Vida (14 page)

I liked my uncle a lot. He was tall, gangly, with thick, black glasses and a giant mouth that made me think of alligators. His thick graying hair was slicked back and he was always talking about jazz music and books because his father was a famous writer that the whole country worshipped. The big secret was that Emilio had been working on his own book
for years already, late at night after everyone was asleep. Since I often stayed awake, I’d hear him clanking away on the typewriter in his office and smelled his cigarettes because he always smoked as he wrote.

Emilio had his own daughter, but when I was around he was extra special with me. He held my hand and pulled me around the salt mine and said, “All this is part of your inheritance.”

“We own this?” I asked, confused.

“All this land belongs to all of us. The good and the bad.”

I didn’t know what he meant but that night I got a better idea of it. Over dinner, the adults were talking about La Violencia and La Situación. It was the mideighties and the name Escobar was just starting to catch the current. Emilio, a lawyer by trade, told Papi that the man who had already taken over Medellín and was now infiltrating the rest of the country had his hand in every pot and a bounty on the heads of the police and important officials. Papi laughed, said that he couldn’t believe it, that he knew Pablito Escobar from childhood. They’d gone to the same school but Papi was a few years older. Still, even then, Papi said, the kid had gangster tendencies.

“His hands are all over this country,” Emilio said. “You watch. There’s not one pure soul left.”

One of Mami’s cousins came to see us at Carmen’s house and kept saying how dark Cris and I were. We looked at each other, and even Cris, who always had a retort, didn’t know what to say. Another friend, an older lady with orange hair, said I was fat and Cris had bad teeth. Another couple, who insisted on speaking in phony British accents, asked my mother why she allowed us to dress like vagrants. For the next day of visitors Mami had us dress as if we were going to a party and Cris and I sat around the living room stiffly, him in his First Communion suit and me in a fluffy dress, sighing that we wanted to go back to New Jersey.

Since we were groomed better, the criticisms turned to Mami. One of her relatives asked her what country club she belonged to and Mami said ninguno. The man raised his furry brows as if he’d just witnessed a scandal. He asked Mami what charities she belonged to and Mami said ninguno, that she was taking college classes and helping out at Papi’s factory. The man just about lost it. Told her he couldn’t imagine why she left Colombia to live como una cualquiera in New Jersey.

He was sweating, and asked Carmen’s maid for a glass of water.

Mami softened her face. I could tell she was trying to show this guy respect, though for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how we were related to him.

“It’s different over there,” Mami said. “We manage just fine. And we are happy.”

“How can you be happy,” the man challenged, “when you’re invisible?”

Luckily Papi was out with Emilio or he would have let the guy have it. Papi already knew that Mami’s Bogotá society gang thought he was a renegade Paisa; he didn’t finish high school and even though he had a profitable business in the States, he was a factory man, not one of those guys from El Club who get siphoned off to the American Ivy Leagues and then return to be senators. Plus Papi’s accent gave him away, fluttery and still carrying the heat of Medellín, not with a potato in the mouth like the Cachaco accent. And even though all those people talked about Papi like he was a bumpkin and not a big-time empresario, they never hesitated to ask him for a loan— showing up at Carmen’s house saying, “Amigo, I’ve got a proposition for you. All I need is a little capital.”

“Where were they,” Papi would ask Mami, “when we had cardboard boxes for furniture?”

That night, Papi came home a little drunk with Emilio. Mami was already in bed when he went into the room and I heard him drop his watch on the night table.

The whispers started. Then Mami’s voice grew louder, clearer. I looked to my brother who was already sleeping, his mouth open and lips dry.

“I was
somebody
here,” Mami whimpered.

“What are you saying?” Papi was impatient, like he just wanted to sleep.

“Quiero volver.”

Mami had always wanted to move back. Her saying so was nothing new. I wanted to wake up Cris, tell him what I’d heard, ask him if it was really true that we were nobodies in New Jersey. Ask him why Mami seemed so disappointed by her American life, if it was because my brother and I spoke funny Spanish and were always messing up our tenses, or maybe because in New Jersey, store people were always saying to Mami, “I can’t understand you, ma’am. Speak English,” and my mother would shoot back slow and steady, “I
am
speaking English.” I wanted to ask him why Mami spoke as if Papi stole her from Colombia, as if she belonged more to this country than to us.

But then my parents went quiet and I decided it was best to try and sleep.

Carla invited my cousins, Cris, and me to her apartment to make arepas. It was the day before Easter and our parents took the opportunity to go visit some other ancient relatives because Papi said they would probably croak before our next
trip back. One was the million-year-old third wife of Mami’s great-uncle, whom he married when she was only fifteen. Mami said the woman was pretty much senile now but that didn’t take away from their gesture of driving all the way out to Chicó to bring her cakes and cheeses.

Símon, who at four was the youngest of us, refused to make arepas because in his own house men were not allowed in the kitchen, so Carla planted him in front of the TV again. Sara, who thought herself Símon’s bodyguard, went with him and Cris decided he didn’t want to cook either so he chose the television as well. This left Carla and me in the quiet of her kitchen. The muchachas were watching telenovelas in their rooms and her parents were out.

I told Carla about the discussion I overheard between my parents the night before and she nodded as she listened.

“Women cut off their hands for men,” Carla said as we patted our balls of flour into flat disks and dropped them onto the pan. I was already quite good at making arepas and Carla even said so. I told her I had learned from Papi’s mother, Abuela Luna with the violet eyes, who lived a few miles from us in New Jersey.

“What do you mean they cut off their hands?”

