And what do you think of Aurora?
You say you’re with the Colibrí, you’re one of her band? No, it’s all right, I can guess why she wants to know. May God always bless the Colibrí; up here in the Estratósfera they think she’s a criminal, but they don’t know what it’s like down on the lakes. The narcos and the government, they’ll take all the money you have and kill you for more. But the Colibrí, she gives it back. Some say the narcos kidnapped her daughter, others say she was just born a man-hater—as if you have to hate men to see the evil in those bastards. She’s a saint, stealing back what’s rightfully ours.
So Aurora, she wants everyone to forget where she came from. Most everyone goes along with it, but I don’t believe her act. She was thirteen when she lost her parents in the Highline attack. That’s old enough to know where you come from. So I don’t know how she managed to turn into that girl who’s always on the gossip feeds. She’s more fresa than a born fresa.
So she never talks about it.
Not even to Jaime—though, I admit, I always thought there was something different between them. He was in that blast, the same as her, and he lost his eyes in it. So it seems to me that neither of them can really forget how they got to where they are, but they don’t talk about it. Not to me, not to their friends. Not even to each other. And yet he spent nearly every day here before the troubles between them—ah, may God always bless the Colibrí, but those are two I wish she could have left in peace. After all they’ve seen.
Did they ever mention his cousin Beto again?
Not where I could hear. I think Jaime didn’t like to think of his family that way. But Aurora was right. All those juniors, even the ones who would never go, know what happens at those parties. They know about the disappeared girls, the ones forced to prostitute themselves until one day someone killed them for nothing at all. My little niece, the daughter of my oldest sister, is one of those missing girls. My God, I hate these people sometimes. My God, may the Colibrí give them what they deserve.
January 10, 2079. I could barely stand to say your name.
You did it, then. You broke up with her.
You almost sound as though you want me to apologize.
How do you even know that I’m attracted to you?
Don’t you keep calling?
It’s not safe for us to meet. I’m not your girlfriend.
I know. It’s okay. I admire you. I love you.
You can’t love someone you don’t even know.
Aurora was . . . is . . . I’ve never seen your face, I don’t know your name and I know you better than I ever knew her.
You were with her for over a year.
The only language Aurora really spoke was her loom and her clothes. Too bad for her I can’t fucking see them.
Communication isn’t only about talking. What do you and I even have in common? Have you even wondered about everything I’m hiding?
You’ll never know all of anybody. But you can love what you know about them.
But what you know might be the wrong part, Jaime.
February 7, 2079. A disguised associate of the Colibrí’s interviews Daniela Q, when she was still at that gossip rag.
How have your readers reacted to the latest activities of the Colibrí?
Our fan base at Mejor Que Tú magazine is teenage juniors and their elevator-riding tween groupies. Most of our attention has to be focused on the tabloid angle, the Jaime/Colibrí speculation. These days, that includes Aurora, though before she wasn’t particularly important in the feeds—I mean, it’s not every day a Zapatista lady thief who runs around in a hummingbird feather headdress and a bandana mask steals some mireina’s tabloid-star boyfriend, you know?
The Colibrí has been making her way through the whole city senate—she’s robbed five in the last month! It’s uncanny, the way she gets past their security. Chucho el Roto for the twenty-first century. She claims in her videos that she acts alone, not for the Zapatistas or any organized group. This didn’t stop the city legislative assembly from raising the bounty on her head on the grounds that the Colibrí is an operative for the New Zapatista Liberation Army. It’s still political poison to associate with them, though that international tribunal cleared them a few years ago. Now the theory is it was really some narco hit. Anyway, no one in the office pays much attention to the political side. Mostly all the juniors and wannabes have been swooning over the message that the Colibrí sent to Jaime in her last video. Did you see it? She’s in the woods somewhere, face hidden by the bandana and the headdress. The girls are all trying to imitate that voice, that sort of take-no-prisoners gravel swagger has gotten very a la moda. But we have an expert in-house who swears she uses a sublingual vocal mask—which makes sense. If anyone could find the Colibrí, the mayor would stick her head on a wall in the zócalo, like the Aztecs. Here’s the video.
