The Opposite House (16 page)

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

One of the first things that really felt like a London episode happened when Papi was away at a conference. I was ten. Papi called at 3 a.m. and Mami spoke to him in a cute, bright chirrup and woke me up to speak to him too. She pinched me to stop me from begging him to come home.

Chabella’s English was still really bad then; it embarrassed me. The teachers at school always asked to speak to Papi instead of her. I couldn’t understand why she was able to understand English but couldn’t speak it the way that she spoke German. It was too embarrassing, standing in between Mami and someone else, translating words Mami threw at them in Spanish when they had questioned her in English.

After Papi’s phone call, Mami made her paper flowers and cried over them for a long time – she wet her flowers so that they wouldn’t catch fire, she cried until she couldn’t talk. I hugged her and kissed her. I hugged her and kissed her religiously, like a ritual; I kissed and hugged her medically, like a life-saving technique. The flowers drowned anyway.

Chabella was still, and I was still. Outside someone, a woman, was crying; she was asking for help, gave a muffled scream, gulped back louder tears, cried
Rape
. I looked to Mami, and Mami put a finger over her lips and went to the sitting-room window; we looked out carefully, carefully from under the hem of the net curtain.

Neat and narrow; the street had broken itself off into a chunk of shadowed road and bin and diamond-shaped lamplight – it looked painted on the air. Watching the road and the man and the woman in the road, I knew we’d never be able to touch what we saw, even if we went down and stood there.

The woman was white. She cried
Please
, and a white man yanked at her ponytail so that she teetered on her spiky heels. It wasn’t playful tugging, but the man was straining to look amused, to look as if he were at play. He locked an arm around her throat and walked away; she came with him in degrees. He was so casual that it didn’t look as if he intended to drag her away, but just to walk with her held against him like a suit he was trying on for size. If it hadn’t been for the involuntary sounds she made. Her lungs convulsed and spoke loudly for her, over and over,
puh puh puh puh
.

Around the corner a group of people laughed in a hard, ragged burst, but it took a second to realise that there were other people out on the road; the laughter was somehow like traffic, a noise that was not really sound, but city liquefied. Mami and I shrank up against each other, shrank into each other. Beneath the curtains there was a shadow-strained forever that fell from ceiling to floor and roped us round in its folds.

Mami whispered,
‘Puedo no,’
– I can’t – before I even told her that she had to call the police.

‘Mami, you’re not going to call the police?’ I asked loudly.

The man and the woman were gone. Nothing and no one moved on the street. I knew that you didn’t call the police for just anything. I was not sure what rape was then, but if it made a woman cry out like she was dying, and made me feel,
me too
, anything like that was serious enough for the police.

‘Mi inglés, mi inglés es tan malo, ellos no me entenderán,’
Mami said, and there were so many tears from her that I couldn’t dry them with my hands. She wanted me to understand why she wasn’t going to help, but I couldn’t understand.

‘So what if your English is bad?’ I said. ‘I’ll talk to them.’

Mami kissed my forehead, her arms dropped down around me; I stiffened because she was laughing and crying at once and I didn’t know what it meant. Her hands clasped around my throat, and when I looked into her eyes I couldn’t find her. Instead I saw something inky and strange rising. I said, ‘Mami?’

She was hurting me.

‘Usted es una hija mala,’
she said. She sounded angry, but her eyes were shiny with hurt.
‘Cómo se atréve a contradecirme?.’

‘Mami,’ I said, and I tried but my fingers couldn’t unlock her iron ones. My vision took on black edges, and I began to believe that she was going to kill me; she was saying that I was a bad daughter and I didn’t know why.

She let go of me; I fell down, and that was when I first learnt that I needed to protect my throat, my voice, because that was where my hands went first, to the circling pain. I croaked, and I vomited hard. Chabella said she was sorry. She said it just once, she said it very softly, and then she got
up and walked halfway across the room and came back to me with her eyes swimming and glowing so that I cowered and thought she was so sad because I was going to have to die. But then she walked away again, came back, walked away from me with her face pulled mask-tight until finally she came back for good and snatched me up into her arms and kissed me and hugged me. It wasn’t enough; I was still afraid.

I need words from Chabella. It has maybe been that way since the first time I understood that she didn’t already know what I was thinking. I was three; a friend had made me cry. Mami picked me up and asked me, ‘What’s the matter, what?’ Papi had rushed to pick me up too, but Mami got there first. Papi says that when she asked I was so surprised that I knocked my forehead against hers in my haste to get a proper look into her eyes. I don’t remember, but apparently I said, ‘I have to
tell
you?’

Miss Lassiter’s telephone rings and rings, on and off, all afternoon long.

Kneeling by the sitting-room table, I write cheques for bills with my eyes three-quarters closed so I don’t see how I’m decimating my bank account. Then I sit in the kitchen with my rosary wrapped around the hand that isn’t trying to finish fitting lyrics to a song, beating the rosary hand against the table in abbreviated rhythms that aren’t helping.

