In April of 1953, Lydia was locked up in the remote land of a psychiatric clinic, and the gentle white dawns of her uniform were never seen again in Samuel’s grocery store. Berta found prosperity after years of cheerful hard work managing the restaurant she had with her husband, Bernardo. Like a versatile sofa-bed that never declines to show its hospitality, the restaurant also functioned as an inn. Freed from work, Berta began moving from one dismal house to another: you can all imagine her last home. She entertained herself buying ostentatious display cabinets for the different houses, in which she would place small, well-polished silver spoons. Now that she had money she could offer better service. But the spoons went unused, like cloistered nuns.
Señora Olinda, almost seventy years old, was obliged to close Odessa, the shoe store she had presided over for close to half a century. There were no longer customers looking for shoes with toes like pointed noses, or thin rose-stem heels. Left without the shoe store, she discovered in herself a belated religious vocation and found herself more and more at ease in the synagogue and at the jumble sales they held. Her lips (as in the younger days at the Odessa) were, as always, covered with a throbbing scrap of a vibrant velvet red that at times obscured her smile.
As for Amelia, I heard she was stricken by an incurable disease that drove through her body like a sword watching its knight die on the battlefield. Susana got fat, as big as an ever-growing metropolis. She now lives with only her fatness for company in an apartment building in Miami where most of the tenants are rich sentimental old women—widows exiled from New York or from some town in Central or South America.
In Miami she has become addicted to vitamins. Yet she often still finds herself returning from Florida on the occasion of the weddings and Bar Mitzvahs of her numerous relatives. These efforts, at times tiresome, to arrive on time for the family festivities have made her whine in the pharmacy for a renewed supply of her much-appreciated vitamins. “I am always on an airplane. The day before yesterday it was Raquel’s wedding in New York. In June, it’s on to Caracas for Leah and lsaac’s golden anniversary. Next fall I’m invited to Tel Aviv to spend the New Year with Ana Landau, she’s a widow now. What a production! I don’t know anyone who functions more like a well-organized Minister of Foreign Affairs than a member of a Jewish family. I’m about ready to ask for the ambassadorship. I’m just waiting for the Kafka twins’ Bar Mitzvah in Rio de Janeiro.”
Lydia, Amelia, Berta, Olinda, and Susana were my Papa’s friends. It wasn’t a conscious flirtation on their part, nor on Papa’s. There never was a more tender, loving, and conciliatory husband than he. Mama was a small anxious despot, a protector. Thanks to her methodical, stubborn and proud nostalgia—above all, to the crazy collection of things she took with her on the boat—we lived in a far-off town of fiction, one that moved erratically in dark seas, ships of gigantic dimensions like massive caskets transporting entire populations.
The city that my mother founded with such care inside our house never had a real and established spot on the map. This was such an injustice when there was so much beautiful real geography that l began to suspect she was a capricious woman, of a spirit subject to sudden change. The passing of time assured me of my conviction that she is a silly woman, a scatterbrain who changes borders as if they were one-night-stands.
Papa, possessor of an educated cynicism, faced reality with distracted compassion. That was why he could not remain forever inside the rigorous region invented by Mama’s mournful longings. Some Saturday mornings (if the teacher gave me good marks on the report I brought home from high school), he took me with him on short but unconventional walks down the narrow streets in the center of town. I suspect Papa’s own walk began much earlier. More than one Friday at 7 p.m., after greeting God and drinking a small glass of muscatel (his body wore the striped suit like a tablecloth ready to receive its wine glasses), nimble and content (with the jug of his heart half full of wine), he would run to see his lovely Lydia and his needy Amelia before eight o’clock (the most melancholy time in the universe) when the stores closed.
Mama planned things like an actress in a repertory company of three-act comedies. The celebration of Hanukkah represented the first act. On the pretext of collaborating with the Israel Club, she would make a cake of honey, nuts, and raisins. The club now and then served as a house of charity, a somewhat bohemian, cordial hospice.
On Fridays, protected by the merciful music of prayer, men would appear at the door who looked as though they didn’t even have a place of their own to die.
In order to do the honors to the second act, Mama put on her skirt and jacket of silk imprimé (that’s what the pretentious employees of El Gallo de Oro called the printed material) with the firm determination of appearing, hanging on Papa’s arm at the Israel Club, to drop off the delicious cake decorated with the skill of an English assassin. She also used the argument of wanting to stretch her housewife legs (those crippled spousal extremities, sacrificed like mermaids’ limbs in an ocean that prohibits voyages to worldly lands of enjoyment and pleasure) in order to arrive with dignity at the pretenses of the third act. Accompanying Papa on the short trip to his friends’ shops (while he made some insignificant purchase), Mama perhaps wanted to assure herself that the visits were not just a useful excuse for a gaze or a verbal caress, performed with the enigmatic touch of love that has no homeland in bed, toward Lydia or Amelia, who, behind their safe sales counters, in the sweetness of dusk, were remote women hidden in the towers of their chaste castles.
