Hot Sur (33 page)

“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.