Hot Sur

6. From María Paz’s Manuscript

The darkness. What was it like? I shut my eyes tight and imagine it deep and velvety. I can’t remember what silence was like either. I cover my ears to remember, but it is concealed behind a buzzing swarm. These are things I forget, because here in jail there is noise and light all the time. I yearn for the calm of a long, dark moment during which there is no sound in my head. You told us you lived on the mountain, Mr. Rose, so you must know real darkness and silence. You also told us that you could see Manninpox from your house, and I wonder if now and then you look over toward us. If you can see Manninpox from your house, it means that from Manninpox someone can see your house. Or could see it if there were a place to look out.

The problem with my moments of solitude is that they’re too filled with Violeta. I can forget about crucial things that have to do with me, such as the charges against me, but I become twisted in anxiety about her. Has she eaten or left her meal untouched? Is she depressed because of the rainy weather? Has she been cured of the habit of pulling out her hair? Since the day she was born, I have had to watch over her. During the time that the two of us stayed back in Colombia, each of us in different cities, I tried several times to call her but we never spoke. For weeks I’d forget about her, but then I’d remember, and the thought that I was forsaking my duty to watch over her would crash over me like a wave. In spite of everything, life hadn’t been so bad for me then, better than I had expected. Of course, I cried a lot for Bolivia, that’s normal, even cubs and calves mourn the absence of a mother, everyone knows that there is only one mother. Everybody except me, who had two, you could say, because Leonor de Nava played that role well for me, better than Bolivia had. But in Las Lomitas I was a girl among girls, one more alongside Cami and Pati, let’s say I was more a sister than a daughter, and there I found happiness. But what about Violeta? How did it go for the abandoned baby? I don’t know, and I don’t think Violeta herself ever knew, or if she did she wasn’t telling.

“Violeta doesn’t forget,” she said at times.

“What, Little Sis? What is it you don’t forget? Is there something Violeta doesn’t want to remember?” I ask her, but she doesn’t respond.

Every time I called her in Colombia, her godmother said the same thing. “Violeta doesn’t want to get on. She’s small, the phone frightens her, I’ll tell her you said hello.” Cami, Pati, and I were always on the phone, if we ever fought about anything, it was about that, because whoever grabbed the phone first would hog it, and yet my sister Violeta was afraid of the phone. What can I do, I thought, to be able to forget about her, or to free myself from the burden of having to go look for her. Besides, Bolivia assured me that the nena was fine and that soon we would all be together. Once, I tried to tell her that things with Violeta were not going as well as she thought. I told her, “Yesterday I tried to talk to the girl, and I heard the voice of her godmother calling her. ‘Come, Violeta, come talk to your sister. What a horror this girl is, hiding in there again, all afternoon in there and no one can get her out.’ Are you listening to me, Bolivia? Violeta’s godmother said yesterday that the girl had spent the whole afternoon hiding there.”

“Hiding where?” my mother asked me.

“I don’t know, Bolivia. Hiding somewhere or behind something, some furniture, a door. I don’t know. The problem was that she had been there all afternoon.”

On that occasion, as on others like it, Bolivia uttered one of her favorite phrases, the one that annoyed me the most, and which she repeated until the day before her death: “Don’t worry, everything is alright.” Everything is alright, those three words summed up my mother’s philosophy.

These days, I call Violeta every week despite of the long lines to use the only phone in our section. But with her nothing is easy. I know she’s angry with me, that she hasn’t forgiven me for putting her in that school so far from home, and I know she has reason to hate me, I hate myself for having done it. So she comes to the phone but says nothing, it’s up to me to sing her the song about the snake from Tierra Caliente that smiles so that you can see its teeth, that one and others from Cri-Cri the singing cricket, which was her favorite character as a child, and that’s how I spend the ten or twelve minutes, singing “Sleepy Piggies,” “Cleta Dominga,” or “The Baker Bunnies,” until I have spent all the minutes on my card. But don’t think that Violeta is dumb or retarded. On the contrary, she’s exceptional. Strange but exceptional, and with an inability to tolerate lies. She knows perfectly well that if I’m calling her it is not to tell her about things as they are, that I hide from her that I’m in prison, and hide from her what happened to Greg, and hide a bunch of other things, that in some way I also hide from myself. The difference is that with me the lies help me live, but they suffocate her. We all live lying to each other, sometimes more and sometimes less, sometimes maliciously and sometimes for pity’s sake. Dr. House has said this, and he’s right. The unvarnished truth is not something that is very useful, and it doesn’t figure in any etiquette manual. But that’s not how things work for Violeta. She tells no lies and doesn’t wish to hear any; measured words and those with various meanings nauseate her. The psychologists have explained to me that Violeta doesn’t know how to interpret evasions and insinuations. That’s why when I call her from Manninpox she freezes and goes silent. Or she doesn’t come to the phone and that’s the worst, that’s how she defeats me, leaves me reeling all week.

“No more. Big Sis quiet. Big Sis quiet,” she told me when I began going around in circles and inventing stories to avoid telling her the real one. Since then, she has not said a word more.

