Chapter 10 #2
“I know I could succeed with it, even in a town like this. People need their portrait taken, don’t they?
Or if you’d prefer, I could see about setting it up in a bigger city.
I’d have to travel back and forth, or maybe partner up with someone, but it would work.
I could keep some of my old equipment, use it there, and I’d need a little capital—”
“You’d be taxed,” she said. “And then there would be bribes to pay to get the permits for a business, and the expense of setting up a studio in a town that’s too small to need one. Taxed to death, that’s what would happen.”
“All businesses are taxed,” her husband said, with an effortlessness that exasperated her.
“I make money without the government nosing around.”
“I know the guesthouse makes money, and sometimes you are kind enough to extend people credit, but a respectable business like a photographer’s studio has lucrative possibilities. What about the port? What about a house there, with a studio attached to it?” he asked, smiling sunnily at her.
“We could not afford a move there. Besides, the port brings me bad memories,” she said, remembering Norberto and their evenings at her aunt’s home. She would always associate the city with him, and with her heartbreak.
“Perla, a wife can’t make all the decisions in a marriage. A husband must have his place in a house. He must have respect.”
She was already infuriated by the memory of Norberto, but these words made her want to dig her nails into his skin. This time he reminded her of her father. Respect! Yes, how much respect he’d demanded, and in turn, how much life he’d leached out of her.
“A husband who can’t pay for his own coffee is cause for laughter in a town, you know that.”
“If you don’t want them to laugh at you, then you ought to get a job,” she replied. “But don’t start thinking you’ll open a fancy studio with my money.”
His amicable smile faded. “I see. How quickly ‘love of my life’ turns into ‘get a job.’ What job should I apply for, do you think? The butcher is looking for an assistant, I’m told.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Those are the kind of jobs in this town. Butcher boy, or maybe waiting tables at the café.”
The thought of her husband in a black vest and white shirt, with a tiny notepad in his hands, taking orders at Tiburcio Dorantes’s coffee shop was as humiliating as if he’d suggested she prance through the streets in her underwear.
He knew this too. It was no casual comment.
One time, long ago, her niece had suggested something similar, that she might be able to find employment outside the house, and Perla had firmly disabused her of this notion.
It was one thing to take in sewing, or to run a guesthouse.
Even to lend money, quietly and discreetly.
It was another for an Inclán to work like any other nobody in a sweaty, grimy shop.
Ulises was part of her family now, and his behavior affected her status.
She had not married him to devalue herself.
Her temper was at a boiling point, but she controlled herself because the plaza was filled with sharp tongues and curious eyes. “I’m tired,” she said. “I need to rest.”
He’d utterly ruined her day, and when they arrived back at the house and he followed her into her room, apparently intent on reviving the conversation about the studio, she locked herself in the bathroom.
When she stepped out, he was on the bed, sulking, with a book between his hands. He set the book aside.
“Perla,” he said.
She threw him an offended, haughty glance. “What are you doing here?”
“Perla,” he said again, and he stood up, cautiously approaching her and placing his arms around her.
She let him kiss her cheek, then her mouth. She let him touch her between her legs and pull her toward the bed. Her pretty, charming husband fucked her until both lay covered in a thin film of sweat.
But when he tried to talk to her about money again, she told him to shut up. They quarreled, then apologized, and there was another bout of lovemaking afterward, to ensure the peace.
—
Her father has a stroke a month after Encarnación runs away. His heart is rent in two from grief and worry and shame. Afterward, he shuffles around the house, leaning on a cane, his left arm useless, the left side of his mouth frozen so that when he speaks it’s difficult to understand him.
Perla’s mother spends her days sniffling and praying the rosary. Her son’s death and her daughter’s desertion plunge her into misery. She stumbles down the hallways of the house, her eyes clouded from the laudanum.
The only servant that remains with them is Estrella, because she has no other place to go.
Servants are always cheap, especially in the countryside, but in these times of strife and misery they come practically free.
Nevertheless, if Perla could do without the cook, she would, for it means another mouth to feed.
The care of both her parents falls on Perla’s shoulders. This was the role her sister should have played, watching over them until they passed away, but now it’s Perla’s burden. What a heavy burden it is. There are mornings when Perla is hardly able to rise from bed.
The thumping of her father’s cane as he demands his supper mixes with her mother’s weeping, but outside it’s no better. People in Puerco Ahogado, eternally fond of gossip, seem to find their tribulations amusing.
After the war ends, her father suggests that they transform their home into a guesthouse.
Now that the fighting is finally over—at least partially, Calles seems intent on plunging the country into another civil conflict—the coffee fields and the groves with fruit trees must be farmed again.
Workers are trickling back into Puerco Ahogado and the surrounding towns, and they need to be housed somewhere.
“We have enough rooms here, and Estrella can cook the meals,” her father says.
“But a guesthouse would expose us to ridicule!” Perla protests. “What will our neighbors say?”
“Open your eyes, stupid girl. Many families are running guesthouses or businesses from their homes.”
Perla is appalled. Then she remembers Laura Trujillo, who is now working in a miserable rural school because her brothers all died in the Revolution and her mother has been left destitute. A shame for a proper lady to be laid that low.
But it could be worse, yes, it could, she thinks, and she remembers those women that fill their baskets with tacos to sell by the train.
Coarse women, with their swarthy skin and their rough hands, with rebozos around their shoulders; women who worked her father’s fields before the war drained the Incláns’ coffers and who snicker when Perla Inclán walks by with her head held high.
Perla trembles, horrified, and she admits to herself that a guesthouse is the best option for them.
Perla hangs a sign from the gates of the house. It reads: Rooms for rent, by the week or the month. Inquire inside.
She comforts herself with the knowledge that some of their neighbors have similar signs. At Sarita Novo’s house there is a sign that reads: Baby clothes, made to order. Down the street Mrs. Cuesta offers piano lessons.
At least the sign by the gates means the moneymaking activity remains safely inside the home. She would die of shame if she, a young woman of marriageable age, had to go out into the world like a common factory girl or a field hand.
Marriageable age! The months from the calendar have been plucked away with a horrifying quickness. She is twenty-four. There’s no one she’d marry in Puerco Ahogado, and she knows even if there were her father would never agree to give away her hand in marriage.
When Cándido Sotomayor begins to handle the family’s legal affairs—there are numerous unpaid debts, many assets that have been seized and rancorous parties wanting to take every cent left—a few months shy of her twenty-fifth birthday, he throws Perla a curious look.