The Landlord, the Tenant, and the Machete

The story is machete. Blade some eighteen inches long. Curve a Salvadoran classic. Tip duller now than it was before this started.  

Precipitating events: Two women in their ninth decades, living in adjacent rooms, with history. One woman had been haute. Her fingers snapped. Her slick marble floors were to be swept, her baby was to be held, her windows were to be brightened just so, like that, and, por favor, cream for the coffee in the china cups of our guests, and now, again, the slick marble floor was to be swept. The other woman had been her maid. Then, fortunes reversed. Niña Nora lost her wealth, her primacy in the social strata, her polished home, her birds chittering in the blooming bougainvillea garden, her fluency of speech, the use of her right arm and her two legs. Her once-maid had a house of her own, the use of all her limbs, a little storefront situation through which she fed the neighborhood her famous chocolate-dipped bananas.  

And an apartment to rent. Modest, sure. On the outskirts: true. But Niña Nora was now Doña Nora, and she moved in as the maid’s tenant, and she wasn’t the one with the machete. 

Grievance: Imagine two trees fighting for the same patch of dirt. Imagine their roots in a tangle in the darkened underworld—green at first, pliable, for a time, then petrifying. The roots of one tree wrapping the roots of the other tree, and neither yielding ground.  

It isn’t known, it now can’t be known, what shuddered through the bones of the maid all those decades ago.  

Forget: Does one? Ever? Know? 

Knots: A kind of garroting. 

You can live with me, the old maid said. You can live here, as my tenant. Pastries in the morning, whiskey after lunch, chocolate-covered bananas in the afternoon, and Doña Nora with an aide to help with all the rest. The deal was struck. 

No one spoke of trees or roots, of memories that harden. 

It was a fine arrangement: Until it shattered. 

I wasn’t there. I was living far away, in another country, in the house I share with Doña Nora’s son. All I know is that one very early morning, while my mother-in-law was lying in her single bed, lying and lying and waiting for the aide to arrive to begin the lifting, washing, dressing, feeding—waiting for the day, in other words, to begin, just another day at the end of her ninth decade—her former maid who was now her landlord smashed her way into the suite of modest rooms with a primal scream and a steel machete and a demand. She wanted, the landlord said, a certain barbecue grill that Doña Nora had given away to a friend. She wanted that particular grill, and, despite the fact that it was not hers to have, she had to have it now. 

Snap. 

Or else. 

Up went the blade, then down, a slash into the pretty painted antique trunk, where my mother-in-law’s wedding dress lived in cool white folds, where the past lived, the Niña of Nora, the haute of wealth. Up and then down, up and then down, up and then Give me the grill, give me the grill, I am the one with the machete. 

It was the aide who, opening the door on the early morning scene, rescued Doña Nora. It was the aide who called my brother-in-law, who called my husband, who told me. It was the antique trunk that dulled the tip of the machete.  

And the landlord? She got her grill.  

And the tenant? She was scurried away.  

And the roots of the trees? They are claws in the ground. We can’t see them. They’re still fighting. 

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of some forty books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher of memoir, a cofounder of Juncture Workshops, a paper artist, and senior editor of Creative Editions. Her new books are My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera and You Are Not Vanished Here: Essays. More at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com. 

This essay is a Short Reads original.