la tortillera

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Bilingual Press Editorial Bilinge

LA tortilleraAuthor(s): Ibis Gmez-VegaSource: Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilinge, Vol. 25, No. 3 (September - December 2000),pp. 306-314Published by: Bilingual Press / Editorial BilingeStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25745724 .Accessed: 19/11/2014 20:15

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La tortillera

IbisGomez-Vega*

We played through the loud music coming from the radio, but nothing could drown thesound of our voices yelling through a ball game. La pelota was our game, played in the

middle of the street with car doors and distinctive torn sidewalk patches for bases. Homebase was usually somebody's handkerchief, if the wind wasn't blowing, and once I took off

my underwear in the middle of the street sowe could play."It's not like there s something to see," El Gordo said under his breath but loud

enoughso I could hear him. I lifted

upmy skirt in one

quickmotion. Stunned, the

boysgiggled, like the little boys they were. I didn't care."You re too much," Berta Miriam said, her favorite words, which she never explained.

The boys didnt say much, but they spent the whole game trying to look up my skirt,which wouldn't stay down anyway. Still, we had a game and a good one too. I hit a longone that made Edilberto run two blocks up our street. By the time he got back, I was

standing on my undies, waiting for any one of them to say something stupid about mystanding on my own underwear, but no one did.

"jMarimacha " my mother snarled every time she sawme hanging out with the boys,but the girls didnt play pelota, sowhat choice did I have? Lucky for me, I could hit theball farther than most boys, and Iwas also good at catching. It didnt take the boys too

long to figure out they wanted me on their teams, especially since we all knew each otherfrom birth. In San Antonio, where I grew up, boys and girls lived together but functioned

separately, even though we lived only blocks from each other, went to the same schools,and knew all the same people. Some of our cousins even married each other, although thathad not happened in my family yet, but people were beginning to whisper about mycousin Laurita and Edilberto s sister, Elena, which iswhat started this whole mess in thefirst place.

The guys and I played pelota around the block from my house, on Edilberto s street,

as far away from my parents as I could possibly get without getting in trouble. I got introuble if went so far away that they couldn't find me, but I also got in trouble if playedpelota in front of my house where they could see me doing it.Actually catching me in theact of playing made them really angry, so I knew enough to play around the corner from

my house in Edilberto's street. One time, when we played on my street and papi caughtme, he started undoing his belt as soon as he turned the corner. I had just hit a long oneand El Gordo's boys were scrambling all over the street to catch the ball when I saw him

coming at me and acting as if he was going to kill me. I ran the bases, though, in spite of

him, and got by the catcher to score another run before running nonstop from home base

tomy house.

IbisGomez-Vega is the author of a novel, SendMy RootsRain (AuntLute Press, 1991), aswell asshort stories and scholarly articles on ethnic American literature. She teaches Latino/Latina literatureand the literatures of other ethnic groups at Northern Illinois University.

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"Tu padre es un comemierda," El Gordo told me. His real name was Armando, but

everybody either called him 'Mando or El Gordo, because he was fat. El Gordo was still

angry that we couldn't finish the game. "That last run was a beauty," he reminded me.

Everybodysaid so.The

guystalked about it as if

theywould never see

anythinglike it

again, and they always ended the conversation by cursing my father out. He should have

just watched, they said, like their own fathers watched, instead of acting like a comemier

da, which is what they always called him, and even though they couldn't finish the game,they didn't hold it against me. It was my comemierda father's fault, not mine, so that's

when we moved the games to Edilberto s street.I didn't mind their calling my father a comemierda, because I called him that myself.

He was angry most of the time, and half the time I had no ideawhy Iwas getting punished. I did however mind El Gordo s sudden loyalty to me. Years ago, when we were alllittle and Imade it clear Iwould

playwith them and not the

girls,El Gordo was the one

who complained the most, even after Edilberto said he should cut it out. He called me a

marimacha, which was what my mother called me anyway, sowhat else was new, and Ididn't even know then what that meant.

"They're all a bunch of idiots," Edilberto said. We were all nodding in agreementwhen he added, "Look at Elenita," and we knew. Edilberto's sister, Elena, had left home,disappeared. People were saying that she had run off with my cousin, Laura, and now

nobody knew where they were."Se fueron pal Norte," I told them, which is what people were talking about doing

now that la revolucion had turned communist, and everybody in San Antonio wanted to

get out of Cuba as quickly as they could, as if they hadn't known that Fidel was a communist from day one.

