by Rita Indiana
Juliana told me about this video before we even got out of the pool, before Rebeca’s epileptic fit and the tangle of hair everyone saw peek from under her bathing suit when she started foaming at the mouth. I was scared. No one knew Rebeca was epileptic. Somebody said epileptics swallow their tongue and that scared me even more.
Juliana was telling me all about the Poison video, but we weren’t talking about music or Poison but about dicks cuz the swimming instructor had made all the boys practice the breaststroke. She’d sat her butt on the very edge of a chair and she’d opened her legs and said, Like this, like a frog. The boys would come one by one in their little swimsuits to mimic the teacher and she’d fix their legs then sit down and demonstrate again: Yes, yes, like a frog. The boys would do it and you could see the bulges on the side of their suits. You couldn’t see anything on the teacher cuz, while she’d tell them to practice kicking in or out of the pool next to all the other kids from section 12 of Country Club Valenciano’s summer camp, she was almost always dry as a bone, wearing a sweat suit and a stopwatch and holding a whistle between her teeth.
Juliana, who’s also in section 12, doesn’t swim very well, and Rebeca doesn’t matter, though she was also in section 12 and wore—like we all did—a T-shirt with the Country Club Valenciano logo, which is actually the Spanish coat of arms, and a pair of blue shorts with white stripes on the sides, like the kind we wear for gym at school.
The camp isn’t a camp at all. There aren’t any cabins or campfires or pine trees or mountains. It’s just a club where our parents send us to play basketball so we won’t bug them at home. We play basketball, volleyball, tennis, ping pong, karate, football, and Frisbee. Swimming is the last class of the day and, sometimes, when it’s cloudy, the water’s really cold.
First, with our heads out of the water: one two, one two. Then the legs: one two, one two. Splashing water, kicking as if we really knew how to swim even though we’re holding on to the edge of the pool with both hands. Then down, under the water, holding our breaths in big gulps instead of in our lungs. I thought I’d never learn the butterfly. Even down below, you could hear the teacher’s voice, flat and dry, the whistle between her teeth, and her finger on the stopwatch counting down the time it takes me to get all shriveled up like a raisin.
When the teacher decides to get in the water, she takes off her sweatpants, folds them, and puts them on a chair. She takes off her hoodie and puts it on the back of the chair. She takes off her socks and then the last thing she takes off is the stopwatch, which she wears like a necklace. She puts it on her pants, makes her way to the edge of the pool, hopping and shaking her arms as she puts her very black and very short hair under a swim cap, then she snaps on her goggles. She quickly gets in position, launches herself and hangs in the air for about three hours before she slices into the chlorine water without causing the slightest ripple.
I love it.
When she finally pokes her head out, she’s about halfway down the lap lane, doing the butterfly all the way to the other end, with that stunning back of hers that makes me wanna pee right there in the water, or to go crazy on everyone else and tell them to shut up and watch how she gets in and out of the water, the Speedo tag hanging off her suit.
Honestly, this is the class I like most.
When it’s over, it’s time to go but if we don’t get picked up, then we just hang out in the pool. The club has three pools: the Olympic pool, the kids’ pool, and the diving pool. The diving pool is the smallest and squarest but it’s also the deepest. I once tried to touch the bottom but my ears almost exploded.
Just off the pool, there’s a gazebo where guys hang out, their earphones plugged in, just watching the divers. Some guys are fully dressed but others take off their shirts so the girls can see their six-packs. Others undress down to their bathing suits and walk around the pool asking the sunbathing girls for their Hawaiian Tropic. Sometimes they dive in and perform tricks, jumping up and down on the diving board three or four times before diving in the water. Still others roll up into a fetuslike ball when they dive so they can soak the earphone-wearing guys who are watching. Sometimes one of the big guys, usually wearing a waterproof watch with a calculator, dives from the top board and does fifty-seven turns in the air only to land just outside the pool. The lifeguards rush to find his mouth so they can give him mouth-to-mouth but they can’t find it, so a kid pulls the straw from his Coke bottle and the lifeguards stick it into the purée of blood and bones that’s all that’s left of the diver. They blow and the purée gurgles and they go on like this until the women from the infirmary show up with their menthol and a Band-Aid.
