The Roscillos, 1965

Thick drops of red would drip to the floor. One by one. They had immigrated from the tips of the broken glass pieces of the jar that sat on the white porcelain counter to the kitchen floor. Loli drew her finger carefully against the biggest piece of the injured jar and tasted remnants of jam. De fresas. She looked around the kitchen and everything was a mess. There was mush of flour spattered across the kitchen floor. The flour that was also dripping on some parts of the counter gave sign that was someone had been here and not just a ghost. Evidence of footsteps could be seen scattered across the mud-red cobblestoned floor that traced all the way to the steps in the backyard that led to the house. Outside the chickens were clucking away and Loli could hear their wings hit the cage for a desperate attempt to free themselves. She tried her best to step over the broken pieces of glass that resembled small diamonds as to not break more. Platanos, miel, arina, azucar, cacao and a piece of an apple were also in this mess. At times she didn’t mind stepping on the really small pieces because of the slow crrrnch crrrnch noise that sounded from below her shiny black Mary Jane’s.

She had decided to enter through the back of the house after walking from the collegio. The front of her home was the bakery that her mother ran. Loli wanted to avoid the front of the store to not encounter the senoras who talk about nuisances. Que hermosa, so tall! I hear you’re doing very well in school, puro 10. You know mi hijo, Danielo? He talks about you all day. Loli why don’t you help your mom in the store? Dios mio, she’s getting so tall. When she entered the backyard, Titan, (pronounced as tee-tan) the large black-as-midnight Rottweiler began barking and snaring his saliva-drenched teeth at Loli?? The voice was distant and tiny and it belonged to her brother. She walked up the four stone stairs and entered the back of the house. The yellow walls of the hallway leading to the living room, of where photos of her family and birthdays and baptisms and confirmations and marriages and all sorts of occasions that ever occurred, smeared with jam. Strawberry jam. What did he do now? She heard crying from around the couch. “Loli?” the seven-year old’s voice inquired most desperately. Loli followed the crying to the yellow leathered lounge chair located in front of the window of the living room. In the corner of the living room, across from the dining room, below the built-in bookcase where there were books that belonged to her father Don Eduardo and his statuette of La Virgin, between the couch and its matching chair was her little brother. She sat on the chair as it crunched while she moved and leaned over the armrest to look at her brother. The large brown door next to her right shoulder was the entrance to the bakery and no clucking came from inside of it, her mother must have gone on an errand.

“What are you doing there?” she asked her brother who had pulled his legs up to his chest and was crying silently into his knees.

He hadn’t changed from his school uniform yet. The small dark boy with his large brown eyes filled with tears looked up abruptly and appeared relieved when he saw his sister. He was the darkest of the children and the most energetic, unlike his slightly pale siblings. Charracas, whose real name was Eduardo like his father said, “I thought you were Mama,” he said wiping his eyes with his small jam-ridden hands.
“What happened? Where’s Mama?”

“Well, I didn’t mean to make a relajo but it’s just, I was hungry and Mama wasn’t home. I wanted to make a cake by myself and then the kitten, you know Josito jumped onto the bag of flour and then...” he started to cry again.

She shushed him to be quiet but not forcefully and pulled her thin brown hair into a pony tail. “We need to clean the mess before Mom gets home, Nos va a fajiar si ve este relajo...” she said in a sing-song voice and took his hand as they ran to clean the kitchen.
They swept and wiped with water and soap and sponges and wooden mops trying their best to clean the kitchen before their mother came home. Bubbles would pop and sometimes they’d fall on the slippery parts of the floor. Sometimes the kittens would get in the way and they would meow in their annoyed tone if Loli swept too much of the messs in their way.

Everything was getting into top shape by the time Dona Irene was leaving Avelia’s, her favorite hairdresser and childhood friend. She wasn’t returning in a rush with her brand new hair-do, and bright red lipstick. Her heals were high but quiet as she walked down the street gracefully, as though she was still a 16-year-old girl in the hallways where the nuns would scold them for high skirts. Everyone always said that Dona Irene was the classiest woman in the town of Matagalpa. Anyone who had good taste and money could come and buy from her bakery. She made everything by herself, with the help of Fini, the servant girl.