That's the thing about Cubans that I just can t figure out. They complain about everything, even when the things they complained about in the first place get fixed, as some ofthem did when el comandante Fidel Castro first started fixing up Batista's mess, like the

"dirty women" everybody was always complaining about. Fidel put them in schools toteach them something so they wouldn't walk the streets, but then people complained thathe was putting his nose in everybody's business, and he made them even angrier when the

"family law" came out. That's when the whole country decided to move out, no matter

what, because Fidel was going to take the children away from their parents, which I didn't think was such a bad idea anyway, as long as I got sent somewhere where I could playpelota with the boys without getting in trouble. Almost everybody's parents were in a

panic, though, because the law spelled things out for them. Men had to do their share ofthe work in the home; if they didn't, their wives could take them to court, and I could justimagine my father being the first Cuban man to land in jail for refusal to put down thetoilet seat or pick up his own mess.

While the grown-ups argued about the new laws, the kids listened. Nothing theysaid had anything to do with what the law really said, but in Cuba people never actually

hear what is being said.Mostly, they hear something like what is said, and then theyembellish itwith some nonsense of their own. By the time everybody got his or her ownversion of the point in, the original point was something very different than what it started out to be, so it didn't make any difference that we all listened to Fidel's speeches andtalked about them. The street version of the speech iswhat most people really heard, andthat's what they really argued about while they complained about how they had been liedto by "El Caballo," their favorite name for Fidel because he was so strong, like a horse,



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and even when he posed during the speeches he looked like a horse, with his mane upand resoplando.

The kids liked the horse name because it seemed a little disrespectful, except that peo

ple reallydidn't mean

disrespect byit.At

first, rightafter the revolution when Fidel first

changed out lives, we looked up to him with pride and affection. We liked the longspeeches, even though half the time we didnt know what the words meant because Fidel,for all his army green and military boots, loved words. Some of the words he used we hadnever heard before. During the arguments caused by the speeches, people always screamedthat Fidel was a communist because of the things he said and the words he used to saythem, but they still listened, compelled by the words, which sounded so good most ofthem couldn't believe them. Even the ones who hated him compared him toMarti, our

poet-warrior, which was a good thing because we all loved Marti, the sincere man fromthe land of the palm trees, even though nobody ever heard Marti speak for hours, non

stop, like Fidel did.For us kids, the speeches were either a nuisance or a reason to get out of the grown

ups' way. Although we knew that anybody who could speak for three hours without

stopping even to get a drink had to be something different, we didnt like the idea of hav

ing our favorite television or radio shows pre-empted by El Caballo with yet another oneof his rambling speeches, which wouldn't have been any skin off our noses ifwe hadn'tbeen made to listen because everywhere we went we could hear his voice thundering outof the houses, through open windows. The whole country came to a stand still and

watched him on television or listened on the radio.

Even when the whole family got together, the parents and grandparents, mostly tocomplain, they watched Fidel on television and told us over and over to "shut up; why don't

you?" as if any one of us cared one whiff about El Caballo's words. Then, the argumentswould start as soon as he finished because everyone had his own version of the speech andwhat itmeant, even though they had just heard him saying it.Nobody ever knew exacdywhat his words meant, but everybody agreed that they could only mean trouble, especiallywhen the argument switched to calculating what los americanos would do this time aboutthis particular speech, as if the americans could have anything to say about whatever Fidel

was saying.They didn't, of course, but the general consensus was that los americanos would

attack Cuba before Castro could finish writing his next speech and things would thenbecome something other than what they were, which apparently were not good because

everybody was talking about getting out of the country before things got any worse."You think they left?" Edilberto asked me, ready to believe me. I nodded. Once, at

Laurita's house, my Aunt Clara slapped her right in front of me, which scared me half to

death, but Laurita didn't even cry. She just turned around and headed for the bedroom,where I found her later, plotting something, and she said one of these days shewould leavethat "hoya de grillos," which iswhat she called her parents' house, definitely not a goodthing to say. I asked Laurita where she would go.

