Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels by Barry Gifford

Author:Barry Gifford [Gifford, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2010-06-23T12:00:00+00:00

OUT OF THIS WORLD

Guadalupe DelParaiso had lived at the same address all of her life, which was seven months more than eighty-six years. She had never married, and had outlived each of her sixteen siblings—nine brothers, seven sisters—as well as many of her nephews and nieces, and even several of their children. Guadalupe lived alone in the downstairs portion of the house her father, Nuncio DelParaiso, and his brother, Negruzco, had built on Claiborne Avenue across the street from Our Lady of the Holy Phantoms church in New Orleans. The neighborhood had undergone numerous vicissitudes since Nuncio and Negruzco had settled there. At one time the area had been home to some of the Crescent City’s most prominent citizens, but now Our Lady of the Holy Phantoms, where the DelParaiso family had worshiped for forty years, and where Guadalupe and her sisters and brothers had attended school, was closed down, and the street was littered with transient hotels, beer and shot bars, pool halls, and the drunks, junkies and whores who populated and patronized these establishments.

Guadalupe rented the upstairs rooms in her house by the week. She made sure to get the money in advance and kept a chart on the wall in her kitchen listing the dates the rent was due for each room. Guadalupe would rent to singles only, and not to women or blacks under the age of fifty. She had not left the house in four years, depending on her bachelor nephew, Fortunato Rivera, her sister Romana’s youngest son, who was now fifty-two years old, to bring her groceries and other supplies twice a week. She paid Fortunato for what he brought her on Wednesdays and Sundays, and gave him a shopping list for the next delivery. Guadalupe had not been sick since the scarlet fever epidemic of 1906. The doctor who attended her at that time told her mother, Blanca, and Nuncio, that Guadalupe’s heart had been severely damaged by the fever and that he did not expect her to live beyond thirty. It was Guadalupe’s oldest sister, Parsimonia, however, who succumbed to a weak heart at the age of twenty-nine. As the years passed, Guadalupe only became stronger in both body and mind.

Guadalupe was making up her list for Fortunato, who would be coming the next day, Wednesday, when she heard a pounding noise, like the stamping of feet, coming from the room above the kitchen. She had rented the room almost a week before to a soft-spoken, polite but bedraggled-looking young man whom, she believed, worked for the railroad. The young man had seen the ROOM FOR RENT sign in the front window and had taken what had once been her brothers Rubio, Martin, and Danilo’s room immediately. He paid Guadalupe a month’s advance because, he told her, it looked like the kind of a place his mama, Alma Ann, would have been pleased to occupy. Guadalupe had not seen the young man since the day he’d rented it.

This pounding disturbed Guadalupe; she could not concentrate on her grocery list.

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