FIEBRE TROPICAL
A Written Creative Work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree
A6 3 6 Master of Fine Arts 70IS
C. .li In
Creative Writing
by
Juliana Delgado Lopera
San Francisco, California
May 2015 Copyright by Juliana Delgado Lopera 2015 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read Fiebre Tropical by Juliana Delgado Lopera, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing: Fiction at San
Francisco State University.
Toni Mirosevich, MFA Professor of Creative Writing FIEBRE TROPICAL
Juliana Delgado Lopera San Francisco, California 2015
Fiebre Tropical traces the life of 15-year-old Francisca after moving from Bogota to
Miami with her evangelical Christian family in search of a better life. Francisca is dragged to the Colombian Christian church where she later discovers her queemess and falls for the pastor’s daughter. The narrative also traces the life of Mami (Francisca’s mother) and La Tata (grandmother) in their own previous migrations. A story of migration and loneliness, womanhood and queemess.
I certify that the abstract is a correct representation of the content of this written creative
) z ~ Date 1
CHAPTER UNO
Yes, hello, si buenos dfas immigrant criolla here reporting from our ant-infested townhouse. The-air-conditioner broke sometimes too. And below it the T.V, the pearl couch—we were there, used and new, there, full of bones and under-vaccinated. Y como quien no quiere la cosa Mami angrily shut the stove where La Tata left the bacalao frying unattended, then Lysol sprayed the counter-tops smashing the dark-trail of ants hustling some pancito for their colony. Girlfriend was pissed. She didn’t come to the U.S of A to kill ants and smell like puto pescado, and how lovely would it be if Marfa could have come with us on the plane? Then she could leave Maria to the kitchen and concentrate on the execution of this Migration Project. Pero, aloooo? Is she the only person awake en esta verraca casa? On the T.V. Another commercial for Learn Espanol Sin Barr eras and
Lucia, La Tata and me chuckle at the white people teaching other white people how to say, Vamos a la casa amigo. We want to go home but Mami explains with a fake smirk that look around you Francisca, this is your home now. On this doomed Saturday Mami obligated us to help with the preparations for the celebration of the death or the birth or the something of Sebastian.
It was June and hot. Not that the heat dissipated in July or August or September or even November for that matter. The heat, I will come to learn the hard way, is a constant in Miami. Sebastian’s baptism took place that summer afternoon a month after we arrived, still salty, on the doomed tropical swamp of Miami. It has been argued—by the only people who cared arguing: La Tata and her hermanas—that my dead brother’s baptism was the most exciting event in the Martinez Juan family that summer. This 1
CHAPTER UNO
Yes, hello, si buenos dfas immigrant criolla here reporting from our ant-infested townhouse. The-air-conditioner broke sometimes too. And below it the T.V, the pearl
couch—we were there, used and new, there, full of bones and under-vaccinated. Y como
quien no quiere la cosa Mami angrily shut the stove where La Tata left the bacalao frying
unattended, then Lysol sprayed the counter-tops smashing the dark-trail of ants hustling
some pancito for their colony. Girlfriend was pissed. She didn’t come to the U.S of A to
kill ants and smell like puto pescado, and how lovely would it be if Maria could have
come with us on the plane? Then she could leave Maria to the kitchen and concentrate on
the execution of this Migration Project. Pero, aloooo? Is she the only person awake en
esta verraca casa? On the T.V. Another commercial for Learn Espahol Sin Barr eras and
Lucfa, La Tata and me chuckle at the white people teaching other white people how to
say, Vamos a la casa amigo. We want to go home but Mami explains with a fake smirk
that look around you Francisca, this is your home now. On this doomed Saturday Mami
obligated us to help with the preparations for the celebration of the death or the birth or
the something of Sebastian.
It was June and hot. Not that the heat dissipated in July or August or September or
even November for that matter. The heat, I will come to learn the hard way, is a constant
in Miami. Sebastian’s baptism took place that summer afternoon a month after we
arrived, still salty, on the doomed tropical swamp of Miami. It has been argued—by the
only people who cared arguing: La Tata and her hermanas—that my dead brother’s
baptism was the most exciting event in the Martinez Juan family that summer. This 2
mainly because La Tata drank a half of rum bottle a day and couldn’t keep Monday from
Friday, September from June, so obviously a fake baby’s baptism is more important than say the fact that by the end of the summer Lucia woke in the middle of the night to pray over me.
But back to my dead baby brother’s baptism. We’d been preparing for the celebration even before departing from our apartment on the third floor down in Bogota; inside the six Samsonite bags Lucia, Mami and yours truly were allowed to bring into this new!
Exciting! Think of it as moving-up-the-social-ladder-life! were the black and gold table cloths, hand-crafted invitations, and various baptism paraphernalia. We even brought two jars of holy water (instead of my collection of CDs that included The Cure, Velvet
Underground, Ramones, etc.) blessed two days before by our neighborhood priest, water that was confiscated for two hours by customs then quickly flushed down the toilet by my tia Milagros who now soaking in Jesus’s Christian blessing believed Catholic Priests were a bunch of degenerados, and buenos para nada, ni para culiar.
Now Mami hustled her naked butt around the dining room, head tilted hugging the telephone. Wearing only a laced push-up bra, reading glasses, purple spidery varicose- veins all over her legs (she was quick to mention to Milagros and the women at church that as soon as she could find someone who did massage therapy as her girl back in
Bogota her legs will be como un lulo again), anxiously phoning the flower people, The
Pastores, the five singing ladies in black—Milagros idea—who will professionally mourn
Sebastian charging Ma $20 an hour for crying. Right now she’s negotiating: $15 per hour 3
plus food leftovers.
We were obedient.
What else could we do? Where else could we go? For the last month we’d been pushed around to this church service, and that church dinner, and that other meeting where La Pastora explained why it is important that dead babies are baptized.
La Tata and I eyed each other. We wanted to hold Mami’s hand tell her, Come on
Mami. Come on now Myriam carajo deja el berrinche. We had some serious eye-to-eye magical power going on with La Tata, I knew she needs a rum refill when her left eye went “give-me-a-break” and she knew I was this close to slapping Mami when my right eye went “buddha-shut.” After signing divorce papers Mami rolled for three days in the same crazed energy, painting our entire apartment in Bogota a tacky red, then crying because her house resembled the one of a narco wife, and when that was not sufficient to kill her mojo this Cartagena-born costenita de Dios bleached Lucia’s and my hair with hydrogen peroxide because na-ah! No hombre is going to ruin Mami’s life, not even your father.
Lucia helped her with the final touches on the cafe. The black and gold icing accompanying the baby Jesus in the plastic cradle retrieved from the pesebre box while
La Tata in the kitchen fried bacalao yelling at no one but of course at Mami, that Myriam doesn’t have any birthing hips no wonder she lost a baby. Lucia sat next to me on the couch and we drooled captivated by the speed of the ceiling fan, the possibility of it 4
breaking and cutting us all. We never had a ceiling fan in our house before, we never needed one. Now our chests are drenched with saliva waiting to dry or to be cut or to return.
Between phone conversations Mami gave us The Eye—the ultimate authoritative squint-wide-open flickering of eyeballs that had you on your feet and running. Whenever the nuns sent home a disciplinary letter she did this, searching for my guilt, and I played along with her daring myself to stand The Eye for as long as two minutes but always failing. Not this time. We were exhausted of moving our shit around, exhausted of meeting this youth leader and that church former drug-addicted woman, and every senora de Dios fixing our hair, squeezing our cheeks, commenting we were either too skinny, too fat, too pale, or, my very favorite, too Colombian. The “too Colombian” thing offended Mami, being too Colombian was acknowledging her hair wasn’t blow-dried by
Alex every day. Levantada, she whispered. But I was fifteen and all I wanted were my girlfriends back home, cigarettes, and a good black eye-liner. None of which Miami was giving me. Instead I was exhausted of the infiemo that crawled deep into your bone and burned its own fogata there. The surreal heat gas-veiled everything, everything seemed like a mirage, a burning stove coming from within. Did living with La Tata helped? No, mi amor. Did living close to Milagros and my other tfas and primos and the freaking
Pastores, whom you are about to meet, aided this transition in any way? Falso.
This was not a Choose Your Own Migration multiple choice adventures where a, b, or c are laid at the end of each page and you can simply choose b) Stay in Bogota, you 5
idiot.
Cachaco, por favor. This was militant mama colombiana index-finger waving you to pack your bags while she sold the remaining of your books (Plath collection of poems saved, thank God), donated your Catholic uniform (that you hated, but still), and then informed Lucia and your sorry ass that Ni por el chiras you are not leaving in six months but next week because Milagros got Mami a job (that never materialized) and then boom boom boom some Cuban guy speaking condescending English stamped your passport, sent Mami a smirk smirk for those boobs, he literally said boobs, and when she asked you translate you simply said, Ay you didn’t know people speak English in the U.S of A?
And what did we really know about migration.
I knew nada before forever jumping the Caribbean charco. You kidding? This homegirl lived in the same apartment on 135th, next to the same chapel, the same
CAFAM, the same comer store where Dona Marta sold me cigarettes religiously, the same, under the same excruciating Bogota clouds for the entirety of my fifteen years.
And although Mami is originally from Cartagena, she moved to La Capital when she was six (making her a so-so costena) and we only travelled to the coast on vacation, which in itself was The Event of the Year (planned for a year) and caused enough commotion to last until our next visit: las maletas! El spray-off! The aspirinas for Fulanita! The pancito you can only get at that panaderfa for Sutanita! Etc. New hair cut, new (awful, hated forever) flowery dress and gold communion studs wore to impress the epicenter of The 6
Matriarchy. I was so anchored in Bogota, so used to our homogeneity, that the girl from
Barranquilla—the only girl in school from outside the city—was out own exotic commodity. We made fun of nera ways, her mouth eating vowels and sounds for our own amusement. But mostly every trip felt so painful because Mami didn’t (and still doesn’t) like change. She likes to stay put and if possible very still so nothing moves or changes.
The day we left her stress skyrocketed, a rash of tiny red bumps growing on her back, scratched for the entire 3.5 hours.
A few days before the baptism Mami bought a yellow prom dress for me along with some Refresh! Artificial tear drops. Pa’ que llores, in case I couldn’t cry. I hate yellow.
Mami knew I hated yellow and red and orange and all “warm colors” but in an unusual enthusiasm out of the ROSS bag along with my yellow dress, she retrieved a tiny set of little boy’s pants and shirt all with a black tie.
What’s that for mama?
For Sebastian!
I told her ni muerta was I wearing a dress. Even in Miami, you have to respect yourself. A yellow dress? You know what was yellow? My Catholic uniform. Fucking yellow stripes with orange and a green sweater, the nuns made sure there wasn’t the slightest possibility of provocation or desire from the men! The Evil Men that only 7
existed outside the school while we, the endangered species of respectable teenagers, were protected by the tackiest most unfashionable piece of clothing ever invented. We were marked. We didn’t have men pissing on us marking their territory but we didn’t have to, the nuns did it themselves.
Anyway, Mami hugged me tight saying she’s not asking for an opinion on the dress.
Wear it. If it weren’t for Sebastian you wouldn’t be here right now. Then out of the
ROSS bag she yanked a naked baby doll, a weird Cabbage Patch doll with blue eyes and a swirl of plastic black hair. She placed the doll on her lap and with great care dressed the piece of plastic with the tiny pants and the tiny shirt and the tiny black tie. I dared not ask if the doll was indeed a boy? Cabbage Patch dolls wore a plastic diaper so it was impossible to be 100% sure on its gender. We could be dressing a girl doll in boys’ clothes but Mami didn’t care.
She handed me the baby demanding I keep an eye on Sebastian. Grab it, Francisca carajo que no muerde. I grabbed the doll by its head, Mami’s face a yeah-muy-funny and placed the baby in my arms the way you’re supposed to hold a newborn.
Of course he’s not a real baby Francisca, sabes? It is a symbolic bebe, si? Like Jesus is not really in our hearts it is a metaphor. But treat it is your flesh and bone brother
Sebastian—can you at least do that for me? This was her joy. The motherfucking boss of an multinational insurance company now reduced to cuddling a plastic toy. Okay mama.
This thick-haired Cartagenera slightly looking down at the white scar across her belly 8
(this one is you) as a reminder of all she’s done for me. Before I could say, No me jodas mas, she exposed the white scar like a trophy followed by a quiet smile and a gentle slap on the butt.
An hour later Mami still ran around. I sat behind La Tata popping blackheads from
her back using the yellow prom dress as a cushion hoping it would disappear between our
butts. Fake baby Sebastian laid next to us, arms reaching for a mommy he never had
because he is dead and this is all stupid. La Tata paid me 25 cents a pop while she
watched a new Don Francisco Presenta. She shushed Mami who on the phone still
negotiated one last crying lady for half the price (mi senora, please, la fiapa).
Even before moving to Miami La Tata was obsessed with Don Francisco (what
woman over 67 isn’t?), sending him hand-written letters and pictures of her daughters. La
Tata called the 1-800 number every time she watched, leaving messages, Si nina, Alba
that is A-l-b-a, si, Alba. Can you tell him to call me back? It’s important. La Tata
daydreamed of that Chilean-born papi reading her name tag, holding out his arm for her,
then spinning the wheel of fortune and announcing she was the winner of a new car, or a
new set of knives. Alba is the ganadora! Landing a faint kiss on her cheek. She would
have hanged the photograph of her and Don Francisco next to her Blessed Woman of the
Year certificate from church. If the never-aging papi called her she would wear the dark
green dress and the only gold earrings she still had, she’d walk down the steps like she
once did at the Club Union sending kisses this way, kisses that way—But did Mr. Tumba
Locas called? 9
Mami didn’t understand how La Tata praised Jesus all morning then watched that low-class crap on T.V. And isn’t she supposed to be cooking the arroz on coco? Doesn’t she understand the baptism is tomorrow and Mami’s hair is a webbed mess and nobody, nobody, is helping her?
Pajaros tirandoles a las escopetas, habrase visto tanta huevonada. La Tata moved around, pulling at her dress, getting the ever-round and wide costena ass comfortable in the sofa.
Those are Jesus’s hijos too, okey? And the arroz con coco will get done whenever the arroz con coco gets done, are we clear? Ya me paro, I can’t even watch Don
Francisco in peace no joda.
Of course Mami couldn’t leave it alone.
Do you really think Jesus would approve of that behavior mama? Where in the biblia is that passage because I totally missed it. Por Dios! Jesus did not die in the cross so half- naked women dance around that man.
Wiping the crumbs from the bacalao La Tata frustrated told mami, Yes Jesus died for all of that and more. He was crucified so Sebastian could die and Francisca could be born.
Mami’s eyes peeked over her glasses as if they alone could kill La Tata. The ceiling fan on high turned the pages of her color-coded notebook where the budget, the visa, the 10
church, the baptism were detailed in bullet-points and perfect hand-writing. Whenever she finished taking notes and the bullets did not perfectly align, she’d rip the page and
start all over again. On her hand also the yellow highlighter meant to differentiate between IMPORTANTE and DEMASIADO IMPORTANTE. Carefully and with an air that said you-dont-know-what’s-coming-bitch Mami removed her glasses, gave a light
flip of hair like she used to, and continued to check off things from her notebook. La Tata
tightened her grip on my hand. They didn’t look at each other.
Mami knew the joy ese verraco programa brought to La Tata, but wouldn’t leave it
alone. If stubborn has a name it is Myriam del Socorro Juan and her house was the
equivalent of military school: orderly, predictable. Uno, dos, tres. Demanding everyone
sacrificed their lives for the cause. The baptism cause. The migration cause. The story?
Sebastian was Mami’s first baby, the one and only boy never bom to bloom into a macho,
so whenever she retells the Horrible Miscarriage Story thick lines draw on her forehead,
watery eyes search for some invisible moving ball on the ground and voice recedes
coming out in soft, broken segments. Back then our Cartagenera was only 21 years old
three months pregnant and with a thick pool of blood in her panties after lifting a fat child
in Unicentro. At the hospital the doctor told her there was nada que hacer, mi senora,
you’re just gonna have to wait and get pregnant again. Head lifted high, Mami curled into
a ball when nobody saw her. Locked herself in the bathroom pretending to be dusting.
Dios mfo. An unconsolable llorona crying and crying for a month and even when the doctor reminded her not to dance pegadito for at least two months, those wide hips lured 11
my Pa and yours truly was born nine months afterwards.
I was joy but I wasn’t Sebastian (what to do with all the baby blue clothes?).
Mami proceeded her speech to no one while highlighting her notebook: Nobody in this house cares about me losing my baby. You two don’t know el dolor, all the pain I’m going through.
Sighing heavily La Tata whispers to me, It’s been seventeen years! To Mami she
says, Okay what else needs to be done?
At the Heather Glen Apartment Complex there was no gate, no lights, no tall buildings or
people on the streets. There was a moldy jacuzzi and a small pool where dead insects,
used condoms and some of the ducks congregated leaving a trail of green poop. A few of
the Venecos and the emo boys also hung there. It was five blocks from Iglesia Cristiana
Jesucristo Redentor and three blocks from the Pastores’ house. Our townhouse sat facing
the Food 4 Less dumpster and Mami loved telling all visitors the piles of plastic toys and
rotting food is how Food 4 Less gives back to the community. Those poor children! You
should see their faces when they open their gifts. Poor people are so humble. Mami the
business woman venida a menos, had she known everyone at church knew the headless
Barbies were trash but didn’t dare say.
A month ago we moved from Bogota into La Tata’s townhouse hopping on that sueno 12
Americano with six stuffed Samsonite bags. Only a month, dale tiempo al tiempo, mi vida. Patience is a virtue, said La Tata to Mami when she’s up to here with job applications and rejections. So what if Milagros promised an accounting job at a
Colombian law firm that in reality didn’t need any math, or business suits or, really, any accounting but was more about distributing fliers to rich people’s houses at night to be thereafter chased out by the neighborhood police. The first night Mami returned giggling like a fifteen year old running from home with her machuque, but after a week of this degradation she wanted nothing to do with this flier pendejada. Soy una mujer educada, carajo. Did the neighborhood police cared she had a window-to-window office and a secretary who watered her plants and delivered a tintico in the mornings? Cachaco, please.
La Tata, on the other hand, sashayed to Miami a year before to join The Exodus of
The Juan Family after grandpa was found dead on the toilet in Cartagena. La vida es dura, mija. Life is hard, girlfriend. 13
CHAPTER DOS
I met the Pastores at Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor two days after we landed. To my surprise the church was a room, a room, inside The Hyatt a few blocks from our house. Was I the only one appalled by its lack of holiness? Did Mami waved her estrato like a flag of entitlement and walked out? She hugged and kissed and called this lady hermana and that senor hermano like this was totally her salsa and I was exaggerating.
Painful to watch. Mami sensing my discomfort mentioned a youth group, people my age learning about Dios. Clearly this was all a mistake.
When we got there three fat women in matching navy suits ran to greet us, introducing themselves as Ujieres, mi nina, Dios te bendiga. A low cemented arch with three palm trees to each side where a sign for the South Florida Beauty Convention hanged on the side. And then: the room that pretended to be a church. Talk about being colonized by the wrong people, the wise Spanish understood it took Gothic fear to believe and follow Dios. For starters the churches in Bogota were old, like centuries old, gothic, tall with vitrales, and colossal images of the Virgen de la Caridad, Virgen de
Chiquinquira, Virgen del Carmen, bleeding tears on the baby, the backdrop of the altar a nailed Jesus de Nazareth face contorted—did I mention homeboy also bled?—showing you he died for you, sinner. During the weekly school mass whenever I searched for spiritual or moral guidance the image of the bleeding, good-looking bearded son of God shook me into my senses: stop fake-kissing your Salserfn posters Francisca, he died for you. And although my religious skepticism started at the age of 11 when I began falling 14
asleep during mass, stealing my tfas’ cigarettes and rubbing myself on the edge of the bed, the imposing thorn crown bleeding for all of us had created a fear so deep I found myself praying unconsciously after each said sin.
But enough of the past already. Mami always says you gotta look into the futuro, el pasado esta enterrado, we sold it, buried it and bought new flowery bedspreads at
Walmart instead. And now Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo awaited with its baby blue walls, four rows of folding chairs and a passageway in the middle. A mustard yellow carpet that resembled Mami’s favorite blouse which tied in a perfect silk bow and hadn’t been worn since her farewell party at the insurance company. Bibles secured in armpits. Everyone blessing their hermano, declaring in the name of Jesus, gloria a Dios for Sutanito’s new job at Seven-Eleven, and beware of Satanas when your children curse at you.
Women kneeled at the center. Others painfully hummed songs as a young man began drumming beats, their faces obviously demanding attention because as everyone could clearly decipher from the tightness of their fists, the hermanas suffered.
They couldn’t be serious, but they were.
I remember the awkward embarrassment, an urge to tell everyone to please turn it down a notch. Amazed at the lack of shame in blasting Christian rock and signing to it while people watched—normal gringos peeked from time to time entertained by the free
Spanish spectacle happening right at their hotel. People are watching you, I wanted to say. But at that moment all they cared about was proving to each other who was Jesus #1 15
Fan, and to be honest it was a tough call. So instead of snapping I actually yearned for the mournful, silent quality of Catholic mass. The Ave Marias, the bells, the Latin phrases nobody understands, all of us girls in uniform passing notes during the evangelio. The imposing holiness of the priest, his robe—the Pastor wore black pants and a dark blue shirt that made him look more waiter than godly.
Mami explained the Christian logic of such circo to me later: you can praise el Senor anywhere, because He is everywhere and He is watching you, sinner. It’s about a direct relationship with Jesus and Dios, no intermediaries, no fake images to praise. What about
La Virgen? Na-ha, no Virgen. Dios mfo. Fifteen years lighting candles to the Virgen, waiting anxiously for rosaries to end, fifteen years with a Virgencita around my neck that protected me of all mal since my baptism. And now, suddenly, the Virgen and I faded into the background.
Mami introduced me to the Pastora inside an arch of blue balloons framing the stage.
A sign—lead singer works at Kinko’s— covered half of the end wall with a rainbow reading ARCOIRIS DE AMOR. On the left two huge speakers. Big party speakers because this was a party para alabar a Cristo. A Jesus party. Someone whispered to me:
Jesucristoooo.
La verga, I told Mami.
Grosera. Okey, here don’t be grosera. 16
Half of the people were thick women with hairs done in highlights, fake red nails, kissing each other’s cheeks with tired eyes while some mumbled things in English with an air of superiority. Clarita! Como ha aprendido ingles, mire a la gringa. Children wailed, chanted. One of them colored a dove black, the bird breaking the lightning sky.
Why black Marcelita? Aren’t you Jesus’ little princess? It should be baby blue. It should be white. Holy spirit is pure mi amor, a ver. Young girls in white sheer gowns shook tambourines, held hands, eyes shut letting out a siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh to the heavens. Above, the heavens, three colossal ceiling fans going whoosh whoosh whoosh and in the back table a man alone in headphones. I asked Mami and Mami asked tia Milagros and tia Milagros responded that it is the Biblical Translation Center, for the gringos. This is a real time translation Spanish to English with headphones. Oooooooh. See how good? Even the gringos come here. Tia Milagros pointed to a giant white man with tiny spectacles seated in the first row wearing headphones hunched over a bible. Mami was super excited about the church’s inclusivity. Of course Mami couldn’t stand the gamines outside of Catholic mass asking for money or Lucia’s close friend a moreno from Barranquilla, of course not.
