Delia’s Crossing (3 page)

My terrified eyes fell on Señora Morales, and suddenly, all I could think of was that chocolate-dipped
churro
that she had slipped past her lips.

I turned and ran from that image as much as from anything else that haunted me this terrible day.

A
ny memories I had of my aunt Isabela were as vague and indistinct as the faded old sepia pictures in our chest of family photographs, the images evaporating with time.
Mi tía
Isabela drifted in and out of my thoughts so rarely, I often forgot my mother had an older sister. We had a few snapshots that were still quite good, but they were taken of her and my mother when they were little more than children. There were no photographs of her children or her husband, who I knew had died. He was much older than Tía Isabela, actually close to twenty years older. I had seen her only once, now more than ten years ago, when my maternal grandmother passed away. She hadn’t come for her father’s funeral, but she had come for her mother’s. When she had defied my grandfather and married her much older American husband, he had disowned her.

To me, the story was almost a fairy tale or our own family soap opera. I couldn’t help but be curious about every detail, but I always would hesitate to ask too many questions, because I could see it saddened my mother to talk about her sister and what had happened. Nevertheless, the whole story had trickled out over time until I now understood this much.

Tía Isabela had matured into a beautiful young woman early in her life, and by the time she was twelve, she was attracting the interest of men twice her age and older, because she looked twice her age. No one, not my father or my mother, would come right out and say it, but from what I heard in their voices and saw in their faces, I could see they believed Aunt Isabela was quite a flirtatious
muchacha
.

“She had a way of looking a man up and down that stirred his blood,”
mi madre
told me once, when she was more relaxed about discussing her sister. “I’m not even sure she was fully aware of what she was doing, but I’m sure to most men, it looked like she was sending some kind of invitation.”

My mother paused and looked at me. I was only ten myself when she was telling me this.

“
Entiendes,
Delia?”

I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure I fully understood. What sort of invitation was it? To a party? To a dinner? How could you send an invitation with your eyes?

“Men,” she told me, leaning down to speak more softly and more privately so neither
mi abuela
nor
mi padre
could hear her, “are too quick to read what they want to read, see what they want to see.
Recuerda eso,
Delia.”

She didn’t have to say it. I wouldn’t forget anything she told me in such confidence with her eyes so big and dark. She so rarely talked about the relations between men and women that whenever she did, I was mesmerized.

According to what my mother had described, no matter what Tía Isabela did, it displeased my grandfather. She was rebellious, disobeying him almost from the moment she awoke every morning. He didn’t like the way she dressed for school or her putting on lipstick before she was eleven. He did all he could to stop her from doing these things, even when he caught her in the village and wiped her lips with the sleeve of his shirt. The second he was gone, her lips were red again.

“The more your grandfather punished Isabela, the more defiant she became. She was a wild thing,
una cosa salvaje,
no tamer than a coyote.”

“A coyote in heat,” my father added, overhearing our discussion as he passed by.

My mother glared at him, and he turned away quickly. For a reason I would come to understand, talking about Tía Isabela was not something they would do in each other’s presence.

My mother was very upset about all of it and somehow blamed herself for what happened between
mi tía
Isabela and their father later on. It was a family mystery, why she would blame herself, a skeleton in one of our closets, but I sensed now that it wouldn’t be much longer before I opened that closet, saw those dangling old white bones, and found out why. Was I better off never knowing?

“
Tu abuelo
thought
tu tía
was headed for lots of trouble,” my mother said. “They were always at each other. I did what I could to help her, make excuses for her, protect her, but nothing I would do or
tu abuela
would do mattered. If your grandfather confined her to the house, she snuck out. If he dragged her home kicking and screaming, she would turn and run off. He was at wits’ end and finally gave up trying. At one point, both he and my mother were considering sending her to a nunnery, but they decided not to put such a burden on the sisters.

“She quit school at your age and went to work at a hotel on the beach, first as a housekeeper, and then she was trained to be a waitress in the restaurant. Two years later, she met Señor Dallas. We did not know she was seeing him romantically. He returned to the hotel many times for vacations. We didn’t know he returned solely because of her, but then, one day, she announced he had proposed to her and she wanted to marry him. We knew nothing about him, of course,” my mother told me.

“At first,
tu abuelo
and
abuela
were cautiously happy about it,” she told me, and smiled. “After all, someone else was going to take responsibility for their
cosa salvaje,
but when they met him and found out more about him, they were very disapproving. He was nearly twenty years older than she was, not a Catholic, and an American who barely spoke Spanish.

“Even though she did not do well in school, she was not stupid, my sister Isabela. When she put her mind to something, she did it or learned it, and learning English was very important to her. The faster she learned it, the more responsibility she was given at the hotel, responsibility and opportunity. It made her feel superior. In fact, whenever she came home from the hotel, she would avoid speaking Spanish and pretend she didn’t understand anyone who did, which infuriated my father even more. She put on airs and made it seem as if she was better than the rest of us.

“They forbade the marriage. I should have suspected something when she didn’t argue. She left one night, and we heard nothing from her until we received an announcement of their wedding in Palm Springs, California. My father burned it and went through the house tossing out anything that reminded him of her, all the clothes she had left behind and especially pictures.

“‘
Ella está muerta a mí.
I wipe her from my memory!’ he cried. My mother was very upset. For days afterward, it was truly like someone in the family really had died. We didn’t speak at our meals. My father went to work in silence, and my mother sobbed in the corner whenever anything reminded her of Isabela. He would get so angry if she cried in front of him.