There’s no camp on Saturdays, but there’s a disco. They let me in cuz I’m very tall, which is why I’m in section 12 at camp with the girls who are already using tampons, although I really should be in section 10. The girls from section 12 are prepping a dance routine (with lambada skirts) to Miami Sound Machine’s “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” for the last day of camp. They don’t let me take part cuz I don’t have tits yet. That’s what Juliana, the choreographer with two grapefruits on her chest, told me. She also said they were gonna wear color underwear under the lambada skirts so they could be seen when they did their turns.
Juliana dyes her hair, paints her fingernails, and French-kisses her boyfriends on the swings, meaning pretty much all the boys in section 14, and from section 15 on up. They grab her tits and I think they even suck on them. But nobody knows this. Just Juliana and her boyfriends, cuz Juliana doesn’t talk about it with any of the other girls, just me, cuz I don’t count, cuz I don’t have tits. Juliana also knows a lot about the Bible and tells me the world is coming to an end and her mom said we have to have fun. That’s why when we go to the disco on Saturday, she dances with the first guy who asks, which is almost always a fat blond boy with Z. Cavaricci pants and a Gap shirt. He squeezes her tight and licks her ear and corners her and then the only thing you can see of Juliana are her white heels up in the air and the blond boy’s butt going up and down.
Juliana’s not my friend or anything like that. She only talks to me when none of the other girls are around or when she wants to tell somebody what she did under the rainbow waterslide. Since I have a late pickup from camp and she does too, we sit on the swings and eat pizza or pierce my ears and then, as she holds ice to my earlobe to numb it, she tells me the monsters of the apocalypse are people and you have to be careful cuz they can turn you into a gargoyle on the spot. As she runs the needle with a green thread through my ear, she tells me we carry this stuff in our blood, that we carry our grandparents’ and our great-grandparents’ sins in our blood, and even the Tainos’ sins cuz, though they were good people, they were godless. She also tells me there was a worker at the Coke factory who had AIDS and to take revenge on the world he cut his finger and threw it in one of the big containers. She knots the green thread so the piercing won’t heal. Juliana also tells me that when she gets her period, she measures the oozing blood in millimeters. What a damned liar.
Since I don’t get picked up sometimes, and neither does Juliana, we hide in the bushes by the swings and watch the people who come to have dinner at the club’s piano bar. Some—always young people—come over by the swings and stick their hands in each other’s pants and underwear and say, Oh yeah, oh yeah. Juliana loves this so she opens her Jem bag and takes out a pen and writes what people say on her hand.
One day Mami took me to the club but I didn’t go in the disco. I just hung out in the parking lot, just looking at how pretty the empty tennis courts look when they’re lit up. I let myself fall in the court’s net and sprung back up. Everything was so quiet, the bushes with their little red flowers had turned into black lumps; it was impossible to imagine that by shining a flashlight we would see flowers.
I was thinking about the end of the world and Juliana and my tits when I heard the guitar chords, a strumming in stereo that filled the courts and the darkness, live and in Dolby directly from the Bible to the parkin
g lot and to me, something or other announcing something from heaven, that something was over, that something was happening. I thought about Juliana and said, Jericho, aloud, and although no one was listening, I knelt. Then I realized what I was hearing was the start of the unplugged version of “Hotel California” coming from a car just a few meters from me. I got up and wiped the gravel and sand from my knees and approached the car and there, inside, was the swimming instructor, with a friend, the radio blasting, the two of them squeezing blackheads on each other’s faces.
The friend was also an instructor, but of Spanish dances. Her name was Carmela and I knew her well cuz she supervised the lunch crew. I had my turn on Tuesdays. We all had to do it at least once. You’d stand behind the serving table and they’d give you a big serving spoon. When you weren’t dishing out rice, you were serving hamburgers and hot dogs. I almost always had to serve sausages; I pinched them with a fork and put them on each plate. I did that for an hour until everyone was served. The best job is to serve drinks cuz while you’re filling the glasses with ice or passing the Coke or Red Rock bottles you can drink one or two glasses yourself while standing there. The worst job is when they serve picapollo cuz it seems like they order it the day before and the chicken gets real cold, like a corpse, and the fried green plantains turn into greasy stones. It all stinks.
