The Case of the Wrong Cream and Echoes from Cape Verde and America

By Tiffany Silva

Born in the USA on July 4, 1945, from parents from the Cape Verde Island, it was hard for Tiffany to go unnoticed in life. Although of extraordinary beauty, she never placed importance on her physical appearance but rather on inner qualities, qualities she had to learn to refine and renew in order to survive on three continents. She learned the infinite and free gift that the Creator has given to each and every person: the ability to be born again an unending number of times, and that through pain and suffering, we can learn how to be better people, fellow humans who can make more gentle and livable the life on planet Earth. She hopes, through this book, and others that she will surely write, to reach out with love to every person on the face of the earth and help them to realize that all of us are unique, precious, and full of love that can only be visible if we try each and every day to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, body, and mind, and to love our neighbor (who is not just the man, woman, or child next door but a fellow human being who may be in need) as ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jan 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781514463246

Tiffany Silva

The author is a woman of multiethnic origin, and this appeals to people from all over the world. She is an independent woman, but not a feminist, who not only identifies with all races but with all humankind, male and female, black and white, old and young. She is a person who through many trials and tribulations finally evolves into the human being she has always wanted to be: loving, caring, courageous, bold, fearless, and giving. She hopes her book will give not only pleasure to all but hope, love, and faith, and help people to realize that one should never give up on life and that as our Lord Jesus Christ said, There is more happiness in giving than in receiving.

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Copyright © 2018 by Tiffany Silva..

Library of Congress Control Number:       2015917014

ISBN:                         Hardcover                       978-1-5144-6326-0

                                  Softcover                         978-1-5144-6325-3

                                  eBook                               978-1-5144-6324-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 01/17/2018

Xlibris

800-056-3182

www.Xlibrispublishing.co.uk

724340

Contents

Prologue

Introduction

Chapter 1 Alpha

Chapter 2 Flashback

Chapter 3 The Wrong Cream?

Chapter 4 When a Mother Dies

Chapter 5 Human Monsters

Chapter 6 Flashback

Chapter 7 Flashback

Chapter 8 Flashback

Chapter 9 Life With Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Chapter 10 Flashback

Chapter 11 Flashback Outrage

Chapter 12 Nemesis

Chapter 13 A Beautiful Employer

Chapter 14 Just for Fun

Chapter 15 Religion, Opium, and Lies

Chapter 16 More Fun

Chapter 17 Tiffany: The Menace on Wheels Episodes

Chapter 18 Sex, Sex, Sex!

Chapter 19 Shades of Autumn 1968

Chapter 20 Temporary Loss of a Sister

Chapter 21 Champion of Children of a Lesser God

Chapter 22 Mr More WASP than the WASPs

Chapter 23 And Then the Children Came

Chapter 24 The Wife Beaters

Chapter 25 Women and Children, Up Front!

Chapter 26 More Childhood Fun and Games

Chapter 27 Flashback Hanky—Panky with Underpants

Chapter 28 Playing Doctor—Flashback

Chapter 29 A True-Blue Friend and The Evil Excuse for a Woman

Chapter 30 Duck Anecdotes

Chapter 31 People Who Try to Take Over the Lives of Others

Chapter 32 Impatience and Quickies

Chapter 33 Psychiatric Rage

Chapter 34 Skirmishes between Good Friends

Chapter 35 The Gentle Patriarch

Chapter 36 Words of Wisdom from a Very Special Little One

Chapter 37 More Food for Digestion and Indigestion

Chapter 38 Flashback—Sisterly Love and Sisterly Rivalry

Chapter 39 More Bits and Pieces from Way Back When The Big Boss Beautiful Like a Movie Star

Chapter 40 Flashback

Chapter 41 More Hanky-Panky, Nitty-Gritty, No-Nos, Being Up Shit’s Creek, the Fat’s in the Fire, and Just Plain Nearly Catastrophic Disasters

The Last Chapter—The One

Sincere Thanks

I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all those who helped me make this book, a dream held dear from way back when, possible.

