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Grandma is not in the house. Early
this morning, around eight o’clock, she
left for the market with her
granddaughters, two young girls with
wilderness in the hair, the smile of
flowers, and a restless happiness that
could only be appeased by grandma’s
hand blows.
He, who had no place to sleep, no place
to live, saw the enormous orchids fly
toward the house’s gratings and entangle
over the roof to escape between its tiles.
He saw them sit down on grandma’s
chair and wait for the afternoon colors
to show up among the innumerable
plants crammed on the front porch. The
orchids were giant dragonflies dressed in
purple roaming through the vines,
opened to the vanilla-colored spirals
drawn by the flight of insects.
The house bared a body of memories, an
unexpected landscape, a surprising
fragrance, difficult for the nose to
pinpoint and yet familiar—the smell of
an armoire packed with clothes which
hasn’t been opened in years, like that of
someone with squeezed bananas in his
armpits walking speedily, straw hat in
hand, toward the noonday sun.
The bedroom of his childhood passed in front of the eyes of he who had no place to sleep,
no place to live. It was an unpretentious room. He could only remember very few toys in it.
It was a perfect square. A door and a window; no carpet; no pictures hanging on the
turquoise-blue walls; no furniture except for the bed, a rustic, rusty metal frame with a
squalid mattress reeking of moth balls. He remembered birds outside the window, his
childhood bedroom window at his own grandmother’s house: cardinals, blue jays, the
occasional canary. His granny…now dead. No matter how hard he tried, he could never see
her face (not even when he shut his eyes) behind the black veil she wore on Sundays to
church at daybreak, when the colors of the birds still fluttered around his window. He
could remember these colors, each wing, each feather, each blinking, alert, obstinate eye of
each bird that ever stopped, even if for a second, at his window sill, but he could never see
his granny’s face passed the veil. He could only remember her the way she looked on
Sundays at daybreak. Life grew slowly on the walls of many other grandmas who didn’t
wear a veil at dawn, but who did invariably awake their grandchildren at six o’clock in the
morning (with the precision of a rooster) to take them to church, to a boring mass, with the
promise of plum or tamarind snow cones. He remembered his own grandma, the flavor of a
fruit on shaved ice which he was incapable of recognizing but whose memory was
pleasant…and he heard bells…church bells.
From the market, grandma, and her two granddaughters, brought a bag. She shook her
queue (maybe it was her head) like someone would shake off a fly glued to his arm,
squinted her eyes, looking at him who had no place to sleep like someone would look at a
fly glued to his nose, and tossed a silent question. She waited for an answer like someone
would from a fly glued to a pile of shit. Grandma played with her flies, and her eyes
wandered upon the body (and long hair) of he who had no place to sleep, no place to live.
Grandma continued to read her bugs’ future. Half her face remained fixed, hemiplegic,
before the visitor. Her face trembled right before she started to talk; perhaps it was the
trembling from a fly that lived inside her or, maybe, that of a worm that lived in her cheeks
inside of a great guava.
After listening from he who had no place to sleep that he had “no place to sleep,” and that
he “would very much like to live in that house where the walls bore the memories of his
own grandmother and the flavor of tamarinds and plums,” grandma went into the house.
He followed her. The girls stayed behind on the porch, whispering in each other’s ears,
giggling, amid the plants, the giant dragonfly-orchids hovering above them, drawing vanilla-
colored whirls. He could hear them giggle, but could no longer see them.
Grandma’s hemiplegia sometimes moved her face, drafting a gesture that seemed to be a
greeting. It was a sort of nervous smile that didn’t know how to come out, as if it had lost
the heel of a shoe on a dancing floor.
The outside of the house was green (though it was a rather bluish green, a green whose mix
had twice as much blue as yellow. Or was it a blue to which too much yellow had been
added?), a turquoise-like color. But it wasn’t turquoise. The house was painted green or
blue, bright under the sun, definitely an oil-based paint, fresh, luminous like ornamental
fishes…. “What color is this?” He seemed to recall having seen it before, but he couldn’t
quite remember where or when—was it in a dream, on some other house, on a paint sample
card, or was it a color he had imagined in the dark, a frog under a flashlight? The house was
blue, turquoise blue, though not quite; like his childhood bedroom walls, though not
quite…and, at times, under the sun at dusk, it was hemiplegic as well. Inside, the house was
filled with strange sounds: crows from roosters and cackles from hens, chirps from sooty
pigeons, and barks from a dog in love with dirt. The orchids were big cockroaches lost amid
dancing chickens, cockroaches which had learnt from seashells the art of dressing up like
flowers and which now were able to skip among the birds while the latter pecked on a
confusing mix of pebbles and corn.