And even so, I’m afraid to tell her the truth. It’s not easy to tell your younger sister that you’re caught up in the mother of all messes and that it’s possible you won’t see her for a very long time. Or maybe I don’t tell her for precisely the opposite reason, because deep down I’m convinced that any minute now I’m going to awake and this castle of horrors, this unrecognizable place, as if from a macabre fairy tale, will disappear. And I’ll go look for her immediately at her school in Vermont, and I’ll take her with me, and promise her I will never again have boyfriends who think living with her would be hell. Although it’s true, it is hell. But so what? Violeta might be a mess but she’s my sister, I love her deeply and I need her. How history repeats itself, or I should say how we repeat it stupidly without knowing it. Violeta and I were always forgotten about when Bolivia brought home one of her boyfriends. For the little lovebirds, my sister and I became like the plague, the little problem that fucked up pretty Mommy’s romance, so young but with such big, needy daughters. Every time a man lived with us, Violeta and I were superfluous, latching on, not really part of the script, or the main obstacle challenging the future happiness of the couple. When Bolivia died, I was left in charge of Violeta, and when I decided to live with a lover, Violeta automatically became the burden. History repeating itself. I’m telling you, the problem is we don’t learn. We fail miserably and then we do the exact same thing afterward. That’s why I sent Violeta off to that special school way up north in Vermont. You understand? I wanted to be happy and she was a burden. I guess I did the same thing as Bolivia, lured by the illusion of happiness. It’s a mistake, you know? The basis of all troubles and miseries are the dreams of such foolishness. That’s not what life is about, period. And it’s not that I’m telling you I’ve been miserable, it’s not that. I imagine there are those who have had it much worse. Or maybe I simply wanted to escape from a closed box by sending Violeta so far away. Look at it this way. For all those years, who was I? What memories do I have of my adolescence? Not many really; I was a closed box. I was the one who cared for Violeta, not much else. Once Mike sent me to buy cigarettes. Have I told you about Mike? It doesn’t matter for now; let’s just say he was one of my mother’s boyfriends. I was eleven years old, maybe twelve. Mike had invited Bolivia, Violeta, and me on one of his business trips, and that had become a whole adventure in and of itself. I had never been in such a fancy hotel and could not imagine that there would be a more luxurious place in all the world, a two-star hotel that I thought deserved all the stars of the firmament, and on the top floor, we found a soda vending machine and ice. We took up two rooms connected by a door, each room with its own bathroom and television, and in the bathrooms little bottles of lotion and shampoo. It was paradise. But the hotel happened to be located on a big avenue with lots of traffic and many lanes, a highway. I went down with the money Mike had given me, asked at the bar for the brand he smoked but they were out, went outside and asked at another place with no luck, and another one, and nothing. Someone said that I could probably find the brand across the way, and I did just what my survival instincts told me not to do: I crossed the highway. I didn’t want to show back up in the room without the cigarettes, so maybe I didn’t mind Mike so much, and at that point was insanely grateful to him for having brought us to that wondrous place. But in any case, I didn’t have a problem, I crossed the avenue with a group of others and nothing happened. I bought the cigarettes intending to go back and before I realized it I was under a car. I opened my eyes, and there I was, under a car, with my nose inches away from its metallic belly and my dress pressed down by one of the rear tires. An Asian man who must have been the driver was crouching on all fours, and when he saw me, he screamed. Aside from the Asian face and the belly of the car, I began to see legs and shoes and I knew there was a commotion around me. I heard an ambulance siren approaching. “It’s a girl,” a woman’s voice said, “she’s dead, she’s dead.” And then I understood that it was me, I was the girl who was dead. But I wasn’t in pain, in fact I didn’t feel anything at all, so I pulled my dress free with one tug, picked up the cigarette pack and coins that were scattered right beside me, I scooted out from under the car, I stood up as quickly as possible, and ran as fast as my legs would allow. I crossed through the other lanes hearing the brakes screech right beside me. At the hotel I hid behind some plant until they stopped looking for me and then went into the bathroom of the lobby. I washed my face and dried it with the paper towels, soaked the part of my dress that the tire had run over and dried it with the hot-air hand dryer, fixed my hair as best I could, and checked in the mirror to make sure there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. After a few moments, I went back up to the room, gave Mike his cigarettes and change, and said nothing. In fact, I’ve never told anyone about it, although I can still see it today as clear as if I were watching a movie. And if I’m telling you now, Mr. Rose, it is for you to understand that I was no one. I was no one and nothing happened to me. My stuff didn’t count and it wasn’t worth recounting, that simple. And don’t think I suffered because of it; it was just the way things were.

Maybe that’s why I never tell anyone I’m in prison, least of all Violeta. I don’t know. Or it could be out of shame. She never liked that I was with Greg, let alone Sleepy Joe. The farce of my marriage seemed ridiculous to her, and because she’s a sly one, few things get past her. It was as if she knew from the very beginning that all my dealings with the two Slovaks lacked substance, that it could only go from bad to worse and would end up just like it did. I damned Violeta by trying to be happy and she damned herself by not letting me. She’s a ruthless witness; the telenovela I was involved in did not win her over, as I supposed down deep it never really won me over either, and that’s why it bothered me so much to have her there at every minute, recording it all. It’s not that she said anything to me, or that she made demands or gave warnings, but she had her own annoying ways of letting me know. She knows just how to patiently exasperate a person to her limits. She began to pee in her bed every night, and wandered naked on the roof, and sat on the corner pulling out locks of hair. She couldn’t stand Sleepy Joe. I think she didn’t mind Greg, or at least she didn’t give him reason to quarrel, although it wasn’t all easy with him either. Greg was a cop, you know, a cop to the bone, with a very narrow notion of the law, even if covertly he did nothing but violate the very law that he upheld. But that’s another issue, the trafficking of arms, which I only came to find out about here, because believe me I knew nothing about it before. But I was telling you about something else. I was telling you that Greg’s disciplinary codes were strict, and he thought Violeta mocked them.

For example, he said to her, “Violeta, stop playing with that glass, you’re going to break it. Can’t you see you’re going to break it?”

“Yes,” she replied, continuing to do what she had been doing.

Greg took it as contempt, when it was simply the way Violeta naturally responded. As I said, she understood everything very literally; she could not sense subtlety or insinuation. The phone would ring and she would pick it up and someone would ask if Greg was there.

“Yes,” she’d respond and hang up.

“But why didn’t you get me, child?” he roared.

“Why didn’t you get me, child?” she repeated.

“But they asked if I was here!”

“Violeta said yes.”

One day, Violeta was trying to lace up some roller skates and could not do it.

“You’re drowning in a glass of water,” Greg said as he went to help her.

“Idiot,” Violeta said, striking him hard on the arm. “Violeta doesn’t fit inside a glass.”

