The tarmac shivered in the heat. A girl shifted a croker sack from one shoulder to the next, before her stretched a long street lined with tall, wooden houses shuttered against the sun. Except for a shoeless boy calling out for custom, a stack of newspapers under his arm, the only sound came from inside her sack. The rasping of small claws made her itch.
It was April, and the dry season sun withered all that it touched. The girl's dress stuck to her back where the perspiration had pooled. Dust from the night journey, through forests and then dry, yellow, scrublands had stiffened her hair and marked her face. She paused a moment, scanning the houses for signs. She had been told to look for green shutters and almond trees. From somewhere behind her, a shutter banged open and a pair of hands emerged from the folds of the curtains. The hands shook out a dust rag. The girl heaved the croker sack to the ground. A solitary gust of wind caused the leaves to rattle. She lifted her face skyward and whispered 'iguana rain,' just as drops of water, soft and sweet, began to fall. The water trickled down her face, leaving it smooth and clean. From behind the curtain folds, the woman saw the sack wriggling at the girl's feet and knew what was inside. She knew too that it was a gift. The maid had arrived.
*
The house the girl came to emerged crookedly, it's long pillared supports rooted into the ground, it's two stories traversed by shuttered windows and balconies. She stood at the gate watching a man, perhaps in his sixties, greet the afternoon with a yawn. Lifting his vest, the man scratched his heavy belly, then, exploring further, pulled at the hairs on his chest. Finally, the hands emerged at the yoke of the vest, scratching, disappearing again, down to the small of the back, his shoulder blades, scratching, scratching. Then he saw her.
"What you doing there girl?" He didn't like being watched. "You looking for someone?" He didn't like her face.
"Is this the house of Mr Christus, sir? I have been sent for employment."
Her voice was soft and delicate, and he listened to it without assimilating the words. "Sir," she called louder. "I have come for employment."
Yes, he thought, that voice touched him somewhere. He scratched his ass. His wife joined him and, leaning over the veranda rails, enquired, "You the new girl?" The girl nodded. "Then open the gate for her," the woman ordered.
The man opened the gate, and as the girl went by, he caught a whiff of spices. She smells of cooking, he thought, disappointed, and wondered why maids always smelt of the kitchens they came from.
At the screen door to the house, the woman enquired the girl's name. "Angelita, ma'am".
Angelita, Mr Christus mused. The name rang of angels and small things with wings, butterflies or perhaps black beetles. He felt ashamed of his thoughts as lately they seemed to clutch at trivialities. He remembered how a few years back, he would have been focusing on the girl's calf muscles. He liked strong calf muscles, bottoms too. The kind that grew outwards, like two melons clasped together. The memory of desires past brought him to focus on the girl. He wiped his eyes and ran along her back a second time. Irritated, he followed her, seeing now that her feet hardly touched the ground.
Angelita glided silently behind the heavy footed wife, letting her eyes settle on the objects in the rooms she passed; the rugs knotted with vermillion and mustard designs, the mahogany furniture, the glass vitrine ribbed with silver and crystal. These things were beautiful and beautiful things were worth the care they demanded. She remembered her own home, the dusty floorboards, the cracks in the walls stuffed with newspaper and hung with outdated calendars, the kitchen with its fire hearth shrouded in woodsmoke, the latrine, stiflingly hot under its corrugated iron roof, and she was glad of the objects around her. It satisfied her that her world would be this house and that the house was full of treasures, for it made a beautiful world.
They came to a passage with high, bare, walls broken by two doors. The first opened onto a porch and wooden staircase clinging precariously to the side of the house. The yard, Angelita spied, was withered and bound by a wall built layer upon layer with sticks and wood, and then the passage grew darker; the floorboards becoming dull and scuffed. This part of the house was uncared for. At the end of the passage, the woman opened the second door. The familiar smell of ripe plantain and lard assailed each in turn. The aroma, grown fat on endless warm nights, caught at Mrs Christus's throat, causing her to swallow, then retch, for the taste lingered on her tongue and lined her stomach. Angelita noticed nothing, for the aroma was, in fact, her own, but the man shuffling behind them smelt it and accepted it for what it was, the smell of the kitchen. They were in a small anteroom hung with onions and bananas, and in the corner stood a large tin drum of lard. A great refrigerator droned against one wall. Two doors led off the anteroom, one to the kitchen and the other to a bedroom, small and dusty.
"Your room," the woman said, motioning for her to put down her things. Disappointed, Angelita stared at her bleak room, feeling the boundaries of the two worlds. This part of the house was obviously hers, access to the front gained only through brief dusting and polishing expeditions. The one window was smudged with dirt, and, still, the room held the useless despondency of its past life.
"She was a dirty girl," Mrs Christus said. "No self-respect."