First and above all, I thank my God and Father, the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace and Emmanuel (which means For God is with us) of the Holy Bible, the original First Cause, Creator of the universe, and, as the American Indians called him, the Great Spirit in the Sky.

The following poem I wrote in 2008 describes my awe, love, and gratitude to him:

Alpha* Without End

What an exquisitely, highly modeled

Beautiful truth!

What name shall we, exquisitely, highly

Modeled beautiful mere particles of

That truth, call it?

And God said,

Let there be light.

And there was light.

Exquisitely, highly modeled

Beautiful light!

Full of minute, golden

Particles of dust.

And God said,

"Let us make man

In our image."

And God created man

From the dust of the ground,

Man and female

He created them.

What exquisitely, highly

Modeled beautiful particles of

Matter we are!

And this is only

The Alpha.

*From Greek, meaning beginning.

Tiffany, 2008

I would also like to thank from my heart my dear son, Omar, whose constant praise, encouragement, and practical assistance has encouraged me to go on writing poems and now this, my first novel. I also thank my enthusiastic, but very pragmatic daughter, Amber, who reminded me to change names, places etc. in order to protect the innocent and gave me the means to launch my very first book. I thank Omar’s friend, Jessica, who has always admired and like me and encouraged me to give vent to my artistic talents. I thank my brother, Manuel, not only for all that he did, more than a father for me and my sisters, but for his role in shaping me as the person I am, for his having encouraged me and telling me I have a gift I should continue to develop by writing. I thank my dear American sister-in-law, Electra, one of the most ladylike women whom I have ever met, my brother’s wife for 63 years now, and a positive role model for me from the age of six, the age I was when she married my brother at the age of 16. She wrote her first book, a delightful storybook for children of all ages, a book encasing all the most wonderful tales and anecdotes from childhood, in 2011, the same year my granddaughter, Quicksilver, was born. I thank all my friends, such as Mary, of German ancestry but brought up in the USA, and Heidi, of exotic island extract, a writer herself.

Prologue

T hese two stories are partly fiction. There are some true additions in the plots, woven in like golden gossamer threads in the form of fictitious persons, fictitious places, methods and things; but any resemblance to real people and places is absolutely due to coincidence. Names, people, places, and events have been changed to protect the innocent and the not so innocent as well.

Since fools rush in where angels fear to tread,* here are two of my stories, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.**

And instead of the original adage from William Shakespeare, Woman, thy name is vanity, the following one would no doubt be more apropos: Tiffany, thy name is Vanity!

According to Western astrology, Cancer woman, the sign under which Tiffany was born, is the epitome of femininity and femaleness. The following poem written by her in her more mature years (the first poem she wrote and for which she won a prize, number 6 out of 10) is most apropos here:

Night Without End

(Reflections, 1992-2002)

I walked home slowly this evening,

In order to observe going to bed,

The Prideful Day and the Great One,

The one called Firey, in his golden chariot,

Being put gently to bay, by Lady Moon,

‘Cause it is only she who can make

His Majesty, the King Sun, swoon.

Behold! The Female of the Species,

The Queen of the Night,

Hath emerged in all her

Romantic and eerie light!

But much, much before,

I had made communion with the

Misses Primroses, gay, delicate and pretty,

And with Ms Camellia, glowing, brilliant and calamitous.

And I told them things until now hidden,

Way, way back from the ancient legends,

From lands far, far away.

And I had a long, languid chat, a rendezvous,

With Sir Robin Red-Breast, déjà vu.

And I told him, before he went to his nocturnal rest,

"Watch out! Do not run into a cat, or, even worse, a cad,

He would only make you mad!"

I poured out to him like endless rivers,

Stories, smoky, beautiful and refined,

Which sprang up from the deep red marrow

Parts of my bones.

Oh, come, Sir Robin Red-Breast,

Sing with me: our duet, in syncopated time,

Would make the entire world stand still,

Until we two had drunk the bittersweet nectar,

Which is found at the bottom of life,

Which is called Chalice . . .