There’s something my grandmother used to tell me, Jaime: Never trust a man with power over you. And sure as hell don’t kiss him. Well, I haven’t yet, but I need to know—what am I to you? A poor indígena who should be grateful you bothered to notice her? Or just a challenge, a new flavor now that you’ve gotten bored of the old one? You seem to think I should notice you—so tell me why. How are you worth it? If we’re both symbols, between the bloodred fruit and the spiny cactus and the eagle and serpent in its claws—which is you and which is me? The sour cactus pear? The eagle alighting with the will of a god? The serpent struggling in its claws? The cactus is poisoned, Jaime, poisoned from the roots. What good are your spines if you won’t use them? Go back to your good fresa girl if that’s all you want out of me. I ain’t waiting.
Well, I can only imagine how Aurora felt watching that one!
Has she done anything in response?
Did she ever! She revealed herself in public for the first time in a month last night, at the gala fundraiser of Todas Juntas, that woman’s crisis charity that her mother runs. If she was hurting, she didn’t show it last night. She stepped out of the Hill family car in her most incredible outfit to date: a floor-length ball gown trimmed in eagle feathers. The fabric was some kind of hand weave in blue and gold and white—no one knows where she sources her fabrics, she must special order them—and it swept upward over a fitted bodice studded with jade. The most astonishing thing, though, was her hat. It was all fabric, stiffened and folded in a way that looked distinctly eaglelike, with these long feathers woven in to brush her shoulders. She looked more dangerous than beautiful in that outfit, a genuine predator. And, given who stole her boyfriend, it was a response more perfect than words. Eagle eats hummingbird. Sorry, no disrespect intended to your boss. I know relationships end all the time.
None taken. She saw the outfit. It was well done.
Aurora’s always spoken more eloquently with her clothing. She gave me a brief interview, though she refused to so much as mention Jaime. All she would say about his new maybe-girlfriend was, “I sympathize with many of the injustices that she decries in her videos. I, of course, take issue with her methods.” The look on her face when she said “methods” will probably pay my rent for a month. Subtexual gold, the commenters love it.
I did an interview with them before the breakup. It didn’t go anywhere at the time, but now I’m remembering this odd exchange between them.
We were adjusting the cameras, so Jaime started flicking through his feed, which he can do just by accessing something with his eyes, I’m unclear on the details. He was ignoring everyone, and Aurora turned to him and said:
“Who would you be if you had to face just a little of your discomfort?”
It sounded harsh to me, but he barely raised his eyebrows. He didn’t look at her, he just said, “Less fucked up. The same as you would be if they hadn’t killed your parents.”
She bent over as though he had punched her. He didn’t seem to notice for nearly a minute. But just when we had finished with the cameras, he reached over, squeezed her hand and kissed it, and I thought—I swear to God, shows you w
hat I know, no wonder I’m still single—that theirs was a true love.
April 19, 2079. The poisoned roots.
How do you feel knowing that your family is intimately involved in a corrupt drug-funded slavery and prostitution ring?
You actually want me to answer you on camera? Beto could go down tomorrow and all I’d feel is relief.
And what about Mayor Torres? Or your father?
Coli . . . they’re not perfect. They’re corrupt machista assholes, fine, I’ll give you that, but I can’t believe that they know about this. I just can’t.
If you do, how could they not?
Don’t make me answer that. I’m worried about you. I’ve heard things.
What things?
That you’re threatening city assembly members. That you’re connecting them with high-ranking members of the Conquistador cartel and sending the information to pirate net broadcasts. That you managed to hack the mayor’s personal video channel for an hour. And that—
What? Tell me.
You’re breaking into our homes. Stealing things . . .
Oh, say it ain’t so, Jaimecito. Things?
They won’t tell me specifics, Coli!
