Casa Azul (12 page)

“Over here,” said Victor. He had noticed that one of the tall windows had a broken pane. He reached through the opening and unlocked the window. “Should we go in?”

“You wait here,” said Maria. She climbed through and went over to the door. Unlocking it, she said to Victor, “Stay close.”

Victor grabbed her hand tightly.

Carefully they went from room to room, hoping to find a clue of some kind. “She had to have been here. We just have to find something that will tell us where she went.” What she didn’t say was that she feared the worst. Something terrible had happened to their mother.

“Where
is
she?” asked Victor, on the verge of tears.

“We’ll find her.” She had to be strong for her brother.

She glanced around the room cautiously. The stark reality of this empty house weighed too heavily on her. Her footsteps echoed as she crossed the room to another door. And another.

In the back of the house, the two children came to the kitchen. The space for the stove was empty. A hole in the ceiling indicated where the stovepipe had gone. Maria circled the kitchen, touching the surfaces and feeling the dust under her fingers.

Victor wandered in the opposite direction, opening cupboards at random. He was hungry again and hoping to find something. When he came to the butler’s pantry, he opened the door and stepped inside.

“Aaaghh!”
Victor leaped back, waving his arms. “Spiders!” He had stepped into a spider web.

In a flash Maria was beside him, trying to wipe away the sticky threads. While doing this, she glanced into the pantry and suddenly stopped.

“Oh, Victor … Look.” In the middle of the pantry floor lay a lace handkerchief, just like their mother’s favorite one.

Retablo

T
he evening descended quickly. The shadows from the trees turned to darkness. A monkey’s cry echoed through the quiet neighborhood as if it were a call to the night to be gentle. A black cat strolled down the center of the cobblestone street with a mouse in its mouth. The cat’s yellow eyes were slits cutting through the darkness.

A few minutes later the rattle and creaking of wheels announced a tortilla cart before it turned onto the block. The old woman who pushed the cart was tired and moved slowly. As the woman approached the corner of Lourdes, Maria and Victor tumbled over the wall enclosing the home they had just searched. Maria clutched her mother’s hanky tightly. Even though they had not found her, she knew her mother had been at this house. This knowledge alone had given her hope.

“Who’s there?” called the old woman suspiciously.

“Just a boy on his way home,
abuelita
,” called a voice from the shadows up the street.

Maria put her hand over her brother’s mouth and whispered in his ear, “Shhhh.”

“Do you have any more tortillas?” the boy asked.

“For you, my dear, anything,” the old woman cackled. “They were to be my supper, but I will sell my last dozen to you for twenty centavos.”

The boy put his hand on his heart. “Five centavos.”

“Fifteen.”

“Ten.”

“Deal.” The old woman unwrapped the last of her tortillas and handed them to the boy. Maria strained to hear more. She wasn’t certain, but the boy sounded like Oswaldo.

The boy paid and quickly bit into the first tortilla. “Sleep well,
abuelita
,” he called after the old woman as she pushed her cart on.

“Quick, or we’ll be seen.” Thinking fast, Maria grabbed her brother’s hand and used the old woman’s cart to block the boy’s view as they darted across the street. She pulled Victor behind a stand of magnolia bushes.

“But why can’t we—?” asked Victor.

Maria put her hand over his mouth once more and whispered in his ear, “Because we don’t want Oswaldo to find out and kidnap you again. It’s better that no one sees us.”

The two held their breaths, listening to the boy stroll down the street eating noisily.

The smell of tortillas lingered in the air. Maria’s stomach growled.

The gate at Lourdes 27 rattled.
The boy must be trying to open it
, thought Maria.
But why?
She couldn’t see out from behind the bushes.

The boy stood there at the gate and ate his tortillas one by one, humming to himself. Maria and Victor tried not to move. But soon
Victor shifted his weight from one knee to the other. As he did this, his back rose and brushed a branch.

Crack!

The branch broke and clattered to the ground.

Maria wrapped her arms around her brother to hold him still.

The boy paused in midbite. He glanced up and down the street and listened. After a minute he continued chewing. He slowly finsihed his torillas. Then he strolled back up the street and around the corner, the way he had come.

The tension in Maria’s muscles slipped away.

“Is he gone?” whispered Victor.

“Shhh.” Maria tried to see through the leaves but couldn’t.

For several minutes Maria fingered her mother’s favorite lace handkerchief in her pocket and tried not to think why it was left in the empty house.

Together, brother and sister crouched and waited, ready to run if necessary.

The portait that Frida was painting of herself, Chica, and Caimito de Guayabal so troubled Fulang that she refused to enter the painting studio when Frida was working on it. Instead, she sat just outside the door and made snide comments into the room.

“Liar!” shouted Fulang.

“Quiet,” snapped Frida. She sat before her portrait, painting dense plants and leaves in the background.

“He came and helped me save two children from a mean man in front of the arena last night,” pleaded Fulang.

“This painting is not a picture of real life,” explained Frida, exasperated. She massaged her foot to relieve the stiffness. She had told Fulang this many times already. “This is a painting of how the world looks from inside my soul.”