Mama admired and at the same time despised Lydia. The variations of her indifference came in all sizes, big and small. Mama, the small domestic despot, envied Lydia her disquieting ability to sell black olives, nuts, almonds, and Maracay cheese, as she did her white uniform, that, free of marital stains, emancipated her, gave her independence.
Lydia was of short stature, a bit heavy. Her ass was the least animated part of her body, but she seemed to keep singing birds in her somewhat meddlesome belly. The hapless uniform nevertheless tried to silence the indiscreet sparrows of a troublesome digestion. Her face, the green eyes, were those of an artist of the time. A shorter and plumper Kay Francis (the bargains she found in expensive department stores gave authority to her warm greetings), she was happy to be able to seize to her waist the liberating banner of stable and certain work.
A Kay, happy to watch life through tenses spread with foggy yellow Kupperschmidt butter. But Papa would have had to make the sacrifice of buying the necessary (as well as the unnecessary) theater seats in order for Lydia to have really been the haughty Kay Francis, to whom silver-screen husbands presented divine jewels, hidden in the lustrous silver domes of breakfast platters, in humble homage to the night before, when at the elegant party, fox skins drifted from one shoulder to the other like snowflakes swirled by the wind around the gargoyles of a palace roof.
lmpassioned stars winked in Papa’s eyes when he saw this domestic version of Kay Francis. Lydia, like the other Saturday morning women, didn’t pay much attention to me, a pale skinny girl with braids tightly knotted like the shoelaces of shabby winter shoes, a red dress of Scotch plaid wool, and frail bones like toothpaste that called for immense bottles of calcium brimming over like a full water tank. Life was passing by. To find love one had to rush around like the race-walkers in the stadium. Papa and the women counted on those few hours a week to ignite the fires of opportunity, to try to light the logs of burning tenderness from fragile, fast-burning twigs.
I felt sorry for Lydia, something of a respectful pity. Mama cautiously mentioned (with tremendous scorn) that she was “separated.” What the hell did that mean? l saw chubby Lydia flapping around in her uniform amid the comings and goings to Samuel’s store, like an ocean teeming with life and topped with the whitest waves. Could it be that separation was an adult disease, different from my discouraging lack of calcium? Or is that the way she labeled it because in her house she had a Chinese folding screen which she hid behind to leisurely put in place some linen contraption supposed to reduce the vast habitation of her stomach?
This desolate operation, to tighten or to meticulously loosen the waists of a weary corset, was like that of a ship captain at the moment in which he hoists or lowers the sails that have been entrusted to him.
Papa, loaded down by his Mediterranean riches, black olives glittering like the buttons on a widow’s bodice, grapes like fairies’ teeth, and the skinny girl at his side like some unattractive trophy of his matrimony, twenty or twenty-five minutes later would enter Amelia’s store for gentlemen.
She received him with little claps of happiness and with the melodramatic gymnastics of open arms. Papa’s smile was a cordial cliff of luminous teeth. I don’t remember if Amelia was married then or if she did it later. lt doesn’t matter. In any case, her heart sheltered an extraordinary comprehension of and access to the maculine world. The sale of men’s shirts and ties gave her these powers.
Sometimes it surprised me that the anxiousness of the greetings, the intimate hubbub of the encounters between Amelia and Papa, depended on a commonplace casual Saturday visit to the haberdashery. lt seemed unfair that the affectionate saleswoman wasn’t included at our family dinners, and that the evident happiness that Papa’s arrival brought her had such a limited time frame. My girl’s eyes perceived that their mutual delight was reduced to a cautious passion that could have been set in the cold snow of far-off mountains.
Amelia eagerly dressed herself up for the hours she spent in the shop. But the pale mauve or blue blouses, the gray wool skirts, seemed to age rapidly on her body. She looked lovely, however, when she wore her Romanian white silk camisole, covered with pleats and done up in a profusion of multicolored sashes. How beautiful it would have been, her entrance into the house for an innocent domestic meal, dressed in the Romanian camisole and with the fire of her eyes burning in golden affection. Then perhaps Amelia’s love wouldn’t have been limited to the embrace that stung by its similarity to farewells from a train en route to distant lands. In the ecstasy of being in such close proximity to Papa (different from the stolen and wounding hour that, on his quick visits to the store, he offered her every Saturday), perhaps Amelia would have let him pull up the multicolored sashes of her adornment, as if they were the backdrop or house curtain of a small and illicit theater.
