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by Faye Hueston
In 1979, while living in London, I became ill with pesticide poisoning. When years of treatment failed to halt my decline, in August of 1985 I embarked on a radical therapy that had cured a friend of malignant melanoma. This nutritional regime, based on organic raw vegetable juices and coffee enemas, was not cancer-specific, but designed to detoxify the body and rebuild the immune system overall.
The downside was that it took from eighteen months to two years to complete the treatment, and it could be heavy going when “healing reactions” set in. It was also labor-intensive, so I’d have to hire live-in help for the first year. After spending three weeks at a clinic in Mexico learning the drill, I’d be on my own. A friend happened to know of a Portuguese helper whose elderly long-time patient had recently died. We met, she agreed to start in September and was engaged on the spot.
The first week home from the clinic was hectic, trying to maintain an unbroken rhythm of juices, enemas, and meals, while teaching the mechanics of the therapy to the improbably named “Isilda.” Short, squat and tempestuous, Isilda tackled the kitchen chores with a vigor that made up in zest what it lacked in quietude. Her ‘take-charge’ efficiency was a welcome bonus, for it freed me to focus on my body and the book I was trying to finish. Unfortunately, I had not foreseen the hazards of introducing into my quiet way of life the live-in presence of a 45-year-old firebrand.
Deaf to noise and a stranger to silence, Isilda banged doors, ran the vacuum cleaner under my feet while I worked, and flung cutlery into the kitchen drawer with such a clatter that it was a job just to hold my thoughts together. Suspicious of all things mechanical, she took an instant dislike to the Norwalk juicing machine — a costly piece of equipment that had been shipped at great expense from the U.S. and was irreplaceable in England. Dismissing the instruction book with a shrug, she jammed vegetables into the grinder with such ferocity that bits and pieces wound up all over the ceiling and cupboard doors.
“It really is quite simple to avoid this happening, Isilda,” I said, showing her for the nth time how to keep the housing covered during the grinding process. But Isilda and simplicity were not on speaking terms.
“I do how you say,” she replied irritably, “but the ve-ge-tables — they no like to stay in!’
It says much for the Norwalk’s sturdy construction that it withstood twelve months of Isilda’s abuse while churning out the enzyme-rich juices on which the therapy relied. I did sympathize, however, with her complaints about having to make ten juices a day (it should have been thirteen at the start, but she had been warned). Bringing a carrot juice to my desk, she would deposit the glass at my elbow as though it were hemlock, cross her hands over her apron and say, disapprovingly:
“I tell you, my dear, all this juices is no good for your kidneys!” Her view of the salt-free, meat-free organic meals she had to prepare was equally dim. “How you eat this food? Is no taste! When I eat, make me sick!”
She was, of course, free to make for herself whatever her Portuguese palate preferred, but it did not take long to grasp that Isilda was one of life’s grumblers. At first her touchiness amused me, for it was accompanied by a manifest eagerness to help me get well — that is, as long as help could be given in a way that she could understand.
“Tell me how I can help you!” she would cry over my prostrate form when I was too ill almost to speak. Isilda could not understand that all I needed, all I wanted from her was a steady flow of juices, coupled with support for what I was doing, whether she approved of it or not. But convinced the therapy was making me worse, she would plant herself at my bedside, all bossy briskness with arms akimbo on her sturdy hips, and scold:
“This thing you do . . . I no understand. I see you are in pain, you say ‘that is good.’ When I have pain, that is not good. It tell me something wrong. When you are sick, you say ‘that is good;’ when you are more sick, ‘that is better’?” Is crazy therapy!”
“Well . . . could we discuss it some other time Isilda? Just give me until January and we’ll see who’s winning, the therapy or the pain.”
As the therapy progressed Isilda’s care-giving, which should have been a comfort, felt more like a cross. Perhaps the juices were stressing her out, I reflected, or too much praise had gone to her head. Often I had to conceal from her how ill I really felt if I wanted to avoid yet another exhortation to abandon the therapy. If she found me in mid-enema on the bathroom floor, she would stand in the doorway clucking with disapproval and shaking her head: “I tell you my dear — all this enemas is no good for your behind!”
Or, folding her arms over her forbidding bosom, she would observe in a sorrowful tone:
“Frankly, my dear, I tell you this — from the heart, yes? This therapy you do, it make you crackers!”
By December Isilda’s personality had undergone a decisive change, from bossy but helpful to stroppy and despotic. Having shrewdly discerned that I was a wimp, she began to exploit my total dependence upon her. If I made a remark she could construe as remotely critical, she would say: “I do my best.” Or, “You no like, I go!”
Easily intimidated, and too ill to stand up to her blackmail or seek a replacement, I resorted to craven appeasement, which only made her worse. Marching up to the desk, Isilda would plonk down a juice, point to the typewriter, and command: “You put in your book that I go to Heaven for making all this juices! My God, what a job!”
And so, very meekly, I put it in my book.
But she had been warned.
In March of 1986, bored with my culinary sackcloth and ashes, and chafing at the social restraints it imposed, I decided to give a dinner party. After all, I told myself, I deserved a night of wild indulgence after seven months of self-denial. “Isilda,” I announced, cornering her in the kitchen, “we’re going to have a dinner party! What do you think of that?”
She glanced up from the chopping board with a scowl. “What? You make your friends eat this food-with-no-taste?”
