Do you know what a coscoja is? Don’t worry, I didn’t either, and when I found out, I didn’t like it at all. I immediately dipped the pendant in rubbing alcohol and left it there all week, me, who, before knowing what it was, put it in my mouth all the time, disgusting. Only my mother, with the coscoja; you always had to be careful with my mother. But be patient. Little by little, I’ll explain everything.
In any case, the day she was leaving, Bolivia dressed in jeans, plain shoes with laces, and a plaid shirt, as if she were going on an excursion to the countryside. I saw her put makeup on her eyes, which were coffee-colored like mine, with long lashes. Many years later, I’d glance on her in a similar manner on the day of her death, with her head on the satin pillow in her coffin of dark wood. She had been made beautiful again, seemed rejuvenated, because near the end fatigue and worry had beaten her; yet on that day she seemed peaceful again, as if the Heno de Pravia had once again restored the resplendence of her skin. I remember watching the shadows of her eyelashes caused by the flames from the altar candles dance softly on her cheeks, creating the sensation that death was treating her lovingly. I’d seen other corpses, and although they did not let me attend the funeral of my husband, I had been to others, and I had never seen a dead person as beautiful as her. Señora Socorro and the other friends roasted a turkey and prepared a Russian salad for the mourners, and we all ate. All of us except Bolivia, she who had always made sure that we never lacked turkey during the winters in America. A few days before Thanksgiving and Christmas, we always went to the parish where they gave out free turkeys so that everyone would have a good meal during those days. So we lined up and got our turkey, and the following day we did it again, and the day after, morning and afternoon, claiming our turkey as if they had not already given us one, and another turkey, and one more, and the best we made out with this scheme is when we got six turkeys one Christmas.
The day she left for America, I looked at Bolivia and thought, I’m so lucky to have such a pretty mother, and at the same time, I grew disheartened because that marvelous radiance who was my mother was going to be so far away from me. Afterward, we bathed the baby Violeta, who had inherited a fair complexion and had the greenest eyes anyone had seen in our neighborhood, where such things were not common, so that strangers stopped us on the street to admire them. Mami, where did Violeta get those huge green eyes? Did her father have green eyes? Bolivia did not respond. She went silent when I asked her about her men. The day she left, we dried Violeta with a towel our mother had put over the heater to warm up; we put Johnson’s powder on her, a diaper, and a onesie made of baby alpaca wool. The whole time, Violeta never cried, she lived as if lost in a dream. I wondered if everything she saw would be green with those eyes of hers. I tried to play with her by shaking a rattle of plastic keys in front of her, but she didn’t notice it.
“Mami,” I told Bolivia, “what good are those eyes on Violeta if she can’t see?”
“She can see. The doctor assured me there’s nothing wrong with her eyes. The thing is that they’re too green,” she responded, and was satisfied with the explanation.
Bolivia’s bags were ready and so were the cardboard boxes with our clothes, but before going out she announced, “Now we’re going to have a little good-bye, soon-to-be-reunited ceremony.”
I, who did not know what a ceremony was, was surprised and delighted when she opened three little blue-velvet boxes and pulled out three metal pendants on gold chains.
“What are they?” I murmured, knowing that we were doing something solemn, that the moment would not be repeated, and that those pendants, whatever they were, represented something. I didn’t really like the dark metal pendants all that much; what was truly beautiful was the gold chain, but regardless, I knew the pendants were important.
