A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. Valerie Miles
in the city I’d already sold two.
Aunt Nené
Aunt Nené painted too. She’d frame her canvases and hang them all over the walls of the house she lived in with her mother who was my grandmother and my mom’s mother. Two paintings signed “Nené” hung in our house, portraits of ladies with perfectly black eyes, like cows, and these big faces that frightened me. One had a mustache. Nené said she liked being a portraitist and she said it to the professor who asked her where she’d studied the art of manipulating oils and the rest, she confessed that she was an amateur, that she didn’t need anyone holding her hand because the pictures poured from her heart like water from a spring.
The professor didn’t respond. Nené looked at one of my boards and said the lines didn’t mean anything, that she didn’t like the new painters and that once she’d laughed at Pettoruti’s absurd cubism. The professor lurched and because he was looking at Nené’s painting it collapsed onto the floor.
Then Aunt Nené said that my squiggles might make sense to me, what with my cognitive deficiencies, but can we even know what the handicapped think and feel, she said in the form of a question.
The professor insisted that I was the best student at the fine arts school, that I’d graduated and was going to exhibit soon, and Aunt Nené asked what must the other students be like and the situation started to sour.
My mom added that my painting was kids’ stuff and it would soon pass.
The cow eyes Nené painted stared out at us from between the wood frame. Suddenly I said something that would earn me a few lashes later: It’s like a cow is staring at me wondering if I’m going to eat her because this painting is boring like a cow face and ugly like an ugly woman’s face.
Nené screeched like the monkey in the zoo and screamed how long was her sister going to put up with me and that it was about time they sent me to the loony bin.
The professor said his stomach hurt and please excuse him he had to go to the bathroom to vomit. I felt as happy as if they’d given me a prize at an exhibition.
Total silence until my mom told Nené that she’d overstepped and to remember that it made me feel good to paint those things on the boards and canvases that the professor gave me. Nené pounced like a wasp: can’t you see that man looking at the girl with bad intentions, she said in the form of a question and my mom scolded her for her dirty mind and added that she agreed that such big eyes couldn’t fit in any woman’s face unless she was a cow.
I sensed that my mom accepted me and I held back a tear that was at the point of crashing to the ground because it would’ve been the most giant tear I’d ever cried since I could mostly understand the basics of conversations between so-called normal people like my mom and Nené were. The professor came back from vomiting and started saying something that she interrupted immediately, which was the following:
Miss, he began and she said that she didn’t go by miss and he begged her pardon and added that a woman as pretty at her age could never be called miss and that he was sure her husband must be pleased to have a painter at his side and she informed him that she was separated because her ex’s ordinary habits bothered her. The cultured and educated professor couldn’t stop himself from saying that it seemed like no one in that house was ordinary.
My mom could tell that the spoiled dinner bothered everyone but Nené. She brought a tray and the champagne glasses. She’d kept the champagne to celebrate the fifteenth birthday of one of her daughters which were me and Betina but she hadn’t opened it knowing that it didn’t make sense when our mental age didn’t keep pace with the hours and the days.
We went back to the table. Betina snoring, asleep in her chair. So ugly, so horrible, how could there be someone so ugly and horrible, buffalo head, moldy rag stink. Poor thing . . .
A toast to peace, Nené said, feigning intellectuality. And then she told the story of how her failed marriage weighed on her because of the guilt she owed to her lack of sexual education and sometimes she missed Sancho, which was the name of her ex.
She sat waiting for a question but no one asked her one so turning red she told how she spent the first night with her ravenous husband chasing her around the house and the marriage wasn’t consummated and he left. It freaked him out.
She filled a second glass with champagne and her listeners’ ears with the clarification that she was a married virgin, neither miss nor mistress or anything else and that was the reason she’d taken shelter in the art of painting.
The way my Aunt Nené was
She lived glued to her mother’s skirts, who was my mom’s mother too and also my grandmother and Betina’s. Our grandmother’s skirts were like a priest’s habit and her shoes were like a man’s and she wore her hair in a black bun because she didn’t have any gray hair because her mother had been a native and the natives never went gray probably because they didn’t think. My mom didn’t have any gray hair just like grandmother but she did think.
Nené could play the guitar by ear and when she did she wore a white headband and she hated gringos. So many ideas spill out when I try to describe her, so many and so stupid but I have to remember I’m talking about a character.
She liked to go dating and would kiss boys nibbling on their lips, she had about eight hundred boyfriends but she kept her virginity to the point of fleeing her marriage bed from the court house and the white church.
In the early thirties an Italian carpenter fell for Nené. I remember what a good guy the carpenter was—tall, blonde, always scrubbed, and perfumed with scented water. He came courting to the door of grandmother’s house which because it was just a neighborhood house wasn’t much. But since no one in the family worked they had to get by with what Uncle Tito who worked in the papers sent them.
Aunt Nené let him kiss her however he wanted. But they didn’t go any further because if she ever got married she wanted to be in a virgin state, which I didn’t understand. By wearing a medallion of the Virgin I thought I’d be saved from anything very sinful you got from pregnancy. Maybe when she got married she’d have to take off the medallion so that the Virgin wouldn’t see her, I don’t know what kinds of things the Mother of God shouldn’t be seeing. My head was full of enormous troubles that I poured out onto the boards which was how I painted a very thin delicate neck from which hung a chain for the Virgin of Luján, and coming from the shadows that I created by rubbing my finger over thick black strokes a huge man like the Basque milkman who brought the milk and always complained “arrauia” or something like that and from his bulk poured liquids that drowned the delicate little neck and the Virgin wept. To simulate tears I painted red splashes of damage that pained the lily-white necked creature.
The Italian boyfriend finished the bedroom with good woods, the bed, and the night stands. Then he finished the furniture in the living room and other knickknacks required of a decent house. I knew because I listened at the door that Aunt Nené laughed at the gringo: does that wop think I’m going to marry him for his pasta? Once I told her: better pasta than drinking café con leche all day.
She told me I had to help her throw the Italian off and I answered that no, that wasn’t right, no. She told me that my dad who was another gringo abandoned my mom. I asked her why she wasn’t ashamed to be lying that way to a good man and she said that wop lowlifes weren’t men and that night she left for Chascomús where one of her brothers lived, my uncle and my mom’s brother.
I didn’t hear anything else about that situation but Nené spent a year away from her maternal home out of fear that she’d bump into the Italian but I was happy to find out that he’d been disillusioned with Nené and had contracted marriage with a Genovese and that the woman was already pregnant and I thought that she wouldn’t be able to keep wearing her medallion for the Virgin because of the contact with her husband that the Virgin wasn’t supposed to see.
Soon after that Aunt Nené took up with an Argentine boyfriend from Córdoba. I liked hearing the lilt of his talk and I painted something along those lines.
With