Eccentric Neighborhood by Rosario Ferre

Author:Rosario Ferre [Ferre, Rosario]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374146382
Amazon: 0374924902
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Published: 1997-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-EIGHT

Aurelio Grabs Ulises by the Heel

I NEVER KNEW ABUELA Adela. She died in 1930, the year my parents were married at Emajaguas. But Father had a picture of her in our house in Las Bougainvilleas, an oval medallion of a dark-haired beauty dressed in black tulle with a fresh rose pinned to her breast. It was the only picture on his dresser, and he used to brush his hair and put on his coat and tie in front of her every morning. I also know how much Father loved her because once he showed me a linen handkerchief yellowed by age that he kept wrapped in tissue paper inside the small steel vault in his closet. “This handkerchief holds your Abuela Adela’s last tears,” he said to me. “Before she died, I dried her eyes with it.”

Tía Amparo talked to me a lot about Abuela Adela when she came to visit us. “She was very perceptive,” Amparo said. “Adela could tell more about people by how they looked than by what they said. If a man’s shirt was buttoned wrong or if the shirttails were hanging out of his pants when he went by her house, Adela knew that he had made a bad investment. If a woman let her slip show or put on her makeup too heavily, Adela knew she was depressed and her husband was unfaithful. Chaguito couldn’t understand how she did it; it was as if Adela could read people’s minds. He even went so far as to accuse her of listening in on her neighbors when she sat outside the dark confessional at La Milagrosa, waiting her turn. But he was wrong. Your grandmother loved people; that was her secret.”

One day something terrible happened. Ulises was six years old and he was playing in the empty lot next to the house, where he found a half-full can of gasoline. He wanted to build a bonfire to cook marshmallows, so he put some sticks together and soaked them with gasoline. Then he dropped a match on the pile. The blaze sprang up so high his clothes caught fire. He ran into the house screaming and Adela threw a basin of water over him. The doctor came and gingerly took off Ulises’s clothes. His body was covered with second-degree burns. He had less than a twenty-five percent chance of surviving, the doctor said. Adela washed Ulises’s blisters with distilled water, spread salve on them, rolled him in a blanket, and put him to bed. Nothing more could be done but to pray.

Aurelio was five. He never forgot the foul smell of charred flesh and the uproar Ulises’s accident caused. The family forgot all about him and he hid in a closet. He was terrified. The word death went swishing around the house like a sharpened sickle. It was the first time Aurelio had heard it, and he was surprised to learn that someone could “pass away,” simply cease to exist. When he tiptoed out of the closet,

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