Cuento de Mi Id

“Christina’s World”

In a museum near my current house, there is a copy of the famous Andrew Wyeth painting Christina’s World. I look at the painting and see a young girl staring at a farmhouse. Judging from her posture, it is difficult to say whether she is attempting to crawl toward or away from it. The artist gives us no clues.

Afterward, I drive through the neighborhood where I had spent my childhood and stop by the house where I no longer live.

I gaze at my old house and note with sorrow the boarded-up windows and the recently-painted graffiti. I blame it all on the way the neighborhood has changed and I indulge myself in a spate of forbidden racism, only to start at a sudden noise. I look up to see a small dark-faced boy peering down at me through a broken window pane. But there are no windows in the house anymore. They’re all boarded up.

I describe the incident to my cousin Roberto.

“Of course, you imagined it,” he says.

“Of course,” I say. “But for a moment, I could have sworn the little boy in the window looked like you.”

We both laugh at this point. It is a joyous laughter the type shared by close friends who just happen to be related by blood or marriage.

Then my husband enters the room and the mood soon changes. Roberto’s wife enters soon after.

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There is an old picture in my mother’s family album. A little blonde girl is shying away from the camera and above her shoulder a dark-faced boy stares defiantly into the camera lens. The dark-faced boy is Roberto. The girl, of course, is me. But I should not speak of these things.

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My full name is Maria Christina Fuentes, but my Anglo friends usually call me Chris. My cousin Lupe envies me for having access to an Anglo Christian name. She also envies me my fair complexion and blonde hair.

“The girls in school always made fun of me,” she said. “One girl even said I must be part-Negro.”

In the sixth grade, she wished she had a picture of me to prove that not her relatives were dark. She did not tell me this until she was thirty.

All through school, I had the exact opposite problem. I had a Spanish surname but no apparent physical right to it. I envied my dark-haired cousin Roberto who was so sure of his identity. He carried himself with the grace of a Latin dancer. If only I looked like his sisters, I’d think to myself, I’d be perfect.

One time we were visiting Roberto’s house and I was staying in a room upstairs. One afternoon, I discovered that I felt good to touch myself in a certain way. I was taking advantage of this discovery when I heard a knock on the door. It was Roberto.

“Everyone’s ready to jump in the pool,” he said, peering around the door. “Do you want to come?”

Still ashamed of the part of me I hid with a blanket, I said no.

“Very well,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “If there’s anything else…”

He seemed reluctant to leave for some reason. I was reluctant to have him stay.

“Please leave,” I said.

There seemed to be a hurt expression in his eyes, but he left.

Three years later, he introduced me to the girl he was going to marry after graduation.

For some reason, I expected her to be blonde. She wasn’t. Roberto didn’t marry a blonde until his third marriage…

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Christina crawls toward the farmhouse, but she is scared to enter. It is dangerous to enter, she is told, and she must crawl away. But she does not want to.

Why is that I wonder?

If she is going toward it, why is there not more yearning in her expression? If she is leaving, why does she stare so intently in the opposite direction?

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I used to have a thing for dark-skinned boys. I had the strongest crush on a black Irish boy in my CCD class and another on a Puerto Rican in my high school Spanish class. I used to be flattered by the way the Arab students in college seemed so impressed by my blonde hair. I dared not tell them that I, too, was stunned by their looks.

I finally married an Anglo, but in the end, we broke up. He cheated on me, receiving calls from women who were inevitably shorter and uglier than me, proving mere looks have little to do with mere sex appeal.

I told myself that I had made a mistake marrying an Anglo and resolved to look for the exact opposite.

My Aunt Claudia tried to introduce me to a Mexican boy she knew, but I got nervous and spilled wine on my dress. Afterwards, I was too embarrassed until my cousin Roberto talked me into going out onto the dance floor. It was the loveliest moment of my life.

On the way back to the table, I was tempted to kiss him, but I knew his wife would be jealous if he did. So I kissed his older brother Martin, who promptly frowned and gave me an icy glare.

I am currently married to my second husband -- a Cuban. He is a kind and gentle man and he has given me three children. I am beginning to acknowledge the fact that I’m destined to spend the rest of my life with him, and if by some chance, Roberto and I end up simultaneously widowed or divorced, we’ll probably be too old to consummate a legal marriage. Perhaps it is just as well. Any children borne of such a marriage would undoubtedly be deformed and neither of us would want that to happen.

Yet old feelings don’t die. Roberto still brings a smile to my lips and I his when all else fails.

There is another thing to note as well. One day when I was carrying my third child, I drove by the old house and noticed that it was still boarded up. I saw someone staring down at me from an upper-story window. It was my dark-skinned friend again and this time he had a little blonde girl with him.

I was glad then that the front door had been boarded up as well or else I might have been tempted to go after them. As it was, I drove away from there as fast as I dared.

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The house that Christina stares at in the painting is a tempting refuge, but she dares not enter. Someday she might, but just not yet. I wish the artist had come out with a second painting which resolved the situation once and for all.

But he did not.