Perfectibility

When we lived in Quito, I used to ride the school bus home for lunch. My mother would sit at the table and watch me eat.

“Sit up straight,” she would say, followed by:

“Don’t put your elbows on the table.

Chew your food well. Digestion begins in the mouth.

You’re slouching again.

Don’t scrape your knife on the plate.

And take the hair out of your eyes. I want to see your forehead.

Elbows!

Why are you hunched over?”

At this point, even the afternoon algebra class began to seem appealing. “I have to go now," I would say, getting up, "or I’ll miss my bus.”

“Put your chair back where you found it. Wipe your lips. Fold your napkin. María! (calling the maid) Take the child across the street. Her bus is almost here.” I was almost an inch taller than tiny Indian María, and I have to give her credit for keeping a straight face as she wiped her hands on her apron and walked me across the street.

As justified as my mother’s admonitions were, I did not take them with good grace. The brand-new hormones coursing through my veins, while giving me the external attributes of a woman, were doing nothing to turn me into a lady. Instead, for a last, blessed reprieve, I clung to my childish conviction that I was fine just the way I was.

But my mother was an optimist. No matter how much I resisted her, she was convinced that she would prevail. In fact, it was her duty to prevail. “Do you think I enjoy having to correct you so much?” she would say when I complained about her constant monitoring. “I do not! I would much rather be doing something else, like going for a walk, or reading a book.”  I was skeptical. I couldn’t believe that anybody could devote so much time and energy to something they didn’t enjoy at least a little.

“And your grumbling and protesting,” she went on, “do you think I enjoy that? Don’t you know how much more pleasant my life would be if I let you do as you please? But what would happen if I did? What sort of person would you become?” She would shake her head sadly, indicating that she didn’t have much faith in my future if I were left to my own resources. “No! I am your mother, and it is my sacred duty—sacred, do you hear?—to correct you when I see you doing something wrong. Even if it means that you love me less sometimes. I must put my own feelings aside and do what I know is right, no matter how much pain it brings me.”

This usually shut me up. How could I argue with her sacred duty? How could I complain when she, who loved me more than anything in the world, was willing to sacrifice herself in order to do the right thing? In her youth my mother had studied law, and she brought her best courtroom technique to these confrontations. Like an ill-prepared defense attorney, I capitulated before her prosecutorial skills.

But I had to do something to get her off my back, at least temporarily. If I couldn’t defeat her in argument, I might be able to negotiate with her. So I offered her a deal: I would accept her corrections without complaint every day of the week if she would agree, on Wednesdays at lunch, to let me eat without comment.

To my amazement, she gave in. When Wednesday came around, there was soup for lunch. I tucked my hair behind my ears, bent over the bowl and, as my mother watched in silent disbelief, lapped up the soup like a dog. The soup was hot, and it dribbled down my chin and onto my uniform blouse. There were chick peas and chunks of meat floating around, and it was hard to catch them without using a spoon. It felt disgusting, but I was intent on demonstrating to my mother that she had to respect our deal no matter what, and I persevered until the last drop was gone.

The next Wednesday, assuming that I had made my point, I intended to make full use of my silverware, and simply looked forward to a critique-free meal. But as soon as I picked up my fork my mother said, “I know it’s Wednesday, and I’m not supposed to say anything. But do you realize that your left elbow’s on the table?” I rolled my eyes, dropped the elbow, and continued eating. My mother cleared her throat. I looked up and she pointed silently at my napkin, which I had neglected to place on my lap. The next time she opened her mouth, before she could even speak, I sat up straight.

It was no use, and so I gave up my campaign. For the first time ever, I saw my mother not as someone who, along with my father, stood practically next to God in goodness and omnipotence, but as a woman who was helpless, because of some quirk of her psyche, to quell the urge to polish me until I gleamed like a mirror in which she could see herself.

The Face of Love

I don’t have the words yet to explain why what I want is so important, so I open my mouth wide and yell, and stamp my feet.

“Olé, olé!” my mother claps, “Are you a flamenco dancer?”

If I had been frustrated before, now I am enraged. How dare she? How dare she mock me when I am trying to communicate something crucial? I would like to fly across the room and bite her on the leg. But her ploy has worked, and I swallow my tantrum, lest she laugh at me again.

My aunt swears that she taught me to read when I was three, so this next scene must have happened around that time: I am in a store with my mother. A nice woman, dressed in black (women in black are everywhere in Barcelona in these days after the Spanish Civil War), strokes my cheek and, for some reason, asks me if I can read.

“Yes, I can,” I answer.

“No. You don’t know how to read yet,” my mother says.