Greg couldn’t understand that she wasn’t being offensive, just literal. Once, when Bolivia was still alive, she sent Violeta to the corner to buy cloves and cinnamon to make her the maizena my sister liked. Because that’s another drama. Violeta would only eat white food: rice, spaghetti, milk, egg whites, wheat bread, vanilla ice cream; she pukes if you try to give her anything else. That day, Bolivia wanted to make her the maizena, a cornstarch drink, which of course is also white, and that is poached in a bath of milk and water, with sugar and cloves and cinnamon.

“Go get me some clavos y canela,” she told Violeta and handed her some coins.

Violeta brought back the canela, the cinnamon, and for clavos, which is the word for both cloves and nails in Spanish, Violeta brought back a bag of steel nails. You understand? You ask her for a thing and she grasps it at the most literal level. And Greg, somewhat of a moron himself, could never comprehend that Violeta did not quite understand. And she didn’t help. If Greg got home tired, she was loud to the point of driving him crazy, or she got lost in the neighborhood and he had to go looking for her. Every day something. But like I said, Violeta’s major conflict wasn’t with Greg but with Sleepy Joe.

But it’s incredible, hard to figure out why she insisted on fucking specifically with someone like him who is so wicked. He is almost instinctually wired to do harm; he has a pressing need to commit wrongs, probably without even realizing it, a childish urge that makes him take pleasure in the pain of others as children sometimes do with creatures in that perverse manner. Except that Sleepy Joe is a child with an adult’s sense of perversity. Or I should say, an evil, nasty, bad adult. That’s what he’s like, or was like; I don’t know what has become of him. I haven’t been in contact with him from here. Perhaps the separation has helped me understand him better, to glimpse how his mechanisms functioned. That’s how things were, Mr. Rose, or at least that’s how I understand them now. All you had to was watch. Anything with a crack, Sleepy Joe pounced on to break, for the pure satisfaction of dragging it to that point, and because hurting others makes his balls tingle and his brain jingle. He had to hurt Hero because the poor thing was a cripple, had to make Violeta sick because she was already sick, had to rape Cori because she had already been raped. Sleepy Joe needed to avenge himself on them, crush them like insects, he a god and they insects beneath his feet. He remained strong and all-powerful; the problem was that he could only achieve this in comparison with the weak. He needed to break the chain at the weakest link, maybe so that he himself would not break, because in the end, he must truly be the weakest link. That’s how he was. Imagine a chicken with only one wing. But not a good chicken. But a mean son-of-a-bitch chicken, with a broken wing. I don’t know when he suffered his own harm, probably as a child, as is the case with most irreparable harm. He seemed like a wounded young man. And not just his spirit but also his body. You should have seen the number of scars on his back.

“What are they from?” I asked him many times, always while we were in bed, I’d caress his back and my fingers would run against those tracks on his skin, one right beside the other, like the beads of a rosary. “Life marks you,” he always responded and said no more.

And yet, look, Violeta wouldn’t leave him alone. She too looked for ways to torture him, almost as if they were competing to see who could be worse. She realized that he was a man full of fear, and went at him from the weak side. She knew, for example, that the little shit was afraid of dogs, and to bug him she’d sneak stray dogs into the apartment, flea-ridden little pests with their tails between their legs, but they tormented Joe and drove him to fits of hysteria. She was also able to get to him in other ways. Because his passion was the shopping channel she’d stand in front of the television when he was watching. He’d touch her to move her to one side, and she’d bite him hard. Because she’s a firebrand, and when she becomes enraged, she has the strength of a thousand demons, my sister Violeta, who otherwise seems so weak and fragile. She has never liked to be touched, not even caressed, and hugged, forget it, she reacts as if she has been burned by a cigarette. She also had more ingenuous ways of startling poor Sleepy Joe, Violeta the gnat. She knew he was terrified of sleeping, although against his will he fell asleep at times. But never in the dark. He didn’t like to sleep in the darkness of the night, and so during the day he always seemed sleepy. He hated the nightmares that the night brought, which in Spanish has an ugly name: pesadilla, which sounds like quesadilla, but which in English is “night mare,” a nocturnal mule, a black and brilliant female wandering the vastness of the night terrified and alone. Violeta took advantage of this, for she made no distinction between night and day and could get around in the darkness as well as in the light.

“Last night the black mule came, Violeta saw her,” she said, and Sleepy Joe would get all freaked out, because he knew Violeta did not lie, not because she was good, but because she was guileless, ignorant of the mechanisms of deception, so the visit from this mule had to have some substance, and Joe was very superstitious.

And I don’t blame him, there’s something about Violeta’s ramblings that make them seem prophetic. Corina feared that Sleepy Joe would do something to her, to my little sister Violeta, such a pretty and helpless woman, and so ignorant of sex although she had developed into a woman, a beautiful woman, my sister, quite pretty, damn it, and what a brew of hormones was bubbling in her. I wasn’t sure if Violeta knew what she was doing when she sunbathed nude on the roof, knowing Sleepy Joe would be around. I think she was tempting him, provoking him on purpose, just because that was one more way to torment him. Anyway, I didn’t want to sit back and do nothing and see whose interpretation of the situation was right, Corina’s or mine. Whatever the case, I thought it would be best if I enrolled Violeta in the school in Vermont.

I don’t think it was such a great torment, Mr. Rose; it wasn’t as if I were sending a kid off to slaughter. It’s a wonderful school, with teachers who specialize in the education she requires, very expensive, on the edge of a forest. Fortunately, Bolivia’s friend Socorro Arias de Salmon takes care of the tuition; she says it’s something she had with my mother, a pending debt. In many ways, I think that my sister is better off in the school, she who always hated the city. Imagine what it is like for someone who can’t stand physical contact to have to deal with crowds, buying cards for the subway, standing in line, making transfers, the eternal maze of stinking tunnels, the noise, people going up, people going down, people shoving. At school on the other hand she had the expanse of green, the sky, the trees, and the peace of the world, and they teach her not to be so selfish and to live among others, I mean to understand them better, which is something she doesn’t know how to do. In the end it wasn’t a bad choice. They specialize in cases such as Violeta’s; they understand her and are educating her, which is important, because I understand that Violeta never did well in regular schools, where she scratched and bit her classmates and sometimes she too would come back all beat up. Be that as it may, I can’t forgive myself for sending her there; the guilt is eating me alive.

