My Parents' Wild and Sexy New Year's Eve

 My violinist father always worked on holidays. Even on Christmas Day, while the rest of us were still eating the capons that my maternal grandmother had sent to Barcelona from her farm, my father would pull out his pocket watch, drain his glass of champagne, and say, “time for me to go.” He would go around the table and kiss his mother, his father, his two sisters, my mother, and me and, after admonishing my mother not to wait up for him, pick up his violin and vanish into the night. 

The year I was eight, a concert was cancelled and he was free on New Year’s Eve. Since he worked outside the house most nights of the week, my mother thought it would be exciting, instead of going out, to celebrate by staying home. She explained to me that because this celebration, which she called by its French name, réveillon, would happen at midnight, I would not be included, but I could participate in the preparations. 

In the early December dusk we set out to buy the food. First, we went to the fruit seller to buy grapes, because in Spain on New Year’s Eve you need to eat one grape with each stroke of midnight, for luck. Then we went to the xarcuteria, to buy foie gras, xorisso, ham sliced so thin you could almost see through it, and five different kinds of olives. Next we stopped at the wine store for a bottle of Catalan bubbly. On the way to the bakery we passed the church. A gypsy woman with a baby, her hand outstretched, huddled on the steps. My mother gave her some coins, and as we walked away with our net bag bursting with good things to eat she said to always remember how lucky we were to have food, and a house to live in. 

The réveillon would take place not at the regular dining room table, but at the smaller, more intimate brazier table. This was a round table with a wooden framework that supported the brazier a few inches above the floor. My mother would decant hot coals into the brazier and cover the table with a floor-length tablecloth made of green felt. On cold afternoons she would pull up a chair, lift the cloth over her lap, rest her feet on the edge of the brazier, and sew or read in comfort in our otherwise unheated apartment. For the réveillon, she covered the felt cloth with a smaller, white Belgian-lace cloth. 

The most important aspect of the réveillon wasn’t food, but romance. She and my father had to match the elegance of the tablecloth, the starched napkins, the candles (which we normally reserved for brownouts, a frequent occurrence in the years after the Spanish Civil War), and the cut-glass goblets. 

I desperately wanted to see this part of the preparations, so well before midnight my mother put on her black, floor-length evening dress. It was fitted at the waist, and fell straight to the floor with a pleat at the back. The décolletage was modest, and the narrow sleeves reached to her elbow (my family was as conservative in dress as it was liberal in displays of affection). She wore pearls around her neck and her white fur stole around her shoulders. The latter was not for show. In winter, whenever she wasn’t sitting at the brazier my mother was always cold. 

She had my father dress up too. The only hitch was that my father’s dress clothes—his tailcoat and white piqué vest and bow tie—were also his work clothes, but he nevertheless looked romantic in them. For a moment they stood smiling side by side in front of the brazier table so I could admire them, and then they sent me to bed. 

How is it that I remember, as clearly as if I had been there, my mother and father drinking champagne and feeding each other grapes with each stroke of midnight, and then dancing to my father’s favorite slow foxtrot (“Night and day, you are the one…”), her head on his shoulder, his mustache tickling her neck? It must have been the glow on their faces as they let me see them in their glory, which even to my childish eyes held all the rest—the wine, the candles, the grapes, and the dance.

Bedtime Rituals

Sometimes, when I can’t go to sleep at night, I repeat the prayer that my mother taught me when I could barely talk, “Guardian Angel, sweet companion, don’t forsake me….” As I begin to drop off, the toddler that I once was rises up within me, and I feel again in my tongue and palate the effort to form those words, as my mother slowly enunciates each phrase. 

Since my mother thought I might catch cold from the chilly floor tiles, I did not use to say this prayer on my knees, but flat on my back in bed, with the covers up to my chin and tightly tucked all around. A year or two later, my mother added a P.S. to the Guardian Angel prayer: “Dear Lord, please watch over everyone. Make sure Daddy has plenty of work, and make me a really good girl.” When she explained that I could hasten the arrival of a little brother or sister by praying hard for it, I added a P.P.S. and kept at it until I was sixteen, when that prayer was finally answered. 

But prayers were only part of the bedtime rituals. The sickly child of a hyper-vigilant mother, I slept in my parents’ bedroom until I was in second grade. Their bedroom was at one end of a long hallway, and the living room where my mother awaited my father’s arrival from his nightly rehearsals or performances was miles away at the other end. At bedtime, I hated to let her go. I dreaded the fading sound of her heels on the tiles as she walked away from me, and I was afraid of waking up alone in the dark with one of my eternal ailments. 

As she quietly made her way towards the door, I would ask for reassurance, “Where is my cold?” 

“On the North Pole,” she would answer. 

“Where is my earache?” 

“Oh, very, very far. In India, I think,” she would say, her hand on the doorknob. 

Then, just before she, like the sun, vanished until morning, I would ask, “And my fever, where is it?” 

“It’s not even on this earth. It’s on the moon!” and she would close the door, leaving me with only my Guardian Angel for company until she and my father tiptoed in hours later. 

I wonder, in retrospect, did my parents find my presence next to their bed an impediment to making love? They were too happy as a couple to have abstained all those years until I moved to my own bedroom, but on the other hand I never heard any sounds that struck me as unusual. They probably counted on my being a sound sleeper, like all children. I do remember hearing them whisper in the dark, and making whispering sounds myself (bsss…bsss…bsss) to alert them to my wakefulness. 

I assume that it was my mother and not my father who insisted on my sleeping in their bedroom until I was of school-age. Yes, I had lots of childhood illnesses, but except for the measles, none was life-threatening. What made her so anxious that she had to keep me with her even during the night? Shortly before she died she said to me, “those happy years when you were little and Daddy and I were young, I always felt that God was up in heaven, holding a big stick and getting ready to bring it down on our heads.” 

Those happy years were less than a decade after the Spanish Civil War, a period during which, living near the front lines and having to hide in ditches to escape bombardments, she had feared for her life every day. So it is no wonder that for her the sudden happiness of married love, relative security, and a child of her own felt like fragile gifts that could only survive because of her constant watchfulness. 

I don’t know whether our prayers, and my sleeping body at hand’s reach in the dark reassured her. I hope they did. But all these years later the Guardian Angel prayer, when I recite it like a mantra, continues to comfort the anxious child that lives within me.

Smells

My mother has just rung the bell of my paternal grandparents' apartment in Barcelona when she spots a smudge of chocolate on my chin. She whips a handkerchief out of her purse, spits on it, and rubs frantically at the spot. As the peculiar smell of her saliva drying on my skin starts to fade, the door opens and my tiny black-clad grandmother, tottering in her high heels, ushers us into the apartment. She gives me a kiss, and I feel the soft, almost invisible down on her cheek, and smell her special smell: toasted almonds. Why my city grandmother should smell of toasted almonds doesn't make sense to me, because it is my country grandmother, my mother's mother, who cracks and toasts the almonds from her trees and sends them to us by train in the fall, to eat along with the raisins that she dries in her attic.