“Yes! Yes! I can read!” I insist.

My mother pulls an envelope out of her purse and thrusts it in front of my face. “O.k., then, read this.”

The letters on the envelope are small, rounded, and crowded together--not at all like the big, clear letters of the alphabet that I have just begun to learn. The writing swims and blurs before my eyes, which are filling with tears. How can she humiliate me like this in front of a stranger? Isn’t she supposed to be on my side? And didn’t she just the other day, when I finally made it to the end of the alphabet, exclaim “What a big girl you are—you’re reading!” I feel betrayed and full of spite, and I would bite her if I could….

It seems odd that a little kid would have a fully developed sense of personal dignity, and would react with such force when it was attacked. Where did this come from? Was there an extra gene for dignity in my DNA? Or does the fact that those rages felt so primal mean that they were less about dignity than about survival as my own person?

In the coming years, I learned to divert my rages and do to myself what I would like to do to my mother. In my room, with the door closed, I would roll up my white uniform blouse and bite my forearm hard enough to leave tooth marks.

I don’t think that my mother, who was not a cruel woman, realized any of this. If she had been mean all the time, it would have been easier for me to take a stand, and simply hate her. But hers was the face of love in my life.

The happiest moments--happier even than the morning of January 6, when the Magi brought me gifts--were those occasions when, my father being away, she would let me share her bed and we would cuddle before I fell asleep enveloped in the smell of her skin.

To me she was more beautiful than any woman in all of Spain, possibly in the entire planet. I embarrassed her one day when, coming back from Mass, I confided that I’d been examining the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, demure in her white veil, blue sash, and mild expression, and concluded that my mother was every bit as beautiful as She.

But if in the daytime I found my mother as beautiful as the Virgin Mary, at night I had a recurring nightmare in which a green-faced witch, not unlike the one I’d seen in The Wizard of Oz, drew me irresistibly toward her.  The horror of the dream lay in my utter helplessness, in the knowledge that, no matter how hard I tried to oppose her, she could, by the sheer force of her personality, bend me to her will.

To my huge relief, just before I disappeared into the witch an angel who looked to be my own age appeared and whispered, “Stay with me, and you will be o.k.” I did, and we watched together as a gust of wind carried the witch away. I haven’t had that dream in a long, long time, but I remember with gratitude the heaven-sent angel of my childish rage, who, in the nick of time, flew down and returned me to myself.

Walking Lessons

I got home from high school and found my mother walking up and down the hallway behind my toddling sister. My mother was stooped over, holding the baby’s hands to keep her upright. My sister had a determined look in her eyes, but my mother’s face was screwed up with pain. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m teaching her to walk, of course.”

At sixteen, I didn’t know much about babies, but we had studied evolution in school, and I thought that our ape-like ancestors must have transitioned to bipedal locomotion without special instruction.

“Don’t you think she could learn to walk on her own?” I said.

 “No, no. She’s too little! She would fall and break a tooth, or hurt her head. I have to do this, even if it breaks my back.” My mother let go of the baby’s hands and straightened up slowly. My sister sat down on the floor and howled.

“See what I mean? She never gets tired. What a child! I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” my mother sighed, resignedly pulling the baby upright and holding her hands.

Leading from the hip, my sister thrust one fat leg forward, wobbled, balanced, then stuck out the other leg. My mother followed, groaning. I went into my room to do homework and reflected, for the first time, on my mother’s hands-on mothering style.

I remembered being spoon-fed by her long after I could cut my own meat. By the time I could recite the multiplication tables she was still combing my hair, washing my face, tying my shoes, buttoning my coat up to my chin and reminding me not to take it off without first obtaining her permission.

She did all these things with a rueful smile that said, “Motherhood! Such a glorious but demanding vocation.” Labor, according to her, did not end with the  baby’s birth, but was only the prelude to a lifetime of effort and sacrifice on the mother’s part.

Now, watching her give my sister walking lessons with my critical adolescent eye, it occurred to me that her intense involvement with my sister and me may have had more to do with her tsunami-like life force and its search for an outlet than with our real needs.

The first girl from her village to attend university, she had studied classics and then law. But when she married she gave it all up to do...not much of anything.

With my father at work, a live-in maid to do the housework (we were by no means wealthy, but in Spain in those days you didn’t need to be to have a maid), and just one child to look after, she was starving for challenges—opinions to sway, people to lead, victories to savor.  And there I was in the next room, gnawing on the crib railing, waiting to be perfected.

