Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [171]
I am having to learn a good deal of Spanish, for you know how I love to get together with others through the tongue, and there is now no English-speaker in the house, with the men gone, except little Enriqueta’s Austrian governess, a rather desperate, solitary woman who rarely leaves her room and who focusses all her feelings upon Enriqueta’s poodle, Enrique. So one side of my sketch pad acquires pictures and the other side acquires Spanish verbs and nouns. And at the same time I learn some of the mysteries of Mexican housekeeping.
How many servants, I asked Emelita the other day, for a house just big enough for the three Wards?
But you will need a large house, she said. Your eminence (!). Your husband’s position!
I couldn’t run one, I said. Not as you do. A middle-sized house at most. How many servants?
So she thought them off on her fingers. A coachman. A cook. A chambermaid. A nurse or governess. A mozo for general sweeping and to mind the gate. Five at least.
I told her that the last servant I had, that wonderful and never properly appreciated Lizzie, was cook, washerwoman, chambermaid, mozo, sometimes nursemaid, and also artist’s model.
She said there are no such people here.
I said suppose I could find one to bring down.
But she said it wouldn’t do. Look at Fräulein Eberl. She was very lonely, that one, unable to associate with the family and unwilling to associate with the servants, and with no one of her class in all Morelia.
If Don Gustavo had not taken a vow, on which he greatly prides himself, never to marry again, I suppose that Emelita would have married him long since. I can’t make up my mind whether I wish she had, or whether I’m happy she hasn’t and he won’t. She is at least entitled to the dignity of her position. It irritates my republican and suffragist sentiments to see such feminine perfection tied like a servant to that Prussian self-satisfaction. She is not pretty, except for her dark blue eyes, and like the other respectable women of Morelia she dresses richly without dressing well. But I have learned to love her in less than two weeks, and she makes the thought of living here very attractive.
You see the things that my mind plays with, mostly at siesta time when everything hushes and even the city outside shuts its doors and stills its bells. I am no better sleeper than I ever was, and so I lie and let the exciting and troubling possibilities buzz around in my head. Or I write you, which is more profitable.
Things are beginning to stir in the house. That means it will soon be time for our afternoon drive, our “airing” as it is called, though we never open the carriage windows. It is during this hour of freedom, such as it is, that I realize how close to imprisonment is the life of a Mexican woman. I watch Emelita and learn discretion. She being the head of a household and I being married, we may acknowledge the bows of gentlemen, but only of certain gentlemen. The young men riding their English thoroughbreds so proudly around the zocolo stare at all the ladies, but the ladies do not stare back, or bow. If they are marriageable, they may hardly acknowledge the existence of anyone male, or even of the female relative of a possible suitor. Inferences would instantly be drawn. So we go around the park every afternoon, getting neither exercise nor air, fluttering our fingers at balconies and carriages, while all around us the gentlemen are walking or riding and getting their blood flowing in the cool of the afternoon, and Indian girls in embroidered