Grandma is in the kitchen at the very
back of the house. He sits uninvited at
the table on one of only two chairs,
hunched, his arms crossed on his legs,
his head up, waiting for grandma to
turn, staring thoughtlessly at her butt—
a shapeless, enormous mass of flaccid
flesh and fat, “maybe it’s all wrinkled
too.” His face, for a second, cringes at
the thought, at his thoughts, and his
eyes quickly turn to the floor, his head
down. Grandma, her back turned to the
prospective tenant, is brewing coffee,
counting the spoonfuls as she spills
them in the boiling water, slowly. Sixty
years of experience, of habits, have
become five minutes of rigorous
alchemy. It takes a lifetime to make
coffee this good in five minutes.
Finally! There it is. He is now staring at the pot on the burner, steam going up toward the
ceiling, spreading in all directions, toward the door, snaking its way out of the kitchen,
toward the only window, toward the hallway and to the street, drawing vanilla-colored
spirals. He is now looking up, at the ceiling. Steam rises from the pot, spreading in all
directions: an octopus lying on the sand. The whole house smells of coffee. The house: a
giant, hot coffee pot with three bedrooms, one bathroom, kitchen, living room, and a small
extra room added to the side of the front porch in which there is a sewing machine and
some unfinished dresses hanging from a rod that runs the length of the room: not too long.
He had followed her into the kitchen through a narrow and long hallway along which there
were four doors (one smaller than the other three in both length and width), three to the
right, one to the left, and after a short wait for instructions sat uninvited at the table while
she gathered her secret coffee-making spells, staring at her butt; he hadn’t seen her face
since they were outside on the front porch and under the sun. It occurred to him that
sitting at the table her butt was only a fart’s blow from his face. Instinctively, he looked the
other way, to the left: a yellowed picture of the Pope hung on the wall. The girls were now
inside; he could hear them.
The granddaughters were two faceless voices trotting about the house, refreshing the
afternoon with their play, curious to the fact that someone without flies in his queue had
nowhere to sleep. They were two fans revolving between the furniture, two small planets
rotating around each other with infallible precision.
Grandma, before the visitor, and waving airs of business, left her coffee and disrupted the
orbits of the two planets with the wrecked roll of a newspaper, sending them to bed in the
middle of the day. This was the first time he heard the old woman’s voice, the old woman’s
old voice: dark, a man singing the blues; scratchy, like the sound of a match when it first
burns; red from sixty years of yelling—a safe yet frightening voice. It takes a lifetime to
build a voice this good: a voice that need not be uttered; a voice that suggests itself in a
look; a thwarted volcanic eruption.
One roll of the eyes, two words…a cry, another cry, two more words…silence…a door
closing (to the left) behind the girls…silence….
It’s six o’clock in the afternoon and grandma is closing a deal with a man sporting an
enormous queue; he has nowhere to sleep, nor has he anywhere to live.
It’s six o’clock in the morning and grandma is dressing up her granddaughters to take them
to mass.
It’s six o’clock in the afternoon and a black eye strides like an orchid mimicking a fly to
live in the left half of grandma’s face.
It’s six o’clock in the morning and the newly arrived man begins to live in grandma’s
green/blue house, attuning his senses to the new unknown sounds, smells, motions, locked
in the room behind the second door to the right of the long hallway leading to the living
room and kitchen; the door right before the smaller, both in length and width, door. From
inside his new room he listens, educating the rest of his senses through hearing; giving his
eyes sounds to create visual images that in turn would suggest to his nose imagined scents,
reminiscent fragrances, and flavors to his mouth. Thus he would begin to organize and
adapt to his new world by deceiving its senses with a myriad of imaginary experiences
beginning in his ear. Now he has a place to sleep, a simple, comfortable single bed in a
simple, comfortable bedroom with a single window, an end table, and a small armoire. No
TV. Through the window he can hear the racket in the backyard: chickens, hens, a rooster,
pigeons everywhere, and the dog whose name he would never learn. Through the wall
behind the headboard of his bed (the wall between his room and the only room in the
hallway that has a smaller door…in both width and length) he can hear water. “That’s got to
be the bathroom,” he thinks. It is the only bathroom in the house.
