The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes

Author:Carlos Fuentes [Fuentes, Carlos]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2012-08-16T06:00:00+00:00

6

Las Amigas

For my sister Berta

Tell them I’m not here! Tell them I don’t want to see them! Tell them I don’t want to see anyone!”

One day no one came to visit Miss Amy Dunbar. Even the servants, who never lasted long in the old lady’s service, stopped coming to work. Rumors circulated about Miss Dunbar’s difficult nature, her racism, her insults.

“There’s always someone whose need for work is stronger than their pride.”

It wasn’t so. The whole black race, according to Miss Amy, refused to work for her. The last maid, a fifteen-year-old girl named Bathsheba, spent her month in Miss Dunbar’s house weeping. Each time she answered the door, the rarer and rarer visitors first saw a girl bathed in tears, then invariably heard behind her the broken but still acid voice of the crone. “Tell them I’m not in! Tell them I’m not interested in seeing them!”

Miss Amy Dunbar’s nephews knew the old lady would never leave her house in the Chicago suburbs. She said that one migration—leaving the family home in New Orleans and coming north to live with her husband—was enough for a lifetime. Dead was the only way she would leave her stone house facing Lake Michigan and surrounded by forest.

“It won’t be long now,” she told the nephew responsible for paying bills, attending to legal matters, and looking after other things great and small that completely escaped the attention of the little old woman.

What she did not fail to notice was her relative’s tiny sigh of relief as he imagined her dead.

She took no offense. “The problem is that I’m used to living,” she invariably responded. “It’s become a habit,” she would say with a laugh, showing those horse teeth that with age protrude farther and farther in Anglo-Saxon women, although she was only half Anglo-Saxon, the daughter of a Yankee businessman who set himself up in Louisiana to show the languid Southerners how to do business, and a delicate lady of distantly French origin, Lucy Ney. Miss Amy said she was related to Bonaparte’s marshal Ney. Her full name was Amelia Ney Dunbar. Like all the other wellborn ladies of the Delta city, she was called Miss, Miss Amy, with the right to be addressed by both the title of matrimonial maturity and that of a double childhood; they were girls at fifteen and girls again at eighty.

“I’m not suggesting you go to a senior citizens’ residence,” explained her nephew, a lawyer determined to deck himself out with all the clothes and accoutrements he imagined to be his profession’s height of elegance: blue shirts with white collars, red ties, Brooks Brothers suits, oxfords, never loafers on workdays, God forbid! “But if you’re going to stay in this big old house, you’ll need domestic help.” Miss Amy was about to say something nasty, but she bit her tongue. She even showed the whitish tip of that organ. “I hope you make an effort to hold onto your servants, Aunt Amy. The house is huge.”

“It’s that they’ve all left.

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