15. Sam Of Marvels #2
My mother chose a laundress, a kindly woman with no daughters of her own, and from there her safety was assured.
With clean clothes and dependable work, she could do almost anything.
From laundering, she advanced to sewing, from sewing to embroidery and fine lace.
The young merchant from Yucatán who sold henequen rope from the peninsula seemed perhaps too humble at first glance, but once he impressed upon her the significance of henequen, the way its fiber was the linchpin of transportation all across the hemisphere, she realized the scale of his ambition.
She married Humberto May for love, but only because their common striving permitted it.
My mother understood the value of appearances.
She understood that transparency is a privilege, and a costly one at that.
Most people, she said to me many times, have to dissemble.
Only the very powerful, the very beautiful, and the very wealthy can truly afford to be who they are.
The cut of your jacket, the shape of your nose, the size of your waist: they may seem superficial, but they can either grant power or divest power.
My mother knew that. The moment she could afford them, she secured tokens for us.
Of all places, only at home in her bedroom was Mamá ever herself.
Then she would take off her brooch—an oval of glass with imprisoned forget-me-nots, in a brass filagree setting—and her aspect would change.
Without the brooch, she had a missing tooth, and her hands were rough, and she had more than one unseemly scar.
To me, she was no less lovely. Indeed, there was something a little unsettling about the Mamá with smooth hands and perfect teeth: She was the one who looked away unperturbed from the rudeness of customers; she was the one who calmly paid the fee when the landlord raised the rent unannounced; she was the one who only narrowed her eyes, cool and deadly, when I spoke out of turn.
She was formidable and unflappable. For her, the glass brooch was more than a token.
It was a talisman. It gathered all her forces, concentrating the qualities and behaviors she showed to strangers.
Then, when the brooch came off, she was the Mamá who laughed and scolded, who had no secrets, who held me tight, smelling of laundry soap and beeswax.
I learned, by how Mamá changed with the brooch, that enchantments could be complicated. They bestowed something, but they also took something away.
My mother gave me my first token when I began my schooling. I didn’t understand why she wanted me to wear it. In the mirror I saw myself transformed: the silver button made my skin paler, my nose more protuberant, my eyes round, and I didn’t recognize myself. What could be the purpose of this?
Cris took more after our mother in appearance, rounded of feature, and I took more after our father, angular and sharp, but we were both of us hybrid creatures; I didn’t realize then that our looks were odd, failing to fall neatly into the categories that people used to classify one another.
“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Mamá said to me, in answer to a question I hadn’t asked.
“But let me explain something to you. Think of this silver button as your suit of armor. With this suit of armor, you can charge into your schoolroom unafraid. With this suit of armor, the teacher will not rap you on the knuckles—no! He won’t even dare to, for he can see how strong your suit of armor is.
” I couldn’t fully comprehend how my changed appearance would bring about such magic, but I understood well enough what it meant to get rapped on the knuckles, and I wore the button gladly.
Mamá was right, of course. And soon enough I noticed the differences.
When I wore the button (later a brass belt buckle, then a pair of spectacles, and so on), people tended to treat me well.
I was greeted politely, teachers looked kindly on me, and I was met with courtesy everywhere.
When I didn’t, my reception was more mixed.
Some treated me the same. Others avoided my eyes, or seemed not to see me, or stared at me directly with sharp, unpleasant concentration.
Just as there was stern Mamá and real Mamá, I began to think of myself as two people: Samuel, the boy I was; and someone else, the boy others liked to see.
The name came to me in my second year of school.
We read Lord Byron (my teacher might be faulted for introducing us to him too early), and while I liked the poetry, I was even more impressed by the swooning admiration with which my teacher uttered his name.
The words themselves seemed to have some kind of power, as if the mere mention of Lord Byron’s name could summon his restless, intoxicating presence into the room.
I never imagined myself to be like him, never for a moment.
But his outsize reputation made him seem somehow artificial and exaggerated, like a stunt performed by an ordinary man who laughed at the audience offstage; from across the Atlantic and between the pages, he seemed more like a character than a person.
