Chapter 13 #3
Perla grabs her sister’s smart hat from above a dresser, spins it between her hands, and pictures Encarnación wearing it as she walks arm in arm with her friend, stopping at a café, then laughing as they head down a wide avenue.
It must have been a happy life. But she’s here now. She’s here in Puerco Ahogado with Perla. She places the hat back where it was.
—
Encarnación’s presence improves their mother’s disposition, and though Osorio grumbles about his youngest child, Perla appreciates her sister’s support.
It’s busy now, their house. Some rooms have two beds, and they have plenty of lodgers.
Coffee attracts workers, and when it’s not coffee it’s the orange groves.
The town, which has slumbered for years and years, has begun to twitch back to life.
“If things continue like this, we might be able to hire a houseboy. Remember when we had a proper staff? Now we have Estrella and Rita, and Rita is lazy. But she comes cheap, at least. She says the piece rate at the beneficios is much lower than the men’s rate, and she’d have to stand for eight hours straight.
She can’t, not with her bad leg. I might even buy a car. Things can only improve in 1929.”
Perla pauses to inspect the finely embroidered clothes for the Christ Child that her sister is working on.
The clothes are crucial for the Christmas celebrations.
They must be white the first year the Christ Child is exhibited, pink the second, the third and fourth years purple, and there are other variations that ensure a steady need for new outfits for the porcelain doll.
“Who are these for?” she asks.
“Emilia Durante.”
“But she has no money.”
“She borrowed it from someone. You know how people are in Puerco Ahogado, they wouldn’t dream of cutting back during the Posadas, and they must dress the Christ Child and later, during Candelaria, take him to be blessed; they know people will notice if they have the wrong outfit.
So they ask their friends for money and hope to pay it back.
It’s a silly tradition, but it’s money coming in.
I want to get Inés a big doll with curls, the kind that opens her eyes and says ‘Mama.’ Remember how we used to have many toys? ”
They used to have so much of everything and be free of all worries. Now Perla carefully measures the amount of rice and beans her lodgers eat in a week. What an awful thing it is to have lost their status and stained their pride.
“Venidos a menos.” Even the phrase itself is ugly. It conjures decay in each syllable.
Encarnación puts the cloth she’s embroidering down and smiles. “Perla, what do you say we go for a walk and buy candy for Inés?”
“She’ll get cavities the way you feed her candy.”
“Then we’ll buy it for ourselves. Come on, let’s go out for half an hour. Estrella and Rita can manage without us for a little while.”
“Father hates it when we go out alone. Ladies are not supposed to wander around town without the men of their family,” she says, repeating the phrases she’s grown up with, even if by now they hold little meaning for her.
“He’s not going to walk with us. Come on, you can blame me if he gets huffy. We’re too old to be needing chaperones.”
They head out, laughing like a couple of schoolgirls.
—
Around this time, their father begins to chafe at Encarnación’s presence in the house. He complains about the clothes she wears, the way she does her hair, the jaunty melodies she wants to play on the piano.
“She’s not grateful enough,” he says when Encarnación does not submit to his criticisms, when she continues to wear the skirts she favors and places the partiturs she’s brought from the city by the piano. “She comes back with a bastard child and expects us to fulfill her every whim.”
“She’s been away for a long time,” their mother says. “She’s forgotten what Puerco Ahogado is like.”
“She better damn remember, and fast.”
Their father can be mighty difficult, and Perla grits her teeth and does not flinch when she hears him tapping his cane against the floor and bellowing for one of them, but Encarnación complains.
“Why must he yell?” she asks as she threads a needle.
“Father has always had a temper,” Perla reminds her.
“That doesn’t make it any better. He was too hard on Natito. He made him cry. Do you remember? He wanted him to join the business and Natito wanted to go to university.”
“We don’t have a business anymore.”
“No, we don’t. I wish he’d stop giving himself airs, acting like he’s still the most important man in town and can order people around with a snap of his fingers.”
“It would be much easier if you weren’t contrarian.”
“Because I wouldn’t wear a mantilla to mass? Covering my hair with lace doesn’t make me more pious. Besides, I had my hat.”
“A hat is not proper. Women wear mantillas to church,” Perla insists. “It’s the proper thing to do.”
Encarnación stares at her as if she’s speaking in tongues; her sister does not understand how norms and rules allow Perla to navigate a rapidly changing, maddening world.
If she did not have propriety and etiquette and tradition to chart her path, Perla fears she would be utterly lost. Like their mother seems half lost, with the laudanum offering her the only comfort she has ever known.
“The way you dress sometimes, and the shoes and hats you wear…the townspeople say it makes you look like a hussy,” Perla tells her sister. She does it out of love, out of concern for her, hoping Encarnación takes her seriously.
But her sister shrugs. “They’re going to say that anyway.”
“Maybe not. Maybe if you didn’t flaunt…”
Encarnación frowns. “What?”
“Flaunt your child.”
“Should I lock her in her room?”
“You know what I mean. You go to church in dresses that are too tight, and with that frilly hat. Inés is a reminder of our shame, but you make it worse. And it doesn’t have to be that way, it really doesn’t. You could wear the mantilla, and more sensible shoes,” she says, almost pleadingly.
“I’m not ashamed of Inés,” Encarnación replies.
Perla is not shocked by this answer, but she is dismayed nevertheless.
Her sister is stubborn and impractical and seems to exist in a world of her own, with rules tailored to herself.
But Perla lives in the real world, she lives in Puerco Ahogado, and she recognizes the limits of the town and its people.
Perla shakes her head and Encarnación simply smiles her teasing smile. Always the joker, the playful one, and Perla cannot help but smile back a smidgen.
—
It happens on a day when the fog descends from the mountains. The streets smell like roses and wildflowers and limes. The light that streams through the window is hazy, almost milky; the clouds dampen the sun’s rays and invite the inhabitants of Puerco Ahogado to linger in bed.