Barcelona smells of diesel, with its citrusy undertones. The fish market smells of fish and wet floors. My parents' bedroom smells of the abominable camphor and menthol salve that my mother rubs on my chest when I suffer one of my endless colds, and of the lavender eau de cologne that she applies to my temples to relieve my frequent stomach upsets.

But I am never sick in the summer. We spend it on my maternal grandparents' farm, which provides an a three-month olfactory orgy.  Guided by my nose, I sniff and snuffle my way from house, to yard, to stable, to fields. There is the hot, dry smell of the chicken coop, and the moister, lower notes of the pig house. There is the metallic smell of the dust on the roads when it begins to rain, and the rancid smell of the sheep as they are driven home from pasture in the late afternoon. 

My  mother and her sisters are forever passing judgment on smells--disgusting! (of the manure pile); delicious! (of the sun-warmed melons from my grandfather's garden). Unlike them, I am an impartial observer of odors, treating them simply as data points to help me navigate the world. The only smell I despise is the acrid stench of the Flit that my grandmother sprays in the dining room to kill flies before each meal.

I am strongly attuned to the individual smells of the grownups in my family. The American devotion to deodorant and daily showers has not yet penetrated European culture, and everybody past puberty possesses copious underarm hair. This gives each of my relatives a signature bouquet that is as much a part of their persona as the shape of their nose or the alignment of their teeth. I do not find it unpleasant.

My olfactory connoisseurship reaches new heights one day when I come across my aunt folding a stack of laundered undershirts belonging to my father, my grandfather, and my uncle. They are all white and  sleeveless, identical but for a red initial sewn inside the neckline. Showing off, I tell my aunt that, if I close my eyes, I can tell which shirt belongs to whom by its smell. 

"But the shirts just came off the clothesline," she says. "They don't have any smell." I assure her that they do. "Go ahead, then" she laughs, and hands me a shirt. I squeeze my eyes shut, sniff, and identify the shirt as belonging to my grandfather.

"That was just coincidence," she says. "Smell this one." I correctly attribute the second shirt to my uncle. The game goes on until we run out of undershirts. My aunt goes to find my mother. "Your daughter," she says, "is part hunting dog."

Other than the undershirt game that I play with my aunt, I keep my olfactory adventures to myself, and ask no questions, especially about one smell that I find puzzling. When I raise my arms to embrace my mother around her waist, and press my face against her belly, I sometimes perceive an odor that reminds me of the smell of fresh sardines, and whose source will remain a mystery for the rest of my childhood.

Artichoke on My Face

“And then God sent an angel to pick blackberries,” my mother says, tucking me in. “He chose the two biggest, darkest ones and gave them to you for eyes. Another angel brought two roses for your cheeks, and he then flew to one of heaven’s cherry trees and brought down the ripest cherry for your lips." 

My eyes are starting to close, but she goes on. “But then God sent a younger angel, one that didn’t have a lot of experience, to look for something to make your nose. And that silly angel went to the vegetable garden and picked an artichoke, and God plopped it in the middle of your face.” As I nod off the Catalan word for artichoke, carxofa, seems to perfectly recreate the sound and feel of God plopping the artichoke on my face. 

But I am no more worried about having a carxofa on my face than I am flattered by the blackberry and cherry clichés. What sticks in my mind is the miraculous care and attention—all because of my specialness--that my creation story presupposes on the part of God, the angels, and my mother. 

It is only when I am a few years older that I realize what the artichoke metaphor is all about: I have inherited the Benejam nose. According to my mother, that nose, which my father got, along with his musical talent, from his mother, is disproportionately broad. The Benejam nose sits in the middle of our faces like an artichoke among the fruits and blossoms of an otherwise pleasing still-life. 

I don’t perceive any meanness in my mother’s tone when she critiques the Benejam nose. Heaven knows she loves my father and me to death. I have to grow a little older before I realize that, coming from someone with a narrow, more classically correct nose, her talk about the noses of her beloveds carries a whiff of schadenfreude. 

Oddly enough, this does not give me a nose complex. Even at the nadir of my adolescence, when I deplore most aspects of my anatomy (too much hair, not thin enough, etc.), my nose ranks low among my concerns. Rather, in my longing to draw close to my father, I like to think that the resemblance of our noses is an outward sign of the deep bond between us.

If my mother does not stint her observations about my nose, she is equally unsparing of her own perceived shortcomings. The chief one among these, according to her, is her legs, which are slightly bowed—something I would never have noticed if she hadn’t brought it up. And she in turn heaps praise on my legs, which she says are straight and perfect as Greek columns. 

Neither my artichoke nose nor my columnar legs have much emotional impact on me as a child. What does put an indelible mark on my psyche is my mother’s preoccupation with physical beauty. Hearing her analyze other women’s appearance in clinical detail—eyes too small and close together, nice long neck, pity about those short arms—I learn to pay close attention to looks, mine and everyone else’s. 

Now I am in tenth grade, and my mother is concerned about my teeth. It seems that my jaws are too small, or my teeth too big, and she takes me to the orthodontist because, as she explains to a friend, “nobody is likely to marry this child for her money, so we need to make sure she looks as good as possible.” Braces are only the latest in her list of improvements, following years of orthotics for my supposedly flat feet, and surgery to correct my errant left eye. 

I am grateful to my mother for her proactive attitude towards my appearance. Thanks to her my eyes and teeth are reasonably straight, my feet well arched. But I’m glad that she left my carxofa nose alone. These days I am often startled, when passing in front of a mirror, by what looks like the ghost of my mother. When did I grow to be so like her? But if I stop and look closer, there in the middle of my face is my nose, in all its Benejam splendor, to remind me that I am also my father’s daughter.

Revelation

I am wandering around in our house in Quito—the one my mother chose because it has the best views of the surrounding volcanoes—looking for something to read. There wasn’t much room in the three suitcases that the airline allowed us when we left Barcelona, so this house is almost bare of books. It is almost bare of furniture, too, and in the kitchen there is only one big pot for boiling water (what comes out of the spigot is full of parasites that we’ve been told might kill us) and a frying pan for omelets. We believe that we’re here for only one year, so we’re sort of camping out. 

On the dining room table, among a stack of letters from Spain, I notice my mother’s passport. In the photo, my mother looks especially happy, because she is about to fly to the wilds of South America. (My mother is the most beautiful woman I know, as beautiful as the statues of the Virgin Mary that I see in church—not the ones where She’s holding her dead Son, but the ones where He’s still a baby.) 

Below the photo I read, Date of Birth: February 28, 1918. But this cannot be. We’re in 1955, which means that my mother is…thirty-seven years old! I repeat the math, just to make sure, and there it is again, that appalling, fateful number that tells me that my mother is extremely old, and will die soon. 