But gringos, she’s been super excited about. I pitied the yanqui man a little. Why in the world would a gringo come to this church? Don’t they have their own?
People jumped to touched me, asked all kinds of questions. Lady in yellow dress and an enormous cleavage (Marcela, later barred from stealing the diezmo), Mamita are you
Myriam’s daughter? Xiomara mira, this is Myriam’s daughter. No way, you don’t look anything like her! I held you when you were this big. 17
This is exciting, I thought, very exciting. Is it different from what you had in mind? Is it different from The Promised Life? Is it different from the yellow-haired blue eyed heaven of boys and girls in Saved by the Bell wanting to be your friends? Cachaco, please, I wouldn’t have conjured up this place in my head in a million gazillion years
(and I grew up in Bogota during the 90s).
You come with me to the youth group, nena.
Mami sat in the first row, next to the bald Pastor and his terrible mustache while
Xiomara with her gelled curls escorted me to the room next door.
Xiomara’s infomercial voice made the walk a sort of limbo, stuck inside a television screen. Down the hallway men in shirts, gelled hairs, smiling out of some sort of obligation, handing me their sweaty palms. Free embraces that I never asked for. Lots of arms around me chanting in unison Dios te bendiga! Dios te bendiga! Dios te bendiga!
But I thought, I’ll meet some people there, right? I couldn’t imagine young people going there out of mere will and a light sense of hope let me breathe deeply one last time. And there ducked taped in gold on top of a rainbow read: Jovenes en Cristo.
Here’s a little something for you, mi reina: All these colombianos migrate out of their pais de mierda to the Land of Freedom, in this case Miami, to better themselves, to flee the “violence” or whatever, seek peace, or, really, to brag they’re living in the freaking 18
U.S of A and hello credit card, and hello cell car I can’t afford, and hello hanging out in a room at the Hyatt with the same motherfuckers you ran from. Like, they couldn’t have done that in Bogota? Barranquilla? Or Valledupar? My second reaction to the room- church was a terrible disappointment. This. Is. it? Whaaa? More on that later.
Now, what I saw behind that door had been inconceivable before (cachaco,
Bogota in the 90s, remember). Never in my life would I have thought young people could be... so... soulless. Depressed? Yes. Hijosdeputa? Yes. Killers? Yes. I’d been robbed by young boys on the streets before, kids barely over 5 years old sniffing boxer, sleeping next to their knives. Junkies? Yes—Catholic school for them daughters of coqueros. But a state of mind robbed completely of humanness, fifteen-year olds humming like a machine, and brought to life through the stupid repetition of prayer: hijos de Dios!
Inside everyone around the circle lifted their hands in a let’s-slap-some-high-fives gesture. Disgusting, I thought. I didn’t want to touch everyone’s hands but Wilson the youth leader, who we’ll call Young Mulatongo, grabbed me by the elbow and skipped around the circle holding out my arm. Are these people blind? I’m punk. I’m an artist. I fight bitches on the street. Once in the middle of la 82 I spat on this girl for calling me a chirri (I did run right after. But still).
But there, where could I run? The condescending smiles. Two girls in matching shiny flip-flops held tambourines fake smiling and only barely touching my hand with their 19
fingertips. Okay mi vida do it for your mother who worked her costena butt off to get that visa and who is ecstatic to be in this church (no one could shut her up about it months before we moved here), and if you just behave today maybe later she’ll forget all about it and you’d be able to stay at the townhouse and think of ways of not killing yourself yet.
Cool.
The Young Mulatongo shook his finger in front of me.
Eeee-cume nina, hellooo. We’re down by three people tonight we need to increment our Sacred Outreach Efforts.
Some of them yawned. Others swayed their arms to the baby blue ceiling. Everyone was instructed to bring a friend and share their Life Changing Testimony. Then in came a young morena from Barranquilla in one of those sheer white gowns, waving off the
Young Mulatongo but flirting with him, passing out pamphlets with light exploding from grey clouds.
Okey, pelaos, this is how it’s going down. I want all you lazy disque followers of
Jesus to get that culo moving or else we’re buried, me estan oyendo? Tonight go home and think of that friend, that lonely ugly child with the Metallica shirt next to you in
English math Spanish government class that is in desperate need of saving. You know the kind. Yes? And you bring that ugly, godless child next week and here he will strip him of that shirt and he will smell of pachouli and we’ll deal with Dios and he will be one of his soldiers are we all full cleaaaaar pelaos? 20
They all went wild, cheering, throwing pillows in the air, bibles flew. Girl is a preacher.
This girl has my attention. And just like that, that ugly Barranquillera and her authority,
and her pimples demanding with no respect whatsoever that we—that I—do exactly as
she said.
Back to our fake baptism.
Our cheddar-cheese smelling blue Honda drove us the three blocks to the Pastores’
house.
Why can’t we walk, ma?
Because we have a caaaaaaaar!
Palm tree after palm tree after Walgreens and a homeless man passed out on a bench
with an IN NEED OF HELP? Handwritten Sign. Was Yaquilandia clean like Clorox
commercials? Let the ripped teddy bears, dirty diapers and heaps of leaves answer that.
We stopped briefly at the McDonalds down the street, and when we finally arrived to the
Pastores’ house gold and black balloons lined the entrance.
Inside the car I carried the colossal SEBASTIAN EN PAZ DESCANSE sign printed
at Kinko’s and Sebastian sleeping on my lap. Right before leaving Mami ran through
everything we should and should not say, no cursing, no wearing black-black, no asking
the Pastores’ daughter about real parents, she’s adopted remember, nada de pendejadas, 21
Francisca for the hundredth time no stealing cigarettes, just behave how I raised you.
Forever in lalaland Lucia could care less where anyone took her. Once in CAFAM in the second Mami turned to grab the lettuce five-year-old Lucia found a new 65 year-old friend to grab her hand and almost walk her out the grocery store. If you’re a mama that’s enough for a heart attack, imagine Mami’s desperation in the late 90s in Bogota. Even to this day you have to shake Lucia at times, wake up sister, smell the bread, feel the mayhem.
At that moment Lucia also wanted to please Mami (who didn’t), because anything seemed healthier than contradicting her.
The sky painted with a crotchet cumulus of dark grey with patches of blue. It was
4pm. Like a giant God scooped a piece of cloudy rain and munched on it. No mountains.
The air thick, soiled, acidic as if you were constantly inhaling poppers. The Pastor, the
Pastora, Carmen and Camilo paced up and down the door reading from what seemed like a bible. Waste no time hijos mios, Jesucristo may fall from the sky any minute now and what would YOU be doing?
In the car with a red pencil Mami outlined her lips on the rearview mirror and do I want any? I didn’t want any. She insisted red lipstick went exceptionally well with that stunning yellow dress. My stunning yellow dress covered half of the back seat. More than half. On the other end Lucia practiced her biblical lines for the baptism. Sebastian on my 22
lap, forever staring at me with glossy blue eyes, forever smiling and judging me behind the tiny tie. The piece of plastic with an enviable liveness. Rays of sun lighted his brown face, that face seeing right through me, knowing exactly how I felt: bored, itchy, out of place. I scratched my butt under the layers over layers of yellow lace, yellow veil, yellow pantyhose and the Nirvana boxers Mami refused to buy me at Walmart but were my birthday present nonetheless.
A ver mama, give me some of that lipstick.
The brief satisfaction on Mami’s face. That way mothers have of transforming a neutral face into complete satisfaction once their lost child agrees to something they’ve proposed. She’s no different. A mother knows best, it’s not her motto. I say what you do, is her motto.
My bottom lip is fuller than my upper lip. Clumsily I traced the lines that keep this mouth together noticing the few thin black hairs on either side that I try covering with the red pencil. Then fill with red lipstick. I’m more clown than glamour, more slashed face than full lips. Mami’s satisfaction is eclipse by my face on the rearview mirror, followed by the loudest sigh Miami’s has heard, and a gyrating door slam. The rest of us are left in the car. La Tata looked around then took a quick sip of her flask. Still lost she turned to me, then proceeded to blurt the second loudest sigh in Miami.
Payasa! She said fighting with me to clean it. 23
Dejame Tata. It’s my face.
Who birthed all these stubborn hijas de puta, ah? Dios rmo. Francisca I love you mimi, but you know your mama is going through it.
I ignored her pleas. Instead I hugged the baby and proudly stomped out and into the house. I owned that face. It was mine. The few things I owned at the time: my face, those
Nirvana boxers, Ariel by Sylvia Plath, and a box full of letters from my girlfriends back home. Long nose, eyes too close together, humungous elephant ears, and still it was my face. I could claim it. I could write all over it. I could have ten seconds of superstar glory down The Pastores’ overgrown lawn while they all stared blankly.
Hola hola, welcome to Sebastian’s baptism this is immigrant criolla reportando from
Miami, Florida. We got them holy signs dug into the yard Those Who Look For Him
Shall Find His Glory and further down Sebastian Found His Glory and lastly Would You
Find His Glory?
The Pastora I learned that day is from Barranquilla as evidenced by the thick long- black hair, tacky yellow highlights and a toothy smile tattooed on that oval face. Not the kind, warm hospitable costena, but a sharp dictatorial female whose smile was less an invitation than a mandatory law. The most devoted mujer in the entirety of Miami Dade county (if you asked her, the world), who saw Evil right in The Eye and just by gazing at 24
a passing colombiano could instantly tell if Jesus resided in that heart or if the colombiano played on the other team, satanas’ team. She scolded the Pastor for
sometimes overshadowing her with his enthusiasm, like after I stomped down the Pastor came running to greet me with a hug and a Dios te bendiga hermana Francisca. A chubby
man. Also from Barraquilla with a swirl of hairs sticking out of his pale blue shirt, gelled
curls combed back that he continued to comb with his fingers and snapping his fingers
after every sentence saying hooooome! Jesu-would-not-do-that. The Pastor who in the
congregation’s eyes held supreme power but deep down the herd knew La Pastora is the
real peso pesado and held more cojones that Noah stirring that ark.
The Pastor handed booklets with prayers and songs to anyone entering. Mami
directed people to the back of the house. Sebastian was baptized inside the Pastores’ pool.
Again, symbolism. The key to 21st century Christianity, I was learning, was to blindly
believe in the power of metaphor and symbolism. The doll was a dead baby, the room at
the Hyatt The House of God, the Pastores’ pool became the Jordan River, etc. You
following?
The pool in the patio, the patio enclosed by a fence. Ducks with red balls on their
beaks fought each other over crumbs of bread a child threw through the holes. Mami
handed money to our professional mourner ladies in black. Black veils and all. She told
them to lose the rosaries and handed small booklets with the lyrics of the songs she chose
for the occasion so they may cry to them. Mami suggested to Crying Lady #1 that she
should cover her chest, gave her a fake grin and continued to parade her gold dress 25
kissing this and that hermana. The four ladies stood in the comer practicing some of the crying in front of Mami who applauded saying, perfecto! She searched for me and what do you think nena? I said nada but gazed around at the tables covered in gold cloth bought yesterday at the Dollar Tree Store, the baby cradles on it. Each flower, balloon, cookie, cupcake perfectly arranged. Mami managed that baptism as if she were managing the 900 people under her at insurance company. Emerald studs on her ears, her long finger pointing and dictating what, where, when. Did I mention girlfriend is a control freak? Did I mention she paid more attention to the arrangement of the food, the gold bows on the shekinas than the actual baptism of the baby? Mami’s focus on kissing, hugging, sitting, gossiping, on overall succeeding as superstar host was such that when the moment came to bless the fake baby someone had to drag her from the kitchen.
The Pastor snapped his fingers, mike check: uno, dos, soooo-nido. Dios los bendiga hermanos!
Mami still ran around asking Lucia to put the tiny babies in the back next to the recordatorios. As a recordatorio of this life-changing event every attendant received a
small bag full of goodies including a tiny plastic baby in impossibly small baptism couture, an infinitesimal bible plus a Psalm verse plus a bag of Skittles (Jesus’ rainbow of love).
It is time hermanos.
The Pastora ran up to me handed me a tag with “Francisca” in cursive. Then a ball 26
point pen and the Baby’s Recordatorio Book where every one who entered should sign and leave a wishful message for the woman who is mourning a miscarriage after seventeen years.
I put the book on the small podium next to the entrance, then realized the Pastora wanted me to stand next to it for the entirety of the baptism. But my mom—I said. There was no arguing. Apparently Mami didn’t see anything wrong with her oldest daughter not only being dragged and bored out of her mind by attending this type of event, but on top of this used as the door-woman. The cherry on top, mi reina. I’m not needed as much as there needs to be something assigned to me. The Pastora also handed me a Jesus and Me:
How To Survive High School copy with dog-eared pages that she suggested I read. Brown hands, long nails painted beige and not one spot on them. The hands of a woman who has not worked or suffered, hands that have known manicures since they were able to point.
And pointing she did, to my face with a wet piece of paper towel La Pastora dabbed on my mouth and all I could do was muster a, But I like my lipstick to accentuate my lips.
I’ll have to teach you how to properly apply lipstick, you’re mother seems incapable.
Now here mi nina, open the book on page 12 and if you feel incline recite The Prayer
That Will Save You at any time. Here by yourself. Just between you and Jesus. He’s always attentive, always expectant of ninas like you.
Outside the shekinas waved their flags in preparation of the baptism dance. The horizon nothing but black clouds, palm trees, A.C. 27
When the Pastora left, Carmen showed up calling me a loser and handed me some pills that Mami apparently told her to make me swallow. I recognized the pills.
Those are not mine.
Pela’a pero of course they are. Dona Myriam just handed them to me.
She has a great voice, Carmen, like she’s giving a speech after saving an endangered
species from dying.
On my second visit to the pretended room at the Hyatt Carmen called early in the
morning first. Aja Francisca, I know moving here is hard pela’a but don’t make it harder
on yourself. Come, see what Jesus has escondido for you. Sin compromiso. Again with
her messianic voice that does not accept rejection. A voice that said stay calm, I got this.
I’ll think about it.
Aja and what’s there to think? I’m just giving you a chance to hang with Jesus and
me and the chicos buena onda that love Him.
That afternoon Jesus wanted to go bowling at the Dolphin Mall.
Jesus’ Youth Battalion held hands in their assigned bowling alley, eyes shut
mumbling prayer to the Almighty. Espfritu Santo may we walk in your wisdom. Carmen
sat alone in the back munching on onion rings. Hair parted in thick greasy slices,
dangling gold cross and dangling “Carmen” gold necklace over a white shirt with a baby 28
blue dove carrying a bible in its beak. Not imposing or holy looking like before. Tongue
licked finger after finger, no use of napkin.
Hola Carmen.
She didn’t as much as look at me. Kept chewing with her mouth open, wiping food
residue with her right sleeve. A thin saliva shadow shone around her lips but I sat there
anyway. I didn’t know anyone else, Carmen had called. She owed me the time. For ten
minutes only the sounds of the hamburgers sizzling, the smack of balls on pins, the T.V
over our heads. Awkward. Of course.
Pela’a I’m sorry you came, she said.
But you call, remember?
Her oval sad eyes outlined with black. Surprisingly I was not upset at her, there was
nothing for me to do at home and her lack of energy was comforting. And even though
the Young Mulatongo hugged me, offered a prayer and asked me to be part of Team
Jovenes en Cristo (or would you prefer Team Jovenes Llenos del Espiritu Santo?), and
even though I said I rather just watch with Carmen, he glared at Carmen because clearly
Carmen was not joining them either, even though he breathed deeply and muttered a
prayer there was a small opening in me, next to this costena with no manners, I was
engaged in her not-doing, in her rejection of participation, in her chewing.
I’m on my red days, she said extending the onion rings. Aja que tengo la regia pela’a, 29
si? And don’t feel like throwing balls. And what are you so excited about? Go play.
Nah. I rather sit here if you don’t mind. I never understood the love for bowling really but you sounded so convincing.
Licking her fingers she walked to the cashier and got more onion rings and milkshake. We ate onion rings and drank milkshake after milkshake in silence while
Justin Timberlake’s Cry Me a River followed Christiana Aguilera’s Beautiful streamed in front of us. The youth group did not sing, some of them covered their ears to Christina’s song. All Carmen said was, That video is soo nasty. If I wanted to see anorexic I’d go to the mall.
But we are at the mall, I said.
We both laughed and that was it.
The last rays of sun hit the house in North Miami. Unmoved by the ducks tugging at her dress, Mami held the fake baby on her arms reclining on the fence. Sebastian already changed into his baptism dress, a long shiny toga-like vestido with a perfect sequin cross sewed in by Mami. From my doorpost I saw her showing off the custom-made dress, probably lying to everyone, Oh this old thing? Fulanito Italian designer hand-made it for the occasion.
More people arrived. Everyone dressed their best. How sad. This is what we all look 30
forward to in this hellish Cuban swamp. So much fake gold, so much hairspray, so much kissing on the cheek and turning for women to nod at the ugliest yellow dress in the history.
Francisca? One lady exclaims in such uncontrolled excitement.
She grabbed my dress, then my hand until I turned to show her the back.
Palida but stunning! Then to Carmen, Carmencita? La adoptada? Mi nina...how you’ve grown chubby.
More and more food piled outside. Bocadillo con queso, arepa de huevo, quidbes, nino evuelto. Two chihuahuas barked. How I hate small dogs. I kicked one in the stomach, not before someone’s kid noticed and ran to tell his momma. How I hate children. I ate a nino envuelto. Around twenty people gathered outside amidst the black plastic chairs, the balloons, Mami showing off the fake dead baby in all his fake dead baby sequin couture.
The Pastor signaled for all to sit. They forgot about me. Carmen still came and went presenting me with three shekina dress options.
Which one?
A lit candle inside a rainbow was option number three. A lit candle with no bra. Her breasts obviously relaxed from all this heat. I stared and she noticed. It’s the light of the
Holy Ghost. Oh, I said. Aja, she said. Her nipples pointed at my heart. The rainbow 31
connects the heavens with mama earth and the Espfritu Santo is the energy between them.
I nodded.
Are you following?
She told me the Young Mulatongo called her the prettiest shekina to ever walk the
Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor, then ballerinas-out to the edge of the pool where people clapped joyous to finally see her.
Waving black flags with gold stars she does her Woman Warrior dance. People did
not dance in Catholic church. Nuns did not dance, you kidding cachaco? Some children clapped. But this is like a novena navidena every day of the year. Maracas tambourines drums.
The Pastora closed the sliding door. To preserve the A.C.
Someone asked where the bathroom is. I don’t know. I don’t live here. I’m being used by my mother in her baptism project.
I watched as the baptism happened outside. At times the door sliding open and a wave of humidity slapping my face.
Mami handed Sebastian to the Pastor who kissed the baby and proceeded to enter the pool. He lifted the baby as he entered the water. People gathered around banging on the tambourines, shaking the maracas, singing Jesus. Whatever. Amen. 32
I paced up and around the hallway. Everyone’s purses, coats (in Miami!), hats (in
Miami!) hanged next to the door. Nobody’s thinking about me. Mami clearly set her priorities. Nobody watched me. Should I? Why not? I needed a smoke, needed money, needed anything to push me out of this sameness. Anything to push me to that life that waited for me somewhere on the other side. This boredom, this awkward shame (pena ajena all the way, cachaco) for having to explain to myself what was happening.
So I did what any bored immigrant teenager locked in a dead baby’s Christian baptism would do: I went through the purses and coats. I wasn’t really interested in the money—who I am kidding, I was also interested in the money and any trace of a secret life that would point to the normal I had known. Deep down I hoped everyone faked their
Christian faith. Sorpresa! It would have been the best April fools in history.
Gums, cigarettes, x-number of anti-depressants, tiny orange bottles, hand sanitizer, prayer notebooks, endless receipts for Tan with Dan and Wendy’s, chicken nuggets, money money money. I pocketed the cigarettes and $100 in fives. I could buy a new eye liner, or Doc Martens or eat sushi that’s not bought one day old from Publix Sabor. I could walk to Barnes and Noble, the only bookstore a la redonda, and actually buy a book instead of sitting in the back reading Clockwork Orange until the manager kicks me out.
Fuck si, money is power.
Heavy black clouds ate away the sun in humid stillness. Summer in Miami is dark. Nothing moves. Water drips rom the ozone like a sweaty armpit. Nadie Como Tu 33
Senor played out of someone’s ipod connected to the speakers. An old lady in fuchsia I hadn’t seen before pulled out her teeth and shone them with her dress. She yawned, other people yawned. The ducks still flapped in the background. The black summer midday
sky, ducks with red balls. My baby brother at last lifted from purgatory and now what.
All of us still there. I chewed someone’s gum then spit it inside someone else’s purse.
She will probably blame it on satanas anyway.
When there was nothing else to do, no other purse to sabotage, I picked at my cuticles
until they bled. Until tiny red rivers pooled at the base of my nail. The life drained out of
my finger. The obvious metaphor for my life.
Carmen still danced around the pool waving the flag.
The Pastor submerged the baby for a few seconds, eyes closed, screams to the
heavens to lift him from limbo.
I had to pee. From the comer of my eye I see Carmen’s brother, Camilo, walking
swiftly to be lost in the darkness of the hallway. Then a middle-aged bearded guy chased
after him. Then I decided finding a bathroom right now is not such a good idea. I didn’t
care about this baptism but if I stood for three hours on that door, I wanted my work to be
recognized.
Thirty minutes go by. I can’t hold the pee anymore. The door slid open as Mami’s
hands covered her face. All the fake gold rings bought before coming to the U.S of A, the 34
pashmina draping from her head. At last, the baby rose from the pool and everyone goes aleluya! Aleyuya! Gloria a Dios hermano. The wrap-around sequin dress must be too heavy with water because I see it drop, splashed.
Carmen received the naked Sebastian. Lifted it high like in the Lion King movie.
Brown fake skin glimmering with the pool lights. Naked baby doll.
She rocked Sebastian, smiling through the sliding doors showing him to me. The
contemporary version of the Virgen Maria, rocking baby Jesus with a pool of halo, ropy
black clouds.
When it all ends Mami handed me the baby to dry it up, put new clothes on.
Mamita ayuda a algo, si? Grab the baby. What have you been doing here all the time
and why do you smell like pee?
She’s kissing everyone goodbye. Que gracias por venir, que si claro ni mas faltaba.
Que you can take the sobrados with you. Que everything was uno-A. Que please sign the
recordatorio book if you haven’t done so already. Que Dios te bendiga hermana. 35
CHAPTER TRES
For the next few weeks nobody knew what to do with the plastic piece of baby in the
house. La Tata thought it was a pendejada to keep it, Lucia and I refused to let Mami
place it among our books and CDs and Mami, even though she would not admit to it, was
embarrassed to have a muneco a esta altura del partido con her bed. After being the
monthly center of attention Sebastian now served no purpose. The Pastores did not
specify what would happen with the metaphorical baby once baptized and the real baby
rose from limbo to baby heaven.