I’m not sure if you can say, Mr. Rose, what made me so drastically rebel against Violeta. Except that I wanted to live my life, is that a sin? Finally a life of my own, a chance to worry about something that wasn’t Violeta, Violeta, Violeta. My dealings with her have always been tormenting, ever since the plane brought us to America. I noticed something weird that very first day, after five years apart, but I wrote it off as the behavior of a spoiled child, because I knew that those who were too pretty also tended to be whimsical. To begin with, she had shown up at the airport with a stuffed toy giraffe, which I thought was a big mistake. Even at that age I had a keenly developed sense of the ridiculous and when we walked onto the plane I felt the other passengers give us that look that said, Oh, God, don’t let those girls with the giraffe sit near us. You know the look, the one saved for those returning from Mexico with mariachi hats or from Disney with Mickey Mouse ears. Fortunately, no one sat next to us. She let me buckle her seat belt but didn’t respond when I wanted to talk about Bolivia’s new car.

“You know who Bolivia is?” I asked her.

“You know who Bolivia is?” she returned the question.

“Bolivia is your mother and she’s waiting for you in America.”

“Your mother waiting for you in America.”

“Yours too.”

“Yours too.”

“Yes, good. Bolivia is your mother and my mother and is waiting for us both. With many presents. In America.”

It wasn’t true that Violeta was frightened about her first time on a plane, as Doña Herminia had warned me. Violeta simply wasn’t — frightened or anything, she was simply not there and thus ignored me, until I tried to take the giraffe away from her, then she screamed.

“We have to put it up in the bin! The giraffe, Violeta. You can’t keep it with you. The stewardess said that all personal items had to be stored in the overhead bin, those are the rules,” I tried to explain to her. Before Manninpox, I was always very respectful of rules, and I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t part with the stuffed animal, when it had been made clear that we should heed the rules for the safety of all.

I knew very well what a plane crash was like because two years earlier, when I was ten, a DC-4 had taken a nosedive into our neighborhood. The passengers and many people on the ground had died, especially those having lunch at a restaurant called Los Alegres Compadres. Our lives had been marked by that accident, the only major event that had happened in the history of Las Lomitas. Some of the dead were people we had known, including a girl from our school. And for months afterward it was as if we were in a movie, with the trained dogs looking for bodies at the wreckage site, and police tape surrounding the area. Everything connected to the event had been a major commotion — the Red Cross, the funerals, the prayer sessions, the news stories on television — and for a few days we were the center of the world. There was also a sense of triumph among the neighbors who could have died but had by some miracle survived.

The residents of Las Lomitas were lower middle-class, that is, we only ever traveled by car, and in other neighborhoods we joked that this had been our only opportunity to die in an airplane crash. Who could have known at that moment that two years later I’d be the first person from the neighborhood to get on a plane? That’s why I wasn’t going to allow Violeta to ruin everything by not putting the giraffe in the overhead bin as the stewardess had ordered.

“Listen to what you’ve been told, Violeta. Or are you deaf?” I demanded. “It could be very dangerous!”

Even then it was part of my character to give respect to authority, especially uniformed authority, as I demonstrated by marrying a cop. It was a hang-up that I got over quickly here at Manninpox, but that stewardess on my first flight with her indigo-blue uniform and red scarf around her neck must have seemed like the very owner of the sky to me. I was so fascinated by her confident and stern manner as she made her way up and down the aisle serving juices and giving orders that I swore that one day I’d be a stewardess. Fortunately, those types of pipe dreams don’t always play out, because a few years later I saw Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts and I swore I’d become a prostitute. I struggled a bit with my sister for the giraffe, but she was making such a racket that I gave up.

“You didn’t cry as a baby. Where did you learn to shrill like that? Hasn’t anybody taught you how to speak?” I told her, even mocking her somewhat.

When it came down to it, the things that made me superior to her were my age, the English I’d learned in school, the double-A cup bra, and the patent-leather shoes with the princess heels that Leonor de Nava had bought me just for the occasion. Not to mention the collection of Condorito comics that Alex Toro had given me the afternoon before when we said good-bye, but that I’d left behind because it had not fit in the luggage. I came to the conclusion that I didn’t quite yet like this hysteric sister that had been my fate, and that I missed Cami and Pati very much.

But how could I not love Violeta, so white and so pretty, with her long wavy hair and those green eyes that looked like jewels, as if in that perfect little face someone had set two stones of light that faced not out but inward. Alice lost among the underground marvels she encounters, that’s who Violeta was and continues to be. Not much later, I felt bad about having been rough with her. A bad start for a new life, I thought, and tried to talk to her about other things but to no avail: she didn’t let go of the giraffe and she didn’t let out a single word. She immediately pulled her arm back if it grazed mine, and I was too tired to deal with all her sensitivities. To make the flight that left at noon from the capital, I had awakened before dawn and traveled several hours on the bus with Leonor, and after the emotional good-bye and all my expectations of what awaited us, I fell asleep and for a bit did not have to think about Violeta.

I was awakened by an acrid stench. It smelled like urine and was coming from her. I opened my eyes and I noticed that she had the giraffe pressed between her legs, but it took me a while to realize that she had been about to burst from the urge to pee and that instead of asking for the bathroom she had peed on the giraffe. And now the giraffe was soaked, a disgusting stuffed thing dripping a yellow liquid. So I snatched it from her, and she screamed again.

“The crew is going to find out you peed on yourself and there’s going to be hell to pay. If you don’t shut up the plane will crash; shut up already, pee-head.” The more I insulted her the more she screamed.

“Let’s go to the bathroom, nena.” I opted for a new tack. “Inside the plane there’s a bathroom with running water and everything. Let’s go wash you and the giraffe up. They’ll send us back to where we came if we arrive in America looking like this. Everything is clean there and you smell like urine. Bolivia told me they don’t accept dirty people.”