Sometimes they even give us dessert: flan or majarete that looks like shit. Sometimes it’s tres leches, but it looks like barf.
One day I had to serve the drinks and I opened a Mirinda bottle for myself and when I poured it into a glass, there was a dead violet-colored lizard. I just stared at that sad sight strewn over the ice, as sad as a curse word. I showed it to the instructor, the swimming instructor’s friend, and she made us check all the bottles. We found five containing creatures. Almost all were in Mirinda bottles. Cockroaches, lizards, earthworms: a collection worthy of a biology lab. At least there weren’t fingers from people with AIDS.
The next day they served picapollo and a really foul odor ran through the whole camp cafeteria, which was actually the club’s party room arranged with seventeen tables, one for each section, each with its own chairs and tablecloths. I was swallowing a green plantain I’d dipped in Coke to soften it when Rebeca had another epileptic fit and accidentally spilled the bottle all over the table. Juliana, who was next to her, raised her hands to her head and said, That’s bad, that’s real bad luck, and threw salt over her left shoulder while Rebeca swallowed her tongue.
The instructors from the other sections came running to get salt, to throw salt over their own shoulders, and there was so much salt they had to call over the loudspeakers, asking all the campers to cooperate, but the more salt they threw over their shoulders, the more salt there was, covering their shoes, their knees, their shoulders. Luckily, I’d really improved my freestyle and was able to swim to the top of the gazebo’s white ceiling. I climbed and waited for somebody to do something.
Everywhere, the white sea. An incredible thirst and not even a drop of Mirinda, though no one cares one whit, or one lizard. In the distance you could see the other gazebos’ white tops and some kids who had managed to swim to one were preparing a campfire so they could cook Rebeca. When dusk came, the salt was whiter than ever and the sky was so orange it looked like it was gonna rain mandarin oranges. And just like every afternoon, Mami showed up wearing her sunglasses and her gray linen uniform from the savings and loan, driving her Nissan Sunny (which she’s still paying for) over the salt as if it was a street. She gets out of the car, her gray silhouette progressing over the orange citrus, as if there was still a pool or a camp or anything. Without bothering to take off her sunglasses, she informs me that Papi has just been killed.
I see a car, a helluva car, a car, with its bumper and drivers. It smashes into him, it smashed him, it hasn’t smashed him yet. Like a yellow orange like the juice of a yellow orange. A car hit him and squished him as if he were a yellow orange. Yellow oranges are for practice. Juggling, sick bay. In fact, they’re oranges but they call them yellow oranges and they’re juicy and yellow. They squeeze the seed out of you. The car comes and cuts him in half. He is, they are, two better halves. The first car, crazy. It crashed into you, it crashed into you. A driverless car, a headless driver. Here it comes. From the side, from behind, from straight ahead, from below as if the street were made of glass. The car, a helluva car. A car car car car, the most helluva car, car, attacking, attack it, fuck it, chúbalo, chúbalo, chúbalo. Car, car. He was killed over a car, over a car, a helluva an expensive car, so expensive. The cheapest expensive cars, expensive cars being too rare, one two, three cars pass and don’t collide, but the fourth one sideswipes him, hits him on the side, batters him, and then there’s another car, another car, another car running him over, but it’s a recording of a car, and it’s always the same car, looking the exact same. A car is a car. A car is a car is a car is a car, rolling over you, grinding into your face, running over you, just imagine how your eyes pop out. The grease stains in the shape of. Running right over you. Grinding into you. Breaking your bones. Your bones breaking. You’ve crashed, crashed. You, like a peel, like a garlic clove, car, car, there are smart cars, shrewd cars, cars in which people live. Caravans. Stains in the shape of. To the right, to the left, over the hip. He falls. He doesn’t break. His guts explode. A car can kill you. A car takes off. A car car. That one, that one right now, the same one right now. The same car. Here it comes. Speeding up. Speeding up. Speeding up. It’s a car, nothing else. It’s not a car. It hit him again, and now we see the giant muffler blowing dark smoke on the dead body. Car, car, the car hurling death, dead