The night after the baptism Mami left him on the dining table and the next few
days you could see her startled every time she entered the dinning room, as if she
expected the fake baby to walk out now that he served no purpose. It was a strange time
for Mami: what was she going to do now that the baptism was over? She paced around
the house trying to find a nook for the fake baby. She went out with Milagros two or
three times a week to distribute fliers again, worked on some guy’s magazine writing
about Jesus and Finance, made some money here and there but when she came home at
night ay de que you’d touched or moved the freaking baby! At the time I thought the hot
humid infernal weather is messing with Mami’s brain cells and moved the baby on
purpose just to have a reaction from her, just to watch La Tata close those hazel eyes in
frustration and finally tell her, Myriam grow unos putos cojones and I’m throwing out
this pedazo de mierda. Sebastian gone, leaving a smell of chlorine and a small void in the
house. 36
But don’t you go thinking it ended there.
This is Myriam del Socorro we’re talking about. The same Myriam who fought the cashiers in Spanish because she just knew the bag of rice was buy one get one free, call me the manager! Fought the manager until he caved in and handed her the free bag of rice. The same woman who more than once obligated Alex to blow-dry her hair twice in a row, wetting it after he’d finished the first time because it didn’t fall elegantly on her shoulders. Mami in Bogota refusing to pay for the car-wash until she’d inspected all the comers of the trunk, then refusing to believe me when I said I wasn’t drinking at
Carolina’s party, then lying, saying she was taking me for ice cream but really dragging me to a hospital to proof I had been drinking and she was right.
You see the pattern here?
And Sebastian was Mami’s project, the baby she mourned for seventeen years. Was she about to drop fake baby forever?
Out of the dumpster she retrieved the plastic doll. Wearing pantyhose and a skirt she jumped until the baby and a bag of trash cascaded on her. I was dividing the room space with Lucia who eagerly taped Jesus paraphernalia after Jesus paraphernalia on the walls and demanded I wear another color other than black in her presence, when we heard a crash outside our window and what do you know there went Mami limping back into the townhouse. Tara! Cabbage Patch was back with ketchup smeared all over his face. 37
Even nonchalant lalaland dreamy Lucia felt Mami went overboard. What. Is. She.
Doing. In. The. Traaaaash. Our eyes meeting in a shared recognition, a brief moment of connection over our mother’s stupidity quickly shattered because, she continued, she just could not understand why if there is such a wide spectrum of beautiful colors that Diosito in his sabidurfa created you Francisca choose the darkest, the satanico one. Lucia and I were like Marfa Magdalena and la Virgen Marfa. The sinner and the holy. She dared not challenge Mami in anything, Mami said jump Lucfa threw herself over a cliff. No falta decir that Lucfa slipped into the Jovenes en Cristo so easily, her Life Changing
Conversion like a Cinderella lost shoe transformed the girl without any rough marks, as if she’d been waiting to pray with Jesus’s immigrant militia mayamense for the entirety of her twelve year old existence and, nina! Did this sister succeed. I mean who was volunteering in outreach efforts on South beach, plastering Sedanos’ with fliers, recording herself reading Bible verses for the children, call out La Tata for cursing? To the point that even Mami—already a fully Jesus-loving devota—as Lucfa lectured La
Tata over a lie, told her to calm down. Ya ya Lucfa calmate carajo. Calmate Lucfa! But there was no calming her. Jesus was with her, in her, all around her. It only took a month to transform this petite cachaquita into a full-blown hija de Dios and, motherfucker, was she proud of this. The prouder Lucfa grew the more time I spent staring at the goddam ceiling fan, fighting with her over my Smiths’ posters, yelling at her for calling Nirvana the satanas of gringos, etc. 38
On the chair next to Mami’s bed laid Sebastian. After praying during dinner that night it was decided the baby should be kept close to the only person in the house who didn’t want him soaked in ketchup in the dumpster. Of course Lucia did not have an opinion on this. But I did.
Es ridfculo mama, don’t you think Tata? Isn’t ridiculous she’s saving that piece of plastic? You, of all people ma.
Underneath the table La Tata patted my leg. Her way of saying, just leave it alone mija.
Esta bien. But what do you care? I’ll keep him in my room.
Why do I care? Porque Lucia and you complain about my posters, mi “satanic” music, my eye-liner pero ay de que I say anything about a maldito muneco. You do know he’s not your real baby, right?
Francisca, in this house no maldecimos. Words have power, you know better.
Damn: maldito. Could she kill with that shit or what? We couldn’t say “maldito” because words have power and we should be sending blessings into the world, so instead the muneco should be a “bendito” muneco. But the damn baby was a freaking maldicion.
A sign that we, that I, that this new life was cursed.
I evaded Mami’s room at all cost. Something inside me wouldn’t let me see Sebastian without a ball of defeat setting around my throat. 39
My fifteen years wasted.
I inhaled the plastic smell of the A.C. and unable to open any windows I stared out the window at the dumpster, at Roberto, the old Cuban drunk in a wheel chair who flirted with La Tata every change he got, at the low cemented houses, pink houses glaring, somewhere across those dry palm trees was my home, beyond the lake, beyond the venezolanas in bikinis wrapped around flashy boys in the moldy pool, beyond the highways crisscrossing—the everlasting whoosh of cars speeding—beyond the flowery bedspread, my dry hands. Beyond Pablito, the Argentinian fat loser with the glasses and the Star Treck shirt knocking on our door asking in the singing accent if one of the ninas would accompany him to the mall.
Yo no voy a salir contigo, maricon.
He played shyly with his hands. Mami yelled from the kitchen that maybe it’d do me good, Pablito mumbling, With all due respect I’m not a maricon I swear I can prove it.
Hands clasped behind him. I saw myself shrink watching the biggest loser in the
Heather Glen Aparment Complex offer his friendship. This is what I’ve become. Not become, really, more like unbecome. And yet. Pablito was the only loser who did not approach me with a Jesus brochure or a Got Jesus? Tank top suggesting I lose my
Ramones shirt for some festive Caribbean colors. You’re colombiana mami, where’s your sabor. Still. Homeboy gave me the creeps and I dare not be seen with him in public
(mind you, I did not know anyone). 40
Now mi reina, do you understand why I locked myself back in my room, blasting The
Cure while staring at the MSN icon on the computer waiting for someone, one of my friends back home, to say something, anything. The first few weeks our conversations lasted hours. They detailed all the gossip in school, who banged the panadero, ended up drunk at the hospital, was caught smoking, etc. I spent as much time as Mami and her devotion allowed me glued to that computer. But after a few weeks the messages began to fade. New people were added to the groups, who’s that? Oh, you don’t know him he’s
Marfa’s brother who is un churro divino. Relationships changed. Carolina? Girl she got kicked out of the school por kissing Paola. Paola said she forced her. Who is Paola?
Bogota changing without me. Leaving me behind. New buildings, bars. My own language kicking me aside. I remember noticing them using new words “guapa” instead
“hembra,” “darse besos” instead of “rumbearse.” I try joining in, sprinkling those new words here and there but they all sounded butchered, foreign. Now the conversations lasted only minutes before hitting a dead-end. The chat windows empty. The ceiling fan pressing down.
The next Sunday at Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor I refused to join the
Jovenes en Cristo after the one hour alabanza. Yes. One hour of non-stop salsa holy beats, slow generic music and arms high up swaying slowly, swaying in unison, almost choreographed, almost shadows of each other, the little, the big, the brown, the white, the arms clinging with bracelets, hairy arms, fingers intertwined, hands that had seen rough 41
times, the scarred, the veiny: all pointing to the baby blue ceiling where Diosito metaphorically lived. This querido cachaco was the second most embarrassing moment during the service. The first one of course being newly arrived sheep of Jesus walking up to the podium to share their Life Changing Testimony in tears and recurrent faints.
Mami, La Tata and Milagros had done so repeatedly already.
Dios rmo. The embarrassment when Mami told the entire congregation my father cheated on her. I could not look at her that day.
That Sunday I remained seated next to Mami who obediently bowed her head when the Pastor demanded, who obediently flipped through the Bible when the Pastora commanded while I silently gazed at her, sometimes angry, sometimes in awe of her new unstoppable devotion. Mami gave me The Eye then whispered I should do lo que me de la gana. Of course Lucia ran excited hugging her biblia and of course La Tata sat at the other end gossiping with Martica about the putas that were doing it before marriage. She continued to call putas putas even though no one was supposed to curse inside church, but they let La Tata curse because everyone felt pity. People knew. They must have. That
La Tata practically ran Cartagena during her time, that she was known as La Muneca a voluptuous matron hija of a well known notary in the city and the most codiciada costena in the late 1950s, and now Alba Leonor de Jesus Juan was an overweight devota de Dios missing most of her teeth. Let me woman curse! A large alcoholic who birthed so many children the skin around her hips drooped as if it didn’t belong to her, as if it was dead 42
and tired of all its use. Mami ignored the tiny bottles of rum on La Tata’s nightstand by wrapping them in aluminum foil or filling Sprite cans. Oh she’s just drinking her medicina. And so we all forget until one day La Tata steps out into the street en cuera, como Diosito la trajo al mundo, an angry bird flapping bright yellowing skin calling on her dead husband: Fabito, mijo, la comida esta lista.
Mami joined the crowd gathered up front around the Pastor who immediately started praying over the kneeled sheep. I stared down at my hands, cold and dry from the A.C., a half-moon mole on my right index finger (the only resemblance to my father), nails bitten to the core, small ugly hands that didn’t say much. I turned them over and imagined someone tracing its lines. I daydreamed of a huge mansion with a greater-than-life library, my wife with long brown hair waking up naked next to me, tracing the lines on my palm, whispering I was the mera mera ultimate love of her life and she wanted to bear my children. Maybe not children, no. I was fifteen, the fuck was I thinking about children. But I wanted this girl to show up in a Jeep and drive me out of Miami into a quiet place where the silence didn’t hurt as much as it did here.
Carmen sneaked up on me and asked me to join the jovenes. Que no quiero, I said. But her arms were strong and clasped my veiny hands. She smelled of accumulated sweat under the white veils, face drenched, satisfied, ugly. Then Camila her stupid minion, stomped down the middle of the room tugging at Carmen, whispering loud 43
enough for me to hear that she shouldn’t be spending her time and energy on a useless soul like mine, clearly I was unsaveable. A ver, can we all just take a moment and look at this sad case? I mean she wears black every single day. I mean esa nina no se puede salvar Carmen.
I was right there but she kept talking like I wasn’t a body.
Camila wanted Carmen for herself and she couldn’t stand me because Carmen wanted to share herself the evangelical way with other people. Like me.
You don’t have to save me Carmen.
But Jesus loves all his children pela’a.
She really meant it, I could see that. I was painful for her to see I was not saved. It hurt her. It was part of her mission, to evangelize, convert, save souls. I saw the pain in the low way she said “pela’a,” “girl” spoken by a true costena but not joyous as they usually speak, aja pedazo’e pela’a! But sad and empty. I was an empty girl with no Jesus in me and then she said she cared.
Of that Sunday I remember giving up to Carmen’s insistence and while walking out of the main room gazing back to find Mami fall on the floor for the first time. The Pastor had slightly pushed her, an ujier standing behind her catching her in his arms as if she had been shot. She looked disheveled (it wasn’t nada, she said later, Jesus was releasing me of pain), landing on that nasty carpet with brown hair for a halo. She’s in a much better 44
place now, Carmen whispered and I pushed her. Ven ven, she tug at me, and why fight it at all? Did I go into that other room? Si. And yes I did hold hands and yes I did pray and yes when we left the Hyatt that day La Tata exclaimed Carmen was a little recogida, an adoptada with no class and her and I laughed uncontrollably and yes I felt a slight satisfaction and no Mami did not explain much else, she didn’t care that I thought it was shameful that a woman like her laid on the floor of the Hyatt, she didn’t care but that day something snapped, something I couldn’t touch but that I knew had cracked, a fissure in that invisible tissue wrapped between her and me, the elasticity of the air caught between us.
Let me ask you something, Mami said on our way back, Por que la insistencia on going against everything that I say? When am I gonna see the day that you’re going to stop being un dolor de culo and actually join the family, ah?
Before I could answer she had her palm raised stopping me short.
No, don’t answer me right now Francisca. Just think about it.
Roberto waited outside our house with a bag of tamarindos for La Tata, his eyes red and watery from the beer. Lucfa ran to meet him and asked him (for the third time) to join the Jesus praising group. I had never seen Lucfa so happy, it was probably one of the happiest moments of her life, she’d found her click, her life calling, and she did not care that her youth was being wasted away, that she won’t discover masturbation until she reached 22, that she would wake up one day crying and abandoned by God. Fat Pablito 45
and his parents were outside too. He waved when he saw us stepping out of the car.
Francisca alia esta tu amigo.
He’s not my friend.
His parents looked decrepit, Goth, as if they had literally walked their way from
Argentina to Miami and were now smoking cigarettes to pass time. From the day we
arrived finding cigarettes became an epic adventure, my day-to-day goal that was rarely
completed because Mami almost always found the butts I was picking up from the street
and hiding in my nightstand. Nasty, I know. Like, disgusting, girl—I know. I tried
standing outside the Publix Sabor near our house with a short skirt, showing all that body
Diosito had not given me because I was plana like a tabla but still tried. I’d lean against
the shopping carts outside and waited for the boys at customer service to take their
breaks, flirted and pretended I’d lost my ID, they all knew I was underage but a grab of
the boob three out of five times produced a pack of Malboro Lights. Tara. Until acne-
scarred Jared dragged me to the bathroom and showed me his pipi and there and then I
knew Francisca needed new smoking avenues.
Maybe Pablito would come in handy after all.
I wave back in discomfort a little disturbed by Mami’s “join the family” comment,
what exactly did I have to think about? Against my own will I was dragged to that Jesus
praising circus every Sunday precisely because I was Myriam’s hija mayor and Mami 46
had to show her new sociedad that she was a woman of good, of Dios, that her daughters were devoted pious colombianitas, that we blindly followed her like all the women in our family had done with their mothers, that we—etc.
But what’s an angry mama when the prospect of cigarettes glimmers like the ocean we cannot see from our townhouse?
I joyously skipped and kissed both of Pablito’s parents who didn’t even seemed to notice I was there until I grabbed some groceries and helped carry them into the apartment. But, you think Mami is dumb? Try again. She knew I was after the cigarettes and said loudly, Francisca, mamita if I find you smoking te las vas a ver conmigo, okey?
A grin to the Goth Argentinians, Francisca is not smoking. A disgusted frown to La Tata for allowing Roberto to hold her hand and a, Callate! To Lucia who did not for one minute shut up ranting on all she’d learned about Eclesiastes.
Pablito’s parents were two hippies and he hated them for that. You could tell he despised their messy hairs and Belen’s hairy armpits and the ghostly way they just drifted about barely touching the ground, ensimismados, perdidos, always in search for something invisible. At least that’s how it seemed. He would later blame his parents for his failed social life, his addiction to pom and even his foot fetish. Both parents were part of the desaparecidos in the late 70s during the military dictatorship after organizing a sit- in against political censure and it seemed neither of them really got over it. 47
When I asked Pablito for cigarettes he mumbled he did not want to be used. I’m not using you, huevon, we are using your parents. But I do not smoke Francisca. Basically, the loser felt guilty stealing cigarettes (that were brought my his tia from Buenos Aires porque here they were too expensive) and refused to disclose their location to me.
Por que seras tan marica, Pablo?
As I have said before, I am not a homosexual and I can prove it.
So what do you propose we do?
His room was scented with jasmine incense and papered with posters of dragons and comics ripped from newspapers. The cleanest place in the apartment, his figurines neatly arranged in war scenes along the bookshelves. I sat on his bed staring out the window were orange rays danced over dark cumulus dark-contouring Pablito’s belly as he scratched and asked me if I wanted to watch him slay dragons on his computer.
Ah, Pablo, enserio? Can’t we just steal cigarettes and smoke?
Ya te dije que no fumo.
What if I teach you?
Pablito rolled up his Star Trek shirt to expose cigarette burns all over his back, and I mean tons and tons of red circles splattered across his yellowy skin like a polka dotted sofa. He’d been burned by the venecos last week because he didn’t want to suck 48
someone’s dick.
Ay, Pablo, why are you showing me that hue von? Cover yourself.
Porque no soy ningun maricon. He rubbed some of the scars as if trying to wipe them out. He did so clumsy then said he’s now officially starting a anti-smoking campaign to eradicate cigarettes.
That’s ridiculous. Te estan jodiendo. They’re fucking with you, the smoking has nothing to do with it.
But it gave him purpose, a way of healing that was accessible to him. He couldn’t just walk up to them and beat the shit out of their stinky asses, no mi senora. And now for some reason Pablito grinned hopeful, waiting for my response.
Didn’t I just tell you I wanted to smoke your cigarettes? Are you that freaking dumb?
His head was now bowed, he retrieved flyers he’d drawn for his smoke-free club where dragons sat around in circles tearing apart packs of Marlboros.
It was also around that time that Mami’s bible group began assembling in our living room. Four women plus La Tata and Mami and sometimes Lucia (when they let her) congregated with pen and pencil in hand filling out their Jehova Vive Workbook. Each week they discussed one chapter of their Jehova Vive Workbook over some tinto and 49
galleticas filling out crossword puzzles, Jesus Saves the Unsaved (filled in the blank), and
El Quiz del Espfritu Santo. At the end of the eight weeks they’d graduate with a special diploma and a small ceremony at Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor, which they all hanged proudly in our living room. And so every Tuesday I’d evade our house for three hours, walking the Heather Glen Apartment Complex in circles drenched in sweat the moment I’d step out of the air-conditioned townhouse, peaking at the pool and sometimes longing to be in that jacuzzi on top of a boy watching the girls’ breasts jump up and down in excitement when a veneco handed her a small mirror with perico.
There was also the lake. Manmade, green, impossibly dirty with cans and dead fish and the fucking ducks, no joda, squawking as if the world was about to the end, Roberto petting them while grabbing the girls stepping in and out of cars, longing for their round culos (which were fine), the flashy one piece disappearing along with the reggaeton and the boys wearing dark sunglasses at night. I’d picked the flickered butts that landed close to me, smoking whatever was left, then eating gum and spreading pumpkin cream all over my face so Mami wouldn’t notice I’d been having some good old tar. But she did.
Always. There was no way around her. The moment I came back to the townhouse, she’d yell at me still looking down at her workbook, Te huelo Francisca come here, and right in front of her Cfrculo de La Biblia she’d eyed me over her glasses, Estabas fumando, no?
And in that nervousness I’d smile and give her a, Of course not. Now, I know what you’re thinking. I do. Why wouldn’t you just stand up to that madre of yours? What could she possibly do or say to you for having a benign cigarrito? I mean, you sound like 50
a real badass (and thank you for that). Pero ay, mi amor, that’s because you just haven’t met a Myriam dell Socorro Juan and The Eye she carries hidden in those lids (a genetic inheritance that only real Colombian matrons develop).
A ver, Francisca, come here.
But I’m here Mami, stop being paranoid, you guys are not even done with your chapter tonight.
I say, ven aca Francisca, and the ladies can wait.
La Tata would look at me and bite her tongue as a way of saying, don’t respond to your mother, do as she says, which always got me confused.
I stepped back but Mami stood from the chair and ask me to give her a hug. Only one of the women looked at us, the other three busied themselves with pena ajena, stirring their tintos as if nothing at all was happening. One of them, I noticed, was mumbling in prayer. You know, back in Bogota I smoked my Kool Lights in the peace and comfort of my room opening a window, blowing out the smoke that reached high enough to cover the tip of the mountains for a second. Mami only asked that the room be aired and that I not buy the cigarettes on the street because, as she graciously explained to me, they could contain marihuana—which is totally untrue. Now, she was determined to eradicate cigarettes from our lives almost as much as she militantly pushed Jesucristo into our hearts. So, here, give your mami a hug. 51
Yours truly spent the next week grounded, which didn’t change anything because where else could I go? It wasn’t as if the Miami’s summer awaited for my skinny, hairy body with exciting trips to the beach and tons of x. No, way. I was helping Mami passing out flyers and wrapping a Colombian newspaper that we then distribute first thing in the morning at 4 a.m. And, okay, I have to admit the sunrise in Miami pierces your brain like a headache you get from eating something so damn good; its majestic yellows and oranges, its dampness, the shooting rays like darts penetrating the sky, the sun naked eating away the receding night and its beauty untouched by mountains: a rising hungry
beast beating on the window where Mami outlines her lips, ready to begin the day. It was
the most beautiful moment of the day and the most frightening. I saw the sun as proof
that this really was happening, this move that seemed like a mirage, a dream, an acid trip
we unconsciously slip into that eventually will fade, before this week something in me
still hoped we would go back because Miami was evidently a failure, a wrong turn en el
camino de la vida and because we had bought run-trip tickets para despistar customs, but
that week our Avianca plane left for Bogota with three empty seats.
We didn’t talk much during our newspaper distribution and tia Milagros was
always with us. Sometimes when reaching for another bag of newspapers, Mami would
place her hand on my knee showcasing her rings—the only remaining treasure she’d not
pawn— and just leave it there for a second. Then she’d ask for more periodicos and that
was it. Milagros, on the other hand, did not shut up for one second.
Aja sobrina, I’ve seen you hanging out with that argentinito, what’s the deal? Don’t 52
tell me you’re into gordos with no money.
Mami stared out the window at two women fighting in their front-yards, pointing
fingers at each other, children around them playing soccer.
Pablo? No tfa, he’s just a friend.
A friend, a friend. You know Camilo, Juan Carlos, Wilson and Mauricio from church
are all single y dos de ellos trabajan en Bank of America, she says searching for my eyes
in the rearview mirror and almost crashing into a Walmart truck.
I didn’t have to see Mami’s face to know exactly how it looked right then; how she
pursed her lips, her hands accommodating the rings over and over, then retrieving hand
sanitizer while crossing the right leg over the left not daring to look at Milagros who at
every stop eyed me, finally turning all the way around at the light saying God will help
me find a good Christian boy and that she understands why I don’t like Camilo, Juan
Carlos, Wilson and Mauricio—you’re waiting for a nice gringo. Good good, at least
someone is thinking of bettering our race.
Milagros, por favor, Mami responded, Francisca needs to first open her heart to Jesus
nuestro Salvador.
Claro, claro que si. But, she is opening her heart. Right nena. She is but she is not
telling us. You don’t want ending up as you-know-who solterona y con malas manas.
Does she know—do you know nena that at any time and place you can just recite the 53
following prayer and Jesus will enter your heart and begin his saving, you know that?
Oh how Milagros enjoyed reciting the Prayer That Will Save You, how she then
turned on the radio to the Spanish Christian station and how she waved her arms to the
beat, finishing each verse with an, aja, and a, ya tu sabe. She wore a pearl necklace
bought at Sawgrass the week before because real pearls were a pawn thing of the past
where she had two maids and a job in which people called her Doctora Milagros. And it
seemed Milagros was dedicated to bring-back-to-life that high class ejecutiva via second
hand, via outlet sales, via flashing them credit cards like it was nobody’s business and
dressing—just wait ‘till you hear—dressing in Miami with the remaining vestidos sewn
in Bogota by so and so designer that were, of course, way too hot for swamp weather but,
nonetheless, cashmere turtlenecks (along with leather botines) were worn that day to
distribute Colombian newspapers that I was sure nobody read.
