by Wendy Dale
That was my reason, but I didn’t have the guts to say it. I sucked at breaking up. So I’d see them and pretend that everything was okay, just like I had always done.
As if the thought of spending two weeks with my parents didn’t distress me enough, there was also the troublesome issue of how I was going to get there. In my most recent phone conversation with my mother, she had explained the complicated logistics of my impending trip. The first step was to pick up my plane ticket, which she had arranged to have waiting for me at a nearby airport, conveniently located just three hundred miles away.
“It’s very easy, Wendy. All you have to do is go to Bogotá and get it.”
“Right. But Mom, I live in Cali.”
“I know honey, but it was a hundred dollars cheaper this way.”
This was all too typical of my mother’s travel arrangements. Her children’s personal comfort never stood a chance when competing with the allure of bargain air travel. I had spent my life on red-eye flights, with last-minute discount tickets and bizarre connections by land. And every protest of mine was always met with what she considered to be the irrefutable phrase in her favor: “But honey, you can sleep on the plane.” She didn’t expect me to stay awake on the journey over. That would be cruel. She only expected me to be up at 2 A.M., to catch the shuttle at 3 A.M., to arrive at the airport at 5 A.M. But 6 A.M. to 8 A.M. on the plane—this was all generously handed over to me as prime sleeping hours.
This time, I was supposed to take an overnight bus from Cali to Bogotá, grab a cab to the airport, and then hop on a flight to Cochabamba, Bolivia. Never mind that this trip was placing my life in jeopardy, that I was living in a country where travel by land was extremely dangerous and if it should occur to any of several armed guerrilla groups operating in the country to stop the bus, I was prime pickings for a kidnapping. My parents, nonworriers by nature, just assumed that natural calamity would somehow bypass anyone who happened to be a Dale.
When the Northridge earthquake devastated most of Los Angeles in 1993, I’d called my folks up two days afterward, once electricity had been restored and I’d been able to access a working line. “Don’t worry, I’m fine,” I had said in response to my mother’s hello.
“Good, we’re fine too, honey. What have you been up to?”
“Mom, the earthquake, didn’t you hear?”
“Sure. Was that near your house? We just figured it was another part of Los Angeles.”
But this time would be different. I would show them, I thought as I hugged Francisco good-bye and boarded the bus bound for Bogotá. I would get kidnapped, just to prove how negligent they were as parents.
Three hours into my journey, we had yet to run into any guerrillas, but the next best thing was happening. I took it as a positive sign when the driver got off the bus, returned five minutes later, and shouted out to the passengers, “Is anyone here a mechanic?”
Our bus had broken down, and if we could just remain stranded for at least four hours, I’d miss my plane. This wasn’t too much to hope for. This was Latin America. Bus repairs were never accomplished in less than half a day.
I took my travel alarm clock out of my suitcase and set it on the seat next to mine. An hour slowly dragged by. Then another one. There was still a lot of banging on the underside of the bus, which buoyed my hopes. Just a couple of hours more, I thought to myself.
We started into the third hour and I allowed myself a measured bit of optimism. Then the fourth hour approached. Finally, the driver climbed aboard, shrugged his shoulders, and announced that the bus was irreparable, that we’d have to wait for another vehicle they were sending from Bogotá.
I couldn’t believe my luck. Getting out of my trip to Bolivia couldn’t have been simpler. I wasn’t going to have to endure an unpleasant confrontation with my parents, the guilt-inducing silence at the other end of the line that would have followed my confession that I wanted to spend the holidays with Francisco instead of them. I just called them up from the bus station and tried to contain my glee.
“Yes, Mom, bad news, you’re not going to believe this, but our bus broke down. We were stranded for six hours and I missed my plane. I wanted to hop right aboard the next flight but it’s not leaving for another three days and, well, I don’t have the money for a hotel, so I guess we’ll just have to do this next year. Sorry about that. But these are the kinds of things that happen when you travel by land in Colombia. Hey, there’s good news though—at least I didn’t get kidnapped.”