Fortunately, she was uncomfortable enough on the wet seat that she allowed me to convince her. We walked down to the end of the aisle and went into the same bathroom, where we barely fit in to close the door. Miraculously, Violeta was no longer screaming. She pulled down her panties and sat on the toilet although I told her not to do it, because Leonor de Nava had taught me that in a public toilet, women should urinate squatting without touching anything for balance. But Violeta seemed peaceful in there; the tight quarters didn’t seem to bother her. She sat on the toilet as if it were a throne and looked at me for the first time.

“Make sure the door is locked,” she said, and I realized that she could speak normally whenever she wanted.

I washed the giraffe in the sink with the liquid soap and afterward tried to mask the lingering smell with the hand lotion and cologne offered there for the passengers in small bottles ordered neatly on the counter. I really liked those little bottles and the only reason I didn’t take one was because I was afraid that they’d detain me for being a thief in America. I read the sign in the mirror that said, “Out of courtesy for your fellow passengers, please leave the bathroom in the same condition you found it,” and I found that very civilized and very American. After wringing out the giraffe as best I could “out of courtesy for my fellow passengers” I wiped and dried the whole bathroom until it was in “the same condition I found it” or even cleaner. The nena seemed calm at last, sheltered in a corner as if inside a cave, pressed up one against the other without protesting, her skin not repulsed at the contact with mine. That’s where I began to understand that Violeta was threatened by large spaces, and that on the contrary, her personality softened when she was in small spaces where she could feel protected by the four walls.

We returned to our seats and they brought us the meal on individual platters. I was astonished at how well everything was organized. It was incredible to see each item in a separate plate covered in aluminum foil, the plastic cup in one corner and in the other the dinnerware and napkin in its plastic bag. The best part was going to be the hamburger inside, with French fries and milk, because this would be our first true American meal. What a disappointment when I saw it was just chicken with vegetables, salad, and flavored gelatin, exactly the same thing I was served almost every day in Las Lomitas. But nothing was going to dampen my enthusiasm, and I consoled myself with thinking that if it was an American chicken it must be an amazing chicken.

That was the first time I was served a meal on a platter; the last time was in solitary confinement. Sometimes someone or something reappears out of nowhere and makes you feel as if a circle has been closed, that something that began a while ago has come to an end, that some maktub is being fulfilled, as my friend Samir would say. Even if it’s something as silly as a plastic tray. They had me locked up in a cell where everything was gray, with no natural light. The walls, the metal door, the bunk bed, the cement floor, the stainless steel toilet, all gray, gray, gray, and lacking a sense of time because they had taken my watch, and not seeing anyone, not even myself because there were no mirrors. I couldn’t even see the face of the human being who opened the slot to slide in my food. The tray came in, the tray went out. Three times a day. They only gave me a plastic spoon, I guess so I wouldn’t think of cutting my wrists. Useless precautions. Later I’d learn that you can make a stabbing pick from a spoon, even a plastic one, it’s what the Latina inmates called chuzo or manca. Spoons, pencils, hairpins, and other innocuous objects of daily life, here they become weapons.

The tray came in and the tray went out, but I could not tell who was bringing it to me. At first I shouted my head off. “Is there someone there? My husband is a cop,” I yelled, “let me call my husband.” But no one answered. I started to think that maybe I had died and that death was that gray place where I didn’t know about anyone and no one knew about me. Day and night with the buzzing fluorescent light that I wanted to turn off to rest or at least to cleanse my eyes of the insistent gray, exchange it for a darkness of deep black. But no. If I closed my eyes, I saw the dirty pink light that filtered through my eyelids. If I opened them, there was the gray, gray all around. They always gave me exactly the same food three times a day, a Styrofoam cup of café con leche and a donut. I used to like donuts, now I hate them. Café con leche and donut, café con leche and donut. Until one morning there was an orange on the breakfast tray. An orange! I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like a miracle, as if suddenly light had entered my cell. That orange shone as if it were alive, I swear, Mr. Rose, and it let me know that I too was alive. Because of that orange I was able to remember what the color yellow was like, which I was forgetting. I thought, the sun is like this orange, and it shines out there. I can’t see it, and its light doesn’t shine on me or warm me, but that doesn’t mean that the sun is not still there, and any moment I’ll be out of here too, and I’m going to sit in the sun and rid myself of all the dampness and confinement. And never again will I eat a donut. In jail, where you don’t have much, every object that falls into your hands takes on religious qualities, of a medal or a scapular; a pencil or a comb can take on those qualities. You press it in your hands, create a bond with it, treat it as if it had a soul. That’s what happened with my orange. My mouth watered just looking at it, but if I ate it I’d lose it, and it was my only company in that hole. I kept it intact until it began to turn and then I ate it before it was too late. But I saved the rind, which emitted a pleasant smell for a while and then lost it. But I didn’t lose the color; I was able to save that little piece of yellow.

Later, there would be my first night outside of solitary confinement, in the section with the other inmates. They transferred me late at night, and I stood for a long while looking through the bars at the endless, well-lit hallway with cells on each side. It was pleasing to be able to look beyond the cell wall, a joy to the eyes to be able to see far and deep, a good thing to confirm that the world was bigger than a cell. A bit later I lay down and fell asleep immediately, dreaming of the hallway, which became a subway station, and the cells train cars that passed quickly by. I woke up with a good taste in my mouth. I thought, if I’m on the subway and this is one of the trains, does that mean it’s going to take off toward some other place?

