a small yard.
In the front of the house was a half-enclosed balcony facing the street. Here, Lala spent her days smoking puros and drinking café she warmed on an ancient burner that worked better than the new ones the roomers had. From her perch, she kept track of the comings and goings of the tenants. Lala genuinely liked her tenants, as long as they kept out of trouble and paid their rent, that is. The longest staying roomer was Rosalinda, who Lala called “la pobre Rosalinda who is neither pretty nor smells like a rose” but never to her face.
Alma liked it when the roomers washed up and came downstairs with their wet hair still grooved with wide comb marks, shirts or shifts clinging to their bodies and always sweetly crisp-smelling. Sometimes, Rosalinda would give her three pennies to braid her long black hair in a neat plait that almost reached her tailbone. On Fridays, Marco, the most recent roomer whose blond hair was always perfectly coifed, sent Alma to the bodega for rolling papers and let her keep the whole five cents change; errands were a way tenants could tip the children and show Lala their appreciation. Lala permitted the roomers’ affection toward the siblings because she was stingy with hers. She didn’t like anyone touching her, though on occasion she allowed Alma to rub her plump little feet and sausage-like toes.
Sometimes one or two of the roomers would come downstairs to gossip, sitting or standing on the steps next to the balcony. They would call their landlord Doña Lala and tell dirty jokes or stories that Alma and her brother were warned by their aunt never to repeat at school. By the time she was nine years old, Alma understood all the components of sex, though she couldn’t fathom how people could enjoy such acts, especially the kind requiring the unusual use of one’s hindquarters. This knowledge gained Alma a measure of popularity at school when it was evident that no one else knew as much as she did. Even the older girls who had boyfriends named her la profesora of sexual studies.
“Oye, niña, what have you learned from your scandalous neighbors recently?” Three upper grade girls formed a circle around her.
Alma smiled broadly and, pointing to each girl at a time, said, “That your father likes to take it up the ass. That your father likes to put it there. And that your father likes to watch.”
The girls erupted in howling laughter and curses.
“You shameless . . .”
“You sucia . . .”
“Hija de puta!” That was the one that stopped Alma in her tracks. Everyone knew where the line was. Her mother was not a whore. She was dead.
“I’m so sorry, I’m sorry.” Micaela’s hand shot up to her red painted lips as she stepped away. “I didn’t mean it.” The girl’s friends moved to push her further back. They nodded to Alma, signaling that they would attend to Micaela’s transgression, who continued apologizing even after Alma was out of earshot.
Alma and Riqui (a nickname her brother gave himself after eschewing the perennial Ricardito) attended a local public school in one of the suburbs of Havana with a mix of mid and lower working class folks. While they had the same full lips and wispy dark hair, they did not look like siblings, and the lighter-skinned Riqui liked to point out that he was the more guapo. Alma secretly agreed while protesting that his shapely legs were “such a waste on a boy.”
Their aunt praised their “equal beauty” and made sure their uniforms were clean and starched stiff, always checked their head for lice, and fed them sufficiently, including a weekly swill of cod liver oil. Lala never let them walk around barefoot, declaring loudly she would not tolerate “worm-infested brats in her house” and forbade pets for the same reason. Alma could not conceive of how worms could get inside her body from her feet or a puppy, but she was an obedient girl who never questioned her aunt’s authority. Riqui, a contrary boy famous for his on-call farts, wasn’t ever spanked, only mildly scolded.
Their Mamá had been tía Lala’s and tía Orfa’s beloved and beautiful only grandniece Gladys. Tía Lala and tía Orfa used to live upstairs before there were any boarders and before Mamá was abandoned by her own mother. Alma knew only two things about her grandmother, who Lala derisively called “la estrella”: that she worked in a casino and would wake them all up in the middle of the night so they could eat the food she’d brought home while it was still warm; and that she ran away with an americano to el norte to make movies. As for tía Orfa (who died of being old), Alma remembered very little, only that she had a broad dark stain that covered her right eye and cheek, like she had splashed that part of her face with reddish brown paint. Alma was still an only child when Orfa died, but old enough to fear kissing the birthmark. And Mamá, well, she remembered some things but more often she felt her as a persistent, sad ghost pressing on her absurdly flat chest.
Lala had helped tía Orfa, a respected yerbera, with Alma’s birth, a five pound runt of a baby, but by the time the nine-pound beast Riqui was kicking his way out of Mamá, Lala was alone. She knew some herbs could ease the labor, but concentrated hours massaging Mamá’s belly for the baby to turn around. After much struggle and screaming, Lala successfully helped Mamá bring Riqui to light but, what with all the difficulty of the labor and the size of the purple baby boy whose piercing cries could summon the dead, she forgot everything else that had to be done after cutting the umbilical cord so that some of the placenta stayed inside and there was a fatal infection.
In their bedroom was a big photo of Mamá in a tin cut frame next to an even bigger one of Our Lady of Regla. Lala made them pray to both every night, even though Riqui usually fell asleep before the second Hail Mary and Lala was snoring by the first Our Father. The blessed mother of the oceans’ face smiled serenely in her blue gown, hands out at her sides, light rays shining all around, the sea sparkling behind her. She looked like a loving mother who would enfold you and grant any little thing you asked for, if what you wanted was pure.
Her mother’s portrait lit by candles was a stark contrast. Alma would study her face; she had the same delicate curls and almond eyes but couldn’t tell from the black and white photo what color they were. There seemed to be a melancholic expression at the corners of her closed mouth, and Alma wondered whether she knew she was going to die so young. Alma couldn’t help blaming Riqui a little, though mostly she was jealous of the tenderness with which tía Lala occasionally treated him. But then again, Riqui couldn’t remember what it was to smell Mamá’s sweet neck or feel her soft fingertips circling her back as Alma did when they had nestled together every night.
Their father was even more of a ghost, an itinerant brush salesman who visited occasionally, then never returned, not even once to see his motherless baby boy; the only thing he left them was his last name, Delgado, which Lala regularly cursed. Alma couldn’t remember what he looked like and there were no photos of him anywhere, though given Lala’s influence she imagined him with horns and a forked tongue.
“Lala,