My mother, as I said, was found in the jungle. She could be Brazilian or Peruvian just as easily as Colombian since most national lines drawn through the rainforest are only observed by maps. She might be mestiza or pure Indian, though we don’t know her tribe—Bora, Yagua, or Ticuna—it’s hard to say, since being dropped in the city was her first displacement. She’s got thick black hair strong enough to strangle someone, which I inherited along with her straight brows and long eyes that stretch to my ears. Alligator eyes are what my brothers call them, because they got our father’s eyes, small and round like coffee beans, and his condor nose. My older brother, Santi, would say that unless you hang with Lévi-Strauss, chances are we don’t look like anyone you know. We’re sand colored, tall and lean with angular butts. My father says it’s from generations of hunger and malnutrition that came before us, but that can’t be verified, because, like my mother, Papi was also abandoned. When he was six or seven his father packed him with a bundle of arepas and left him alone in a Bogotá park. It was sunset before he realized his father wasn’t coming back for him. He went to the safest place he could think of to wait out the night, a church, and spent the next five years sleeping on its steps among the derelicts and street kids until he observed a man who came for daily Mass and, figuring the guy must be halfway decent, one day followed him home. Papi doesn’t like to get into details, but sleeping on the church steps was pretty dangerous and he got all the propositions you’d imagine a twelve-year-old homeless boy would get.
The man my father followed turned out to be an ironworker, and he agreed to let Papi work for him in exchange for food and a place to sleep. Eight years later, the man, Santiago, sent Papi to repair the fence around a convent on the city periphery. That’s where he met my mother—an eighteen-year-old nun in training. It sounds kind of telenovela escandaloso, but they fell in love and my mother became pregnant. She didn’t have the nerve to tell the nuns, so she just ran away with my father, whose name is Beto, leaving a note for the nuns confessing everything. He had a dream to get them both to the United States, where he heard poor people had more of a chance. It took them a while to find a way out of the country, but a rich guy whose window bars he installed had prize Doberman puppies that needed escorts for their emigration to New York. My father begged for the job. The rich guy had friends in high places who could take care of the passports, but neither of my parents had last names, so my father went back to the church where he’d spent his urchin years and a young priest agreed to marry him and my mother and sign a document vouching for their existence. That’s when my parents picked out their own last name: del Cielo, because they figured the only father they had now was God.
The only sad part is that their baby was born dead. They called her Eden. Years later, my parents took us back to Colombia to visit the nuns and show them their young family. Mami had been writing them for years, first about her new life in Los Estados and the three children that were born there. We went out to the convent garden where my parents met and had an improvised funeral for Eden. I was only five and didn’t realize what was going on until the Mother Superior put a thin gold chain around my neck that she said had been meant for Eden, who was now my spirit sister. I wore it until it broke off a few years ago and my mother placed it in a special rosewood box beside her bed, next to her altar of favorite saints.
I can tell you all about the Great American Crossover because my parents never shut up about the early days. How they made it to JFK Airport, delivered the puppies, and Papi called a Jackson Heights connection provided by Santiago who found him a job sweeping in a warehouse, and one for Mami cleaning bathrooms at an elementary school. She’d been teaching my father to read Spanish, but now they had to start from nothing and learn English together. You’d never know it, because my father hardly has an accent now. Of course it wasn’t always this way. As Papi says, all of us are living many lives at once.
My father also says that every person gets a vision once in their life that holds the key to their future. I know it sounds like Disney talk but he swears by it and says that after a year as a Queens janitor he dreamed about the day his father left him at the park, saw his weathered crying face, and heard him sob, “Perdoname, hijo, perdoname,” because his father had six other kids and was ashamed he couldn’t afford to feed them all. He handed Papi the pack of arepas saying, “This will help you fight the hunger for a while.”
Papi shook my mother awake.
“Caridad, we’re going to start an arepa factory!”
