The Maids, Part Two

When we arrived in Ecuador, my mother was warned by the local ladies that the maids would steal everything.

In the 1950s, Ecuador had practically no middle class. Some twenty families owned 80% of the country's cultivated acreage. The rest of the population were Indians and mestizos living in squalor. Everybody expected the maids to steal, but the ladies wanted my mother to be prepared.

How do you defend yourself against theft by someone who lives in your house, cleans your bedroom, cooks your food? My mother figured we didn't have that much to lose and relaxed her vigilance, so she wasn't surprised when, one by one, her lace-edged batiste hankies disappeared. One day, the maid disappeared too. Surprisingly, several months later she came by for a visit. My mother gave her coffee and some cookies. After they had chatted a while my mother said "Maria, I am sorry that you took my handkerchiefs when you left."

"Your handkerchiefs?" Maria said. "I didn't take those. I took your towels, senora, but not your handkerchiefs!"

Our second Ecuadorian maid was another Maria. She was the youngest maid we had ever had--seventeen--and she disliked me. I was twelve, and I can see now that she probably envied me, with my school and my glasses and my violin. I was not allowed to give orders to Maria--or any maid--but if I gave Maria a message from my mother, she would ignore it, which would then get me in trouble. I was relieved when she left.

I loved the third Maria. She was a grown woman, and treated me like the child that I was. Short and squat, she wore her hair pinned up above her ears. The house we rented while she was with us had "servants' quarters" in the backyard, and Maria asked if she could bring her ten-year-old niece to live there. My mother agreed. When the girl arrived, barefoot and in braids, it was clear that she had never been to school, and my mother thought I should teach her to read. Our lessons were not a success. Like the second Maria, this girl seemed to resent me, despite my good intentions. The lessons didn't last.

We soon became aware that the third Maria had a novio, who would visit the little building in the backyard. As time went by, she seemed to be gaining weight, but it was hard to tell, since she was large-boned. Finally one day my mother decided to take the bull by the horns.

"Maria, is there any possibility that you might be...expecting?"

"Oh, yes, senora, I am."

"And when do you think the baby will come?"

"Any day now, senora, any day."

Horrified, my mother excused Maria from all but the lightest work and hastily collected a layette. Maria went into labor almost immediately after disclosing her pregnancy. My mother told her to get ready, that my father would drive her to the hospital, but Maria demurred. She mopped the floor. She emptied the trash. She walked me (quickly) to pick up some shoes that I was having repaired. And finally she let my father take her to the hospital.

She came back with a baby girl asleep under a thatch of straight black hair. The novio moved into the little house in the backyard, and my parents gave a party when the baby was baptized.

In the weeks that followed, Maria kept her daughter sequestered in her room. The weather was sunny and mild, and my mother suggested that she take the baby outside. Maria demurred, my mother--a firm believer in the benefits of fresh air and sunlight--insisted, and Maria finally took the baby in her bassinet into the backyard. But when my mother looked out the kitchen window, she saw that Maria had tented the bassinet with a shawl, so that not a drop of sunshine could reach her daughter.

It took my mother a while, but she finally got Maria to explain that she was hoping to keep her baby's skin as white as possible....

When we came to the U.S., that was the end of The Maids. It took my mother years to get over the shock. "How am I supposed to give a party," she would complain, "after spending the whole day cooking? I don't know how these Americans do it...."

The Maids, Part One

Until my parents and I came to the U.S., we always lived with a stranger in our midst: The Maid. The Maid lived with us in our Barcelona apartment, 24/7, except for Sunday afternoons, which she had off. She had her own bedroom--The Maid's Room--which was bigger than mine, but she shared our bathroom facilities (toilet in one room; sink, bathtub and bidet in another).

As I have explained before, in the 1940s and 50s, when Spain was recovering from the Civil War (1936-39), you didn't have to be rich to have a live-in maid: plenty of impoverished women were glad to get a roof over their heads, three meals a day, a uniform, and a salary. Since The Maids came from the poorer regions of Spain, they spoke Spanish. Barcelona is in Catalonia, so we spoke Catalan (all Catalans also had to learn Spanish, as mandated by the Franco government). This meant that, as a family, we spoke a language that The Maid could not understand, which gave us a measure of privacy. Otherwise, The Maid was in our midst.

My mother treated these women kindly. She fed them well, paid them the going rate, gave them rest periods during the day and addressed them with the formal usted. Since I was just a kid, the maids always called me tu.

