Hot Sur (12 page)

I’m sorry if this seems conceited, but I consider myself a rather pretty woman. Not beautiful or gorgeous, but definitely pretty. My hair is coffee-colored, long and thick. A thick head of hair, a crown of hair I should say. My hair is my best feature. The only thing that hasn’t deteriorated with the hemorrhaging and with this life in jail. As for the rest, I have acceptable features, a seductive smile although not perfect because I never wore braces, tanned skin, cinnamon they call it, and a pleasing little body. That’s what a boyfriend told me once the first time he saw me naked; he told me that I had a pleasing little body. I found the comment a little off-putting, especially in the middle of what was supposed to be a torrid sex scene. But maybe the man didn’t want to offend and was only making “an objective description with restrictive use of adjectives” as you would have advised in your creative-writing class. Anyways, I’m no babe, but I’m also not lacking in female graces. Well, I have a pleasing body when I’m thin, although not as thin as now, now I’m thin as a rake, and besides I’ll confess that for a long time I was fat, chubby fat with a big ass, especially after I got married, married life accumulated in my thighs and in my butt. Now I’m very skinny, and that makes me look anorexic, with the prominent cheekbones and the eyes grown so large I look like a nocturnal bug. Because of the anemia, my hands are transparent. If I put them against the light I imagine I can see the bones, like in an X-ray. And although my current appearance shocks me, I think Kate Moss would be envious.

One time, after I had arrived in America, I had to fill out an application for a job. I was with my friend Jessica Ojeda, who was born in New Jersey and spoke English better than I did. Although just because she was born here was no guarantee she spoke better English. I learned it as a girl in Colombia, at the Colegio Bilingue Corazon de María of the Mothers Clarisas, which I attended with the Navas and in which Mother Milagros provided intensive lessons on grammar, pronunciation, and English literature five days a week. Then I got to America and from the time I was twelve to the time I was eighteen I hung out in Latino neighborhoods in which English was hardly heard. My first great disappointment upon arriving in America was that Bolivia had no car, the second that it was so hot, and the third was that in America everyone spoke only Spanish. You want to know what the business signs were of my first neighborhood in America? La Lechonería, Pasteles Nelly, Rincón Musical, Pollos a la Brasa, Tejidos el Porvernir, Pandi y Panda Ropa a Mano para Bebe, Papasito Restaurante, Cuchifrito, Sabor de Patria, Fútbol en Directo, Cigarrillos Pielroja, Consultorio Pediatrico para Niños y Niñas. And so on. But back to the job application that I filled out with Jessica Ojeda. She noticed that where they asked for the color of your eyes and hair, I wrote
coffee
. Hair color:
coffee
. Eyes:
coffee
. Skin:
coffee with milk
. That’s what I wrote because that’s what we call that color, coffee—or rather it is one of three terms: wheat, cinnamon, or coffee.

“Those are names of food,” Jessica reprimanded me. “Don’t say that here, because people get offended. Here you say Latino when they ask you for your ethnic group and dark brown when they ask you about your hair and eyes.”

“You don’t understand,” I explained. “Those of us born in the coffee zone have coffee eyes, and hair that is the same color as brilliant dark coffee in a cup, of coffee when it is magnificently coffee-colored. And our skin is the color of coffee with milk and sugar when you drink it really hot.”

“Alright then,” she said, offering a compromise, “put dark brown.”

“Not dark brown.” I held my ground. “Coffee. I’m proud of that, end of story.”

Let’s see, Mr. Rose, what else can I tell you about me? Do you want to know if I have any special features? A few scars, which here in prison they call embroidery. One on my cheek from a scratch from Violeta that I told you about. Another one from an appendix operation, one on the eyebrow from a bicycle fall, a mole an inch from the corner of my mouth on the right side. Normal all in all, so far, but I have a few other things that are somewhat embarrassing. For example, stretch marks on my thighs from all the weight I gained and lost, too much hair on my legs, and a coffee-colored bramble of pubic hair; one of my nostrils is a bit higher than the other, and although I’d like to tell you that my breasts are full, like in the novels, the truth is I barely fill an A cup. Aside from that, I’m five feet five inches tall, wear size seven and a half shoes, have transparent hands from anemia, which I told you already, and have a pair of ears that are “full,” but which I can fortunately hide under my long hair.