It was probably in her DNA, because my mother’s mother was just as driven and intense. But she at least had a farm to run while my grandfather, a vet with no head for business, was off taking care of the village livestock. She had sharecroppers to supervise; wheat, oats, and olives to send to market; broody hens to coddle; rabbits to fatten, slaughter, and cook; and four children to raise.

But it looks like my grandmother too believed that babies would never learn to walk unless they had proper instruction. Here she is, in her farmyard outfit, ensuring that I will not have to spend my life in a wheelchair. She is holding me upright with a kitchen towel drawn up under my arms. This keeps her from having to stoop, a back-saving technology that my mother would have done well to adopt.

I look pleased to be standing on my own two legs. Probably, I’ll want to keep going long after my grandmother is ready to stop. I can see her now, rolling her eyes, proudly complaining to my mother, “Ai, Maria santissima! What are we going to do with this child? She’s worn me out. All she wants to do is walk!”

Pizzicato

“Would you like to do a pizzicato?” my father would ask, smiling under his black and bristly mustache. I would toddle over and he, taking care that my grubby fist did not graze the body of his violin, would put my finger on the E string and I would pluck it. Then he would wrap the violin in an old brown silk scarf of my mother’s and lay it carefully in its case, as if he were putting a doll to bed.

A violin being tuned—first the E and A strings together, then A and D, and finally D and G--followed by a warm-up scale was among the first sounds to reach me inside my mother’s womb. A couple of years later, when my father was practicing the solo part of the Beethoven Violin Concerto and I was being toilet trained, my mother found me on the potty one day, humming the opening bars of the third movement.

Not long after that, I started attending concerts. My father’s orchestra performed on Sunday mornings in the Palau de la Musica. My mother would first take me to Mass, and then to the concert. Those Sunday mornings required feats of self control on my part. First there was the sitting quietly at Mass, but at least that was interrupted by periods of kneeling and standing. But the sitting at the concert was unrelieved, and it seemed to go on for days. Fortunately, the concert hall was a near-psychedelic example of Art Nouveau architecture, and I entertained myself by gazing at the sculptures of the nine muses whose gigantic torsos protruded out of the wall behind the orchestra. Still, I conceived an early hatred of the Romantic composers, whose symphonies went on and on, fooling me into thinking that they were about to end only to rebound in cruel codas. Brahms and Schumann were especially bad that way.

In that pre-Suzuki era, music instruction was a serious, solemn business. When I was eight, before I was allowed to approach an instrument I did a year of solfeggio, a method to teach pitch and sight singing, and musical dictation. Nobody expected this to be fun, and it wasn’t.

When I was finally permitted to begin the piano I took lessons from my father’s sister, Maria Dolors, a gentle, skittish person, thin and wide-eyed as a gazelle. She was so tentative in her instruction that the closest to a correction she ever got was a whispered “perhaps you could try it like this...” I felt protective of my vulnerable aunt and worried that my mistakes gave her pain.

At home, when my mother sat next to me on the piano bench, my feelings were quite different. She had had some piano instruction herself, and she thought that she would help things along by correcting my technique while I practiced. But there was nothing tentative in her manner, and I resented her intrusion in what I perceived to be Maria Dolors’s and, by extension, my father’s domain.

The entire landscape of my life was ruled by my mother. She made me put on sweaters when I wasn’t cold, eat when I wasn’t hungry, go to bed when I wasn’t sleepy, and kiss ancient, black-clad relations who smelled funny. She supervised my prayers, scrubbed my face, braided my hair, put bows on my braids, and held my hand tightly while we crossed the street. Music, I had assumed, was outside her domain, but now she was invading that as well. Despite her having been my father’s student before their marriage, she knew very little about the violin, however. It occurred to me that, if I took up the violin, I would be safe. Even better, my father would be my teacher.

At eight or nine years old, I longed for my father’s attention. He was a benevolent but remote figure: “a saint,” according to his mother and sisters; “very busy, and not to be disturbed,” according to my mother. And he was busy, rushing from rehearsal to performance with his violin and sitting down to compose at the piano when he had five minutes to spare. I don’t think he ever once scolded me, partly because I was too much in awe of him to misbehave and partly, I suspect, because he didn’t notice me. For years I had racked my infant brains for ways to get him to focus on me. Now the solution was at hand: I would take up the violin, and he would have to give me lessons.

So after a year of piano, having mastered Schumann’s The Merry Peasant, I began to clamor for a violin.  My parents acquiesced, and on February 12, the Feast of Saint Eulalia, virgin and martyr, they presented me with my very own instrument. I couldn’t wait for my first lesson—which, as it turned out, also became my first lesson in the need to choose one’s wishes carefully. (To be continued)