Vida

by Patricia Engel

  Día tells me that after I left, he went back to Brazil. Got sick of New York and had this feeling he needed to be among his people. Taught English at a bunch of different schools, rented a great apartment in São Paulo for cheap, had a car and everything. But New York called to him. He returned to the same apartment in Astoria, the same job pouring drinks for the same drunk idiots. Got married in between, then divorced, just a few months ago, from that girl he hired as a cocktail waitress around the time I started up with Malik. Asks me if I remember her. I don’t.

  “She remembers you,” he says.

  I recognize those eyes from back when he used to grab my arm in the bar, tell me to stop drinking, to go home like a normal girl and stop spending my nights with degenerates. “You’re so judgmental,” I used to tell him and Día looked like he might fold over and cry.

  It’s raining all around us. Heavy sheets more like walls as we sit on the bench under the gazebo. There’s nowhere to go. Not without getting drenched down to our skin.

  Día tells me the wife forbid him from reaching out to me all these years. She sensed his thing with me ran deeper than cigarettes and nerdy conversations in the corner of the bar. I don’t know what to say. He’s looking at me like this is what he came here for and I wish the rain would stop already.

  “Tell me about your life.”

  “You know,” I say. “Nothing special.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You always had a few in rotation.”

  There was a time when I wanted it to be Día. Only Día. When I wanted him to wipe that crabby look off his face and tell me something real, not one of his theories about the world. He used to mock me. Make me list all the things I believe in. God, Heaven, the inherent goodness of mankind—and then he’d laugh, give me reasons why none of these things exist. We’d sit together in the park, our thighs smacking against each other on the bench while break-dancers and skateboarders rocked their bodies nearby. He’d talk about the world, everything that was wrong with it. Sometimes I listened. Sometimes I wished he’d just mellow out and take me home, lie on the bed next to me, and be still and quiet so we could fall asleep together. I waited. But it never happened. We never spent a single night that way. Then I met Malik, who pulled me by the wrist into the phone booth one night and told me to be his girl. Día was watching from behind the bar when I let Malik kiss me.

  “Why did you come?” Día asks me.

  “To see an old friend. Catch up.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Día.”

  We let that sit. The rain relents and sun cleaves the sky. I can’t stand it anymore. I get up, tell him I’m going. He doesn’t move. Just like me to run away. Just like him not to do much to stop me. When I’m on the other side of the pool, I look back at Día sitting there lighting another cigarette. I wonder why we never fit. Why we never tried.

  MADRE PATRIA

  My mother was telling my father she had that dream again— the one about the dying horse. It wasn’t a dream so much as a memory that came to her in sleep: She was nine years old, riding in the passenger’s seat of her father’s Chevrolet as he drove her and her sisters to the farm in Fusagasugá. On one of the long, dusty roads of the savanna Mami saw a gray horse walking along the ridge of grass—so thin you could count every rib, his back sunken as if he were carrying a thousand ghosts. The horse wobbled along, unsure of every step, and Mami begged her father to stop the car, said the poor horse was starving and that they needed to feed it, give it some of the fruit they had packed in a basket in the back of the car, give it some of the water they had brought in bottles all the way from the capital. But Mami’s father said, Don’t worry, my darling, the horse is fine, just bored and tired. Told her they had to get to la finca before dark or some guerrilleros might stop them on the road and start some trouble.

  Mami cried, told her father the horse would die and it would be their fault, but her father kept driving, promising her that they’d come back this way tomorrow on their way to pick up some new chickens for the farm. He’d drive the trailer and said if the horse was still there, they’d bring him back with them and have one of the ranch hands nurse him to health. My mother didn’t sleep all night, waiting for her father to have his morning tinto and his first cigarette before he was ready to get back on the road to find the horse. When they came to the same spot, the horse was still there, lying dead on the grass, its mouth wide open with flies gathered at its nostrils.

  Mami told Papi the dream like it was the first time, and he listened, detail by detail. Finally, he told her that it was because we were in Colombia that she was falling into nightmares. Papi hated coming to Colombia, always said this place never did him any favors, and it was only because Mami’s sister was here that we ever came back.

  “This country is a giant cemetery,” Papi said. In a way it was true, most everyone Mami had ever loved here was dead. Every visit to Bogotá was marked by a full day of leaving flowers at the tombstones of relatives I never met, including Mami’s parents.

  Mami got mad when he talked like that, said they were both born of Andean earth and we should honor it.

  “Es que no entiendes, Maria. This country doesn’t want us back.”

  On the cot next to me, my brother pretended to sleep. We were assigned to our cousin Símon’s room. He and my prima Sara preferred to bunk with each other in Sara’s room rather than be with either one of us. Even though we were all close in age, us kids didn’t know what to say to one another most of the time. Símon and Sara were four and six, and Carmen was going through this phase of dressing her kids in lederhosen and embroidered jumpers as if they lived in the Swiss Alps or something.

  I poked Cris with my finger. “Do you hear them?” I knew he was awake. He always kept his eyes closed for a long time after he was conscious in the morning just to eavesdrop on the world. I was seven and Cris was ten but he had skipped a year of school and this always made him seem much older to me.

