Stories | Autumn 2022

The Wall

by Carolina Rivera Escamilla

[ A version of this story was previously published in the author’s collections of short stories …After … ]

I like the brick wall, the one Papá built of brick. The other ones are made of corrugated metal like at my friend Cande’s house, although mine are shiny and new, while hers are rusty and decaying with holes. My little brothers yell to her from the street, “Your house is a colander,” and Cande hurls at them the first stone she finds on her patio, stones with fallen coffee tree leaves stuck to them. Her house is inside a coffee grove. Mine is on the edge of a gully. I always defend Cande. I invite her in the afternoons to touch the brick wall and to play tic tac toe on it. 

Papá tells us he built the brick wall from bricks left over from the last mansion he finished in the neighborhood of Escalón. People from my neighborhood, my girlfriends, my sisters, and brothers get jealous of me, because I love my wall. They tell me that I nurture that wall like I do our baby sister. To her I give kisses all over her little face, as I comb her fine hair. 

Before Christmas arrives, my brothers, sisters and I remove everything from the wall to paint it. My sister Estela and I, as the older ones, get to give orders to the little ones. My older brothers do not want to paint the wall with us anymore. They say that is a game for kids, not for them. They exit the house wearing their bell bottom pants and their long hair covering their faces. The oldest takes his guitar. When I go out to see where they are going, they have already joined friends who are parked on a corner of the street. 

Nevertheless, today, it is they who blend the whitewash for us before they go. They mix it in a barrel that they themselves cut down to lower it to our size, so we can all reach the barrel’s bottom with our rough brushes. Angel, the eldest, had already drawn a blue window with clouds that look like mice under an orange sun on the outside of the wall, and he tells us, “Do not even touch the exterior wall. Don’t even look at the wall on the outside. Stay inside to paint. I’m working on a mural outside.” We all peek at the outside mural as soon as Angel is out of sight. 

On the inside wall usually hang the most important family objects. So, three days before Christmas, my sister and I take down the calendars that the store lady, Nata, gave us last Christmas; a poster of El Divino Salvador del Mundo; a fake stone necklace that hangs from a rusted nail; and the two felt-covered pieces of soda cork covered with purple and red velvet my sister and I made as gifts last Mothers’ Day. Mine has the shape of a vine with grapes, and my sister’s is shaped like a strawberry. When I take these down from among all the other Mothers’ Day gifts, I sneeze as a layer of fine dust fans out into the space. We all laugh because Javier, the youngest of us, tries to grab the dust sparkles to save them in his pants’ pocket. The gifts from my little brothers are always color-pencil drawings inside heart-shaped construction paper. 

Estela is in charge of taking down the photographs of my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and the pencil portraits of my mother and father from when they were twenty and twenty-seven years old, and the photos of my older brothers. Seven of these are very fine drawings in pencil, drawn by an artist friend of my oldest brother. One day he visited us, and Mamá gave him some colones and the seven oxidizing photos. One month later, Angel’s friend delivered the yellow-brown photos and their drawings that looked exactly like the photos, except new. Mamá had them framed in black and white frames with glass. The portraits show more emotions and feelings within their beautiful black and brown eyes than the original pictures. We hang them on the wall. Any important thing must go on the brick wall. 

My little brothers line up along the wall to splash cups of water on it. Then we give each a soapy rag to wipe the wall as hard as they can. My brother Antonio, Junior, is in charge of pulling nails from the wall. He likes that job because he can use Papá’s hammer, which he hangs on his belt just like Papá. 

I always invite Cande to help us paint the wall, and if there is some paint left, we haul the barrel over to her house to paint the corrugated metal walls on the inside of her house. Last time we painted, the whitewash did not go very well, as the paint did not stay white, but dissolved into a color not unlike Mamá’s old photos. Nevertheless, Cande says that it does not matter; the walls look better urine yellow than sooty black from the oven and rusty brown from all the leaks. 