"Donde haya caridad," she said, and I thought then, as I did until recently, that shewas talking about awoman, Caridad, because it's the same thing. As it turned out, shewas

talking about away of behaving she said Cubans knew nothing about. That's what I toldEdilberto the day after Elenita disappeared to calm him down. He was really depressed,and I didn't know what to do for him when he got that way. Edilberto blamed his parents,

who were too strict, but we had no idea what in the world had happened because nobodyever told us kids anything.



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Elenita and Laurita didn't say very much of anything, either, which made us all veryangry.We were fed up with secrets by this point because everybody in the country seemedto have plenty and we couldn't figure any of them out. Secrets had become away of life in

Cuba since before the revolution whenpeople

weregoing

aroundwhispering

because

nobody wanted to get caught by Batistas secret police and be made to talk. It was betterto know nothing, everybody said, even if you really did know nothing. After the revolu

tion, the habit of whispering and keeping secrets got even worse because everybody wasafraid of the communists, afraid of what could happen, even if no one we knew had beenarrested. Most of us kids figured that the stories about arrests were all made up, things the

grown ups said to keep us in line, and it probably worked because itwas getting harderand harder to know anything, no matter how old we got and how much we thought weknew. After Elenita and Laurita disappeared, we were all dumbfounded, shocked to findthat people could be erased, just like that, but the reason forwhatever happened went rightover our heads. One day we just got up to find that shewasn't there, and her own mother said shewas dead.

"jTortillera ," my mother said when I asked her about Laurita, which only gave heranother excuse to scream at me, "y tu, procura no salirme asi, cabrona, hija 'eputa " but it

meant nothing to me. The guys didnt know either. When El Gordo heard the womenwho were gossiping in his kitchen, he picked up the same word, "tortillera." When he

joined us in the street that day, we knew he had something to tell because he had that lookhe gets, as if he's about to burst, and everybody, Chucho, Tito, Cuco, Felito, his nastycousin Max, who put a cat in starch once and hung him up to dry until we finally found

him and beat the crap out of him, not the cat, and even his older sisterMiriam, who knewElenita really well and wasn't even part of our group, rode our bikes all the way up the hillto the Parque Central, huffing and puffing, just to be away from our parents sowe could

figure it out.

"They said she's a tortillera," El Gordo volunteered as soon aswe all stopped.We hadall heard the word, sowe let him have it.

"We know that, berraco," I told him because I knew he didn't like that word."You don't have to get nasty," he said, almost hurt, which surprised me. El Gordo

said a berraco was a castrated bull, and he did sort of look like a bull when he turned red

with anger."A tortilla is just an omelet, eggs with fried potatoes," Cuco explained."Some people like to put onions and even petits pois in their tortillas," Max added as

if anybody cared. Ever since that thing with the cat we could barely tolerate him.

Everybody knew Max would hurt you for the hell of it, and we didn't know what to dowith that kind of mean.

"I like mine simple, fried potatoes rolled in the eggs and cooked flat, on both sides,likemy mother makes them," said El Gordo.

"I like itwhen the eggs drip," Cuco jumped in eagerly, and we could tell he was get

ting hungry."Maybe I should ask Graciela," I said, just to change the subject. It wasn't time to eat

yet, and we all knew that getting hungry before lunch or dinner could make us cry. heone thing we hated about the revolution was that food disappeared. We couldn't just runall over town to find Chicho el Cojo pushing his beefsteak sandwich cart and leaning toone side because only one of his legsworked right. Meat was rationed and bread disappeared, mostly because the electricity got cut off almost every day, so Chicho lost his



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business and we lost the one thing we could stuff ourselves with between meals. Lately,Chicho had been walking around town talking to himself, and we went hungry until wecould rush home for what little our mothers could put on the table. Just thinking about asteak sandwich was

makingmy mouth water.

"jQue Graciela ni Graciela " El Gordo exclaimed. Graciela was the secretary at myfathers company, and she knew everything. El Gordo was just jealous I had someone Icould talk to, but he didnt like that she favored me.

"Miriam has a girlfriend " Max chanted. If he hadn't been Felito's cousin, we wouldhave dunk that boy in a pot of starch and hung him out to dry a long time ago.

"Everybody knows Miriam has a girlfriend, four eyes," Edilberto told him. Edilbertodidnt like him either.

"That's what makes her a tortillera too,"Max said, and I popped him one. Felito camebetween us and sent his four-eyed cousin running in the opposite direction.