Magalys calls to ask me if I want to have coffee with her. I want her to have forgotten my Cuba, or at least dimmed it amidst the train of other memories. I wonder if she’ll show me what I would have been like had we stayed in Habana. She and her brother teach dance classes near Bond Street, and I can meet her at the studio because she’ll be finished
with her last class by the time I get there. It sounds as if at least ten million people are tap-dancing behind her, but her voice is very calm.

Tomás has got awkward digestion. His condition is called reflux. What happens is he eats something, waits half an hour, and, no matter how carefully he has chewed his food, he vomits. Even when he was nursing, he used to dribble milk hours after having fed. I observed all this with deep interest, the return of Tomás’s food without invitation. Mami took him to the doctor, but the doctor said that as long as the reflux didn’t happen while he was sleeping, it was OK. And it never did happen while he was sleeping. When he was smaller Tomás didn’t used to think about it; he’d just go and vomit and then get on with whatever he was doing. He ate extra at meals in anticipation of the amount that he was going to lose. At fourteen I knew about bulimia; I’d read books with titles like
When it’s Hard to Eat
. Tomás’s vomiting like that wasn’t good, but it couldn’t be that bad because he didn’t do it on purpose.

One day Papi noticed what Tomás was doing.

Papi put down his newspaper, put on his slippers and followed Tomás upstairs. I followed Papi. The two of us watched Tomás lean over the sink and spit up his lunch, then thoroughly and unselfconsciously rinse out his mouth and dab his face with a face towel, the way Mami had taught him. Tomás was five. I looked at Papi to see what he thought; Papi’s mouth was wide open, his eyes were narrowed behind his reading glasses. Tomás turned, said, ‘What is it?’ to both of us, and tried to get past, but Papi clamped his hands on Tomás’s shoulders and knelt down so as to be small with him.

‘You do that every day?’

Tomás said, incredulous, ‘What?’

‘It happens two or three times a day,’ I interjected, surprised.

Papi didn’t look at me. ‘Stop that, Tomás. Do you hear me? Do you see me doing that kind of thing? It’s unheard of. Boys don’t do that.’

‘Papi, girls don’t do it either, though. Mami doesn’t do it. Maja doesn’t do it. Just me does it,’ Tomás argued.

Papi straightened up and looked down at Tomás. All he said was, ‘Don’t test me.’ He went downstairs, back to his newspaper. Tomás came and took my hand, and gave me a look full of surprise. ‘It’s OK?’ he said. He meant everything. Papi, vomiting, everything.

‘It’s OK,’ I said, gently putting his other hand back down to his side – Mami didn’t want him sucking his thumb because that was how people got buck teeth.

After that, Chabella and I watched Papi watching Tomás.

We all got to know the signs of Tomás’s regurgitation, the way his cheeks expanded, the way he’d get a dizzy, gassed look from trying to hold it in. Then, when we couldn’t bear to sit around watching Tomás hold sour food in his mouth any more, Papi let Tomás scramble up the stairs to the bathroom. To Mami, Papi said, ‘Why is this happening to my son?’

Chabella said,
‘El crecerá fuera de ello
, Juan, he’ll grow out of it. He’s so small now. And he’s the London baby.’

There was a thing that happened that I didn’t tell Papi. My Spanish teacher wrote lots of letters for Amnesty International and thought that I should take more of an interest in Cuba. Miss Roberts was no more Spanish than I
was, but we always had to call her Señora Roberts, to sustain the mood of the language lesson. After one lesson she leant on the edge of my desk and asked me, ‘You know what
gusano
means, don’t you?’

I glanced at the door to make my intentions clear and I said, ‘Yeah, it means “worm”.’

She said, ‘That’s what they call anti-revolutionaries and other dissidents in Cuba. It’s actually a key term in Fidel’s political vocabulary.
Gusano
. Or if not that then you’re the son of a
gusano
. It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it, using language to take away the humanity of someone who opposes you?’

I said, ‘Yeah.’ I fidgeted with my bag strap; I didn’t like the way Señora Roberts had said ‘Cuba’ so softly, as if she were trying to rein in the towering force of it, as if she expected me to gasp or something. I didn’t like the way she was looking at me, eyebrows raised, lips quirked; she was looking at me as if we shared something, as if she knew me much better than she did.

I knew that Señora Roberts was thinking that my father must have told me all about being
gusano
, what it was like to have your colleagues begin to denounce you to avoid the label themselves. She thought that as she spoke a painful reel was playing behind my eyes, a sequence in which someone wearing a Cuban flag for a bandana spits in my father’s face and shouts,
‘Gusano!’
Then, perhaps, the same man kicks Papi’s legs out from under him and stamps on his ribcage. But that is not the story. If Papi says
‘gusano’
, he doesn’t let the word or its meaning come near him. Papi sits silent and bespectacled behind Cuban broadsheets, then he throws them away and says little about them.