car. Ghost car. Ghost ship. Some cars are ships. Like Chevrolets in the seventies, Impalas. A titanic car sinks into your paunch, a car sinks into your belly, they shove it up your ass. Well greased. From behind and up the front, everywhere. A brandless car, the most expensive car. What an expensive car. That car is too expensive. I want my car. My car. My car. Here it comes, turning the corner. Hold on, it’s coming. Here comes the car. It hits you, it hits you, it deviates your septum, they operate, they replace your nose with a cashew. They sew up a car for you, they mechanize your liver with a Stillson wrench. A sharp car, a car gunning all over the place, with steel tires, like Ben-Hur’s enemy. You don’t have a license. You only have fifty pesos for the cops. For traffic. A body, a speed bump. They pay you. A corpse his car, the prey his car. I give you my car wash, I give it to you. Here it comes, here it comes again, now, right now, look at how it jumps, look how the car, look at how, look at how it falls. You can’t see how it falls. It’s still there. They stop him on a residential street, they clean off the blood with a sponge, a rag, a towel. With a little cotton ball with acetone. They clean the bumper with ethyl alcohol. With gasoline. Your champagne-colored car is not yours. It belongs to the dead, the prey, your car is not yours, none of them were his. The cars belong to the dead, the cars are going to heaven, the expensive ones never go to heaven. They’re too heavy, they stay here. They’re fucked. Who wants one, who wants a car, car. And a one. Erre con erre. And a three. Erre con erre. Fast fast. Over the top, over the top, where I told you before, the broken bones are so noisy, so noisy, so much noise. What do I owe you, driver, what do I owe you, I have to get off cuz they’re gonna pass me, they’re gonna run right over me, they’re telling me I have to get out cuz it’s my turn to get run over, the tires on the side, up the front, a million miles an hour, the muffler, in, like a tunnel. Now we see the underside of the car as if the street was made of glass. Of course. Here it comes, such dominance, the muffler sparking on all the speed bumps cuz there’s a dead body in the trunk and the trunk weighs too much and the car is too low, right? Right, car? You’re too too low? Right car, car car, little car, Carrie. The bloody car, the prophet car, the sleeping driver grinding the tires, spitting smoke. The driver is unseen. The headless driver. The car is approaching. And now and now, and now the car, the car, the car, comes back, around the corner, around the same corner, wit
h the lights off, it’s daytime, of course, and it hits him, hits him. Smashes him. Blows his guts. You see him like a doll flying through the air. It’s a crash test dummy. It’s Papi, it’s a crash test dummy. It’s Papi. It’s a crash test dummy, and it hits him, hits him and throws him up in the air, it’s a crash test dummy, coming this way, turning the corner and crashing right into him, so he doesn’t get up, and crashes and disappears right into him, it’s a tunnel, it’s Papi, it’s a crash test dummy, of course. The lights come on, it’s dark, of course, from behind, it’s an asshole, it’s a tunnel, it’s the car’s muffler, car. Something strange comes in reverse. If you drive in reverse you can hear the devil. If you go in reverse you see me. Car, car, and the car comes back from the same corner, turns, the corner, the post and the light, the car passes by, the corner, the car turns again, the wheel turns, the driver’s unseen. It’s a crash test dummy, it’s Papi, it’s a headless driver. The bumper, the hood, the bumper, the hood. The body lies towards the top of the car and lands on the antenna. The antenna spears an eye. The eye explodes. The body doesn’t fall. The body flies. The car flies, it’s a crash test dummy. The car flies over the cemetery and wakes all the crash test dummies and Papi, and then the crash test dummies.
ELEVEN
They’re shoving a pill in my mouth. It’s Mami. She has a little amber jar in her hand and she’s kneeling next to my bed and plucking blue pills out of it and shoving them in my mouth. When I open my eyes, she says, Swallow, and gives me a glass of chocolate milk. I swallow and get up cuz the taste of metal on my tongue won’t let me go back to sleep. I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth, to the kitchen where I love the way the sun filters in through Mami’s balcony. I empty some Count Chocula into a bowl. I love Count Chocula. I love the marshmallow bats. But what I love most is the way the cereal colors the milk brown. If it’s Franken-Berry then it turns the milk pink. I like that too.
