Caramelo Read Online Free PDF Page B

for the midday meal. We run up and down the stairs and across the courtyard chasing each other through the back apartments where the Grandparents, Aunty Light-Skin, and Antonieta Araceli live, and through the front apartments where we stay.
    We like being seen on the roof, like house servants, without so much as thinking what passersby might mistake us for. We try sneaking into the Grandparents’ bedroom when no one is looking, which the Awful Grandmother strictly forbids. All this we do and more. Antonieta Araceli faithfully reports as much to the Awful Grandmother, and the Awful Grandmother herself has seen how these children raised on the other side don’t know enough to answer, — ¿Mande usted? to their elders. —What? we say in the horrible language, which the Awful Grandmother hears as ¿Guat? —What? we repeat to each other and to her. The Awful Grandmother shakes her head and mutters, —My daughters-in-law have given birth to a generation of monkeys.
    Mi gorda , my chubby, is what Aunty Light-Skin calls her daughter, Antonieta Araceli. It was her baby name and cute when she was little, but not cute now because Antonieta Araceli is as thin as a shadow. —¡Mi gorda!
    —Mama, please! When are you going to stop calling me that in front of everybody?
    She means in front of us. Antonieta Araceli has decided she’s a grown-up this summer and spends all day in front of the mirror plucking her eyebrows and mustache, but she’s no grown-up. She’s only two months younger than Rafa—thirteen. When the adults aren’t around we shout, —¡Mi gorda! ¡Mi gorda! until she throws something at us.
    —How did you get named Antonieta Araceli, what a funny name?
    —It’s not a funny name. I was named after a Cuban dancer who dances in the movies wearing beautiful outfits. Didn’t you ever hear ofMaría Antonieta Pons? She’s famous and everything. Blond-blond-blond and white-white-white. Very pretty, not like you.
    The Awful Grandmother calls Father mijo. Mijo . My son. — Mijo, mijo . She doesn’t call Uncle Fat-Face or Uncle Baby mijo , even though they’re her sons too. She calls them by their real names, —Federico. Or, —Armando—when she is angry, or their nicknames when she is not. —Fat-Face, Baby! —It’s that when I was a baby I had a fat face, explains Uncle Fat-Face. —It’s that I’m the youngest, says Uncle Baby. As if the Awful Grandmother doesn’t notice Uncle Fat-Face isn’t fat anymore and Uncle Baby isn’t a baby. —It doesn’t matter, says the Awful Grandmother. —All my sons are my sons. They’re just as they were when they were little. I love them all the same, just enough but not too much. She uses the Spanish word hijos , which means sons and children all at once. —And your daughter? I ask. —What about her? The Awful Grandmother gives me that look, as if I’m a pebble in her shoe.
    Aunty Light-Skin’s real name is Norma, but who would think to call her that? She’s always been known as la Güera even when she was a teeny tiny baby because, —Well, just look at her.
    The Awful Grandmother is the one whose name ought to be the Parrot because she talks too much and too loudly, who squawks from the courtyard up to the second-story bedrooms, from the bedrooms down to the kitchen, from the rooftop all through the neighborhood of La Villa, the hills of Tepeyac, the bell tower of la Basílica de la Virgen de Guadalupe, the twin volcanoes—the warrior prince Popocatépetl, the sleeping princess Iztaccíhuatl.
    Father’s name is el Tarzán, Tío Tarzán to my cousins, Uncle Tarzan, even though he doesn’t look like Tarzan at all. In his bathing suit he looks like an Errol Flynn washed up on the beach, pale and skinny as a fish. But when Father was a little boy in Mexico he saw a Johnny Weissmuller movie at the neighborhood movie theater, The Flea. From that moment on, Father’s life was changed. He jumped from a tree holding a branch, only the branch didn’t hold. When