I could tell my mom was disappointed, but what could she say? “Well, I guess there’s nothing you can do. Have a Merry Christmas, sweetheart.”
Hours later, I was aboard a bus headed back to Cali, convinced it was a sign. Through no effort on my part, my trip to Bolivia had fallen through. This had to be a message sent to me from above. I was done trying to please my parents. I was done holding out hope that they would someday come through for me. It was over. Our relationship had come to an end.
My siblings and I would form a new family. I’d convince my sisters that there would be no more Christmases at my folks’. We’d find a new place to meet up every year. And when my brother was old enough, he could come too. We didn’t need parents. After all, we had always been there for each other.
Besides, I had Francisco. When my siblings were far away, I would rely on him. It would be Francisco and Wendy, both of us clinging together like a lighthouse (wait, did lighthouses cling?) or, better yet, like Velcro. That was it—he and I clinging together like Velcro against the world. He was an orphan and I would be too. We didn’t need any parents to complicate the picture. We’d be fine— we’d be better off on our own.
The list of Colombian superstitions supposed to guarantee luck in the new year was longer than most restaurant menus. Two days after Christmas, Francisco explained that all we had to do was adhere to a few simple rituals to ensure our good fortune.
“Say, you want love. Well, you have to wear red underwear on New Year’s Eve. If you want money, you wear yellow ones.”
This was easy: “I would like an order of prosperity with a side of success, please.” After all, if he was really dishing up wishes, money was the only thing missing from our lives. We had each other—no need for red underwear. And we were happy together. Over the past few months, I had grown even more certain that I had made the right decision in leaving everything behind to be with Francisco.
Of course, I had my bad days too. Occasionally, in a fit of weakness, I’d yell out to him, “I got you out of prison. What have you ever done for me?” And if I was in an especially bad mood, I might think silently to myself that this hadn’t turned out the way I had planned at all. We were getting poorer by the day and there wasn’t any solution in sight. Getting him out of jail was supposed to be the end of our problems, not just one in a series of never-ending obstacles. I had sort of imagined that once he was free, my job would be over, and he’d begin to take care of me. So far, this hadn’t happened, but I blamed our circumstances more than him.
I had never said it out loud, but I had made a silent commitment never to abandon Francisco just because times were tough. I would never do to Francisco what my parents had done to me. Besides, things were going to get better. We had a brand-new year to look forward to.
“How about travel?” Francisco asked. “People who want to travel walk around the block at the stroke of midnight carrying a suitcase.”
I laughed at the image of the entire neighborhood going out for a stroll dragging a bunch of empty luggage behind. “No, I think we definitely need to stick with asking for money.”
“Right. So, we need to take what’s left of the cash, carry it with us, and wish as hard as we can when the new year strikes.”
Whether this was going to work or not was questionable, but it was starting to become a fun game. Yellow underwear, walking around with hundred-dollar bills plastered on our bodies—at least it was an entertaining way to spend the last day of the year.
On December 31, both of us with new underclothes and four one-hundred-dollar bills in our pockets, we stepped outside onto the tiny balcony outside the master bedroom and waited for the countdown to begin. Neighbors swarmed on the grass below us, some of them dancing to music, others drinking licorice-flavored aguardiente and swaying uncertainly. It was a huge unorganized block party and suddenly everyone began chanting in unison: “Cinco, cuatro, tres, dos, uno.”
Beneath us, the crowd was welcoming in the new year. People were shouting and screaming, hugging, and kissing. They threw confetti and blew into squawking toy horns. I looked at Francisco and thought, The worst year of my life is finally over. It’s done.
I don’t know how it happened that we both started to cry at exactly the same moment. Looking back, I imagine that they had been tears of relief. At least, I think that was why Francisco was crying. In my case, I suspect that deep down, somehow I knew that not even yellow underwear would work enough magic to save me.