Mami mumbled the words of the song until she too was swept by the now soft rock
beats and joined Milagros in singing. Her voice fueled by a certain conviction,
channeling some deep inner hope—something she did quite often—her sweaty forehead
wrinkled by the weight of her faith, pronouncing each word as if she was teaching it to
children, vocalizing, leaving no ays! or si! Jesus! out of the chorus, her voice a pulley
lifting all her troubles from her belly to the tip of her tongue and out to the air-
conditioned oxygen we breathed in that white van at 8 a.m. watching the bumper-to-
bumper traffic going south on 195. 54
I knew there was something about Milagros’ question that troubled Mami. She only
sang tightening her eyes with such conviction when there was something real happening
around her. I rolled my eyes until they hurt, thinking how predictable Mami was.
Pleaaaase, give me something to work with. Then I remembered the last time her
passionate and contorted face erupted in a volcano of tears and silence. The day after my
dance rehearsal, before we jumped the Caribbean charco, a picture of Carolina holding a
Coca Cola and a cigarette in the neopunk tienda en el centro. The only picture of her
smiling (odio sonreir carajo, she’d say every time), totally drunk she’d pencil a heart and
my name underneath right on her chest. She’d say, Let’s get tattoos before you leave
cause I ain’t gonna find no malparida like you around. It was a BFF kind of deal, si? But
the nuns were militant about anyone stepping boundaries and in that picture Carolina
crossed all of them. Inside the school we wore a uniform and even though during the
weekends we wore “whatever” we wanted, the monjas made sure we understood we
always carried the name of Santa Francisca Romana with us. Madre Teresa found the
picture and called Mami demanding an explanation. Mami sat next to me barely eyeing
the photograph, telling the monja this was surely just a close friendship that I was not
doing any drugs or involved with low-class people and that she assured Madre Teresa, le juraba y rejuraba, that Francisca will honor the Santa Francisca Romana school: she’d be
an exemplary mujer of this school. The monja wasn’t totally buying it, but Mami’s
conviction face told her she’d do everything in her power to keep me in line. 55
When we got home that afternoon Mami forgot to tell me that as part of the punishment Carmen was picking me up in two hours to join her and the jovenes distributing flyers at Sedanos’.
No way mama, I said slamming the van’s door, Am I your slave?
Cuidado. Words have power culicagada and in this house we don’t curse, agreed?
I smelled the powder in her face and watched the wrinkles accentuate when she squinted at La Tata who, with her window open, was carelessly chatting up with Roberto.
She’d notice Mami but barely smiled, paid no attention, and continued staring down so that you could only see a moon of white hair with streaks of blonde (she’d tried doing her highlights herself) hanging like a carpet put out to dry over the window. Don Francisco’s voice yelling from behind La Tata. Below the townhouses packed together like pale green sardines. A few steps decorated each entrance and right above the steps a window where some of our neighbors hanged Venezuelan, Dominican, Colombian, Argentinian, Cuban flags, in an effort to express their deep patriotism for a country they left because they were all pussies who didn’t want to stick around when shit went down—at least that’s what Roberto says.
I thought Mami was stomping right into their faces, confronting them about this make-believe romance, or yelling at La Tata for her indecency but what does she do? She 56
walks—not even—she strolls one feet in front of the other with such glamour, such elegance, you’d think she was still entering her office in Bogota, waving to the doorman who opened the door for her and greeted her as Doctora Myriam, como esta? Oh cachaco, even the weight she’d lost the past months was working for her, lifting her skinny varicose legs from the cemented parking lot, now she was in the runway of her life stomping that thick soiled air that cushioned the jerky steps now long strolls, now clattering murmur of the neighbors, now her wavy black hair blocking Mami’s view so that for a second it seems as if she’s stopping this race but, no senor, Myriam del Socorro
Juan is flitting across the parking lot hushing Marienela who mindlessly sings boleros next to the dumpster, now determination and, what’s that? Now Mami a circle of prayer around Roberto, arms extended, Mami yelling for the entire Heather Glen Apartment
Complex to hear that, He! is confused, that he! doesn’t understand what he! is doing because, por el amor de Jesucristo, he! is a sinner, unsaved, who amidst the skirts of widowed viejas searches for lost life taken from him by the evils of la borrachera y las mujeres, because there is no doubt that he! es un pobre mujeriego that doesn’t know about respect, that was probably kicked out of Cuba because he! was an embarrassment to his family, que no? A ver! So please God—now eyes shut to heaven—take pity of this sad soul, let him find you.
What Mami really meant to say is that she was tired of seeing La Tata hanging out with a bueno para nada, borracho, near the house. That we had come so far! for La Tata to ruin this Migration Project by lowering herself. 57
Before Mami finished her speech La Tata had closed the window furious, and poor
Roberto was babbling with his head down, hunched-back, picking the dirt from his calloused hands. You could tell homeboy felt shamed or defeated or both. Even his eyes
showed a different type of watering, different from the drunk pool that made his eyes yellow and red; this time the water was clear and the babbling stopped. 58
CHAPTER CUATRO
The punishment did not last one day. It lasted three, four days that turned in weeks in which Carmen picked me up in her white van decorated with so many golden Christian fish, it looked like we were a tourist excursion to the beach. She arrived right at noon.
She arrived right when the heat loses its gaseous elements and turns in to a solid cotton ball of warmth pushing at the nostrils, successfully inhibiting normal breathing so that just stepping outside feels like drowning in hot caldo. Hola, Carmen. She arrived right when the grey asphalt of the Heather Glen Apartment Complex transformed into a hot plate seen through a veil of gas. All a mirage. All an endless summer. Carmen at noon when Miami was a closed kitchen with a terrible gas-leak problem.
The car door slammed, then her eager knocking on the door. Francisca! She didn’t ring the bell, she didn’t wait patiently for me to open the door, Carmen’s confidence stood firm in her black bermudas and white flip-flops. Francisca! By the fourth day
Mami knew it was Carmen and by the fifth day she was complaining about Carmen’s manners. Esa nina! Can you tell her to ring the freaking bell?
I dreaded the moment almost as much as it excited me to leave the house. Because what was there waiting for me here? Alo, mi reina. Nada. But, also, what was waiting for me inside that white van? Three cold empanadas, boxes of Jesucristo Vendra, Are You
Ready? fliers, and Carmen’s fruity cold-medicine smell. I went along with it. I took
Sylvia Plath’s poems with me for comfort. Day after day dreading Carmen’s smell, but 59
anxiously waiting for it. My daily choices fluctuated between helping Mami lick white envelopes, watching Pablito slay dragons, or driving off to Sedanos’ with Carmen.
Leaving is always the best option.
In a useless effort to conceal my identity I wore a black hoodie thinking the cool kids by the pool would not notice it was loser me, loner me, still-no-friends me, who was seating shotgun with this smiling costenita. I wanted to scream out the window: I am not even Christian, please believe me! I wanted to unzip my yellowing skin, leave it behind.
But we didn’t roll down the windows here. A.C. was out oxygen because real oxygen was unbearable.
On the first day she picked me up I made the terrible mistake of asking for music. A stack of CDs with titles such as La Luz Del Sefior and Other Hits, 30 Ways to Love
Jesucristo, I ’ve Been Rescued: 10 Hit Songs by Former Prostitutes, etc. were our options.
I fed La Luz Del Sefior and Other Hits to the radio. As soft drumbeats bounced from the back speakers to my ears and as Carmen hummed the lyrics of the song (which I realized she had not memorized entirely), I gazed outside. A homeless man holding a sign I
FOUGHT FOR YOUR FREEDOM with a tiny U.S flag perched on the web of hair; a dark woman selling red roses; people going in and out of cars. Blonde babies on the back of SUVs. Both the translucent white people and the black people here had shocked the entire familia. Bogota’s diversity only went so far (meaning most people’s skin color fell somewhere between yellowish and dark brownish. Meaning not too pale, not too black).
The black people in our city were poor, very poor, displaced by the violence in rural areas 60
and begging for money at stoplights. Here, black families bought eggs next to Mami at
Walmart, there were albino children outside the supermarkets selling cookies. It was all so different and yet similar and yet so boring. I noticed these slight differences with zero excitement. They passed right through me. It was like riding a tourist bus with a jaded guide who nonchalantly points at the city’s attractions: to your right, here, another Polio
Tropical.
The Christian music was annoying and heartfelt. The guy singing so passionate it was impossible not to feel some of that passion too. At some moment in the chorus I felt my heart both eye-roll and quiver with recognition. Carmen wore some ridiculous sunglasses that I’ve only seen on men riding motorcycles, and around her neck the fish symbol in a gold necklace over another gold necklace reading CARMEN.
So this is the deal pela’a. Pay attention, okey? Why are you all distracted? We’ve not even reached the pretty part of the road.
Francisca, she said tugging at my hoodie, It is a million degrees outside, why you wearing a hoodie?
Carmen, like Mami, was full of questions about me: why don’t you join the familia?
Why don’t you receive Jesus in your heart? Why don’t you pay attention? Por que,
Francisca, por que!? All the questions bounced back unanswered and useless.
We were now way past the homeless guy, already on the 195 North. I told Carmen 61
that I was distracted because this was all new to me.
Nuevo? You have never seen a highway before? Ay, pela’a si in Colombia we have avenidas, no? This here is just bigger, but not better. You want some empanadas?
Carmen pointed to the squared Styrofoam next to my feet. I would eat cold empanadas every day for the next two weeks even though La Tata cooked the best arroz con coco with chicken sudao in all South Florida, but riding in this car felt like running away. A white spaceship. At least I could pretend we were running away: hello this is radiocriolla reporting from our runaway car. Over here Jesus, over there some dirty tampons.
One is espinaca, she said, And one is came.
In Bogota my school sold fat empanadas filled with yellow rice and meat. Every day
Carolina and I waited in line for Glady’s empanadas, then broke into the chapel carrying one notebook and scissors—our witchy tools— and proceeded to conjure Napoleon,
Hitler, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz while enjoying greasy food. I swear every time we called on Sor Juana the notebook moved sideways. (Sidenote: I now sometimes think it was Carolina gently pushing the scissors so that I believed it was one of my heroines speaking to us from the depths of deadhood).
On our fourth week rides after munching on the empanadas I blurted: do you have a boyfriend? 62
It came out of nowhere. Carmen bit on the empanada and chewed for a good ten seconds before responding.
I was trying to tell you our distribution plan, you ready?
Is the Pastor’s daughter not allowed to have boyfriends? Is that why? She turned to me quizzically, trying to decipher my intentions, so I said: Tranquila mi reina I’m not here to judge you.
She chuckled, Of course you are not judging me!
What does that mean? I said slightly offended, You?
Her right palm landed on my left knee. Cold from the A.C. Freezing actually, but also small with nails painted a horribly off-yellow.
She left it there with no explanation. I was waiting for her to respond that, of course, I was not judging her but, of course, she was judging me because Jesucristo is not yet in my heart, etc.
Pero mama, nothing.
The weight of that hand warmed my leg. Her fingers dark, her cuticles eating away the nail. She had a small band with the Colombian flag and a brown one with yet another
Christian fish.
The hand remained there until we enter Sedanos’ parking lot, then she said: you are 63
very important for Jesus and He is waiting for you.
It was all about smiling, and Dios Te Bendiga, and a pat on the back after giving them the flier. That’s it. Our Three Step Program for flier distribution and outreach efforts.
Some people smiled, others thought we were gonna jump them and screamed help! One guy pulled me aside saying he didn’t want a flyer but wouldn’t the two gorgeous chicas join him for fried chicken and a good time? He lifted the bag of fried chicken at me, then at Carmen who joyously (and without a bra) jumped around in excitement every time she approached somebody.
I laughed in his face. He called me una calentahuevas and limped towards Carmen.
Of course girlfriend doesn’t notice the skinny stick of white hair approaching her. She doesn’t even notice when as his eyes traverse her legs, or the Jesus Lives spread across her shirt, or notice when his reading glasses finally landed on her neck studying both of her gold necklaces. Two thoughts occurred to me: it would do her good if he suddenly attacks her so she may stop trusting every single soul with such joy and begin to distrust everyone like a true Colombian. My mind went there. It went to this fried chicken lover reaching for Carmen’s waist, forcing a kiss on her neck, people around us busying themselves with their kids, everyone (including me) looking the other way, at their groceries, at the inflatable dinosaur selling Excedrin, at the sun. Then the thought of him touching her became too real. What if he did touch her? What if he did reach for her? He 64
was slow and clumsy and receipts fell out of his caqui bermuda shorts like feathers.
I cannot remember the second thought because I blanked (but I swear there were two). Fried Chicken Lover was unstoppable and now way out of my reach, a papery white trail decorating the asphalt, connecting us. He was definitely about to touch her and
I was about to become complicit. I dreaded the thought of policemen arriving, asking me questions, of Mami’s face turning sad with disappointment, Of course Francisca would not do anything but stand there! Of my own predictability. Then the rush of saving her became almost palpable. Some strange energy running through my fingers, into my gut. I imagined myself courageous, my skinny legs sprinting, my veiny fingers landing somewhere on the Fried Chicken Lover’s body (in what can only be described as a pinch, but still), I imagine Carmen in my arms.
I remember the feeling from the time, back in Bogota, when right before my very eyes my hamster Ulises choked to death. He was old and thought his tiny mouth remained elastic but then it didn’t. I sat staring as his eyes went round and round, his furry body on loop. Too many almonds. He choked on too many almonds. It was only after he plopped to the side that I screamed. And screamed. And screamed. And mindlessly ran with him on my palm to the kitchen where Marfa washed the dishes singing some vallenato. Immediately, Marfa rinsed her fingers, dried them in her apron and proceeded to execute what can only described as failed-hamster-revival-for-the- mindless. Her chubby fingers all up his small mouth. I remember knowing that, in some way, I had killed him. 65
Now back to Fried Chicken Lover.
I wish I could say all my thirdworldness won, that I remembered I came from the land of the panela and the yucathatneverdies. That I channeled some of that fierceness my criollo ancestors had when defeating the Spanish (but, also, fierceness made them hate
each other and never agree on one single thing, which is the real reason why developing
is still part of our international name). I wish I could say I remembered La Tata’s wise
words about womanhood, and strength (people always seem to remember having
remembered a third-world granny saying shit that saved them), but, really, La Tata
believed a trimmed pussy and $100 will get you anywhere. I wish my legs had not been
so slim and stupid, I wish they could take me important places (like across the white
paper trail to save Carmen).
The courageous feeling only went so far, only got to my fingertips and dissolved into
a terrible paralysis Fve grown accustomed lived in my gut.
What I know is this: Fried Chicken Lover gazed back, winked at me, kissed two of
his fingers, then placed the two-kissed fingers in a metaphorical kiss on Carmen’s
shoulder. She turned around to greet him and he, as expected, as predicted by your
anchored and useless narrator, grabbed her face with both hands, leaned in and whispered
something.
At this moment I realized I was not scared for her. In an embarrassing way, I wanted
to be that Fried Chicken Lover. In an embarrassing way, I wanted to whisper something 66
to her face.
She then gently pushed him and continued distributing flyers to a family of six. And when he turned around and gave her the finger, she smiled thinly and annoyed, shouting some blessing at him.
You’re a terrible outreach partner pela’a, she said after the first week. You complain all day about the heat, you don’t smile at people, and what’s this? She said pulling out
Sylvia’s Ariel collection of poems from my backpack. What’s this? Francisca! (She pulled to the curb. Stopped the car, and eyed me) this depressing, manic poetry does not compute with Jesucristo. Que vamo hacer contigo, carajo?
I was shocked and excited that she knew Plath’s poetry. Nobody around me in this place had read anything beyond the church’s cannon.
You ’ve read Plath?
She grew a little desperate: that’s not the point!
But it was the point. For me, this was huge. This Jesus praising junkie, this adopted lost child, this greasy-haired paisa, knew who Plath was. Inside Carmen probably regretted this recognition so different from the world she was supposed to belong, from the world I was entering with her. 67
Esta bien, I said trying to calm her down, We don’t have to talk about it.
But there’s nothing to talk about!
I winked at her and for the first time in idontknowhowmanymonths there it was, baby girl: a smile. My own plain mouth contorting, pushing itself to the sides, a small wakening monster.
Of course you could now argue this was coming. That, hello mami linda, but I guess my vision blurred. I guess the days piled one on top of the other. It was the end of
September, which meant Mami got into a fight with Milagros because she mentioned my
father, I inadvertently became Carmen’s outreach mano derecha, and the palm trees
swayed in the same direction as they did in June, as they did in July, as they probably do
now.
If there was anything Mami hated talking about during this time it was, uno, dos, tres:
Co-lom-bia. She did not touch “The Subject,” she did not compare places, she cut it off
like a nurse cuts an umbilical cord with silver scissors. Chin-chin, it was gone. There
were, of course, more specific untouchable Colombian subjects such as my father and the
(previous) glimmer of her hair, Mami’s job, subjects she’d dismiss with an, You know they murdered three children from good families in Bogota last week? Aja, can you bring
me that notepad? Nodding and pointing to the notepad by pushing out her lips, then 68
resuming sticking flyers for Facial Surgery Discount! licking the envelope twice. She
hated licking those envelopes and eventually started using a brush dipped in water,
mindlessly, repeatedly, she’d dip and brush and dip and brush until a white stack grew,
almost cave-like around her.
My father is not a mystery. If he has yet to make an appearance is because I thought
Mami overreacted to his stupidity and my eyes rolled all the way behind my head every
time she said, Tu papa ruined my life. He was not a secret DAS agent (think CIA for the
criollos), or a senator snorting paramilitary money, or a good macho father making arepas
from scratch on Sundays. He was just there and then he wasn’t. Nevertheless, Mami took
it to heart to tattoo the pain all over her face as a reminder that my dad was an asshole. It
was like a glow in the dark tattoo, only visible when the lights were off (rechargeable in
the sun).
Anyway, Milagros made some comment or other about my dad being one of the best
things that ever happened to Mami, which all in all is a pretty shitty thing to say, I mean,
where does that leave Lucia and La Tata and me? Mami says Milagros knows how much
he ruined her life. That’s all she says. Do not ask for specifics, Mami’s reply is always:
this is not the moment, pass me the glue. But Milagros is also jealous that the Pastora
chose Mami as the lead ujier at Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor. Mami says, and La
Tata is not taking sides on this, that Milagros’ face almost exploded with anger when at
the Mujeres Valientes meeting—not to be confused with the weekly Bible group at my
house—La Pastora proudly announced that Mami showed leadership and a devoted 69
commitment to Jesus. Myriam del Carmen came home that day with a dignified look, a look that reminded me of the times I visit her at her office in Bogota. A look that said: I manage people, I make shit happen, do not mess with my tumbao. She was mesmerized by her own energy, and just sat munching on the arroz con coco with a terrifying look of satisfaction.
Was Mami back? Ay Dios mio reinita, do not get ahead of the story.
And so obviously during the next few Sundays Milagros did not sit with the familia in our reserved spot on the right hand side next to the Diezmo Box. She walked around us, kissed all of us except Mami, and then continued kissing people like it was a cocktail party and not a service. I arrived early with Mami and helped Carmen set up the Jovenes en Cristo space. We arranged pillows, organized bibles, bullet-pointed the material she needed to cover on the white board, and place a small stack of flyers in front of each pillow that each young person was to distribute during the next week. Camila and the other girls were also there, also arriving earlier and earlier each Sunday, also bringing
Carmen cookies in the shape of crosses and even an Ipod mini with a Christian fish on the back. You could tell Camila was lost. If she hated me before now she justcannotstandher! She pushed me one day then said she’d tripped. She quizzed me on the New Testament every time Carmen was there.
Francisca, she said to me one day, If you now have Jesus in your heart you have to 70
stop wearing all negro. It’s kinda of an insult to El Senor, wouldn’t you agree Carmen?
We were all three in the bathroom. Carmen in the middle of us pinning up her hair, readying her shekina outfit.
I do not have Jesus in my heart, I said while Carmen kept pushing bobby pins down her tangled hair.
You don’t?
Then to Carmen: She doesn ’tl
Carmen’s response was a simple: The Lord loves all His children.
But this wasn’t enough for Camila, she clearly had been working hard to climb the blessed ladder at this church, she clearly wanted to go to high holy places, and where was she now? Where was Carmen leaving her by choosing me?
Furious, Camila entered a stall and peed. I thought of leaving them alone, girlfriend was trouble and Carmen needed to set things straight with her. During one of our days at
Sedanos’ Carmen said Camila still needed to work things out with Jesus, that she was too competitive and had no patience. Maybe I needed to leave this youth hierarchy before it all got too messy. Carmen did not speak a word. The bobby pins fell around her (she was definitely terrible at doing her own hair), she caught herself almost saying, fuck.
It was all uncomfortable to watch. 71
It was all—wait, no, scratch that. Uncomfortable? Had I not been searching for some spark in my life? Had I not been waiting for something (anything) to happen? Who does
Camila think she is anyway? Let’s be honest cachaco, I spent all those hours with
Carmen handing out flyers in the sun, I clearly deserved to be the Pastora’s daughter #1.
Even if I didn’t have Jesus in my heart, so what? Carmen did not seem to care (she cared a little but not enough to stop our weekly outreach efforts). I did not care. I, for once, was spending my days doing something other than writing Don Francisco letters (I love you
Tata, but it gets old), or waiting for the dial-up internet to connect, or meeting with the biggest loser and his dragons in this side of the hemisphere.
I reconsidered leaving and instead offered to untangle and carefully braid Carmen’s hair. She padded my hand placing a gold hair tie.
And, claro que si, I felt some malice trickling all around my flat chest, giggling internally I saw myself climbing up life’s ladder looking down to find Camila begging to clean my shoes. Motherfucker did it feel good.
I braided Carmen’s hair like I owned it. Every string of hair combed through my fingers twice. When Camila walked out of the stall I was all over that head, hair-spraying the shit out of it then sprinkling gold glitter (Carmen was Holy Spirit that day), not even caring—but knowing—that Camila was there totally heartbroken, that she held back tears, that she searched for Carmen’s eyes on the bathroom mirror and when they met
Camila blurted: I picked up the new Got Jesus? shirts this morning, they’re on the 72
counter at the entrance next to the fake bowl of grapes. You have to give it to her, she tried.
Carmen thanked her. Then Camila asked if there was anything that needed to be done before she got all done up in her shekina dress too. There wasn’t anything else. I kept my gaze to the dry hair, untangling here and there, feeling Carmen’s dandruff, amazed at my newly acquired girl power. With my invisible hands I patted myself in the back.
I made the terrible mistake of telling Pablito about Carmen and how Camila literally opened doors (more like closets where we kept the pillows) for me at the church.
Excited I yapped about doing Carmen’s hair, about having access backstage where only the important people at Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor went. I-was-happening. I told Pablito about the younger shekinas lining up before service to get a one-on-one braiding with this mami. I went on and on about helping Carmen outline her weekly
Jovenes en Cristo meetings and about letting her pray over me.
I thought you hated that place, he said scratching a scab on his arm.
Yo se! I do.
He didn’t care. All he cared about in that moment was removing the piece of textured dead skin successfully.
Well, entonces? Excuse me Francisca but if you hate that institution it seems 73
contradictory that you care about Carmen? He always talked to me like we were high class Spaniards who instead of embarking on a low-class trip to the New World, stayed in the Motherland grateful for the purge of bums.
