by Rita Indiana
Then it’s Papi’s birthday and for a whole week there are trucks coming in, trucks with chairs, tents, stands, lights, stages, sound systems, and thousands of tons of fireworks for the spectacular conclusion. More people come, and then even more come in trucks, buses, small planes that drop them without parachutes on the platform just to get things going. There are still a few technical details to deal with and in the meantime we put on a Maná CD for four hours worth of entertainment. They applaud, they come up with slogans, they improvise music with empty Snapple bottles. When least expected, there’s a stuttering electronic boom and the people run to the platform and I come out. The people are in a bad way, they shout, they scream, they shake. Some young girls faint and the people lift them up and float them over to the stage on a sea of hands. The security people take over. I say, one, one, two, can you hear me? The people are in a bad way, they shout, they scream, they shake. Some young girls faint and the people lift them up and float them over to the stage on a sea of hands. The security people take over. I finally begin: Papi is like Jason. Applause, hallelujahs, amens. He shows up when you least expect him. Applause, hallelujahs, amens. But what makes Papi most like Jason—applause, hallelujahs, amens—is that he always comes back, even when they kill him off. The people are in a bad way, they shout, they scream, they shake. Some young girls faint and the people lift them up and float them over to the stage on a sea of hands. The security people take over. My Papi has more of everything than yours. The people get up, dance in circles, say, Praise be to him who is holy. My Papi has more cars than the devil. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Ovation.
The program transpires exactly as announced on the event poster: music, prophecies and the end of the world, in that precise order. Three hours later (when the end had been planned), there were seven hundred thousand souls raising their arms and waiting for Papi to take them, and Papi was still talking through my mouth: Here I come. We heard a voice that came from the heavens, saying, Surrender now, there’s still time. The people knelt, some protecting their heads with their bottles of Gatorade. I saw how the white helmets emerged from the forest and suddenly there was a shootout and the believers fell into piles. People were confused, some believing this was Papi, so they ran toward the helmets with open arms, especially cuz they were white. The white helmets did away with anything that moved and then they destroyed the platform, the houses, demolished the buildings and filled the pools with dirt and cement. Everything happened in about two hours. They went into the woods and chased down those who were still alive and had managed to escape. They put guns to their necks and made them dig a mass grave and pick up the Styrofoam cups and the plastic bottles left over from the concert, and then pick up the dead and bury them. When the press finally arrived, all they could do was take pictures of a bloody shoe that had been left behind in the commotion, a lost boy who was bawling his head off, and Lázaro’s body, which the guards had been ordered to leave unburied so people would learn a lesson. He remained on that table, bearded and barefoot, according to the newspaper caption, just like the warring rebel they’d taught to fight during his training in the Sierra Maestra. The photo captured a rebel who had survived three hundred sixty-eight battles before defeat and still had the look of life in his eyes; that photo went around the world and very soon the bookstores were full of biographies and memoirs written by alleged lovers and classmates. There were T-shirts and posters and lollipops with that photo.
The survivors, one hundred forty-four total, were all jailed in a colonial prison, and day and night loudspeakers would preach about the reign of the father, the imminent coming of our lord, encouraging us to give up the backward African practices of our settlement and to accept the good news from the hands of a priest who came down every day to lead a mass and read the Bible to see if someone would confess something. If they didn’t respond by confessing, they took them up, one by one, to the second floor where two hairy-bellied sergeants would tickle them, would pull out their fingernails, shove hungry rats up their asses, etc., etc. Everyone confessed. They said I was Papi’s daughter, that the twins were my cousins, and that the bearded guy was nothing more than an android. When everyone passed the lie-detector test, they sent them to an insane asylum, where they found no priests, no torturers, but plenty of anthropologists.
TWELVE
She showed me her ball. It was in a glass jar that still had a Maggi mayonnaise label; it was on her nightstand next to a floral arrangement, and just like she’d said, it was about the size of a softball. They had to take everything out, they hollowed me out, Mami told me as she lifted the sheet so I could see the centipede-like scar from which a flesh colored tube drained into a see-through bag resting next to her bed and filled with urine and blood.
I would arrange her pillows and give her back rubs cuz it’s painful to lie down for such a long time. I also gave her foot rubs and head rubs and told her jokes so she would laugh and plead with me not to make her laugh cuz it hurt. Then I would arrange her pillows again and raise or lower the bed by turning the handle. The room was dark and whenever we failed to turn on the lamp I would stub my toes against the edge of the bed and the other furniture and she would tell me to put my shoes on, that I would get sick from walking on that floor. I would lay down on the couch next to the bed, which was the longest couch I’d ever seen, upholstered in a wine-colored vinyl, and I would cover up and listen to her breath coming and going, coming and going, and sometimes I would even count her breaths as if I were one of those little machines they place next to sick people that go tick tick tick tick.
Sometimes she’d ask for the remote control and turn on the Cristina show. Today’s guest was Luis Miguel, who Mami likes so much, but Patrick Swayze is who Mami likes most, especially after she saw Ghost; she says Whoopi Goldberg is really funny. Whenever Mami says someone is really funny I think it must be something bad, though she does laugh a lot with Whoopi Goldberg and everything, but when she says someone is really funny there’s something inside Mami that’s saying something else.
