Caramelo Read online

  The Awful Grandmother complains daily even with the two younger sons and their families gone. To make matters worse, because of the Grandmother’s rages, Oralia has threatened to quit.

  —If you don’t like my services, señora, you can go ahead and fire me.

  —So that you can run off while you still owe me for the cash advances I gave you? Not even if God commanded it! Don’t make faces. Look at me, Oralia, I said look, don’t interrupt, look at me. I’ll find another girl to help you, te lo juro. Listen, do you know anyone we can trust? Ask around. See if you can’t find some poor thing from the country. The ones from the country are always more decent and hardworking. I don’t like the idea of people I can’t trust sleeping under my own roof.

  But in the end it’s just Candelaria who is finally sent for and delivered washed, scrubbed, and scoured the following week. A cot is set up in the same rooftop room as Oralia’s, so that she doesn’t have to travel the hours back and forth to her mother’s, except on her one day off. The girl Candelaria is to live in the house of the Grandmother!

  —Not for always, don’t you get any illusions, missy, but for now. And you’re to bathe every day and keep your hair very clean, understand? This isn’t the ranch.

  So that she might rest a little, so that the dining room repairs can take place without the children running underfoot, the Grandmother insists Father take his family to Acapulco for eight days. It won’t cost much. We can stay at Señor Vidaurri’s sister’s house. Acapulco is only a few hours away. We can drive.

  Mother, who never agrees with the Grandmother, begs Father this time:

  —Every time we come to Mexico it’s the same old crap. Nothing but living rooms, living rooms, living rooms. We never go anywhere. I’m sick and tired, do you hear? Disgusted!

  Finally, Father gives in.

  At first the trip to Acapulco is only to include Father and Mother, the six brothers, and me. But the Grandmother sighs so much Father has to ask her to come along.

  —Why the hell did you insist on bringing her? Mother hisses while she’s packing.

  —How could I say no to my own mother? Especially after she was kind enough to loan us the money for this trip.

  —Oh, yeah, well, I’ve had it with her damn kindnesses.

  —Shhh. The kids.

  —Let the kids hear! Better they should find out sooner than later who their grandmother is.

  On the morning we are to leave, Aunty Light-Skin and Antonieta Araceli are packed and coming too. The Grandmother has gone herself to the secundaria to inform the Mother Superior about my cousin falling ill with la gripa.

  Even Candelaria is coming along!

  Because just as the final suitcase is being lifted to the luggage rack, the Grandmother whines to Father, —Bring her, poor thing. She can help with the babies.

  So at the last minute, Candelaria is sent to her rooftop room to fetch a plastic shopping bag filled with a few raggedy clothes. But Candelaria’s village is in Nayarit. She’s never seen the ocean. Before the eight days are up, she will be sent back on the next Tres Estrellas de Oro bus to Mexico City with the Awful Grandmother’s address pinned to her underslip to prevent her from becoming one of the countless unfortunates seen hiccuping terrible tears on the television’s public announcements … If you recognize this young lady, please call … since she is new to the city and can neither read nor write, because a huge Acapulco wave will knock her over, and the ocean will come out of her mouth and eyes and nose for days when it is discovered Candelaria can’t take care of the babies without someone first taking care of her.

  It’s no use. El destino es el destino. A person’s destiny is her destiny. The little note pinned to her slip with the house address is lost. Who can say where it went? And Candelaria does appear on television crying and crying telenovela tears. Who would’ve thought! Salty water like the ocean running out of her eyes, the servant Oralia shouting for the Little Grandfather to come see, and the Grandfather having to send Oralia downtown to fetch her, and her mother Amparo the washerwoman will beat Candelaria badly for giving her a fright, and then come and ask permission to have her removed from her job at the Grandmother’s because her daughter is already of an age, and a mother can’t be too careful, can she? And the Grandfather will say, —Well, yes, I suppose, I imagine so. And both Amparo and the girl Candelaria will disappear back to their village somewhere in Nayarit, because by the time the Grandmother returns, it will be as if the earth swallowed them up, the washerwoman and the washerwoman’s daughter both gone, and who knows where, and nothing to be done about it.

