Chapter 5 #2
She opened the smallest of the suitcases, admiring the blue silk lining. Her fingers slid across the fabric. Without intending it, with the desire to luxuriate in the feeling of the silk, she discovered an oddity.
Inés frowned. The stitching on one corner had been sewn with a clumsy hand and was coming undone. She poked at it and peeled it back.
She thought she’d find money, a paranoid man’s fortune. Instead, she pulled out letters, tied together with a piece of string. She sat on the floor and undid the knot, looking at the postmarks. Some of the letters were from her aunt, but most were from other women. She read a couple of them.
She also found a copy of Conmovedor, a magazine of the kind that had lonely hearts ads at the back of it—the kind her aunt had bought on several occasions, pretending she was not interested in that section.
A couple of corners were turned, marking pages.
Several ads had been circled with a red pen.
Quickly she grabbed another letter, and another, going through their contents.
Enclosed are the hundred pesos you requested, my dear. I hope your business venture is going well and that soon we might meet. I long to hold you in my arms, said one of the letters.
Inés laughed. Then, fearful that she might attract attention, she pressed a hand against her mouth. But it was funny! Aunt Perla was practically purring with delight because she had a new suitor, and he was a phony. Wait until she told her…
Inés dropped her hand, thinking hard. She heard the shuffling gait of Rita, coming up the stairs with her bucket to mop the hallways.
Inés stuffed the letters and the magazine back inside the suitcase and tucked it back in the corner. She quickly made the bed and lugged the old bedsheets downstairs.
—
All afternoon she tried not to stare at the man sitting across the table from her.
For once her gaze was respectfully on the napkin on her lap, as her aunt commanded.
Rita passed around the empanadas and the cups of coffee.
Inés toyed with a crumb, but her nerves made it impossible to eat properly.
She feared her aunt might comment on this, but Perla was busy smiling and chatting with the other people around the table.
Busy performing for him, Inés thought. Meals were never this congenial at the guesthouse. If Inés had failed to finish the laundry or not made the beds to the satisfaction of her aunt, Perla was quick to chide her in front of everyone else.
It’s too bad Inés was distracted and didn’t launder the sheets, she might say. Tomorrow she will get to it, won’t you?
Seldom, too, were Inés’s chores up to the standards of her demanding aunt.
Rita and Estrella and Fito were also the recipients of cruel barbs, but Perla reserved her most poisonous words for Inés.
Scrounger, she said when she was particularly furious, as if Inés were eating all the rice and beans and eggs in the kitchen, as if she didn’t toil with Estrella in the garden behind the house or assist with the upkeep of the rooms.
I hate this miserable place, Inés thought. I hate these miserable people.
“The problem, Mr. Linares, is that every year the festival of San Fidel de las Cumbres becomes rowdier,” Eduviges was saying. “It used to be a church celebration, now it resembles a common town fair, practically a carnival.”
“Although you have a fun carnival in Veracruz,” Ulises said. “The carnival queen and the parades with floats.”
She glanced at him, quick. His voice was appealing, his demeanor relaxed. He didn’t look like a liar who wrote to heaps of women at the same time. Then again, who was she to recognize a liar? Salvador had lied, and she’d thought he was honest.
“The festival of San Fidel de las Cumbres is not supposed to be like that, though. Fireworks are fine; confetti, good food, and music are to be expected. But the dancing, Mr. Linares! The way these young people dance these days,” Eduviges said, and, as if to emphasize her point, she began quickly fanning herself with a white lace fan. “They’re immodest.”
“It’s all those new dances,” Manuela said. “Rumba and danzón. Cuban dances, black dances.”
Inés stifled a groan. They were going to begin with their nonsense, those two silly, prejudiced bats who thought women should cover their hair with a mantilla even when they were not going to church, who wished skirts reached the shins, who wished all people had skin the color of ivory and lace.
But Nepomuceno’s eyes were bright. She’d seen him drinking sherry before they sat to eat, but he was not drunk yet, and in this state, he was combative.