She shook her head as if she wished she could take back her words. I still didn’t understand what she meant
and she didn’t explain. We went on in silence, sculpting our arepas, trying to make each one more perfectly round, flat, and smooth than the one before.

Carla had a boyfriend nobody knew about. Nobody except me. She confessed her secret to me the day of the arepas when my brother and cousins had all fallen into a deep sleep in the living room. Carla and I were on the window seat again. She asked me if I had a boyfriend and I said no, I was only seven, and then when I asked her, she blushed, said his name was Andy and he was a professor at her university.

“Is he old?”

“No, he’s just thirty,” she said, which sounded very old to me.

“He rides a motorcycle,” she went on, her eyes widening so that it looked like her emeralds would roll right out from under her lashes. “He was engaged when I met him and he left that girl for me. My parents don’t know yet but we’re going to get married.”

Her little mouth grew bigger and bigger. Her teeth glistened, her cheeks filled with color, and her smile expanded so much I could nearly see down her throat.

“How do you know he loves you?” I asked her.

“It’s a feeling,” she said. “No matter where I am, with him I feel that I’m home.”

I wanted to tell her I felt the same way about our cocker spaniel, Manchas, but I was shy. Carla told me her Andy said he’d been waiting his whole life for her and I wondered how that could be since he didn’t even know she existed until last semester. Even so, I felt privileged that she told me her secret, especially as us kids filed back down to Carmen’s apartment after the parents came to get us. They still wore sleep on their faces but I was refreshed because I felt I’d been let in on the adult world of love, and the way people talk about it, like it’s some kind of secret code.

On Easter morning, Mami and Carmen were each in their rooms crying as the husbands tended to them. They got in a huge fight about something that happened when they were kids. It all came out over breakfast, when Carmen asked Mami why she wears so much makeup and Mami snapped that it might be because her sisters told her she was ugly her whole life.

It continued from there and us kids went into the living room to play with the pollitos Emilio bought off some guy on the street. There was a basket full of chicks sitting on a mound of fake grass, each one dyed a different color: pink,
blue, green, or orange. A whole rainbow of pollitos that chirped as they bounced around between us and crapped in our laps. We each took one and named it. Cris named his blue one Rambo and Sara named hers Flor. Símon named his Símon and Cris told him it was stupid to name a pollito after yourself but Símon said the chick was actually named after Bolívar so it was perfectly acceptable. I named my orange pollito New Jersey.

While we went to Easter mass, we left the pollitos in the bathroom. I thought they would get cold, so I dragged the alpaca blanket off my bed and tried to leave it there for them, but Carmen stopped me, said the blanket was very expensive and did not belong on the bathroom floor. After mass, the pollitos were gone. Emilio explained that someone took them to live on a finca. Not the one in Fusagasugá that belonged to Mami’s father—she lost it to some relative in a family inheritance land war years earlier, which turned out to be a blessing because guerrilleros had taken to hanging around on that land and when they get rowdy, they sometimes cut off people’s fingers, ears, or tongues. I heard that last part on the television in Carmen’s house.

My cousins and I were crying over the lost pollitos. Even Cris was sad over losing Rambo so soon. We’d fallen in love with those little chicks so fast and now they were on their own in the world, and Símon was sure they’d been fed
to the rottweiler who lived in an apartment on the ground floor. My uncle and father tried to calm us down, assure us that the pollitos were going to live long happy lives and be adopted by adult chickens that were lonely and wanted to be parents, but we were inconsolable. On top of it, our mothers were still giving each other the silent treatment. Mami was in one room saying, “I don’t know why we bother coming here anymore,” and Carmen was in another room muttering, “I don’t know why she even bothers coming back.”

Then the phone rang. It was one of the neighbors reporting some building gossip: Carla had been in a motorcycle accident. La pobre niña, the lady said, esta media muerta.

We went to see her at the hospital. Two days had passed and Carla was no longer half-dead but recovering, though her back was broken and she was wrapped in a long, thick plastic brace that made her look like a giant crustacean on the bed. Her arms were broken and her beautiful face was ripped open on one side, sliced by the concrete, though she said it was a milagro that that was all that had happened, since she hadn’t been wearing a helmet, just that denim jacket her mother hated so much.

The novio was doing just fine. Somehow the guy made it out without a scratch and Carla’s parents got to meet him
in the hospital, and their first words to him were not hello but “She lost the baby.” I know this much because all us kids were gathered around our parents’ legs when they exchanged information.

Carla’s mother, who was normally expressionless and always wore a tea suit, looked like she’d just been in an earthquake, and her father, a respected advertising man, looked like Carla was already gone. My father kept saying thank God she’s all right, but her parents looked like they were ready to bury Carla and I didn’t understand why.

When they let us in to see her, I held Carla’s hand and told her she looked pretty, that the hospital light above the bed made her glow like an angel. Cris didn’t come through the doorway and Símon was still traumatized from the missing pollitos and stayed on a plastic chair in the corridor with Sara looking over him, as usual. I told Carla I wished she were my sister. I always wanted a sister and all I got was lousy Cristían. Carla tried to laugh but her bones hurt, so she stopped. They hadn’t yet told Carla she wouldn’t walk again or that she would probably never have children of her own. That day, despite the stillness of her shattered body, Carla looked vibrant, her eyes dancing because Andy had just called to say he was on his way over to see her.

We left a few days later. I promised Carla I would write her letters, tell her all about my life in elementary school,
let her know as soon as I got a boyfriend, and she promised she’d invite me to her wedding, though the last time I saw her, when we went over to the hospital to say good-bye, Andy was sitting all alone in a chair at the end of the hallway with his face in his hands. He didn’t move from there during the full hour that we were with Carla.