HAVE A HEART #2
‘If I have to clear tables, I’ll get this blouse dirty and Morales will beat me for it on Sunday,’ I complained. Elena said nothing. Her face, always paler than mine, was paler than ever.
Caterina eyed us critically as she led us along the corridor. ‘Be good,’ she said, and her grip was hard. ‘Don’t talk back.’ She stopped outside the parlour. ‘Don’t cry.’
She pushed open the door. Inside were the four gentlemen from downstairs, almost done with a bottle of sherry. Abruptly, I realized what they wanted us for.
I couldn’t move. I had always known that I would have to do this one day, but Caterina and the others were older, fifteen or sixteen at least. Elena grabbed my hand, dragging me with her into the room as the door swung shut behind us.
I forgot how to do anything but breathe.
One of the gentlemen was saying something, gesturing to a pair of chairs at the table.
He was smiling, his whiskers damp with sweat and spirits.
Another man eyed us, mouth occupied with his cigar, another blinked rapidly, as if he could not see us through the smoke.
‘Senoritas,’ greeted the first, ‘have a drink with us. Do you like sherry?’
Elena’s face was red to the eyes as she nodded, looking down at the tablecloth. I gripped her hand and stared into the corner. At the edge of my vision, I saw a little glass, brimming with sherry, pushed in my direction.
‘We have ordered some pasteles from the kitchen,’ the blinking man said, ‘and we have these for you. Sweet things, for sweet girls.’
He pushed a box across the table. It looked expensive, creamy pink cardboard decorated with golden swirls and the words Delicia Turca.
Elena was still staring at the cloth. ‘Gracias,’ she whispered.
‘Well,’ the first man said, ‘salud.’
I watched as Elena reached out and took hold of the glass before her.
Her hands were trembling, and the sherry slipped over the rim on to her fingers.
As she raised it, she glanced at me. Please, her look said, don’t leave me alone.
That’s what made me copy her. I picked up my own glass and raised it to my lips and drank the sherry down in one.
It was disgustingly sweet.
The men were laughing at something. I looked up at last and found that it was me they were mocking. At my side, Elena still held her sherry. She had only sipped it.
‘That one might be dull but she’s got fire,’ the man with the cigar observed. ‘That’s how they make them on the streets: slow in every way but one.’
His lip curled at me. My stomach gave a lurch and a shudder, as if my guts were creeping upwards. I couldn’t take my eyes from his starched white collar, from his beautiful suit. I kept wondering what he’d done to get those fine clothes.
‘Come here,’ he said.
I wouldn’t have moved if Elena hadn’t let go of my hand, so abruptly that I swayed.
It was as if she was backing into a corner without moving an inch, leaving me exposed.
I stood, cold sweat on my back and a strange, bitter taste in my mouth.
If I ran, could I reach the door? If I did, where would I go?
My guts squirmed, climbing higher, making their way towards my heart, to wrap it, to shield it, to keep it from being crushed by the world.
When I stood before him, the man stared at me critically, chin to toe. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.
I opened my mouth to tell him ‘thirteen’, but what came out was not sound. Instead, a sudden rush of vomit surged from the guts that were now in my chest, hot and furious, all over the man’s beautiful shirt front.
Through my stinging eyes, I saw his face and almost laughed.
Then he was shouting in disgust and kicking me away from him, screaming that I was diseased.
I fell back against the table, and something shattered, but I couldn’t see what; all I could think about was the nausea and my roiling guts as I vomited again.
I heard voices, Morales’ voice, saying that I wasn’t diseased, just a stupid girl who wasn’t used to drink, and that if the gentlemen came with her, she would have the girls arrange baths for them, and another bottle of Tío Pepe, on the house.
When the scraping of chairs and curses finally stopped, I looked up, my lips shaking, my nose and eyes streaming. Only Morales remained, and Ifrahim, who must have arrived amidst the chaos, the tray of pasteles forgotten in his hand.
Morales hit me then, harder than she ever had before. It made me bite my tongue, but the wash of blood tasted clean, after the sherry and the sick.
‘You disgusting maggot,’ she said, wiping her hand on the tablecloth. ‘I always knew you’d cost me.’
I risked a glance at her face. The anger was gone, or trampled down deep where it didn’t show.