The following day they allowed me to wash for the first time in who knows how long. It was a short shower but with hot water and soap. It may not have been Heno de Pravia, Bolivia’s favorite soap, but in the shower I thought of her, of them two, or I should say us three at that time. I thought about my mother’s round pretty body, and baby Violeta and her lizard’s body, and my dark-skinned slight body, almost inconsequential when compared to Bolivia’s. Maktub, I thought, maktub, better this way, much better that Violeta had been in Vermont, that she’d been spared the raid on the house, the screams, the persistence of their questions, and the blows they had given me and would have likely given her. Good thing she didn’t see how they brought some of her favorite things down from the roof terrace in black bags. In the end, it was good that Violeta had been away at school, seated in a garden, safe, where no one could reach her or harm her, making wicker baskets in her crafts class and learning what laughter is, and what tears are, and hugs, and any other expressions that others call emotion but that she has trouble with. When I speak to you about Samir I’m referring to the man in my neighborhood who sold baklava, halvah, mamoul, and other Arab sweets. The same one who tells me that he finds it odd that Westerners use toilet paper. Greg didn’t trust this Samir but I liked him because he was as sweet as the honey confections he made, because each time he passed by his store he called out to me, Ai-Hawa, you are my Ai-Hawa, the air that I breathe. Samir explained to me that in his language there is the word maktub, which means that everything has been decided and written, everything, everything from the beginning. That morning under the shower, the first time I’d been allowed to wash in Manninpox, I tried not to think about anything except the lovely days of my childhood, my first childhood, the one before Bolivia’s trip. Not to think about anything, let my body focus on the hot water. But I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering back to Samir and maktub. Maybe everything was maktub since then, from the time Bolivia said good-bye to us when we were children. Everything maktub since then. Everything that is now coming to being.

This chapter is written in a hurry, Mr. Rose, I’m sure you’ve noticed. It’s just that this will be the last chapter, and not because I have exhausted everything I have to tell, not at all, the three of us have just arrived in America, after all. The story of Bolivia, Violeta, and me, a drama that I titled Little Women in Queens, because when we first arrived they had made us read Alcott’s Little Women in school. Yes. I’m writing against the clock now, because today, Saturday, Socorro Arias de Salmon is coming to visit. And I will give her all of this to send to you. It is a desperate decision made at the last hour. It was only yesterday that they told me she had asked for permission to come, and they wanted to know if I’d accept her request. It’s going to be my first visit in Manninpox, and likely the last, at least for a while, so I came up with this idea, a bit suicidal, to send this manuscript with her. I know it’s like tossing a coin, all or nothing, either it gets to you or it is lost forever. And that will be the end of all of my efforts to see my story turned into a novel. I hope I did the right thing, Mr. Rose, and that Socorro can find out where you live. Who knows? Let’s cross our fingers. We did what we could. There aren’t many other options anyway. There’s a rumor that in other sections they’re already beginning with the security searches. And that they’re going cell by cell taking what they can. They say that this time they’re very picky and stricter than ever. Only one thing is certain: I’m not going to just wait till they take away my papers. Anything but that. Maktub there as well.

I have two hours from this moment on. And I have to decide what story I choose to tell you. How can I fill the rest of my life? I think the best thing would be to continue chronologically as if nothing were happening, as if I still had all the time in the world. That is, continue the story of our arrival in America and taking the first steps of our American Dream, and then just stop wherever, when time runs out.

So Violeta and I were having chicken and vegetables on the plane, or I should say I was having it all, her meal and my meal, because she hadn’t touched a thing. Meanwhile, Bolivia wasn’t doing well, I know because she later told me the story many times of how she had to deal with hell and high water on the day of our arrival. Some months before, let’s say eight months, she had realized something. Something that was self-evident and if she had not realized it, it was because she had not wanted to: with the little she earned, and the amount she sent to Colombia for her daughters, then rent and living expenses for herself, she was never going to put away enough money for our visas and plane tickets. That simple. But what was it that suddenly made her realize this? I don’t know. The thing was that one day she stopped deceiving herself with happy accounting tricks and settled on the truth, the hard fucking truth. She had been working like a slave for four years in New York without having saved enough and living on hope, pretending things were fine, letting the years pass, but then that truth struck her like a full-blown slap, she said. She sat in Alice’s little plaza in Central Park, the one where Alice is with her tea party companions, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, and such. It was the place she had wanted to bring us on the day of our arrival, a very pretty place that I knew from photographs she had sent of her there. On the back she had written, “To my daughters, we will meet here again.” From the day I received it, I placed it in my wallet for safekeeping, where it should still be, although they took my wallet when I arrived here, but they’ll give it back some day, and the picture will still be there, a very young Bolivia with a red wool cap and scarf standing by the Cheshire Cat. But it was there in that same place that she realized she’d never make it, she could work another four years, and it would still not be enough. Meanwhile, time would continue to pass, her daughters would continue to grow older, and what had begun as a temporary separation would become permanent abandonment. The possibility was terrifying, abandoning her own daughters, and although she never told me this, I suspect that she was frightened less by the idea of abandoning us than by the thought she might get used to it. That is, seated there next to the cat, Bolivia must have known she was in a quandary: either she went back to Colombia or she abandoned us. And it hurts me to think that at least for a moment she must have thought of choosing the second option. But even if it happened like that, she corrected herself right away and began to look for a temporary solution. Like most Colombians, she knew how to dance, was genius at the salsa, mambo, and merengue. On Sunday afternoons she went with her friends, two Dominicans called Chelo and Hectorita, to the Copacabana, where someone would always pay for her entrance and maybe a couple of drinks. She had met some men there who were crazy about her. She was still pretty, my mother, although work life had tattooed her legs with varicose veins, caused her eyes to wrinkle with crow’s-feet, and made the skin on her hands red and peeling. But she was still alluring and full of life, and knew how to arrange it so she’d have what she needed to shine there at the Copacabana: Bolivia knew how to dance. Among those who attended that club on Sundays, there was a rich Venezuelan called Miguel who had become well known for a phrase he kept repeating: it’s not Miguelito, call me Mike. This Miguelito or Mike took an interest in Bolivia and was soon approaching her with what she called serious propositions, such as coming to live in Spanish Harlem. He had a nice place, this Miguelito who liked to be called Mike, I know because later on Violeta and I would also end up at his place. It was a spacious apartment with great light, wine-red wall-to-wall carpet, expensive furniture, and even a white grand piano that they had gotten in there somehow for who knows what because no one played. Mike was tall and always gasping for air because he wouldn’t stop smoking even though he had suffered from asthma since he was a child, a serious case that often had him on the verge of suffocating. He wore a wide-brimmed Panama hat, white shoes and pants, a palm-print shirt, and had an enormous belly.

