A Cup of Water Under My Bed (7 page)

Another time, Tía Chuchi asks me to take one of my aunties to the mall. Tía Dora doesn’t believe in this sort of thing, she says, and it’s best that she not show up at the house unannounced. Tía Chuchi doesn’t say what this sort of thing is, and I know to not ask.

A third time, I come home to find my mother at her sewing machine in the basement and next to her, on the floor, a box with holes the size of nostrils. The bird feet scrape the cardboard from the inside.

“What’s that?”

“It’s your father’s things,” she says, not looking up from the pants whose hem she’s taken apart. The box moves in spurts on the floor, but my mother snips at the thread and says no more.

When a woman arrives, her hair wrapped in white cloth, my mother tells me to stay in my room. I don’t argue. I have already read about what happens to the birds, and I am not sure that it is anything I want to see.

I walk into the basement one day to wash a load of laundry and find my father talking to a woman I have never seen before: Ana. She’s a
santera
, a priest in the religion. She’s short, with large hands and gold rings on almost every finger. I feel at ease with her, and curious too. She’s a book whose cover I like.

“Go upstairs,” my father says, waving at me as if I were a mosquito rather than a woman in her twenties. It is not his usual bark, though. It is more like a pleading.

“Let the girl stay,” Ana says, grinning. “She has to learn.”

Ana cracks open a coconut with a large knife and starts cutting the meat into big chunks. She moves the blade as quickly and easily as if it were a pocketknife.

“Why do you use a coconut?” I ask.

“
El coco habla
,” she answers.

I nod, as if I, too, usually chat with fruits and vegetables.

It is my father and me that day. My mother comes later. But for a while, it is only us and the woman, and on the floor, Elegguá in his clay dish, along with Ochosi and Oggún and the tin rooster. Ana says prayers that sound like songs, and I find myself tapping my foot to the beat. She blows tobacco smoke at Elegguá, which at first looks insulting, like smoking in someone’s face, but after a few seconds it appears romantic and submissive, like a woman offering her lips to a lover.

Ana instructs my father to bring out one of the birds. It’s small, and she holds it by the legs and brings it around my father who stands with his arms open. The bird’s wings flutter as Ana moves the animal around his body, over his arms and torso and back.

Next, it is my turn.

I close my eyes and it is the sensation of being tickled as the wings thrum against my face, my outstretched arms, my belly. I find myself grinning and feeling as light as the bird’s wings. By the time I open my eyes, the woman has slit the bird’s throat and the blood is pouring onto Elegguá, feeding the orisha.

I had read about this ritual in books and thought I would find it repulsive, strange, frightening. But to my surprise, it feels normal and ordinary, like watching a Catholic priest at Sunday Mass refer to a cup of wine as the blood of Jesus Christ.

Ana tells my father to talk directly with the orishas. This is his time to make a request and share his feelings. I stare at the floor, wishing now that I was upstairs in my room. I am embarrassed. My father, as far as I know, has never been told to discuss his feelings.

He starts by shuffling his black boots, his eyes on the ground. I glance over at him. He looks like a little boy, shy and awkward in front of his teacher, his hands clasped behind his back. He makes his requests, and the sound of his voice is like nothing I have ever heard from him. This is the man who routinely screams at my mother to turn off the television, whose voice is raspy from smoking too many cigarettes and cigars, but now he is someone’s son. His voice is tender,
suavecito
, earnest even.

Ana touches the chunks of coconut to my father’s forehead and arms and then throws them to the floor. It is time for Elegguá and the
guerreros
to speak.

“You need to take care of your stomach,” she says to my father.

From there, she proceeds to tell him about his health, and the fact that Papi listens is more astonishing than the notion that a coconut and a rock are delivering the news. Whenever we take my father to the doctor, he spends more time complaining than being examined. But here now, before the orishas, my father is quiet and attentive.

As much as I hate to admit it, books have limitations.