But you know.
How can I know?
Say it, baby. Say it. Don’t play innocent fresa boy with me. You know what I’ve been doing because it’s in the center of the frame you’ve been trying to pretend isn’t actually on the wall all this time.
Wait—the girls? You’ve been stealing Beto’s girls?
They’re human beings that someone else bought. Or do you think there are different rules for lake-dwellers and indígenas like me?
No, of course not! Of course you can’t—you’re freeing them. Of course.
You sound surprised.
I just don’t understand why my father—he said you were stealing things and that I had to stop betraying my own blood and help them catch you. He said that you’re just using me to get to them. I know it’s not true—
Oh, but it is, Jaimecito.
You’re not—it is?
I’m only talking to you like this because I want you to hear me, at long goddamn last. I want you to see, er, metaphorically speaking—
Oh, for God’s sake, Coli.
Sorry. I mean that you have spent your whole life shying from real responsibility. And you do it by denying your awareness of the evil around you. Well, now you’re talking to me, Jaime. Now you know. So yes, I’m using you. I’m using you because I want you to help me.
You want me to help you. Help you how?
I can tell you the names of girls my people have confirmed are missing and almost certainly have passed through Beto’s orbit. I can even give you vocal clips for a few of them. You visit your cousins and talk to the domestics of your aunts and you get yourself an invite to one of those terrible parties and then let me in the back door. I get those girls out one at a time.
You can’t be serious!
Why not?
I could get killed!
You know that your own family is capable of killing you and you still defend them?
Defend them? Look at me, I can’t stop laughing and I’m so scared I could puke. My father told me to denounce you and I told him to go to hell.
So pick a side, Jaime.
Don’t ask me this, Coli. I want you to survive. I want us to meet in person again. My uncle and my father are planning something. They want to find a way to bring you down.
Tell me something I don’t know, mi vida. So will you?
I don’t want to die.
Neither do I.
Send me the names. And the voices. God help us, Coli, but I won’t let you do this alone.
May 8, 2079. I nearly sent this. I very nearly did.
When I knew you were going to leave me, Jaime, but you hadn’t done it yet, I would lie in my bed and imagine all of the ways I could convince you to stay. And the wildest thing was, I knew that I could! All I had to do was betray my family and everything that I’d dedicated my life to. And now you’re gone, months gone, and I’ve had my cry, as Mamá would say. Now it’s time to get back out into the world!
The trouble is, I see the world through your . . . well, not eyes, obviously, but your voice, your poetry, your laughter, those silly songs you would improvise for me on our walks. But you don’t want me. Not the parts of me that I could give you, anyway.
I was making you a scarf. I’d had an inspiration the night of the first V-mail I never sent, and I sat in my backstrap loom though it hurt like hell from the bruises, and I worked out the basic pattern. I’m finishing it now, Jaime, and oh, it’s so beautiful. You would have loved it. The colors of the ocean mixed with a thread that shimmers like a quetzal feather. The embroidery is thick, nearly a quarter of a centimeter high, a pattern of feathers. I finished it and hid it under my bed. I think Rosa found it, though.
I’ve started to regret not telling you back then, so I’ve decided to say it out loud now and see how I feel about it. It seems to me that I’ve spent so long unable to trust anyone, that my secrecy has grown inside me like a tumor. Maybe you would have understood; maybe you wouldn’t have blamed me.
But now you would, I think.
Here, a truth.
My parents didn’t die in the Highline attack; my mother is still alive. I was with the New Zapatista Liberation Army, protesting the new station, and I saw the bomb just before it went off. It wasn’t our bomb, Jaime. You have to believe me. The government blamed us, that’s all. There was a boy my age nearby, in the path of the blast. And I grabbed him and pushed him onto the tracks. He and I woke up in the hospital, forever changed. The Señora Hill—Mamá—adopted me. I’ve been able to use her access—and yes, yours, Jaime—to pass government information onto my mother and the others in the movement.