As I stand holding the passport, the room swims and darkens around me. A ghostly hand squeezes my ten-year-old insides, and my breath feels as tight as when I run in Quito’s 9,000 ft altitude. My father is upstairs, rehearsing Dvorak with his string quartet. My mother is taking a nap. I am alone with my terrible secret--because it is a secret, and must remain so. I cannot reveal to my mother that she is in imminent danger of dying of old age, because the knowledge might kill her on the spot. Let her spend her remaining days in blissful ignorance. I must deal with this horror alone. 

My mother, dead—I can no more imagine that than I can imagine my own non-existence. The sense that she is essential to my survival is as deeply rooted in me as if I were still in her womb. But yet here she is, an impossibly ancient woman of thirty-seven, with perhaps just a few years or even months left to live. 

What will happen to me when she dies? Although I know that my father is a few years older than she, the realization of her imminent mortality is too overwhelming, and leaves no space for wondering how long he will last, or what my life with him will be like. No, when my mother dies I will be left alone in this strange country of volcanoes and no seasons, left to find my way back to Spain somehow. 

If I had come across my mother’s passport in Barcelona, I would have had two sets of grandparents nearby, all of them older than thirty-seven, yet going about their business without so much as a cane to lean on. Or I might have confided in one of my mother’s sisters, who would have mocked me a little, and jollied me out of my fright. 

But all those people are far away now, across the Atlantic, and here I am face-to-face with my mother, carrying my dreadful knowledge. Our uninterrupted mother-daughter duet, now that the buffer of grandparents, aunts, and uncles is gone, is beginning to weigh on me. Without her in-laws to please, her parents to worry about, and her sisters to shop and argue with, my mother is free to concentrate on me: my posture (slouched); my hair (in my face); my smile, or lack of it. In our nearly empty Quito house, there is nowhere for me to hide. 

But in the secret recesses of my cells, the hormonal tides are rising. The feathers that will power my future lifelong flight away from my mother are beginning to sprout. This wordless sorrow at the thought of losing her, my utter inability to envision life without her presence, are the last fraying threads of the cord that has bound me to her from conception. 

For now, however, the rumbles of my oncoming puberty are too faint for me to hear. As for my mother, she is in her glory, surrounded by volcanoes, having adventures that she could not have imagined as a child in her Catalan village. Her husband adores her, and the Dvorak sounds divine. The Amazon beckons, with its orchids, ocelots, and head-hunting tribes, and the best is yet to come. After all, she’s only thirty-seven. 

Drowned Men's Undershirts

Summer, 1947. My grandparents’ farm, in a valley at the foot of the Pyrenees. In the afternoon, after the siesta, which is necessary because being out in the midday sun is considered suicidal, my parents take me along on their walk. 

First, however, we have to find the sailor hat without which I am not allowed to go outdoors. My mother has a complicated relationship to the sun. On the one hand, she thinks it essential to my proper growth, and after one week in the country I turn as dark as a hazelnut, a process that the entire family encourages and applauds. 

On the other hand, going outside without a hat puts me in immediate danger of catching an insolació (sunstroke), believed to cause malaise, fits, and hallucinations. When my mother warns me against insolació, I imagine the hot yellow sun drilling into my skull, gilding my brain and the inside of my face and my throat all the way down to my stomach, making me glow like a lightbulb. 

The fact that my Mediterranean DNA has provided me from birth with an inch-thick thatch of hair to protect me from the rays of our favorite star does not assuage my mother’s fears. When she finds the white sailor hat, she plops it on top of my curls and leads me out the back door. A couple of semi-feral barn cats, alerted to the possibility of bread crusts by the squeaky hinges, scatter when they see my empty hands. 

My parents’ afternoon walks are of two kinds. The short version takes us along the dirt road from the farm house, past a wheat field, up a gentle slope to the threshing floor and the big hay barn. The long walk leads to the irrigation canal that, first envisioned by the Arabs in the 10^th century and completed in the early years of the 20^th, transformed the valley from a semi-arid wasteland into a paradise of green fields and almond, olive, and fruit orchards. 

The canal’s broad swath of brown water runs placidly between high banks bordered by shade trees. My parents and I walk on the narrow path alongside, my father holding my left hand and my mother my right to prevent me from succumbing to a fit of toddler insanity and diving in. 

We’ve been walking a while, and I’m getting bored. I want to go back to the house. “But we can’t go back now,” my father says. “We’re almost at the weir. Don’t you want to see the waterfall?” Long before we reach it, I can hear the water rushing over the top of the weir wall. I can tell that we are getting closer because my mother tightens her grip on my hand, the way she does in Barcelona when we are about to cross the street. At the fall, my father picks me up so I can see the thrilling sight. 

I am both horrified and fascinated by the noise, which is louder even than the thunderstorms that we watch from the covered terrace of the farmhouse. And I am intrigued by the water, which was a dull sepia in the peaceful stretches, but now gradually pales as it plunges until, at the bottom, it forms a roiling, boiling mass of bright white spume. 

“That’s enough, Lluís,” my mother says. “Get away from there. You’re making me nervous.” My father retreats, and puts me down, repeating the lesson I have heard a thousand times, “You know that you must never, ever go near the water, especially here at the weir.” And this time my mother adds something new: “The waterfall is so dangerous, that even grown men have fallen in and drowned.” 

Grown men drowned in the canal! My mind, ever determined to make sense of the world’s weirdness, seizes on this as the obvious explanation for the white froth churning at the bottom of the fall: it consists of the drowned men’s undershirts. 

My parents take my hands and we turn back towards the house, and my afternoon snack (dinner is at 10 p.m.). In the damp, shadowy kitchen, which smells of drains and potato peels, my grandmother drizzles olive oil onto a thick slice of crusty bread. 

“Where did you go on your walk?” she asks. 

“We went to the canal, all the way to the weir, and I saw the undershirts of the drowned men.” 

“The undershirts of…” she echoes, peering at me closely. 

She hands me the bread, wipes her hands on her apron, and goes to find my mother. “Did the child wear her hat when you took her out this afternoon? I ask because she may have caught an insolació . She said she had seen the undershirts of drowned men….” 

My parents and I on the canal path

Baby Carriage

The vehicle in which I rode as an infant was a kind of horseless barouche, black as a hearse, with a large hood that could be folded back to allow for the beneficial effects of sunshine. Set high on its four wheels, it enabled the adult pushing it to maintain uninterrupted eye contact with the infant contained in its depths. It had excellent suspension—I can still feel its comfortable bounce as my mother wheeled me over the cobbled streets of Barcelona. 

Once I was old enough to sit up, my mother removed the middle portion of the carriage bed, which left two small benches at either end. How I loved those benches! The endless possibility of choice they offered--now the front one! Now the back one!--in a life otherwise ruled entirely by others, made me feel powerful, self-reliant, free. 

