“What’s the Dunaj?”
“The Dunaj, the Dunaj! Don’t you know it? The Dunaj is the biggest river on the planet.”
“The biggest river is the Amazon,” I said, sticking up for my own. “The Amazon that runs through where I come from. But no one thinks of plunging a girl into it to baptize her, because the piranhas would feast on her. But let’s leave it at that. Everyone has a right to think that their river is the biggest. But tell me about the second bath your blessed mother took.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think she ever told me, but there were only two, I’m sure of that, I heard her mention it a few times. She bathed my brothers and me body part by body part, feet and hands, face, ears, and neck, but she’d never put us in the bathtub, that was for lepers and the ill, according to her.”
“It’s okay, Greg,” I said, because I noticed distress in his voice, as if the memories weren’t pleasing.
It wasn’t long before I’d find out that the problem wasn’t just the mother. Greg as an adult also resisted bathing. My coworkers bragged how their husbands washed their things before doing it and then showered afterward. But that wasn’t going to be the case with me, neither before nor afterward. At that moment, of course, I couldn’t have fully known, so I just responded with the kind of consolation that entails offering someone who tells you a sad story about his life with an even sadder story about your own.
“We all have our issues,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder. “Take my Aunt Alba, Alba Nava, Leonor de Nava’s sister-in-law, aunt to my almost sisters, a rich woman with no kids who lived in an enormous house.”
“Who lived in an enormous house?”
“Alba Nava, the sister-in-law of . . . look, it doesn’t matter, a rich woman in my town. I’m from Colombia. Anyway, this Alba Nava kept her huge house very neat, with a tiled pool in between the living room and the dining room, a pool for fish, but there were no fish in it, not even water. It was empty the whole week except for Wednesdays, the day on which my half-sisters and I went with Leonor to visit Alba. Then the pool was filled, but with us three.”
“Wait, what three?” asked Greg, whose mind was always somewhere else.
“Well, us three, me and Cami and Pati Nava. Us three, the three girls, they’d put us in the pool on Wednesdays.”
“In the water, with the fish?”
“I told you, there was no water or fish. What I’m trying to tell you is that Aunt Alba made us get in there, in that empty pool, for the whole visit. So that we wouldn’t get her house dirty, capisce? When it was time to serve tea, she’d bring us hot chocolate and crackers with butter and marmalade that we had to eat there, inside the pool, being very careful that not a single crumb fell outside.”
“That’s pretty pathetic,” Greg said.
“What I’m trying to say is that it’s as awful to be too clean as it is to be dirty.”
My strategy for solace must have worked, because two weeks later, the man was proposing to me. I said yes, without even thinking about it twice, and said to myself, María Paz—only it wasn’t María Paz but my real name—you did it, and I congratulated myself with little taps on the back of my shoulder and told myself to have a nice day, pretty little María Paz, you hit the jackpot finally, you’re going to marry a gringo and become a real American, so from now on have a very nice day every fucking day of your life. The thing is that my mother had come to America but she had never become a real American. Violeta and I grew up in this country, but for us also it was as if we remained at the threshold without being able to step into that enormous and bright hall. We had arrived but we hadn’t gotten here yet. Because getting to America is not landing in Phoenix, Arizona, or Dallas, Texas, or finishing high school with honors, not even speaking English without an accent. America is hidden inside America, and to truly penetrate it, a visa is not enough and neither is a Visa card, nor a green card, nor a MasterCard. All that helps, but they don’t definitively make you a real American.
For me, Greg signified access through the big door. Finally, I’d be a hundred percent American. You know what that means as far as papers? Bolivia had been able to get a green card for herself, but they had denied them for us, her daughters. In time, she had been able to normalize Violeta’s situation with the help of the mental health institute that confirmed that the girl was autistic and could not be deported because she could not take care of herself. But I remained outside. Bolivia wanted to get me in by claiming me as a mental case also, but I refused. So I behaved normally during all the psychological exams and wasn’t diagnosed with anything. Bolivia had gotten her green card when she applied for it through proper channels, but times had changed by the time I applied, and I was denied. That’s why I had to use false papers when I began to work for the survey department of the cleaning products company. It’s easy to get papers. Maybe you’re not aware of this, but the business for false documentation is a multimillion-dollar industry in this country. The problem is if they catch you, you go straight to prison. But I was saved. My marriage to Greg would allow me to obtain the proper paperwork and give me the rights to residency and work. I was going to marry a gringo; what more could I ask for. I was going to marry all these legal rights and a white American.
