Reina — The Queen

When I was introduced to Magdalena’s housekeeper, I was friendly, warm and low-key. I knew I was about to be spending a long time with her since she lives with Magdalena except on weekends, and wanted to get off to a good start. I tried to talk with her as best I could in my limited Spanish. When Magdalena and I would talk in English, I’d still include Reina in the conversation visually.

Reina spoke very quickly, and in a kind of Spanish I hadn’t heard and didn’t understand: sometimes grammatically incorrect so even I noticed (genders switched on some nouns), and put diminutives on everything so at first I couldn’t figure out the root word. She seemed frustrated by my lack of comprehension, with the occasional eye roll. I asked her in Spanish please to speak more slowly, but she wouldn’t.

I immediately began to get the feeling she didn’t like me. She was, indeed, queen of that realm. I hadn’t been there more than a few days before she asked me when I was leaving. She regularly beat the dog. She’d scream for me from downstairs when it was time to eat. When I was in the middle of a sentence, with her or Magdalena, she blatantly interrupted me. That happened more times than I can count.

As time passed, she got bolder. When Magdalena wasn’t around, she’d try to boss me. One day she tried to get me to change my sheets, which didn’t need changing and that was her job. She’d get visibly pissed when I didn’t understand her. I started to intentionally not understand her when she was bossing.

She watched my every movement. At the kitchen table she’d been looking down at her food but her eyes were on me, watching my hands and my face. One day she saw me cutting off some mold from the papaya at breakfast. Magda wasn’t there. I was trying to be discreet but every time I moved my hand I felt her eyes on me. She got up to go beat the dog or something, and I raced over and scraped my remaining papaya into the trash and buried it, and then ran back to the table. When she came back she saw no food on my plate, went to the trash and found what I’d done. She started yelling. I didn’t know enough Spanish to know how to handle it. I tried to say I had an allergy to mold, but didn’t know the word for mold. And really, I there was no way to discuss it without being impolite: pointing out the mold on the food one has been given.

Well, I thought I’d heard the end of it, but at the next breakfast there was no fruit at my place as there had been every day for about a month. I didn’t say anything as I saw them take their first bites of their fruit. “You can’t have any. You’re allergic to it,” said Magdalena. Magdalena had told on me. And she had obviously heard the part about “allergic.” “Of course I’m not allergic to it. I’ve eaten it every day since I’ve been here,” I told Magdalena. “No,” she persisted. “You must be allergic to it because you threw it out yesterday and that’s what you told Reina.”

I was up against a wall. I was being punished and I had no idea why. I had the choice either to eat no fruit for the rest of my time there, or try to explain. I need fruit, and I resented the little victory dance I could see in Reina’s eyes as she saw me “in trouble.” There was no polite way to say it: I have an allergy to mold. You gave me moldy food. No matter how gracefully I phrased it, that’s the message. Magda got angry: “I’ve been having MATs here for forty years. I know what kind of food you need. I would never give you moldy food.”

“It was probably my imagination,” I said.

It wasn’t.

I didn’t and don’t understand why such a huge deal was made over this, and why Reina wanted to stir up trouble.

Daily she tortured me. She talked about me in front of me in Spanish. I heard her called me floja. I asked Magdalena, “Why is she calling me ‘lazy.’”? I was told I’d left some wrinkles in my bed when I made it, and I had piles of school paperwork on top of my chest of drawers.

I’d like to point out that I am a very polite person who leaves a small footprint when in someone else’s house. I offer to help. I keep out of other people’s way. I don’t leave my stuff around. I wash my own dishes when appropriate.

But no matter what I did, it was wrong. I cleared the table after one dinner and Reina screeched at me not to put the dishes wherever I was putting them. One day she saw me fill my toothbrushing cup with purified water and told me never to use that for my teeth or tea. (I later talked to Magda who said it was fine if I used it; I said I wanted to be safe on that front, since I’d gotten sick in Guatemala from water once.) One day I brought a blue plastic cup up to my room and when Reina found it she gave me a squawking lecture about not using the tall plastic cups upstairs. Another time I brought a short blue plastic cup to my room and she gave me a five-minute lecture, with arm-waving and anger, about that I needed to use only the YELLOW, short plastic cups upstairs.

I took to sneaking downstairs at night to fill my toothbrushing cup, and waited till she went to bed before heating a cup of purified water for my nightly tea.

I could (and probably will) go on and on.

One of my first reactions was one of understanding: this is a woman who probably has nothing in her life, and that her relationship with Magda’s family, and her attachment to their realm, was probably the only thing she felt was hers. She is illiterate, which I believe must be demoralizing. I was an intruder and she couldn’t even understand what I was saying. I was taking Magdalena’s attention. Sometimes I’d laugh with Magda at something she couldn’t understand. I was there as a teacher — which seems to be an honored status in Mexico — while she was a housekeeper, which is  humble. I never felt that she was or treated her as anything other than an equal, but I supposed that she resented my presence and my advantages in life.

I would often try to talk to her and learned that she hadn’t learned to read and people had told her she had a head of stone. I figured that she had not a head of stone, but a learning disability that these days would be recognized as such. By the end of the stay I decided she did have a head — and a heart — of stone, but that was later.

So initially, though I was frustrated, angry, hurt and experiencing an array of emotions, my predominant feeling and thought was compassion. Yes, I thought her reactions to me were childish, like an older sibling resenting the birth of the next. But I couldn’t fault her for that.

By the end of my time there, I was as emotionally broken down as she must be inside.

Other instances of the bumpiness:

She’d knock at my closed door and say, “Puedo entrar,” but before I could answer she was in the room. While I was working, she sometimes sat at the foot of my bed and talked. I was always polite, always tried to understand and reply. She’d get frustrated with me, though, so I hated even trying to talk to her any more.

Her beating of the dog was daily and devastating to me.

Even till the minute I left she tortured me, insisting I haul my luggage downstairs to wait for the taxi 45 minutes before it was due to arrive, and throwing her arms in the air in rage when I dragged my heavy stuff a block to the street to catch a cab when the scheduled one didn’t arrive.

All I could ever tell was that she was bossy and I was doing SOMETHING that violated her interior world order.