I owe my earliest memory to that baby carriage. It is the summer before my first birthday—it has to be summer because in the photo the carriage is parked on a dirt road, and dirt roads belonged to summer. Someone is telling me to be still so that I can have my picture taken, but instead of sitting still I plop my bottom back and forth from one of the little benches to the other. With the big head and black hair of a court dwarf by Velázquez, my eyes squinting in the sun and my tongue poking out of my toothless mouth, I am being disobedient, and bursting at the seams with the sheer gloriousness of me. 

There is no question of the identity of the photographer. My father’s camera is as much an expression of his masculinity as his violin, and it would no more occur to my mother to take a picture than he would be inspired to fry a sardine for my dinner. I also know that my father was the photographer because of the certainty, which has remained intact for three-quarters of a century, that my momentary misbehavior is being watched with smiling benevolence, a quality that I associate with my father rather than my mother, who despite her affection is unswerving in the immediate enforcement of her commands. 

My father, summer-brown in his white polo shirt, the only garment that exposed his hairy forearms. My father, who loved the countryside with the fervent passion of the city-dweller and who, freed from the round of rehearsals and performances, would, during the siesta hour when he could neither practice the violin nor compose at the piano, take my grandparents’ horse and cart for a leisurely ride to the next village, feasting his eyes on the orchards, fields, and hedgerows of my mother’s native landscape. My father, the all-but invisible recorder of my childhood, who would suddenly materialize with his camera, saying, “Quick, go outside! I want to take your picture.” 

And I would stand, more obediently with each passing year, my espadrilles sunk in white summer dust, my skin tanned the color of a hazelnut, and my eyes squeezed tight against the glare of the Mediterranean sun.

 

First Communion

“Don’t disturb your mother! She’s embroidering your veil.” It’s August, 1951.There is an old sheet spread on the terrace of my grandparents’ farm house, and my mother sits on a low chair in the center, a billow of white tulle on her lap. She is embroidering a wide border of leaves, tendrils, and flowers around the edge of my First Communion veil, which reaches from my head to my feet. I have been told that in the coming years she will embroider the center, and I will wear this same veil at my wedding.

“Somebody wash this child’s neck, and her feet too. The dressmaker is almost here. She can’t see her like this!” The dressmaker is coming for the final fitting of my white organdy First Communion dress: long sleeves, tiny tucks across the bodice, full gathered skirt all the way to the floor. And, underneath, a long white slip to match.

“Let’s review the Commandments,” my aunt Xin says. “You have your test with Mossèn Ignaci this afternoon.” Mossèn Ignaci, the kindly old priest who married my parents, has acceded to let me make my First Communion early. He has been assured by the family that I am an unusually well-behaved, compliant child, and that I already know my prayers and most of the Catechism, so there is no need to wait for my seventh birthday, which is when, according to the Church, I will attain the age of reason.

In the sacristy, Mossèn Ignaci tests me on the Hail Mary and the Our Father, and also on the commandments about honoring my father and mother, skipping the ones about adultery and coveting my neighbor’s wife. And then we practice the communion itself. He takes an unconsecrated host from a box and puts it on my tongue, explaining that I must let it dissolve instead of chewing it. The little wafer tastes sweet, and before I can swallow it he feeds me another one, and another, as if they were candy, so that I have no choice but to chew them a little bit. 

The day before the ceremony, my father takes me to make my first confession.  I have scoured my brain for sins ahead of time, and have come up with “I have forgotten to say my prayers,” and “I have been distracted at Mass”—sins that will come in handy for something to say during my next fourteen years of weekly confessions.

Mossèn Ignaci is hidden inside the confessional, but I can hear him breathing.  After I finish listing my sins he gives me a penance (three Hail Marys), and absolution. But it’s dark in the confessional, and I can’t tell whether the little door behind the grille is now closed, or still open. Should I leave? I wait patiently until my father, wondering what on earth I could be confessing for such a long while, comes to rescue me.

The next morning, standing in my pristine white shoes, socks, and underpants, I hold up my arms as my aunts slide the chilly, silky long slip over my torso, followed by the crisp white dress which fastens down the back in a row of tiny cloth-covered buttons that look like the mushrooms that come up in the fall after a rain. My hair is arranged in untidy corkscrew curls (“Too much hair!” my aunts exclaim before giving up). Then the magnificently embroidered veil is placed over my head (“It almost cost your mother her eyesight!” they remind me) and secured with a crown of white silk flowers.

My mother’s mother comes in, holding the all-important First Communion medal, a bas-relief ivory Madonna set in gold, hanging from a gold chain which she fastens around my neck. My tiny paternal grandmother totters in on her high heels and gives me my First Communion ring (“a bracelet for your finger”).

Somebody puts white gloves on my hands (“Don’t touch anything!”) and hangs my First Communion bag, filled with little cards commemorating the occasion, from my left wrist. I pick up my First Communion missal, which has mother of pearl covers and a gold-colored clasp, and we are ready to go.

It is a brilliant summer morning, the sun not yet hot. I set out from my grandparents’ house with my parents, my mother’s parents, her two sisters and her brother, my maternal great-aunt and -uncle, and, all the way from Barcelona, my father’s mother and father and his two sisters. We walk solemnly down the dusty road, into the village, past the parish church and the fountain with the seven spigots, then out of the village, past vineyards and wheat fields and garden allotments to the hermitage of Our Lady of the Orchard, where Mossèn Ignaci is waiting.

During Mass, I glance up at the statue of Our Lady of the Orchard, enthroned above the altar. It is a reproduction of the Romanesque original (the one supposedly found up in the elm tree by a shepherd), which was burned during the Spanish Civil War. She sits grave and impassive, her robes arranged in weirdly symmetrical folds, one hand on her Baby and, in the other, the sphere of the world.

I have some trouble managing my outfit: my long skirt catches under my shins when I kneel, and my First Communion bag gets tangled with my veil. At one point, I drop my missal with a clatter onto the stone flags. But the communion itself goes smoothly. I remember not to chew the host and, back in my pew, put my head in my hands as I’ve been taught and try to think about God.

Afterwards we march back to the house, the sun hotter now and everybody hungry because of the pre-communion fast. In the afternoon, the village children arrive and I, still in my long dress, distribute sugar-coated almonds in pale shades of pink, yellow, and blue.

Then comes a special treat: my father’s father, who is part owner of a magic shop in Barcelona, puts on a magic show. The other kids are transfixed as he manipulates playing cards, draws peseta coins out of their ears, and does odd things involving handkerchiefs and red cups and yellow balls. But magic tricks always leave me cold. They remind me of fabric flowers, which only look like the real thing. I’m after genuine magic--the mystery for which there are no words.