When he looked up I realized he never shaved his upper lip and thinned black hairs laid in an awkward semicircle around his mouth. The hairs were mostly dry except for the tips of some, wet from his constant licking.
You’re soooo missing the point. That’s what I get for trying to tell you anything important.
He chuckled, So la iglesia is important now?
It’s not important, I said frustrated picking Ficciones by Borges from his nightstand.
It was not important. He’s totally missing the point.
But it was, it wasn’t—maybe it was becoming important. It landed right there between Becoming a Female Gangster and Leaving Miami Forever (my ultimate important goal) and whether or not trees fall in places nobody hears (least important in the world).
Okay, he said doubtful, Would the senorita care to watch me slay zombies now?
I sat on Pablito’s Dragon Ball Z bedspread with a grin on my face. Out the window it poured like it only knows how to in the Caribbean, soaking even beneath the skin. The 74
rain did not come in drops, was not subtle and comforting, but more like someone had gashed the ballooning grey sky with a giant knife and the sea rushed out. Whenever it rained in Bogota (which, hello, every day) Mami said it was God crying and my father replied, No no Myriam, it’s Dios pissing on us. It’s His revenge.
Maybe God is both crying and pissing at the same time. If I had been The Creator of this world I’d be sobbing and peeing myself too, all the time— I also would have done things a bit differently, but on the other hand I would have never applied for that job.
I never understood Pablito’s love for videogames but I didn’t care. I liked being out my house and his parents were careless. His mom sat in the decrepit balcony in her pjs, fuming, reading, and from time to time yelling at Pablito to check on the gnocchi. This house was chaotic and Godless. I stole his mom’s cigarettes and smoked them in their bathroom. And that day while pocketing la senora’s Marlboros I found a box of colorful condoms and took a few. In my room that night I ripped the XXXLARGE Cherry
Flavored! pink package and blew it up to an imaginary penis. A deflated balloon at some poor person’s party, plus that nipple tip at the end. I caressed the gooey surface, massaging the tiny bumps with my index finger, at first pretending this was a scientific pursuit and I was just doing some empirical research, then moving into the bathroom determined to find this pink phallus some use.
In the bathroom mirror I am a long yellowing stick, sad small tits and a jet-black bush that I refuse to trim (for what?) plus this new cherry flavored pink cock. I picture what it 75
must be like to carry around such a thing between your legs. I turn sideways, I twirl, I give myself a shameful fake handjob, I ask Jesus to forgive me (twice) while I pretend
Carmen opens the bathroom door and sits on my lap and I braid her hair while she
whispers that my pink cock is the most beautiful ballooning dick she’s seen. I hold the condom on my pelvis looking more like a needy child at a birthday party than a sex toy
for the Pastora’s daughter. I get homy and scared. I try to think about boys sitting on my
lap instead of Carmen. I think about the Young Mulatongo, I think about Pablito (I went
there!), I think about my cousins, and Camilo and Roberto and every boy at church I’ve
been introduced to. I’m caressing their buzzed heads and penetrating them at the same
time. I think I am a woman, I say to myself, and I am in need of a man. Five minutes go
on before one of the boys grows long, dry hair, greasy skin, and thick legs. Five minutes
and their penises disappear and I’m braiding Carmen’s hair again, her gold necklaces in
between her breasts, her hoarse voice praying over me and before I know it I’m praying
too, before I know it I’m thanking Jesus, then regretting everything and asking him for
forgiveness over and over until the condom deflates from all the touching and Lucia
knocks on the bathroom door. 76
CHAPTER CINCO
We became inseparable. I’ve never known someone’s face so closely, so detailed. I could trace every freckle on her brown skin. I knew how her eyes shimmered when someone was willing to pray with her at Sedanos’ parking lot, and understood that she pinched herself whenever she felt angry towards her mother. I asked her once why she did this, she said it was a sin to think badly about your parents and pinching was her punishment.
After a few minutes she corrected herself and asked me to keep it a secret. We laid on her couch and as she said this her head fell on my shoulder followed by a sniff on my armpit followed by a you smell like rotten lemon, Francisca! She laughed, Pela’a let me lend you some deodorant.
I don’t need deodorant! Como no voy a estar sudando? It’s fucking hot outside.
We were alone in her house. Even though we were now this close the Pastora still wasn’t 100% on board with Carmen’s new BFF being an unsaved soul and she told me so. A few weeks before Carmen smelled my armpit, Mami and the Pastora pulled me aside during Jovenes en Cristo to have a “charladita” on matters regarding my soul burning in hell after the rapture.
Let me stop here for a second mi reina: I know right now your mind is going, yeah right, who really believes in the rapture. It’s the 21st Century in the 1st world! We’re civilized people! This is a secular (ha!) country! Etc. Tune-in to your favorite Florida’s conservative radio stations and prove me wrong. I beg you. Prove me wrong. 77
Now, where was I? The rapture. Although this third world mami now prayed sporadically, now attended church every Sunday, now put no resistance to distributing flyers in Sedano’s (actually enjoying it), now Carmen’s #1 confidant, now sometimes colorful t-shirts, Mami still felt I was holding back by not allowing Jesus in my heart. It was very simple for her: you pray for Him to enter, He enters, during The Rapture your soul flies to heaven, you are saved. I kinda wanted to be saved now. I did. Being saved at
Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor was like belonging to some V.I.P club: you got first dibs on heaven. And yet I was not on Jesus’ V.I.P list yet, which felt both relieving and terribly anxiety-producing at the same time. It was the thin thread that still separated me from totally giving in, marrying Jesus, climbing the holly ladder and being respected—in this tiny piece of world, but who cares? I couldn’t leave the country. I couldn’t leave
Miami. I knew no one outside this church and no one knew me. I tried resisting and where did that take me? The cool boys snorting their perico and the dyed-blonde Venecas with their big tits by the pool knew nothing about me, wanted nothing to do with me. I was invisible to the world until I entered that church every Sunday at 9 a.m. and the young shekinas begged me to braid their hair.
So for the 100th time Mami and The Pastora urged me to pray to Jesucristo nuestro
Salvador.
I’ll think about it, I said to Mami’s shock.
I’d always just rolled my eyes, or changed the subject, or silently escorted myself to 78
the nearest bathroom and cried over my uncool existence.
So by the time Carmen smelled my armpit the idea of Jesus getting cozy in my heart had been marinating for a few weeks. I refused her medicated Dove deodorant. There were drops of sweat and minuscule pieces of skin, and maybe a few hairs to think about rubbing against my dotted armpit. The sole idea of having pieces of her in my pores sent an excruciating thrill that I just couldn’t stand.
Okey pues, I can lend you a shirt. Take that nasty thing off.
She crossed the line by pulling my arms then holding my waist for what seemed like an eternity. I asked her if she did this with all the youth. She didn’t. I asked her if she did this with Camila. She chuckled. Camila would never smell this terrible.
She wouldn’t? Why?
Nina, have you seen how impeccable that girl shows up at church? Her mother inspects every single comer of her every day before leaving. No smelly armpits for her.
For like one second I felt bad for Camila then remembered I was now above her on this holy ladder. As Carmen pulled up my shirt my earring got stuck, I yelled at her but she kept yanking at it sending a ripping pain through my left ear. The earring fell but the shirt wouldn’t come off. I thought about La Tata that morning handing them to me, one of the last treasures inherited from her own mama who brought the pearl earrings from
Lebanon when she migrated to Cartagena. She’d been watching Roberto from her 79
window drinking rum out of a Sprite can suddenly smiling when I came in and asked her to help me find some earrings. Over the last month her room was transformed from old-
lady flowery drapes to museum of the dead to Jesus Christ’s locker room. It was a mess.
I gazed around in shock as she handed me the pearl earrings retelling the story of her
mama while sending kisses to Roberto. Black and white photographs of every single dead
and alive family member filled the walls, along with bible verses written in her
handwriting awkwardly taped around the larger-than-life photograph of my grandfather
as a young man in Cartagena. Her skin suddenly droopy and yellow. Her spotted hands
cold, wrinkly and small. I hated earrings, but I was re-inventing myself, soaking in
haleluyas and bendiciones. Pearl earrings too? Sure.
Of course my ear now bled.
Carmen, huevon tengo sangre en la oreja. My ear is bleeding! Oh por Dios. Carmen
stop pulling at my shirt!
Of course Carmen thought it hilarious and giggled, of course I grew angry but wanted
her close and needed to continue making a scene if any good was to come out of a
bleeding ear. And I did: screaming, grabbing her arms, demanding she dial 911 because
for all we know it was now a gangrenous ear, and I am losing my hearing, and I will learn
how to sign, and she will always carry that I-deafened-Francisca cross on her shoulders.
She will always come back to me.
No shits given. Girlfriend still pulled at the shirt, my arms now caught in an 80
unmovable vertical position, my belly forever exposed to the A.C. It was the first time she acted careless, violent, miscalculating herself tightening her grip on my arms while choking on her laughter, then pushed me to the sofa and landed next to me. I was into it and wanted her to continue. I tried pushing my feet into her legs but then my shirt finally came off but I kept pretending to be fucking angry at her, touching my bleeding ear with one hand, searching for the missing earring on all fours with the other hand, all I wanted was for her to throw herself on me and tighten my wrists.
She rested on the couch looking for the first time like a cool, dorky girl who just happened to be wearing a shirt with a bleeding crown bisected by a blue dove.
I have a secret remedy for your ear. She could really be hanging out at the comer of some big city rolling cigarettes and wearing a leather jacket.
Pff, yeah right. Like I’m gonna let you anywhere near my face right now.
She waited for me to sit again on the couch.
Leather black couch on white tiles. Faded beige bra on yellowing skin. Now my belly too expose too malnourished too real right now and all of the sudden Carmen’s hands, also too real, on either side of my head, her long cold fingers pressing on my neck my toes contracting in fear. I may have closed my eyes? I may be making shit up. But I know my hands grabbed onto the leather couch as if we were about to fly off. Her breath stank of Cheetos. Stay still, she said. The thrill of her approaching warmth left me frozen on the 81
spot until I felt her tongue, like a mollusk entertaining a pray with its tentacles, sucking and licking on my earlobe.
She’s not kissing me. No. Well kinda. But not really. She’s caring for the earlobe she just violently ripped and spread her germs all over. She’s putting my entire right lobe on her mouth like those hamsters the shekinas bring to church sometimes, how they suck on tubes of water. I stay there with my eyes either closed or open either staring at the pictures of the Pastora in her shekina gown in front of me or into an adrenaline rushed darkness where I felt her teeth barely touching my skin where I couldn’t make out the form of her tongue but just its waves of water.
I’m not sure how long this lasted. Maybe real-life thirty seconds, maybe a minute, but maybe it was a week. We were there sixty years until her tongue grew wrinkly and we passed out from old people’s disease. We died side by side while she nurtured by lobe my faded bra holding my slightly sagging breasts her shirt threadbare still slightly touching my arm.
The warmth of her saliva on my ear was abruptly followed by the cold wind of the
A.C right above us. I dare not look at her. The thought of a disappointing face— I didn’t want her taking back all the seconds of saliva spent on my ear, I wanted her to be proud of licking a part of my body. The fear of Carmen suddenly snapping out of it. 82
CHAPTER SEIS
But let’s go back to Mami, to Coffee Land and the bum bum bum of the Sagrado
Corazon, the Virgen Marfa overseeing the early days of the perico that brought us ay
Jesucristo here comes Don Pablito Escobar and there’s nothing you can do about it. In those days Myriam lived in Bogota. She sang Ana y Jaime in a blue checkered Catholic uniform that reached below the knees daydreaming of Cartagena where Mansur, her machuque, lived. La Tata yelling at her to help with the sewing, the baking, amazed at
Myriam’s ability to lose herself entirely in a sueno. La Tata would sometimes find Mami en el patio, book in hands, eyes closed. Myriam! Que carajo are you doing? But she wouldn’t pay attention to her mother’s calling. Myriam was daydreaming of the machuque opening the doors of her ever-than-large office where she didn’t have to help
La Tata sell candy and bake cakes for rich people (toca aclarar, her own people), rather she would be that Senora Myriam estrato seven mi vida, and her office with a view would be proof of this.
Pero once La Tata bursted the sueno’s bubble, it was the small house with its rusty wooden fence and old buckets of paint that welcomed Myriam. Hola hola, buenos dfas princesa. Over here half-dead roses sticking out the front, over there browning leaves against thick grey clouds against a drop of light blue. Same. Cielo. Every. Day. Mornings of sun and a sky so blue you’d thought it was our mar, just another of Diosito’s third world jokes, and the mar did come, from the cerros, from el sur, thick dark cumulus circling la city, so that by 4 p.m. the sky ripped open in a fierce aguacero that transformed 83
Bogota into a blur of water. Myriam enjoyed the rain. The one thing about Bogota she didn’t hate was the weather, crisp and cool, rainy, hair lasting an entire week blow-dried without puffing into an uncontrollable frizz as it did in Cartagena (and she always carry a plastic bag for her hair). La Tata complained that the hijuemadre aguacero created puddles, drowned the roses and made her run around the house with buckets catching every leak from every crack in the ceiling. The labyrinth of buckets depressed Myriam, angered her, reminded our girl that their house in Cartagena did not leak, did not crack, that in the mornings she’d call on her maid to heat up the quidbes and strolled down the spiral stairs inhaling the smell of cleanliness and Channel perfume.
She hated thinking about her childhood. Days in Cartagena before el idiota of her father fucked them over investing money in land all over the country that was quickly taken over by this mafia and that sicario and after paying vacunas to this narco, vacunas to that guerrilla they weren’t sure which poor-tum-evilrich motherfucker was stealing their fincas. Lost in the swaying bureocracy of the 70s when her father reached out to his rich buddies at Banco Popular, all them criollos gave him the finger and before you could say se armo el coge coge he was fired. And so, unable to pay the private club membership, private school, private this and that in Cartagena and Cartagena being such a tight social circle, the whispering of their loss forced the family of four to move to
Bogota like nobodies, mi Dios! Like Milagros and Myriam never took tennis classes, nesting en una casita in a so-so neighborhood surrounded by “those kinds of people.”
Okey, Hold on. You know what mi reina? Don’t roll your eyes. This ain’t another 84
Colombian-meets-cocaine-meets-FARC story. Chill out. We’re just getting started. And for the hijuemadre record in late 1970s there wasn’t one criollito soul untouched by the mero new rich cartels. So kill me for bringing those memories of our patria back to you.
Myriam hated thinking about her childhood but never lost faith. She’d told La Tata she couldn’t help her because she was working on her homework.
But you’re asleep!
Mama, it’s called thinking?
Are you trying to call me estupida? Ah? Come here right now I need you to finish the icing on the cake for Martica.
La Tata could sometimes be extreme and slap the girls but not this time. She was in a good mood, her cakes were booming in the barrio and everyone wanted a piece of Alba’s sugar. On the other hand the only hombre in the house, Don Fabito, had retrieve into a ball of aguardiente in the back of the house and against all odds La Tata’s income fed the house. And because La Tata held the pantalones, earned the monies, the main bedroom instead of nuptial became her working place. In the tiny room adjacent to the kitchen, a room for a maid they did not have (at the moment), rested a double bed La Tata shared with Fabito.
The sight of Fabito angered Myriam now. The radio on all day, old newspapers scattered around the floor and over the couch next to the ever-present media de Nectar. 85
Myriam rarely brought her friends from the private Catholic school she and Milagros attended—sobra decir, payed by her mother’s sisters who of course couldn’t watch the downfall of the girls into district schooling—Myriam could not stand the embarrassment of el harapiento papa mumbling curses to the radio, the broken antenna on the T.V, bags, clothes, scattered around the house and the house itself small and screaming a bare estrato three. Imagine from estrato seven to barely three. From a Mercedes to a buseta.
Na-ha mamita. At school she performed the high-class elegance memorized so well from her early days en la costa, Milagros playing along but barely caring, sometimes forgetting that their father was in a business trip in Italy. Myriam didn’t let La Tata step foot on the perfectly trimmed lawn of the Santa Maria School unless La Tata’s outfit had been scrutinized and scanned for any possible poor choices. La Tata knew this and told both of them to be thankful that they at least had food in their plates, a roof over their heads, at least didn’t beg on the streets, look at those poor children with snot and ripped clothes.
Delen gracias a Dios, no joda!
But Mami couldn’t thank God. Although angry at El Senor for letting their lelo father ruined their lives, she prayed during school mass, after comunion and at night in front of the Virgen to please let her rise above this nightmare, let her be the businesswoman she was meant to be, etc.
A block from their house there was a small mercadito de las pulgas where mujeres campesinas brought their handmade clothes, jewelry and those ugly chivas tourists get when they travel to Colombia. Those sold cheap. The jewelry even cheaper because 86
nobody in that neighborhood could pay more and of course the campesinas got whatever they could, having been uprooted by the same poor-tum-evilrich motherfuckers plus the
military from their land they were the new poor class of la city arriving en pleno Bogota
sometimes barefooted, always lost, always pushed to the margins, up the mountains
beginning what would be known as “invasiones:” a clog to the arteries of Bogota,
assemblages of shacks coating the mountains with its sadness, its lack of electricity, its
mud and rats. Mi reina, the campesinas had it so bad even the poor people en la city
where like, I ain’t sharing my barrio with those people.
Myriam walked past the mercadito every day on her way to and from school. She
thought some of the jewerly truly beautiful and intricate: tagua necklaces, wooden
bracelets engraved with precolonial designs, silver earrings with bright blue stones Mami
could not recognize. Even for a nina venida a menos the jewerly was cheap, so she
bought the silver earrings. The next day at the Santa Maria School all the ninas de papi
drooled over the delicate stones hanging from Mami’s earrings. You would think she’d just feel superior, welcomed, a new sense of belonging, but what Myriam really felt was
the aja! moment of a miracle. Out of that splendid cuerpazo of hers came out the story of
a Lebanese designer living in Cartagena who brought the stones from far away places and
with whom Mami had a close relationship.
And so it began a new entrepreneurial phase for our girl. Next thing you know the
culicagada invested all her savings plus some of La Tata’s in the campesinas’s jewelry.
Freaking out La Tata, What have you done with all your savings carajo! You don’t need 87
four pairs of necklaces, para que? Ah! Where does the senorita think she’s going with a box full of plata? Dios rmo. Are you going insane? She dared not reveal her secret business to anyone, anyone but Milagros who sometimes lela—sources say Milagros fell head over heels enamora’a with the moreno Walter working the comer store and just imagine what that did to La Tata and her sisters— Milagros aloof but still noticing the new circle of preppy girls around Myriam during recess. Her hermana rapidly acquiring superstar status. Quickly moving up the popular ladder, spending weekends in Fulanita’s penthouse in Santa Marta or at Sutanita’s countryhouse in Cachipay, all paid by the new
BFFs disposable income. Buying her way into each estrato. She could not afford designer clothes yet but with the pesos from the jewelry she also purchased the campesinas’s clothing, worked on them for days, adding a bit of golden lace here, some silver buttons there, copying every outfit Rocfo Durcal wore in the fotonovelas she read religiously.
Sobra decir: if Myriam was caught selling anything she’d be kicked out of the school and if she got caught selling that cheap jewerly she’d be kicked out of the sociedad.
And did she get caught?
She did and then she didn’t. Already a queen at school, already La Tata dropping looks on her that were reserved for the truly out of place guarichas in the neighborhood, already buying white Reeboks spending such amount of money like it was nobody’s business and a new (shorter) school uniform—already colonizing the patio with jewerly boxes hunched over her notebook balancing out the books! The books! Was this surreal or what 88
cachaco? Seventeen and in one hand holding as many bills as any nina de papi. The
Dream!
Milagros stopped her one day in mid-recess.
En que carajo’e lio andas metida tu, Myriam?
What are you talking about pendeja. Stop being so jealous, por Dios.
Jealous? You know Tata knows what you’re doing and she don’t like it a bit.
That night when she got home her mother waited for her belt in hand, Now you are gonna
tell me ahora mismito where carajos are you getting all that money y ay Myriam del
Socorro Juan that you lie to me.
Mami didn’t say a word.
Is this how I raised you?
You’re being overdramatic. I just got new friends.
New friends? New friends? That’s what I get for letting your tfas enroll you in that
school. Which friends? Why haven’t I seen any of those amigas? You can always bring
your friends here.
La Tata stopped mixing flour when Myriam’s eyes sent a
youkno wlcan ’ tbringthemhere. 89
In a way, La Tata told me, It was my fault. I raised them like that, but the descaro of your madre— the shame in her eyes nearly killed me. I worked hard and the three of them were a pain in the ass, complaining, Fabio silently drinking himself to death and here was this culicagada starting at me with shame. Did I say shame? Como si I also didn’t once wear so much hijuemadre gold. Like this pechos didn’t have three maids just to cook for me. Just to cook, mija. Your abuela was The Muneca of Cartagena and
Myriam’s shame shocked me. What had I become?
Myriam didn’t want to tell La Tata because she knew her mama would throw a fit for “exploiting” the campesinas, lying to the girls at school, and jeopardizing her education. Plus why was she not helping with the bills?
Because, alo? An apartment en la 94 is not payed with smiles and the carajita knew this. La nina was a sonadora but she was not a bruta. Ademas, coming home to her mother’s exhausted eyes drained her, watching La Tata’s hands peel and darken, eating fucking arroz con huevo and platanos every Sunday. She needed to be vindicated, no joda!
Years later in Miami, Mami would fight La Tata over the verifiability of this story.
Because as La Tata tells it, I told your mother she was not gonna jeopardize her education and lying about the jewerly? Had I taught her that? And I may just be a vieja but didn’t I dream of golden dresses too? Entonces no, mija. Lying was not welcomed in my house.
Call me close-minded, call me conservative. 90
Myriam left the house, moved in with one of her rich friends whose father traveled all the time and their place so big Myriam was barely noticeable. According to
La Tata, Myriam fell in malas manas in that house, which could mean anything from wearing a skirt too short to fucking a boy before marriage. La Tata didn’t like reminiscing about her girls’s doubtful behavior, but when drunk any subject was a good subject and one day during Don Francisco between her fourth and fifth glass of Sprite rum, she said Mami looked exactly like the woman in a Zolof commercial after she’d return home that time. I don’t think this Zolof woman needs much description: the usual woman in an aura of skinny overwhelming sadness. When I asked Mami about that time at Leonor’s house she just told me, God wants us to get rid of our past and look into the bright future where He and the Espfritu Santo are holding our hand. But that afternoon La
Tata was a chisme volador and before you could say ay juepuchica she spilled the beans on one of Mami’s darkest pasts.
Leonor de las Mercedes Santos was the daughter of a widowed senator that we’ll call Pepito Santos. If you’ve been paying attention to this story you now know that, yes corazoncito mio, Pepito was one of those rich hijueputicas money-laundering for our dearest Michelsen, shaking hands with the cartel’s top gangsters for an exchange of silence, billullo, and tons of uncut perico. And what. do. you. know. Leonorcita being a spoiled only-child brat herself manage her own perico habit on the side, a hobby really, a relief from her shopping trips to Miami and tanning trips to their apartment in Cartagena. 91
When Myriam entered the equation Leonor was in the midst of her own small coca business, obviously just a way of entertaining herself, because helloooo what daughter of a senator in the late 70s needed money? Myriam spent her days in their guest room, taking trips back to her neighborhood en el sur only to buy jewelry from the campesinas but detouring into her street, watching her small house from afar, sometimes longing for
La Tata’s bizcochos, but more often than not, angry at how disheveled the entrance looked with its graffiti and dying trees. Once she caught sight of La Tata hands’ white from the flour trimming the roses. But the moment her stomach quivered in a beginning yearning knot, the image of Leonor’s doorman, her silky perfected hair and equestrian boots shattered the spell.
