Something Fierce by Carmen Aguirre Read Free Book Online Page B

powder keg, my mother said, and nobody knew what was going to happen next.
    The Siles family’s three maids, two young teenagers and an older woman, slept on bundles of hay brought into the landlords’ kitchen late at night. They washed themselves in the morning in the cement laundry sink in the courtyard, using pails to shampoo their hair in the five o’clock highland cold, when a veil of frost covered the city. I loved to watch them braid their hair and weave coloured wool into it. The maids talked in Aymara. They liked to laugh long and loudly, but I could also hear them cry late at night. They scrubbed the landlords’ clothes in the cement sink in ice-cold water until their hands bled. Often Señora Siles would monitor them: “More bleach on that one, you Indian. Or don’t you know the meaning of white?” The clothes were hung to dry, and when they were taken down in the late afternoon, every last piece was ironed. The maids swept, washed and waxed the floors in the landlords’ vast house, on all fours. They cooked four meals a day from scratch, kept an eye on Pedro, made the beds, scrubbed the three bathrooms clean, tended to the garden and did the shopping at a nearby market, where they were allowed to go for only half an hour at a time. The walls of the courtyard were topped with broken bottles encased in the cement. The jagged edges pointed straight up to keep thieves out and the maids in. If they were late getting back, Señora Siles would pull their braids and spit in their faces. Her shrieks of “Stupid, lazy Indian!” overtook house, garden and alley. Ale and I watched it all from our kitchen window, where we were peeling potatoes and boiling the corn. On a day when the punishment was particularly harsh, Ale exclaimed, “I will never be poor. If you’re poor, that’s how people treat you.”
    â€œBut that’s why we’re here,” I said. “To participate in the struggle to change all this.”
    â€œNo. I don’t care about the struggle. I will never be poor.”
    The maids got two hours off on Sundays, between three and five in the afternoon. In preparation, they shined their braids, added coloured pompoms to the ends and put tiny gold hoops in their ears. Each pulled out a velvet skirt and pinned an embroidered shawl over her shoulders. A bowler hat and a pair of flats with starched bows completed the look. They were beaming by the time they boarded the bus to Plaza Murillo, and didn’t seem to mind that Ale and I were tagging along, although of course we’d go our own way once we got there. Dozens of buses were headed to the centre of the city, crammed with maids and the men who would woo them as they walked in big circles around each other in the plaza. Shoeshine boys grabbed the buses’ back bumpers, their wares on their backs and their feet on homemade skateboards. Vendors in white pleated smocks held cotton candy like little pink clouds above their heads. University students with ancient typewriters strapped to their backs made the pilgrimage along the cobblestones, card table under one arm, block of paper under the other. They hoped to make a few bucks by taking dictation from the maids, who maybe had to send a letter to an important someone. The men who received the letters would pay some other student to have them read.
    Organizers from the domestic workers’ union were also out in full force, speaking urgently to maids of all ages about a planned general strike. Most maids were new to the city, and many of them didn’t get paid. They simply worked as slaves in exchange for room and board. If a maid was impregnated by one of the males of the house, she’d get fired and thrown into the street, and then what? Ale and I heard all this from a woman shouting through a bullhorn. We didn’t get too close to the action, though. Bob had warned us that no matter how much solidarity we felt for the maids, we