At the end of the day, after the children go home and I’m back in my short summer dress and espadrilles, the family sits under the apple tree by the well. I am still high on adrenaline and divine grace, racing around and begging the grownups to play with me. My father’s younger sister, Montserrat, plays hide-and-seek for a while, but then it’s bedtime, and as my mother tucks me in I burst into tears. “What’s the matter? Didn’t you have a wonderful First Communion?” she asks.

“Yes, yes, I did,” I answer.

“Then why are you crying?”

“It’s because I’ll never be able to look forward to making my First Communion, ever again,” I sob.

Which proves that it’s never too soon to learn that the happiest times are those we spend awaiting happiness.

Litany

As a musician, my father was seldom home in the evenings, but on his nights off he often led us in saying the Rosary. My mother, her two sisters, and I would sit in the dining room while he walked up and down, beads in hand. The Rosary consists of five Our Fathers and fifty Hail Marys. How long does it take to say all those prayers? If you’re a kid, half your life.

“Why do I have to say those same words over and over?” I ask my mother.

“You’re supposed to meditate on the lives of Jesus and the Virgin Mary,” she says.

“But it’s boring!”

“Shhh. Your father’s about to begin.”

I stare at the bread crumbs from dinner that litter the yellow tiles under the table. The maid is waiting in her room for us to finish saying the Rosary so she can sweep and go to bed. I glance at my mother’s stockings, which she has rolled like donuts around her ankles to keep them from getting runs, and decide that when I’m allowed to wear stockings I will never roll them like that. I envy my father, who is allowed to walk while he prays, instead of having to sit still.

After the last Hail Mary is said, however, there is a reward: the Litany of the Virgin Mary, a list of fifty epithets of the Mother of God, which my father recites in Latin. After each name, we respond in chorus, ora pro nobis (pray for us).

Here is a sample:

Speculum iustitiae (Mirror of justice)

Sedes sapientiae (Seat of wisdom)

Causa nostrae laetitiae (Cause of our joy)

Rosa mystica (Mystical rose)

Turris eburnea (Tower of ivory)

Stella matutina (Morning star)

I don’t know why this list of names thrills me. Years later I realize that they have  something in common with Homeric epithets such as “white-armed Hera,” and “bright-eyed Athena.” At age nine, though, I have not yet heard of Homer, and I don’t know Latin. I can make out a few words, but even if I understood all of them I would find them puzzling: what is a tower of ivory, or a mirror of justice, and what do they have to do with the Virgin Mary?

But I love the rhythm of the Litany, my father with his raspy smoker’s voice pacing in synch with the names, and us responding ora pro nobis, ora pro nobis. On and on go the names, Mother of our Creator, Virgin most powerful….And this  extraordinary collection of praises is dedicated to a woman—one who as a teenager was visited by an angel, which was just the first of a series of amazing things that happened to her.

And now that She is in Heaven, sitting between God the Father and her Son, Jesus, with the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove hovering above her head, She looks down upon me kindly (Virgin most merciful) and with special understanding, because she was once a girl like me.

The presence of this quasi-divine Lady in the heaven of my childhood gives me something that the images of God the Father, with his white beard, and God the Son, with his brown beard, could never give me: a sense of identification with the divine feminine that puts me in the ancient lineage of females—Babylonian girls praying to Ishtar, Egyptian mothers praising Isis, Greek wives sacrificing to Hera—who, from time immemorial, have sought help and consolation from the Mother of us all.

Life Before Plastic

When the first factory-made men’s shirts arrived from America to Quito, Ecuador in the late 1950s, they came in clear plastic bags. I don’t know which of my classmates first realized the potential of the bags as ultra-modern, super-cool book carriers, but when she showed up in school with her books neatly encased in one of those bags, we all longed for the day when we too could discard our hand-tooled leather satchels and replace them with plastic bags.

When my mother finally bought one of those shirts, she let me have the bag. I remember carefully sliding my books and notebooks into it, and admiring the effect of my school things neatly contained by a material that, like Cinderella’s glass slipper, simultaneously protected and revealed them.

But my plastic bag was as fragile as the glass slipper, and after a while the corners of my books made holes in it. I didn’t much care, however, because by then my parents and I were packing our suitcases for our new home in the land of plastic, America.

Before those bags, for the first thirteen years of my life, in Spain and later in Ecuador, I had lived a plastic-free existence. The objects that surrounded me were made of wood, metal, glass, stone, wool, cotton, clay, paper, straw, rubber, or celluloid.

Other than paper, very little was ever thrown away, and objects like the red clay pan in which the maid washed the dishes, or the long bag of unbleached cotton in which she brought the bread home from the bakery, had been around since before my birth, and I thought of them as sort of second-class members of the family.

Other than as containers for dried flower arrangements, who uses baskets anymore? But all through my childhood the eggs, almonds, cherries and sausages that my grandmother shipped to Barcelona weekly from her farm came by train in a deep two-handled wicker basket covered with burlap, and both basket and burlap were piously preserved and returned to her by that same train.

When my mother went to the fish market she carried a flatter basket, its handle looped over her arm. I had a basket of my own, a smaller version of my mother’s.

I loved the fishwives, goddesses who sat enthroned above their displays, wearing blood-spattered white aprons decorated with broad bands of lace.

Fish of all sizes and colors, squid, octopuses, mussels and clams were arranged mandala-like on round wicker trays, and gleamed as brightly as the rose window of a gothic cathedral. After my mother had made her choice, the peixatera would wrap up for me a single iridescent blue sardine, to carry home in my own little basket.

The Mediterranean of my childhood was crammed with fish, one of the few reliable bounties in those hardscrabble, post-civil war years. Now it, like the rest of the waters on the planet, is having the life choked out of it by millions of tons of plastic—fish-ensnaring, habitat-poisoning, indestructible plastic, most of it in the form of plastic bags.

The plastic bags that had seemed so rare and precious to my schoolmates and me in 1958 have become the banner of environmental destruction. Things must change, and soon. In the words of Joanna Macy, “While the agricultural revolution took centuries, and the industrial revolution took generations, this ecological revolution has to happen within a matter of a few years.”  (quoted by Richard Rohr)

The scope of the disaster is so enormous that I often want to just give up. But if optimism is the only moral choice, then I must act as if my efforts count. So in my own small battle for the survival of the planet, I keep my flag—a well-worn New Yorker canvas bag—in the back of the car, and proudly fly it when I walk into a store.

Of Uncles And Equines

My favorite uncle, the husband of my grandmother's sister, was that rarity: a schoolmaster who adored kids. Early in our acquaintance we cast each other in roles which we never tired of playing: he as a devil (un dimoni!) and I as his intended victim. He only actually chased me once. After that, he merely had to look at me sideways to send me fleeing with terror and delight down the long dark hallway of my parents' Barcelona apartment. But this was just our urban entertainment. In the summer, we had my grandparents' entire farm for our adventures.