“Of course not,” I laughed. “It will be a proper meal, with wine and cheese and — perhaps a ratatouille — and a rich dessert. Moreover, it will give you a change — you’d like that, wouldn’t you?
“You no give your friends this juices,” she warned, beheading a carrot with a vigorous chop. “I no make extra juices!”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I assured her.
In the event the dinner was delicious, the company convivial, and the migraine I woke up with the next morning a beaut.
As the months wore on, Isilda grew more disobliging by the day, her small suspicious eyes narrowing more often, the large peasant hands crossing more defiantly over her apron to denote disapproval. Silent and sullen she still marched ahead of me on the way to the greengrocer, her dominance affirmed by the distance she put between us, no less than the upward thrust of her chin. No week went by without her moaning about the juices and lately she’d been getting the sequence wrong, like an actor stuck in a long-running play who begins to forget his lines. She, however, could leave in September — or the next day, as she kept reminding me, whereas I was stuck with an indefinite run. Quite simply Isilda was bored; and so was I.
By June, the strain of anticipating her moods had begun to tell. Each Iberian oath issuing from the kitchen, each “you-no-like-I-go” ultimatum, made me long for a placid, monosyllabic Swede as her replacement. No governess of my childhood (it was that kind of childhood) had been more domineering — not even the termagant who had washed my mouth out with soap for some childish oath and locked me in a closet as dark as an Egyptian tomb, thus nurturing a lifelong claustrophobia.
One night two weeks before she was to leave, Isilda brought a large suitcase into the room containing the things she planned to send ahead to Portugal. “I bring for you to look before I send; see I no steal nothing.”
“Steal?” I echoed. “Of course I won’t look through your things, Isilda. When have I ever questioned your honesty?”
She made no reply, but trundled the suitcase back to her room, leaving suspicion to hang in the air like a silent rebuke.
Days later, returning from an errand she had run for me at the chemist’s, she thrust her open palm at me with the change. “Here, you count; see I do not steal.”
“I will not count,” I snapped. “What is all this about not stealing, Isilda? You know I’ve never mistrusted you!”
As though trust were an added affront, her mouth tightened and she marched off to the kitchen, hands sweeping the sides of her apron in that gesture of irritation that had seemed so amusing at first, but now made my heart sink. The strain of this sort of thing day after day had taken its toll. Could I endure fourteen more days of Isilda without closing my hands around her throat?
On the eve of her departure she confronted me after dinner, the small gimlet eyes narrowing as she said, or rather demanded: “How much money you give me when I go? Four week vacation, yes?”
Even after a year her audacity could astonish. Legally, there was no obligation to give her a penny, but four weeks was what I had planned. Being ordered to do so, though, was another matter. Anger loosened my reluctant tongue and I lost my temper. “What makes you think I wouldn’t do the right thing by you, Isilda?” I rasped. “Have I ever cheated you? Tell me, have I? Frankly, your attitude these past months has driven me up the wall and as for your complaints, well I’ve had those right up to here! At times your behavior has been so . . . so uncalled for, that it was all I could do to keep from telling you off!”
Stunned by this outburst that took us both by surprise, Isilda was struck wordless for once. For my part, even as the words left my lips I regretted them.
“I’m sorry, Isilda,” I said, anger collapsing like a dud soufflé. “I’ve been a bit on edge lately and . . . well, it’s just that you could have been more helpful at times.” Seeing the storm clouds gather on her brow I added, in a conciliatory tone, “Forgive me.”
But Isilda, for whom a grievance was like gold, was not about to forgive. Turning on her heel she swept wordlessly away, closing her bedroom door with an eloquent bang. Sick with remorse, I spent a sleepless night regretting my loss of temper and wondering what I could do to patch things up before she left. The next morning I waited until she had brought her two suitcases into the hall before attempting to slip the vacation money into her coat pocket, but she pushed my hand angrily away. Seizing the cases she made for the door, pausing only to deliver a final blow: “I think now when I leave, you fumigate my room, yes?”
As I stood there watching her dark figure disappear down the stairs, I wondered if any part of my life made sense any more. Was there something in me that brought out the madness in others, or was I even madder than I could bring myself to believe? I closed the door on her retreating image, reflecting with a leaden heart that such visitations must be sent to try us. No doubt Isilda found me as heavy a number to live with as I found her — although, in a funny way, I was going to miss her. She may have been difficult, but she was never dull.
When I think of her now, I see her enjoying her Bacalhau and Madeira on a balmy evening in a Portuguese piazza, regaling her friends with tales of “all this juices” she had to make in London for the crazy therapy of an American, who was so “crackers” she kept sticking a hose full of coffee up her behind.
Ah well, with luck Isilda will never have to know that it worked.
* * *
Born in Beverly Hills and now living in Cary, NC, Faye Hueston has lived half her life abroad, chiefly in England and France. She has completed two works of non-fiction, one on adoption, the other on her recovery from pesticide poisoning through an alternative therapy. Her previous publishing history involves articles on adoption for the summer 1992 issue of The Aspen Quarterly, and on water divining for the winter 1993 issue of The American Dowser. In 1991 and 1994, she won awards for nonfiction at the Santa Barbara Writers’ conferences.
Copyright 2006 by Faye Hueston. All rights reserved.
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