  “I’m not deaf,” he answered, eyes still shut.

  My aunt’s house was cold. The climate is static in Bogotá: always cool with only a taunting sun breaking through the fog of the Andes. But they didn’t have heaters and Tía Carmen insisted that it wasn’t because she was cheap— nobody in Bogotá had them. So we slept under alpaca blankets so heavy that we couldn’t move all night, packed into the mattress as if we were being smuggled.

  Mami and Papi were silent on the other side of the wall. Carmen gave them the guest room, which was furnished with things that used to be in Mami’s childhood home. Every time we visited she would say, “So that’s where that dresser ended up,” or “I remember that lamp.” It annoyed Carmen, who said it made her feel like Mami was accusing her of theft, and they always got into a big fight that resulted in both of them crying and the husbands trying to calm them down.

  Carmen would tell Mami that she had changed and that the United States had turned her into another kind of woman. This made Mami cry even more and it always took her ages to fall asleep, with Papi offering her words so soft I couldn’t make them out through that flimsy wall. Cris always fell asleep the minute he hit the mattress but I stayed awake for hours listening to the sounds of the apartment, the car horns on the carretera below, the echoes of a city I didn’t know.

  On nights that our parents went out for dinner with old friends or distant cousins, the primos, Cris and I were left with a family who lived in the same building. The older couple had a daughter named Carla, who kept us entertained until our parents came to collect us. Carla was eighteen, beautiful, with golden skin and canela hair. She had tiny green eyes, a flattened nose, and a pale coin-size smile that looked so fragile it might fall off her face. She was slight of build and always wore a denim jacket that her mother said made her look like a campesina. If you put her in a lineup, compared her to other girls the way people like to do, you might not think her so pretty, but I thought Carla was the most spectacular girl I’d ever seen in
real life, with the largest laugh you could imagine coming from such a small face.

  She went to school at Los Andes, was studying psychology, and wanted to help children. Maybe that’s why she would ask me so many questions. Not the usual stream that I got in Colombia about what it was like to live in Grin-golandia. Carla wanted to know what I was afraid of and what my dreams were. I told her I only had one dream that I remembered and that was of my brother killing my only friend, Mina, who lived down the block. In my dream, my brother locked Mina inside a refrigerator until she suffocated. The dream was so real that I avoided Cris for days afterward every time I had it. And my only fear, I told Carla, was of losing my parents the way Mami had lost hers, before they had a chance to see her make anything of her life.

  “How are you afraid of them dying? By sickness? By murder?”

  Cris and the primos were watching a movie on television while Carla and I sat on the window seat overlooking the street.

  “I’m afraid that one day they’ll just disappear.”

  Carla nodded as if she understood what I meant. She told me to wait for her a minute, walked off toward her bedroom, and returned with a guitar. She sat beside me again and began strumming. This pulled Cris and the primos away from the movie, and they gathered around Carla, who was already deep into a ranchera.

  Cris asked her to play “Purple Rain” but Carla said she didn’t know the song by heart. The primos requested some song, and finally I thought of one other than “Los Pollitos Dicen,” which was the only Spanish song I really knew.

  “‘Spanish Eyes,’” I offered and Carla asked me why I wanted that song.

  “That’s the song that was playing when Mami and Papi had their first dance,” I said. “When he was still engaged to that other lady.”

  Carla’s eyes narrowed on me and she asked me what I knew about that.

  “She used to sew handkerchiefs for Papi with her own hair, but Papi never wanted to marry her in the first place.”

  My primos and Cris wanted me to shut up so Carla would play the song already but she kept staring at me as if I was some kind of exhibit. Finally, she pulled her eyes off me and went back to her guitar, sang “Spanish Eyes” in her private-school English, and we all chimed in at the si, si part and cried out like mariachis.

  She retired the guitar after that song and we all moved to the sofa to watch the rest of the movie, but I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I was buried under the alpaca blanket in Carmen’s house with the whispers of my parents on the other side of the wall.

  In New Jersey, my brother and I disappeared from our house for hours without having to check in with our parents. We lived on a shaded suburban block near some woods and a river, and played on the slow street with the neighborhood kids until we each got called home to dinner. We rode our bicycles, played Manhunt, sold lemonade, and performed magic shows for each other. My brother was obsessed with Electric Boogaloo and spent his afternoons popping, locking, and trying to do backspins and flares on a flattened cardboard box in the driveway with his friends, while I roller-skated up and down the sidewalk convinced I was training for the Olympics. But in Bogotá, we couldn’t leave the apartment without an adult escort, and when they took us out it was with their large hands pulling us along the avenida. Carmen took us to the mall one day and along the road there were children, not much older than me, with glazed eyeballs like zombies, asking for money. Every now and then one would poke their nose inside their jacket and lift their head with an even smokier expression than before. I don’t know where he heard it but Cris said those kids were sniffing glue, not like the kind we use in art class at school but one that makes you dream and forget where you are.

  “Where are their parents?” I asked my brother.

  “They don’t have any, stupid.”

