The whole neighborhood has been wrinkled since Mary stopped ironing. There are those who do what they can and you see them out there with four edges on their pants and their shirt collars half burned. Others don’t get along with the iron and go everywhere like magicless genies out of the bottle.
Mary never ironed for me because I was taught since I was 8 years old. Along with sewing, embroidery, crocheting, cooking, washing, scrubbing and cleaning, my mom taught me how to iron. I suppose to make me an autonomous person, but also so that I could take on that task that she disliked so much.
I remember the loads of clothes she ironed on Sundays. My dad only liked to wear long-sleeved shirts. That taste for covering his arms comes from the time when he was mobilized to cut cane. I suppose he wore wrinkled shirts during the harvest, but as a city poet his clothes had to be well ironed.
I started with the most difficult shirts, to get them out of the way quickly. There was no way to smooth out the blue one with thick fabric and the one with green and red stripes; you had to wet them with a cloth and then iron them like crazy. Me, moved, ironing my dad’s shirts, and my friends from high school putting the shirts in the pressure cooker so that they would be wrinkled so they could be fashionable.
On the street I don’t pay attention to people’s clothes, but when I go to the theater, I am a wrinkle detector. I don’t know if it’s because of my rigor as a theater critic or because of so many hours in front of my dad’s shirts. In Cuban theater, wrinkled clothes on stage abound.
The only time I have left Cuba was to Denmark. I was invited to spend 25 days at the Odin Teatret, the most transcendental reference for group theater in the world and composed mainly of women. There I had unforgettable experiences; one of them was repairing an ironing board. One of the most important activities carried out behind the scenes is ironing clothes very well. Each actress does it with astonishing calm and energy, as if the success of the performance depended on that task. The women in the group speak six or seven languages and also master the art of ironing like no one else on world stages.
When I went to Odin my dad had already died and we had given away all of his shirts. I returned from the “first world” with a new vision about ironing. An idyllic, theatrical, astral vision. Now I only iron my son’s uniform shirts and, every time I do it, I remember the Odin actresses and Mary, who ironed the entire neighborhood’s clothes.
Pituca, as they call her, lives right below my apartment. She learned to iron when she was little and she exchanged sewing for ironing with her sister. When they grew up, her sister became a seamstress and she became a professional ironer.
She loved her work, although sometimes Jambrina, who was her husband, brought her four or five people’s clothes at the same time and she didn’t like that. She told him: “When I finish one, you bring me the other. Yes, because that mayhem cannot be.”
In addition, she would have her shots of rum while she ironed in The Penance Room, as she called her workplace. Mary ironed happily, concentrating on her clothes and on her little glass of rum, which the late Jambrina was in charge of refilling. It was, according to her, a relaxing task, because your mind turns white, black, or blue, depending on the color of the clothes in front of you.
In the Penance Room she had her ironing board and her irons. “I had to have spare irons so when the weapon stopped, I could take the other one.” There were several substitute irons. The one she used the most was La Encontrada. She named it that way because the father of her children found it in a trash can and gave it to her. In addition, she had an iron that cost 17 pesos in a state store and another that she called La Tumbabrazo, because it weighed a bunch of kilograms.
The Unbreakable, the one that got her out of all trouble, was an iron made in the USSR of type Y T 1000-1.2 T 4.1 with an aerodynamic shape and an approximate weight of 3 kilograms. Although she stopped ironing a long time ago, she knows by heart the features of her cutting-edge iron. It has a circular red light that indicates power access, three levels and the corresponding settings for ironing nylon, silk, wool, cotton and linen.
Mary took me to the Penance Room and there it was, leaning gracefully against the closet wall. Its extraordinary combination of black and silver provokes the admiration of anyone who approaches this relic. The frank deterioration of its cable is a reliable example of the ravages of time. This iron, Mary tells me excitedly, has survived the voltage ups and downs, the embers and the charcoal, when even without electricity it had to smooth the children’s uniforms and reinforce the pleats on the grandmothers’ skirts.
She only once burned a piece. The heat melted the pants pocket of Félix, a second-floor neighbor and also deceased. But the incident did not tarnish her record as an excellent ironer, nor did it diminish the fame of her Soviet iron.
I have burned a lot of things. Many times it has happened with that iron that “went overboard” and it was like playing Russian roulette. “Let’s see if it doesn’t burn out,” we said at home before starting to iron.
But Mary’s thing is true mastery. At that time, she charged 5 pesos per piece. Almost every day they brought her around 20 and with that little money it was enough for her to live honestly before the pandemic and the economic disorder of our country. She did better ironing than being a teaching assistant in a Children’s Day Care Center, which was what she studied for.
Mary hasn’t ironed for a few years. When I ask her why, she answers me laughing, with that face of hers of happy resignation: “Because I’m tired, Isabelita, I’m tired. What I want is to have a woman in my house who does things for me.”
I love Mary a lot, I like to see her happy and with money. I told her about Odin’s ironing actresses, so she knows that there in Denmark too you have to fight with the iron, to encourage her.
Now she is a messenger and she runs errands for various neighbors. The good thing for her is that fewer and fewer things arrive at the grocer’s and the ironing was done every day.
Now Mary has more time to rest and have her drinks all over the house, not just in the Penance Room. She tells me about those times and I remember Jambrina with a long stick on his shoulders, as if it were a Chinese scaffolding; but instead of buckets of water, he carried racks with ironed clothes.
“I had tremendous prestige ironing,” Mary tells me, and I know it’s true, because in my neighborhood people pray to all the saints to make Pituca want to iron again.
Author
Isabel Cristina