Berta had set up her restaurant in a long thin building a block up from Amelia’s store. The tables were at the back, in a raised area that meant climbing three or four bare steps unprotected by the decorations of the rest of the scene. But for me, to arrive at this upper section of the house was like being installed on the gently sloping hill of a theater house.
There was always something frustrating about these visits to Berta. Papa and l would arrive just as the preparations for the noonday meal were taking place. At the table they would have already placed large platters overflowing with salads of potato, beet, onion, and tomato. The chunks of lettuce were veritable gardens.
When Papa said goodbye to Berta I knew we were going to miss the show, the real entertainment: the predictable actions of the actors, the customers’ unexpected moments. “It’s time to go.” Papa watched life through the jealous mirrors of haste. Mama’s tyranny awaited us in the dining room at 12:30 precisely, with the Venetian blind up, the sun shining on a fountain of chopped egg, potato, and onion salad. That’s why I was never able to see any of Berta’s customers. Not once did I eat at her place of business. A restaurant was a prohibited adventure, a swelling of high waves. In order to get near such proud waters, it was necessary to make a crossing that would take an entire childhood.
The lower part of the house held the bedrooms where taciturn guests took their lodging. Berta had a slender, good-natured husband with the body of a dancer who used it only to call the actors to their places: light taps on the doors to offer aspirins, front-door keys, correspondence from remote areas, vague messages. He spent the rest of the time in a comer, the chair balanced awkwardly against the wall behind the stairs that led to the tables, watchfully idle (carrying on the shoulders of his thin body the insomnia that flourishes in boarding houses, and also in theaters).
Sometimes he would let the newspaper drop from his hands onto the stairs as he murmured in a faltering voice: “Ay, Leybele! Leybele! Good God, the only one of us who got this far and they wouldn’t rest until they tracked him down in the last corner of the world to kill him.”
Papa would hold me tight, tenderly taking my hand, trying to soothe with his smile the misfortune of the world. But a sad haze clouded the proud granite of his teeth.
I remember that Bernardo, Berta’s husband, would take a napkin from one of the tables, and it wasn’t sweat he wiped off his face. They were small and fragile tears. His Adam’s apple would swell up disjointedly, as if he had already served himself salad without waiting for the customers. As if the spines of an evil accursed fish had lodged themselves in his throat.
In this restaurant, suspended as in a dream of some high tower, the tables were covered by a type of cheap oilcloth generally reserved for the kitchen. I was enchanted by the innocent little animals and the rough-drawn dahlias printed on the cloth.
The petty maternal despot had never seen such crude material on a table. Now I understand: for her, to omit the white starched tablecloths would have been like renouncing the snow of her native city.
On the occasions when they laid out white tablecloths in Berta’s restaurant, criminal fingerprints and blood (Del Monte ketchup spilled by negligent diners) ended up staining them. Anyway, the owner of the establishment would never have had the patience to thumb through fashion magazines for ideas about interior decorating.
And it was Berta who triumphed. She jumped over the tables like a thoroughbred horse going over a fence. She didn’t bother herself with haughty refinement. A malady such as that would have shrouded Mama early in her pure white tablecloths of nostalgia.
Berta tended toward stockiness, and the gestures of a sharp and fierce worldliness peeked out from her face. Her eyes were spirited and vivacious. It was impossible for those pupils to fall victim to myopia or any other visual ailment. The abundance in her ebony gaze would have smashed to smithereens the glass of any lens. Those imperial violets! Her hair was all boisterous curls, like that of “Imperio Argentina” or some other torch singer, a joyful celebration of black ringlets.
A peaceful garbanzo bean of a mole, cooked over a slow fire on her skin and placed between the nose and the upper lip, gave belligerent notice of a large and brutal mouth, one that let loose virile laughs and cheerful curses in the way of greetings.
Sometimes the musical laughs, the insolent sarcasm, seemed to abandon her body that was so occupied with changes in the menu and conversations with unattractive guests whose smiles revealed teeth like rusted grilles. And, indeed, the fighting and the celebrating in her grandiloquent voice migrated to a freer part of the body: straight to her arms. Berta’s mischievousness traversed her upper arms until it arrived at her hands, folded in a gesture of prayer (of embrace) toward Papa. But on a moment’s notice she would have to go back to the kitchen for more platters of food, for soon the diners would arrive and the oil and vinegar would be scattered around the tables like incense at a church. And Papa had the officious tyranny of home waiting for him.