Over and over again in the literature on the orishas, the rooster that sits atop the staff and guards us from his perch on the kitchen cupboard is described as small. Ósun’s bells are tiny, the scholars report.

But the tin rooster in our kitchen looks large to me. He stands tall and brave, his silver chest wide and proud. It is said that the day a person dies, his Ósun is buried with him, and I think of the tin rooster this way, as if he were a friend who would walk with you into the final secret of this life.

I wait with Ana at the front door afterwards, while my father retrieves money from the bedroom to pay her.

“Call me when you’re ready to receive your Elegguá,” she says, adding, “when you have your own home.”

I nod, ask how much it would cost, and say that I’ll think it over, although I already know I won’t do it. I don’t even know if I believe in this because it is real or what I grew up with or what hasn’t betrayed me, or if any of that matters. It’s similar to my relationship with my father. I can’t jump into forgiveness. The heart doesn’t work that way. I have to gather information, take notes, observe what changes, what stays constant, what remains hidden, what can be trusted. Forgiveness and faith are like writing a story. They take time, effort, revisions.

When Ana leaves, my father sits on a folding chair in the basement. He lights up a cigar and I put my clothes in the washing machine. Elegguá sits on the floor nearby as usual, his face blood-stained, his cowrie shell eyes watchful and, it appears to me, smiling.

A Cup of Water Under My Bed

L
a Viejita María is a woman who looks like dried corn. Her face is a light yellow, the skin dry and wrinkled; her white hair like a husk, with silk threads pulled back and running wild around her head. She lets Tía Chuchi and me into her apartment, her dark eyes peering at me. It is the first time she and I are meeting. I am in high school and she grins, as if she approves of my height, my hair, my age.

The apartment itself is stuffed with white carnations, rosary beads, statues of San Lázaro and La Virgen del Cobre. Dollar bills are folded at the feet of the saints, creating the impression that the holy ones are grabbing the money between their toes. Apples are laid out for the saints, too, and unlit candles crowd the shelves and side tables, their wicks bent like black fingers pointing at me.

We talk with the
viejita
for a while. Actually, it is Tía Chuchi who speaks. She sits on the edge of a love seat and slips into a back and forth with the old lady about people they know from Bergenline Avenue and which priest is presiding over the morning Mass these days. Their conversation moves like a river, following the contours of question marks and commas. I try to not stare at the
santos
, because their eyes look more real than my own. I also ignore the bag of cookies my auntie brought and which sits unopened on the coffee table. When La Viejita María glances at me, I offer her a polite smile.

The old woman is supposed to read the cards for me.

We are here because I am growing older, because Tía Chuchi thought this was a good idea, because the factories in New Jersey are closing, and although I do not plan to work in a
fábrica
, I am worried about the money. No one ever told me how much college costs, and I keep imagining the worst: unable to afford higher education, I work as a manager at McDonald’s, closing the store at one in the morning, my babies binging on the Happy Meals I bring home. The cards, the tarot cards, will tell us what we need to know about the future.

Us. My future is always plural. It is always about my mother and my father and my aunties and my sister. The pressure is enormous, and La Viejita is here to ease the sensation that comes over me whenever I think of the years ahead: the feeling of a fist squeezing my throat.

The conversation between the two women continues until, as if by the natural order of things, the river takes a turn in the woods, passes a small clearing.

“María,” Tía Chuchi begins. “It’s that we came for the girl.”

The
viejita
sets her eyes on me. There are a few moments of mutual observation, and then the kitchen table is cleared and the cards are shuffled. The old woman instructs me to create three stacks with the cards. She picks one stack and places the cards on the table side by side, creating a long river of images: of men in robes, a smattering of swords, knights riding horses, a woman wearing a crown. The
viejita
observes each card as if it were an old friend and tells me what they are whispering to her: a man is protecting you, a woman is leading you, you are working with books and words, and this is good. There are other pronouncements until we reach the last card.

