Vida (11 page)

I was pissed but held back. If I hadn’t, the first words out of my mouth would be, “I don’t want your life, Jess. I’m not like you.”

And her next question would be, “Who exactly are you trying to be?”

I wasn’t ready for that either.

Later that night, when the boyfriend and I were eating pasta in front of the television, I told him I’d seen Jessamy earlier.

“I don’t know why you hang around her,” the boyfriend said as if his food had suddenly become spoiled. “That girl has the fear of life in her eyes.”

I defended her. Said she was my friend, but the boyfriend wasn’t listening. Flipping channels with his free hand, shoveling linguine into his mouth with the other. Afterward, we smoked cigarettes on the balcony and then went to bed. We weren’t one of those couples who fall asleep like intertwined roots. We kept to our separate sides of the mattress, only came together to have sex and to push each other out of bed in the morning.

Vida had many smiles: careful ones, small ones; the harsh but sexy ones she gave Sacha that looked like more of a decoy. But sometimes a sunrise ripped across her face and she smiled like it was going to save her life. Like at the beach or when she spoke of her family. She smiled even when she told me how she worked in a flower shop in El Centro Andino only to give her money to her father who would then gamble it away, and how her brother Tony worked as a mechanic and a messenger for gangsters, and ate every meal with a gun next to his plate, which is why she had no problem with cleaning Sacha’s gun for him. She said she had a little sister named Justina who worked in the kitchen of a diplomat’s house and they were training her to serve dinner for dignitaries and maybe one day she’d get to work for one of the overseas ambassadors.

Her mom, she said, was a gentle woman who worked as a companion to an old scientist who was going senile. She had to sleep in the old man’s house most nights because he had a habit of wandering into the street and had once been lost for two days before Vida’s mom recovered him on the steps of the Gold Museum talking about Bolívar to anyone who would listen.

It was Vida’s mother who encouraged her to be a beauty queen and made Vida’s competition dresses herself. And Vida had paid off, winning Reina de la Primavera, Reina de
Azúcar, Reina de las Flores, and even Reina de Usme. People said she had a gift; even her priest said she had been blessed with beauty to bring money to her family. Back then, she said, all she hoped for was a regional title. But then Fito put it in her head that she needed to aim higher: Miami. “The Jerusalem for Colombians” is how she put it. Enter shiitake mushroom.

We were at the beach by Forty-first Street. I was on a school break and the boyfriend was at work. I still didn’t know what Sacha’s day job was and gave up asking. Vida and I were stretched across towels in our bikinis and she stared into the sky as if she could see her whole history projected into the clouds like a movie screen.

Two or three times, guys wandered over to our spot of sand and tried to flirt, but Vida cursed them, inspiring some insults about how we were stuck-up sluts, but she just laughed.

“I hate men most of the time,” she told me.

I asked her how she ended up with Sacha, said that they seemed like a good couple, which was only a half-lie.

“There were four of us and we each had a bedroom. Sacha sat in the waiting area most of the time. Collected money. Watched for police. Made sure that we didn’t try to escape. But I could see that he liked me. I worked at earning his trust. It was obvious that he was lonely. It wasn’t so hard, Sabina. You can get a lonely person to do anything.”

She paused, lit herself a fresh cigarette.

“It took a year but one day he said he loved me and that he wanted us to be together like normal people, away from the house. He gave the other girls money so they could run away and the two of us left together. We had to hide for months because his boss had people searching everywhere. But time passed. And now we are okay.”

My friend Jess would say it was the freak factor that drew me to Vida. That she was a novelty act for me, a living movie complete with exploitation of Latinas. There was also the vanity element, that, in her, I saw a parallel life, one that my mother always imagined aloud: the What if we had stayed to live in Colombia? narrative. She always said I would have grown up more feminine, with better manners, and that probably I would have figured out how to be married by now.

And then there were the Colombian horror stories that my parents and their expatriate friends told one another whenever they got together for sancocho and vallenatos, to appease their guilt for having left the motherland.

“Un país de locos!” The men would shake their heads in shame, repeating headlines ripped from
El Tiempo
about the guerrilla and paramilitary infiltrating the cities. Political corruption, secuestros, executions, baby trafficking, child prostitutes. The land-mine capital of the world.

“Que verguenza,” Papi would say as if talking about an alcoholic parent.

My parents and their friends all congratulated themselves for having American-raised kids who only had to see Colombia on vacation. The last time I’d been back was at nineteen, spending two weeks at tea parties with the old relatives, who liked to speak French to one another for kicks, and the cousins, who hung out at El Country and made it their mission to get me wasted on aguardiente in La Zona Rosa every night of the week.

Then there was my tía’s muchacha, Claribel, who had a secret history we weren’t supposed to mention that involved getting raped by a half brother at fourteen, resulting in a baby who was adopted by an Italian family. Claribel, who had to put in a good two years of service before my aunt would pay for her to get her high school diploma on Saturday mornings. Claribel, who drifted through the rooms of my aunt’s house like a ghost, making our beds and shining our shoes without our asking.

“Do you ever think of going back?” I finally asked Vida.

“Every day. But first I have to think of a story to tell my family, to explain what I’ve been doing here all this time.”