“Why are you dressing up as if you were coming from the beach?” Bolivia often asked him.

“I’m not dressing up, it’s who I am.”

Deep down, I always liked this Miguelito, call him Mike, better than any of the scum we had to put up with later. This guy had character, that can’t be denied. He was the owner of a packaging company and that may have been the reason Bolivia said yes one of those Sundays at the Copacabana; she’d later be less subtle about her reasoning: if this man supported her, she could save the money to bring her girls. And what was said was done. Maktub. The new apartment was a dream, more beautiful than she could have imagined, but living with her new boyfriend was more difficult than she had suspected. Until you sleep beside a severe asthmatic, you have no idea what a torment the night can be, for the afflicted and the partner. Bolivia came to understand that for Mike the bed wasn’t a place to lie down, because he’d sit up almost at a right angle with a bunch of pillows propped up behind him, and he’d snore like a seal if he happened to fall asleep, or wheeze all night if he didn’t. Sometimes she pitied him, and tried to help him by boiling eucalyptus leaves, getting him the inhaler, massaging his back, and begging him to stop smoking. Other times, and these were more frequent, she thought of him as a giant and clunky noisemaking machine. She couldn’t forgive all the horrible nights and the days she struggled through at the factory because of him, overcome by such sleepiness that she shut her eyes even though she was holding a hot iron. But my mother withstood this respiratory drama for seven months, during which she was able to save the money she needed. She sent us the tickets and said she’d be here waiting for us, and ten days before we arrived, she left Miguelito, called Mike, without offering too much explanation. According to Bolivia herself, she told him as he served her the morning coffee. Ciao, Mike, I’m not coming back tonight, I’m going to live with my daughters who will soon arrive. She had warned him previously that the setup would last only until her daughters arrived. Then good-bye forever. That very afternoon, Bolivia sublet two rooms with a bathroom in an apartment of Colombians, far from Spanish Harlem, near the East Village, which was cheap then.

Her roommates were single and pleasant, students, or so they had told her, and she believed them, or had to believe them because she had no other choice. That’s the way my mother thought: if I can’t afford another place, then this is the best place. It wasn’t huge or pretty, safe or peaceful, no wall-to-wall carpet or grand piano, and in the end wasn’t even private because the entrance and kitchen were shared. The money she had saved was enough to buy a whole other round of used goods, three simple mattresses, a table with four chairs, a black-and-white television, and a set of picture frames.

“The two rooms turned out very lovely,” she told me. “Like a dollhouse. I was very lucky to have a place to receive you. All that was missing was a vase and the towels and sheets I had left at Mike’s.”

Our plane arrived on a Monday night at eight and Bolivia had asked for a week off from work, so that she could show us our new American home. That Monday as we were about to board at the airport in Bogotá, she got up at six to finish ironing the blankets, cleaning the whole place, going to the market for crackers, food, eggs, cereal, maizena, soda, flowers, and at around noon she went to get the rest of her luggage from Spanish Harlem. Returning in a cab, she noticed the commotion of sirens near her block, and when she got closer she realized it was directly in front of her building. She asked the cabdriver to stop, got out at the corner, and went into the deli to find out what had happened.

“Get out of here, woman, they’re searching your apartment,” the store clerk told her. “Get out.”

“But why?”

“For the same reason as always, drugs. Get lost, woman, before they grab you as well. Did you leave your papers up there?”

“No, I have the papers right here in my purse. But I have my furniture in there, stuff for my girls. I’m going to go see if I can get my stuff. I’ll explain to them I have nothing to do with these drugs,” Bolivia resolved.

“Oh no you won’t,” the man detained her. “Over my dead body. I won’t let you go.”

“What about my things, my girls?

“Your girls are lucky there’ll be someone waiting for them at the airport tonight. Their mother was almost taken away by the feds. Thank God and get lost. Now, what are you waiting for?”

The rest of her belongings were in the taxi, and the taxi driver was cursing because of the delay as he emptied the trunk of the car, leaving Bolivia’s things on the sidewalk.

“Now what do I do?” she asked the store owner. “I have nowhere to put my things.”

“Come. Leave them down here until you get set up. There’s room in the store.”

Bolivia could not have been more grateful. May God repay you, as they say in Colombia. She stacked her belongings in one corner of the store and set off on foot to look for a place to rent, because in a few hours we would arrive, and she had no place to put us. How would she tell us she had no place for us to sleep? All the promises of the good life in America, so much waiting for the great moment. But where was my mother going to find someone who would open their doors, just one someone who would take pity on them and say come on in, comadre, bring your daughters and make yourself at home, where two fit so do three, where three fit so do four, and if we have to water down the soup, so be it. That’s how Colombians welcome each other. But in New York, no one told her these things, and Bolivia couldn’t find a place, and she had to suspend the search to come get us.

The plane arrived on time and Bolivia saw us immediately, her two girls standing there almost unrecognizable with the years that had passed, very different from each other, me darker than she remembered me, almost an adolescent but still a girl, and with hair, a lot of hair, messy and unruly, that’s what she’d tell me later, she said that on first sight I had seemed more hair than girl, and that she watched me looking around with those sullen eyes and that face of few friends. That’s how she saw it, but it was just that my face was puffy from having slept most of the flight.

“I looked at Violeta from the other end of the gate and I don’t know what I saw in her,” Bolivia would tell me years later, “but I saw something. Very pretty, my girl. But strange.”

I have to love them both equally, Bolivia promised herself as she approached us, I have to love them both exactly the same, not an ounce more for one or the other. And I’m not sure if she succeeded. I’ve always thought our mother loved Violeta more. Maybe to protect her, but it wasn’t just about that. There was something the girl had that I lacked, some magic in between temper tantrums that made it easier for Bolivia to be a mother to her than to me. Who knows? Between the three of us nothing ever arose spontaneously, everything had to be learned slowly after five years of everyone on their own. Bolivia was going to have to get used to being our mother, us to being daughters. We had a lot to learn, sometimes I think too much, or perhaps too late. In any case, it wasn’t going to be easy.