"Yes, ma'am." Angelita knew the mechanism of intonation, of polite acquiescence, and looked for the first time at her mistress, feeling dislike stirring in her heart. The woman before her was tall, her hair, backcombed to a high puff, was rusty red from heat treatments and perms. She had a mole, on the left, above her lip and her ample breasts, neatly pressed, formed a precise cleavage. Equally neat were the solidly molded body curves, tight beneath a corset.
Mrs Christus closed the door to the tiny bedroom aware of the girl's disappointment, but she felt no twinge of pity or regret. She turned to the kitchen. The girl seemed average in every way, except for her voice. There was a beauty in it that irked her. The clear notes of each sound reminded her of a flute played in the wind, and she felt that it was uncalled for in a girl of her sort. You couldn't show it like a broach or assume it like an expression. It was an insubstantial gift and knowing this made Mrs Christus feel better. She opened the kitchen cupboards with a certain pride: cups, saucers, plates, pans, shockingly new, ordinary, plain. Angelita winced, she had hoped for a discovery. Uninterested, she turned and found that the man had followed them to the kitchen and was watching her. He was looking at her with the kind of disbelief that is in itself a kind of interest. He was muttering to himself and Angelita, embarrassed, turned away.
Mr Christus had long ceased talking about anything but the most puerile of subjects, he did as he pleased and spoke mainly to himself. He had found within himself, and more so as he grew older, voices from the past reviving lingering memories, repeating over and over an eternity of words left unspoken, desires buried before they had blossomed, chances hanging tantalizingly close and remaining still untaken. At first, these voices whispered softly, beguilingly, but ignored they grew until finally, ferocious, they screamed at him. But he had learned to live with them, to cope, to answer.
"Muttering?" Mrs Christus reprimanded her husband. "Mutter, mutter, mutter! Papi, this girl will think you are crazy and I don't blame her. I think you are crazy. You hear it girl?" Mrs Christus pointed at her husband. "It's what you will have to live with."
Angelita looked again at the hunched, fat bellied, man, muttering still. He's just an old man, she thought and wondered how just a few moments ago he could have frightened her. He was even, and this she felt for sure, impotent. An impotent, old, man, she repeated and smiled at him for he was as harmless as a pet. The smile, sly as a tiger, warm as a fire, residing between maybe, yes and no, stilled the voices, turned them, with a click of a switch, off. At that moment Mr Christus realized that something had begun, a hand had reached into his darkness. He knew that the maid had brought him good news. She was hope. He tugged at his ear, chewing on this bit of knowledge, and then shuffled away, down the passage. For the rest of the day he remained in his office, a room called his but really nothing more than a junk store. He sat at his desk turning over pieces of a radio he had dismantled. He had intended to fix it, but now he looked at the pieces without comprehension, his thoughts enmeshed in the novelty of the new maid, the air about him fluting with her voice. In this room, his room, were the broken remnants of more radios, typewriters, a lawn mower, a telephone, a sewing machine, five clocks, decorations made from colored lights, hanging by wires, bulbs cracked to reveal little silver filaments. Some he fixed, some he left, and others he forgot how to put together. He opened the first drawer to his desk. It was filled with springs which he took and arranged into soldier neat lines. He opened the second drawer fingering the cogs, screws, coils of copper wire, a set of tiny screwdrivers, soldering fluid, lubricating oil, batteries, hinges, small tins of enamel paint and more stuffed layer upon layer, drawer after drawer. He intended to make something from all the discarded pieces but, as yet, he knew not what. He spied a small cracked head which, when still attached to its body, had once adorned the dressing table. Broken, it had become his and rolling it in the palm of his hand, he thought of the maid who in her small room was unpacking her few pieces of clothing. She, in turn, thought of the man whose eyes had just challenged her. He had the look of a beloved ornament fallen from favor and swept away into the recesses of a dark cupboard. His face was faded and lined and every movement spoke of neglect. She felt something for that man and wondered what it was.
Wondering still, Angelita cleaned the window, aired the bed, and dusted the open shelves. On the table, beside her bed, she placed her mother's effigy of a black Christ, El Señor de Escuipulas by name, and a candle to either side. In the kitchen, she opened the croker sack and retrieved the two iguanas, fat with eggs, trussed and ready for skinning and gutting. Her father had risen early the previous morning and disappeared into the cool mist of the forest, his machete in hand and a sack slung over his back. Still sluggish from the night's chill, the two iguanas had been easy to catch. She had watched him tie them up with vines he had harvested from the forest, ready for her journey to the city. He told her that the iguanas were a gift for the lady in whose house she was going to work and that she should not cook them in the way traditional to her people but in the way of city people.
"Stew it". He said simply as he returned the green iguanas to the sack, together with a small machete, sheathed in a green and red leather case, which he had given her many years ago.
