One day, Vida moved past the usual light talk about the weather and food and asked me flat out what I was doing with my boyfriend.
“I don’t see you with him,” she said with such authority that I felt childish, which was absurd since I was five years older.
“I just like him,” I told her, which was true. The boyfriend and I met at the gym where he worked out aging divorcees, sometimes sleeping with them to lift their spirits. He admitted that to me on our first date. We didn’t have much else in common—that was no secret. And logistically it wasn’t ideal because the boyfriend was in a green-card marriage to a Cuban girl that cost him ten thousand, of which he still owed five.
He was a boyfriend for the shadows, somebody my parents didn’t know existed. A boyfriend I spent nearly every night with but with whom I didn’t envision any other life. He drove me to the doctor when I had the flu. Took me to the movies and let me pick them. Once I found a text message on his phone from a woman named Claudine, inviting him over for a Parisian lunchtime superfuck, and something in me split, though I never mentioned it.
Vida asked me if I still believed in love. Asked me as if it was something like Papá Noel or El Coco, an imaginary creature sent to taunt us as kids and inspire fantasies. I shook my head and it hurt my heart a little to do so.
“Me neither,” she said with a pride that I wanted for myself.
The boyfriend worked days at the gym but ran a little side business at night as a private driver. When they wanted to get fucked-up on South Beach, the clients called and he’d drive them around in their own car. The boyfriend and Sacha were partners and they rotated jobs, but on some nights they’d both get stuck working. On one such night the boyfriend suggested I hang out with Vida. Told me she was lonely, had no friends, and couldn’t drive herself anywhere. I picked her up at her apartment complex, which I’d never been to because she and Sacha always met us when we went out together.
The apartment was a shoddy place on upper Collins near the banged-up motels and right off of drug dealer’s row. She was sitting on the front steps smoking a cigarette when I drove up, her hair pulled into a ponytail, wearing jeans and a pink blouse. Almost looking like a private school girl who got lost in the wrong neighborhood.
I thought we’d go for a drink or maybe get dinner, but Vida only wanted to go to the beach, even started begging me to take her there like I was her mother or something. We bought some medianoches at a little Cuban place and parked just before Haulover Beach. Though clouds covered the moon and the shore was dim with night, Vida pulled off her sandals and ran toward the water, went in up to her knees and splashed around in the foam. I sat on the sand and watched her lose herself, shouting things at the clouds. When she came back to my side on the sand, she ripped into her sandwich and told me she still couldn’t grasp the immensity of the ocean, that until last year she’d only seen it on film and on the plane ride over.
“I thought you’ve been here for years already,” I told her. Which was true. She’d told me she came to Miami at twenty-one and I knew she was already twenty-three.
“That’s true,” she said, rubbing the sand off her ankles with her free hand. “But they didn’t let me out of the house the first year.”
“What house?”
“Where I was working.”
I imagined a horrible employer. A family who hired her as a muchacha. I saw tons of young girls in white maid’s uniforms all over Miami, pushing strollers at the park and grocery carts at the supermarket. Maybe she had a boss who locked her away. I’d heard of that. My mom’s muchacha was full of terror stories.
Vida faced me but all I saw was the outline of her hair and the car lights flashing in the distance behind her.
“Una casa de sitas.”
If my second-generation Spanish was correct, she said a brothel. A place where they take appointments with women. I didn’t know how else to say it, so I asked her as plainly as I could what she was doing there. And just like that she said they’d made her a puta.
She pulled her hair out of its tie and wrapped it back up again.
“You think differently of me now, don’t you, Sabina?”
“No, of course not.”
“I was a nice girl once. Nice family. Everything.”
There were so many things I wanted to ask her. Did her family know? Did Sacha know? How did she end up in there and how did she get out? How long did she stay?
“I’m so sorry,” I said, like an idiot.