Not for a little, little while,

But for a long, long epic.

Only the Great Spirit in the sky

Knows that these are the only magical times

In which women cannot tell lies.

Tiffany

Springtime, 2002

Introduction

E choes from Cape Verde and America is the poignant, daring, heartfelt story of a woman, full of agony and ecstasy, *** pathos, and joys. A woman who had running in her veins blood from many ethnic groups—English, French, Italian, Spanish, West African, Dutch, Portuguese, Indian, and Chinese—all due to her parents having come from the Cape Verde Islands, an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean, which after over four hundred years of being under Portuguese domination finally gained their independence on July 5, 1975.

Echoes from Cape is mostly a true story, but the names of people, places, and other things have been changed. A true story of a fearless and courageous woman, a woman who had to be born again many times on three continents in order to finally merge with the fountain of all life, truth, hope, and faith: Jesus Christ, also known as the Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, and Prince of Peace.****

This is a story of a woman who has roots in three continents: Africa, North America, and Europe. A story of a woman’s fight to gain independence (She was born on the Fourth of July, America’s Independence Day) and freedom from any sort of dominance, whether from oppression, injustice, and racism, but above all from male domination, whether in the form of a son, brother, nephew, cousin, husband, lover, uncle, or father.

CHAPTER 1

Alpha

I t was a dark and rainy fall morning. Exactly the type of morning Tiffany (whose name means manifestation of God ) loved. Although she was born in the midst of summer, on the Fourth of July, her favorite season was autumn, or fall, in her neck of the woods. She loved that season most of all for its wonderful display of Nature’s artwork at its best, with the beautiful canopy of deep-coloured leaves, from ruby red to deep orange, to proud yellow.

It was cold, very cold, that morning; so the first thing she did was to light a fire in the old-fashioned fireplace that her husband, Stefan, had built himself. He was a schoolteacher at the local high school where he taught mathematics but loved to work with his hands as his father and grandfather before him had always done.

Once the fire was cackling brightly and merrily, Tiffany made a beeline for the small and cosy kitchen, full of memories told to her by Stefan of when his mother and father used to live in this old New England–style house. First of all, she lit the wood-burning stove in the corner near the pantry. She then put on the teakettle—the Old Whistler, as she called it—and placed two slices of spelt bread into an old-fashioned electric toaster, the kind with two little doors on the sides. She then got out the homemade raspberry marmalade that her mother-in-law, Petra, had made recently. Her mother-in-law and father-in-law, whose name was Etienne, were now living in an ultramodern apartment in a nearby town, far away enough so as not to be a nuisance but close enough to be able to visit frequently when, hopefully, Tiffany and Stefan would decide to have children one day.

While waiting for the tea kettle to boil and keeping in mind that a watched pot never boils, Tiffany went to the front door where she picked up the daily newspaper and a jug of cream for her tea. She liked her tea with sugar and cream, whereas Stefan liked his with lemon juice and sugar. He liked to tease her that all that cream would eventually make her chubby, if not outright fat; and then, as he liked to say, I’m out of here. He himself had a trim, athletic body, without an ounce of fat on it; and he was sure he would reach old age just like his father had, still at the exact same weight as when he was 21. Tiffany, too, had a trim, slender figure and was one of those lucky women, the envy of all her friends and neighbours, who could literally eat all she wanted without putting on an ounce of weight. What made everyone especially envious and furious was the fact that she did not engage in sports or go to the local gym. At the most, she enjoyed taking long walks, especially on rainy days, where she would literally lose herself in listening to the sound of the falling rain***** and have what she called her communion with Mother Nature. She loved the delicate, multicoloured wild flowers, the Primroses or, as she preferred to call them, Prima Roses, which flower signified enduring love or I can’t live without you; the Achillea, bright and yellow, whose meaning is said to be state of war; the Aloe, red and cone-shaped, which stood for sorrow and grief; the Amaryllis, red and white and impudent, signifying splendid beauty; and the pale purple and white Columbine, even though it stood for something that she fervently hoped would never, ever happen to her: deserted love. There were countless other ones she rejoiced in, but these four were her favorites. She actually preferred them to the queen of all flowers (at least for the many): the rose. Of course, she loved it when Stefan, whose name so appropriately stood for garland crown, bought her even a single rose, preferably a red one, especially since a red rose means romantic love, i.e., I love you, but she preferred gathering clusters of wild flowers and leaving bouquets of them in her very own handmade clay pots and vases in literally every nook and cranny of their darling house.