“But Chica would never hurt you,” argued Fulang. “You know that.”

Lying on the couch, Chica ignored this conversation until her name was mentioned. “Hey, leave me out of this.”

“It’s not whether or not she would hurt me,” replied Frida. She sat straight in her chair to align her spine.

“I might,” purred Chica. “You never know. Cats aren’t so predictable.”

“The point is that a painting is not a photograph of reality.”

As the two argued, Fulang played with the grass mat that lay in front of the door. Absentmindedly, she had unraveled the weaving and put a piece of grass in her mouth. Suddenly she gagged.

“You okay?” called the candy skull from across the room. He was resting on the table beside the front door.

Fulang waved at the skull that she was fine.

“Hey,” the skull continued. “You think you could help me here?”

“You want me to move you?” asked Fulang.

“No,” answered the skull. “I was wondering if you could read this letter to me.”

“Frida got a letter?” Chica sat up. She loved mail. They all loved mail and looked forward to its arrival every day. But with the tension over the painting, they had forgotten about it.

Fulang leaped onto the small table beside the skull.

“Hey, there’s no room for me,” complained Chica

“It’s from the United States,” said Fulang, examining the stamp. “Maybe it’s from Dr. Eloesser.”

“Give it to me,” Frida said, snatching it.

“Read it to us,” pleaded Chica.

Frida crossed the room and sat down on the couch. Fulang picked up the candy skull and carried it over. She, the skull, and Chica settled on the back of the couch and looked over Frida’s shoulder.

“What’s it say?” asked the skull.

Frida tore open the envelope and pulled out a letter. “It’s from my friend Clare!” she exclaimed excitedly.

Frida pressed the letter against her chest and began to cry.

“What’s this about?” clacked the skull.

“Don’t you have a brain in your head?” snapped Chica. “Oh, I forgot. You don’t.”

“Very funny,” replied the skull.

“A while ago Clare asked me to do a portrait of Dorothy Hale. You remember Dorothy—jumping out of her apartment window.”

“After throwing a party for all her friends,” said Fulang slowly.

“I can’t believe Clare doesn’t like the painting.” Frida threw the letter on the table.

“Oh, right,” Fulang replied. “You paint Dorothy jumping out of her window and also smashed on the pavement below. Then you have Dorothy as an angel flying above with a banner that reads: The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, painted at the request of Clare Boothe Luce, for the mother of Dorothy. Finally you write an inscription on the bottom:
In the city of New York on the 21st of the month of October, 1938, at six in the morning, Mrs. DOROTHY HALE committed suicide by throwing herself out of a very high window of the Hampshire House building. In her memory this
retablo,
having executed it FRIDA KAHLO
.”

“I let them paint out the words on the banner,” protested Frida.

“What mother
wouldn’t
be horrified?” Exasperated, Fulang picked up the letter and reread it. “Beside, you promised her it would be a
recuerdo
, like the portrait of Dismas. It was supposed to be of Dorothy lying peacefully for her jouney to heaven, but instead you had to make a
retablo
. You showed her in death—not the memory of her!”

Fulang, Chica, and the skull looked at one another, not knowing what to make of the news or what Frida would do.

Suddenly Frida stood. “Well, what Dorothy did makes a lot of sense.” Frida was somber. “When I go, I want it to be like that.”

Fulang almost choked when she heard those words. She was already disturbed that Frida wanted to make a giant papier-mâché Judas for her Cinco de Mayo party. Now she seemed to be saying that she wanted to commit suicide after the party.

A Magical World

B
reathe. Breathe
, Fulang repeated to herself as she stepped outside into the courtyard. The air had cooled as the sun dipped below the horizon. This was in stark contrast to the stuffiness inside the house. The tension had become so great that Fulang felt as if she were suffocating. She paced across the courtyard and lifted her arms over her head to let more air into her lungs.

“One, two, three …” Fulang counted to ten to calm herself. This usually worked, but this time she counted to twenty without much success. In frustration she picked up a stone and threw it at a tree.

“OUCH!”

“Who’s there?”

Caimito poked his head out of the branches. “It’s me.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Fulang.

Caimito leaped to the ground. “I didn’t think you were in the habit of throwing rocks at sleeping monkeys,” he said, rubbing his head and laughing.

Fulang didn’t laugh. She just turned to continue her pacing.
Caimito approached her and picked at a flea in her fur. “Is everything all right?”

Fulang stopped and shook her head. “Everything’s horrible.”

As the night descended, they stood awkwardly and silently, like teenagers who liked each other but were afraid to admit it. Time passed without notice. The birds quieted and the neighborhood seemed to turn in for the night.

“It’s just that Frida is so depressed,” she finally said. “She’s even planning a Cinco de Mayo party that’s more a Day of the Dead celebration.”

“But Cinco de Mayo celebrates the
birth
of Mexico—as a country free of dictators!”

“It does.” Fulang sighed. “What’s worse is that Frida has always seen her life as linked to the birth of Mexico. Now she’s turning that day into a funeral. And this makes me even more afraid, because I think she is planning to kill herself.”