“What silliness!” Nepomuceno exclaimed. “Cuba is a fine place, filled with the most delightful rhythms. And here, in our lovely Mexico, who could dispute the genius and the joy of dances and celebrations in Yanga? Or the lovely port of Veracruz? What do you think, Mr. Linares? Would you outlaw merriment, as these ladies might want to? Destroy the drums, prohibit the languid danzón, eradicate the African rhythms that suffuse the music of the Caribbean and of our shores?”
“I don’t mind a good danzón,” Ulises said. “There are many dance clubs in Mexico City where you can dance the night away.”
She stifled her smile and watched the Zorrillas’ faces go rigid with revulsion at the thought of dance clubs. To them those places must be the equivalent of Sodom in neon lights.
“It’s fine for a grown man to dance. But young girls should not dance like that,” Manuela said crisply.
“Nonsense. Inés dances many dances, and she’s a lovely girl,” Nepomuceno said, and turned to her. “Will Bartolo escort you to this year’s festivities?”
“I will escort her,” her aunt said firmly. “My father always told us ladies from good families are like delicate flowers, which must be carefully pressed inside a book, and I agree with him.”
Inés’s hand wrapped around a fork, her fingers squeezing it tight. She wished she could stab her aunt with it.
She watched the people around her, but she heard little. The sound seemed muffled, as if she were underwater. She felt like retching.
A carefully pressed flower, she thought. A dead thing.
There were many ladies from good houses—despite her bastardy, Inés was still an Inclán—who slowly withered in those fine homes.
Celebrating funeral after funeral, they came to adopt blacks and grays as their colors.
They stepped out of their homes for mass, for a relative’s wake.
A few, like Cándido’s sister, became the default housekeeper for a male relative.
A brother, a cousin, an uncle. Women polishing the floors and wiping the dust from the top of an armoire.
Quiet women, growing old, in silence.
This was the plight of the spinster. The town strangled any joy out of a girl who had failed to marry, punishing her for a crime against society.
“La quedada,” that’s what they said. But it didn’t only mean decay and refuse, it was a special kind of insult. It meant a transgression of the highest sort.
Ladies of good families became quedadas.
The poor women, the maids and the factory workers, the girls in worn huaraches and frayed rebozos, they came and went more freely.
They took lovers. Had children out of wedlock.
Some never married, but they were never quedadas.
Although, even then, families tended to think poorly of an old aunt who had no labor to contribute.
Inés did not wish to marry; she did not dream of wedding dresses or bridal bouquets. But she did not want to perish inside this house either. Crushed against its walls.
A carefully pressed flower.
—
Rita helped her carry the dirty glasses and plates back into the kitchen.
Estrella had already left, and the dishes were not her responsibility anyway.
She was a cook, that was all, and besides, she did not live with them and said her goodbyes at seven promptly.
It fell to Rita, who did have a room in the house, and Inés to wash the mountain of dirty cups and forks.
“It’s late,” Rita lamented. “I wish Fito was around to lend a hand.”
“Having him here three times a week is already a strain on my aunt’s budget, or so she says.”
“Yes, so she says. But she has that friend of hers staying here and she’s charging him nothing, ain’t she?”
“You wash, I’ll dry,” Inés said.
There was no point discussing her aunt’s accounting methods. When she wanted, it seemed she had funds aplenty, and then again she professed a genteel poverty.
After the dishes were washed and dried, Inés bade Rita good night.
Rita went to the “service room,” which like all maids’ quarters was a small, spare bedroom that in this case could be entered only by ducking one’s head under the doorway, and Inés climbed the steps and waited.
She brushed her hair slowly, paced around her room, contemplated the moon that slid across the night sky.
She listened to the sounds of the house, and she thought about a million things.
She thought of her mother, who had escaped the house only to return to it with a child, becoming infamous in their town.
She thought of her aunt Perla and all the insults, all the cruelties she’d committed against Inés.
She thought of Salvador, who’d promised her love and a future, and now she had neither.
She even thought of the Zorrilla sisters, who were forever mourning their lost status and money, a couple of bitter, malicious hens, and of sad Professor Nepomuceno, who mourned something else that Inés could not grasp.
The sounds of the house began to grow dimmer.
The footsteps and shuffling of feet diminished; doors were closed, some of them creaking on their hinges; the springs in old mattresses squealed in protest and a window rattled shut.
Outside, crickets played their music and the wind caressed the flowers of the purple jacarandas.