I’d like it if in your book you recounted Bolivia’s departure for America as sad but also joyful, because before she left we took a hot shower together, something we had never done. She washed my hair with an herb shampoo that she herself made in the kitchen, and since my body was small and dark, hers seemed a wonder, so round and full, so white and generous, which always made me uneasy. I was a little girl, Mr. Rose, and didn’t know much about life. But I did know one thing, that my mother did things with her body. Though I wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly what. I felt as if her body wasn’t guarded, wasn’t private, but rather exhibited outside the house; there was something about Bolivia’s body that fascinated me and frightened me at the same time. That afternoon she had ironed my halter top and favorite dress, a yellow jumper, my favorite color then. Bolivia knew how to iron with starch beautifully, by which I mean that the clothes came out fragrant and fresh, as if new. It seems it was a family thing, because her mother also ironed, my poor wretched grandmother Africa María, may she rest in peace. And my mother had shown me; I think it was one of the few things she got to show me before she left. Although come to think of it, I must have made that up. No one shows a seven-year-old girl how to iron; that would be an atrocity. A girl would burn herself with an iron. Anyway, I’d have liked for such a memory to be real, and maybe it is and it is good to think that Bolivia taught me something, that she left me something before leaving for America, something besides the
coscoja
, the broken-off coin piece that hangs from the chain around my neck, well, that used to hang around my neck before they confiscated it when I was brought to Manninpox.

Do you know what a coscoja is? Don’t worry, I didn’t either, and when I found out, I didn’t like it at all. I immediately dipped the pendant in rubbing alcohol and left it there all week, me, who, before knowing what it was, put it in my mouth all the time, disgusting. Only my mother, with the coscoja; you always had to be careful with my mother. But be patient. Little by little, I’ll explain everything.

In any case, the day she was leaving, Bolivia dressed in jeans, plain shoes with laces, and a plaid shirt, as if she were going on an excursion to the countryside. I saw her put makeup on her eyes, which were coffee-colored like mine, with long lashes. Many years later, I’d glance on her in a similar manner on the day of her death, with her head on the satin pillow in her coffin of dark wood. She had been made beautiful again, seemed rejuvenated, because near the end fatigue and worry had beaten her; yet on that day she seemed peaceful again, as if the Heno de Pravia had once again restored the resplendence of her skin. I remember watching the shadows of her eyelashes caused by the flames from the altar candles dance softly on her cheeks, creating the sensation that death was treating her lovingly. I’d seen other corpses, and although they did not let me attend the funeral of my husband, I had been to others, and I had never seen a dead person as beautiful as her. Señora Socorro and the other friends roasted a turkey and prepared a Russian salad for the mourners, and we all ate. All of us except Bolivia, she who had always made sure that we never lacked turkey during the winters in America. A few days before Thanksgiving and Christmas, we always went to the parish where they gave out free turkeys so that everyone would have a good meal during those days. So we lined up and got our turkey, and the following day we did it again, and the day after, morning and afternoon, claiming our turkey as if they had not already given us one, and another turkey, and one more, and the best we made out with this scheme is when we got six turkeys one Christmas.

The day she left for America, I looked at Bolivia and thought, I’m so lucky to have such a pretty mother, and at the same time, I grew disheartened because that marvelous radiance who was my mother was going to be so far away from me. Afterward, we bathed the baby Violeta, who had inherited a fair complexion and had the greenest eyes anyone had seen in our neighborhood, where such things were not common, so that strangers stopped us on the street to admire them. Mami, where did Violeta get those huge green eyes? Did her father have green eyes? Bolivia did not respond. She went silent when I asked her about her men. The day she left, we dried Violeta with a towel our mother had put over the heater to warm up; we put Johnson’s powder on her, a diaper, and a onesie made of baby alpaca wool. The whole time, Violeta never cried, she lived as if lost in a dream. I wondered if everything she saw would be green with those eyes of hers. I tried to play with her by shaking a rattle of plastic keys in front of her, but she didn’t notice it.