"Get away from us,"Miriam told him, even though Max was her cousin."You're so stupid " Max complained, but he said itwalking away. He couldn't take all

of us at one time, so he left, but Max was treacherous, the kind of guy who would jumpyou when you least expected it and make you eat dirt or grass. I made amental note to

keep my eyes open, just in case."You think that idiot is right?" Edilberto asked. "You think it has something to do

with liking irls?""I guess," I said. "That's what my mother sayswhen Nieves's daughter walks by.""The fat one?" El Gordo asked. "She likeswomen too?"

"Maybe," I told him, "but its the skinny one my mothers been talking about.""Elenita sleeps with women?" Edilberto asked, puzzled. "She never even played

pelota " he said, amazed. El Gordo elbowed me, and we pushed and shoved each otheruntil everybody told us to quit that.We didnt know much, but itwas generally acceptedthat there had to be some connection between playing pelota as a child and liking women

when you finally grew up, which is why my mother kept warning me I would grow up tobe just like Laurita, la tortillera, which wasn't such a bad thing because I really likedLaurita and Elenita too, no matter what they were.

"Fm going to look this up," Miriam volunteered. She was not as clever as my best

friend, Berta Miriam, but shewas pretty clever in her own right, sowe all sort ofwatchedasMiriam leaned her bike against the bench and walked over to the library, across fromthe park. "Come on " she demanded, and I joined her. Miriam could always get me to go

with her, but I didnt like the library anymore because my third-grade teacher workedthere now. She was my last love, before Graciela. I spent all third grade dreaming abouther piel canela and the scent of her body that smelled like nothing I had ever smelled

before, but Iwas very careful never to let on that I could smell her.In the third grade, I learned that women have a personal scent. My teacher's scent

came from roses and powder and sweat, and itwas the only time I smelled it on anybody.

Itwas

just hers, but if closed my eyes and thought about it I could remember it, no matterwhere I was, and it always brought a big silly grin tomy face, the scent of Iris, that still

lingered inmy head. I loved her and the smell of her, but now that Iwas in Pre I was tooold for that. The only problem was that, every time I saw her, Imelted all over again, andhere Iwas in search of a dictionary headed for the library where she worked.

"Maestra," I said as soon as I saw her. She was on her way out of the building, probably going home to lunch. She smiled with her whole face when she saw us, winked. I



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smelled her, and Iwas in third grade all over again. The little butterflies who lived inmystomach fluttered, and the rhythm of their wings charged through my body like amagic

wave of warmth that made my knees weak and the skin around my lips tingle.

"MytwoMiriams," she said,

huggingus. Iwas so embarrassed I couldn't

speak. Justlooking at her beautiful brown face made me blush, but Miriam was all business."We came to look up aword," she said.

"jAy, que bueno " La Maestra exclaimed. "Which one?" Miriam and I looked at each

other, but neither one of us knew if it was safe to tell her.

"


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not falling. People inCuba always say that boys don't cry, somost of them do their best notto cry, even when you beat them, so I had never seen Edilberto cry. "


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thought El Gordo would pass out. Edilberto's face was looking like the water works wereabout to break out again, so El Gordo put his big butt on the seat and started ridingaround us with his eyes to the ground as ifhe were checking the street for potholes, which

everyoneknew

theyhad. He didn't even have to

say,let's

go,but Miriam did.

"Come on," she said, "or we'll get in trouble," and the whole bunch of us sort of

slipped away from La Maestra little by little like one big human flower losing its petalsone at a time.

La Maestra wiped the tears from her eyes as shewatched the kids ride away in silence.Itwas getting harder and harder to stop crying, and she didn't even know why. Elenita hadbeen her student, just like Edilberto, El Gordo, and the other kids were, and shewas thekind of teacher who stuck her nose in all her students' business to seewhat she could doabout it.Most of the time, their problems could be solved with a kind word, a push in the

right direction. The kind of thing her students never got from their parents, they got from

her, even as she screamed at them for not memorizing their assignments or wasting hertime with the god-awful screeching they offered instead of music, but the students stillcame to her because their parents were either too busy or too unconcerned about theirchildren's lives to be the least bit acquainted with their fears. In her many years of teach

ing, this had become her role, a sort of advisor who nurtured with kindness even as shescreamed to get their attention. Elenita's troubles, however, had frustrated her deepestinstinct to get involved, to fix her students' lives as she fixed their lousy sense of rhythmor their inability to concentrate on the music they were playing.

