Come, Vicente! I’m naked!
I Am The Immaculate Conception lies in a nursing home bed in Tampa because her grandson and his wife can no longer take care of her at her home. They both need to work full-time and even when they’re there at night she tries to get up and walk. She has already fallen out of bed a few times as she slips in and out of dementia. She raised the grandson who became her caretaker because his mother from her youngest son’s first marriage, or whatever it was, somehow could not or did not want to raise him. She has two other grandchildren and they all call her madrina because she is also their baptismal grandmother.
The true love of her life was her middle son, who was gay, unlike her youngest, who married several times, fathered a handful of children, and was otherwise a womanizer. Her oldest believes I Am The Immaculate Conception was responsible for his middle brother’s sexual preference, and had emasculated him by keeping him for her own – she lived with him and was her escort at every social event he attended. The oldest says she tried with him first, but he rebelled. When he began seeing a young woman and married her, I Am The Immaculate Conception treated the young woman badly. But they both resisted and the son bore a lifelong grudge against his mother, whom he would call by her name, never mother or mom. He didn’t want to turn out homosexual, like his brother. He had read Freud and formed some notions about human sexuality that were a mix of psychoanalysis and machismo. His children only know these things second hand, from stories their parents tell, for with them she is affectionate, loving, and tolerant. And they learn about their uncle’s sexual identity very slowly, their favorite uncle, just like they were the grandchildren I Am The Immaculate Conception loved most, and their homosexual uncle the great love of her life. At least after her husband, whose name was Arturo, died. So who the hell was Vicente?
*
As in a reverse traveling shot, the vision pulled back and to the left, until a building covered all but a half profile silhouette of the man and then nothing. Had he been there at all, standing in front of the colonial building, looking ahead at the street or a plaza, relaxed yet firm, comfortable in his skin and his white or off-white clothes and hat, possibly straw, a figure from the Latin American 19th or early 20th century, a patriarch perhaps, though of uncertain age, a leader no doubt, but of what? But the man had been there surely. He had purpose. He could have stepped out of his home, if that was his home, to address someone or a group or a crowd. Or he could just be there for a breath of fresh air. For it must have been warm, his clothes and his setting indicated that, and it must have been noon or mid afternoon. The man had been there, even if he slowly shrank from view and then was seen no more. He had been there. And his name must be Vicente.
*
When I Am The Immaculate Conception was, let’s say, 10, relatives came to visit, among them a male cousin her age who had a reputation as a tough kid. She asked him to go out back to play. This being a provincial town, the backyard led to a wooded area and there she stopped. “I hear you’re tough,” I Am The Immaculate Conception said. “Let’s fight.” They did. She beat him up.
*
“The Cold One is coming,” she says. She looks at her favorite grandson with the confiding expression with which she shared information she thought his parents shouldn’t know or wouldn’t want him to know, like how his mother wearing too much gold jewelry and her multiple allergies and his parents always going around with priests were all of a piece, none of it good.
She’s lying in bed in the nursing home, slipping in and out of dementia. When she speaks of the Cold One she doesn’t seem quite lucid, but neither does she seem mad. After all, she is going to die soon and she knows it. Still, something about the tone of her voice and the look in her eyes is spooky, the way a seer is spooky. She’s looking at death. Gone is her naughty giggle, which was always present, as if life were one long dirty joke – I am the Immaculate Conception loved dirty jokes, and some she told her grandson when he was too young to understand them. He never repeated, though, even in the coarsest company. The Cold One is no joke. Or is she? I Am the Immaculate Conception is not giggling, but there’s wickedness in her as she speaks of death. Perhaps she thinks the Cold One is the biggest joke of all. The dirtiest.
In her town there was no funeral parlor yet, so when someone died the local women took care of washing and dressing the corpse for the wake. I Am the Immaculate Conception led the process. One day, as the women are washing the naked dead body of a local woman, I Am the Immaculate Conception turns to her volunteer crew and makes a suggestion. “You know, she was such a bitch when she was alive, why don’t we give her a good spanking?”
And now comes the Cold One, whom she cannot challenge to a fight, whom she cannot spank. I Am the Immaculate Conception looks otherworldly, possessed, possibly demented. But she does not look afraid. Her grandson kisses her cheek and says goodbye. He never sees her again.
*
When Arturo comes to town with his fiancée, I Am the Immaculate Conception takes a look at him and tells her mother, “I am going to marry that man.” What does he look like? He is fairly handsome in a gentle way, and wears his blond hair short. A year after I Am the Immaculate Conception declares her intentions to her mother, Arturo has dropped his fiancée and she and Arturo are married.