We started talking about other things. She told me that Sacha agreed to pay for her to go to beauty school to learn how to do hair and nails and that he knew a Polish lady in Aventura who would give her a job off the books. Her eyes shone as she told me that her dream was to open her own salon one day.
On the walk back to my car she told me it was her hairdresser who brought her over to Miami. A transvestite named Fito who always did her hair and makeup for the beauty pageants gratis because he said Vida was the best investment in her town, Usme. He told her family he had contacts in Miami and would get Vida auditions at all the Spanish networks so she could be a presentadora on Sábado Gigante or something.
“And your parents let you go?” I was so used to the overprotective pair I’d been dealt, unable to imagine how they could just send her off.
“Oh, my mother had me drinking water from the Flower of Jerusalem. It was supposed to bless me and send me on a journey, so when Fito offered to pay for my ticket, Mami thought it was the work of God.”
I had to ask. Flower of Jerusalem?
“She kept it in a glass bowl next to the television and we had to feed it fresh river water every week or it would curse us. It was only when I went to an American grocery store for the first time that I realized I’d been praying all my life to a shiitake mushroom.”
I was laughing but Vida just shrugged it off and went on with her story. Said that when she and Fito landed at Miami International he disappeared, and some other guys ushered her into a car, stuck a gun into her stomach, and informed her that Fito had sold her for seven thousand dollars that she had to pay off starting now.
I couldn’t sleep that night. The boyfriend returned from work exhausted, rolled around next to me, pulled the blankets off of me, pulled me close, trying to initiate more but I feigned indigestion. I couldn’t stand the night or his touch. I’d sworn myself to silence, not wanting to betray Vida’s confession. If I told the boyfriend, he would tell Sacha, who I was certain would then reject her, since I’d known many a man who loved to hold a girl’s past against her.
The boyfriend grew up in a two-room house on a dusty patch of land with chickens that became dinner. His father left his mom when she was pregnant with him and she never remarried. They had a cat that was constantly pregnant, but the kittens always disappeared within days of their birth. When the boyfriend was seven he caught his mother drowning them in a bucket, something that still caused him nightmares. When he took me to the winter carnival that year, we spotted a cat stranded in the middle of the Palmetto Expressway crouched against the highway divider. The boyfriend stopped the car, nearly causing an accident, and ran into the darkness to rescue it. The cat lived with him now and often left decapitated mice on the kitchen floor. “Because he loves me,” said the boyfriend. “He knows I saved his life.”
The boyfriend was tall, with enormous thigh muscles and a back that was wide and defined like the smooth ripples of the Sahara. He had stretch marks on his biceps from a few cycles of teenage steroids, and more wrinkles around his blue eyes than you’d think a guy his age should have. No matter how many showers he took he still had the musty smell of a workout, and sometimes I left bite marks on his shoulders and neck just to keep the other women away. I didn’t used to be this territorial. The boyfriend thought it was cute: a Latin thing.
When he and Sacha convened and fell into their Hungarian slang, sounds and intonations reminding me that we would never really understand each other, I looked to Vida. She was sitting on the lawn
chair with her knees curled into her chest, a cigarette propped to her lips by her long red nails.
“They could be brothers,” she said.
It was true. They looked like twins with their creamy complexions, shaved heads, and box-smashed noses.
She asked me how I met the boyfriend and I told her the prepackaged story: I was sweating on the treadmill and he picked me up. Most people laughed when I said that but Vida gave me her still eyes, then offered a half smile as if to appease me.
“How did you meet Sacha?”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“The house. He worked there, too. He was the guard.”
We were speaking Spanish, so I know that he couldn’t have known what we were saying, but Sacha appeared within seconds, pulled Vida up by the elbow, and dragged her toward the driveway. She seemed defiant as he talked into her face. She crossed her arms and looked away, at the ground, up to the sky, even to me on the other side of the yard. When she came back, I asked her if everything was all right and she rolled her eyes as if bored to death. “Such a big production,” she said, “just to tell me he loves me.”