Elenita had been one of her best students, a pianist with an exquisite sense of timingand the passion to match, and maybe itwas her passion that should be blamed for the

mess she found herself in because, once Elenita fell in love, nothing could keep her fromthe woman she wanted. La Maestra tried telling her that she should keep it quiet, keepher love and, most of all, the name of her lover to herself until she could move away, maybetoHabana where the best music schools were. La Maestra never for a second doubted that

Elenita would win scholarships and play with the best musicians, and maybe even travel

abroad, the kind of thing that most people could no longer expect now that the revolutionand the chaos that followed had changed everything. Elenita, however, couldn't check her

passion. She was the kind of girl who lived big and openly, and La Maestra told herself

that she was either very foolish or very innocent."No tiene malicia," La Maestra whispered to herself now that she thought about her

student, and she couldn't help but smile. Elenita didn't know enough to lie, to hide herlove for awoman in her most secret place. Instead, she rushed home filled with passion,glowing with love, and told her mother, who beat her with a hairbrush and wailed loudlyin customary fashion to mourn her daughter's behavior. The neighborhood women heardthe mother screaming, wailing, and joined in. Even women who didn't know the ungrateful daughter joined in, though they were simply passing through the neighborhood ontheir way to the meat market where the meat rations were sold.They gathered in the liv

ing room and over-flowed into the sidewalk, where they stood and commented, anill-intentioned Greek chorus, on how quickly the country's moral fiber was unraveling,disintegrating before their very eyes since the revolution.

"So much for keeping it quiet," La Maestra thought to herself now that she was

thinking about it all over again, even though she really had not been able to think about

anything else because ofwhat it would do to Elenita and whoever the girl was. La Maestraknew from having seen it before that, once Elenita's mother calmed down, shewould sim



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ply deal with her daughter's decision with silence. She would neither acknowledge it nor

speak about it again, but she would make sure that, for the rest of her life, Elenita livedwith the shame of her silence, just likeNieves had done and somany others. She wouldn't care about the

miserythat this kind of treatment created. Once the silence

began,it

would go on forever, to spite her. Even if Elenita could find away to live at home and

squeeze a love life out of stolen moments, shewould always be miserable. Her mother andthe people around her would see to that, and these days the housing shortage would keeppeople like her from getting a home of her own. Even she, as old as shewas now and witha job of her own, still lived at home.

"What was that girl thinking?" she wondered, but she also had to smile at the girlscourage. Elenita shocked the Cuban Greek chorus and her own mother when she toldthem that they could not run her life. La Maestra heard from one of her friends' motherthat Elenita didn't even shed a tear but

packedinstead what little she could carry and got

on the bus with another girl. Neither one said where they were going, but she told themshewas headed for whatever the end of the bus line would be. Clearly, neither the mother nor the gossiping, curious women had expected such an outcome. Itwas simply unheardof that a girl would just pack up and leave.

"Look at Nieves's daughter," they said to each other, which was exactly the problemas Elenita saw it. She had spent the better part of her life struggling with her own awareness of what itmeant to be Nieves's daughter, especially after she had come to recognizethat Nieves's crime was no different from her own. She too had fallen in love with a

woman, but the wagging tongues had won, beaten her into submission; she walked

through town amarked woman whom everybody pitied and whispered about, but no oneeven addressed directly by her name. Elenita surprised her often when she called out hername on the street and walked beside her on her way to her mother's home. Nieves neverhad much to say as shewalked, head down, wrapped in a sweater and herself. Elenita toldherself then that she would never end up an outcast. She would leave first, even if it meantthat she must turn her back on her family.

When Elenita left, a Maestra thought that she too should get on the bus and followher to seewhat she could do, but lacking a home of her own with which to offer shelter,La Maestra waited, torn. If she could only say, "mi casa es tu casa," like her father had said

somany times to his friends, she could have perhaps kept Elenita from leaving until shefinished school. She could have offered safety, something most kids lacked; instead,Elenita left, and La Maestra knew that her brilliant student would have very few choiceswherever she went. Even inHabana, if that's where the bus took her, Elenita would needa place to live, a job, something to live for.

"She has love," La Maestra reminded herself as she covered her eyes with her spreadhands. "It would have to do."

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