Of course, later I’d discover that he was a Slovak. From Slovakia, a country that before then I did not know existed. And that, even today, I confuse with Estonia and Slovenia. Greg was born in America, of Slovak roots. His mother, the one who did not bathe, was a Slovak. Comical, if you think about it. After so much suffering about being considered a foreigner, I came to find out that if you dig a little, every American is something else, from another place, and feels nostalgia for some town in Japan, or Italy, or whatever mountain in Lebanon. Or Slovakia. As for Greg, he was most nostalgic for kapustnica, a traditional soup made from fermented cabbage, and he took great pride in making it as his mother had made it, and his grandmother and great-grandmother before that, and so on all the way back to Eve. Greg and his kapustnica, a nightmare for me, for I don’t like strange foods: scrambled eggs with surprises in them, or let’s see what the spoon scoops out on this miraculous fishing expedition, nothing worse than soups that are like the sea, turbid and full of critters. I don’t go for that. I need to know exactly what I’m eating. If it’s rice, rice, or beans, beans. My tongue is a cowardly creature that hides in its cave and is terrified of strong flavors or weird textures. All the fears that I don’t have as a person, my tongue has. I’ll do anything, except to taste something I don’t recognize. In that, we were very much alike, Greg and I. He too had a phobia of unknown and suspicious foods, but of course he didn’t think of kapustnica as such. For him, kapustnica was the thing, the queen of soups, the eighth wonder of the world. I once tried to prepare a typical Colombian dish so he’d try it, so he’d learn a little bit about where I’m from. I made him ajiaco, a traditional Bogotá-style stew with three types of potato. Well, I was able to find two of the potatoes in a market for Colombian products and substituted for the third. For our native potato, which is small, yellow, and very tasty, I used the pale and sweet Idaho, but it didn’t matter, Greg would never notice. And instead of the guascas, which is an herb we add to the stew, I put some marijuana leaves, also Colombian and easier to get here. The rest was all according to the recipe, corn from the cob, chicken, capers, heavy cream, and avocado. I got emotional cooking, tears almost welling up in my eyes; it’s a whole ceremony to cook native dishes in a foreign land, something patriotic, like singing the national anthem or raising the flag. You feel as if it is you, your ancestors, your identity that are simmering in the pot. I spent a whole Saturday getting the ingredients and all of Sunday morning making it, and even took the trouble to explain to Greg that it was a pre-Columbian dish and then had to tell him what pre-Columbian was.
“It’s something that comes from our indigenous ancestors,” I told him.
“I see,” he said. “So it’s Aztec.”<
br />
“Well, not Aztec, not really, you have to go down in the map a little further, from Central America to South America, you understand. Because although it might sound strange to you, there are three Americas: North, Central, and South—not just North, which is yours. The Aztecs are from Mexico. We Colombians are Chibchas. Me, I’m Chibcha, not Aztec. It’s not the same.”
“But almost the same,” he said.
In any case, my stew was a failure. Greg barely tasted it, a few spoonfuls and that’s it because he was overcome by a case of the hiccups. And he said offensive things that I wasn’t really expecting, me who always played along when it came to his kapustnica, which I think is atrocious but would never have said so to his face. But he, on the other hand, was the type that just blurted out any insult right in front of you, and told me that my stew was a very primitive dish. What do you think, Mr. Rose, Greg the peasant calling my things primitive.
“It’s not primitive,” I corrected him. “It’s ancestral, which is different. So have some respect. I already explained to you that this is a soup that they have been making since before Columbus, that is, from the pre-Columbian cultures, which in many ways were more advanced than the Europeans.”