I was exaggerating before when I said that I had no female friends in Florida. I had one: Jessamy. A thin-lipped strawberry blonde. The kind of gringa that doesn’t know what she is but if you ask will probably say Scottish and Welsh. This is odd to me because my parents know our family lines five generations wide and ten generations back, down to the last conquistador.
Jess and I were new teachers together but she couldn’t stand it, so she left after a year, got her real estate license, and now all she talked about were interest rates. Usually we’d meet for coffee because she was only willing to break away from her new fiancé for one-hour blocks at a time.
She’d never ask about the boyfriend because she thought he was a loser and whenever she got on my case about him I avoided her for a month or two. I wanted to tell her about Vida because Jess did a stint as a social worker before teaching and I thought she might have something to say about it, but when I started she got that look like she wished I’d cut it and finally said, sighing, “I don’t know why you hang around those people, Sabina.”
I was pissed but held back. If I hadn’t, the first words out of my mouth would be, “I don’t want your life, Jess. I’m not like you.”
And her next question would be, “Who exactly are you trying to be?”
I wasn’t ready for that either.
Later that night, when the boyfriend and I were eating pasta in front of the television, I told him I’d seen Jessamy earlier.
“I don’t know why you hang around her,” the boyfriend said as if his food had suddenly become spoiled. “That girl has the fear of life in her eyes.”
I defended her. Said she was my friend, but the boyfriend wasn’t listening. Flipping channels with his free hand, shoveling linguine into his mouth with the other. Afterward, we smoked cigarettes on the balcony and then went to bed. We weren’t one of those couples who fall asleep like intertwined roots. We kept to our separate sides of the mattress, only came together to have sex and to push each other out of bed in the morning.
Vida had many smiles: careful ones, small ones; the harsh but sexy ones she gave Sacha that looked like more of a decoy. But sometimes a sunrise ripped across her face and she smiled like it was going to save her life. Like at the beach or when she spoke of her family. She smiled even when she told me how she worked in a flower shop in El Centro Andino only to give her money to her father who would then gamble it away, and how her brother Tony worked as a mechanic and a messenger for gangsters, and ate every meal with a gun next to his plate, which is why she had no problem with cleaning Sacha’s gun for him. She said she had a little sister named Justina who worked in the kitchen of a diplomat’s house and they were training her to serve dinner for dignitaries and maybe one day she’d get to work for one of the overseas ambassadors.
Her mom, she said, was a gentle woman who worked as a companion to an old scientist who was going senile. She had to sleep in the old man’s house most nights because he had a habit of wandering into the street and had once been lost for two days before Vida’s mom recovered him on the steps of the Gold Museum talking about Bolívar to anyone who would listen.
It was Vida’s mother who encouraged her to be a beauty queen and made Vida’s competition dresses herself. And Vida had paid off, winning Reina de la Primavera, Reina de Azúcar, Reina de las Flores, and even Reina de Usme. People said she had a gift; even her priest said she had been blessed with beauty to bring money to her family. Back then, she said, all she hoped for was a regional title. But then Fito put it in her head that she needed to aim higher: Miami. “The Jerusalem for Colombians” is how she put it. Enter shiitake mushroom.
We were at the beach by Forty-first Street. I was on a school break and the boyfriend was at work. I still didn’t know what Sacha’s day job was and gave up asking. Vida and I were stretched across towels in our bikinis and she stared into the sky as if she could see her whole history projected into the clouds like a movie screen.
Two or three times, guys wandered over to our spot of sand and tried to flirt, but Vida cursed them, inspiring some insults about how we were stuck-up sluts, but she just laughed.
“I hate men most of the time,” she told me.
I asked her how she ended up with Sacha, said that they seemed like a good couple, which was only a half-lie.