“They’re three pieces of the same coin,” she replied, and showed me how they made a whole. On one side of the coin there wasn’t anything, just scratches on the worn metal. On the other side, there was an eight-point cross with the word “lazareto” written in the middle. Around and above the cross, it read “two and a half cents,” and below, “Colombia, 1928.” Bolivia put one of the necklaces on me, lifting my hair to fasten the chain behind. She put the second pendant on the baby Violeta and kept the third for herself. Of course, I didn’t know what a lazareto was, and I didn’t even think to ask; I must have thought of it as something magical that made the pendant a protective amulet. Years later, in America, Bolivia would tell me that such coins had been minted in the first decades of the twentieth century for restricted circulation in leper colonies, to avoid contagion in the rest of the country. They were called coscojas, and the engraved octagonal figure was the cross of the Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem, also known as the Templar cross or the cross of the eight beatitudes. That’s when I came to know the horror of leprosy and learned of the great family secret. I found out that my grandmother Africa María had spent her last days being eaten away by the illness in isolation at the leper colony Agua de Dios. Her husband and children never saw her during the nine years she spent there, until they heard about her death and then went looking for her, but only to be there for her burial. Apparently, the husband, my grandfather, had been sending her personal necessities all along—although he never went to visit her, each month he’d send her a suitcase full of food and other goods, with a note that the suitcase wasn’t to be returned. According to what Bolivia told me later, my grandfather preferred to buy a new suitcase every month and deal with the loss rather than get back such a thing impregnated with miasmic airs. Among the contents of the suitcase, there once was an electric iron, which apparently my leprous grandmother never used because she preferred one of those old-fashioned heavy iron ones, one of those you fill with hot coals. That’s what Grannie Africa ironed with, there in her colony for the sick; her flesh may have been falling off in pieces, but she painstakingly cared for her clothes.
My mother was a teenager when her mother died, and she told me that they arrived at Agua de Dios for the burial exhausted after two days of travel, dazed by the heat and the buzzing of insects because the place was in the middle of a swamp. They were not allowed near the lepers who attended the burial but stayed on the other side of the fence. My mother remembered she could see them in the distance, but not their faces, which were covered with rags, and that she had been shaken by the thought that these creatures were the only company her mother had had for such a long time.
The authorities had made the members of the family cover their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs that had been soaked in alcohol. My grandmother’s body was incinerated along with her mattress and other belongings. Bolivia stood there, scratching the swollen mosquito bites on her legs and watching the flames consume someone who was supposedly her mother, but who had been buried alive for so long that she had been almost erased from her children’s memory.
“How can I explain it?” Bolivia told me. “For us, her children, she had always been present, but not as a person, as fear, a shadow.”
When the flames had died out and the embers extinguished, Bolivia saw a metallic glitter in the ashes. She shook herself loose from her father, ran to the place where the pyre had burned, and in spite of the screams of warning, picked up a dried branch and scraped out that little gleaming thing that had caught her attention. It was the coscoja, probably from one of the pockets of my grandmother’s incinerated clothes.
“Funny how the mind works, María Paz,” Bolivia told me when we were in America. “The day of my mother’s burial, I thought of her surrounded by sick people, but healthy herself. Healthy and with her old-fashioned hairdo and with the knitted shawl over her shoulders that she wore in the photograph in our living room.”
It was only little by little that Bolivia and her brothers began to understand the truth that had been kept from them for so long. After the burial, which in fact had not been a burial at all but a cremation, permitted by the church for dea
ths from contagious diseases, the family had to stay overnight, three to a cot, at an inn at the halfway point of the journey back. It was only there, in the insomniac mugginess of that night, that Bolivia finally figured out that during all those years of her absence, her mother must have been just like those sick folk who hid their putrefied flesh with rags.