‘Out,’ she said.
I tried to speak, and choked. She didn’t mean out of the room, but the inn.
It was impossible. The men, the clients, they might simply get up and leave, walk out of the gates and into the world, but I wasn’t like them.
I had no money, no family, no name or friends to call upon. There wasn’t anywhere else for me.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please, I’ll work.’
‘You think they’ll want you after that?’ She looked at me, still revolted. ‘What use do I have for a thing like you anyway? Your youth is the only thing of value, and if I can’t sell that …’ She turned towards the door. ‘Ifrahim, make sure she—’
‘Camila.’
For all my pain and terror and sickness, I remember being stunned by that. I had never heard anyone call Morales by her first name. She stopped moving. I couldn’t see her face from where I stood, but I could tell her eyes were fixed on Ifrahim’s.
‘I’ll use her in the kitchen,’ he said, softly, the way he always spoke.
‘God knows I could do with the help.’ He winced and shifted his chest, and I knew his heart was paining him.
Morales knew it too, because I saw her lower her head a fraction, as if to look through his ribs.
‘If she doesn’t work,’ he said, ‘I’ll throw her out myself. ’
I don’t know what passed between them in that silence. I could only see Ifrahim’s face, his brown eyes betraying nothing as he held Morales’ gaze.
She never agreed. Never disagreed either, just turned her head and walked from the room.
It was Ifrahim’s heart that caused him to speak for me that day, I am sure of it.
In the kitchen, he helped me clean my face and gave me a lump of precious ice from the box to soothe my tongue, and let me sleep in front of the stove, so that I wouldn’t have to tread the corridors of the inn, where the men might still be at their business.
The next morning, early, he set me to chopping onions and peeling potatoes, while he went to the plaza to argue for meat. Vegetable tears stung my eyes as I worked, and I wished that they were tears of love, so I could give them to Ifrahim.
That day, we made tortilla. We used eggs from the market and oil from the huge canister by the stove and my own cut onions and potatoes.
And when I saw the gusto with which the guests greeted those plates of tortilla, when I saw them cramming it down with bread and beer, a strange realization crept into my mind.
Without us, those people would have gone hungry.
Ifrahim and I kept them in their seats; we held them there spellbound with only a few humble ingredients.
It was a kind of magic – slender but potent – and I understood for the first time that Ifrahim lived by it.
Being a cook gave him authority; he wasn’t like the men upstairs, with their clean shirts and their deep pockets, but he had a control they didn’t, and he could wield it in ways they never would have imagined.
Later, my hands cracked from scrubbing soap and blistered from the kitchen knife, I moved my things out of the room I had shared with Elena.
I can’t say exactly what made me do it, only the knowledge that something had shifted for us both.
She did not look at me while I collected my few clothes, only sat on the edge of the bed, holding the hem of a beautiful white lace mantilla between her fingers.
I supposed it was a gift from the senor with the cigar.
The box of Turkish Delight was there too, open beside her.
They were untouched save for one, chewed and glistening, spat out amongst the others.
‘Take them away,’ she said, when she saw me looking, ‘I don’t want them.’
I didn’t want them either but I picked them up, chewed lump and all. I thought about giving them to Ifrahim, in thanks, but I knew it wouldn’t be right. I burned them instead, in their pretty box, until the whole kitchen smelled of animal bones and roses.
I slept in the kitchen every night after that, on an ancient truckle bed wedged next to the stove.
On colder nights, I’d wake to find the inn’s cats tailoring themselves to my body, beneath my arms, against my neck, in the gap between my knees, purring for warmth.
I didn’t mind them. They had fleas, but they kept the rats away.
With them, and Ifrahim in his storeroom near by, I felt safe.
I told him that one night, a few weeks after he’d spoken for me. We had finished our labours in the kitchen, the inn gates were closed, and everyone else had moved upstairs, to sleep or entertain. He’d nodded slowly.
‘There’s safety here,’ he agreed. ‘Cooking saved my life.’ He took a drag on his pipe then, and looked at me through the stove light.
‘Feed them, Ale,’ he said softly. ‘Feed them well and they will want you, they will need you. Make them forget you’re a girl and think of you instead as a kitchen-thing, a duende, a stove-spirit.
Then, they will want you for your usefulness, and leave you be. ’