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.