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The Singing Cricket and the Devil
Every evening at 7 p.m. Doña Tomasita turned on the big radio in the
front room and I sat in front of it to listen to "El Grillo Cantor,"
broadcast from Mexico City. I can still sing the introduction to this
show. El Grillo Cantor, the singing cricket, sang about his adventures
in his world of tiny and huge creatures. I told Mother his stories, but
she didn't like crickets. Their songs hid the cries emerging from hell,
she said.
Doña Tomasita looked after me. She was the grandmother of Paula, one of
Mother's friends. She was very old, and toothless. I used to watch
fascinated as she gummed the food around in her open mouth.
Before welfare and social security benefits, women supported their
children as best they could, regardless of the dangers they were exposed
to. Even so, they ran the risk of losing their children because it was
assumed women were morally weak, and they threatened society by raising
a child without a husband. This included widows. Children were taken
from mothers by representatives of respectable organisations consisting
mainly of men and placed in foster homes or orphanages, where presumably
they were loved and no harm ever befell them.
Mother paid various
people to look after me while she worked. Sometimes she was unable to
pick me up on time, due to an employer's caprice. Whenever I stayed
overnight I slept on a single cot against a door in the hallway.
Tomasita urged me to sleep by scratching against my door and telling me
that the devil was trying to get in.
During the day I spent hours playing with my stuffed animals on the
front veranda. Antonia, another of Tomasita's granddaughters, made these
toys for me out of brightly coloured material.
When I was older,
Mother confided that once when I was under a year old she returned from
work and found me naked, crying, and tied with a diaper by an ankle to
the foot of a bed.
Mother's female relatives were all in Mexico, but she had a circle of
nurturing female friends. Some of these were maids too. Other young
women worked at Manotou's, E de la Rosa, and La Popular. One of Mother's
friends was the ticket-taker at a movie theatre. Provided we waited
until the last reel had started, she'd let us in for free. She also gave
us the leftover popcorn. Movies and life were the same to me. I cried
loudly whenever beatings or death occurred on the screen, to Mother's
great annoyance and impatience.
We lived in a single room above
El Monterrey Café. One window faced the old mercado.
Sometimes Mother sent me across the street to buy tortillas while she
watched at the window. The market was permeated with the wonderful
smells of Mexican food. The other window faced the main street, with a
cantina on the corner. We spent hours watching soldiers in different
military uniforms staggering out into the street to throw up, and being
taken away by the MPs.
Other evenings, sitting side by side in
Mother's big bed, we did our embroidery. Mother's family belonged to the
caste that had traditionally been convent- and seminary-educated. To
qualify for the best education, you had to be Castilian and Catholic.
This caste system has operated in Mexico up to recent times. This is
what students protested against, and were killed for, during the Mexico
City Olympics in 1968. There were priests in Mother's family, including
the bishop of Campeche. The girls provided the altar cloths and priests'
ceremonial robes. The education of women was irrelevant since they only
married and had babies.
Mother made exquisite, delicate laces. Some of her embroideries didn't
even show stitches on the reverse side of the cloth. She used a large
wooden embroidery frame, I a small metal one. She had a thick braid of
silk embroidery thread from which she selected the colours and shades
she needed. Two purple bells were my first embroidery effort. The same
rule applies when learning to colour; you have to keep within the lines!
Blackouts were part of everyday life during the war. Everyone knew they had to
be indoors by the appointed hour. One evening Mother picked me up a
little later than usual. She was extremely anxious because we had to be
indoors before all the street lights were turned off, otherwise we'd be
on the streets alone in total darkness. We were almost home when
Brownsville went black and silent.
Mother held my left hand tightly and warned me not to let go, and to
keep my right hand touching the wall as we walked until we reached the
next street. We crossed it and walked stealthily up to our room.
Propping our pillows against the window sill, we watched the lights
playing in the sky and listened to the airplanes flying overhead until
we dropped off to sleep. In the morning, our pillows were still propped
side by side on the window sill.
After the war Mother held onto a
couple of souvenirs: faded little food-ration books. Some time later she
told me that some of her employers wouldn't hire her unless she handed
over some of her food rations.
Mother didn't speak fluent
English. One employer pretended she couldn't understand what Mother was
saying when she asked for her wages, until Mother brought along a friend
to interpret. Then she threw Mother's wages in coins onto the floor.
When I was little Mother complained that I cried too readily. I felt helpless.
Big people were supposed to protect little children, but did a bad job
of it! War scared me. Hunger hurt. El Grillo Cantor was different. He
created a place I could enter fearlessly. He overcame scary things by
being clever. Without killing. And he sang.
Alma Iris Ramirez
Adelaide, South Australia
Published:
November 14,
2005
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