“Oh yeah,” he challenged me, “tell me a single thing in which you are more advanced than the Europeans, one thing, and it’s definitely not soup. In Europe, this thing that you prepared is something very poor peasants would eat in the winter when all other foods have run out and there are only potatoes left in the cellar.”
I could have argued that potatoes are originally from the Americas, that without the Americas, his peasants could not have eaten any potatoes, but I bit my tongue so as not to get him riled up. Although I could have also asked him if he thought his crude scraps of fermented cabbage were a feast for a king. But I stopped myself. The truth was that I always stopped myself so I wouldn’t provoke him. My Greg was a calm guy, almost lethargic, but when he got worked up, he’d let loose with the biggest threat. He used it often and without much thought, as if drawing a gun: he said he’d make them take away my green card, because it was only thanks to him that they had given it to me. That kind of blackmail intimidated me. I grew meek, lowered my head, and even allowed him to say that my Colombian stew was disgusting, because in the end that’s what he really meant, that it disgusted him. I tell you, Mr. Rose, Greg was a calm person, but there were things that set him off, and the topic of food was one of them. I don’t know why food makes us so sensitive. Perhaps because it’s what we have inside, in our guts, and also what we shit, that is, what runs through us from our mouths to our assholes, what goes inside the top hole and comes out the bottom hole, what we are, to put it plainly.
Don’t worry, Mr. Rose, don’t think I’m going off on tangents again because I’m taking my time telling you these things; on the contrary, it’s a way of getting directly to the matter you are probably waiting to hear, the reason I ended up in prison in the USA. You might think that the kapustnica has nothing to do with that, but it does. It has everything to do with it; it is almost the heart of the matter. I know that you don’t know why I was imprisoned, I know because during the first class you asked us our names and nothing else; you said that what we had done or failed to do was exclusively a matter between us and the law. That’s what you said, and added that it was none of your beeswax and that we didn’t have to explain anything to you. And I’m almost getting to the matter. We’re on the right track, but let me talk about Hero a little bit first, the dog that went with us everywhere; when we were not at home, he was at work with my husband. He was crippled like Christina of that novel. His hind legs ruined like her legs, because apparently he had been used to detect plastic explosives in Alaska, where there are still independence fighters who set off bombs. And the independence fighters blew off Hero’s hind legs, so because of the accident, he got around on a little cart that Greg himself built for him, careful to make it as light as possible and attach to him so that it wouldn’t scratch off his hair anywhere. Hero’s martyred parts fit snugly in the cart that he pulled with his front legs as if nothing, and I never saw a dog more agile, more full of joy, or more excited fetching a ball, even if we threw it a hundred times. All in all, he was a dog like any other, normal size, I imagine, before they turned him into half a dog, with a coat that was black and yellow with a little white near his snout, and we adored him. The Association for the Protection of Retired Police Dogs had decorated him for canine services to the homeland and turned him over for adoption to good-guy Greg, who kept the name the dog had had in Alaska, although I always thought that we should change it. I wasn’t convinced that our Hero had fought on the side of the good guys. I suspected that the fighters for Alaskan independence had some just claims, like the brothers of my Puerto Rican friend Alissette who fought for the cause of Puerto Rico Libre. And anyway, I preferred a name without so much history for Hero, such as Tim or Jack, or maybe Lucero, the name of the Navas’ toy poodle.
For twelve hours every day, from eight in the morning till eight at night, Greg and Hero were stationed at the entrance of the building where we worked, checking bags, asking for documentation, giving passes, always very cordial and easygoing, Greg and his little dog. The little dog and the cart. And I, who had worn myself out with some tormented and unpleasant love affairs earlier, told myself, María Paz, muchacha, it’s time to think about things a little differently. This Slovak is no Adonis, nor is he a real American, but it would be enough that he is as loyal as his dog. Who was Greg really? For me, always an enigma. A good cop? But how good, I never knew. He swore that he wasn’t a racist, but he was. He’d see a white woman with a black man and claim that she must be a prostitute. And if he saw a black man driving an expensive car, he said it was likely stolen.