Every morning, The Maid would get me dressed, put my hair in braids, and take me to school. Back in the apartment she made the beds, dusted, mopped the tile floors, washed our clothes by hand, and ironed. My mother normally did most of the food shopping and cooking. At midday, The Maid would fetch me from school and serve lunch. Then she would sweep the dining room, which had to be done after every meal because of the amazing quantities of crusts that fell to the floor every time you cut a slice of bread. Then The Maid would take me back to school (all this on foot) and go back to her room for a nap. If she was busy when school let out at six thirty, my mother would come to get me, which gave me great joy. The Maid's day ended after she washed the dinner dishes--like everybody else, we ate around 10 p.m.

The first maid I can remember was Luisa, a grim, dark-haired woman who always wore black, which meant that sometime in the last ten years someone in her family had died. Luisa was with us when I started first grade at a school run by German nuns. She was as obsessed with punctuality as the German nuns were. A slow, absent-minded child, I was forever being harried by cries of "corre, corre!" on the part of Luisa, and "schnell, schnell!" on the part of the nuns.

Luisa left one day in a mysterious huff and was replaced by Florentina, a red-faced widow also dressed in mourning who wore her gray hair in an untidy bun. Florentina wasn't much fun either, though she was less driven by the clock--but by then I had internalized the punctuality mandate, and would force her to run panting up the hill to my school. Florentina smelled of bleach, and in the winter she got chilblains on her fingers, from washing our clothes in cold water.

The best maid of all was Maruja, from Malaga, and she fulfilled all the national cliches about the wit and charm of Andalusians. She was younger than her predecessors, and, even though she wore glasses like me, she had a novio, for whom she would dress up on Sunday afternoons. She told thrilling stories about the Holy Week processions in Malaga, she told jokes, and she sang. In the spring, when the kitchen windows were open, you could hear the maids all up and down our apartment house singing while they washed dishes. Maruja was the best. She sang old boleros,

Dos gardenias para ti,
con ellas quiero decir:
te quiero, te adoro....

She sang them with feeling, and she sang them in tune.

Slow Food, Slow Living

I've been reading a book about the Slow Food movement, and about slowing down our lives in general. I agree that the clock, industrialization, and the digital age have upset our biological rhythms and our relationship to the natural world. And I believe with all my heart that a return to a slower pace of life would make us healthier and happier, and would help the environment.

What I cannot quite see is how all this is going to come about. By reason of age and national origin, I have had direct experience with both slow food and slower living, all of which was predicated on, a. a servant class and, b. women staying at home.

Though my family was by no means rich, we always had a live-in maid. (This was in 1950s Spain.) We lived in a large apartment in Barcelona—my mother, my father, a couple of my mother's unmarried sisters and I, and the maid. My father, a musician, worked long, irregular hours. My aunts also had jobs. I went to school. My mother administered things and told the maid what to do.

In the morning, dressed in my uniform, I would tiptoe into my parents' bedroom and my mother would lean over and braid my hair. The maid would take me to school.

Later in the morning, food shopping would be done, either by the maid, or by my mother if it was laundry day (the maid washed our clothes by hand). My mother did most of the cooking for the midday meal, for which we all came home. After that, the maid would take me back to school and return to wash dishes and sweep the bread crumbs off the dining room floor. My mother would go to art openings, or window shopping, or if it was raining, would stay home and read a book. The maid got to go to her room and have a rest in the afternoon.

At six, the maid would fetch me from school. My mother would supervise my homework, and we would have a simple dinner (an omelet and a piece of fruit) when my father got home, before he went to his evening performance. The maid would wash the dishes and go to bed.

In the summer we would all, except for my father, who could only afford to take a month off, go to my grandparents' farm for three months.

It was a slow time. I remember long conversations at the table, after the dishes had been removed, while I dozed on my mother's lap. I remember being told stories, long ones, by whatever adult was available. I remember, in summer, the wine bottles cooling in a bucket in the well, and long walks under the stars to the village fountain—the grownups talking, always talking—to fill the water jugs for the next day.

Does anybody live that way anymore? Where have all the maids—the dishwashers, child-minders, floor-sweepers—gone? Where are the ladies who dressed up to go shopping for a length of lovely woolen fabric to take to the dressmaker for next winter's dress? Where are the mothers who kept things running, who brushed their husband's hats and welcomed impromptu guests and visited old relatives?

I hope that the daughters and sons of those long-gone maids are happier than their mothers were. I'm not sure about the happiness levels of the children of the maids' mistresses. I know that for all of them, rich and not-so-rich, food and slow living are things of the past.

Now we're trying to recapture that way of life, and I'm all for it. I just don't see how we're going to do it.