  But this is before Candelaria swallows the Pacific and is sent back to Mexico City on the next Tres Estrellas de Oro. We are on our way to Acapulco in Father’s red station wagon, all of us. Father at the wheel. The Awful Grandmother sitting where Mother usually sits, because her feelings get hurt if she isn’t given this seat of honor. Antonieta Araceli seated between them on the bump because, —I always get carsick when I sit in the back. Mother and Aunty Light-Skin and Candelaria take the middle each with a “baby” on their lap—Lolo, Memo, me. Rafa, Ito, Tikis, and Toto claim the best seat, the one that faces backward.

  —Why do they get to sit in the back and not us?

  —Because they’re a bunch of malcriados, the Grandmother says. —That’s why. She means “badly raised,” though it’s only Mother who notices when she says this.

  We wave good-bye to the Little Grandfather, to Oralia, and Amparo standing at the courtyard gates.

  —Good-bye! Good-bye!

  —If we don’t stop, maybe we can get there in seven hours, Father says.

  —Seven hours! Not even if God willed it! We just want to get there alive. Don’t you worry who’s honking, Inocencio. You just take your time, mijo. Take your time …

  Pulling shut the green iron gates with a clang, the washerwoman Amparo in the trembling circle of side-view mirror.

  17.

  Green Rice

  —And then what happened?

  —I don’t remember.

  —Try, Father.

  —It happened a long time ago.

  —Were you in school, or were you sitting in a tree? What did you say when they first shouted, “Tarzán, Tarzán!” Did it make you cry?

  —What questions you ask me, Lalita. How am I supposed to remember things like that?

  —Are we almost there? Tikis asks from the seat that faces backward. —It’s taking too long.

  —Too long! the Grandmother says. —These nice roads are here thanks to your grandfather’s hard labor. Before the highway commission built this very highway, it used to take three weeks to travel what we cross in only a few hours now. Imagine what it must’ve been like for us with the heat and the bugs and the being bumped about on burro. We suffered, believe me.

  —I thought Grandfather was just a bookkeeper, Tikis says. Ito shoots him a dirty look, and Rafa sends him an elbow.

  —He may have been a bookkeeper, the Grandmother says, —but he had to fight the dust and jungles and mosquitoes and dynamite blasts just as much as anyone who picked up a shovel. This was nothing but wilderness before the highway commission. People had to travel by boat, and by rail, and horse, and when the rains arrived, by burro or on the backs of Indians. They say the emperor of China once sent a gift to Hernán Cortés that was supposed to travel over this route. Two beautiful Chinese vases big enough for a man to hide inside. But the way they tell it, the Spanish viceroy had to send them back, all the way to the Chinese emperor across the sea, imagine. Because the mountain trails were so bad he couldn’t be sure the vases would survive the trip.

  —Why didn’t he just say they broke, Grandmother, and keep them for himself instead of sending them back to China and hurting the emperor’s feelings?

  —What nonsense you talk, child! How am I supposed to know?

  On the side of the road, a dog making caca.

  —Don’t look! the Grandmother shouts. —You’ll get a sty on your eyelid.


  We pass towns with big mudholes in the streets and runaway pigs, and mountains a green-green-green that makes you want to cry. Everything smells like silver. As if it just rained. As if it wanted to.

  In Taxco we have lunch in a restaurant open to the street. A dead man passes on the shoulders of a funeral procession just as we are shoveling big spoonfuls of green rice into our mouths.

  The road to Acapulco is so winding, it’s better to look where you’ve been instead of where you are going. The hot wind smelly like an aquarium. We have to stop for Antonieta Araceli to drink Tehuacán mineral water because of a queasy stomach. Then we have to stop further on because all of us kids need to pee from drinking too many bottles of Lulú and Pato Pascual. Before we get to Acapulco we’re throwing up in several flavors. Tamarindo, tutti-frutti, lime, orange, strawberry.

  18.