Awake after his first night in grandma’s blue/green house, he listens to the muffled purl of
the water that runs in the bathroom inviting a fresh morning to slip between forks and
knives. The dog, which has not ceased to beg the moon for love since last night, has,
however, put his body under the shade of a tree, seeking protection from pigeons and
hens. The rooster repeats over and over the secret record of his hopeless passions. And
grandma is already saying to one of the girls—imagine that—to send her sister’s bothers to
hell.
Hemiplegia has burst everywhere in
the house, as if things were
stubbornly determined to sleep, as
if glasses had no desire to turn to the
other side of the table and greet the
light, and because grandma’s face
strolls absent through every corner.
Grandma, no doubt, is closed like a
door; perhaps her gestures have
slowly shut down through the years,
leaving just that fly swatter’s look
on her, in her.
Coming into this house is like
entering a giant ear, the center of a
caracole, or the mouth of the dog
that doesn’t stop barking every
night, keeping a solitary dialogue
with the streets. By morning,
grandma talks to birds, to plants,
and maybe to the ghosts of the past
hanging from the trees.
When the new guest entered the house, he also entered the realm of tobacco—witchcraft
smell of smoke and gunpowder. Who can tell whether grandma smokes her cigars while
chewing them, or whether she blows the smoke between her hands joined in prayer under
the altar stuffed with a motley array of wooden statuettes; brightly-colored Indians; hand-
carved fertility dolls from Tanzania and other lesser-known African deities; a giant
Buddha behind a pile of wheat pennies; voodoo dolls of all sizes and styles from New
Orleans; and a Simón Bolívar dressed in a suit of lights…and saints, dozens of them—all
gleaming under a hundred candles. Who knows whether grandma doesn’t have between
the chain of garlic and the aloe plant the portrait of a charismatic, corrupt politician next
to that of a revolutionary who wants to overthrow the government; who knows—one can
never guess—whether grandma, during her tobacco-journeys, her visits to African
kingdoms where big robes are flagged defiantly, kingdoms of nocturnal dances and
disease, surrounded by the smell of crushed plantains and that of idols with candle wax on
the hair, saffron on the moustache, and onoto on the cheeks, didn’t become the kind of
grandma who likes to play politics by painting the floor under her feet, and the shades
upon her eyes, turquoise green/blue (the color of the opposition party) because the
celebrations and triumphant fireworks of the government’s party (whose color is white)
kept her grandchildren awake and scared the living shit out of her foreign daughter-in-law
who could only curse and swear every time fear bit into her tits.
The smell of tobacco rotates in and around the house, in the spaces of saturnalia. It
transports grandma to the jungle’s shores. It takes her, on a black broom, to legendary
regions, near her granddaughters’ maddened heads like a flying demon who comes in
through open windows to steal sleeping breaths, simulating men hanging from trees whose
black leaves tremble, or gentlemen without face who whistle through towns with a sack on
their shoulders, or beheaded centaurs dancing on walls of stone, or little girls spitting
candies and jewels when they behave, snakes and frogs when they don’t.
The house has grown used to grandma’s terror. At night, it can wrap itself with spooky
tales, and it can get up at dawn with the comfort of the rooster among his hens. The girls
continue to grow, between cigars and grandma’s financial juggling, inspired by coupling
birds and the mystery of the Holy wafer, and by their father’s songs and swinging boots.
They have no mother; she is dead. Their father who is almost never home, is a low ranking
officer in the army. He, the new tenant, only saw him, the father, a couple of times in the
very short time he, who hadn’t had a place to sleep or to live, lived and slept in grandma’s
house. Both times he sang with the girls on the front porch songs about frogs, burning
bridges, and bus wheels. Both times each girl swung sitting on each of his army boots arms
crossed tight around his calves. He sat and sang moving his legs back and forth, his
daughters clinging to them.
Late this afternoon, the other side of grandma’s face fell asleep while she sew; her legs
found one another, and the needle became very happy because it now was a kitchen knife.
Ten years have passed since he met grandma and her granddaughters, but the house is still
there, as bright as ever. Under the stars, for he again has no place to sleep, no place to live,
he hears it.
The green/blue house is still there every night, filled with fright and ghosts shaking away
flies that believe to be orchids eating from a chunk of wood that could very well be a horse
rotting as the granddaughters grow. The blue/green house is there this afternoon,
pensive, staring at grandma while she lies dead onto the sewing machine: a strange animal
devouring a length of cloth; one of those creatures that remain immobile like vaginas
giving birth to flowers inside the trunk of a hollow tree.
