At the Bottom of a Little Box The first time I saw Bisa Bea she was very well hidden I only found her because my mother was cleaning up My mother is very nice She doesn’t usually worry about neatness the way other mothers do Sometimes she leaves things all over the house and when she needs something she drives us crazy turning everything upside down But sometimes she goes on a real rampage She does a general cleaning as she likes to say She cleans and cleans and cleans for two or three days in a row She moves everything around rips up paper and piles up the old clothes she never wears She finds lots of things she thought she had lost She tosses old magazines into the trash and gives me lots of paper to use in my art class at school And she always has surprises for me like the sparkling colored necklace she found one day and gave me for my costume box It was during one of my mother’s general clean-ups that I met Bisa Bea It was like the story of the giant that my aunt loves to tell Have you heard it It goes something like this There was a rock in the ocean and inside the rock there was an egg and inside the egg there was a candle and whoever blew out the candle would kill the giant Of course there was no giant in my mother’s general clean-up No egg either But there was a pink candle from my first birthday
party which she kept as a souvenir inside my old shoe from when I was a baby But I am actually telling the story of the giant because I wanted to tell Bisa Bea’s story in the same way There was a closet inside my mother’s bedroom and inside the closet there was a trunk and inside the trunk there was a box and inside the box there was an envelope and inside the envelope there was a stack of pictures and in one of the pictures there was Bisa Bea I didn’t know this at first I came home from school and saw my mother’s bedroom door open the closet door open the trunk wide open and Mama sitting barefoot and her hair a mess with a box in her hand I kissed her and looked down at the box It was the most beautiful thing in the world A box made of different-colored woods some dark and some light forming patterns a landscape with a hill a little house a pine tree and a few clouds in the sky My mother opened this box and took a wrinkled gray envelope from the very bottom What’s inside it Mama I don’t remember Let’s have a look It’s full of things The envelope’s very thick And so it was stuffed with lots of photos There was one of a bunch of serious-looking people in a square There was another of a whole family with lots of kids and even a little dog gathered under the statue of Christ the Redeemer that sits on a mountain looking down over Rio There was still another of a little girl with ribbons in her hair sitting on a bush that looked like a camel Can you believe it I was impressed
Mama how can a plant look like an animal Long ago people cut bushes into shapes Some were round others resembled chairs still others looked like animals This picture was taken in Paris Park which had a little pond and a fountain that was lit with colored lights at night It was like a lit water balloon on the ground How do you know these things Because I remember darling I’m that little girl No Mama you’re kidding I glanced back and forth from my mother to the photo of the little girl It was sweet to see my mother as a kid sitting on a camel’s hump thinking about a water balloon And it was strange seeing her grown up sitting in front of me on the floor explaining all this We rode trolleys It was so much fun Everything was fresh and open Sometimes there were even two cars We’d pay for the ride and the conductor would pull a cord and ring a bell There was a kind of clock way up high and the numbers went up depending on how many people got on the trolley I tried to imagine what that was like I knew that a trolley was some kind of city train Once I had seen one in a TV movie and I was dying to know more Did the conductor have to let go of the steering wheel to pull the cord Wasn’t it dangerous My mother smiled Where did you get that idea The trolley was the least dangerous thing in the whole world The conductor had nothing to do with the steering wheel He only made sure people paid The
motorman was the one who steered We were looking at the photos and talking when all of a sudden I saw the nicest picture you can imagine It wasn’t square or rectangular like the pictures you normally see It was round and a bit long oval my mother later explained like an egg And it wasn’t black-and-white or in color It was brown and light beige Mama told me that old pictures were usually that color and it was called sepia And the photo wasn’t loose like the pictures you pick up from the photo store in a small album or inside an envelope Not like that That oval and sepia picture was mounted on a stiff piece of gray paper that had paper flowers on it The decorations were kind of swollen up It was nice to run your finger over the raised parts And best of all right in the middle was a pretty little girl her hair in curls wearing a light-colored dress covered with ribbons and lace and beads She was holding a doll with a hat in one hand and some kind of bicycle wheel not attached to a bike and without spokes in the other It was a sort of metal circle Mama can I have that picture of the doll That’s not a doll sweetie It’s a picture of Abuela Beatriz I don’t know that grandmother I only know Abuela Dina and Abuela Esther Are there others Mama