At that point, the story of that day ties in with my own memories, a swarm of people and suitcases in that airport, very hot, Violeta restless and me in a black mood, maybe because of exhaustion or all the confusion. María Paz! Violetica! María Pacita! Violeta! The woman with wavy hair and red lips that ran toward us, screaming our names, turned out to be our mom and she fell on her knees and embraced us and we embraced her, although I think Violeta was hesitant. I wasn’t hesitant, but it was strange. Five years of not having seen Bolivia, five years of speaking to her on the phone, had made her more into a voice without a face, and at the point of meeting her, there in the airport, I felt as if that voice that was so familiar was coming from the wrong face, I couldn’t make the two square off, I don’t know if you get what I mean.

Bolivia, for her part, who had fought like a lioness to get to this reunion with her daughters, lived through that moment as if it were a personal victory, the end of a long journey, a kind of impossible goal that became reality through a monumental sustained effort. A victory, yes, but a Pyrrhic one, because her little girls were here, but where could she take them? Up to that point every time Bolivia was about to surrender, every time she was about to drop dead from exhaustion, or that she couldn’t take it anymore, every time that happened, she got a second wind with the mere thought that one day she was going to see us again, just as was happening at that moment at the arrival gate in JFK. Except that she did not imagine Violeta looking so strange and she couldn’t quite see me in that young woman with dark skin and too much hair, as if I was not her daughter but that I nevertheless brought back memories of the man who had impregnated her, who I learned from Socorro, because my mother would never talk to me about these things, was a sailor on a Peruvian fishing boat, half-native and half-black, who had arrived to the Pacific Colombian coast in pursuit of a school of tuna. He had partied with Bolivia for a whole week and then taken off after another school of tuna. And never returned. That was my father, and Bolivia thought of him when she saw me at the airport that day.

“You look like your father,” she told me that time, and never mentioned him again.

Bolivia had imagined the reunion with her daughters just as it was happening, except that in her dreams, we left the airport hand in hand, like in the movies, heading to a pretty house with plaid blankets and curtains and a bouquet of flowers on the table, a place where her two girls would marvel at things like the air-conditioning and the remote control. But she had no such things to offer us, and she couldn’t find the words to tell us what was happening. She just wanted us not to find out what was happening, and, putting on a face as if everything was alright, she hailed a cab having no idea where we might be going. While the driver loaded our luggage into the trunk, she thought, I have two minutes to figure out where we are going, one minute, half a minute. She covered me in hugs and kisses and tried to do the same with Violeta, who didn’t let her, and meanwhile the taxi driver insisted on directions and she didn’t know what to say.

“Where to, señora?”

“What’s that?”

“An address, lady, you haven’t given me an address. Where are you going?”

“Just go out here, I’ll tell you. Go straight here, I’ll tell you. Cross that street, take a right there,” Bolivia responded because she had to say something, to keep the car going, to stall while she thought of something, and meanwhile she prayed, help me, my dear, dear God, show me the light, tell me where I should take these girls to spend the night.

“Here,” she said finally in front of a hotel.

A dumpy hotel, a reeking hole in the wall, with dirty linen, stained carpets, cigarette burns on the furniture, and one window that looked out on a black wall. What did I think of all of this? I don’t remember; I was just tired. It must have already been a disappointment when we realized Bolivia didn’t have a car, but that shitty hotel definitely laid waste to any pretenses I may have acquired from living with the Navas. In any case, when Bolivia awoke the following day near dawn, I was ready; I had the suitcases packed and Violeta ready as well.

“Get dressed, Mom, we’re getting out of here,” I told Bolivia.

“But where, honey?”

“To America,” I said. “We haven’t gotten there yet.”

“But this is America, my pretty girl,” she said.

“Don’t lie to me, this is not America.”

Then she made a phone call and things got better quickly. Soon we were having breakfast in a big elegant apartment with a wine-red carpet and a white piano with a big-bellied man named Miguelito who spoke Spanish and asked us to call him Mike. Mike offered us corn arepas, black beans, white cheese, and café con leche. When I looked out the window I saw that many of the signs outside were in Spanish: Chalinas Bordadas, Pollos a la Brasa, Cigarillos Piel Roja, and Las Camelias. We had arrived. There with Miguelito, in that apartment in Spanish Harlem, we would spend our first few years in America.

And so, Mr. Rose, the time draws near. So off this goes, see if it gets to you, like a message in a bottle. I have a cramp in my hand from writing so fast, and it’s a little sad too, because it’s as if I am saying good-bye to you. Thank you for your company. Telling you all this has been a way to keep close, I should confess to you that lately you have been like that orange because you remind me that it is bright outside and that one day I’ll be there, outside, and that everything is going to pass, as all nightmares pass. It’s 11:40 according to the clock in the hallway. The countdown is about to run out. Visiting hours begin at 2:00. The inmates have to be ready in the visiting room by 1:30; at 11:45 they ring for lunch and I have to go even if I’m not hungry. So I have only five minutes to tell you these last things. If we’re going a line a minute, it would be a paragraph, at least a paragraph, a good one to finish our novel. If you ever see Violeta and recognize her, tell her that the first thing I’m going to do when they let me out is go get her. And tell her I will get out of here, whatever it takes, to be able to keep that promise. Tell her that in spite of everything, I love her. Tell her I’m sorry, to forgive me and wait for me, I’m going to come for her. And what else, my God, what else can I tell you, Mr. Rose, in the minute I have left. You make up a good ending for the novel. But make it beautiful. Please, you know I hate depressing endings. Invent something. You know about that, it’s your job. Don’t make me look bad with the readers; I don’t want them to pity me. Ciao, Mr. Rose, the bell for lunch just rang, it was truly great meeting you. Maybe we’ll see each other again one day, although I’m not holding my breath. It all depends on maktub, what has already been written. And now, for real, ciao.