The new year brought about change just as we had hoped, but not all of it was good. Melba returned from the United States with nothing more than a day’s notice, making it pretty obvious that she was ready for Francisco and me to find another place to live. She came by to pick up the bed Francisco and I had been sleeping in, letting us know we had twenty-four hours to get the rest of our things and leave, and went to spend the night at her cousin Helena’s, but not before informing me that she had decided she didn’t really owe me two hundred dollars. Due to some sort of new math they must have been teaching in Colombia, she had arrived at the sum of just seventy-one bucks.
“Fine,” I said, “I’ll gladly take seventy-one dollars.” At that, she stuck her nose up in the air indignantly and stormed off without handing me a penny.
Francisco and I had nowhere to go and showed up on Manfred’s front steps nearly in tears. He invited us in, calmed us with encouraging words and warm drinks and proposed a handful of potential solutions: his camper, a place on his living room floor—there was even a vacant apartment for rent that was owned by a friend.
One look at the place and Francisco knew there was no way he could talk me out of moving there. The moment we walked in, my outlook on our bleak situation changed entirely. I jumped up and down like a five year old and squealed, “Oh my God! We’d be living in a tree house!”
The apartment was like the Disney version of where Tarzan and Jane would have lived. There was electricity and running water, but a good portion of the place was actually made of bamboo. The kitchen and dining room were quite normal—white plaster with exposed beams—but to get to the bedroom, you had to climb a twelve-foot ladder that led to a huge wooden loft. And the living room was even more exotic, a combination of bamboo supports and mats woven from palm fronds. There weren’t any windows—just cutouts in the walls covered by wooden shutters, much like the openings in a barn. And the view was spectacular. We were on top of a towering hill that looked out over the entire city.
Of course, we didn’t have anything to fill the place with, but the lack of furnishings seemed to go with the place. It was like Gilligan’s Island; we would make something out of nothing. Bamboo, a few sticks, some rocks—who needed Ikea when you could forage for your furniture?
The day we moved in, Francisco hauled in three tree stumps from outside, set them down in the living room, and informed me proudly that now we had chairs. We also had a hot plate that Manfred had loaned us, a few pans, a set of silverware, two glasses, and a twin mattress. Manfred hadn’t had an extra TV, but he offered us a monitor left over from his film days that doubled as a tiny nine-inch television as well as a radio.
I wanted to buy furniture (more important, a fridge), but our financial situation was steadily growing worse. Our new apartment wasn’t an extravagance—it was only costing us fifty dollars more than we had paid to Melba each month, but my dwindling savings had yet to be augmented by any actual income. We had been working steadily with Manfred for four months, but so far we had yet to see any actual return on our investment.
We were all doing our best to make our new business venture a success. Francisco spent his mornings going from office to office, trying to drum up business. Anyone who expressed interest got a free script for their product, which was where Manfred and I came in. The second meeting consisted of the two of us acting out the commercial I had written and explaining details such as costs and production times.
The people whose offices we visited were enthusiastic and amazed—visualizing their product on TV had the tantalizing effect of seeing their name in lights—but after a few weeks of “deliberation and discussion” they always came back with the same chagrined and apologetic answer: Given the poor economy, it just wasn’t the right time.
Nevertheless, we refused to give up. As soon as we’d get another “no,” there’d be a new client who expressed interest, buoying our hopes yet again. Like a chain-smoking grandmother in polyester playing the slots at Vegas, we kept convincing ourselves that the more losses we stacked up, the sooner our win was about to occur. All it took was one lucky pull of the lever to obliterate the memory of all the quarters we had dumped into the machine. So we kept at it, hoping one of our clients would finally come through.
I was beginning to get scared. Not having money in the United States was bad enough, but being poor in another country brought out an entirely new level of fear. In the United States, there were always possibilities, always temporary work as a last resort, but there was nothing to fall back on here. Worse yet, I’d recently overstayed my visa, not having the money it would have cost to petition for an extension of my stay.