It sounds funny now. And when business magazines do articles on my father because he’s now known as the King of Latin Foods, they always get a kick out of that anecdote. But it’s true. Papi says arepas, just white corn flour, peasant food, are the heart of any Colombian diet. So my mother started making them and my father started selling them on the streets of Queens during the daylight hours, working the nightshift sweeping. A year later he had enough cash to open a kiosk, and a few years after that, when Papi’s English was good enough, he managed to convince a young banker to give him a loan. With it, they opened their first bakery and then the first factory, which eventually grew to national and now global distribution of all the cornerstones of Latin American household cuisine.
And my mother? They don’t call her Our Lady of New Jersey for nothing. Since she and my father had it so rough when they landed in the United States, my mother was determined to help out as many new arrivals as she could and word got around. When someone arrived, they called her or just showed up at our door and my mother would bring them in, give them clothes, groceries, listen to their stories, and set them up with a job. Mami had built an intricate network of those she’d helped over the years who now had their own businesses. She was a one-woman embassy, getting the new arrivals to doctors who treated at a discount, lawyers willing to help with their papers, tutoring their children so they wouldn’t get railroaded into the slow classes in school. She was godmother to about thirty kids already and the namesake of a dozen others. She drove an old baby blue Mercedes and still wore her fat whip of a braid down to her waist, never a drop of makeup, and the same mochila she carried with her on that flight with the dogs out of Colombia.
My father says he only moved us out to a fancy New Jersey suburb because he had a dream of owning acres, a house with many rooms so nobody he knew would ever be left without a place to sleep, and this was the closest thing my parents had known to paradise. There were always extra plates at the dinner table—water added to the soup, is what Mami would say—always a bed freshly made, waiting for the next guest, be it for a night, a week, or a month. On Sundays after church, our house was Grand Central Station for Tristate Colombians, people passing through to say hello, celebrating successes or quietly relaying bad news, dropping off pasteles, buñuelitos, chicharrónes, and albóndingas, any little gesture of gratitude for my parents.
I thought this was how all families operated until Ajax started coming over and mocked our clan, saying, “When immigrants get money they turn their mansions into refugee camps.”
But my older brother, Santi, explained to me that Ajax probably acquired that line at home and the only thing people resent more than poor immigrants are wealthy ones:
“Remember, hermanita, the Brown American Dream is the White American Nightmare.”
I never thought much of any of this until I moved into Séraphine’s house. There, it was as if everyone carried their family history in their pocket, bragging about bloodlines, waving the family crest rings on their fingers. The paperwork to live in the House of Stars was more detailed than a college application, asking for the names and nationalities of grandparents and great-grandparents. I didn’t have anything to put in those spaces. Séraphine had been forced to grow lenient over the years, though. She said there were hardly any real blue bloods anymore; immigration, Communism, dictatorships, and little countries gaining independence did away with nobility and name privilege. Now, in the era of “le Self-Made,” a sort of charlatanism in
her view, she lamented that any nobody off the street could come into the opportunities, money, and property that used to be afforded to the few of a certain birthright. According to Séraphine, all of us girls residing in the House of Stars were part of the fresh and hungry newly moneyed international breed that was turning France into a resigned colony of our pleasures. We were the greenbloods, full of equity, pedigree unknown.
2
Loic was an actor, though he’d never taken an acting class or performed anywhere. He said just because an artist isn’t actively creating doesn’t mean their time is without artistic value; if you want to create art you’ve got to live art, and he was in a period of creative fermentation, which sounded to me like a whole lot of nothing, but Loic was almost thirty, so I figured he knew something about life that I didn’t.
The day after my arrival, he took me on a tour of the neighborhood, pointing out the locales that made up my new vie quotidienne. The pharmacies, the boulanger with the best baguette, the post office around the corner, the tabac with the cheapest cigarettes, the wine shop, the cleaners, the public pool, the Italian restaurant up the street where the girls of the house ate a few times a week because they were friends with the waiters. He showed me the nearby métros and bus stops, bought me my first carte orange, showed me the cheap French grocer and the expensive one where they sold American brands. He brought me to the best local pub—Claude’s, nested behind the Odéon, and pointed out La Verité, the bar for men where Gaspard worked that one could only enter with a secret password.