Perhaps because I was visiting a restaurant without being interested in any of the men who came for the platters of food, I began to dream about a customer who, in the middle of noon’s torrential heat, would make his majestic entrance, suited in a black tuxedo and wearing soft patent leather shoes. A man with massive shoulders and gallant manners, with a moustache and graying temples like the actor Arturo de Córdoba.
He would snap his fingers in command and say to Berta and her husband, “Do you see my beautiful suit? Take my order. What dish do you recommend today? I want wine for everyone. But, for the love of God, no more potato salad with beets. 1 have triumphed. From sunrise on it’s a constant party. For Leybele, our unfortunate brother, as well. In his memory. After all, Berta, what are we, anyway? Commerce and memory. One last favor: bring me some shoeshine boys from the corner to shine my shoes. That way they’ll realize I don’t crawl in the gutters and the streets anymore. 1 would like everyone to notice that my shoes are made of patent leather, fit for a ballroom.”
Berta and Bernardo would appear, surrounded by waiters in starched uniforms like members of an army. In homage to the courteous diner, my fantasy transplanted itself to the great hall of the Paris restaurant with its vast cemetery of dining room. The elegant diner chose a filet mignon.
Olinda in the shoe store Odessa was always on her feet, a party hostess with no parties, attending to the door and maneuvering the cash register. Her hair was a fuzzy, fat gold cloud. She reigned over the store with a petulant and virtuous grace, dressed in a silk blouse adorned with exquisite designs of delicate lace and pleated Scotch plaid skirts. But in her white complexion, in her mouth painted a surprisingly shameless red, she was a woman of daring. Capable of taking on the whole night as if it were a big house, something unknown, with thick curtains of velvet surrounded by gilded railings. A mansion where it was necessary to break down all resistance, something that had to be possessed in full youth and vigor, when strength for the attack and the decision still remained.
The rotund housebound despot would snivel with spite when she saw her little one arrive with a bag containing shoes bought at Odessa. She also sobbed bitterly on seeing Papa enter with packages of olives and mortadella, purchased in the shop where Lydia worked, or with socks bought in haste at Amelia’s bazaar. But for Mama the visits to Odessa were the most mortifying.
Olinda, the manager of the store, was a woman sufficiently audacious to have embarked alone for America. Customers at the store (especially on the days when prices were raised) would whisper: in Havana she stood up her boyfriend who, it was said, had purchased the ticket for her long voyage. While she was there she had spent all her time dancing the rumba and, between dances, she had met the Russian shoemaker who now crafted his wares at Odessa.
But to go to Olinda’s shop was like becoming attached to an expensive lover. That was why some Saturdays Papa took me to Susana’s shoe store, a less pretentious one next to the market.
Susana was voluminous and large. But the emphasis of her nose offered certain inroads into her character. She herself, without calling for one of the employees (all of melancholy faces and dressed in dark clothes, as if celebrating a burial), sat on a small stool to try the shoes on me. She was generous, complacent, and clever. Her knees, like juicy oranges recently brought in from the field, brushed up innocently against Papa’s legs while concealing the arduous struggle with my shoe.
But I think he preferred Olinda, high-priced Olinda, along with the doves who found treasures beneath the bow of a silk blouse. Those doves that the Havana night sent off to hover over the body of the Russian artisan.
Over the years, it seems I have become Lydia, Berta, Olinda, and Susana. In moments of vain coquetry, I am Amelia. The fugitive illusions of the Saturdays of their youth are my longings today.
An affable and timid man runs in brief and affectionate spells from his frigid marriage to my house; he pops up by chance, like the playing card that a blind man chooses. And then from my comfortable home back to the cold and imposing marble of his conjugal domicile where, at the cocktail hour, they feed on shriveled peanuts.
The comings and goings of my lover are so rapid and so forced, so that he can return exactly on time to the gloomy castle of his marriage, that last spring he tripped and for months wore his right arm in a sling. Another time, in the winter, he tore his Achilles tendon. The plaster cast, enemy of action and adventure (mountains of snow in the garden, the neighboring park, illicit paths), has him waylaid in the failed throne of a wheelchair.
1 adore in my lover the exquisiteness of his manners, the sublime freshness of his body sprinkled with Loewe cologne. As for the rest of it, these fractures have become part of the custom of our passionate love.
He will return next spring on crutches (his suitcases of disability), ready to lose one leg or another as if in some ancient war. Because he will never stop running between his matrimony of solitary eiderdown and the love that we—Lydia, Amelia, Berta, Olinda, Susana, and I—offer him.
Madrid, 1989
Translated by Amy Diane Prince
Originally published in Oy, Caramba!: An Anthology of Jewish Stories from Latin America,
edited by Ilan Stavans (University of New Mexico Press, 2016)