“We heard very little about or from her for some time, and if anyone did bring any news here, my father would refuse to listen to it. The mere mention of her name burned his ears.

“‘I have only one daughter now,’ he would say.

“I went to the pay phone at the post office and called her when our father died. She told me he had died years ago and hung up. When our mother died, as you know, she came to the funeral, but I wished she hadn’t,” she added. “You were too young to remember it all. She arrived in this limousine as long as the street, just in time for the church service. Bedecked in jewels, with her hair full of diamonds and her face caked with makeup, she was dressed as if she were going to a ball and not a funeral. Her husband wasn’t with her. He was already quite ill. And neither were her children. She brought a personal secretary instead, a personal assistant, a fragile young woman following at her heels, holding an umbrella over her as if she had become supersensitive to sunshine. The poor girl was terrified of missing a step or a word of her commands.

“Your aunt behaved as if she were a foreigner, too. Her English was surprisingly perfected by now. She was a true
norteamericana.
Again she acted as if she didn’t understand a word of Spanish and forced Father Martinez to speak in his broken English. All she talked about was her wonderful home, the places she had traveled, her army of servants, her cars and jewels and clothing. She bore no resemblance to the young girl who had grown up here.

“She left a sizable donation at the church and was gone practically the moment the coffin was lowered into the ground. She spent no time with us and told me the first thing she would do when she returned to Palm Springs was take a bath.

“‘I’ll have to soak for hours to get this dirt and filth out of my skin,’ she said.

“We haven’t heard a word directly from her since, but she makes sure we know about her wealth. You have two cousins: Edward, who is two years older than you, and Sophia, who is a month younger than you. She had sent us announcements of their births but no pictures, and she had no pictures to show your father and me when she came to the funeral. She didn’t care to talk about her family with us. She was truly like a stranger. If our mother hadn’t died before, she would have died then.”

I recalled these conversations with my mother and thought how strange that this sister she had described with such pain was the woman who apparently wanted to claim me, to provide for me and be my legal guardian. If she had no interest in her family all these years, why would she care now? She wasn’t embarrassed about not attending her own father’s funeral, and she wasn’t embarrassed about the way she had behaved at her mother’s funeral, and now she was not embarrassed about not attending her sister and brother-in-law’s, either. Why would ignoring me even after all these family tragedies embarrass or bother her at all? If her own parents and my mother weren’t that important to her, why would I be?

Was she trying to make amends, repent, and using me as the way to do it?

Did she regret the way she had behaved, and was she so sorry about it that she wanted to lavish her wealth and kindness on me as part of her redemption?

Should I be more grateful and happy about the possibilities than sad and afraid?

What awaited me?

And what about my cousins? I hated to think of anything good coming out of my parents’ deaths. No matter what that good was or how much better off I might be, I would never be happy knowing why I had it all, but wasn’t it good to get to know them and for them to know me?

Right now, I couldn’t think about it. For our small village, the prospect of a double funeral draped the streets and houses in a dark, dreary shadow, even though the March sun was shining brightly. The very sight of the two coffins side by side in the church was devastating. It was difficult for many, not only me, to believe this was actually happening, that my young and beautiful parents were gone in seconds, their lives snuffed out like two candles. People were either hypnotized by the sight or avoided looking and kept their heads bowed. Even the babies on their mothers’ hips looked subdued and mesmerized by the deeply mournful atmosphere.

Mi abuela
clung to me almost as tightly as I clung to her. She had seen much sorrow in her life. Besides her own parents, she had lost a younger brother in a farm accident with an overturned tractor. He was barely fifteen. She told me her father never stood or walked straight after that.

“He looked like a broken corn stalk, his shoulders turned inward under the weight of his great grief.”

Everything stopped in our village for my parents’ funeral. A parade of mourners followed the coffins through the village in a procession that seemed it would take the rest of my life. The sky should be gray, I thought. The world shouldn’t look so bright, but the heavens had already shed all the tears the night before in a downpour that created streams carving grooves everywhere in the old roads. It was truly as Señora Morales told my grandmother as they went around the puddles.
La muerte tuvo que ser quitada.
Death had to be washed away.

And then there was Señora Porres nodding at me, confirming in her mind that the
ojo malvado
had indeed visited our small village and chosen my parents. Her eyes were full of “I told you so.” She gave me the chills. Perhaps the
ojo malvado
wasn’t yet satisfied.

There were even more people at the cemetery than there had been at the church. Some had just gotten off work. Señor Lopez had brought many from his soybean farm to attend, the men fumbling nervously with their hats in their hands, all of the women dressed in black, surrounding us in an inky pool of grief. Everyone looked devastated, not least of all Señor Lopez.

“They were truly like my own children,” he said.
“Mi hijo y mi hija.”

He gave my grandmother some money and shook his head as if his tongue had died in his mouth. There were no more words, no Band-Aids, no soothing balms, no remedies to help cure this sorrow. Only time would make it possible to continue.

According to what I had been taught, there were three types of death, and now we had gone through two. The first death occurred when your body stopped functioning and your soul departed. The second occurred when you were interred in the earth. And the third death occurred if and when you were no longer remembered by anyone. I was determined not to permit my parents to suffer this final death.

“My heart must look like a spider’s web with all the scars that have been carved in it,” my grandmother told her friends. She battled to keep the final death away from so many departed loved ones.