Eccentric Neighborhood Read Free Page B

with cotton every night before going to bed. Everything was white in this bathroom, and it was so large that as a child I used to get the words bathroom and ballroom mixed up. There was a cast-iron tub with griffin’s feet, a shower with a halolike nozzle, and a cylinder with rings that sprayed at you from every direction when you stepped inside naked. The shower had American Standard star-shaped spigots of stainless steel. These must have been mixed up in the installation, being labeled (logically in Spanish, but incorrectly in English) C for hot water and H for cold. Abuela Valeria, who didn’t speak English, assumed that C was for caliente (hot) and H for helada (freezing), because in the States cold water was always ice-cold. A squat square tub, a baño de asiento, sat in the corner. It was ideal for reading, and it was there that Abuelo Alvaro devoured from María , Sab , and Amalia the morsels Valeria fed him to whet his appetite every night before making love.
    Tío Alejandro’s bedroom was next door to my grandparents’, in the right wing of the house. It was spacious and had a four-poster canopied bed, its own private bathroom, and a bay window that opened onto the garden.
    The other two bedrooms were in the left wing of the house. There my aunts and my mother had slept long ago. These rooms shared a bathroom, a small, low-ceilinged cabinet that Abuelo had built under one of the gables. Later, when the grandchildren came to visit at Christmas, they slept in this wing of the house. Since the bathroom could hold only one person at a time, there was often a cramped line of little boys and girls in front of the door nervously crossing and uncrossing their legs.
    Almost every room at Emajaguas had its own skylight. Skylights were a way of saving money: one didn’t have to turn on a light except when it began to get dark. But they also gave the rooms a special atmosphere. There is a dreamlike quality to a room with a skylight; it eliminates the passing shadows of the world outside, the swish of headlights on the road, the streetlights coming on at dusk. A room with a skylight gives one a sense of security. Nothing bad can happen there; there’s no reason to be afraid of what the future might bring.
    The skylights of Emajaguas were always located in strategic places: over the dining room table, for example, or above the bathtub, where sunlight fell directly on the naked body. At the Sacred Heart in La Concordia the nuns taught us that looking at yourself in the mirror without clothes on was a cardinal sin. Girls were supposed to be ignorant of their bodies—the little bushes of hair beginning to sprout in unexpected nooks, the bulbs pushing out in flat places, and all kinds of fluids beginning to run—and modesty was an important part of being a decent person. Thanks to Emajaguas I always laughed at all that. I loved to stand in the bathtub under the skylight without a stitch on. By the time I turned twelve I knew my body’s secret places by heart: a nest of downy fleece growing here, a delicate pink halo appearing there. I grew up liking the way the creamy curve of my breast melted into my belly and, when I bent my elbow, how the hidden part of my underarm resembled a freshly baked loaf of bread. At Emajaguas I could caress and touch myself at will. Exposed to the light of day, my body was innocent and had a life of its own; shame and sin meant nothing to me.
    I was thirteen when I discovered the answer to the age-old enigma of how we arrive in this world. One morning at recess one of my girlfriends, María Concepción, came over excitedly to where I was sitting with a group of other students. She said she wanted to tell us a secret, so we rallied around her in the school yard, as far as possible from the vigilanta , the lookout sister. “I found out where babies really come from!” María Concepción said. “They don’t come from Paris on the wings of Jesusito at all, like the nuns say!” Then she proceeded