I never meant to use you when we met. I was surprised that you even wanted to talk to me. I thought we had so much time, I thought that I could control how much my mother demanded of me. I couldn’t. And I couldn’t tell you. For years I had a nightmare where I would tell you who I was, and then I would wake up to a different nightmare, where I couldn’t.
So I tell you now, when you can’t hear me. Maybe this will go in my documentary, my collage, my forbidden portrait of a distorted heart.
June 3, 2079. I cried the first time I watched this. You found poetry even in betrayal.
You had the most beautiful voice. I read the rumors about the sublingual mask, but I didn’t believe them. That voice went through me like a dart, mezcal and woodsmoke, something cold and something still burning.
I had given you information about four girls I was able to find. Two in Beto’s apartment and the other two with a lowlife friend of his who lived a few floors down in Cuauhtemoc Tower. I told you that I had tried to look discreetly among my uncle’s staff and my own family’s, but I hadn’t. I realized, and then couldn’t stop remembering, the way the girls would always change in my uncle’s house. Their soft voices folding into one another, the texture occasionally brightened by sobs in a bathroom, my aunt’s quiet disapproval of the sentimentality of her waitstaff. Once, stumbling home late and drunk from a party, I smelled blood on the pool house bathroom towels. My brother told me one of his girlfriends had gotten her period. And I remember thinking, but not saying, Period blood doesn’t smell like that, Jorge. So I told you about Beto. I figured it would be enough.
“And your parents?” you asked, so cool and so sharp. My heart rocked against my breastbone.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Yes you do, Jaimecito,” you said, and disconnected the call.
A week later you got in touch again. “I’ve got the four out,” you said, warm this time. “I’ve been thinking, would you like to visit me?”
I came to Star Hill three days later. Though you kept the bandana up, you didn’t blindfold me, because outside of Estrato tech my implants struggled to make sense of the world. The lake and its reflections made me feel as though I had fallen th
rough a looking glass. You brought me there on a flat-bottomed boat and I held myself rigid, the stink of that black water filling my nostrils. I couldn’t even catch a whiff of that foreign-familiar smell that I remembered from the time you robbed us in the railcar. You poled the boat well, I’m sure, but every time we rocked I was convinced we were about to fall in. You must have been laughing at me the whole time. And all I wanted to do was touch you, at last, to make sure that you were real.
We stopped, I couldn’t tell where. I could get a read on a small structure with just one other person inside. My network connection was laggy. It couldn’t register locations, let alone faces. I stayed inside the boat. I didn’t trust myself to get out on my own. You climbed back in and handed me a glass.
“Pulque,” you said, when I sniffed at it.
I’d never had pulque before, but I took a sip. It was sour, viscous, bubbly. Nothing like a good beer. Berenice once told me they fermented it with dog shit, but I thought better of asking.
“It’s good stuff,” you said, laughing a little. “But give it to Juanita if you don’t want it.”
Juanita, the person whose face I couldn’t read, introduced herself. Her hand dwarfed mine when she shook it. She was at least a head taller than both of us. She took over the pole in back and you sat across from me at the front of the boat. You told Juanita to take us through the chinampas garden plots, which I’m sure would have offered a beautiful view for someone else. I wondered what you wanted. Why had you agreed to see me after keeping me dancing for so long?
“I’ll take you back anytime you want,” you said. “If it’s too hard just tell me.”
I took another determined swig of the pulque. “It’s not too hard. I’ll adjust. I’m just used to . . . having more information.”
“You’re not used to being blind.”
I tilted my head, though even as I did it, I recognized the gesture as something Aurora would do when I said something she didn’t approve of. I missed her. When had that happened? “I’m always blind, Coli,” I said. “What I do now isn’t seeing.” I could only rely on my unaugmented senses to orient myself. The rain started. It washed over our little corner of the world, a soft rush that nearly drowned our voices, drumming on the tiny pavilion roof.
Three Sides of a Heart Page 28
