A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. Valerie Miles
when along comes a thatcher who asks Miss Chusena your shack are you thatching or stocking the shacks dear my shack I’m not thatching nor shacks am I stocking only thatching the shack for María Chusena.
My mom watched me and when I couldn’t untwist it she’d hit me over the head with the pointer. The psychologist made sure my mom wasn’t there for María Chusena and I untwisted better because if my mom was there when I tried to finish María Chusena I’d make a mistake in my rush to avoid the pointer.
Betina wheeled around, vroom, opened her mouth and pointed into it because she was hungry.
I didn’t want to eat at the table with Betina. It made me sick. She drank her soup straight from the dish without a spoon and scooped up the solids with her hands. She cried if I insisted on feeding her by putting the spoon in every orifice on her face.
They bought Betina a high chair with a tray attached and a hole in the seat to piss and defecate through. She’d get the urge in the middle of the meal. The smell made me vomit. My mom told me not to act so delicate or she’d send me to the lunatic asylum. I knew what the lunatic asylum was and from then on I ate my meals perfumed by my sister’s feces and misted by her piss. When she farted I’d pinch her.
After dinner I’d go to the garden.
Rufina would disinfect Betina and sit her in her wheelchair. The idiot would nap with her head on her breast or breasts because now her clothes showed two very round and provocative bumps because she’d developed before me and even though she was a horror she was a young lady and from then Rufina had to change her rags every month and wash between her legs.
I took care of mine myself and I could tell that I was still skinny as a broomstick or like my mom’s pointer because my breasts weren’t growing. And like this the birthdays came and went, but I was taking a drawing and painting class and the teacher thought that I’d be an important visual artist because being half crazy I was drawing and painting like the extravagant visual artists of the day.
The art exhibition
The professor told me, Yuna—that’s what they call me—your paintings should be part of an exhibition. One of them might even sell.
I was so overcome with happiness that I threw my whole body on the professor and attached myself to him with all four feet and legs and we fell together.
The professor said that I was really pretty, that when I grew up we’d get engaged, and that he’d teach me the most beautiful things like drawing and painting but not to tell anyone our secret which actually was his secret and I guessed that he meant another more important exhibition so I grabbed him and kissed him again. And he kissed me too, a blue-colored kiss that affected me in places that I won’t name because it wouldn’t be proper and so I grabbed a big canvas and without drawing I painted two mouths in red joined together, inseparable, musical, and two blue eyes above them crying tears of glass. Still on his knees, the professor kissed the painting and he was still there when I went home.
I told my mom about the exposition and because she didn’t understand art she said that those shapeless blobs on my boards would make everyone at the fine art school laugh but if the professor wanted me to it didn’t make any difference to her.
Two of them sold when I showed my pieces with some from other students. Too bad that one of them was the kisses. The professor christened it First Love. Which seemed fine to me. But I didn’t completely understand the meaning.
Yuna is a prodigy the professor would say and I liked this so much that every time he said it I would stay after and throw myself on him. He never stopped me. But when my breasts came in he said not to jump on him because men are fire and women straw. I didn’t understand. I stopped jumping.
The diploma
So when I was seventeen I got my diploma in painting and drawing from the fine arts school, but because of my dyslexia I’d never be able to teach classes or private lessons. When I could buy boards I kept painting because the paints were a gift from the professor who’d often visit us.
Betina and her vroom chair circled the professor until he was dizzy but my mom never left me alone with him and once she slapped me maybe because she saw us kiss but on the cheek not on the mouth like the movie stars on screen.
I was afraid she’d keep the professor away. But she didn’t so long as we didn’t go around kissing because if the devil put his tail in it and the professor put some other part of his male anatomy in mine I’d end up pregnant and the professor would never marry a disabled student.
Betina wheeled around more than ever when the professor came for my private lessons and examined the boards and canvases piled up along the wall intended for the art exhibition in Buenos Aires.
One time it got late and my mom invited him to dinner which he accepted. I trembled thinking of the disgusting sounds and emanations coming from the pile known as Betina. But as the captain commands, the sailor obeys.
Rufina had cooked cannelloni. And on top of that I remembered the cannelloni from the lunatic asylum. I wanted to paint to calm down. I painted a board that no one else understood. A cannelloni with eyes and a hand blessing it. In mente I whispered: if you have a soul may God receive you in his bosom . . .
The dinner
Rufina set the embroidered tablecloth that my mom kept away and the nice plates that she kept too. Whenever she set the table like that her eyes would mist over because they were wedding gifts. It must’ve been the memories of when her marriage unraveled and my dad gone. It never hurt me because I didn’t love her.
Let her cry . . . my dad must have found someone better without a pointer. My dad must have had normal children not idiots like the ones she had and which were us.
In the middle of the table was a smart ceramic statuette of a pair of villagers embraced on a thicket under a willow. One day I’d paint what that scene made me feel because at seventeen every girl wants to be embraced in a thicket under a tree.
We ate on the fancy china because the everyday things were chipped and stained from use. The silverware was also the good ones that my mom was careful with because she said it was the set from her marriage. The crystal came out after several years away and looked like solid water. It didn’t seem like the same stew dressed up in such luxury.
There was even sweet wine. Not the other kind because there wasn’t money for it. In the water pitcher there was water, of course.
My mom sat down first at the head of the table and next to her the professor who arrived exactly on time and with candies.
Across from the professor, me, and next to me Betina.
My mom said first something to pick at. I wondered where she was keeping a pick and if that was some other kind of utensil we never saw it, but that wasn’t what it was but actually some plates of salami and cheese with tiny swords in them.
My mom said serve yourselves and she put wine in the adults’ glasses and water in mine and Betina’s and when the bell rang and in came Aunt Nené my mom said it was the surprise she had for us.
Rufina went back and forth busily. Now Aunt Nené helped her.
The main dish arrived delivered by the hands of Nené. The same chicken stew as always but in a silver dish and dressed up with the vegetables that Nené brought it seemed like an offering to a king.
And so the meal began, each one as best they could. My mom watched us without her pointer but I knew she had it within reach under the table.
Betina struck a visible and frightening note. Brutish resonant belches chased by my mom’s apologies that the poor thing at sixteen had the mental age of a four year old as a result of the disability according to the tests that they’d given her.
Aunt Nené concluded the melody with poor Clelia—that was my mom’s name—two retards for daughters, and immediately stuffed a piece of breast meat in her letterbox-red mouth.
The