“If you can dance, at least,” he said, stepping back, chin in hand, looking consideringly at me again.
His name was Arturo Bonifacio Ramos and he was from a country called Argentina, a city called Buenos Aires. Both places might as well have been in fairyland; I’d never heard of them. I would only learn geography later in life when I finally traveled to those places, and even then I counted them as sea journeys—seven days, ten days, three weeks—whatever it took, that’s where they were. Give me a map and ask me to put a finger on Buenos Aires right now and I might easily put a mistaken finger on Cape Town.
Geography, I might not be good at, but I was certainly good at money. Excellent in fact. Within a year I’d gone from that shy, lost young girl ripe for exploitation to a shrewd young woman who knew what she wanted and was hell-bent on getting it. You don’t grow up poor and hungry, demeaned by your neighbors and schoolmates, without acquiring that simple need for … What? I have to think about what it’s for. Not revenge. I did not need that. Just plain “to show them,” I think was all I wanted. And that’s exactly what I did.
It was also a year before I could call Mr. Ramos by his first name, Arturo. And of course he became my first lover. Did I want him as my lover? I certainly was not in love with him. No, what I needed was a pair of arms around me, someone holding me close, my head resting on his masculine shoulder, my heart beating against his. I had never had that, not from any man or woman. My mother was cold and ambitious, affection was not part of her life. She was not the hugger, kiss-good-night mother of my dreams and that I always swore I myself would be, if I ever had a child of my own. Then I would become that “mother,” the giver not simply of life, but of love and protection, determined at all costs to save my child from harm.
The fact is, like everybody else, I had but one mother and I had to put up with her. I had to do as she said. I had to submit to having my hair washed in cold rainwater caught in the bucket under the drainpipe that ran from the gutter along the edge of the roof. Then I had to sit while she tugged a wide-toothed comb through the knots, and afterward smoothed on some kind of oil, the smell of which I could not stand. Ever after, in my life, my hair was taken care of by professionals, by my own hairdresser who treated it gently and used a drop of scented lotion, then polished it with a different kind of oil until it shone smooth against my scalp, a glossy sleek helmet that ended in a single fat braid.
That fiery red braid was to become my signature. I never bobbed my hair even when it was fashionable. Every picture painted of me, every photograph taken throughout my life, every moment in bed with a man, I wore that braid. Of course the men loved to unravel it, to spread my lavish locks across the pillow, to match it up with my lower red fuzz that intrigued them twice as much.
When I first experienced this kind of “intrigue,” the gentle touch of a man’s fingers, I thought this was maybe the way it felt when you died and went to heaven. My entire body soared upward until I seemed to be floating, crying out my joy, screaming for more, more, do not stop …
I wonder how many women know what I mean. So many I met, and with whom I tried to discuss these feelings, simply gazed at me as though I were mad. Sex was for men. Money was what women got for giving them sex. It was a hard lesson, but I learned it.
Only one woman understood, a girl I met in the dressing room backstage at the Royalty Theatre in some small French town where we were both the “chorus” and the “magician’s assistants.” She got sawed in half—I held up the box cut in two to prove it was real. Her name was Milan. I told her I thought it was an odd name for a girl. No odder than yours was her smart answer. At least there’s a reason for mine, she added. I was born in that city.
I had no such reason. Why I was named Jerusha would be forever a mystery though it was believed my mother, still drowsy from the drugs given to help the birth, had really meant to say Josephine. She had a thing for Bonaparte, and for small men, like my father, the “small man” who rarely darkened our doors. Certainly never long enough to pay for us. Poverty was a day-to-day event.