Angelita took the iguanas to the yard and searched around until she found a wooden plank of the right thickness and width. She placed the iguanas beside the plank and returned to the kitchen to fetch a pan of water and some limes. From her bedroom window, Mrs Christus watched as Angelita washed down the plank and then placed the iguanas on the wood ready for decapitation. The girl chopped off their heads, opened the fat bellies, and removed the eggs. The peculiar sight of the iguana tails flicking from side to side, after they had been cut off, took her back to her childhood and her grandmother's house. It was the Easter tradition to eat tamales with a chunk of iguana meat and an iguana egg hidden, like a treasure, in the soft corn parcels wrapped in banana leaves. As a child, Mrs Christus had been frightened of the iguanas, but her grandfather had pulled her close whispering that the good spirits of the forest had delivered them to the hunter and that the meat was especially sweet because the iguanas had been feeding on blossoms and tender leaves. Iguanas were good medicine, he said. The taste of iguana was the taste of her childhood, of happy times on the family farm. Those memories had been sealed away not only to protect them, but also because they were clues, little arrows, pointing to another time when her family had lived off the land. Now was different. She was born into a well-to-do household buzzing with commercial activity. Everyone was involved in buying and selling.
Mrs Christus shook herself from her memories and focused again on the girl who was now gathering up the pieces of meat and placing them in the pan. Angelita returned to the kitchen, seasoned then seared the iguana in coconut oil, added tomatoes, cabbage, and water. While the meat stewed, she washed and cooked the rice. When the food was almost ready she went to the dining room and laid the table for best. Carefully, she edged open a drawer, stiff from disuse. Inside were yellowed tablecloths. She chose one made of linen butterflies held together by clouds of lace. Over the moth holes, down the center, she placed mats woven into green leaves. At the vitrine, she hesitated, turning the key slowly, waiting before tasting the pleasure of touching the crystal inside. But the keyhole was rusted and when she got in, the goblets, she had spied, were coated with dust. Everything she touched in the rooms seemed locked in a past grandeur, but recalling her thickset, impassive mistress, Angelita felt that she had not been part of that past. She took the goblets, engulfed in serpentine swirls, and wiping each one placed them at the tip of every knife. To reveal the goblets from their cobwebbed stands, to bring these things to the clean light of day initiated them to her service. Each clean thing was a mark of her hand and was therefore hers. Already her small domain was issuing up treasures that, through care, would become her own. So when Mrs Christus came and saw the table laid as she had never seen it, she was irked once again. A nest of painful memories lay on the table before her and she was angry that the girl had taken it upon herself to open what had remained closed, locked behind years of forgetting. Each item seemed to be embroidered together by someone who understood beauty.
"It's not necessary." Mrs Christus said aloud, but when her husband made his appearance and sat comfortably among the things, fingering the lace edges of the butterfly wings, the snaked goblets, she felt pleased. She softened. Perhaps the girl's gifts could be put to good use. She sat down and heard the girl's fluting hum bring in a steaming dish of iguana stew. Angelita laid the dish carefully on one of the green, leaf-shaped mats and spooned a generous portion on each plate. She had set the table, as requested, for three and was intrigued to see, sitting next to his father, the son, small with a thin drooping mustache and eyes that squinted through a haze of blindness. He reached for things, waiting for touch to inform him, and twice he had brought the goblet to his nose to better see the sinuous patterns. His lips were slightly red, whether from wine, or nature, Angelita couldn't guess.
Mrs Christus, eager to taste the stew, was the first to eat. She expertly tore a hole in one of the iguana eggs and sucked the inside out. The smell, the taste, enveloped her in warmth. She was comforted and consumed three more eggs. Just as she had finished spooning the second helping onto her plate, her husband coughed out an egg. It rolled across to her side of the table. He retrieved the egg and examined it.
"Bushmeat!" He said with disgust. Angelita watched the son show his father how to tear open the leathery eggs and suck the centers out, but he would have none of it. According to Mr Christus's memory, bushmeat had never been served in his house. Mrs Christus, with her plate piled high, felt exposed and could eat no more. The maid had come to her by way of her sister in law with whom she was close. They had grown up together, best friends, and were even distantly related. Her sister in law had promised her a gift. She would never trust her again.
When Angelita next entered the dining room to clear the table, the incident had been forgotten and the son, at the request of his father, was giving a rundown of the family business, a store selling liquor. Mr Christus grunted and nodded but his attention was with the maid who was now humming from setting to setting, lifting the plates and gently placing them onto her tray. He was sure he heard the rasp of dry wings on the air. His mind was wandering and he questioned as to whether he should pull himself together or just let it be, but then he saw that his son too had caught the trail of sound left by the maid and that the creased rings of concentration around his eyes had relaxed. This brought on a painful twinge of emotion, the first for years, and that night Mr Christus went to bed feeling a point, deep and hard, in his chest softening. He took it as a sign of illness, age, and decrepitude. Not understanding that Spring was budding again in his aging body, he covered himself tight and slept with fisted hands.