Arturo enjoys a Solomonic reputation in the town. Whenever two people have a dispute they bring it to him to settle, which he does calmly and impartially. He is sensitive, too much so, perhaps a reason why he married a fearless woman of iron will. During the Fat Years, when sugar prices soar enriching the countryside, Arturo prospers. He runs a cottage-industry cigar factory behind his house and has interests in a family-owned bakery. The chinchal, as such factories are called, make cigars for domestic consumption, not the prestigious marques that get sold abroad. But Arturo does well enough by his chinchal, at one time employing as many as forty cigar makers. Then the price of sugar falls, the economy collapses, and Arturo is ruined. His three sons are grown and they move to the capital to find employment. Arturo’s failure to provide for his family breaks his heart. Literally. He dies of a heart attack. If it weren’t for his fellow Masons paying for his funeral, he would’ve been buried in a pauper’s grave.
*
I Am the Immaculate Conception follows her sons to the capital. They live in one big room which they turn into an apartment with dividers. Vertically the room is even more spacious, dizzyingly so. The Spanish architects of the Caribbean colonies raised ceilings to cathedral heights in order to keep the living level cool. And this is no ordinary building. It was the palace of a marquis. And though cathedral ceilings is an architectural figure of speech, caddy corner from the palace there is an actual cathedral. The Palacio del Marques de Aguas Claras sits in the city’s most prestigious plaza, three corners of which were aristocratic palaces and one the cathedral itself. But the days or marquises and palaces are long over. Only the cathedral serves the same functions for which it was built in the late eighteenth century; her grandchildren are all christened at its baptismal font. Otherwise, the colonial heart of the city is tourist territory. On the ground floor of the palace there is an elegant restaurant, spilling out into a sidewalk café. At the ground level, other palaces house tourist shops where Americans, a curious breed, come shopping for souvenirs like stuffed baby alligators. I Am the Immaculate Conception can see the tourists from her second floor balcony, filled with potted plants. She cannot see the posh crowd that dines on the patio of the ground floor restaurant because all windows have been sealed shut, giving the big halls of the palace the lugubrious penumbra of a medieval castle where something insalubrious might take place.
But nothing does. Inside her apartment the tropical light filtered through the stained glass of the balcony transom plays chess on the black and white floor tiles, while the balcony itself brings the sounds of mule or horse drawn carriages. One of them delivers coal for stoves in rooms and apartments like this one. The men who do so are called carboneros and seem permanently blackened by their merchandise. Other men bring blocks of ice they carry with big pincers up the stairs. And others push carts filled with fruits and vegetables that they call out in musical pregones. Then there are the knife sharpeners: the cart they push carries a big sharpening wheel, and they make their presence known by blowing on a Pan’s pipe. History will one day erase all of them from the cobblestones of the plaza.
*
Before she has to go to the nursing home, before dementia sets in freeing all her demons, I Am the Immaculate Conception tells her favorite grandson about two big changes of heart. She is near the end, this she knows, though she does not know she will last a few more years, need to be in a nursing home, and slip in and out of dementia with demons running loose and loosening her tongue. She has reflected on what she has believed all her life, and now she knows she was wrong.
Why shouldn’t a woman have the same freedom as a man, she tells her grandson. Men get with whomever they want and no one judges them. Women must only get with one man, their husband, and only after they’re married. That’s not right. Let women have whom they want whenever they want them. That is what’s right.
And why should black people be less than white. When my son was young he fell in love with a woman and wanted to marry her, she says. He went to her house to meet her family. And there, sitting on a chair, was her father, black as a dog, she puts it. He called off the engagement. That was nonsense, she says now. What difference does it make it you’re white or black?
I Am the Immaculate Conception has discovered gender and racial equality. She has done so using nothing but her mind and reviewing her own life as it is about to end. Ravaged by dementia, she will revert to horrible language about race and accuse her nurses of being sluts who are luring her other grandson, the one who has cared for her in her last years, into having adulterous affairs. But in her last days of lucidity she has concluded all men and women are created equal.
*
Lavender. Is it her perfume, always something Spanish, or her talcum powder, also from Spain, or the flowers that grow on pots out in the balcony? Or is it a lavender light? A lavender feeling. But not from flowers in the balcony, no. Too much sun. Lavender comes from inside, where there’s a shielding darkness, deliberate and welcome and cooling, like the height of the ceiling. A lifetime later, long after I Am The Immaculate Conception is gone, long after her sons are gone, long after Arturo is gone, long after Vicente and her demented naked desire are gone, long after a world, a whole big world to a very small child, is gone, what will remain is the new misery of low ceilings and the old memory of lavender.
Illustrations: From the series “The Engulfed Cathedral” (featured on cover), and “Castigo Grito” by Yolyanko William.