The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (11)
The maternity ward was crowded with narrow cots and new families. Isabela’s mother cut through the room to get to her daughter’s bedside. Her hair, which had been onyx black the night before, was threaded with silver strands. The woman’s face was hard as marble, her slow, careful steps like she was walking across a tight rope. Guayaquil was a crowded city, but not that big. She feared someone would recognize her, see her breaking her husband’s decree that no one, not even the gardener, was allowed to visit Isabela and the child. A girl, at that.
Roberta Adelina Montoya Urbano stood beside her daughter. She took the baby’s hand and pried apart newborn fingers with nails still so delicate they were almost see-through. She inspected the color, the lines on the palm of her hand like she’d determine her whole future.
“Mamá,” Isabela said.
Roberta shut her eyes. She withdrew a crinkled white envelope from her purse and set it on the bedside table. A good Catholic woman, she had to be able to say to her husband that she hadn’t spoken to Isabela. But he’d never said anything about giving her money.
Isabela drew her baby closer and watched her mother walk away.
A pretty young nurse rounded her bedside. She checked on Isabela’s every comfort, and asked, “What will you call her?”
In the Montoya family, it was tradition to name the first child after the father, wherever he was. But she couldn’t imagine saying his first name for the rest of her life. They’d spent one night together, and then he was gone. Before his departure, he’d given her two things, only one of them a gift. An orchid, a species which only grew in Ecuador. The ship he worked on was exporting them to Europe, but he’d stolen one for her. It was a beautiful flower unlike anything she’d ever seen—white and darkest plum and soft. She still had it, but now it was beige, pressed between the pages of a book she couldn’t will herself to ever finish. The second was her daughter, weightless, fragile, like the same flower, which didn’t need solid ground to grow.
Orquídea.
* * *
Once the sucres in the crinkled white envelope had been stretched as far as they could go, Isabela secured a job working long hours at a doctor’s office on the other side of the city, and a tiny house in an industrial stretch of land by the shore. Though she lived a stone’s throw from her childhood home, the Montoyas didn’t want anything to do with the unwed mother and unlucky girl. A bastard daughter was never to inherit land, titles, her father’s surname, or even love, which would have been free, had that strain of the Montoya clan been in possession of it.
As she grew, Orquídea quickly understood that if she wanted something, she would have to learn all the things that no one would teach her. At five years old, she walked the quarter mile to the pier. An old fisherman, who was nothing more than leathery brown skin and bones, taught her how to fish and clean the pink guts out for dinner. She gave the scraps to the cats that slunk like lazy shadows around the corner from her house.
That long dusty road flanked by cement houses with tin roofs was called La Atarazana, named after the old colonial shipyards. The ships were long gone, but Isabela made a home on the desolate shoreline, and soon, others followed. Among them, Orquídea was known as the peculiar little brown girl with unkempt black curls. Only cats liked to follow her around.
When her mother finally enrolled her in school, she learned to read and write. She also learned how to fight the girls from good families who made fun of her name, her skin, her whole existence. How to take a beating from the teachers who left her arms and hands stinging from the ruler, and later from her mother’s belt for having to be humiliated by having a daughter who fights like a puta machona.
She learned how to stitch her only uniform when the seams split and holes appeared in her socks. She learned where to pinch schoolboys who tried to shove their hands under her skirt or grab the new peach pits of her breasts. She learned how to draw blood from those pinches. She learned to bite and to frown, because it was the only way to avoid getting robbed on the way home from school. When pinching didn’t work, she learned to wield her fishing knife. She’d hold it up to a boy’s crotch and say, “I can gut a fish in two seconds. What do you think I can do to you?” Her heart raced and she was called nasty, rude, savage. But there was no one else to protect her.
She learned that no one was ever going to want her, for reasons she couldn’t control, and that praying to chipped statues of la Virgen María and el ni?ito Jesús didn’t come with anything but silence. She learned to survive and survived by learning.
By the time she was thirteen, she was a full-blown beauty, with lustrous black curls, skin like the darkest honey, but still peculiar and still followed around by cats, though roosters had begun to join her daily parades to the river shore.
Perhaps one of the most important things that Orquídea learned during her adolescence in Guayaquil was the identity of her father. She met him once but didn’t get his name.
On the day that she met her father for the first time, she was seven. Everyone mistook her silence for being dim-witted, but Orquídea was as sharp as the knives in her pocket. She saw the truth in people’s lies. She saw the sin in their deeds. And she saw her own face in a stranger’s. Her father, a Colombian fisherman turned sailor who’d sailed into town only once before that, was tall, with deep black skin, and the kind of smile that made women dizzy. He went back to Isabela Montoya’s old house but was told by a local boy that she no longer lived there, and for a sucre would show the sailor the correct house.