American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [38]
I asked him trivialities, concocted to allow me to cast my eyes up at him, stare at the trickle of sweat on his chest, ponder the contours of his face.
From the day Flavio had brought him to the house and introduced him as his nephew, my mother had singled him out as a bright young man. “That boy is smart,” she would say, looking down at him from my window. “He has a future, and a mind for something better than this garden.” I would watch her scratch her head and think what she might do for him: Teach him how to converse in English, do sums? Read to him from Van Loon’s histories or Plutarch’s Lives, as she did for us? Just as long as he doesn’t go far, I’d pray. As long as he stays right there, by the window.
I loved him in the extravagant way children love grown-ups of the opposite sex. It is a need born early, our hunger for romance. We love our uncles because they are not our fathers, because they are familiar enough but essentially strangers: free, unpredictable, wild. We love our mother’s friends because they have pretty faces, because their smiles invite us to, because their eyes seek us out whenever we enter a room. I loved Antonio because he was handsome; because he was good; because he appeared to love me back; because, when I considered the way he turned to look at this midge of a human being, when I saw the light in his eyes, when he put down his tools to pay attention, I knew that I was his; and that fact made him fully and incontrovertibly mine.
It was Antonio, as I say, who taught me most about the leyendas. But it hadn’t started out that way. I had been his teacher first.
Sometime in my fifth year, during an endless afternoon while Papi was at the factory and Mother helped George and Vicki scribble words into notebooks, I skirted the kitchen and wandered back toward the animal pens. Antonio was there, cleaning out cages and sweeping out dung.
“Can I watch you, Antonio,” I asked, “while you work?”
“Sí, sí,” he said, wiping his brow with his sleeve and turning a crate over for me to sit on. “But you must pay the price of admission.” He put a finger to his chin. “Let’s see,” he said. He was sloe-eyed, tousle-haired, and the dirt on his face looked yellow. “I know what you can do, Marisi. Tell me a story.” I frowned, thinking he was making fun of me. But his open-hearted smile told me he was not.
I sat on the crate, contemplated my white shoes, and tugged my cotton dress over my knees. On that day, I began the ritual that taught me everything. As Antonio heaved cages, pulled weeds, chased a renegade chicken, or wielded a wire broom, I’d repeat Greek myths Mother had told us at bedtime. I began, appropriately enough, with one about gardens: How Hades had burst through the earth into Persephone’s garden, to drag the girl down into hell. I told him about Zeus’s infidelities: How he’d turned a beautiful lover into a cow to avoid his wife’s wrath. Antonio chuckled at that, his white teeth glinting in the sun. “You have chicas, Antonio?” I asked him.
“Ay, sí,” he said, and shrugged. “But no jealous wife.” He threw back his head and laughed.
Mother’s face appeared at some point in the course of that afternoon, and I could see by her expression that she liked what I was doing. “Teaching is the highest form of learning,” she told me later. And she told the other servants she approved.
“Where are you going, Marisi?” Claudia would ask shrilly from her perch in the kitchen as I trudged toward the servants’ quarters out back, a place she knew I was not supposed to go. She was peeling potatoes, and Flavio bustled in and out, carting the day’s dishes from the aparador. “To see Antonio,” I’d say, as if I were the queen and he were my exchequer. “I’m telling historias. It’s storytime.”
I pretended to be Aesop one day, as Antonio raked the beds that lined the garden