A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. Valerie Miles
heads and sent them to the corner wearing the colored cardboard donkey ears. The misbehavior was rarely repeated. In my mom’s opinion a little blood makes any lesson stick. The third graders called her the third grade miss but she was married to my father who left her and never performed the obligations of a pater familiae. She worked as a teacher in the mornings and came home at two in the afternoon where dinner would be waiting because our small dark housemaid Rufina did the cooking. I was sick of stew every day. A chicken coop clucked behind the house and in the yard squash sprouted miraculously and unruly golden sunflowers stretched from the earth to the heavens next to violets and stunted roses that gave that miserable heap its perfume and that’s how we ate.
I never admitted that I learned to read time when I was twenty. That confession embarrasses and surprises me. It embarrasses and surprises me for reasons that you’ll find out later and lots of questions come to mind. One I remember especially: What time is it? Honest truth I couldn’t tell time and clocks frightened me just like the sound of my sister’s wheelchair.
She was even more of an idiot than me but she could read the face of a clock even though she couldn’t read a book. We weren’t typical, never mind normal.
Vroom . . . vroom . . . vroom . . . murmured Betina my sister wheeling her misfortune around the garden and the stone courtyards. The vroom was usually wet with the idiot’s drool. Poor Betina. Freak of nature. Poor me, another freak, and my mom weighed down by abandonment and by monsters even more so.
But everything in this awful world passes. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to dwell too much on anything or anyone.
Sometimes I think we’re a dream or a nightmare relived day after day that at any second will stop that won’t appear on the screen of the soul to torture us any more.
Betina suffers from a mental disorder
That was the psychologist’s diagnosis. I don’t know if that’s all it was. My sister had a crooked spine, from behind in her chair she looked like a tiny hunchback with puny legs and massive arms. The old lady who came to darn the socks said that someone had done something to my mom during her pregnancies, the worst during the one with Betina.
I asked the unibrowed mustachioed lady psychologist what a mental disorder was.
She said it was related to the soul but that I wouldn’t understand till I was older. But I supposed that the soul was something like a white sheet inside the body and that when it got stained people became idiots, Betina a lot and me a little.
I started noticing when Betina wheeled around the table with her vroom that she was dragging a little tail that stuck out through the back of the wheelchair seat and I told myself it had to be her soul coming untucked.
When I asked the psychologist this time if the soul had anything to do with being alive she said it did and even added that when it was missing people died and the soul went to heaven if it had been good and to hell if it had been bad.
Vroom . . . vroom . . . vroom her soul dragged more and had more gray stains every day and I decided that it wouldn’t be long before it fell out and Betina would be dead which didn’t matter to me because she made me sick.
When it was time to eat, I had to feed my sister and on purpose I’d mistake the orifice and I’d put the spoon in her eye, in her ear, in her nose, before finally her cakehole. Ah . . . ah . . . ah . . . moaned the filthy creature.
I would grab her hair and put her face in her food and then she’d be quiet. Why did I have to pay for my parents’ mistakes? I thought about stepping on the tail of her soul. The thing about hell stopped me.
Reading the catechism had burned the “thou shalt not kill” into me. But with every little bump today and again tomorrow, the tail grew and no one else saw. Only I did and I rejoiced.
The institutes for different students
I wheeled Betina to hers. Then I walked to the one for me. Betina’s institute was for treating very serious cases. The pig-boy, puffy-faced, thick-lipped, and pointy-eared. He ate from a gold plate and drank his soup from a gold cup. He held the cup in his stubby cloven hooves and made a sound like a gush of water down a well and when he ate solids his jaw and ears moved and he couldn’t chew with his canines, which jutted out like a wild boar. Once he looked at me. His tiny black beady eyes swimming in a pool of grease wouldn’t look away and I stuck my tongue out and he roared and threw his dish. The attendants came and to control him they had to tie him up like an animal, which is what he was.
While I waited for Betina’s class to end I’d wander around the corridors of that coven. I saw a priest come in followed by an acolyte. Someone had dropped their sheet, their soul. The priest was sprinkling water and saying if you have a soul may God receive you in his bosom.
Who or what was he talking to?
I got close and saw an important family from Adrogué. On a table there was a silk cloth and a cannelloni. If it hadn’t been a cannelloni but something that a human womb had expelled the priest wouldn’t have done a christening.
I asked a nurse who told me that every year a prominent family brought a cannelloni to baptize. That the doctor had urged them not to have any more children because it wasn’t working. And that they’d said that because they were very Catholic they had to keep procreating. Even with my disability I could tell this was a nauseating situation but I couldn’t say so. That night I was too sick to eat.
And my sister’s soul got longer all the time. I was glad my dad had gone.
The development
Betina was eleven and I was twelve. Rufina said it’s the age they’ll start developing and I pictured something from inside coming out of me and I prayed to Santa Theresa that it wouldn’t be cannelloni. I asked the psychologist if she thought I was developing and with a red face she suggested I ask my mom.
My mom got red in the face too and said that at a certain age girls stopped being girls and became young ladies. That was all she said and I was left in suspense.
I already said that I attended a handicapped school, less handicapped than Betina’s. One girl said that she was developing. I couldn’t tell any difference. She said that when it happens blood comes out between your legs for several days and that you don’t have to take a bath and that you have to use a rag so your clothes don’t get stained and be careful around boys so you don’t end up pregnant.
That night I felt the place she’d said and couldn’t sleep. But it wasn’t damp so I could still talk to boys. When I was developed I’d never even look at a single boy if I didn’t want to get pregnant and have a cannelloni or something like it.
Betina talked or blabbered and everyone understood. So it happened that one night during a family gathering that because of our manners they didn’t let us come to, we ate alone and my sister started squawking like a trombone: Mamá I’m bleeding from my cookie! We were in the next room over from the dinner. A grandmother and two cousins came in.
I told my cousins to stay away from the blood because they could end up pregnant.
Everyone left in a huff and my mom gave us both the pointer.
At the institute I told them that Betina was developed even though she was younger than me. The teacher stopped me. The classroom is no place for immoral talk like that and she covered me with moral and civic lessons. Everyone in the class was suddenly worried especially the girls who every so often felt for any possible dampness.
Just in case I stopped talking to the boys.
Margarita came in radiant one afternoon and said “it came” and we knew what she meant.
My sister left school in third grade. There wasn’t any point. Actually for either of us there wasn’t any point and I left in sixth grade. I did learn to read and write, but with terrible spelling, everything without an H because if you didn’t pronounce it what was the point?
The psychologist said I had dyslexia. But she suggested I’d improve