As our funds diminished down to the two-hundred-dollar mark, my efforts to round up money grew more and more intense. I suddenly recalled every person who owed me money and made every attempt to collect. I got a few hundred bucks out of a friend in Los Angeles, remembered a commission check I was owed by my printer. For a fleeting moment, I even considered asking my parents, but knew what the answer would be in advance: “It’s just not a good time for us right now, Wendy.”
My biggest fear was reaching the zero point and not having enough to even eat, so we began rationing our intake. We were always hungry, spent our nights dreaming about food, and waking up in the morning to the familiar shout of the fifteen-year-old bread seller hawking his products made breakfast the happiest time of day. “Pan de bono, arepas,” he’d cry out, reminding us that sustenance was only minutes away. I’d put the water on for coffee while Francisco raced out of the house halfway clothed, chasing after our meal.
We had come up with a plan to subsist on just over a dollar a day, meaning that our midday meal consisted of lentils and rice, with a grated up carrot added for flavor and vitamins. It was cheap, provided protein, and most important, it didn’t require refrigeration.
At dinner, using the hot plate Manfred had loaned us, one of us would chop up and fry two green plantains, sprinkle on salt, and eat them with ketchup. Long ago, I had quit draining off the oil, figuring we could use the extra calories. And when we were able to sneak a few oranges off of a nearby tree, we’d squeeze the juice out and mix it with sugar and water.
We augmented our diet with occasional visits to homes that had refrigerators, accepting any invitation (Francisco’s distant relatives, the kind neighbor downstairs) and tried not to make a scene as we gorged ourselves on tender meats and fresh salads. Any time we were asked over for lunch by Francisco’s wealthy aunt (a Restrepo), we were always overjoyed at the thought of eating a square meal, an enthusiasm that was slightly tempered by the knowledge that the cab ride there would consume our budget for two days’ worth of food. Sitting in front of the hearty stews and sumptuous entrées that the maid brought around, we would try to cram in as much as possible, eating enough to fill us for that day as well as the next.
The only time I lost my appetite was when Francisco’s aunt refused him a small loan. Sitting at the table in her three-story penthouse apartment filled with servants, I couldn’t help
but look at the silverware in front of me and enviously think that a single place setting would buy Francisco and me food for a month. It was the only time in my life that I ever struggled with the temptation to steal.
My relationship with material things had changed. I had become practical now. The ridiculously expensive Coach wallet, the Bally shoes I’d bought myself at a duty-free shop in London, my collection of pearls—these things were completely useless to me now. These luxuries from my past seemed like relics, anthropological clues to a life lived long ago.
As our money grew sparser, so too did our visits with Manfred. After four months of failed attempts and a bank balance of less than a hundred dollars, we finally resigned ourselves to the fact that we’d have to look for a source of income elsewhere. I knew Manfred would have offered us money had he had any to spare, but his own financial situation was nearly as precarious as our own.
Francisco had tried asking all of his relatives for a loan and I’d already spent the money so generously offered up by my closest friends. I wasn’t about to endure another refusal from my parents, which just left my sisters, but they were both struggling to pay their way through college. I couldn’t possibly impose on them.
The shift from optimism to resignation to despair was so gradual that I didn’t even notice the decline. It seemed like one day we were full of hope and patience and the next, we were on the brink of starvation. But the realization that I could not survive this way any longer came on what Francisco and I would later come to refer to as the Day of the Maracuyá.
We had been walking down the hill, treading carefully down the fifty or so irregular stone steps that led to the bus stop. Usually, I kept my gaze on the ground to watch my footing—the steps ranged in size from a few inches to several feet (one massive stair actually reached up to my midthigh and I had to sit on it and scoot down like a little girl). But this time, while taking a short rest, I happened to glance overhead for a second. In the vine above us was something that looked suspiciously edible.