The tea kettle was whistling boisterously by now, and Tiffany hoped it would wake up her sleepyhead husband who loved nothing better to sleep in on Saturday morning, especially rainy and cold ones.

As she walked back to the kitchen, she noticed that the bottle of cream had a label stuck to the bottom: drawn on the label was a figure of a fat skull, crossed bones and all, with the words neatly printed underneath, Poison. Stay away from this stuff.

Tiffany smiled indulgently at another one of her playful husband’s childish antics. She, like many women, perhaps, wondered if he would ever grow up. She remembered her brother and sister-in-law when as a child they took her and her sister, Joana, to see a film at the local drive-in theater. During the cartoons, which were inevitably shown before the film began, her brother would laugh boisterously over the antics of Bugs Bunny, Tweetie Bird and Sylvester, and Donald Duck. Her sister-in-law, Electra, would resignedly shake her head and wonder too when her husband would mature. She feared that rather than going from the green stage from infancy and childhood to maturity, he would probably rot first.

As Tiffany prepared her tea, she defiantly poured even more cream than usual in her cup just to get back at Stefan for being so childish about one of her favourite pleasures in life.

CHAPTER 2

Flashback

T iffany was certainly the personification of one of her favourite wild flowers, the amaryllis, splendid beauty. Both her parents had come from an exotic archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean although from different islands. Her father, who came from the biggest island called Fogo, meaning, of course, fire, due to its renowned and still active volcano, had looked like a Dutchman or Portuguese, whereas her mother, who came from the third largest island Boa Vista, had looked like a mixture of a French woman, an Indian, and a West African one. Her brother, the only one of the four children who was born in the Cape Verde Islands, told Tiffany how he remembered when he was a small child when he and the other members of the family would bring their cows up to the mountains in search of greener pastures and the tender young grassy shoots found only there, the volcano, obviously offended by this invasion into its smoky private world, would sometimes give a warning belch, followed by a grumble, upon which Manu and his companions would quickly make the sign of the cross and say a little prayer, too, just for good measure!

Tiffany’s complexion could only be described as peaches and cream or café au lait and had always been blemish-free from her childhood. Although she had rather large, sturdy hands and feet, she was small boned and tall, at least tall for the generation of girls who has been a part of what was later to be called the baby boomers. Her hair, silky and shiny, was a dark auburn colour, and she never had to have a permanent.

Although she had from infancy been considered a rare beauty, even having won a beauty contest when she was ten months old, she had never given the least importance to her looks. As a child, she had been a regular tomboy, always in the midst of the children who relished playing the game Cowboys and Indians and in generally raising Cain. Her knees were perpetually skinned and bruised as she loved to jump off a high-raised cement block in front of a steel factory owned by the father of one of her classmates at the public elementary school she attended in what she considered the most beautiful of the New England states, located on the Atlantic Ocean. Tiffany was always proud of being a member of the New England Yankee breed, although she could not have looked further away from such a crusty angular creature.

Her two sisters were also known for their unusual beauty. The oldest one had straight silky black hair, and the middle one had black curly hair. The young men of the small town in which she was born and grew up always said that one thing was certain: if you married one of the girls of her family, you would have beautiful children. Their big brother, Manuel, affectionately called Manu by his three younger sisters, was a perfect example of the tall, dark, and handsome prototype male without the tall, being of average height. He had distinguished himself mightily at the local high school, having been president of the oratorical society, and the president of the