“Mami,” I told Bolivia, “what good are those eyes on Violeta if she can’t see?”

“She can see. The doctor assured me there’s nothing wrong with her eyes. The thing is that they’re too green,” she responded, and was satisfied with the explanation.

Bolivia’s bags were ready and so were the cardboard boxes with our clothes, but before going out she announced, “Now we’re going to have a little good-bye, soon-to-be-reunited ceremony.”

I, who did not know what a ceremony was, was surprised and delighted when she opened three little blue-velvet boxes and pulled out three metal pendants on gold chains.

“What are they?” I murmured, knowing that we were doing something solemn, that the moment would not be repeated, and that those pendants, whatever they were, represented something. I didn’t really like the dark metal pendants all that much; what was truly beautiful was the gold chain, but regardless, I knew the pendants were important.

“They’re three pieces of the same coin,” she replied, and showed me how they made a whole. On one side of the coin there wasn’t anything, just scratches on the worn metal. On the other side, there was an eight-point cross with the word “lazareto” written in the middle. Around and above the cross, it read “two and a half cents,” and below, “Colombia, 1928.” Bolivia put one of the necklaces on me, lifting my hair to fasten the chain behind. She put the second pendant on the baby Violeta and kept the third for herself. Of course, I didn’t know what a lazareto was, and I didn’t even think to ask; I must have thought of it as something magical that made the pendant a protective amulet. Years later, in America, Bolivia would tell me that such coins had been minted in the first decades of the twentieth century for restricted circulation in leper colonies, to avoid contagion in the rest of the country. They were called coscojas, and the engraved octagonal figure was the cross of the Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem, also known as the Templar cross or the cross of the eight beatitudes. That’s when I came to know the horror of leprosy and learned of the great family secret. I found out that my grandmother Africa María had spent her last days being eaten away by the illness in isolation at the leper colony Agua de Dios. Her husband and children never saw her during the nine years she spent there, until they heard about her death and then went looking for her, but only to be there for her burial. Apparently, the husband, my grandfather, had been sending her personal necessities all along—although he never went to visit her, each month he’d send her a suitcase full of food and other goods, with a note that the suitcase wasn’t to be returned. According to what Bolivia told me later, my grandfather preferred to buy a new suitcase every month and deal with the loss rather than get back such a thing impregnated with miasmic airs. Among the contents of the suitcase, there once was an electric iron, which apparently my leprous grandmother never used because she preferred one of those old-fashioned heavy iron ones, one of those you fill with hot coals. That’s what Grannie Africa ironed with, there in her colony for the sick; her flesh may have been falling off in pieces, but she painstakingly cared for her clothes.

My mother was a teenager when her mother died, and she told me that they arrived at Agua de Dios for the burial exhausted after two days of travel, dazed by the heat and the buzzing of insects because the place was in the middle of a swamp. They were not allowed near the lepers who attended the burial but stayed on the other side of the fence. My mother remembered she could see them in the distance, but not their faces, which were covered with rags, and that she had been shaken by the thought that these creatures were the only company her mother had had for such a long time.

The authorities had made the members of the family cover their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs that had been soaked in alcohol. My grandmother’s body was incinerated along with her mattress and other belongings. Bolivia stood there, scratching the swollen mosquito bites on her legs and watching the flames consume someone who was supposedly her mother, but who had been buried alive for so long that she had been almost erased from her children’s memory.

“How can I explain it?” Bolivia told me. “For us, her children, she had always been present, but not as a person, as fear, a shadow.”

When the flames had died out and the embers extinguished, Bolivia saw a metallic glitter in the ashes. She shook herself loose from her father, ran to the place where the pyre had burned, and in spite of the screams of warning, picked up a dried branch and scraped out that little gleaming thing that had caught her attention. It was the coscoja, probably from one of the pockets of my grandmother’s incinerated clothes.

“Funny how the mind works, María Paz,” Bolivia told me when we were in America. “The day of my mother’s burial, I thought of her surrounded by sick people, but healthy herself. Healthy and with her old-fashioned hairdo and with the knitted shawl over her shoulders that she wore in the photograph in our living room.”