From the moment Myriam stepped outside the household La Tata did nothing but rezar to Dios y la Virgen del Carmen. As La Tata explains it, Every day this devota de
Dios lit candles, pray three rosaries, and donated money to their local church. But never
went looking for Mami. When I asked her why she didn’t just stop by the Santa Maria
school she said that with el dolor de su alma Mami needed to learn her lesson. Myriam
wanted an easy life? Then in no way was La Tata gonna stop her from hitting her dumb
head against the world. Life is hard, mija. Ademas—La Tata added munching on a Hot
Pocket— I knew Diosito heard my prayers and He took care of her. Plus, mija, I had cakes to bake, dresses to sew, life didn’t just stop because your madre wanted to play
superstar.
Ay Dios mi'o were these two stubborn. One staring at the house from outside and the 92
other eyeing the soul of her daughter from the inside without making a move. Talk about gridlock.
Here’s where the historia gets murky. So we’ll use Milagros’s take on the sto ry - worth noting this version is littered with chisme from various girls at Santa Maria school.
In the midst of selling fake jewelry, climbing the pompous estrato ladder with
Leonor, returning to the exhilarating comfortable feeling of superiority, doorman opening doors, maids making her bed, cheeses aged for years traveling the Atlantico to land on her plate, blow-dry every two days, Marc Jacobs purse, Italian eating en la 94, drifting quick and far—hooked on to Leonor during every party. Of course Myriam couldn’t say no to all the parties, cocteles, and dinners at Leonor’s house. Parties with a live orchestra, a live magician, every culicagado under 25 whose father (let’s admit, there were no women) had a foot in el senado, jarras upon jarras of aguardiente, salsa and, you guessed it, perico until 5 in the morning. There they are: Leonor and Myriam passed out on champagne. Leonor and Myriam in Santa Marta. Leonor and Myriam binge drinking with
Nicolas and his friends. Leonor and Myriam speeding down the circunvalar. Out now of her poor house, Mami fell head first in to the luxury of Bogota’s top riches. I am afraid to say—even to her denial—that Myriam became the Life of The Party, demanding more aguardiente after everyone was passed out and stealing bags of coke from Leonor’s drawer to stay awake and fully watch the sunrise. Cachaco the early 80s! Colombia was just getting started in the amapola business. That shit was so sticky and good your face felt numb for hours. 93
She became foul-mouthed, dropping hijueputas here, malparidos there, showing up coked out of her mind to chemistry class, getting kicked out of Spanish for calling the profesora a malparida igualada. I mean, what did she care? Leonor was now her sister from a rich mister. Oh my God, she was living The Life. Right? But it didn’t stop there.
No senor. Myriam also banged—another denial, swearing, Tu papa took my virginity- four or five or ten muchachos de papi, Nicolas Betacourt especially charming her with his light brown curls, green eyes and endless source of dough.
Sometimes while Nicolas anxiously grabbed her breasts she thought of Mansur.
Warm Mansur, caterpillar brow Mansur, olive-skinned rich Mansur with that Lebanese accent still mixing with his Spanish. How’s the senorita doing today? The politeness of his ways, the opening of doors, chairs, the perfect dabbing of mouth with cloth napkins.
His big hairy hands. The way they grabbed her waist hard, pulling her close, so that everyone knew that hembrita was his. Mansur who read Shakespeare, recited poetry and serenaded her outside her house in Cartagena with roses. You, queridisimo lector, may be bored out of your mind with the sight of this Romeo but try saying that when an hombre with so much tumbao knocks on your door with freaking mariachis and a love poem. And homeboy respected her. In the 70s. In Cartagena. You’re gonna fly high mi pajarito, he’d say whenever Myriam rambled about the big office. You, mi princesa, will run this town and possibly this godforsaken country of miserables. They walked around the Ciudad
Vieja, hand-in-waist, the breeze of the night finally cooling the infernal heat of the day.
The sea dark, infinite, monstrous, sprinkled with couples here and there, naked teenagers 94
swimming and giggling. Whenever they spent the day at the beach Mansur’s skin quickly turned so dark when she’d turn to play with the curls on his chest she’d whisper, mi negro bello.
Mami was fifteen, new to the love business. Blindly following her negro bello into this motel, that restaurant, that other playa, ignoring the days when he did not call, the nights he hurried home, the weeks of silence, and before you could say se armo la gorda
Mansur’s wife knocked on the Juan’s door.
Now below Nicolas’s skinny body, Myriam did not know La Tata apologized to the woman, visited Mansur’s office, demanded the sinvergiienza restore his daughter’s reputation by disproving his wife, by disappearing from the girl’s life. We are to assume the negro bello loved Mami, but then again, guess what? She also ignores reminiscing about the Lebanese papi. Apparently, Mansur saw her one last time before the family moved to Bogota, but if Mami still waited for him, still longed for him while Nicolas humped, then the papi probably didn’t keep La Tata’s promise. And so Myriam imagined his big hands opening her thighs until Nicolas’ heavy breathing, the smell of strong cologne and cigarettes brought her back to Leonor’s house, to the perico, to the six months of hellish wealth.
Six months that felt like a life-time.
And it surely was a life-time for when Milagros finally cave in and approached her during recess Myriam’s once full Coca-Cola cuerpazo, now transformed into a sad 95
skeletal dry carcass with protruding teeth. Girlfriend was all teeth! I cannot emphasize how flaca your madre was, Milagros will say. Eyes popping, more bones than flesh. Ay muje, but her gold necklaces and new haircut! Plus Nicolas sending his chauffeur to pick her up in his Mercedes after school. I mean, who needs body fat when there’s a rich
muchachon willing to fuck your brains out inside a penthouse? And we’ll get to the brains-out part of that fucking. But, first, Milagros truly worried approaching Mami.
A que tu juegas, Myriam? Stop playing, you need to come home, eat something.
She handed Mami an empanada. Mami chuckled.
You think I don’t have enough food? Por Dios Milagros, I could feed this entire
country with Leonor’s fridges.
What Mami really wanted was for Milagros to beg her. She couldn’t admit this life-
altering plan had gone cuckoo and she was now losing her freaking mind, losing her
body, her soul with no idea how to get it back. Secretly for the last two months Mami had
longed for this moment. Secretly a yawning loneliness clogged Mami’s heart. She sobbed
at night and after el nino Betancourt finished his humping business and came all over her.
But she needed Milagros to plead, implore, supplicate—the pride of this culicagada! She
needed Milagros to hug her, drag her to La Tata where Myriam could curl into a ball
while La Tata rocked that wounded body until a punta de aguapanela con queso and her
best tamales she’d heal Myriam’s soul. 96
Pero, ese orgullo!
And, sadly, this is not a children’s book, mi reina.
Milagros tried touching Myriam’s cheeks but she recoiled and left her sister standing in the middle of the parking lot while she hurried into the Mercedes waiting outside. Her heart knowing exactly what she needed: the touch and care of her madre. But that teenage pride, coupled with the still delicious numbing feeling of the perico, and Nicolas’s gift after gift tightening his grip on our girl’s mind.
A week before her 18th birthday on one of those rainy mornings Bogota does so well,
Leonor woke up Mami banging on the door, yanking at her hair (you have to pardon the stereotypical telenovela image):
Te me vas ya\ Leave my house ahora mismo. Perra de mierda, ladrona, hija de puta levantada. Here I am opening the doors of my home to you and you’re stealing my jewels and my drugs? You fucking low-class bitch. Out!
La Tata grew silent at this point but I manage to gather a confession from Milagros.
Yes. Myriam did steal Leonor’s jewels and sold them right-at-the-school. La idiota!
Underneath the nina rica’s nose. Sold even to Leonor’s friends. Oh, how desperate Mami became—so hopeless, almost no light shone inside her.
Pero por supuesto once and for all she should have gone home with the cola entre las 97
patas and begged for forgiveness. Pero nina, if that country of reinas had a contest for
Miss Stubborn Myriam wouldn’t even have to enter the competition to win. And let’s be
honest, even to this day Mami’s stubbornness keeps her from drinking her medicine on
time, keeps her from seeing the Pastor’s ever growing mansion, etc.
Like a coked-out messiah there was Nicolas. Ay el nino rico always willing to save
her. Drive the skeletal body to his penthouse, fuck the bag of bones, maybe slap her
around a bit, maybe punch her face when she refused his dick. A whole week she spent
there.
This junkie motherfucker will eventually go to rehab in Miami then move back to run
for a senate seat (and win!).
They probably slept ten hours by the end of that week. The sleepless daze running
their bodies into the wall. Literally. La Tata was kind when she said Mami resembled the
woman in the Zolof commercial. Not mentioning the eggplant eye, the white spots on her
scalp, the Dalmatian bruises on her legs and stomach. We shall never know exactly what
happened because it’s not something Myriam ever talks about. All that can be said is that
it marked an ending for Mami. An ending of body, an ending of hope.
Milagros picked up Mami in a taxi. When they arrived La Tata had transformed the
living room into a healing cocoon: carefully laid out pillows, ruanas and blankets, warm 98
water, aguapanela for an entire batallon, chicken caldo, beef caldo, platano caldo.
Vicvaporu for days. Isodine, Doloran, gauzes, a rocking chair. Curtains ajar, the mid- afternoon sun warming Mami’s frail body. When I asked her how she knew Mami was beat, La Tata responded she felt the palpitos mija. A mother knows, a mother knows. And
I knew, she continued, that Myriam’s pain ran deep. I was right. Her soul came back broken.
They didn’t speak. Mami’s silencing shame didn’t allow for any talk but also she still could not just outright ask for forgiveness. Mi reina, you do not know stubborn. And more than orgullo, it was the saddening daze, the cloud of bones that carried her, the perico still racing a murky fog around her bloodstream, the chills running down her spine every time Nicolas’ memory imposed itself on her. Myriam was mas alia que aca. And
The Sueno! The Riches! Not only broken but pulverized. Mansur at times a beautiful mirage warming her but quickly swallowed by the darkness inside. Her heart clouded by an uncomfortable heaviness that was not released because Mami dare not cry. She would never admit it (even to herself) but girlfriend hit her first rock bottom (congratulations!) and La Tata was there, wrapping her motherly blanket of tenderness and mertiolate. La hija prodiga returning home.
At night Mami woke up panting, sweating like Bogota didn’t rest 2600 meters closer to the stars, running a 104 fever only calmed with sliced lemons in her socks and leche magnesia. In Milagros’ words: Francisca, tu mama was nothing but a threadbare trapo. 99
Dios mio.
And it was during those sleepless nights, between nightmare fevers and mumbles, that
Myriam started speaking to Dios. Like most souls in our verraco country, la Cartagenera was a cultural Catholic attending mass on Sundays, crossing herself when in front of a church, sometimes lighting the Virgen de Chiquinquira a candle, but not taking The
Power of El Senor too seriously. The fever changed that. Rock bottom changed that. The
murky forest of gloom swaying inside her called for release and girlfriend understood she
needed help from something bigger than herself.
For years she had watched how La Tata’s devotion built the tezon and motherfucking backbone, which had her mama feeding the entire family with no complain. So while the
house drowned in a silence punctured by the sporadic gunshot, our girl crossed herself,
recited the Jesucito prayers memorized during childhood, at times chuckling at the
embarrassing sight of her frail body speaking to no one, but this, too, faded, and as the
nights progressed Myriam demanded (you think she’d asked?) forgiveness, healing,
Diosito she had been bad but did she deserve all that throbbing in her belly? Demanded a
life of happiness and if papi Dios wanted a few million pesos would do her good too.
Kisses were sent to the crucified Jesus nailed on the wall. Kisses, a few eye-rolls and
finally tears.
Every day La Tata changed the bandages on her arms, rubbed Vicvaporu on her chest, sat 100
silent listening to a radionovela while Mami sipped on her caldo. Humming a bolero, La
Tata combed and braided Mami’s hair every night so it could recuperate its original voluptuous mane proportions and strength. Then the praying of Ave Marias, Padres
Nuestros over Mami’s sleepy body, Mami suddenly—to La Tata’s suprise—joining in prayer, conjuring every santo and even inviting Padre Pablo, the family’s priest, to bless the girl.
Milagros excused her sister with the nuns at school. Leonor and her amigotas whispering levantada, mal nacida, ladrona but Milagros was not Mami and she rubbed it off with a smile.
If you ask La Tata she’d say Mami broke the silence after five consecutive days of prayer when some color returned to her cheeks, some cuerito built around those bones and she was strong enough to hold Tata’s hand and say I’m sorry. But of course we are to doubt La Tata. Even though most of this story was disclosed while drunk (children and drunks the only truthful people) after the third week of humming and silence and the only exchange being “gracias” and “buenos dias,” La Tata grew a bit desperate and finally
said to Mami:
Bueno Myriam ya. Please dejemonos de pendejadas.
Myriam’s fingers played clumsily with the ruana until she blurted a, Perdon. I’m
sorry mama. 101
Sorry? La Tata replied amused. Ay mija, you are a desvergonzada is what you are.
Mami chuckled.
Okay, I’m a desvergonzada. But I’m paying for it, no?
Paying is what you are gonna do when you knock on San Pedro’s door and he slams
it in your face.
What La Tata ignored was Myriam’s newly growing faith.
Of course mi reina, if you were to ask me Yd say it was the caldo, the mertiolate, the
doloran, the rubbing and caring of motherly love, Bogota’s warmth radiating on her body,
but knowing Mami’s addictive personality once Diosito entered her head it was He who
guided her. She craved some spiritual relief, I get that. The numbness of her drifting body
needed to be anchored, grounded in some straightforward way such as Ave Maria and
Padre Nuestro. Praying calmed her. Praying relieved her from the responsibility of
directly dealing with the ball of solid pain roller coasting in her belly. Praying pushed the
memories of Leonor and Nicolas behind a black curtain, to be dealt with later (or never).
If you guessed this was Mami’s first heart opening to Dios, then you guessed right
cachaco. A moment she will remember twenty-something years later inside a room in the
Hyatt hotel while La Pastora shook hands over her body and overwhelmed by Jesus’s presence in her heart, Myriam fell into the arms of a lead ujier.
We now know Diosito’s mystical power can only take you so far. It definitely took 102
Mami to far away places (and still does). Pero everything that rises must fall reinita, and the holy highness eventually faded, letting the broken pieces surface from the underground of her heart.
But first, let’s enjoy that moment of glory for a second.
Let’s savor the Gloria gloria alleluia and the sudden lucidity waking up Myriam with a renewed sober determination that said, Today is the day. Today I’ll make lists of this and that and checked them off whenever they get done. Today I will wear that uniform and walk down the school with dignity. A sense of control, of being able to change. Not belonging still hard, being completely truthful almost impossible.
In front of the bathroom mirror, she’d rehearsed saying, My mother sews dresses and bakes ponques y bizcochos. I live in Las Margaritas. Y quel Myriam knew it was the right thing to say, to do, to think, even when todavfa the longing for that window-to-
window office, of Bogota kneeling at her and a call from Mansur, swam around her belly.
Pero a prayer to Dios rmo came to the rescue. A wooden rosary now hang around her neck (tacky, she first thought, but necessary), the weight of the cross calmed her, the beads tickling her chest a reminder of the cambio, she was a new mujer, a mujer that carry a rosary and God.
It was September and that meant rain. A can taros. It meant the opening of 103
underground rivers overflowing the streets to sea proportions. A Colombian Poseidon back-stabbing La City. Grey sky and grey roads melting into an impressionistic painting of blurred umbrellas, tall buildings, and red brick red brick red brick. Hazy minifaldas
clutching purses tighter than life. Tighter than the masses of rolos herded into this buseta
and that taxi, now the street kids poking purses, horns screeching like it was the end of
the world and they were all late for it, the stench of wet soil, of gasoline, of loss. The
cerros fogged and infinite. Rain meant endless plastic bags on blow-dried hair. It meant jumping puddles, dodging splashes from motorcycles and cars sharp turning whenever
they saw a girl in uniform. Estos hijueputas! But now she held the rosary and didn’t say
anything. Didn’t give the finger. Myriam hid behind a tree when a car drove too close to
the sidewalk, praying—she prayed a lot—trying to keep that feeling afloat, attempting to
let Dios know she needed him, needed that calmness, was scared shitless of the forest
now faded in the back of her mind. And so she prayed. Counted the Ave Marias with her
fingers, while searching for Leonor who evaded her a toda costa.
Mira guaricha, Leonor’s friends told her, Leonorcita doesn’t want to see you. Stop
writing those stupid letters.
Pero why doesn’t she say that to my face?
A ver, she already did.
It was true. While Myriam was bedridden Leonor called the house countless times to demand she return the jewels and drugs and emphasized que she nunca, ofgame bien, 104
never wanted to see that hijuetantas again. La Tata answered with a Senorita you got the wrong number. But after a few days of non-stop ringing she disconnected the phone.
When she connected it again, it was Mansur’s voice on the other side that surprised her
Dona Alba, como me la va?
She didn’t expect the machuque to have the balls to call.
What was happening? One day Myriam is a normal girl and the next day she is a tweaking Whore of Babylon and now this? Who did this senor think he was?
La Tata shut her eyes in desperation when telling this part of the story. The memory clearly exasperating her. When the thought or memory was too much to handle she did this, as if needing extra concentration, extra darkness for the darkness of memory.
Mire senor Mansur, if I have to repeat myself again you will pay bien caro.
Mansur chuckled.
Senora I don’t want to disrespect you—
Ah no? Then we agree and good day.
But, he continued, I have true feelings for your daughter and she does too.
La Tata may have lost her status in Cartagena but she still knew influential people that could break any cabron’s bones. And after all the work and suffering Myriam put her through, there was no way in hell this senorito will steal her daughter. She called in a 105
favor. General Fernando paid a visit to Mansur and according to La Tata the rich papi quedo curao, didn’t call no more. Sobra decir, Mami didn’t know about Leonor or
Mansur calling. So when Leonor’s girlfriends said, Leonorcita called you, she thought they were lying.
Nobody wanted anything to do with her at school. Just like hanging close with the nina de papi catapulted any hembrita into superstatus, fucking it up with Leonor immediately deemed you the lowest deviant in Santa Maria. Plus Myriam returned with a different air that screamed nerdy nerd all over that recuperating body (a cuerpazo building slowly but surely), with the uniform way below the knee, a tight bun and only two pearls adorning her face. How dared she! Even the girl from Popayan with braces, thick glasses and a limp wanted nothing to do with her. The unspoken vow of respected hierarchies, so alive and well in our patria. Myriam becoming a loner loser but also the consentida of the monjas, even telling Sor Patricia she was considering joining a convent.
A convent! When Milagros told La Tata about the rumors, she sat Mami on the rocking chair and demanded to know why couldn’t she keep it together.
Now you want to be a monja? A monja? Por Dios Myriam del Socorro. You want to kill me? Why can’t you walk through life like a normal mujer. Look at Milagros, she’s doing it.
But Mami fell hard with God, with His discipline, she wanted to be married to Him so that feeling would keep her warm forever. The monjas at school had it good. They 106
enjoyed a comfortable life, no? They taught. They lived together. Occupied gorgeous offices with a view of the cerros. And with hard work she could even become the Madre
Superiora, imagine that. The Madre Superiora managed the entire school plus the monjas plus her room all mahogany with paintings dating to the Virreinato (or so we’re told). No need to climb higher in the sociedad because there was no way she could be a woman
Pope.
Photographs of that time show Mami smiling thinly, impeccably dressed in the checkered blue uniform below the knee, long wavy brown hair parted right in the middle locked behind the ears, and if the background were not the flowery couch and a disarray of La Tata’s sewing supplies, Myriam could perfectly pass for an apparition of the
Virgen.
Ay Mami you tried keeping up your chin, tried rejoicing in that blessed tumbao even when at school they filled your bag with worms, stole the tightly wrapped sanduche La
Tata packed for you, cornered you in the bathroom sliding ice cubs down your blouse, some nuns disciplined a few of these girls but none could do shit about Leonor, her daddy the #1 donor at school, sending blank checks any time she got in trouble and did the nina get in trouble often? Of course not. Even La Tata met with the Madre Superiora at her office after finding Mami’s notebooks dripping with worm goo, the nun’s response a mere we’re doing everything we can senora. But, you know, girls tease each other.
Indignant La Tata knew this had everything to do with monies. Everything to do with 107
becoming a no one in a city built for someones. The frustration overwhelming and before she could stop herself a Vayase a comer mierda monja hijueputa speeded out of her mouth. 108
CHAPTER SIETE
Carmen did not freak out.
That really did work, I said breaking the silence. Longing for my earlobe to stay inside her mouth a little longer.
Although her cool, dorky look was replaced with that greasy church-girl side-eye, when I finally turned to her the holy costena wore that signature smile on her face. Smile that meant something— Something I didn’t know.
Asudden electricity in my head and my crotch pulsed with excitement. A dog waiting on a bone. Please say you want me.
Aja, and what I did I say muje? But you think I’m puro embuste pela’a, puro mequetrefe lying to you, que no? I give you the truth plain and simple the way Jesus has been giving you His truth for months now.
Oh por Dios mi reina. Look. A. Carmen’s. Excitement. What did it mean? There was barely any excitement back in Catholic school and it was all around stealing cigarettes and wearing the shortest skirt possible without the nuns calling you out. There was always Jesus. But different. The nun’s excitement about Jesus was soft, silent and a little indifferent. You knew they were excited because they reminded you so every day: we’re excited about Jesus, they’d say. And you believed them. But Carmen’s energy called for something else, something higher, and for the first time I really prayed to Jesus to 109
revealed it to me, for the first time I felt something real caught on my throat, some wind that needed my care, my attention. I searched for what was missing there. Clearly something hidden in the way Carmen’s tiny teeth popped up behind that smile. Come on,
Jesus.
And so I give in. I don’t want to. But, maybe, I do. I do.
I brace myself for the worst, fearing the goodness that may come of this. The way my skin will suddenly turn bright instead of yellow, the way I will hold Carmen’s hands and actually give two shits about prayer. The way Mami’s face will soften. El Sagrado
Corazon de Jesus dropping from the heavens with open arms and sharing some of that halo with me. I knew Jesus waited for me to hop on the holy train. I could feel it. And so for the first time since the negra from Valledupar and I met I stared at her fiercely and said: Carmen, I want to receive Jesus in my heart.
And so querfdisimo reader, with eyes shut holding Carmen’s left hand while her right one lands on my forehead, we both say the prayer repeated over and over for the past six months in unison:
Jesus te abro las puertas de mi corazon y te recibo como mi Sefior y Salvador.
Gracias por perdonar mis pecados. Toma el control del trono de mi vida. Hazme la clase de persona que quieres que sea.
A deep sigh followed by a lot more sighing and some mmmms because I thought 110
that’s what you’re supposed to do when Jesus enters you. Carmen’s hands now pressing over my heart in circles.
Carmen, what are you doing?
What does it look like I’m doing muje? I’m helping ease your heart from the light rip caused by Jesus entering it.
