Maling was that person to me. Her family lived in District 3, down the street from our house. She is quite the personality, all four-foot four-inches of her. Like the best, she is warm, caring, and loving. Of course Maling distinguished herself with an occasional disposition to say, indulge in a drink or two. She and her husband Cap were the best and there was no basis to my endearing joke that my taste for a beer or two was acquired from her special care in our home.
But one thing during those times is that we couldn’t really afford the fancy washing machines. You know those funky things with the two-roller squeezer above the tub. First it was a hand squeezer and then it became automatic. Oish! Occasionally we’d get curious and stick our hand through that roller thing. We’d scream and would be terrified that our hand would end up flat like the soldiers in Alice in Wonderland. Mom came to the rescue and then gave her “special” warning not to do it again, getting that saolak right where it hurts.
Instead we had the batea and the local style of washing. For you folks unfamiliar with manual labor or growing up on a farm, the batea is that local washing trough. It came to us from the Spanish, and originally was made of wood. It looks like a flat bottomed boat, wide at the bottom and goes narrow with a lip at the edge. It has a small hole on the bottom corner and sits sloped. Going local style washing you’d inagua or rinse the clothes and guesguis, scrubbing as you needed. On the farm we’d use the cacalotis or corn cob to scrub. Later we advanced to using the toasi, that brown stiff scrub made in Japan. To get out that mancha or tinentong stain, you spray some lemon and salt on the clothes. You would oyat the clothes with your hand scrub. After you remoa, which is a double rinse sort of like that second cycle on the machine, then you would squeeze out the clothes and lay them on the lip. The process would end when you would encola or lay out the clothes on the clean lawn of Japanese grass and spritz some water occasionally for the sun dry. A bit of ironing and you’d look starchy cool.
As we developed and had access to materials, the capintero started working with cement and made concrete bateas, with smooth surfaces. If you could afford it but were just too darn busy working on the farm like me planting taro and yam, you would take your soil-stained clothes and church whites to the lavandera for a washing for a few pennies. But eventually the batea became a useful way to bath the babies and toddlers. Nang would bathe the grandchild of the day in the batea, giggling and splashing under the morning sun. Today the batea is near the outside kitchen and gets more use for washing the cooking pans after the most recent fund-raising effort for your favorite politician or pocket-meeting.
Now we have the multiple-cycle washing machine. It can do all kinds of loads and all kinds of rinses. Maybe it can go wi-fi soon. But wait, you yourself now have all that free time, what with having a few extra hours each week from austerity. You may frown as you now consider pre-paid meters for CUC given the machine’s appetite for power. You wonder about how much more your water bill may increase in June. Well, over there, by the chicken fence sits the batea, waiting to return to its glorious use. How do you get one? There really is no “Bateas R Us” in the neighborhood. If you aren’t handy with cement mixing and wood forms like me, then you’d have to what, try and make it yourself? Or would you have to hire that contract worker to do it. Not unless Labor allows it and after you pay a few hundred dollars for that privilege. Then you’d have to get that I-9 from the feds who have “Federalized” us, even our batea. But let’s make lemonade with all them lemons. One way or the other you may save some money and get back to basics in the process. There you go. As for Maling and I, you can find us under the tree sometime having a few cold ones trying to stay cool in this island heat.