  La Casita de Catita

  Acapulco. In a house shaped like a boat. Everything curled like the fronds of a fern. The ocean. Our hair. Our sandals drying in the sun. The paint on the boat-shaped house.

  The woman Catita is Señor Vidaurri’s ugly twin, but how could a twin of Señor Vidaurri live in a rusty boat of a house that smells of overripe mangos and moldy jasmine? Señor Vidaurri’s face is not ugly on a man, but it’s not pretty on a woman. Señor Vidaurri has a big burnt face like the sun in the Lotería cards. La cobija de los pobres, el sol. Catita has had to make do with this borrowed man’s face. It frightens me to look at her and see Señor Vidaurri.

  Except this Señor Vidaurri has two long gray braids on either side of his big burnt face. This Señor Vidaurri is dressed in a pinafore apron, the kind the house servants wear, plaid so it won’t show the dirt, with flowers embroidered on each pocket—a daisy, a carnation, a rose.

  The first time I meet Catita I don’t want to kiss her, even though Father insists.

  —Leave her, Catita says. —It’s that she has shame.

  Is Señor Vidaurri also frightened when he looks into his sister’s face and sees himself?

  The driveway of Catita’s house is very steep. That’s what makes our feet walk as if we’re in a hurry, so that we all come waddling down like pull toys. We wear ugly rubber sandals Father buys us the first day and silly straw hats. When I take mine off, the Awful Grandmother squawks:

  —¡Necia! Put that back on, or I’ll put it back for you!

  Except for Candelaria, who the Grandmother says is already more burnt than chicharrón, everyone gets a silly hat. Mother and Father. All six brothers. The Grandmother, Aunty Light-Skin, and Antonieta Araceli. Straw hats with ACAPULCO stitched in orange yarn, two palm trees on either side, or a maguey stitched in green on one side and on the other, a Mexican man asleep under a sombrero.

  Catita and her daughter sleep in the stern, a room with round windows like portholes. In the room above them sleep the Grandmother, Aunty, and Antonieta Araceli. Under a mosquito net in a courtyard cot, the girl Candelaria. We sleep above the kitchen, beyond a balcony with wet towels and bathing suits drying on the rail. Green suction-cupped toes of a tree frog. Fuchsia flowers with furry tongues. Lizards frozen into “s”s on the ceiling until the flick of a tail sends them scurrying.

  We sleep with the sheets pulled over our heads because of the lizards, even though it is very hot. We insist on sleeping like this. With nothing showing but our noses. Under the sheets, the sour smell of skin.

  Here is Catita and here is her fat daughter who smells of chocolate.

  Maybe it’s only her skin that is the color of chocolate, and I’m confused. That could be. I won’t remember the daughter’s name. Only her fat arms and fat tetas. And what she said once about the townspeople never swimming in the ocean.

  —Why not?

  —Because we never think of it.

  —But how could anyone who lives in Acapulco forget the ocean?

  When she does come with us finally to la Caleta beach one morning, she swims so far away she is a little brown donut in the distance, waving and bobbing in the harsh waves.

  —Come back or the sharks will eat you!

  But that’s how the people who live here swim when they remember to swim, forgetting sharks.

  All the smells swirl together. The old woman smell of Catita the same smell as the steamy dishcloth that holds the hot corn tortillas. The sleepy land breeze of rotten bananas and rotten flowers. The curly wind from the ocean that smells of tears. The yeast smell of our bodies asleep under the sheets. The daughter without a name and the lazy, sweet tang of chocolate.

  19.

  Un Recuerdo

  —Say “whiskey,” the Indian in a straw cowboy hat commands.

  —Whiskeeeeeeey!

  Click, says the camera. When the camera finishes winking, Rafa, Ito, Tikis, and Toto sprint down the beach to watch the next parachute rider float across the sky. Aunty wipes a grain of sand out of Antonieta Araceli’s eye with a flowered hankie and spit. Lolo and Memo tug Mother by the hand to the lip of the water to jump over waves. And the Grandmother whispers too loudly into Father’s ear, —Don’t pay that peon one centavo in advance, or we’ll never see him again.