Why did my mother choose that specific object, my grandmother Africa’s coscoja, for our farewell ceremony so many years later? She never told me, and when I asked her, she’d use any pretext to change topics: “Do you want more chocolate milk?” Or “Turn on the TV, María Paz, the telenovela is on.” So I had to go digging for answers on my own. And I can assure you, Mr. Rose, that the things I began to discover did not put my mind at ease. My mother had told me about what she called the great secret of the family, the unnamable illness of my grandmother Africa. But that was just the beginning. The real secret, the secret behind the secret, I had to figure out myself. It had to do with a dark well without memories, the years in which my mother and her brothers grew up in the absence of their own mother, that woman who had been denied and made to disappear, that mother whose name the father never again spoke aloud, that living corpse whose children could not ask questions about, that undeclared orphanhood, that absence of maternal love that was never explained, the horror of that muted nightmare. That blind point of panic and darkness in the hearts and heads of those children who no one thought it necessary to make things evident for. I can’t help but think of my mother at sixteen years old, the willowy pretty girl she must have been, saving from those ashes of disgrace that coin that contained some vestige of memory, or perhaps healing or redemption. I also can’t help but think of my mother, already a woman in her own right, having my abandoned grandmother’s coin broken into three parts so she’d leave a legacy for her daughters whom she was about to abandon.
Bolivia paid a jeweler to cut the coin and on each piece place a ring through which the chain would pass. That’s what she had decided, but the rest of it, what I’m going to tell you about now, was fate, like everything else that has happened to me. And you, who are a professor and more importantly a writer, know that fate means chance, luck, coincidence—something that happens to you not because you want it to happen but because it is destiny. Don’t think that I haven’t looked up such things in dictionaries. Because that’s exactly what happened, that the word “lazareto” engraved in the coscoja happened to be divided like this: L-AZAR-ETO, and because the middle piece was mine, mine said and still says, AZAR, Spanish for fate. You figure out the consequences. Imagine, in particular, everything that can happen to you from the moment that your own mother brands you with such a word by hanging it around your neck.
After our ceremony, each of us with her medallion, we went out on the street, clean and freshly ironed on the outside and full of foreboding on the inside. We left Violeta and her cardboard box at the house of her godmother, Doña Herminia, who would care for her. Violeta passed peacefully from the arms of her mother to those of her godmother, which did not surprise us because we had already began to sense that Violeta was Violeta. But what did Bolivia feel on leaving her baby, so pretty and so innocent, in the hands of someone else? That I never found out. Many things cannot be known. Was Violeta really strange from the time before Bolivia left for America, or did she become strange because who knows what could have happened at Doña Herminia’s house, where no one was there to defend her or give her proper company. That was one of those mysteries that Bolivia refused even to acknowledge, always finding some excuse to avoid the heart of those truths. Chocolate milk, the telenovela, anything to pretend she didn’t know what you were talking about. The past, our past, her own past, what may have happened during the years of separation, none of those were topics she ever agreed to discuss. She made us believe the page was blank: zero memories, zero regrets. As if our lives had begun at the moment of that second ceremony we had five years later, at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, when, worn out by the heat and fatigue, we finally brought together the three pieces of the coscoja again.
Sorrows do not exist if they’re not named, that was Bolivia’s philosophy. Her native country had been left behind. And the past forgotten. She wasn’t a woman who dwelled on nostalgia, my mother, or bet against impossible odds. She prided herself on being practical, remaking herself endlessly. “Don’t look back,” she’d say, and was committed to moving us forward without too many complications. She had to feed us, so she provided food; we needed a roof over our heads, and she arranged for that. “Pulling us forward,” she always said, and I suspect she never noticed how twisted we were coming out—really more sideways than forward. There were so many things we never knew or talked about, and that burn inside us with a dark resplendence. Coins rescued from the ashes—I’m telling you about this side of my mother, Mr. Rose, because I know that there shouldn’t be any secrets when I write. You need to know that because of this, Bolivia’s silences, it was difficult to grow up with her, to be secure, to become an adult, and remember that after five years apart, we got there only to live together like strangers. You can’t blot out the sun with your thumb, and the three pieces of a coin brought back together didn’t change the fact that none of us really knew who the other two were. Remember that when you write about all this. The things we dared not talk about forced us to live in constant fear, confined in a narrow box. I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t that web of big and small lies that tangled up Violeta’s mind.
