My big brother isn’t bad, but you can’t push him. Sometimes he looks sad, even lost. That’s when he wants me to play with him or watch the street. But my stories bother him, and soon he loses interest and tries to change them his way so they’ll be more fun. I resist at first, but then I give in; we’re not talking about my story any more. That doesn’t matter. As long as time passes. He does the same thing when we play. He mixes things up in no particular order: toy soldiers with animals, cars with ships, as if he couldn’t concentrate and follow one story at a time. As soon as he gets a hankering for something, it’s got to be satisfied right away, and if he decides to march his horses through the airplanes, no one can protest. I try to point out that the two don’t go together. He says there aren’t enough cut-out pictures of cars, but plenty of nice horses or bicycles, or Christmas trees, whatever. All his pictures have to be a part of the game. If he gets mad, he’s likely to hit me. Or worse, stop playing completely. He just can’t get caught up in something like I can, he doesn’t take anything seriously. That’s why our games never last long. He’s learned how to string me along, maybe by watching me play alone. He knows I’m having fun even if it seems strange to other people. There’s nothing I can do about it. Sure, it bothers me. Sometimes I wish I was as casual as him, and could break off the game just because someone won’t give me one of his pictures. Next time I’ll surprise him, I tell myself. But he always loses interest first. Or else I give him an excuse by stupidly refusing to share or trade my things. Still, he’s the one who gets first choice every time. Because he’s the eldest, as our father says. That’s the way it is in life: he’ll have to look after the family if ever our parents aren’t there. Not now, he’s too young, our aunts or the maid tell us what to do when our parents are out. Later, though. Later, he’ll do great things, that’s what everybody says. So it’s normal that he gets first choice. Anyway, when he’s through with something, he hands it on to me, right? His old clothes don’t bother me, but when it comes to his pictures and cigar boxes, I pretend not to be disappointed. I’ve got lots of boxes anyway, and an enormous collection of beer-bottle caps, so I never come out on the losing end when it comes time to divide things up.
It’s trickier when it comes to pictures, since magazines are rare at our house. Nothing but love stories, photo-romances and fashion stuff. My mother copies the dresses in the magazines for her customers, or gets ideas for new ones — that’s why we mustn’t cut them up. Eventually, though, we end up with the romances after they’ve been read and reread, folded, crumpled, lent to all the neighbour ladies, cut out if the men are good-looking, kissed, rolled up to kill flies, looked at again if there’s nothing else to read, knelt on to wax the floor or after Maria has finished cutting up fish on the kitchen counter. So we don’t get much in the way of pictures. Besides, they aren’t always the right thing for us since our aunts don’t like war, or wild animals, or the circus, or trucks, or bandits. All they like are men who kiss women, and crying girls, and made-up women, and baby stories. My father doesn’t buy magazines. They’re for lazy, shameless women, he says. He only reads the Sunday paper.
Sometimes I bring back magazines from the bar, things the tobacco-shop clerk doesn’t want. Our collections grow rich with photos of race horses, trucks, policemen and murder victims. Sometimes my mother’s customers leave us the magazines they’ve read, but unfortunately they face the same fate as the romances before our scissors can get to them. Good pictures are precious, and choosing them is serious business. I hide my desires, otherwise my brother will pick the same pictures I want. I’ve also learned to pretend to be upset and sulk, even if I’m happy with what I’ve gotten. If I don’t do that, he might decide to divide everything all over again. Sometimes, though, I forget. I admire my new pictures and say everything that comes into my head, and suddenly he realizes he’s been fooled. What’s even stranger is that I start liking my new pictures right after I’ve made my choice. I don’t know how to explain it, but the moment they become part of my collection, everything seems to work together, as if these were just the pictures I was waiting for to improve my stories. My brother’s never happy. He always wants to trade as soon as I start playing. That’s when I get mad. No more trades. My collection will be thrown off balance; the pictures he wants to give me don’t fit in with what I have. Of course they’ll end up fitting in if he forces me to trade, or if he starts to cry and our mother steps in and makes us combine both our collections and divide them up again, fair and square. Sometimes I get so mad that I use my fists right away, and that starts a fight that brings the women down on our heads. Worst of all, when they punish us, sometimes they rip up our pictures. That’s the last thing I want. I wasn’t really mad anyway, I was just exaggerating my anger to screw up the courage to hit him. That kind of stupidity irritates me, because I realize I like my things more than he does his.
Our games always end in argument and disappointment. But they break up the long stretches of boredom as we sit, withdrawn, even though we’re looking out the window together. Watching the street from our third-floor flat is everybody’s favourite activity. Except Maria, who can only do it when she’s finished her work in the kitchen and if my mother forgets to give her other chores. The street is broad with heavy traffic, and accidents are frequent. I can spend hours counting cars, or shooting all the red ones using my finger as a pistol. My brother shoots red cars, too, but he always scores more than me. He’s cheating, I tell him. That was so a red car, he answers, sometimes two or three in a row. While I argue he keeps right on shooting, running up his score. He cheats when we shoot at passengers in convertibles, too, always counting more people than there really are and adding them up so fast I can’t keep track. If I spot a car full of people before he does, he shoots at the same time I do, claiming that my aim is off, and that I only wounded them. For him, winning is important, not playing the game.
My brother is completely different from me, starting with his colour. He’s red-headed like my father and fairer, too; his eyes are green and he sweats a lot. We’re the same height, but he’s stronger and heavier. Our mother is always comparing us and telling me I’m going to die of tuberculosis. She’s got an obsession with tuberculosis, even if no one really knows exactly what tuberculosis is. In her eyes I’m thin and pale, and since I’m a bit of a dreamer, she thinks I’m sick.
It’s true that my skin and eyes are darker. Everyone calls me “Blackie.” For a long time it bothered me, then I got used to it. Now it even makes me a little proud, as if black meant something tender, something special. I know I’m not really black. Not like the black women who work in the kitchen. It’s the same word, but in my head it doesn’t mean the same thing. When my father calls me “Blackie,” it’s got nothing to do with what he means when he says that blacks are like animals. My mother says “nigger” instead of “black” when she talks about black people. And she tacks on, “When niggers don’t dirty the entrance, they dirty the exit “Which isn’t so easy to figure out because all her black girlfriends aren’t niggers. She likes them a lot, and respects them. “Nigger” means someone she doesn’t like, something like pest, demon, devil, witch, Satan, evil thing, shameless, Crux Credo, Virgin Mary, syphilitic, son of a bitch, skin and bones, wretch. If she’s chasing me with her whip and I manage to escape, she calls me “nigger,” or even “little nigger.” “Come here, little nigger, you shameless brat. So that’s it, you want to kill your mother, you dirty little pest?”