I go upstairs and tiptoe into Papi and Chabella’s bedroom. Chabella’s vanities are all to do with her heart. On top of her dresser, photos of me and Tomás and Papi and Aaron and her cousins and her favourite pupils and all the living that she prays for; all these photos jostle with small, mysterious tasks that she has begun and neglected to finish — a plastic half-bottle of holy water from Lourdes stands beside a full crystal bottle of rose water; both stand on top of a rectangle of ruched silk with a threaded needle dangling from one corner. Handfuls of seeds are strewn amongst wooden beads. Scraps of rice paper, maybe the beginnings of paper chains, are stuck to the side of the desk.
In Mami’s top drawer are her photo albums, and I open one at random, my fingers blunt on the stiff pages, finding her again and again. In all of the pictures, Papi looks at Mami with tender concern, as if he has forgotten that it’s his wedding too.
I find Chabella not just in her tense, happy bride’s face
(she told me that for the entire day she was so happy that she thought she must faint, or die — nothing happened except that her heart grew fuller)
but in the people she left behind her; the way they smile from beneath the impression of her thumb pressed painfully over their faces.
On the phone, Amy Eleni says, ‘You know what I read about rats? I read that if they lived uninterrupted lives, they never stop growing. Imagine! You could get a rat as big as a dustbin. As big as a house.’
(So what, I think. I am painting my nails and thinking of boys’ names.)
‘I mean, what if foetuses were like rats? Say a foetus stays in the womb longer than nine months, what if it went on a growth bender? What if a baby got as big as its mother?’
‘Amy Eleni,’ I say, ‘shut up.’
Why is she saying this? She knows about the hysteric, how she beats me by making things seem funny when they’re not, by finding pain in speculation. But she can’t know how it gets when I think about my son, so when she says, ‘What?’ I just ask her if she still has my purple nail varnish.
Amy Eleni says Despina is not anorexic. She doesn’t say it defiantly; she just says it, because she is sure. According to Amy Eleni, her mother ‘doesn’t give a shit about her weight’. Emily Brontë probably didn’t care that much about her weight either, but she died hungry, with food in the house. I can’t forget Despina’s mint-tea cupboard from the times I went over to Amy Eleni’s house to drink mint tea with all the lovely sugar that Chabella wouldn’t let me have.
The first time, Amy Eleni opened a kitchen cupboard and said, ‘This is the mint-tea cupboard.’ She said it formally, as if the cupboard was a person she was introducing me to. Inside sat one tiny, thick-spouted silver teapot. Behind the teapot was an organic wall of sugar, forty to fifty kilo bags of it, all packed so tightly together that it looked as if a giant fist had punched them into the back wall; the packets had lost their edges and ran into each other.
(I thought, maybe Despina likes her mint tea sweet, maybe she’s a hoarder, maybe she’s an anorexic.)
Amy Eleni looked at me and said, ‘I think it’s more of an aesthetic thing than anything else.’ We were sixteen. Aesthetic was Amy Eleni’s favourite word that week.
I recognised the sugar wall, its jigsawed threat. I know that in this world something really is trying to stop me from having a large milkshake with my large fries. This suspicion emerges like a spasm in my jaw whenever what’s crammed in there tastes too well. I used to think that the only reason Chabella could weep copiously and at the same time eat slabs of steak in stewed tomato sauce was that she was not complex. Cubans are cheerful, Cubans are resilient, Cubans are collectivist. In my mother’s country, I thought, la lucha is such that people are not equipped to understand when they are unhappy. It’s a situation-specific kindness from God — Cubans are born lacking; they have no internal ‘off’ switch, and so it is that they go on and on and on.
But look at the British! Their government had to have some of the suffragists force-fed through tubes because each one of them had located her ‘off’ switch and leant her entire weight against it. These women were pissed off. And not a word about it being hard to eat; they did not see the joke in being weak. They did not want to take their place in el drama, or the tender masquerade of scented handkerchiefs and faintness and tears.
When the hysteric saw what the suffragists had done — the way that, en masse, they’d turned starvation onto its side — she must have been surprised. Her shock must have brought her close to speech. Here, in grey climates, are people mocking the things that happen in places that the sun loves more, those places where hunger herds people ahead of her and into blindness, where hunger makes a person run their tongue along their bottom lip to claim the wilted wings shed by dead flies. Suddenly so clear, or clearer, that people will use all of their frailty to hold out for more, that people go into sickness as a signal test.
Two months ago a woman drove her car off the end of a pier in Blackpool and drowned. But first, cloaked in deepening water, she smoked two cigarettes whilst waiting for the people milling around on the mainland to realise that they weren’t going to be able to get help to her in time. People tried to get the woman’s attention; they tried to reassure her. She refused to look their way. She was from Cameroon, which is why at first there was some confusion over whether she had accidentally driven off the pier or whether this was a suicide attempt.
People who actually knew this ‘pier woman’ might not have described her as sensitive. They would probably have said she was ‘tough’ or ‘loud’ or ‘pushy’, all the while thinking: ‘black’. One eyewitness maintained that the entire thing was an accident. With her thumb Amy Eleni jabbed the offending lines in the Fortean Times: ‘Yeah right, eyewitness! If it was an accident why wasn’t she making eye contact or looking for help? Why wasn’t she asking for reassurance that she wasn’t going to die?’
The pier woman was in the kind of trouble that calls for a material defence. Two unhurried cigarettes, a reminder to her body that breath can be made visible. Trouble: a thing heard on the air and in my headphones when my favourite song plays. It climbs inside and puppeteers until I echo. Maybe the hysteric is my mystic signal test, a way of checking, asking:
Who’s there?
Something old? Someone holy. .?
Amy Eleni longed for a knife to slit away the webbing between her stiff fingers. I chased my vein lines with glass. Maybe we were having conversations so intense we couldn’t hear them. If we could have heard what we were saying, Amy Eleni and I, we’d have cringed the way we do when we think of someone using prayer to bargain, cramming extra requests in on the back of the usual one-request-per-rosary-bead transaction. But the hysteric, she makes us able to say without knowing. She makes us able to say to this trouble that comes: Wait! Please don’t go. Just in case you’re holy after all. Really I’m like you. I can be strange and deep-flowing too. See?
Despina frightens me with her cold eyes and her measured voice and the long, lost time she spends standing before the bright Orthodox icons in the hallway when she gets back from work. I don’t know what I’d do if Despina was my mother. She is the tallest silence. Despina is no Jacob. Neither is she Bisabuela Carmen that she would lay hands on her god and try to break him and make him stay. It’s the reason why she’s still alive; religious people know their place. I wonder does Chabella fit that pattern.
9 clandestine spiritual warfare