Some of the other bakeries in town could not compete with Irene’s Panaderia, she had everything. The miel for roscias were brought in and grown from the family’s finca that Irene’s father bought when he received his first paycheck. Fini was 15 years old and did everything quietly, delicately and usually slowly. She woke up early in the morning to attend to her favorite part of the day when she could feed the birds in their cages. Fini’s family was from el monte of Dario and in order to help the family get by either had to sell fruits in the highway risking all sorts of dangers, or move away from her family and help take care of another and still be given the chance to go to school. Fini was this quiet girl, who Alfredo the eldest son had a bit of a crush on. Well it wasn’t just a bit of a crush, for him it was silent passion that he never told anyone, not even his cousin. He didn’t think that she knew how he felt, because of his studious manner and role as the eldest son of one the well-known families in town. He could never allow himself to make his feelings public.

“Estas cachimbado, hijue puta!!!” his cousin Hector would yell obnoxiously reaching certain voice pitches that only Titan could hear sometimes and nudged his elbow into Alfredo’s arm as Fini was approaching them with a sea green pail of water.

They laid back on the green walls outside the house. They chewed on icacos en miel. These were the sweetest dulces that his mother made. They were slimy looking melted honey that had a gel-like substance surrounding a walnut, best eaten cold. Hector didn’t nudge because it was Fini, he nudged because he knew his cousin was in deep but he didn’t know with whom. But it wasn’t love that Hector thought, his idea of romance was taking his girl to have sex somewhere other than his car.
She smiled and greeted the boys. Alfredo dug his hands into the pockets of his navy blue school pants and nodded and smiled sheepishly and then for some reason took his glasses off to wipe them as she stopped in front of them. When he put his glasses on he saw that she was sweating a little bit at her forehead. The weather was humid today like it had been for the past week. Everyone was fanning themselves and talking faster on their porches or on the streets to distract themselves from the heat. He could see this as he looked at her brown-gold hair that was braided. But he did this quickly as he spoke to her, not at pauses. It would be too obvious if he stared at her and then spoke to her.

“Senora Irene says for you to open the door since she left you with the keys today to the store.” she said. He nodded and stood there silent.

Her face went from serene to slightly impatient.

“I’ll wait for you in front of the house, then,” she said and walked away with the pail.
He ran his fingers through his hair in deep frustration, What an idiot, why didn’t you say something? Idiota. He said goodbye to his cousin and rushed after her. Hector yelled something to him, but Alfredo ignored it. When he arrived to the corner of his home, Fini was standing there patiently with the pail of water and soap. She was dark, but not like his brother. Charracas looked like a devil, darkened by hanging out with the kids of the barrio and rolling around in the dirt. Fini wasn’t dark that was too sinister to describe her. She was olive-skinned as if all she did was live on the beach, even though she grew up in the monte, as if something from heaven had reached down to her every morning to give her this glow. She smiled again when he arrived to the door, the entrance to the bakery. She was always calm even when his mother was scolding her for something silly like not mopping the floor right. After Alfredo opened the gate he let her pass and she began to set up to clean. He went behind the case to steal a piece of polborones and as he was crouching down to grab one he could see her cleaning the floor through the glass. The water caused her skin to glow even more. She cleaned quietly and delicately.

He recalled the earliest moment that he could never forget of his childhood. They, he and Fini were children and he was eating strawberry ice cream in the backyard. Fini had just arrived to the house three days before that and had been crying every morning before she went to start cleaning with Zsalina, a 60-year-old woman who had one eye, and never told anyone why. When she came out he was sitting there finishing off his ice cream. She was staring at it, looking hungry. People aren’t fed very often in el monte. He gave her the cone and she gladly took it and ate it as if it was the most precious food that was ever bestowed to anyone. She gave him a quick peck on the lips, it was something purely innocent at the time and he felt embarrassed that his lips were sticky from the ice cream. He couldn’t remember why she did, but he never forgot. Even when he dated Helena, one of the prettiest girls in town, there was something that she could never stir in him that Fini could do simply by folding clothes outside or by chewing on icacos en miel. Delicately and quietly. When he finally realized that he had been staring long enough he made himself look busy. He would open the pantries and windows and sat on the stool at the register and would wait until his mother came back.