Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

For Josefina, there was an intensely mysterious but real relationship between the life of images and the life of flowers. Who could deny that flowers, though they don’t speak, still live, breathe, and one day wither and die? Well, the images of Our Lord on the cross, the Sacred Heart, the Virgin of Guadalupe were like flowers: even if they didn’t speak, they lived, breathed. Unlike the flowers, they never withered. The life of flowers, the life of images. For Josefina, they were two inseparable things, and in the name of her faith she gave to flowers the tactile, perfumed, sensual life she would have liked to give to the religious pictures as well.

“This house smells musty,” Miss Amy exclaimed one night as she ate dinner. “It smells like a storage closet, as if there’s no air, musty. I want to smell something nice,” she said to Josefina in an insulting tone, sniffing for a kitchen odor as the maid laid the plates and served her vegetable soup, staring at Josefina’s armpits for a telltale stain, an offensive whiff. But the maid was clean. Every night, Miss Amy heard the water running for Josefina’s punctual bath before bed; if anything, she felt more like accusing Josefina of wasting water, but she was afraid Josefina would laugh at her, pointing toward the immense lake, like an inland sea.

Josefina placed a bouquet of tuberoses in the living room, a room it had never occurred to Miss Amy to decorate with flowers. When the old lady came in to watch her evening television after dinner, she first sniffed the air like an animal surprised by an enemy presence. Then she fixed her gaze on the tuberoses; finally she exclaimed with concentrated rage: “Who’s filling my house with flowers for the dead?”

“No, these are fresh flowers, they’re alive,” Josefina managed to say.

“Where did you get them?” growled Miss Amy. “I bet you stole them! You can’t touch other people’s gardens around here! Around here we have something called private property, capisce?”

“I bought them,” Josefina said simply.

“You bought them?” repeated Miss Amy, for once in her life bereft of arguments or words.

“Yes.” Josefina smiled. “To brighten up the house. You said it smelled musty, closed up.”

“And now it smells like the dead! What kind of joke is this?” Miss Amy shouted, thinking about the photograph of her husband hidden in the drawer, the misplaced glass marbles: she, not the maids, was responsible for those things, she offended herself to offend the maids — no maid must take the initiative. “Remove your flowers immediately.”

“Certainly, ma’am.”

“And tell me, how did you pay for them?”

“With my own money, ma’am.”

“You spend your salary on flowers?”

“They’re for you. For the house.”

“But the house belongs to me, not you. Who do you think you are? Are you sure you didn’t steal them? The police aren’t going to come to find out where you robbed the flowers?”

“No. I have a receipt from the florist, ma’am.”

Josefina left the room, though behind her lingered the scent of mint and coriander that she caused to emanate from the kitchen, having taken to heart her mistress’s complaint that the house smelled like a storage closet. Miss Amy, uncertain as to how she should attack her new employee, imagined for a moment lowering herself to the indignity of spying, something she’d never done with her other servants, convinced it would mean giving them a weapon against her. It was her greatest temptation, she admitted it to herself, to enter the maid’s room secretly and poke around in her possessions, perhaps discover a secret. Of course, that would mean showing her hand, losing her authority, the authority of prejudice, lack of proof, irrationality. Others had to come and tell her things, that the room was a pigsty, that the plumber had to come unplug the toilet, which was blocked up with filth — what could you expect from a black, a Mexican?

Lacking the pretext of the plumber, she had made use of her nephew Archibald. “My nephew informs me you never make your own bed.”

“He can make my bed when he gets in it to screw me,” said a sharp-tongued young black woman who left without saying good-bye.

Miss Amy wanted to lure Josefina into her own territory — the living room, the dining room, the bedroom — force her to reveal herself there, to make a big mistake there, to see herself there, in the bedroom after breakfast, in the ornate hand mirror that Miss Amy suddenly turned so as to banish her own reflection and force Josefina to look at herself. “You’d like to be white, wouldn’t you?” asked Miss Amy abruptly.

“There are lots of güeritos in Mexico,” said Josefina impassively, without lowering her eyes.

“Lots of what?”

“Blond people, ma’am. Just as there are lots of blacks here. We’re all God’s children,” she concluded plainly and truthfully but without sounding impolite.

“Know something? I’m convinced Jesus loves me,” said Miss Amy, pulling the covers up to her chin, as if she wanted to deny her own body and be like one of those cherubs who are all face and wings.

“Because you’re a good person, ma’am.”

“No, stupid, because he made me white. That’s proof God loves me.”

“As you say, ma’am.”

Wouldn’t this Mexican woman ever answer back? Would she ever get mad? Would she ever retaliate? Did she think she’d beat Miss Amy that way, by never getting mad?

She expected everything except that Josefina would retaliate that very night after dinner as Miss Amy watched a news program to prove to herself that the world was hopeless.

“I put your husband’s picture in the drawer, the way you like to do it,” said Josefina. Miss Amy sat there open-mouthed, indifferent to Dan Rather’s commentary on the situation of the universe.

“What does she have in her bedroom?” she asked her nephew Archibald the next day. “How has she decorated it?”

“The way all Mexican women do. Pictures of saints, images of Christ and the Virgin, an old ex-voto giving thanks, and God knows what else.”

“Idolatry. Sacrilegious papism.”

“That’s the way it is, and nothing can change it,” said Archibald, trying to pass along a little resignation to Miss Amy.

“Don’t you find it disgusting?”

“To her, our empty, undecorated, Puritan churches seem disgusting,” said Archibald, inwardly savoring the excitement of sleeping with a Mexican girl in Pilsen who covered the image of the Virgin with a handkerchief so the Virgin wouldn’t see them screw. But she left the candles burning— the girl’s delicious cinnamon body shone … It was useless to ask tolerance of Miss Amy.

“By the way, where is Uncle’s photo, Aunt Amy?” Archibald asked with some sarcasm. But the lady pretended not to hear, as she knew that the next day she wouldn’t be able to tell Archibald that the maid had put the photo away.

“What do you think of my husband?” she asked Josefina as she took the photo out of the drawer to put it on the night table.

“Very handsome, ma’am, very distinguished.”

“You’re lying, you hypocrite. Take a good look. He was at Normandy. Look at the scar crossing his face like a bolt of lightning splitting a stormy sky.”

“Don’t you have pictures of him before he was wounded, ma’am?”

“Do you have any pictures of Christ on the cross without wounds, blood, just nailed, dead, crowned with thorns?”

“Yes, of course. I have pictures of the Sacred Heart and the Christ Child, very beautiful ones. Would you like to see them?”

“Bring them to me some day.” Miss Amy smiled mockingly.

“Only if you promise to show me your husband when he was young and handsome.” Josefina smiled tenderly.