  The Indian cowboy adds Catita’s address to his notebook, folds the tripod, and hitches it on his shoulder shouting in a nasally voice, —Fotos, un bonito recuerdo, fotos. Very pretty and very cheap!

  Beyond la Caleta bay, the ring of green mountains dipping and rising like the ocean. And beyond that, sky bluer than water. Tourists yelling in Spanish, and yelling in English, and yelling in languages I don’t understand. And the ocean yelling back in another language I don’t know.

  I don’t like the ocean. The water frightens me, and the waves are rude. Back home, Lake Michigan is so cold it makes my ankles hurt, even in summer. Here the water’s warm, but the waves wash sand inside my bathing suit and scratch my bottom raw. La Caleta is supposed to be the good beach, but I stay out of the water after the ocean tries to take me.

  The froth of the waves churning and rolling and dragging everything in sight. I make sand houses where the sand is muddy and sucks at my feet, because the dry sand is so hot it burns. The ocean foam like the babas of a monkey, little bubbles that turn from green, to pink, and snap to nothing.

  Candelaria, wearing a shell necklace, weaves a rose for me out of strips of braided palm fronds.

  —Where did you learn how to do that?

  —This? I don’t know. My hands taught me.

  She puts the rose in my hat and runs into the ocean. When she moves into the deep water her skirt billows out around her like a lily pad. She doesn’t wear a bathing suit. She wears her street clothes, an old blouse and a skirt gathered up and tucked in her waistband, but even like this, bobbing in the water, she looks pretty. Three tourists drinking coconut drinks in the shade of the palm-leaf palapas sing a loud Beatles song, —“I Saw Her Standing There.” Their laughter all across the beach like seagulls.

  —Cande, watch for sharks!

  The ocean bottom is ridged like the roof of a mouth and disappears beneath your feet sometimes when you least expect it. That’s why I have to shout to Candelaria to be careful when she wades out in the deeper water. The Acapulco water, salty and hot as soup, stings when it gets in your eyes.

  —Lalita! Come on in.

  —No, the water’s mean.

  —Don’t be a silly-silly. Come on. Her voice against the roar of ocean, a small chirping.

  —Noooo!

  —And if I throw you in, then what?

  We’ve been to la Roqueta island across the bay on a glass-bottom boat, and on the way there we’ve seen the underwater statue of la Virgen de Guadalupe all made of gold. We saw the donkey that drinks beer on la Roqueta beach. And we’ve seen the cliff divers at la Quebrada and the sunset at los Hornos where the ocean is out to get you and comes down slamming hard, like a fist in a game of arm wrestling. And we’ve had a fish dinner outdoors at a lopsided table set in the sand, and afterward swung in a hammock. Father, in a good mood, bought us all shell necklaces, Mother and me, Au
nty and Antonieta Araceli, the Grandmother, and even Candelaria.

  Candelaria wearing her shell necklace and jumping with each wave, as brown as anybody born here, bobbing in the water. Sunlight spangling the skin of water and the drops she splashes. The water shimmering, making everything lighter. You could float away, like sea foam. Over there, just a little beyond reach. Candelaria sparkling like a shiny water bird. The sun so bright it makes her even darker. When she turns her head squinting that squint, it’s then I know. Without knowing I know.

  This all in one second.

  Before the ocean opens its big mouth and swallows.

  20.

  Echando Palabras

  I’m looking for Candelaria’s face in the dirty windows of dirty buses lined up and roaring hot air. Father has picked me up and put me on his shoulders, but the Grandmother has marched Cande off in a hurry, and I don’t know which bus is hers. Finally, I see the Grandmother making her way back to us rolling and pushing her way through the sea of people. The Grandmother swats at anyone who gets in her way, a handkerchief held to her mouth as if she isn’t feeling well.

  —¡Ay, ay, qué horror! she keeps muttering when she finally returns to Father and me. —Get me out of this inferno of Indians, it smells worse than a pigsty.