And yet, he married me, a dark-skinned Latina. In church, in a wedding that was lacking nothing. There was a priest and altar boys, Madonna lilies, white roses, a cake with three tiers, various canapés, a hot and cold buffet that included lobster, a bride’s dress and a veil with a crown of orange blossoms, and even a cubic zirconia ring that looked like a diamond. Because that’s how Greg had wanted it. I had never been very religious, but he was so Catholic that he even hung a crucifix over our marriage bed. He paid for everything with part of his pension funds, the church, the reception, the honeymoon in Hawaii, and even bought a royal-blue tuxedo with a bow tie and a tight-fitting, wine-colored cummerbund to hide his belly, if you know what I mean. The wedding dress also came out of Greg’s pocket, and my sister, Violeta, who was to be the maid of honor, her dress, and even the bridesmaids, four of my coworkers, their dresses. Because Bolivia didn’t live to see it, I had asked Violeta to be my maid of honor. But in the end she didn’t do it. At the last moment, she decided not to come to the wedding, and left us holding a long, almond-colored shantung dress that we had had made for her to pair with mine, which wasn’t shantung but embroidered and also almond-colored. But Violeta’s case is a whole other chapter and requires its own explanations, so it’d be best if I talk about her later; just keep in mind from this point that she’s the heart of the story. For now, I’ll only say that I’d have rather been married in a more simple ceremony, definitely a more private one. Don’t think that I was feeling like one of Charlie’s Angels strolling on the beaches of Hawaii with an old fatso like Greg.
Our relationship began according to the law because that’s the way he wanted it. And it suited me, after all, because after so much anguish and effort I was finally going to become an American citizen. Put yourself in my shoes. From the moment that my mother passed away, I was the only person who cared for Violeta, and they could deport me at any moment. Now do you understand why I almost fell to my knees the night Greg and I met at Applebee’s to go to the movies afterward, and he pulled a black velvet box out of his pocket, with white felt on the inside, like a miniature coffin, and in it was the cubic zirconia set in white gold? It wasn’t from Tiffany’s, Mr. Rose, as Holly Golight
ly would have wanted it, but for me it was as if it were. Always generous, my poor Greg, he had his savings. At home, we never lacked food or services, and after we were married, we always paid the rent ahead of time. Not that it was much. They’d have had some gall to charge us more, given the depressed neighborhood and the depressing building. We’re talking about one of those “white flight” zones. It had been a long time since anybody saw a white face around there. My Greg was like a museum piece amid so much brown and black, mestizo and mulatto. The truth was that even though Greg was the white one, he always felt like a fly in a puddle of milk, and he couldn’t wait for the day we would leave. He was just waiting for the rest of his pension to kick in so we could get the fuck out of there to that town of poor white folk where he had his house, where the fly in the milk would be me. What I’m trying to tell you was that my neighborhood was in a seriously bad state. A few years before, suffice it to say, the owner of our building had tried to burn it down to collect insurance and would have gotten his way had the firemen not put out the fire in time. To this day, no one lives on the first floor, the walls still blackened. But my apartment is different. Freshly painted, cozy, with all the necessary appliances, blinds in good condition, and a white rug. I always kept my apartment gleaming. Or as Bolivia would say, like a silver cup. And Greg lent a hand, with his toolbox always ready to fix anything. The last thing he had been able to do, my poor old man, was to widen the barbecue on the so-called roof terrace so that we could fit more burgers and corn on the cob on it, a nice detail on his part. A rather useless detail, though, because we never really invited anyone, except Sleepy Joe, who invited himself. But that we even had a roof terrace with a barbecue—tell me if that’s not the “American way”? The terrace also had a splendid view and with binoculars we could even see the Empire State Building. But what you saw with the naked eye was our neighborhood, not a great sight, as I said, a rather depressed area, but at least we had a barbecue. Although we never got to try the new larger version.
Hot Sur Page 21