  Everywhere, we saw children. On the steps of the cathedral, outside El Andino, perched like gargoyles on the walls of La Zona Rosa. Some of them were selling gum or flowers, and some just floated along the street watching us, saying “Por favor,” in low voices. Mami kept telling Carmen the city had changed so much, but Carmen said, “No, mija, it was always like this.”

  The mothers took us kids for fast food because Cris and I were sick of the ajíaco at home. Mami saved our leftovers to give to a pack of stray dogs we saw circling the parking lot. But behind the dogs came a cluster of children, asking Mami if she had any more scraps for them. We sat in the car with Carmen while Mami went back in to buy the kids some food. Cris, the primos, and I were silent while the kids—you couldn’t tell the boys from the girls—stood around the car looking at us, dirt on their faces, mocos like webs around their nostrils, mumbling words I couldn’t understand.

  Carmen’s husband, my Tío Emilio, organized outings for us while my parents and Carmen did their social rounds. He took us to the top of Monserrate, where Cris and I threw up in the cable car, and to the Gold Museum, and when Cris complained that he wanted to go bowling, Emilio took us to a decrepit alley in las afueras. One day, he decided to take us kids to the salt mines while my parents and Carmen went to visit an uncle who Mami had avoided for the last ten years. We roamed around the caves, whispered into the walls that my uncle said could carry voices for miles, and in the old days that was how people would communicate to each other that they were being invaded. Emilio broke off a piece of wall and licked it, helped each of us do the same so we could taste the salty rock, chew it, and when we were through my uncle grinned, “There, niños, you just ate a piece of our land.” We giggled because it felt like we were breaking some kind of law.

  I liked my uncle a lot. He was tall, gangly, with thick, black glasses and a giant mouth that made me think of alligators. His thick graying hair was slicked back and he was always talking about jazz music and books because his father was a famous writer that the whole country worshipped. The big secret was that Emilio had been working on his own book for years already, late at night after everyone was asleep. Since I often stayed awake, I’d hear him clanking away on the typewriter in his office and smelled his cigarettes because he always smoked as he wrote.

  Emilio had his own daughter, but when I was around he was extra special with me. He held my hand and pulled me around the salt mine and said, “All this is part of your inheritance.”

  “We own this?” I asked, confused.

  “All this land belongs to all of us. The good and the bad.”

  I didn’t know what he meant but that night I got a better idea of it. Over dinner, the adults were talking about La Violencia and La Situación. It was the mideighties and the name Escobar was just starting to catch the current. Emilio, a lawyer by trade, told Papi that the man who had already taken over Medellín and was now infiltrating the rest of the country had his hand in every pot and a bounty on the heads of the police and important officials. Papi laughed, said that he couldn’t believe it, that he knew Pablito Escobar from childhood. They’d gone to the same school but Papi was a few years older. Still, even then, Papi said, the kid had gangster tendencies.

  “His hands are all over this country,” Emilio said. “You watch. There’s not one pure soul left.”

  One of Mami’s cousins came to see us at Carmen’s house and kept saying how dark Cris and I were. We looked at each other, and even Cris, who always had a retort, didn’t know what to say. Another friend, an older lady with orange hair, said I was fat and Cris had bad teeth. Another couple, who insisted on speaking in phony British accents, asked my mother why she allowed us to dress like vagrants. For the next day of visitors Mami had us dress as if we were going to a party and Cris and I sat around the living room stiffly, him in his First Communion suit and me in a fluffy dress, sighing that we wanted to go back to New Jersey.

  Since we were groomed better, the criticisms turned to Mami. One of her relatives asked her what country club she belonged to and Mami said ninguno. The man raised his furry brows as if he’d just witnessed a scandal. He asked Mami what charities she belonged to and Mami said ninguno, that she
was taking college classes and helping out at Papi’s factory. The man just about lost it. Told her he couldn’t imagine why she left Colombia to live como una cualquiera in New Jersey.

  He was sweating, and asked Carmen’s maid for a glass of water.

  Mami softened her face. I could tell she was trying to show this guy respect, though for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how we were related to him.

  “It’s different over there,” Mami said. “We manage just fine. And we are happy.”

  “How can you be happy,” the man challenged, “when you’re invisible?”

  Luckily Papi was out with Emilio or he would have let the guy have it. Papi already knew that Mami’s Bogotá society gang thought he was a renegade Paisa; he didn’t finish high school and even though he had a profitable business in the States, he was a factory man, not one of those guys from El Club who get siphoned off to the American Ivy Leagues and then return to be senators. Plus Papi’s accent gave him away, fluttery and still carrying the heat of Medellín, not with a potato in the mouth like the Cachaco accent. And even though all those people talked about Papi like he was a bumpkin and not a big-time empresario, they never hesitated to ask him for a loan— showing up at Carmen’s house saying, “Amigo, I’ve got a proposition for you. All I need is a little capital.”

  “Where were they,” Papi would ask Mami, “when we had cardboard boxes for furniture?”

  That night, Papi came home a little drunk with Emilio. Mami was already in bed when he went into the room and I heard him drop his watch on the night table.

  The whispers started. Then Mami’s voice grew louder, clearer. I looked to my brother who was already sleeping, his mouth open and lips dry.

  “I was somebody here,” Mami whimpered.