We were alone, walking slowly side by side on the paths. So far, I’d had only a glimpse of the back garden. It was charming, with beds of flowers and paths laid out among evergreens and palmettos, an overgrown Eden. Behind a fence made of a prickly woven vine I could see green blades of corn, a small milpa in the middle of the city. From this point we could look down over the town, and beyond that to Volcán de Agua in its massive rise, gray green this time of day.
“Dígame lo que está pensando,” said Catherine, inviting me to present a topic for discussion. I stalled. I was reluctant to talk about the Ávilas again, but my head was full of what had transpired at another noon meal. This time it was today’s, just a while ago, and I hadn’t had a chance to write it out. I decided to wing it. Here is what happened and how I tried to tell it to Catherine.
In the absence of Doña Rosa, who was at a birthday luncheon, Juanita was left in charge of serving the food during her noon break from school. Don Francisco had already eaten and gone back to his store, so only Marco was at the table. He was passing me a plate of cold cuts, asking which I preferred, “cat or dog,” when Juanita flounced in from the kitchen, muttering, her ponytail bobbing.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“Ella es imposible!” she said, pointing through the door, where I could see the maid cutting up a melon with a big knife. Her facility with the knife was awesome, but Juanita whirled back into the kitchen, saying, “No, no, no! Que te dije? Stop!”
She began scolding the girl so blatantly I wondered if I should intervene. Then it occurred to me it might be more histrionics for the sake of the gringo, with the servant in on the joke. But the acting was too good. Finally, Juanita came back to the table and plopped into a chair. “I don’t know is she stupid or maliciosa!”
“What on earth did she do wrong?” I asked.
“I keep telling her to wash the fruit first, you know, with the kill germs stuff, before she cuts it up. She never remembers. She’s going to make us all sick.”
“Sick? Ay, ay, ay,” gasped Marco, grabbing himself by the throat.
“Aren’t you being too rough on her?” I asked Juanita.
She screwed up her face. “What? Ruff? —Oh. No, no. I must make her listen. It is my job. My mother and I, it is something we do,” she said, twisting a corner of the tablecloth. “My mother is very, you know, modern. We train indio girls as muchacha...de servicio. Criadas. Maids, you know? It is their only chance to—.” She searched for a word. “You know, to get out of her village. Otherwise she will just start having babies.”
I was pretty sure this was not how her mother would have put it. “But must she be a maid?” I asked. “Can’t she learn another trade?”
“She has no education,” she said, in a loud whisper. “She doesn’t even speak Spanish.”
“Why don’t you teach her?”
“We are trying. But she is tonta. The dumbest one yet. And she smells.”
Whoa there! I considered saying that I liked the way she smelled—smoke, tortillas, dogs. I glanced out to the kitchen, wondering still if the girl was a party to a set-up. I couldn’t see her face. Only yesterday I’d heard Juanita chatting with her, both of them laughing. “Are you pulling my leg?” I asked, in English.
“What? No, no!” She was flustered. “What are you thinking? This is not—this is serious!”
“Serious? Oh, no, no,” moaned Marco, falling to the floor in a spasm.
“And she gets a look in her eye when I talk to her,” Juanita said. “Like she is putting a spell on me. She is not real Catholic, you know.”
“Heavens to Betsy!”
“No dobla la rodilla.“
“Qué?”
She genuflected with a little bob. “The other indigenas made, you know, la señal de la cruz. This one, she never crosses herself. She walks right by our crucifijos without even looking. She wears something around her neck, do you see that? To protect from witchcraft. They believe it, you know. Brujería, mal de ojo. Evil eye.”
At that, Marco escalated his poisoned act to dramatic heights, gargling in his throat as he went into a convulsion. I glanced out to the kitchen again, but all I could see was the girl’s solid back in its huipil as she stood at the stove. For a second I was taken visually by the dazzle of colors in that woven blouse. I saw nothing on her neck except a zigzag of lightning around the opening.
“My guess is she’s a little afraid of you,” I said to Juanita.
“That’s loco. We should be afraid of her.” She looked at her watch. “I must go. Do not eat the melon.” She gave Marco’s limp body a little kick as she left the room.
That was it. When I was done, Catherine said nothing. We just walked, following the paths in the garden.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked.
“Su reacción.”
My reaction? I was feeling deeply the need for her reaction, a little teacherly encouragement, maybe even praise, but I answered. “It was too literal, I think. I need more idioms.”
“I mean your reaction to what took place,” she said. “How did you feel?”
I looked up the word “bemused” and put it into a sentence. Aturdido. To that, she gave a barely audible snort. I cleared my throat. “The student would like the evaluation of the teacher.”
She stopped in the path. “Wait a second. You tell that story and all you’re thinking about is how well you told it?”
“Of course not. But that’s sort of what I’m here for, right?”
“And you really don’t have anything more to say?”
Why should that surprise me? She wanted me to talk. “This is a language exercise, isn’t it?” I said.
“Actually, no,” she answered. “At the moment I can’t think of anything less important than how you speak Spanish.”
She said that in English. Until now I had been struggling—heroically, I thought—with Spanish. I took the liberty and abandoned it. “I bet there’s a message for me in there,” I said. I tried to read her face, but she was staring at the ground. “Why don’t you actually tell me what’s on your mind?” I asked.
“All right.” She looked up. “Juanita Ávila Espinosa is becoming a dangerous person.”
“Ooh. That seems like an overstatement.”
“On the contrary, it’s an understatement.”
“You’re talking about a kid. She acted very badly, but she’s just a kid, with her own problems.”
“I didn’t say it was her fault.”
“Something in the water?”
“In the blood. Ladino ceguera.”
“I