I see. I thought it was metaphorical?
She was clearly upset at me for not understanding the steps Jesus took in order to enter a new sinner’s heart but, also, her leadership skills were failing her terribly at this moment. I went along with whatever she said. Okay, heal my heart from the ripping. I shut my eyes longing for some ripping to happen, I imagine blood vessels spurting blood all over Jesucristo who came down like a Mary-Poppins in a holy umbrella. I said to myself, Take this seriously pendeja, por favor. Everything else has failed. You’re doing it. I said to myself, this is your only chance. And just like that, that sudden wind caught before in my throat rolled up my temples not before shaking my eyes then vibrating on my toes my knees. Carmen’s blessed radar must have activated because she took me in her arms, now reclining on the couch, now whispering prayers to my ear while still circling my heart with her hand, sometimes touching my boob. Esta bien, it’s okay. Let yourself go, He’s with you now pela’a. Ill
I didn’t want to tell Mami about it. How do you go about revealing such things to people? It’s awkward. Also, I didn’t want her thinking she had anything to do with it
(although in a way she did), but of course she started noticing some differences. After that afternoon with Carmen a weight lifted off my shoulders, as if the brick wall between her and I, between Mami and me, between the shekinas at church and yours truly, faded. I had the same rights as anyone now. Jesus had settled somewhere underneath my aorta and I was now saved. If The Rapture surprised us tomorrow my soul will fly to the heavens next to Papi Dios where I would watch everyone who stayed behind burn in apocalyptic fire. I know it’s hard to believe, but I was into it. I was into talking about
Satan like homeboy was in every comer, or imagining being pardon from flames and instead resting in comfy clouds with a flat-screen T.V and myriad of books. Eventually I even wore a Got Jesus? T-shirt and stared in disgust at people who picked Spiderman,
Batman or Spongebob toys (Satanic toys!) for their kids at Walmart. Once I handed a woman a How These “Toys” Are Opening Doors For Satan in Your Home flyer and she stared at me in disbelief. But even before the shirts and the evangelizing at Walmart, service after service my hands slowly sprung up like shy worms squirming to the surface until they swayed in unison with the rest of the congregation, the women of course noticing, of course winking at me, and at the end of the service congratulating you nena on your fervor! Then congratulating Mami for performing an excellent motherly role. At first, it was embarrassing. The godless girl inside reminded of this social suicide.
Reminded of how Cool Kids look like: leather jackets, cigarettes, booze, hair across the 112
face, classical literature, no God. Sometimes in an effort to cling to pieces of this coolness, I’d step outside the service, light a cigarette, recite Plath’s Daddy from memory. But the magic faded and soon I remembered Satanas is a liar. He wants to start blocking my blessing and He will not succeed and was asking Jesus to forgive me. Asking
Him to take me back. Worried someone will see me, someone who will tell Carmen or La
Pastora and I’d be removed from my church duties and I’d be back in square one, where I started six months ago. I didn’t want that. What with all that energy metastasizing inside me every time Carmen danced and clapped next to me, every time the Pastora seemed to be pointing at me when in the midst of a sermon she said you’ve been lifted from the depths of hell, hermana! Now give El Sehor your life, soak in our Savior’s blessing! All this new attention and people needing me and dinners at the Pastores’ house where I
sometimes slept over watching Carmen babbling prayers in her sleep.
At home life became more peaceful. Except for La Tata’s silent drinking, the secret
meetings with Roberto that I still arranged because it seemed the old Cuban drunk brought her a glimpse of felicidad, a moment out of her museum of sadness. Except for
La Tata’s glassy eyes, now gloomy and glued 100% to the T.V. watching every-single
telenovela on Telemundo (Telemundo really ruined every immigrant Latin-American granny in Florida—what else could they do?) there was some harmony now between
Mami y yo, Yo y Lucia. The three of us like the holy trinity. Lucia even lending me her
favorite book A Young Woman After God’s Own Heart where I learned about devotion,
sin, and daily prayer. We all took turns filling La Tata’s Sprite can with more water than 113
rum but it was pretty much left to me to help close her bra every morning, rub swollen feet at night, give her Ibuprofen before she went to sleep so she wouldn’t wake up with a hangover. For some reason every one forgot about La Tata. During the months after the baptism she hung around the house like another dusty ornament quietly hoarding photographs cut from magazines that she’d taped around her room, paying Roberto for tiny bottles of cheap rum— a dark spot growing on the sofa where she sat religiously to eat and drink until it was time to help her stumble to the bedroom.
Mami’s motto with most undesirable events was (and continues to be) if you ignore
it long enough it will go away. What she ignored: Bogota and her window-to-window
office, my father, the new greasiness of her hair, a thick web of that hair asphyxiating
combs around the house. She shut anyone who dared mention Maria, our maid, or Alex,
her hairdresser, or our handy-man, doorman, etc. At the top of the amnesiac list was, of
course, La Tata’s drinking. And I was not about to disturb the slight chance at peace and
winning in life that the church provided, so I too pretended La Tata indeed drank a ton of
soda, I silently cared for her so Mami’s Migration Project could continue. Admittedly
from time to time I stole a few bills from la Tata’s hidden envelopes, sometimes also
from Mami’s purse, and did nothing with the money. Just felt it. The comfort of those
bills wrapped in a small bag and inside my Plath book. I didn’t ask Jesus to forgive me
since that would have meant admitting I was doing something wrong. I wasn’t. I felt justified since La Tata’s meager income was spent in rum. Justified because that black
plastic bag was the family’s savings accounts. Duh. Just in case something went wrong, I 114
had a cushion stashed in the middle of Lady Lazarus.
Now every week Mami entered the church proud next to me in my pastels colored shirts, next to Lucia, La Tata dragging herself with little steps helped by a cheap cane.
She sat in a special chair where everyone at some point during the service would stop by and kiss her cheek, ask for a prayer, share some juicy gossip. Never failing to show her devotion La Tata shared her Life Changing Testimony more than three times and helped by her morning rum sang so loud during the alabanza I had to tug at her dress to shush her. The tension between Mami and La Tata was real. Mami glared at La Tata and La
Tata eyed her back and shut her eyes with such force and fiercely shook her hips to the
salsa beats and tightly hugged La Pastora asking for prayer over her legs. The thin veil
separating La Tata’s drunkness from our perfected church bodies always in danger of ripping.
El Senor doesn’t like greys, the Pastora reminded us, Either you devote yourself entirely and follow His word or you don’t. Nobody is coming here a calentar silla!
We were finally all together in Christ as a familia, como debe ser, and Mami kept
inventing new illnesses when people asked why La Tata fell asleep during el sermon, why she chuckled so loudly. I ignored Mami’s complains and poured La Tata water, helped her to the bathroom, told everyone she had a tough night sleeping with that arthritis. I did not want to focus on my abuela, thankyouverymucho. Why were we 115
focusing on La Tata when I had Jesus in my heart? When the shekinas ran to me and demanded advice on their boyfriends? When Carmen and I spent the entire weekend together planning the youth group on her bed? When Carmen and I prayed together?
When she lent me her pjs?
It was La Tata who after church one Sunday told me she knew what was happening
with Carmen.
De que hablas, Tata?
Eyes shut the way she closed them whenever she was angry or frustrated as if she
needed the darkness to concentrate, as if the weight of what she was about to say lay
heavily on her eyelids.
Ay, Francisca mami. You know that’s gonna kill your mother. Who cares if you kill
me? Pero tu mama Francisca she may be a pain en el culo but.
I didn’t say anything. The accusation tone was new and it was lump with some gossip
thrill and a hint of acceptance.
Yo se lo que esta pasando contigo y esa muchacha Francisca. Ay mi Dios libre a tu
madre de un ataque.
I hugged her. She didn’t return the gesture. Her eyes still closed. 116
Tata! What you need is a refill!
Turned on the T.V. Poured Tata her refill, shout out the window searching for
Roberto. Mami out with Milagros and Lucia, so I heated up some Hot Pockets for La
Tata and her secret boyfriend, served them rum cocktails and placed both lovebirds in front of the television. Told them they have thirty minutes before Mami gets back. La
Tata closed her eyes again at me but then Roberto’s hand landed beneath her summer
dress and I disappeared.
For the next few days I avoided her. I had no idea what she meant by “killing Mami”
and I didn’t want to know. Or I did know but I still didn’t want to know. I applied
Mami’s Forget About It wisdom and moved on with my life. Wait, scratch that. I didn’t
“move on” because that was the entire problem with Miami there was nowhere to “move”
to. I was forever stuck in the Heather Glen Apartment Complex, the man-made lake now
cooler, less infernal with few mosquitos buzzing around. November in the blink of an
eye, mi reina. November when I swore I couldn’t last more than a few weeks here and
now look at me: I’m wearing shorts (still no flip flops because I respected myself) and
sometimes when speaking to people in broken English I said, That’s exciting and Oh my
God. Cachaco, so alien! But still my tongue delighted in trying out new moves.
November and the trees and flowers remained the same, just like Bogota. I used to
cherish my city’s stagnation, how August and January could only differ in rain but the
weather was never severe, never snow then flower then heat then fallen leaves. The same.
And now here there was no moving on either and sometimes that sameness came with 117
waves of recognition. I understood tropical weather. But November was different. I could move myself to Carmen’s house whenever I pleased and I could move my body next to hers and watch her drool in her sleep. It was November and the weather seemed Andean.
Still no mountains or red brick buildings but a softer air, one that did not get stuck in your nostrils. No thick jello passing for oxygen. A thinner, cooler breeze that killed some of the ducks unable to fly outside of the pool.
We continued our days of devotion and prayer. We continued heating up Pop Tarts for dinner and fried plantains with rice for lunch. I ate Hot Pocket after Hot Pocket until I couldn’t poop for three days. Continued my sleepovers at the Pastores’s house, Mami enthralled by my relationship with Carmen nodding every time I walked out the house with my Jesus t-shirt on, sighing in relief when I joined prayer during dinner, even leaving a Christian CD wrapped in gold paper on my bed as a gift. I laid in bed every night trying hard not to touch myself, repeating Jesus Is With Me over and over in an effort to contain my hands—but who am I kidding. El que peca y reza empata, I also told myself. Jesus I ’m so sorry. Please know you’re still welcome inside me, don’t leave.
Then the hardest part: don’t think about Carmen. Pero cachacho, inevitable. By now I had my own routine, the same pink dick bathroom fantasy alive in my fingers without thinking. My hand knowing exactly what to do, when to stop. The moment I left my room to get water La Tata called me. 118
Francisca.
Que?
Mi nina, por favor.
Que?!
We both knew. I felt she could read it on me so I avoided staring into her eyes. The
T.V. showed a blonde woman with a Spanish voice-over thrusting her hips, stretching her legs, selling a $19.99 aerobics video. La Tata clasped my hand tight, Bring me more
Sprite. We sat side by side watching reruns of Caso Cerrado, La Tata’s hand patting mine from time to time letting me know, Dios loves all his children but He still demands those children align with the evangelio. I know that. Okey, she said. But then she’d repeat it all over again. I combed her dry white hair with my fingers. Curly white. She let it grow into a tiny afro that she called The Crown of Old Age even when Mami suggested she dyed it blonde like most old women at church—or at least a light brown— La Tata refused saying she’d fought plenty for her white hair. Las canas son la corona de la vejez.
Mija.
Que paso, Tata?
Ay mija.
But, again, nada. Just patted my hand over and over, rocking herself back and forth 119
back and forth guarding my palm in hers like a treasure. As if she could control my destiny by keeping my hand close to her.
The next week the Pastora facilitated the Jovenes en Cristo workshop around the
“urges to touch yourself and let boys touch you.” Carmen helped handing out worksheets where a blue-eyed blonde smiled the caption underneath reading Jesus helped me wait for the right man. In Jesus I leave all my carnal longing.
This is a period of transformation, cimentacion, formation of values for all of you.
You think Jesus was not a teenager like you? You think he wasn’t offered the temporary pleasures of drugs and sex? But all these roads will eventually lead to unhappiness. The only eternal road is the one going to heaven!
Camila’s enthusiasm catapulted her to the make-believe stage where she shared her testimony in tears after the Pastora encouraged us to share our terrible youth experiences.
Camila told us a boring story about some boy back in Bogota fingering her underneath a desk during math class, sobbing because she still could not believe Jesus was not in her heart at the moment.
The Pastora hugged her. Had she repented?
Then came the endless repertoire of regrets from every single female. Marihuana.
Perico. Basuco? Yes. Fingers here. Penis there. Money. Money. Tongues. Condoms. No 120
condoms. A surprise abortion. Mas perico. Etc. In the back I sat restless. The hell was I going to share my intimate one-on-one with everyone. Yes, I was down with Jesus. Yes,
Jesucristo (and, let’s be honest already, Carmen) unknotted something around my belly every time I sang during church. But, this? We all knew there will be judging. If La
Pastora felt the sexual encounter revealed truly crossed the holy line then out that secret went to those parent’s ears and no mi amor, Mami did not need to hear what she spent so much time avoiding. Plus it had been a good month since Mami’s last lecture and
Jesucristo! Did it feel good. Besides, what would I share? Lining-up in Catholic school outside the bakery to tongue-kiss the baker? Cruising up and down the fenced lot of the school skirts all the way up demanding some sexual attention from the boys from the school next door? Or share the saddest breaking-hymen story that was losing my virginity to my neighbor who just humped like a rabbit inside me? I chuckled at the thought of him. So tiny and desperate. Then I remember Jesus and a terrible shame overcame me.
I’m sorry Senor but there’s nothing I can do about the past. With my eyes I told Carmen I wasn’t going up and with her eyes she called me outside.
La Pastora stopped us midway.
Is there anything you want to share, Francisca?
Not really.
She stared at Carmen, eyes demanding she get a testimony out of me. She’s your friend, carajo! Get her to confess. 121
There’s nothing to fear Francisca, Carmen said.
But of course there was. Confession was fear.
Confess. Yeah right. Tell Jesus y de paso every repressed soul in there that I want to wrap my arms around Carmen and live with her for the next fifty years. Go ahead. See how that settles in this group mamita, a ver verraca, where are those cojones that carried you in Bogota? You think you’re punk now bitch? Go ahead— tell all these harmless hijosdeputa what you really want to do with the Pastora’s daughter. Tell Jesus you love
Him but that for some fucking reason you love Carmen’s greasy smell more. A ver.
I know, I said. But I don’t have anything to say.
I was standing up already thinking I was going to meet Carmen outside while everyone else sat on pillows. Should I sit? I was left on my feet alone everyone judging me for not confessing because of course we’ve all done some shit and all of them knew I was reluctant to join the church in the first place and that Ramones shirt screamed herofna sexo STDs or, at least, perico.
What did I do? The only thing I knew what to do now, pray. When that didn’t work and everyone grew quieter I made up some terrible youth story.
I let a boy touch my tits once and I’m sorry Jesus. I know now to wait for my husband.
Unconvinced smiles all around. Amen. God forgives you hermana. Etc. Carmen 122
nodded but we both knew I held back. When the workshop ended she drove me home wanting to know what went wrong.
Nada. I just don’t like sharing my stuff, you know?
One hand on the peeling steering wheel, one hand resting on the window. Out of that shekina dress her legs dark and thick with tiny black hairs and those chapped lips that she continue to bite and peel. Carmen glowed when she worried about me. I played with the
Christian fish hanging from the rearview mirror.
I’ve never told you this before pela’a but I wasn’t 100% on board with my mom and dad when they became a pastors.
She searched for a reaction and I nodded.
I was in a very complicated relationship with an ex-boyfriend. And let’s just say I’m glad I’m not the guaricha of a low-class sicario en Barranquilla.
Si, claro. You’re the closest to a Christian Virgen Maria in Miami.
Embuuuuuste. Is that what you think?
She stopped the car and stared at me for a long time.
If only. Right then. I would move close to her, would hold her face and kiss her. She may panic for a second but then say, Ay pela’a you are so slow, what took you so long and demand we leave this shithole together. I’d grab her thighs and tits and awkwardly 123
admire them. She’d do the same. We wouldn’t know how to properly fuck inside her car but it wouldn’t matter because it’d be warm and we’d be naked drawing stick figures of ourselves on the misty windows.
Jesucristo, dame paciencia. Mi queridi'smo reader, you think you’re frustrated with this? Enough is enough, you say. Stop the pendejada and own your shit Francisca.
Francisca, carajo. Yes, reinita, but you’re not the motherfucking criolla scared shitless of losing the one relationship that at fifteen brings you enough joy to ignore the hell outside.
I tell her I don’t really know what to think. I thought that’s what Christians wanted to be, that’s what we {oh God) aspire in life. To be pure and righteous and right all the time so God would not kick us out of His eternal mansion when we died.
Tu sabe most people at church—including myself—have gone through some real stuff. She continued, Vainas verracas, no te crea. I know it’s been hard for you but, come on Francisca, it’s time to get over it. Over it muje. You’re been doing so well.
I am.
Look how far you’ve come.
I have.
She keeps driving.
From that quivering place behind my knees I gather the cojones. I put my left hand on 124
her thigh. Warm. She tenses but doesn’t say anything. I give in to the quivering. I open up to that place deep inside me calling for her warmth. I wait for her to relax and then I slowly caress her thigh. We both keep our eyes on the dark road, from time to time a few lights like shredded silver light up her eyes. I feel myself disappear into my knees, my fingertips. Pulsating like a dying animal. No one can see us. I wait for a slap a push I wait to be kicked out on the curb I wait for an explanation. Eyes deep into the darkening road, I know somewhere inside this car there’s hope for us. There’s some humming on the radio and she turns up the volume. The radio spits soft Christian rock And to Whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? We are growing seeds. Calm your desires. Calm your desires. We are growing seeds.
When she drops me off I don’t get a kiss but a low Dios te bendiga pela’a. 125
CHAPTER OCHO
CARTAGENA DE INDIAS 1956: LA MUNECA BRINGS ALL THE BOYS TO THE
BAR.
Before there was Miami cradling Mami’s holy high addiction, before the Sabana
Cundiboyancense swallowed everyone’s pride and the red brick buildings killed Don
Fabito, even before yours truly was a lost criolla spermatozoon, there was—drumroll—
La Tata hiding in prayer underneath a bed in Cartagena. Every time the dandy lawyer knocked on their door she ran up the stairs holding her naguas whispering to her sisters,
That hombre again! Pero. Dios mfo. I’m not here, I’m not here, I’m not here. But under the wooden bed she was, clutching her rosary. Annoyed, sweating shitless. Our Alba. Just fifteen but a total mujeron with a hair so long Rapunzel cried envy tears, hips so smooth and thick Coca-Cola envisioned their bottle after her (they should have!). But silent and shy like a worm. Like she’d inherited some bad blood and not the tralala tongue del diablo of the Cartageneras. Pero what’s going with this pela’a? Aja is she slow muje?
Seemed to be the song sang on repeat around her. The nina was cursed with shyness.
Okay, that’s not true. Let me rephrase that: a love for solitude misunderstood for shyness.
And there she laid: Inhaling all that dust under the bed while her daddy whispered angrily if she didn’t not come down a hacerle visita al Don he’d pull her out himself.
How dare she! Next to the door the long mirror reflected the lit candles emitting a trail of smoke as if there was a thin thread tied to the planks of wood in the ceiling, as if the 126
room were held together by a thin evaporating miracle. Next to the candles estampas of
El Sagrado Corazon de Jesus, La Virgen de la Candelaria, La Virgen de Chiquinquira, La
Virgen del Carmn, Santo Tomas. La persistencia de ese hombre! She thought. Is he ever gonna give up so I can listen to my radionovelas in peace? No joda. You’d think any jevita during the 50s would be jumping on one leg if a partidazo like the dandy lawyer approached their fathers, serenaded them with a tuna and gifted a freaking German horse.
The cabron’s family owned the Ford dealership in Cartagena carajo, knew the presidente by name. Promised land, cars, entry to the country club and he wasn’t even that perro.
Only slept with a few guarichas. What else do you want mujer?
But. Have you learn anything from this story yet? These women ain’t gonna fall that easy. Cachaco, por favor. A horse? What the fuck was Alba to do with a caballo in that hellish heat? The germanic pony died. She hated horses. She hated animals. She hated hairy men in white suits. And, above all, she hated her father’s smiling eyes, the cross ring on his pink serving whiskey and cracking jokes with the dandy lawyer while they waited for her downstairs.
Albita!
She sneezed. It was bug season. It was mosquito fever season. Outside: muddy streets
staining long-skirts. Outside: sheets of rain coating Cartagena. The colonial Caribbean beauty once the most important Spanish port through which slaves came in and only gold came out. A boiling pot of riches, Dios te salve Marias and gunpowder. Alba scratched 127
the red mosquito bites on her legs, enjoying the pain, scratching harder each time checking the bumps until a red head popped and bled. She’d been out in the garden with her radio until late last night and now her legs look more com than skin.
Head, armpits, and the rosary hanging over her blouse all damp returning the dreadful memory of the hombres paraded around her house over the past year. Every time, the same thing: a knock on the door. She ran up the stairs, her sisters giggled, her father dragged her out by the hair and into the living room where a hairy man in a white suit, white fedora, smoked and called out: Albita, mi muneca.
La muneca.
Mi Dios. How she wanted to slap them. Stomp on their hats and with their thick cigars bum grey circles on their wrinkly foreheads. Shave their mustaches and maybe their heads. The desire heavy on her stomach. Tiny rocks rolling around the belly and
behind her eyes where she laughed uncontrollably as yet another white suit approached
her with a set of emerald studs. Please hombre, is that all you got?
She scratched again. On the radio another bolero by Los Panchos. Esta Tarde Vi
Llover, her favorite .Waiting for the sound of her father’s stomps, Alba hummed the tune
to ease the dread. Esta tarde vi llover, vi gente correr y no estabas tu. Eyes shut tight.
Drops of sweat racing on her forehead. She hummed, hummed louder until nothing else
was audible, the house en Bocagrande gone, the smell of her mother’s quidbes gone, the
itchiness of the blue dress out of mind. She hummed until she saw rain inside her, Esta 128
tarde vi Hover, until she felt the familiar pain, the yank on her scalp.
QUE TU HACE ALL DAY WITH THAT CROWN RADIO
Alba could do without anything but her radio. Radionovelas she heard religiously. And boleros. The sound of the mountains and machine guns. While the black and brown
Crown radio spat stories of deceit, patriotism, guerillas, love, while it cradled her with its
te amos and its cumbias she bit each nail and cracked every finger. Her olive hands short, disfigured, with fingers missing pieces of themselves. Hands that said, hola hola I’m
anxious. Hands that said, these dots around my palm are coagulated blood from sewing a
lot. Her sisters teased her for this. Alba tiene nocos! Alba tiene nocos! And she let them.
Every single one of them except Lurdes who waved her hand at the jokester bitches and
they were gone. Many times before, Alba had tried to exert older sister power over them.
Screaming—which only came out as a plea— or slapping, which the agile ninas dodged.
She tried being a real woman like she’d been taught at Nuestra Senora de la Candelaria
boarding nun school. But it was all too much work and she let Lurdes lead the herd.