“It’s only for a few months,” Bolivia told Doña Herminia when she handed her Violeta. “Take care of her as if she were your own; you’ll be well compensated.” Then the two of us headed for the bus terminal. In one of the many yellow buses with red stripes, I journeyed to the city where Leonor de Nava, kin to my mother, lived with her daughter Camila, who was two years older than I was, and Patricia, who was my age. They called them Cami and Pati, and because their last name was Nava, they were nicknamed Caminaba, which means walked, and Patinaba, or skated. I’d live with them until my reunion in America with my mother and sister. Pressing the piece of the coscoja in my hand, I looked at Bolivia one last time from the window of the bus. I thought that she looked awfully young with her backpack, her plaid shirt, and without daughters, and for a moment I got the feeling that she was getting rid of us. “It’s only a few months,” her mouth said, enunciating the words exaggeratedly so that I could see them through the glass that prevented me from hearing them. Only a few months, and then America!
Only a few months. But five years passed before I saw Bolivia and Violeta again.
4
Interview with Ian Rose
“The only thing I have left now is to wander with my pack of dogs, animal among animals,” Ian Rose tells me. He agreed to have breakfast with me at the dining room of the Washington Square Hotel, where I’m staying now that I have come to New York to interview him for this book.
He assures me that ever since the dogs noticed his sorrow, they live attentive to his every move, as if they are there to remind him that in spite of everything life is worth it. Almost every day at the house up in the Catskills, Rose takes them out for walks in the woods, single file until a squirrel or rabbit crosses their path or a field mouse flashes by, and the dogs go crazy. Rose likes to watch them out in the wild; they become doggedly doglike, their instincts liberated and their noses trained to the ground to follow the traces of whatever sexual effluvia or droppings they may find along the way. The excrement of other creatures is crucial for them, he tells me; from it they get more information about a subject than the CIA could with a whole legion of infiltrators. When their caravan regroups, it proceeds behind Skunko, the most ordinary and unkempt of the three, who has earned his spot as leader because of his infallible instinct to find the way back no matter how far off they’ve gone or lost they are. Even if it takes a few times going around in circles, Skunko’s instinct always manages to get them back home. Behind Skunko is invariably Otto, the oversized
do-gooder that Rose inherited from his ex-wife, and at the rear, the bitch Dix, all four of them, Rose included, lifting their snouts in the air when they sense something burning or water nearby, urinating on the rocks or tree trunks. They superstitiously avoid the bend in the path where Eagles’s mutilated body was discovered, remain expectantly silent before the trail of a bear or a fox, mark with their own trail the bright, fresh snow blanketing the fields, distinguish the edible mushrooms from the poisonous ones, or lay down to rest on the moss in a clearing, warmed by the pale sunlight filtered through the leaves. That’s how it was that morning, Rose tells me as we have our tea and toast.
“Do you understand?” he asks me. “When Cleve died, I knew that all I had left were my dogs. My dogs and the woods.”
Sometimes his dogs crossed the line and got him in trouble, especially the beautiful Dix, a spirited and explosive female with jet-black hair, the daughter of a Labrador and a German shepherd, crazy by nature and out of control, like all mutts that are a cross between two noble lines. Old fights had left her covered in scars, and her main thing was breaking into chicken coops and contributing to the extinction of the mallard ducks and other semi-endangered species. On those occasions Rose rebuked her, but did not really mean it because deep down he was proud when she brought the prize in her mouth to him. Until one day Dix brought him Lili, the neighbor Mrs. Galeazzi’s cat. Lili was a soft puff of white cotton who never did anyone any harm, not even mice, and seeing her in such a shitty state, Rose hoped at first that it was just a pigeon or something, but he knew for sure it was Lili, Mrs. Galeazzi’s great love, when he noticed the collar. Poor, wide, loving Mrs. Galeazzi, another soft puff of white cotton who never did anyone any harm. Indeed, that tattered thing clenched in Dix’s mouth was Lili, and Dix placed it ceremoniously at Rose’s feet, looking up with sweet and pleading eyes seeking praise.
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