“There were four of us and we each had a bedroom. Sacha sat in the waiting area most of the time. Collected money. Watched for police. Made sure that we didn’t try to escape. But I could see that he liked me. I worked at earning his trust. It was obvious that he was lonely. It wasn’t so hard, Sabina. You can get a lonely person to do anything.”
She paused, lit herself a fresh cigarette.
“It took a year but one day he said he loved me and that he wanted us to be together like normal people, away from the house. He gave the other girls money so they could run away and the two of us left together. We had to hide for months because his boss had people searching everywhere. But time passed. And now we are okay.”
My friend Jess would say it was the freak factor that drew me to Vida. That she was a novelty act for me, a living movie complete with exploitation of Latinas. There was also the vanity element, that, in her, I saw a parallel life, one that my mother always imagined aloud: the What if we had stayed to live in Colombia? narrative. She always said I would have grown up more feminine, with better manners, and that probably I would have figured out how to be married by now.
And then there were the Colombian horror stories that my parents and their expatriate friends told one another whenever they got together for sancocho and vallenatos, to appease their guilt for having left the motherland.
“Un país de locos!” The men would shake their heads in shame, repeating headlines ripped from El Tiempo about the guerrilla and paramilitary infiltrating the cities. Political corruption, secuestros, executions, baby trafficking, child prostitutes. The land-mine capital of the world.
“Que verguenza,” Papi would say as if talking about an alcoholic parent.
My parents and their friends all congratulated themselves for having American-raised kids who only had to see Colombia on vacation. The last time I’d been back was at nineteen, spending two weeks at tea parties with the old relatives, who liked to speak French to one another for kicks, and the cousins, who hung out at El Country and made it their mission to get me wasted on aguardiente in La Zona Rosa every night of the week.
Then there was my tía’s muchacha, Claribel, who had a secret history we weren’t supposed to mention that involved getting raped by a half brother at fourteen, resulting in a baby who was adopted by an Italian family. Claribel, who had to put in a good two years of service before my aunt would pay for her to get her high school diploma on Saturday mornings. Claribel, who drifted through the rooms of my aunt’s house like a ghost, making our beds and shining our shoes w
ithout our asking.
“Do you ever think of going back?” I finally asked Vida.
“Every day. But first I have to think of a story to tell my family, to explain what I’ve been doing here all this time.”
Dolor ajena is what they call it. Feeling pain on behalf of someone else. A pain that is not your own. No succinct way to say it in English. I suppose that’s how we get by.
I’m not that charitable. Nothing in me said I should help Vida. Give her money from my savings so she could buy a plane ticket back home. Hook her up with a counselor at my school, someone to talk her through her dramas. Help her heal. None of that. I just wanted to drink her up like everyone else.
She asked me if I had some old clothes that I could give her. Hers were worn-through, so that the seams on her jeans looked as if they might give at any moment. I never wore clothes enough for them to disintegrate from wear. Always tossed them on a whim to make room for more. I showed up at her place with three shopping bags’ worth and she pored through my clothes like they were spun from gold, trying things on and modeling them in her dumpy living room. Sacha was in the bedroom, supposedly on the phone with a client. They had a small balcony that opened onto a back parking lot and the kitchenette smelled like grease.
She walked across the room like it was a runway, posed, and for a second I got a glimpse of that beauty queen. Her prize smile, lashes that fluttered their way into a judge’s favorable graces.
She was wearing a blue dress with an arabesque print. A dress I bought in a Las Olas boutique and never wore. It hung in my closet for a year waiting for a party, a romantic summer dinner, nights that never happened. It looked like it was made for Vida; the gauzy fabric clung to her round breasts and draped off her behind like the bows of a palm tree.
The only way she could think to thank me was by doing my nails for me. She pulled out a plastic tub, filled it with water and soap and washed my feet for me in a way that made me ashamed. She was proud of herself, telling me she already knew how to do all the stuff that they teach at the beauty academy. She’d cruise right through it, she said, be their best student ever, just as soon as Sacha gave her the money to enroll.
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