cook for many years, earning a miserable wage and spending most of it on tobacco and rum. She looked after me because she had accepted a responsibility more sacred than blood ties. Anyone who neglects a godchild is damned to hell, she used to say. Itâs worse than abandoning your own child. Itâs my obligation to raise you to be good and clean and hardworking, because I will have to answer for you on Judgment Day. My mother had not believed in original sin, and had not thought it necessary to baptize me, but my godmother had insisted with unyielding stubbornness. All right, comadre , Consuelo had finally agreed. You do whatever you want. Just donât change the name I chose for her. For three months my madrina went without smoking or drinking, saving every coin, and on the designated day she bought me a strawberry-colored organdy dress, tied a ribbon on the four straggly hairs that crowned my head, sprinkled me with her rose water, and bore me off to church. I have a photograph from the day of my baptism; I was done up like a happy little birthday present. She did not have enough money, so she paid for the service with a thorough cleaning of the churchâfrom sweeping the floors and waxing the wooden benches to polishing the altar ornaments with lime. That is how I came to have a little rich girlâs baptism, with all the proper pomp and ceremony.
âIf it werenât for me, youâd still be a pagan. Children who die without the sacraments go to limbo and stay there forever,â my madrina always reminded me. âIn my place, anyone else would have sold you. Itâs easy to place girls with light eyes. Iâve heard the gringos buy them and take them to their country. But I made a promise to your mother, and if I donât fulfill it, Iâll stew in hell!â
For her, the boundaries between good and evil were very precise, and she was ready to save me from sin if she had to beat me to do it. That was the only way she knew, because that was how she had learned. The idea that play and tenderness are good for children is a modern discovery: it never entered her mind. She tried to teach me to be quick about my work and not waste time in daydreams. She hated wandering minds and slow feet; she wanted to see me run when she gave an order. Your headâs full of smoke and your legs are full of sand, she used to say, and she would rub my legs with Scottâs Emulsion, a cheap but famous liniment made fromcod-liver oil, which, according to the advertisement, when it came to tonics was equal to the philosopherâs stone.
My madrina âs brain was slightly addled from rum. She believed in all the Catholic saints, some saints of African origin, and still others of her own invention. Before a small altar in her room she had aligned holy water, voodoo fetishes, a photograph of her dead father, and a bust she thought was St. Christopher but was, I later discovered, Beethovenâalthough I have never told her because he is the most miraculous figure on her altar. She carried on a continuous conversation with her deities in a colloquial yet proud tone, asking them for insignificant favors; later, when she became a fan of the telephone, she would call them in heaven, interpreting the hum of the receiver as parables from her divine respondents. She believed that was how she received instructions from the heavenly court concerning even the most trivial matters. She was devoted to St. Benedict, a handsome blond high-living man women could not leave alone, who stood in the fire until he crackled like firewood and only then could adore God and work his miracles in peace, without a passel of panting women clinging to his robes. He was the one she prayed to for relief from a hangover. She was an expert on the subject of torture and gruesome deaths; she knew how every martyr and virgin in the book of Catholic saints had died, and was always eager to tell me about them. I listened with morbid terror,
âIf it werenât for me, youâd still be a pagan. Children who die without the sacraments go to limbo and stay there forever,â my madrina always reminded me. âIn my place, anyone else would have sold you. Itâs easy to place girls with light eyes. Iâve heard the gringos buy them and take them to their country. But I made a promise to your mother, and if I donât fulfill it, Iâll stew in hell!â
For her, the boundaries between good and evil were very precise, and she was ready to save me from sin if she had to beat me to do it. That was the only way she knew, because that was how she had learned. The idea that play and tenderness are good for children is a modern discovery: it never entered her mind. She tried to teach me to be quick about my work and not waste time in daydreams. She hated wandering minds and slow feet; she wanted to see me run when she gave an order. Your headâs full of smoke and your legs are full of sand, she used to say, and she would rub my legs with Scottâs Emulsion, a cheap but famous liniment made fromcod-liver oil, which, according to the advertisement, when it came to tonics was equal to the philosopherâs stone.
My madrina âs brain was slightly addled from rum. She believed in all the Catholic saints, some saints of African origin, and still others of her own invention. Before a small altar in her room she had aligned holy water, voodoo fetishes, a photograph of her dead father, and a bust she thought was St. Christopher but was, I later discovered, Beethovenâalthough I have never told her because he is the most miraculous figure on her altar. She carried on a continuous conversation with her deities in a colloquial yet proud tone, asking them for insignificant favors; later, when she became a fan of the telephone, she would call them in heaven, interpreting the hum of the receiver as parables from her divine respondents. She believed that was how she received instructions from the heavenly court concerning even the most trivial matters. She was devoted to St. Benedict, a handsome blond high-living man women could not leave alone, who stood in the fire until he crackled like firewood and only then could adore God and work his miracles in peace, without a passel of panting women clinging to his robes. He was the one she prayed to for relief from a hangover. She was an expert on the subject of torture and gruesome deaths; she knew how every martyr and virgin in the book of Catholic saints had died, and was always eager to tell me about them. I listened with morbid terror,
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