One summer my grandfather got a mother/daughter pair of donkeys to work on the farm. I don't remember the daughter's name, but we named the mother La Reverències ("Curtsies") after her habit of suddenly bending one of her knees.

My uncle one day got permission from my grandfather to take my visiting boy cousins from Barcelona and me to ride the donkeys on the threshing floor in front of the barn, which sat far from the house on a slight rise beyond the vegetable garden and the wheat field. A bare flat space, the threshing floor had been baked granite-hard over the centuries by the sun and the enormous stone rollers that crushed the wheat at harvest time.

My grandfather agreed, with the proviso that my uncle ride with me, to prevent accidents. So while my cousins took turns riding the younger donkey, my uncle and I got on La Reverències. The sun was beating down on our heads, the cicadas were going full blast, and the sky was so clear that I could see the Pyrenees in the distance as we made our way round and round the threshing ground.

The sun, the cicadas, and the slow clip-clop of the donkey's hooves had me in a kind of trance when, out of the blue, La Reverències curtsied and my uncle and I tobogganed neatly over her neck and crashed to the ground. It could not have happened faster if the donkey's neck had been drenched in olive oil. I can still feel the hardness of the ground on landing, and hear the laughter of my cousins as my uncle and I dusted ourselves off, while, nearby, the culprit munched serenely on some tufts of summer-dry grass.

La Reverències, left, and her daughter, right. Between them, my cousins and I, in our summer espadrilles. In the background, the back of the barn. Both my cousins and the donkeys seemed like giants to me. When did they shrink so much?

My other uncle, my mother's youngest sibling, was barely out of his teens when I was a toddler. He lived with my grandparents, rode a big motorcycle, hunted partridge and quail in season, and had curly blondish hair and a small straight nose. In the summer, the sun would turn his face bright red.

One evening, he and I were leading the carthorse from the barn back to the stable, which was across the courtyard from the house, for his dinner of oats and hay. As a special treat, my uncle said that I could ride the horse, on the condition that I hold tightly on to his mane. This was a first for me, and I was thrilled by the motion of the great beast, the smell of horse sweat and the prickly feel of his hair on my bare legs. The sun was going down, a cool breeze had come up, and in the pear trees that bordered the path a nightingale began to sing. Inspired by the bird, my uncle also broke into song: Oh Susana, no llores más por mí/Con mi banjo y mi caballo a Alabama me marché...

Then, perhaps carried away by the beauty of the evening and the prospect of dinner, he gave the horse a friendly slap on the rump. The usually lethargic beast misunderstood and broke into a trot. My uncle ran alongside, looking terrified, and I tried to hold on, but the sudden jolting and the sensation of my seat losing contact with the horse were so disconcerting that I lost my head, let go of the mane, and flew through the air and into the arms of my uncle, who fortunately had excellent eye-hand coordination and whose face, I noticed, had turned beet red.

He set me down, caught the horse, stopped to catch his breath, then squatted to look me in the eye and whispered, "Do not ever tell your parents what just happened."

And this, if my parents read this blog somewhere in the cosmos, is the first they'll hear of it.                                                  
                                                     

Early Critters

It may have been my mother's mother, the one who brought me a lame chick to keep me company after my tonsillectomy, who ignited my passion for animals. Or it may have been that, as the only child in an extended family, for me a dog or a cat, a rabbit or a hen was the closest I could get to a playmate, a sibling, someone who did not tower above me and talk about things I did not understand.

I grew up in a vast turn-of-the-century apartment in Barcelona. My mother, having been raised on a farm, believed that animals should not live under the same roof as humans. No dog claws skittered on the hard tile floors. No cat left a drift of fur on my pillow.  I hungered for a friendly, silent presence at my side, but had to make do with watching the pigeons who perched on our balcony.

But summers were different. We spent them at my grandparents' farm, in a fertile valley south of the Pyrenees, where an endless procession of animals amazed and delighted me. Horses and donkeys munched and snuffled in the stable; a sow the size of a bus fed twelve of her children in the sty. My grandmother let me throw corn to the hens who scratched the dirt in the courtyard, giving wide berth to the hunting dog, an Irish Setter who lived chained to his straw-bedded house. She would lift the cover of the nest box in the rabbit hutch and hoist me up to see the hairless litter moving feebly in a cozy cloud of  fur. And when one of the semi-feral cats who lived on mice and bread crusts gave birth, she would take me up to the hayloft and move aside the hay so I could see the still-blind kittens sleep entwined like the fingers of two clasped hands.

My grandmother and I feeding the chickens

One summer, she arranged for a goat kid to arrive in time to be my companion. Another year, it was a lamb. I tried my best to get these creatures to follow me around, but they seemed mostly intent on pursuing their own goals, the goat leaping up to reach the branches of the pear trees, the lamb on getting away from me.

The lamb and I

When one of the sows farrowed, my grandfather would detach a warm, pristine piglet from one of her teats and place it in my arms. Many years later, when the nurse handed me my first-born I inhaled the same clean, slightly oily smell from her scalp that I had smelled on the little pig.

The horses, donkeys and mules were my favorites, both the ones that belonged to my grandparents and those that were brought to be treated by my veterinarian grandfather. I would watch out the dining room window as some poor mule was brought limping into the farmyard by a couple of peasants wearing standard Catalan country attire: black beret, blue shirt, a black sash around the waist, black corduroy trousers, and dusty espadrilles. A hand-rolled cigarette hung perennially from their lips. 

My grandfather would appear and confer with the men, run his hand over the mule's back and lift one of its hooves. The mule would shy and roll its eyes; the men would admonish it in low, soothing tones, and my grandfather would do his work. I paid special attention to his technique for giving injections. After rubbing the area vigorously with a swab of cotton dipped in alcohol, he would drop the cotton on the ground, bring out an enormous syringe and plunge the needle in. When the men and the mule were gone, I would take my toy horse out to the yard, disinfect its hind leg with a bit of rag, fling the rag to the ground, pierce its thigh with a nail, retrieve the rag, rub the other leg, give another shot, and so on until I was called inside because the sun was too hot. 

I spent hours skulking around the farm, watching the creatures, absorbing their smells, wondering what they were thinking, and how it would feel to touch one. But I was constantly warned against getting too close to them--the sows had been known to eat children, the horses could bash your head in with a kick--and my grandmother would have fainted at the thought of bringing the dog, or one of the kittens that periodically tottered to the back door, its finger-long tail held high, into the house.

Back in Barcelona, in early December my mother would take me to the Christmas fair that was held next to the cathedral, to get supplies for our Nativity scene. But first we would go into the cathedral, to see the geese. Barcelona's Cathedral of Saint Eulalia may be the only church in the world to harbor geese--thirteen large white birds said to be the descendants of a gaggle first put there in Roman times.