With Estela we finally bring over the barrel filled with whitewash to our wall. This year Cande is not here. The four brushes made from mezcal look like horses’ tails and are already in my little brothers’ hands. When the barrel comes, they all come at once, surround it, but before they can submerge the brushes, we interrupt them and tell them to put the brushes on the floor. Their happy sunflower faces shift immediately into withering flowers, as they bend down their heads and place the four brushes on the floor. After a brief silence, I explain to them that Estela and I will paint the top part of the wall. I pick up two of the brushes. “Do not get too close to us as we paint up high, because if the whitewash splatters and falls on your face, you could go blind, and if it falls on your skin, you might disappear.” I tell them this, and all seven of them move away from us. Estela tells five of them, “Go out to play now.” They obediently disappear out the door. 

She moves the last two side-by-side a little away from the wall. I take Antonio, Jr., and my sister takes Javier. She stands Javier on a chair facing the wall. “Close your eyes, you have to paint with your senses.” Javier takes the paintbrush, and before his brush can touch the wall, whitewash somehow splatters onto his face. We take him down fast from the chair and carry him to the barrel under the mango tree. The big barrel is full of water from the last two months’ storms. We throw two buckets full of water on him, and he starts screaming, “I can’t see, I can’t see, the whitewash has left me blind.” We laugh. 

Before we get back to our task, Estela changes Javier out of his wet clothes and puts him to bed, adding a bit of drama by covering his eyes with a piece of cloth. The traumatized Javier falls asleep. Estela, Antonio, Jr., and I finish painting the wall. My little brothers and little sister help us after the wall is dry; we show them how to do touch-ups. As they sponge the wall with dry patches of cloth, they remind me of how Mamá would dip clean cloth into beans and soups to feed us tastes of food when we were babies. Now my brothers feed the wall as once we were fed. Mamá and Papá arrive home near sunset, and they congratulate us for the work. 

The wall looks wider, and I imagine it like a sea. In an instant, it transforms itself into a desert with short pathways. The wall is the bed I dream of having there against it. It becomes a canoe and takes me to the other side of the world, perhaps China. I weave myself into the wall, and now both the wall and I become a warm blanket that covers the roof of this little house, while my brothers and sisters and parents sleep. Mamá tells us it is time to get ready to go to bed in our sleeping areas. Papá tells us that later he will give some extra brushing to even out the wall’s white color. 

Since the sun is already set, the night looks divided to me between the stark light that reflects from the living room wall and the dull light reflected in all the corrugated metal walls. I imagine the wall is a purple moon. I sit on top of it to see all the world’s Christmas trees. If I had had other paint colors, I would have painted it the color of a late red afternoon over a baby blue sky with horizons in violet, purple, yellow, even green. And there would be Estela and my brothers and I playing hopscotch. But we only have whitewash, because real paint is too expensive, and Papá and Mamá do not have money to buy colored paint. Yet I have seen my wall painted like a sunset in my dreams. I wash up and go to bed. 

Late at night, when everyone is knocked out, or dizzy, as my Papá says, I get up to examine the wall. She does not want to go to sleep either, so I join the wall as we illuminate the silence of the night. The paint is nearly dry, so I softly run my fingers over her, carefully plucking the mescal hairs that stayed on her while we were painting. The removed hairs leave prints that look like skinny drunk serpents. They’re veins in her white body. From a distance in the living room, I see the brick wall like a child’s baptismal gown, boxed among the other three corrugated dull metal walls. Christmas always finds our brick wall ready to be dressed again in new jewelry, school gifts, as she readies herself to play with friends like Cande and to trace out the New Year. I kneel and contemplate her, as though she is my patron saint, or the witch who will work miracles for me. I like her eyes. I am the only one who knows where they are since I invented them for her. They are watermelon seeds on a cotton tablecloth, and her sunflower eyelashes cover me when I hear the neighborhood dogs start barking.