“Don’t worry about the money,” the old corn-face lady says, grinning at me. “The money will come.”

The
viejita
gives me that kindly old people way of looking, as if she has already been where I am now and she has no judgment about it. I smile again, hoping that she will say more, but she only nods and ends the reading. My auntie tucks a few dollars beneath La Caridad’s toes.

As we leave, I chastise myself for having believed that an old lady who looks like corn would know anything about something as important as the future and college and books. When I call the scholarship office at the local state college, they tell me they still don’t have an answer. I call again and again, and the third or fourth time, the man says, “Yes,” and I can hear him smile. “You got the Trustee scholarship.”

“How much will that cover?” I ask, anxiously.

“Four years of tuition and fees.”

La Viejita Maria. New Jersey is filled with women like her. They read tarot cards and cups of water. They swear by herbs and honey, cowrie shells and Florida water. They come from Cuba, but also other places south of Jersey: Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Alabama, Mississippi. When Frederick Douglass needed protection from the white man, his elders in Maryland insisted he carry
hierbas
on his right side. Roots, they called them.

In Jersey, the women run botánicas, selling religious candles in the front of the store and reading the cards in the back room. They see people in their kitchens, prescribing remedies for a bad cold or a job that has been lost. They sell powders that when added to a lover’s orange juice render the
querido
faithful. They do
limpiezas
, cleaning kitchens and bedrooms of bad energies with cigar smoke and holy water. They talk with the dead, with the gods, with the
cartas
, and then come back to us with messages.

The women are
gorditas
and
flacas
. They wear gold rings, gold chains, gold bracelets. They walk around their homes in housedresses and
chanclas
. The women are black,
blanquitas
, brown, yellow. Some are episodes of
Sábado Gigante
with the volume turned all the way up. Others are thick Spanish-English dictionaries, quiet and serious. To reach them, we take the bus down Bergenline Avenue, down that glorious stretch of sixty blocks crammed with banks,
panaderías
, shoe stores, liquor stores, and the
cabinas
to call Latin America. La Viejita María lives off of Bergenline, and so do Conchita and Ana and Juana.

My mother and my father and Tía Chuchi believe these women know something we do not, like why my father’s stomach hurts and when the factories will open again. We don’t visit the women very often, but somehow there they are—at the center of our lives.

There is a peculiar power to naming a person. It is unlike anything else we do in this life, this tattooing of a word on another person. In Spanish, we constantly name each other. Usually, it is a descriptor:
el moreno
,
la gordita
,
el cabezón
,
la gringa
. Sometimes the names refer to family roles or character traits that manifested early in life. A man in his sixties is still called El Niño, or the one who threw temper tantrums as a toddler remains El Terremoto, the earthquake, into his thirties.

With the women who read cards, however, no one can decide on a name. One of my aunties calls them
brujas
, insisting the women know nothing. “Those women are nonsense,” Tía Dora says, scowling. “They’re witches.”

“They are
brujas
,” Tía Rosa confides to me in her bedroom, her thin lips whispering because she thinks the neighbors in the apartment next door can hear. “I know they put curses on me. I went to a woman and she told me.”

My father skips the formalities of names and defines the women by the work they do: Ana,
la que echa cartas
.

My mother, always firm in her practice of not stating the obvious but still discussing the subject at hand, refers to them as the women who know. When she returns from seeing one of them, she murmurs, “
Ella sí que sabe
.”

Tía Chuchi nods, pulls from her pocket another story: “There was this family I knew
en
Colombia, and they took their daughter to a woman, because the girl was sick,
pero muy enferma
of a broken heart, except no one had touched her heart. But the woman—she knew. She pulled up the girl’s skirt,
y allí
, right there was a piece of black cloth.” Tía Chuchi pauses, looks me in the eye. “Someone had pinned the fabric to the girl’s
falda
to bring sickness upon her.” She clicks her tongue. “That woman knew.’”

But not always. They don’t always know. That’s the problem.