He led me across Saint Germain to the language school where I’d start classes the following week. That’s how I got myself to Paris. I’d majored in Romance languages and deferred my acceptance to a graduate program in international relations in exchange for a year in Paris I claimed would give me a linguistic edge in my intended career in diplomacy. It was a decoy, though. I wanted more than what I let on. Sometimes it was to be a professor, a journalist, a novelist, a cultural anthropologist, or all these things at once. I was only certain that I wanted a fluid, creative life. And academics proved an easy scaffold. I was a practical girl, after all, raised among survivalists.
The House of Stars was full of self-identifying artists. I didn’t know how many of them were inborn or if it was just that, in Paris, art was contagious. Séraphine declared herself an authentic artiste because she once performed with la Comédie-Française and painted very well before her fingers contorted from arthritis. She wrote poems for lovers and was an excellent equestrienne, which she maintained was an art form, as was throwing good parties and keeping an eclectic group of friends.
“Art is a matter of the spirit, chérie,” she’d say. It wasn’t that I was special—she called everyone chéri or chérie, and if you spent more than three minutes with her, you were bound to receive a fat dose of advice or philosophy.
I’d heard from Loic that Maribel, the rangy Spanish girl, was a painter, raised in conservatories and by parents who were famous artists who dressed like mimes in identical leotard ensembles and were the subject of coffee table books and museum retrospectives. At twenty-one, Maribel was primed for a promising career as the star of Beaux-Arts. I met her over breakfast. Every morning the maids set the dining room table with a spread of coffee, baguettes, and brioches, but I’d been shy those first days and remained in my room alone as I heard the laughter and chatter of the girls on the floor below. The first time I went down to join them, I found a seat at the end of the table between Naomi, the spider-thin Manhattanite, and petite and golden Dominique, the daughter of a French former model and the Lebanese founder of the Marpessa resorts lining the Mediterranean from Beirut to Saint-Tropez.
“Hi. I’m Lita,” I tried a casual tone.
I dwarfed them in size, but the indifference on their faces made me feel quite small.
“She’s the new girl,” Tarentina told the table as if it weren’t already clear. She sat at the head, wrapped in a silk robe and a boa of cigarette smoke.
There were a few small waves but no further introductions. I’d have to piece together their identities myself. Saira, the African girl, sat across from me and offered me one of the brioches in the basket between us. She lived on the third floor in the room directly above mine, and I’d already heard from Loic that she was the youngest child of an ousted dictator who was currently being treated for cancer in Casablanca.
“We were just talking about the news,” Maribel said, turning to me. “Have you heard?”
I expected more details about the death of the princess, but that morning the girls were captivated by the story of an American who’d arrived from San Francisco the day before expressly for the occasion of his suicide, throwing himself on the Franklin D. Roosevelt métro tracks at the height of the evening rush, holding up the trains for hours.
“His mother said he’d never been to Paris before but he knew he wanted to die here. He wasn’t sick. Not even remarkably depressed. He just wanted to live his dream of dying in Paris.”
“What are they going to do with his body?” asked Camila, the other Colombian, an emerald-blood to whom Loic had already introduced me in the corridor assuming we’d be fast friends. She was also on the diplomacy track, having interned at The Hague, the U.N., and UNESCO, and was completing a law degree at Nanterre. Loic said all girls came to Paris under the guise of wanting to be fashion designers, models, chefs, or diplomats when all they were really after were husbands. That was before he knew diplomacy was my official career plan, too, but I wasn’t offended, already accustomed to my brother Santi’s position that diplomats are just professional dinner guests.
