Rosa

I. Esmeralda

I.

Esmeralda

Rosa puts the rice on and sits in Laureano’s recliner with her feet up. Her bowels drag at her, probably meaning the start of another bloodletting just three weeks after the last. The front doorbell rings. She hopes it isn’t Mondo’s social worker—Mondo is in jail again until the start of April—or anyone like that, who usually come to the front. Que entren, she calls through the screen. It isn’t a social worker; it’s little Esmeralda, from the Mexican store. She comes in shyly when invited and sits primly across from Rosa on the divan with a notebook in her lap. Three years ago she was in Rosa’s catechism class and was notably smarter and better mannered than any child she had ever taught the Salve Maria and the Padre Nuestro.

It’s about a project for her fifth grade, says the little girl. She needs to interview an older person. Ah, Rosa feels old. Do I need to get up?

No, you sit right there and I ask you questions. Hah, like the social worker, she tells herself. No, this child used to sort through red beans on the floor of her papa’s bodega. Hokay, she says. What kind of questions?

Well, about your life: where you were born, about your childhood, how you came here.

Rosa’s childhood. Well that might be looked at, unlike some other parts.

So the little girl picks up her pencil, and Rosa sighs and begins the tale, up to the hard parts. Those unreel before her nights…

It was my aunt raised us. My mother died. There were four of us, she begins. My aunt, she cook for us in great pots on a petroleum stove behind the house, or in the big wood oven in the shed. You never knew what was in that pot … shreds of meat when we had some, and roots, and verdes. Each of us big ones have to feed a little one before we eat.

And then she boil the wash in another pot and hang it over the chicken coop. There was nothing like a washing machine in those days. Or even electric.

Did you ever have any fun?

Well, we children hunt eggs, and every Sunday we each have an egg fried in grease and put on stiff white dresses to walk in a line behind my aunt and uncle to Mass … You have to walk very carefully, because if you scuff your shoes you can’t go out to play after.

My aunt is very strict, but we together, we sisters. We sleep in one big bed, and my brother, who was little then, sleep in my aunt’s bed. She make him her baby. She don’t have any children her own.

Was it a farm, where you lived?

A very small farm. All the family live on the same street. We have some chickens, and a pig they kill at Christmas. My other uncle have a cow; so we have all the milk we want, and curd for butter and white cheese. A mile away there is an abasto, like your papa have. We girls was sent there with our pockets full of coins when the flour run out, or to buy canned meat. The big market is twenty kilometers away. There, we go in the horse cart with my uncle once a month. We have salt cod part of the month, and sometimes a chicken; when that run out we eat beans and rice. We live there till I am eleven and our father want us back. Were you happy? the little girl asks.

Was she happy? She must have been, because when her father came and took them all to run a household in that big brick half-built house in Ciudad Jardin, while he worked building houses—bringing home the scrap bricks to finish their own house—that was when the sadness began, the fear she doesn’t see her way to telling this little questioner about. No, she can’t, she just can’t…

So she heaves herself up, saying something about coffee, and goes to the kitchen to boil some water and set out some Goya biscuits, and of course Laureano comes in from whatever he’s doing and wants coffee too. We’ll talk more another time, says the girl, like a little woman already.

Yes, they will talk more, she promises; and from that afternoon on the thoughts of those years start to file past her mind’s eye—as she was going to bed that night and even next morning dressing for work. She wonders for the first time why her father ever wanted them back? Three girls and a baby. It wasn’t as if they could help him in his building projects. Like Laureano, he had his half-repaired cars, old washing machines, kitchen sinks, unfinished rabbit coops all around the house waiting for his attention. Their aunt had taught them all to cook, but they even forgot how to do that around him. Ah, well, she’ll think of something nicer to tell the little girl next time she comes.