Sometimes people come to see her and they bring her passion-fruit ice cream, but it would always go bad cuz the mini-fridge in the room doesn’t get cold enough. Sometimes they’d bring chocolates and she’d say, You eat them, it’ll make me happy, and I’d eat them to make her happy. Sometimes she’d get a craving for a Coke cuz she had gas and I’d walk down to the clinic basement, which terrified me, but it’s where the vending machines are, saying aloud: Please don’t appear to me, please don’t appear to me. When I got to where the vending machines were and dropped in the coins, I’d keep my eyes on the black hole where the can of Coke would land and not look anywhere else, sure that if I looked behind me I’d see a dead body.
When I returned to Mami’s room she’d ask me if everything was going okay at school and I would say yes. I’d stay with her for many days and ask her if she needed anything and then run to the cafeteria across the street to buy a pork sandwich which I’d sneak past the nurses at the nursing station under my T-shirt cuz hospital food is so bad. Almost always soups. I’d go to school and then back to her room. My friends were almost all children of other patients and they all left very soon, although some came back to visit and we’d meet in the clinic hallway to smoke and exchange little packets of Condorito and Game Boy games, never stepping too far from the rooms in case our mothers needed us.
Mami’s ball grew in silence. She didn’t even notice. For a long time she thought it was sciatica cuz her leg would fall asleep and hurt, stuff like that. But everything happened cuz the ball was putting pressure on a nerve, attached as it was to the uterus and her ovaries and, even before cutting it out, the doctor told her it was the size of a softball.
I imagined a ball with stitches, a dirty white ball inside my mother, and also how, once it was taken out, we’d play with it and I would hit it out of the park with a bat like Sammy Sosa.
When Mami was ready to leave the clinic they found another ball, this one the size of a golf ball; it was on her b
reast, a benign tumor, of course. She sent me to my abuela’s house cuz hanging out at the hospital was not doing me any good. I was at my abuela’s house for several years and I’d receive letters from my mother with photos of her balls (tennis, badminton) and I’d put them up on the bathroom mirror, inserted between the mirror and the frame. I’d ask myself why cysts were round and not triangular or cubed and when we went back to school and the teacher asked us to write a composition about what we had done during our vacation, I wrote one entitled “My Mother’s Balls,” and I got an A–.
I went to see her one afternoon and found her crying and I didn’t know what to do. She said two of Papi’s business associates had been by and told her Papi owed them a lot of money, and they knew Papi had taken life insurance out on me and they thought it was only natural we should assume Papi’s debts, and that there were many ways to pay that debt and the best was to pay them with the life insurance. The whole time they kept showing Mami pictures of their kids that they kept in their wallets.
I knew those business associates from when Papi was alive and I’d visit at the dealership. They talked all the time about wanting to club somebody in the balls. I moved back to the clinic and now, since we couldn’t sleep, Mami and I would entertain ourselves by playing memory games. For example, we’d try to remember somebody’s name. Mami would describe him physically and I would say, Yes, yes, that guy, and then we would begin listing names that began with the letter A (Arturo, Alejandro, etc.) and we’d go through the whole alphabet until we’d come on the name. Sometimes we’d list surnames instead of names, or women’s names when we were trying to remember a man’s name, which was very funny. In the end, it was always her who remembered and when we got to H and I said Homero, or Hans, she’d say: Hilda Saldaña, Hilda Saldaña, and I wouldn’t even know who that was so I never would have remembered.
When Christmas came, Mami told me to spend more time at Cilí’s house so I could drink golden cream punch and make sunglasses from bread crusts. I’d go to Cilí’s and come back with grapes and treats rolled in sugar, all wrapped in a napkin. She’d say Santa Claus was coming and ask me what I wanted even though it’d been a long time since I believed in Santa Claus and she knew it. On TV we’d see the president at the door of his house, distributing gifts, scenes from the previous year in which women and children would get in line at dawn so they could receive a doll, a jump rope or a bicycle. I think they give out a bicycle for every thousand dolls.
One day Cilí tells me, Let’s go to the cathedral, and I say I wanna go see Mami and she says no, there’s a concert by the national choir. So we go to the cathedral and there’s a mob, and before the concert starts there’s a commotion and then silence and it’s that the president, Balaguer, has arrived. He’s blind and people are quiet as he slowly shuffles his feet, one of his sisters at his side. They sit in the front pew, and for a moment I think if I could get close to Balaguer, and if I could put my hands on him, I could heal him and he’d be able to see. I don’t know where this idea comes from and I don’t tell anyone cuz they’re gonna think I’m crazy.
When I go back to the clinic I open the door to Mami’s room and find an empty bed without a wrinkle on the sheets. I get a pain in my chest but I just stand there at the half-open door without knowing which way to go cuz everybody knows a made bed in a hospital means someone has died. But then I hear her, coming down the hallway and being very chatty with the nurse who’s helping her, and she’s wearing her purple-flowered gown and her hair is stuck to her head from so much time on a pillow. Mami raises her hand to greet me and it’s the same hand with which she’s carrying her bag of urine and blood, and she smiles at me and I smile at her, and then she says: I can stand up now and even walk a little but I’m still gonna need your help to go to the bathroom.