Quickly she’d bestowed her fourteen year old sister with the matron torch by saying,
Please Lurdes just make them leave me alone. What if she wasn’t the toughest bitch en
Bocagrande? She didn’t care. Anyone else could take the lead, be the president, as long
as the radio was full batteries and the high-pitched women voices joined the hoarse manly
ones in a dance around her ears. Her piece of cielo. She carried the Crown radio when she
strolled down Mayor Street to Dona Gloria’s for eggs, when she plucked chickens and
sewed their feathers into stuffed animals her mother sold, when she entered the glam of 129
Club Union with her sisters but hid in the garden to catch glimpses of Belen de La
Torre’s last pleas as Belen’s family was gundown and a masculine voice narrated the bloody ending.
In scraps of paper Alba wrote possible radionovelas ideas. She’d been doing this for a few years now after her catechism class with Sor Juana, a class where all females students were to write their own bible stories.
Only one picture of the Crown radio survives. Sepia and stained by time around the edges the exact date smudged. There she is squinting to the camera while half of her hair flows over her chest in the wind. Lurdes and her father next to her both looking to the left, something moving off camera. She stands on her own, apart. With one hand touching the tips of her hair, clutching the Crown radio with the other one.
BUENOS DIAS, ALBA CLARA DE JESUS JUAN
4:45 a.m.
A roster. There may have been a roster that I missed somewhere in this story. La Tata probably would have loved waking up to the quiquiriqui! of the gallos instead of a mosquito net and the loud beating inside her head and wouldn’t it have made for a cute third-world story?
4:46 a.m.
She barely slept. There was really no word for insomniac in her family. It was more, 130
aja did you try placing glasses of water in each comer of the room? Albita, call the priest so he can pray over this room. Or—mija, boiled lettuce water before sleeping and if that doesn’t do it you need to seriously speak with the man above. Next to her bed Lurdes sound asleep, perfectly still like a beautiful breathing corpse. Alba lit two candles to La
Virgen del Carmen every night. None of it worked.
7:00 a.m.
If this were Nuestra Senora de la Candelaria boarding nun school Sor Ines in a tightly wrapped habit would be teaching Alba how to punto de cruz. But this was two-story house under a billowing ocean. This was asthmatic mom, notary father. Four sisters trailing behind the nuns into school and two that remain plucking chickens. This was mom dusting three-feet ceramic statue of the Virgen in the living room—a gift from the
Carmelitas. Our girl all about the arepas, cafe con leche, all about lighting those candles, sweeping the floor, waking up the chickens. All about waiting for her piece of noon in the shade listening to the latest radionovela, her favorite, La Salvadora.
10:38 a.m.
Mom’s coughing fit. She coughed against the sink until a thick white phlegm dangled from the tip of her lips. The coughing’s gotten worse since she started plucking chickens and glueing their feathers on stuffed animals but she’s proud (hello, in the genes mi reina) and won’t stop doing it even when the family doctor suggested her lungs may be filling up with bits of feathers. Two ballooning clouds inside mom waiting to pop. Alba silently 131
bothered lifted her mom’s arms, patted her back, poured her water. That martyr look in her mom’s eyes that she detested. Secretly Alba wished she’d just die right there.
Sometimes, only sometimes.
11:17 a.m.
She had to walk down the street to see the priest and hand him used clothes for the poor plus pick up a gallon of holy water. Brown dust covered every bit of muddy road.
Senoras fanned themselves, men in hats blocked out the sun with their palms. Three kids next to the church begged for money. Alba gave them a few cents then bought a mango from the seno next to them in her square cart. There’s a skeletal dog at the woman’s feet.
The woman noticed Alba looking, shrugged and told her, He won’t eat any mango.
Inside the church was cool and dead quiet. Black and white pashmina’s on women’s bow heads. Christ forever bleeding, forever shinning, forever open-mouthed. Alba searched for the priest but couldn’t find him. Her father knew him quite well and she’d been to the back of the church often. But there was nobody in the back only the priest’s robes on hangers, packs of white long candles, an enormous Bible, a few chairs. Many, and I mean, many different takes on the Virgen and when she passed La Virgen del
Carmen she crossed herself and kissed her knuckles. Behind the virgenes stood another door that she’d never seen before. Alba hesitated for a second. She remember verses of the bible about conduct repeated many times by Sor Ines that the nun ended with a, always ask yourself will El Senor approve? Am I being a Martha or a Mary? She didn’t 132
want to be either one. She needed the holy water to sprinkle around the house, make concoctions of ginger and honey for her mom. Mi Dios, her mom. She needed to find the priest. She decided she’d be Martha if that meant finding holy water and so Alba turned the doorknob, the creaking sound of wood against the wind crashing into the stained- glass windows.
11:45 a.m.
She couldn’t help but stare. The body on the other side so unlike her own and yet familiar. Alba knew she would get in trouble for this, maybe beaten with a belt, maybe hours kneeling on rice head pointing to the sun. Maybe she’d be excommunicated and end up in the streets. For a second she saw herself on the streets, stealing people’s leftovers, sleeping at the beach with her radio, narrating her radionovelas to the starry night. But then a famous radio producer Augusto Villanueva would discover her, of course. The first woman from the streets to be on the radio. She felt a tang of pride.
Twelve seconds of orgullo interrupted by the moving naked body reclining on the wooden bunk bed, by the jiggling arms angrily turning pages. A strong incense smell reached her. There was something else in the air that reminded her of the dandy lawyer.
Not the pachouli, no. It was, dare she say it? Cigarettes? Dios rmo. It was. Aja que se armo el coge coge, mi reina. She wanted to run out and tell the world, la monja is smoking. La monja is smoking! How is this even possible? She thought. Do people sell cigarettes to nuns? Isn’t that illegal? Where is the priest? Her hands now drenched. Now crossing her because, que carajos, the nun was still holy. En el nombre del padre, del hijo, 133
del espfritu santo, amen. The special feeling of witnessing this act of secrecy beating in her face. Nobody else was there. It was their own intimate act. She’d never seen anyone naked like that. Partially naked, maybe. She’d seen naked bebes, sometimes her sisters, but never an adult. Never fully naked with hips brown and scarred white. She’d never even seen her own tesorito in detail, just from above while showering (and barely, really) and now the nun’s black unruly bush confronted her like a dead fury animal. The nun played with her black headpiece like it was hair. Hairflipped. Then curling the headpiece between her fingers. She seemed to be mumbling something Alba could not hear. A song. The humming grew louder. A bolero. A bolero Alba had completely memorized amorcito corazon, yo tengo tentacion de un beso, the words ignited something in her. A recognition. Alba wanted to run and hug the naked nun, feel her skin. She’d never felt anyone naked before. Look at the skin with a magnifying glass. She was lifted by the humming en la dulce sensation, de un beso mordelon, quisiera, amorcito corazon, decirte mi pasion por t\ until her voice too rose from her throat like a hot balloon.
11:51 a.m.
Que haces tu aqui?
I’m looking for the padre. 134
Well the padre is not here.
I’m giving him this bag of used clothes, we’re supposed... yo... mi madre needs a gallon of holy water?
Either you come in and close the door or you wait outside and close the door. A ver, nina. I cannot have you ahf parada.
Close the door behind you. There’s agua bendita in the casa cural. I don’t have the keys because some people around here think I don’t do enough. Me perdonaras... eh...
Alba.
Me perdonaras Alba, but you have to come back some other time.
El padre told my mom we should stop by today. You see hermana, she’s sick.
I’ll pray for her.
Anything else? What are you staring at? Ay por favor, don’t pretend you’ve never seen a woman naked before. I’m a monja but a human being, right? HA. Tell that to the padre! You want a cigarette? 135
Bueno. I went to Nuestra Senora de la Candelaria.
You did? Those hermanas are pious but they’re always competing with each other during holy week. It’s embarrassing. Are you competitive? Here, light it with this candle.
What do you mean you don’t do enough, hermana?
Can you keep a secret, Alba?
Don’t hold the smoke in your mouth. I’ll take that as a yes. I’m starting to feel like I don’t fit with the carmelitas.
Are you gonna stop being a monja?
You know Alba, sometimes God puts you in a certain place for you to learn but He doesn’t expect you to stay there forever. I’m thinking this is my transition. I may go back to my congregation in Corosal. 136
Nina, por Dios, say something. Why are you so quiet?
I’m not.
I have some holy water around here. You can take some back to your mom and come back on Sunday.
12:27 p.m
The morning was over and she missed La Salvadora. She’d never felt so close to anyone before. 137
CHAPTER NUEVE
We’re up in the mountains but we don’t remember how we got there. It’s an unusually sunny day: the skyline of Bogota perfectly traced against the deep blue of the Sabana.
Not one cloud. Behind us a rose garden covering every wall of Monserrate, behind us a seno selling mazorca, chunchullo, churros. Carmen wears those unflattering motorcycles shades, hands on the railing pointing to this bird and that airplane and over there where you can get the best arepas de queso in the entire city. I stand behind following her fingers. We buy mazorcas and eat them. The grease from our lips collides in a clumsy kiss and I want to stay in that moment, perfect and suspended. Knowing I’ve never been happier. When she turns to pay the seno the coiled rose stems rip from the walls, they rip break tear, the rose stems surround her, thorns aimed at me. Paralyzed in fear I watch as the pink serpentine dances in circles with Carmen inside. Then I move closer. I do. I approach the maze defiant my hands fists of fear until thorns knife my left cheek, until the pink roses swallow Carmen. I woke up panting, nauseous, touching my cheek over and over, traces of the dream following me while I peed, brushed my teeth, sipped coffee, watched Telemundo next to La Tata.
Carmen left without saying adios. I found out three days later on a Tuesday while clipping my nails and a sudden grief, a momentary sense of complete loss, launched inside me. Mad, I thought, or cutting me from her life completely, or telling the Pastores 138
y de paso Mami, all of them coming for me, their tears and rage, Carmen’s disappointment barring her from my life. Mami walked into my room with printed photos of Carmen and the Pastora dancing in some church in Bogota, eyes sizing my reaction. I muffled my surprise in a toothy grin. Of course I knew she flew to Colombia! A ver, duh.
We’re super close friends, we tell each other everything. Mami looked me over suspicious at my excitement.
Nena you didn’t know she left? I thought you two were like this.
She twisted her fingers in a super-close way.
Obvio si, we are. She probably just forgot ma, sabes? With all the work at church and running the youth group.
She didn’t forget. I knew that. I couldn’t believe she was gone. Why. How. When.
Why. After driving me home, we didn’t speak for entire week and when she didn’t show up at church I thought okay, she’s sick. Okay, girlfriend’s got the fever or maybe she can’t face me. And how to call her without acting surprised? Of course it had to be about us. Us. Ay por Dios, Francisca. Us. The sinful weight of those letters.
Mami kept her eyes on the photograph. Hands no longer soft, smooth, but cracked with deep thin lines criss-crossing. She stood directly underneath the A.C, hair softly blown in a frizzy halo.
La Pastora said she’s acting all rara since you all last shared testimonios. In her email 139
she said it was the first time Carmen refused to lead the jovenes that week. Imagmate tu.
La hija de la Pastora. Any ideas?
I couldn’t tell if she blamed me or if that was a genuine question. Mami had developed this devoted face in the past few months that said, I’m better than you and, also, I fear for your soul, and sometimes even, what are you doing away from Jesus? The judging, the condescension all there wrapped with in a thin smile bow.
Que no se. How am I supposed to know what she’s feeling?
She drove you home that day Francisca. Yo no soy estupida.
But that couldn’t be it. She would have said something. Francisca stop. Pela’a what in
Jesus’ name are you doing. Is this a game. Francisca Jesus is very disappointed.
Girlfriend is the hands-on, aggressive overtly direct nina de Dios. Why hadn’t she said
anything? And what could she possibly tell the Pastora? If the Pastora knew I approached
her daughter in a minimal sexual way, before you could say ay chuchito our entire family
will be banned from Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor and Mami would be sobbing,
digging for a belt. Everything that we built here, gone. Domingos de church, Cfrculos de
Biblia, dinners at the Pastores’, monthly food give-away, Lucia’s endless phone
conversations, the jovenes, the non-stop phone ringing for Mami, the youth group.
Carmen. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday: all gone. Jesus
salvame de esta. In an awkward way I prayed for Carmen’s silence. Jesus, what should I
do? What could I do? I couldn’t imagine a different self that did not desire the costena. 140
Couldn’t see a way out of wanting her. No Francisca existed without that longing, the ball of feeling around my shoulders the hunger to touch her, to fuck her.
Ma you know Carmen is weird. Why don’t I help you with the Christmas celebration for church?
You want to? Ay, nena. I have so much work to do. There’s the children’s danza, the
Holy Ghost cupcakes, the tree to buy at Walmart. Vamos a Walmart?
Right now?
Mami eyed her watch, she still had the photos.
Primero, let’s finish this conversation. What about Carmen, nena? You two didn’t fight?
And fearing for my life I said, What exactly did the Pastora tell you?
That Carmencita did not come out of her room the next day. She didn’t want to lead the jovenes. She spend all her time inside her room and you know how that nina is loud!
Between us, nena, you know she talks talks talks como lora. So they took her with them to Colombia on that evangelizing trip, remember? I think they’re in Medellin right now but the Pastora is worried. Young people don’t understand how important it is to follow the Lord’s word, me entiendes? Gracias a Jesus, you’ve changed. Me tenfas los pelos de punta. But see the good Jesus has done in your heart? And it’s hard when you’re young, I know. But like the Pastora says it is the most important moment to create the base for 141
later. Jesus was tempted too! I was tempted too! Obvio que si. But he teaches us to call on him on those temptations. And, quien sabe, maybe Carmencita is falling on bad steps?
I don’t know.
The yellow light filtered through the window made her features stark and manly.
Shadows breaking Mami’s face into puzzle pieces, tiny golden boxes, black liminal space. I wasn’t sure how much she believed. How much did she questioned, how much she knew but dared not ask preferred pretending like nina is all good, is all fine, is all dandy pandy pass me the glue. How much was this “Pretend Mami” she performed so well, had refined in the last six months so that the real Myriam laid mummy buried somewhere in that body. Because let’s be clear: Mami was not dumb. Mami knew her shit.
Ma it’s probably nothing, La Pastora is probably exaggerating.
Okay. I believe you. But just in case, I’m gonna ask you one last time, listo? Did anything happened with Carmen when she dropped you off?
Friday I laid in bed skimming my Jovenes en Cristo book waiting to go to dreaded
Walmart with Mami. Pablito called a few times but I didn’t want to see him. I couldn’t get the roses swallowing Carmen out of my head, my hand unconsciously checking on my cheek for any knifings. I checked inside the Plath book for the money I’ve stolen and 142
saved. The $347 that got my blood running every time, knowing there’s a possibility of escape, a one-way ticket. Where? No bus went to Bogota. New York then. I’d seen Sex &
The City when La Mama gave the T.V. a break. Just in case Jesus back-stabbed me, gave me the middle finger and bye bye. During the last Jovenes en Cristo meeting the temptation discussion lead to a sex discussion, which lead to this tiny Puertoriqueno showing everyone a paperclip of Amoldo Perez in a orange jumpsuit interviewed about proudly killing men in South Beach. These are men having intercourse with each other, the tiny boricua continued, How should we feel about this? What is El Senor telling us to do? Everyone had a sad opinion. Convert them. Lock them up. Make them fuck prostitutes. Evil souls. Dead spirits. Soldiers of Satanas. I had no opinion but I had money. Just in case. In case Mami sobbing, belt in-hand, disowned me, left me to the ducks. Crisp green bills. Bills that I ironed when the house was empty, mumbling prayers to El Senor, Please mi Dios make me like a boy, any boy, make me think of a boy. The vapor from the iron rose, the bills stacked flat. My other brain going, yeah right mamita.
Yeah Right.
We stopped by Xiomara’s house first. Two enormous palm trees enclosed the entrance where the Young Mulatongo in shorts trimmed the bushes waving at us as we parked. Pink, grey and so big you could fit five townhouses in there. Hurricane season was officially over and the sky shone in a electrifying blue as if it were lit from inside.
All the women at Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor envied Xiomara. Praising her jewels, her designer purses, the hand-made leather case with a gold cross etched on the 143
cover of her precious biblia. I mean Xiomara was the first one to own a Blackberry and a hands-free bluetooth even before the Pastor allowed them as non-satanic devices. But.
While that gringo second-husband was an engineer we all knew girlfriend grew up in rusty Pablo Sexto and those thick-gelled curls, those accentuated eses, were proof of her low estrato. You cannot fool the Colombian trained eye, mi reina. So there you have it.
Senoras de bien of Bogota, cachaco, the wives of that bank president, that part-owner of
Panpaya that never before had to be in such close presence of la chuzma, el pueblerfo, now swallowed the stone of pride and let Xiomara sit wherever she wanted. Jesucristo! If this was not the Apocalipsis Jesus definitely had a dark sense of humor.
The Young Mulatongo, aka Wilson Jesus de la Santfsima Trinidad, led us into the house. Inside sat Xiomara perched on a red velvet chair as another churchwoman hunched coating her toenails. The television blasting Joe Osteen in a football field packed with people in white t-shirts painfully shutting their eyes and thin smiling at the same time.
Pero entren! Sin pena. Francisquita mi nina y tu Myriamcita.You want some tintico?
Some tea? Papito bring Dona Myriam some of that French tea in the yellow jar. I’m telling you Myriamcita, Frank brought it from his last trip to Paris and it made me lose 15 pounds like this!
She snapped her fingers in a Z like El Zorro and pushed down the sides of her waits showing us the imagined cuerpazo. 144
Ay pero no se ponga en esas Xiomara. We only came to pick up the tree decorations you are donating to the church?
Mami was better than anyone at hiding envy and to be honest she sometimes enjoyed
Xiomara’s outlandishness. Both went way back. If you were to ask Mami she’d just say
Xiomara worked briefly for her and that was it. When mami? You know, before. If you asked Xiomara, which you didn’t have to because “la guaricha” ran to the Life Changing
Testimony spotlight every four weeks, you’d know she was once Mami’s maid, or cleaning lady, or “special assistant” as she now wants to remember it, and is proud of the drastic turn in her life. Look where I am now. Look!
Wilson will get them for you Myriamcita, but you are not leaving so quickly, no? Sit down. Yaira can do you nails too, right Yairita? I’m paying.
No, no de verdad. We have to get going. Francisca go help Wilson with the decorations.
Wilson returned with tea in a Miss Piggy mug and then awkwardly stood next to me.
Xiomara didn’t listen. She kept rambling on and on, talking to herself while picking up the pink cushions that held her back and placing them in a semicircle on the other end of the sofa like a nest of pempto bismol.
Right here! She spatted the cushions. All that stress is gonna kill you Myriamcita. Not to mention the wrinkles that you already have but that will get worst! Relajese! Did you 145
know stress is the number one wrinkle cause? I’ll bring you some cocaditas. You two go pack the Christmas balls or do something. Wilson needs to finish the flier for the Jovenes, why don’t you help him Francisquita? Or should I call you Panchita!
That’s okay. Francisca is fine. I’ll stay here.
Xiomara laughed and Wilson echoed her.
Yo no muerdo, he said. I don’t bite.
The thickest curls crowned around his head dropping to his eyes, so that every few seconds he brushed them back but the black rings of hair cascaded down again.
Objectively, I thought, Wilson could be a good-looking muchacho. If he didn’t miss spots when he shaved, if he wasn’t an awkward bag of bones. If those chicken legs were pumped with some muscle. If he didn’t walk diagonally as we entered another room, his one long fingernail pointing to the plaque next to the doorframe Xiomara’s Biuti Studio. I tried fixing it, he said, but she wouldn’t let me. His faint mustache curving in a smile.
The mustache not unlike Carmen’s upper lip shadow. Black hairs on brown skin. His was thicker, coarse. But the droplets of sweat reminded me Carmen’s. Her vulgar way of eating which, according to Mami, the Pastora needed to teach esa nina how to chew with her mouth closed. She’d lick her fingers, one by one. Polio Tropical was her favorite.
After outreach at Sedanos’ we always stopped by Polio Tropical for some pollito, plantains, fried yuca. The chicken overcooked (girl, nothing like Kokoriko. Am I right?) but motherfucker did Carmen eat through it like it was her last meal and yours truly just 146
chuckled, amused as she devoured wing after wing like I’d only seen men do before. No shame. No apologies. Dainty manners thrown out the window. With a napkin Carmen wiped her mouth, missing spots on her upper lip that afterwards shone in the sun like she’d hidden tiny precious stones under her skin.
Bueno pues, Wilson said, Here are the Christmas balls. And those two other boxes under the purple shelves.
And where’s the flier? I said. Because—what the hell right? Actually, I just missed helping out with the youth meetings. You know, what I did before youknowho left. But mostly I missed being useful to God, etc.
You really don’t have to help me. I know my mom can be pushy sometimes.
I tried suppressing a laugh.
What?
Sometimes'?
After it became known at Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor that I converted,
Xiomara pulled me aside many times whispering she rather see her son with a nina from a good family than a morena with unknown roots. The Pastora can say misa! She said.
But I haven’t worked this culo off for nada. And despite knowing Wilson chased after
Carmen, phoned her, consecrated her the most beautiful shekina in the world, every time she had the opportunity Xiomara reminded me her son needed a novia. And how was I 147
not pursuing her hijo? He clearly was un partidazo.
Oh por Dios, I know! She’s always pushy, right? Said the partidazo. I’m sorry.
It’s not your fault.
His dark green eyes smiled at me. The thick gold curtains glowed in stark contrast behind him. Who has thick gold curtains in Miami? I tell you who: Xiomara. I don’t know how to smile with my eyes so I blinked. Blinked. Blinked until Wilson’s brows furrowed.
Are you okay? He said.
Not only was I okay but I was so okay I stumbled on the rolls of fabric behind me and knocked down a picture of Xiomara.
Muchachos! Xiomara yelled from the living room. Don’t destroy the house por favor!
I stood up like it was nothing but another part of my performance. Tara! How do you like that, I said. Then I picked up the drawing of bulgy-eyed Jesus playing futbol with a bunch of boys.
Is this the flier?
Yes.
Is it a boys-only Christmas? 148
No.
Entonces, Wilson? Donde metiste a las ninas?
He said he didn’t think it’d mattered that there were no girls. We’re allhijos de Jesus and yet I can’t paint the entire humanity. Right?
Okay, I said. But if you want people like, say, me that are already part of the church to come to this Navidad with Jesucristo you need to try harder. Why would I want to go to a soccer match full of boys?
Why wouldn ’t you?
He winked. I couldn’t tell if he was flirting.
I’m the worse at telling if boys are flirting. I go with whatever the gut tells me. Which recently has been, shut up. Stay still. Purse your lips. Remember what God wants from you.
Maybe at least draw some breasts and long hair on one of the boys?
We decided it was best if I drew the females into the flier. I sat at a red desk and waited for Wilson to bring the markers. Tiny porcelain dolls smelling daisies leaned on the edges. The room entirely decorated with dolls of all sizes. Some of which she painted.
Yes, homegirl was also a painter. Paint brushes of all sizes perfectly arranged in a mounted shelf. Dolls crying blue tears, bulgy-eyed dolls, black dolls, dolls holding hands 149
with a doll-boy. At first I hadn’t noticed the shelves behind me, next to the closets, lined with dolls clothed with actual textile. But as the sun set, the sunlight glared from the window shone deforming their faces. I wondered, in the scale of satanism, how satanic were these dolls?