Loic pointed out that Camila and I were compatriots, but when I admitted I was born in the States, she wrinkled her nose and said, “So you can’t really call yourself Colombian then, can you? Just a Colombogringa, at best.” I could have argued that Queens, where I was born, is a Colombia satellite but was relieved she’d drawn a line between us so I wouldn’t be burdened with having to get to know her. But Loic added that I was the heir to the Compa’ Foods fortune and all of a sudden she was dying to be my friend.
“He’s going to be buried back home,” Maribel answered Camila. “He had enough sense to prepay his funeral and set money aside for the customs paperwork and shipping of his cadaver.”
“That’s so morbid,” Naomi said, picking the layers off her croissant. Her room was also on the third floor, and I’d learn that she had a longtime boyfriend back home in addition to the Paris boyfriend I’d already seen floating around the house—an Egyptian boxer named Rachid who worked weekends at the Puces.
“It’s not morbid. Everyone dies,” Maribel said. “I think it’s romantic that he elected the scene of his death. When I die, I want it to be like that, a moment of my choosing.”
“Don’t be such an idiot.” Tarentina tossed a brioche from her plate at Maribel. “It’s your life, not a goddamn film.”
Tarentina was the oldest and had been in the house the longest at five years, earning her way into the largest bedroom, down the hall from mine, with its own private bathroom. She’d changed schools nearly every semester of her residency, though she rarely went to class, devoting most of her time to two men and a few others she crammed in at intervals. Her preferred lovers, a famous English musician and an elderly almost-blind French art dealer living on rue Bonaparte who was always offering to adopt Tarentina so he’d have someone to leave his estate to. Her parents had died when she was a baby and her grandparents were dead now, too, so even though she was twenty-three, technically, since she was without family, she was still available.
I’d found out the orphan part the day before when she stopped by my room. I was at my desk writing a letter to my younger brother, Beto. We’d been writing each other for years, even while growing up in the same house. It had started at the suggestion of a therapist who thought it was a good way to draw Beto out of himself, but I told him it was because we didn’t have ancestors, so it was on us to leave evidence of our existen
ce in the written form.
I looked up as Tarentina announced, “I hear you’re an orphan.”
I shook my head. “I’m not.”
“Why would the countess say you are then?”
“My parents are orphans. Maybe that’s what she meant.”
“You don’t have to be embarrassed. I won’t tell anyone if you are.”
“That’s my family.” I pointed to a family photo I’d taped to the wall beside my bed taken at last year’s Noche Buena party, the five of us standing before the Christmas tree.
Tarentina looked it over with a disaffected sigh.
“Too bad. All the best people in history are orphans. It’s like magic, you know.”
Later, when I told Loic about our encounter, he briefed me on Tarentina’s not-so-secret history; her father killed her mother and then himself in what was deemed a “crime of passion,” and even though she threw her fancy colonial last name around with pride, Loic said Tarentina’s original last name was German because her father’s father was not the full-blood sixth-generation Brazilian rancher she claimed, but a runaway Nazi.
I accepted the coffeepot from Saira, pouring into the cup placed on the chipped saucer before me. I sipped it. Bitter and diluted compared to the full-flavored coffee my father brewed in our house every morning. The girls went on about the virtues of suicide versus succumbing to illness or accidental death while I kept silent. I’d been raised around a crowded table and knew sometimes it’s best not to compete for airtime and just wait your turn.
Giada eyed me from across the table.
“You look a bit like Tania. I mean, vaguely. You could be her cousin or something.”
Since our first meeting, she’d softened toward me during our run-ins in the washroom where we took turns brushing our teeth over the sink. She told me her father held a minor political office in Rome, and after skidding out of an English boarding school, she was sent to Paris to be kept out of the Italian public eye and study pastry making, though she took pride in being a semiprofessional DJ groupie, rarely missing a night of Laurent Garnier at the superclubs on Les Champs and around la Bastille.
It's Not Love, It's Just Paris Page 2
