Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

‘I don’t know,’ said Lottie.

‘Will it be safe?’ asked Lando, but he said it to Jonah and I was angry with him at that. I stepped forward, but now my father stirred and put his hand on my arm.

‘She’ll be safe,’ said Jonah. ‘Dante’s all right.’

Missy, who up till now hadn’t offered an opinion, said gruffly, ‘You could look for years and still not find a better man than Dante Santos.’ After that little else was said on the matter. Lottie called the children up to see their sister and her new baby and then they left the apartment to make up their bedding for the night in the safety of the yard, in readiness to leave early the following morning. They weren’t going far. ‘Maybe only the next town, to repair the House and do some quiet business before we come back, to check,’ Lottie said, glancing at my father.

The sun had long set when I reached the boarding house. Aunt Mary came downstairs on hearing the door. She was still in her day clothes, though ordinarily she’d have bathed and changed for bed by now. She looked tired and she was frowning as she met my eye. I wondered if she’d waited up for me. I wished I’d been able to go to her rather than have her come to me, if only to demonstrate that I hadn’t forgotten my obligations to her. I started to apologise but she shook her head. ‘Missy Bukaykay sent Fidel with a message,’ she said. ‘Have you eaten anything since morning?’

I hadn’t expected the question. ‘No, ma’am,’ I said slowly, struggling to remember. She sent me straight to the kitchen where America, in her nightclothes, had already started warming food for me. And it was now, at Aunt Mary’s generosity, at the sight of the food America laid out wordlessly on the table, that I finally yielded. I cried as I ate, and America, wise enough to know when to ask and when not, left me to do so in peace.

News of the birth spread quickly through Esperanza and most mornings my father opened his door to find dry food, an old dress, a vest for the baby with a note from one neighbour or another. Johnny Five Course, whom I’d never thought of as a sentimental man, brought dinner for my father and Lorna every night for two weeks. Jonah brought a rattle for the child and a bottle of rum for my father, which he helped make a start on one night after work.

Missy visited most days to check on the baby and brought guava or castor-bean leaves from Uncle Bee to make decoctions for Lorna to wash her wound with or poultices for her breast to encourage her milk. She berated Lorna each time for not resting, for Lorna — afraid perhaps that her luck might end and though she was tired and sore — kept the apartment cleaner than it had been in a long time.

At the boarding house, Aunt Mary and America unpacked the boxes they’d stored away when the boys were small and found blankets and sheets and a small crib that Aunt Mary and I took to my father in a taxi. We reassembled it in his apartment, pushing the dining table up against the wall to make room. My father was now sleeping in the kitchen while Lorna and her baby, whom she was yet to name, had the main room to themselves.

America set to making batches of food full of iron or calcium or protein, whatever she’d decided a new mother needed most that particular day. Fried sardines, chickpea curry, soybeans or rice cakes heavy with anise to help Lorna make milk. If Aunt Mary knew of the few extra groceries that were diverted in this way, she never complained. I wondered at the time why they would want to do all of this for Lorna, or even for my father. Now I understand that at least a little of it was for me.

I helped America silently at first but found my voice again soon enough; America’s cooking had a rhythm to it that felt right and it pulled me out of myself. When she decided I didn’t need to be handled gently any more, she stopped her cooking and supervised me making a fig and black molasses cake, partly for Lorna but enough for the rest of us too, snapping her instructions like a colonel, her voice losing the softness of the preceding few days. ‘Mix that like you mean business,’ she said as I turned the flour and eggs together. ‘It’s not made of diamonds.’

‘Diamonds are the hardest thing in the world. Nothing like mixing a sponge,’ I said, testing her.

‘Don’t get clever with me. Your reading better get you further than this kitchen if you’re going to feel free to talk to me like that.’ She picked up the tin of molasses and put it down again roughly. Not so roughly that I’d figure she was really cross, just roughly enough that I’d think twice about contradicting her again. I smiled to myself.

‘Haven’t seen much of Benny lately,’ I said.

I’d said it just to make conversation, but now America glared at me. ‘Stop fishing,’ she said curtly. I looked at her, surprised, noticing as I did so how weary she looked this morning, her rash bright across her cheeks. My attention had been inward these last few days and I felt ashamed of it all of a sudden. For now that I thought about it, America had seemed really distracted this last week too, and it occurred to me that perhaps she’d cooked such a lot as a kind of solace. I recalled that I’d come into the kitchen the day after the birth to see her and Benny sitting together at the table as if they’d been talking . They’d fallen quiet as soon as I walked in. America had got up sharply and sent me off to fetch shrimp paste, though I was sure there was an open jar in the Frigidaire. When I got back, Benny had gone. America left the jar I brought on the kitchen table for a couple of hours before putting it back on the pantry shelf.

She watched me now, warily. I turned the cake mixture more firmly, as if doing so might appease her. ‘You think the sun moves around you?’ she said.

‘The sun, the moon, the stars,’ I said lightly and pushed the mixture round so fast that some spattered onto the table.

‘Watch it! That cake’s got to fill eight people.’ I stirred more carefully. ‘Why don’t you just ask him?’ she said suddenly.

I stopped stirring. ‘You think I could?’

‘He’ll tell you if he wants to. It’s his own business. Jesus, Joseph, you’re such a baby. You don’t need my permission to talk to him.’

I stared at her. ‘You get mad at me if I do anything without checking with you first.’ I expected her to respond to this with a crack about how men needed to be told how to wipe their own noses.

Instead, she said softly, ‘You’ll do just fine.’ She didn’t give me a chance to ask her what I’d do just fine with, but opened the molasses tin, thrust it at me and said, haughtily, ‘You may pour.’

When the sponge was ready, she cut a big slice for me to take up to Benny.

He didn’t answer straight away when I knocked, though I knew he was in because I could hear music. Then he said, ‘Door’s open, Joe.’ I wondered stupidly how he knew it was me, even though I knew the difference too between his footsteps and anyone else’s.

He was sitting cross-legged on his bed, his sketchbook across his knees, a packet of Marlboro by his feet. I took in the cigarettes, glancing up at him, surprised. He stared back and I looked away. I stayed just inside the door.

Benny’s room was at the front of the house. It was broad and often filled with sun and so gave the impression that the doors and windows were wide open even when they were not. It opened onto a wooden balcony that overlooked a corner of the garden in which, in the old days, a poultry house had stood. The walls of his room were papered with his own work. Sketches of Esperanza: Johnny Five Course’s stall; Cora grinding coffee, her eyes glinting over her glasses at the artist; Ignacio decorating pastry, looking like he was humming while he worked; Dub’s motorbike and on the same sheet of paper the wolf’s head on the back of his jacket. On the wall above Benny’s desk, taped over what might have been pictures of the jetty, were several portraits of the girl under the yellow bell tree. I moved forward to take a closer look. In a couple of them she seemed different; she was smiling. I turned back to him. He’d been watching me and now I saw his face darken like a monsoon sky. ‘Get lost,’ he said, coldly.