It would have been bad spiritual manners to go straight to the geese, so first we used to stop before the main altar to pray. Already as I knelt there, with the grit on the kneeler digging into my bare knees, I could hear them, their cries echoing against the stones. I would say a quick prayer and whisper, “Can we go now?” My mother would answer by closing her eyes and praying some more. She knew the art of sharpening anticipation.

Eventually we would rise, make the sign of the cross, brush the grit from our knees, genuflect as we passed the altar, proceed in a dignified manner to the holy water basin, make another sign of the cross...and emerge into the cloister.

The cloister was like no other place I knew—a space that was both indoors and outdoors, where light and sound bounced oddly among the stones and the palms and the orange trees, a space that spoke to me of beauty for its own sake in the midst of the serious business of religion. A space inhabited by geese.

In the center of the courtyard was a raised stone platform, surrounded by an iron grille, where a moss-covered fountain trickled water into a spacious basin. There the geese, with majestic disregard for the holiness of the place, honked and waddled on the flagstones, making the most amazing green droppings and then casually gliding into the water and floating about, looking
pleased with themselves. Warm, alive and untamed in the midst of the stone and cement of the city, those geese seemed like a miracle to me.

Hoping that that goose will let me pet her

Not long after the visit to the geese, it was time for the Christmas capons. They came by train from my grandparents’ farm, in a large wicker basket cushioned with straw and covered with a piece of burlap. When the birds, annoyed but alive, arrived at our apartment, my mother would  put them in the cement tub in the laundry room. There I would sit until bedtime, watching the way their red combs shook as they cocked their heads to look at me with one eye and then the other, stretching out a finger to touch their feathers, inhaling their hot poultry smell and feeding them crusts of bread. 

The next morning, inevitably, the empty laundry tub was scrubbed clean and the apartment became, once again, devoid of animal life. I don’t remember making any connection between the succulent birds at the center of the Christmas feast and my temporary pets.

After the capons were gone, I hibernated for six long months until the train and then my grandfather's horse and buggy conveyed me back to my real home, the farmyard and the dusty summer roads and my animal brothers and sisters--the horses and the rabbits and the chickens that made my life feel real again.

Pizzicato (continued)

Slowly and solemnly, my father set the violin on my left shoulder and tucked it under my chin, then stretched out my left arm to support the neck of the instrument. It was my long-awaited first lesson--the beginning, I hoped, of long, interesting sessions in which my father would pay flattering attention to me, and from which my mother would be excluded.

“You must hold the instrument up, up! so it’s never pointed at the floor,” he said. Then he went to work on my right hand, molding my fingers one-by-one into proper position on the frog of the bow. While this was going on, my left arm had drooped until my elbow rested comfortably on my belly. “Up!” my father reminded me. Next he gently placed my bow on the A string. “Now, veeery carefully, move the bow towards the tip.” I did, and the bow skittered disgracefully across the string, making an appalling noise.

“Yes,” my father said, “it is very difficult. I will explain.” Stopping periodically to raise my drooping left arm, he explained how the hair of the bow should be turned towards my face when I was playing near the frog, then gradually turn until it was flat when I played at the tip; how I was to press lightly against the string when the bow was at the frog, and gradually increase the pressure as I moved towards the tip; how at all times the bow was supposed to stay in an ideal (but unmarked) spot between the bridge and the fingerboard; how I should never put on too much resin on the hair, or touch it with my fingers, or neglect to wipe the wood with a cloth after every practice session.

“Bowing is very difficult,” he repeated, “but it is the key to a good tone, and without good tone there is no music.” Goodness knew I wanted to have a good tone. Those first bowings across the A string had been the sound equivalent of sucking on a lemon. But I was hopeful. Surely it wasn't all about the bow, and before the lesson was over he would teach me how to play a song? But after a few more explanations and some more proppings of my feeble left arm, my father declared that he had a rehearsal, and had to leave.

“What am I supposed to practice?” I asked.

“Bowing on the A string, of course,” he said.

“But what about my fingers, the ones on my left hand. Don’t I get to use them?”

He waved his hand towards the ceiling. “That will come much later, when you have practiced lots of bowing, at least five minutes every day.”

“Five minutes just bowing on the A string?”

“Of course,” he said. “Bowing is crucial! And don’t forget to hold up your left arm.”

And I did practice bowing on the A string, although all the instructions about the angle of the bow hair, the pressure and placement of the bow on the string, and the need to hold up the violin quickly vanished from my ten-year-old mind. This was so different from the piano, when from the first day one could play five notes with just the right hand, and those five notes sounded like regular notes, not like the unearthly screeches I got out of my A string. But at least my mother was keeping out of my way.

A week later, I caught my father as he was getting up from lunch, brushing crusty breadcrumbs off his pants. “Can I have my lesson now?” I asked. “Well, o.k.,” he said, looking at his watch. “Five minutes, because I have to leave for rehearsal.”

He repeated all the instructions from the first lesson, and showed me how to bow on the E string. “Now that you’re playing on two strings, you should practice ten minutes,” he said, putting on his coat and picking up his violin case.

A few weeks later, I was allowed to place my index finger on the A string, to play a B. By now I was required to practice fifteen minutes a day. I stood in my room (”Your father is composing. He must not hear you,” my mother said, closing the door), playing my five notes over and over, not knowing what I was aiming at but feeling in my very bones that the evil wooden box under my chin and the reverse magic wand in my right hand had nothing to do with music as I understood it.

Music was what my father made, and anything less sounded to me like an abomination. If music had been presented in a less reverential, more playful way, I might have developed a friendlier feeling towards the violin, but this was long before the Suzuki Method. As it was, with every squeak, every wrong note, I felt like a clumsy altar boy who spills the communion wine at Mass.

My humiliation at the inability to sound like my father soon turned to rage. Gritting my teeth, I would crumple up a particularly difficult sheet of music, then guiltily smooth it out again. Once I whacked my bow hard against the music stand, and several long white hairs came loose. Terrified that I had done irreparable damage, I cut them off with my mother’s manicure scissors and hid them in the kitchen trash. You know that little overhang where the top surface of the violin meets the side? A close look at my first violin would reveal two shallow dents made by my front teeth....

River of Words

I was too short to reach the faucet, so to ask my mother for a glass of water, I said “un vas d’aigua, si us plau.” But if I had to ask the maid, I said instead “un vaso de agua, por favor.” Somehow I knew to speak to my parents, my aunts, and my grandparents in Catalan, a Romance language born of the sloppy Latin of the Roman soldiers who occupied the northeast of Spain. But to speak to the maid, who came from the south, I used Castilian, another descendant of bastardized Latin.

When Ferdinand and Isabella unified the various kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula in the 15^th century, Castilian, known in the rest of the world as Spanish, became the official language of the new country, and a centuries-long suppression of regional languages such as Catalan and Basque began.Growing up under Franco’s dictatorship, my generation wrote and spoke Spanish, which was enforced as the language of public life, more correctly than Catalan. But for all his efforts to eradicate it, Franco could not erase Catalan from the dining room table with its cruet of olive oil and its bottle of dark red Priorat, or from the bedtime stories, the nightly prayers, and the lullabies.