A character, just like the one I played every day.
The boy with lighter skin, with the bulbous eyes and nose, the boy who went to school and pleased his teachers, became “Byron.” I was “Samuel” only at home.
My brother, Cristóbal, wore the tokens, too, and as a result he did well in school and passed as well as I did.
But he never showed any interest in enchantment.
Indeed, he showed a certain discomfort with it, an impatience that matured into hostility.
To him, the tokens were not armor worn for the necessity of preventing injury, as Mamá and I knew; to Cris, they never rose above simple deceit.
I’m not sure why his views hardened so, but I do remember instances when our different ways of understanding crystallized.
I recall one such instance when Cris was sixteen and I was twelve.
It was Cris’s last year of ordinary schooling, and though he could have been an engineer at any of the Boston firms, he had decided already to forswear the tokens the moment he graduated.
They wouldn’t have hired him without the tokens, that much was certain.
Cris didn’t mind; he declared that he was happy to find his own way, and he planned to open a business on Saddle Street alongside Mamá’s, where he would never have to wear another token again.
This had caused some friction in our household during the last several months, with my mother even going so far as to say that she hadn’t scrimped and saved and sacrificed for him to throw it all away, and Cris biting back that if she considered Saddle Street a trash bin, what was she doing in it, and so on.
Cris fought with Mama in a way I never could.
He held his tongue more around me, but only because I was a less formidable opponent.
There was no point wasting his breath, and he knew that my fascination with enchantment wouldn’t be shaken by mere shouting.
It would take something more subtle. As we walked home on a cold April day, still wearing our tokens (which we only removed when we had safely reached the entrance to Saddle Street), two girls in fine skirts and fur muffs walked past us on the sidewalk.
I glanced at them, judging them to be about Cris’s age, both quite well-off.
I also noticed their evident interest in Cris.
Some moments later, we heard giggling behind us, and I looked over my shoulder to see that the girls were following us. “Ignore them,” Cris said, apparently already aware of their presence.
“Why are they following us?” I whispered urgently.
“Some silliness of their own, I’m sure,” he said indifferently.
We stopped at a corner where a coach churned by, and the girls caught up with us. “Hello!” one of them piped, while the other dissolved into muffled giggles.
Cris turned toward them with an air of reluctance.
I was already staring. The blond girl who had greeted us grinned, a gleam in her eyes.
The oversized muff enclosing her hands looked like some kind of sleeping creature, maybe a rabbit or a weasel that had curled up on her forearms. Her bonnet and coat were made of white wool, and I found myself gawking at them, wondering what hands in her household managed to keep such garments so clean.
The girl’s face radiated imperturbable overconfidence, and she seemed quite unembarrassed; meanwhile her friend, face half covered by her own raised muff, was flushed to the tips of her ears.
I didn’t dare say anything. I glanced at Cris, who considered them in a discouraging manner before half turning away again. “Yes?” he asked.
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” the blond girl asked.
“No, I’m certain you don’t,” Cris said curtly.
The embarrassed girl gave a little gasp of horror. She reached out a terrified hand and tugged on her friend’s sleeve. “Let’s go,” she whispered urgently, as if we couldn’t hear her.
To my surprise, Cris turned to me with a strange, hard smile on his face. “Perhaps it would be best if I removed my anchor pin,” he said to me.
Now it was my turn to gasp. “Please don’t,” I said. The anchor pin was one of three tokens he wore, and I knew what would happen if he took it off.
“They’re only speaking to us because I’m wearing it,” he said.
“Cris, I beg you not to,” I urged him again, feeling suddenly near tears.
What could I say to persuade him? I couldn’t appeal to his own sense of self-preservation, for he clearly cared nothing about it.
I could only, selfishly, urge him to think about me.
“In a few more months you’ll be done,” I said to him in an undertone, “but I’ll still make this same walk every day for four more years.
If you take that pin off, do you think my walking here will be easier or harder? ”