Dolor ajena is what they call it. Feeling pain on behalf of someone else. A pain that is not your own. No succinct way to say it in English. I suppose that’s how we get by.

I’m not that charitable. Nothing in me said I should help Vida. Give her money from my savings so she could buy a plane ticket back home. Hook her up with a counselor at my school, someone to talk her through her dramas. Help her heal. None of that. I just wanted to drink her up like everyone else.

She asked me if I had some old clothes that I could give her. Hers were worn-through, so that the seams on her jeans looked as if they might give at any moment. I never wore clothes enough for them to disintegrate from wear. Always tossed them on a whim to make room for more. I showed up at her place with three shopping bags’ worth and she pored through my clothes like they were spun from gold, trying things on and modeling them in her dumpy living room. Sacha was in the bedroom, supposedly on the phone with a client. They had a small balcony that opened onto a back parking lot and the kitchenette smelled like grease.

She walked across the room like it was a runway, posed, and for a second I got a glimpse of that beauty queen. Her prize smile, lashes that fluttered their way into a judge’s favorable graces.

She was wearing a blue dress with an arabesque print. A dress I bought in a Las Olas boutique and never wore. It hung in my closet for a year waiting for a party, a romantic summer dinner, nights that never happened. It looked like it was made for Vida; the gauzy fabric clung to her round breasts and draped off her behind like the bows of a palm tree.

The only way she could think to thank me was by doing my nails for me. She pulled out a plastic tub, filled it with water and soap and washed my feet for me in a way that made me ashamed. She was proud of herself, telling me she already knew how to do all the stuff that they teach at the beauty academy. She’d cruise right through it, she said, be their best student ever, just as soon as Sacha gave her the money to enroll.

She chose the color polish. A light pink because she said I struck her as an understated sort of girl.

“A natural shade,” she said, “because it’s quiet and honest. Like you.”

And this only made me feel like more of a phony.

The boyfriend slept with another girl. I asked him straight out and he confessed. Said it happened twice and that it was another lady from the gym. Forty. Divorced twice. Panamanian. I know because I asked for details and I was
so angry my only response was, “Panama used to be Colombia, asshole.”

Then, my canned defense. Said I hoped it was worth it. You lost me. Lost me. Lost me. Gave him a wall of silence, unreturned phone calls, adjusted to my life without him, the hole in my evenings, and the cold bed. Returned to life before the Hungarian. Sunday without his grill. His friends. Without Vida, the living documentary.

And then I caved in, because I am like everyone else who can’t do anything based on real principles. I thought of my father. How he would shake his head and say I have no character. That he didn’t raise me for this kind of treatment from a man. And when my parents called to check up on me, I closed my eyes and mumbled that everything was fine, while the boyfriend fell asleep with his head in my lap like nothing.

When I saw Vida again, this time for dinner, the four of us at a churrascaria on Seventy-ninth, she and I fell into our Spanish while the boys talked business in their language.

“I didn’t think you would take him back,” she said softly.

“Neither did I.”

Later, the boys suggested we get a bottle of wine and drink it on the beach. Normally, Vida loved the beach, but with Sacha and the boyfriend there she seemed indifferent. As the boys got drunk and did flips in the sand, Vida lit
herself cigarette after cigarette. She had an eye on Sacha while he and the boyfriend frolicked like little boys. He blew her a kiss and she stared back under a veil that looked a lot like contempt.

“The owners of the house used to surprise us at night sometimes. Once, they went extra hard on me, punched my eyes so that I couldn’t open them for days. I never was allowed out except two or three times when Sacha let me smoke a cigarette with him behind the house. But after that beating, he put me on his motorcycle and all I felt was the wind because I couldn’t see. I held him as tight as I could but I was in so much pain I thought for sure I would fall off and die on the road. And then I smelled the change in the air. Salty and sweet at once and he carried me into the water. At first it stung but then I opened my eyes and saw the sea in front of me, all around me. We were in our clothes but wet up to our necks. He held me so I could float, didn’t talk so I could listen to only the waves. And when he returned me to the house and put me back into the bedroom where I lived, I thought, It’s not his fault that he is so cruel. We’d all become different creatures.”

Just as I started to think of her and Sacha as some kind of weird fairy tale, Vida turned to me and declared that she was no Eréndira.

She told me other things.

She said there were four girls and they were expected to see clients whenever they showed up, and could only sleep a few hours at a time. One of the girls wore bikinis all the time and would do anything for drugs, and the owner of the house, a guy named Raul, kept her supplied. One girl, Vida told me, hardly ever spoke and once they raped her so badly that she bled for hours in the shower. There was a woman doctor who came to see the girls when Sacha called, but she was pitiless and Vida was pretty sure all the girls were sterilized during one of those brutal examinations. Vida heard of a girl who was there before her, who managed to have a client fall in love with her and buy her debt to the house. Some girls thought she was like a Cinderella but Vida thought the client probably made the girl his personal slave. Vida said the other girls resented that Sacha took a liking to her, that she tried to explain to them that she had a plan for seducing him to get them all free, but that Sacha started encouraging clients to pick other girls so Vida wouldn’t have to work. For this, Vida said, she would never forgive herself.