Although as a toddler I didn’t think much about the difference between Spanish and Catalan, I was acutely aware of the distinctions between barceloní , the variety of Catalan spoken in Barcelona and by my father and his family, and lleidatà, the variety spoken in the province of Lleida, a mere eighty miles away, where my mother came from. Although as a city kid I should have spoken barceloní, my heart belonged to the horses, pigs and chickens, the wheat field and the grape arbor of my maternal grandparents’ farm, and I proudly spoke a countrified lleidatà.

But whether barceloní  or lleidatà , I spent my childhood swimming in a river of language that flowed over and around me and sometimes threatened to engulf me.  If you had asked me in my earliest years what adults did, I would have answered that they talked. At our house the radio was only turned on for selected programs, and there was no television. So people talked, all day and far into the night, as a kind of sport.

My mother and her sisters talked while they mended their stockings, ironed their blouses, or braided my hair. If one of them gave an opinion, the other countered it. If one told a story, the other corrected, expanded, and topped it with an even better one. When my father came home from rehearsal at the Liceu, the Barcelona opera house, he told us about the fabulous all-Black American company that had come to perform Porgy and Bess, or the amazing ballerina Maria Tallchief--also American, and a real Indian. Back from the bakery with the midday loaf of crusty bread, the maid relayed what she had heard the baker’s wife say as she stood in line.

After the meal I would sit on my mother’s lap while the adults lingered at  the table, talking. With my head on her chest I could predict by her intake of breath when she was about to say something. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but I knew if she was feeling excited or angry by the rhythms of her breathing and the resonance of her voice inside her rib cage—the same rhythms and sounds that had lulled me during the nine months I had inhabited her body.

Words, followed by sudden pauses and then more words, swirled around me as I drowsily pressed a moistened fingertip onto the tablecloth to pick up the last crusty crumbs of bread. People gestured and exclaimed, burst into laughter, interrupted and talked over each other. This was not considered impolite, but rather a sign of interest and engagement.  Failure to participate prompted anxious inquiries: “You haven’t said much.  Are you coming down with a cold? You should have worn a sweater this morning. Let me feel your forehead...” (To be continued.)

Therapy Chicken

My mother opens my nightgown and sticks the thermometer under my arm.  “Hold it tight against your side and don’t move,” she says, checking her watch.  “How long?” I ask. “Five minutes, as always. Be patient,” she says. After an eternity, she takes out the thermometer and frowns at the mercury. “Mare de Deu! Thirty-eight point five!” she cries, shaking down the thermometer.

I know what this means: anything above thirty-seven degrees centigrade leads to what my mother calls “a good sweating.” It begins with my swallowing an aspirin dissolved in a teaspoon of water. Then my mother lays a lasagna of covers on me—a couple of thick woolen blankets topped by a feather-stuffed duvet. For a while my temperature continues to rise, and I lie shivering under the blankets, feeling as if my bones have turned to ice.

 But as the fever drops the shivering gradually diminishes.  The ice in my bones melts away. And then I feel hot, so hot that I start to fling the covers off. But my mother has been watching for this moment.  “No, no,” she says, pressing down the comforter and the blankets. “You must lie still and sweat, or you won’t get well.” “How long?” I ask. “You’re not nearly there yet.  You have to be patient,” she says.

My hair sticks to my face.  My flannel nightgown is glued to my legs so that I can’t turn on my side.  “Shhh!” my mother says, “don’t move.” She tells me the story of  Jordi pastoret , a shepherd boy who lives on a mountain with his sheep and his dog. How I envy him his mountain, his sheep, and especially the dog!

Eventually, I give in to the appalling heat. I stop listening to the story and just go limp. My mother takes my temperature again. “Thirty-six point five, thank God!” she says and draws back the covers. She peels off my sodden nightgown, rubs me down with alcohol and dresses me in a dry nightgown. Meanwhile, the maid has put fresh sheets on the bed. I lie back down, the heat and stickiness replaced by a cool dryness. The ordeal is over.

But only temporarily.  If my fever spikes again, there is another aspirin, and another sweat. If the fever stays down, I nevertheless have to spend the next day in bed, an entire day when my arms and legs seem to take on a life of their own and, like unruly horses, have to be restrained by sheer willpower from leaping out of bed and taking me with them. I spend those endless days practicing patience, making mountains and valleys with my legs under the covers (“Do not throw your covers off.  You’ll get sick again!”) and staring up at the familiar cracks in the ceiling, imagining the outlines of faces and hands, the same faces and hands that will be there waiting for me when I get sick again.

 

If the aspirins and the sweats don’t work right away, my mother calls Dr. Contreras. He is young and usually in a hurry, and I hate him because every time he sees me he mimics the terrified shrieks with which I used to greet him when I was a baby.  He doesn’t seem to notice my grown-up self control. Impatience radiates from him as he unbuttons my nightgown and puts the stethoscope to my chest and then my back. I recoil at the warmth of his head, the smell and scratchiness of his dark hair. “Be still,” he says. Then he stands up, snaps his bag shut and says to my mother, “She’ll be fine. Try not to look at her so much.”

But what else was there for my mother to do, if not look at me? The troubles of my early months—her failure to produce enough milk, my endless crying—must have shaken her self-confidence as a mother. In addition, she, my father, their families and the entire country had barely survived a bloody civil war. All of a sudden, with peace on the streets and a new husband and a child of her own, life seemed suspiciously good. “I felt as if God were standing over me with a stick, ready to bring it down on my head,” she told me many years later.

It was no wonder that she regarded my existence as a precarious gift, something that could be taken away from her at any moment.  So she watched me day and night, feeling my forehead for the onset of fever and making sure I wore a sweater when the merest cloud obscured the Mediterranean sun. For my part, I accommodated her with an endless stream of sore throats, earaches, flus and indigestions that gave interest and drama to her days.

Of all those early illnesses, one shines out as a time of great happiness. Like most of my generation, I had my tonsils removed. My maternal grandmother came to visit while I recovered, and she brought me a chick from her farm. She had chosen him because he had a defective leg, which meant he couldn’t run very far. He was just past the adorable fuzz-ball stage.  His pale primary feathers were already poking out of his little wings, and I could see his future comb beginning to part the yellow down on top of his head. In chicken years, he was probably about my age.

 The moment my grandmother put him on the bed, my sore throat and my boredom disappeared, and an inexpressible contentment came over me. I no longer felt the least desire to get out of bed. Instead, I wanted to spend the rest of my life lying in that quiet room, with my hand on those soft, warm feathers, and those thrilling cheeps in my ears: my first experience of the mysterious power of an animal’s companionable presence. (To be continued.)