Love War Stories

by Ivelisse Rodriguez

  Instead of telling us stories about people doing it, or pulling out a story from one of their books, they told us a ghost story. The story of boogeywoman Carmencita. We had all heard versions of the Carmencita story. Her name was the one whispered in back alleys, around campfires, and under the faithful light of slumber partygoers, way after the parents have gone to sleep. As if she’s made a pact with our mothers, she comes howling in the middle of the night. Carmencita tells ghoulish bedtime stories of love gone awry. She comes to girls and women who believe in love when they shouldn’t. But our mothers offered something new. They said they knew her. When she was alive. So they knew the truth.

  My mother pulled out a yellowed newspaper clipping. She passed it around before reading it to us, even though she knew none of us girls could read Spanish very well.

  GIRL, 15. STILL MISSING.

  May 13, 1955 (Arecibo, PR)—Carmencita Vazquez, the young girl missing for several months, has still not been found. The search has been called off, however, as pieces of her clothing and her shoes washed ashore several weeks ago on Los Negritos beach where she was last seen. Multiple theories abound, including that the girl met a terrible end. The young boys who were with her the last time she was seen alive maintain their innocence. Some speculate the girl has just run away. But, again, none of these can be substantiated. In an interview, the mayor of Arecibo, Guillermo Cardenas, stated, “I remind all citizens of Arecibo that all we can really be sure of is that this young girl has not returned home.”

  “We saw her at the beach and were probably the last ones to see her alive.” My mother uses her lips to point to the other women in the room. “Carmencita came down to the beach with her boyfriend Luis, his older brother who worked in the United States, and two of their cousins from Rio Piedras we had never seen before. Imagine, a girl unchaperoned with one, two, three, four men.” My mother throws a look my way. “They stopped and talked to us for a few minutes. Then we didn’t see them the rest of the night. The next day there is all this talk that she’s missing, can’t be found, her mother’s worried, thinks Carmencita ran off.” My mother paused to inhale/exhale from her cigarette. She did this constantly. Start. Stop. Smoke.

  “All kinds of gossip. Screams heard. Nobody knew what where. Sand poured down her mouth. Raped by each boy. Two boys on top of her at once. Beat up like a man. On and on they went. There were so many. Then the worst rumor: Luis had set her up.”

  My mother said that months after these stories, girls began to hear Carmencita’s screams by the beach. She started appearing to women before wedding nights, before third dates, second dates, first dates, and before quinces. She told these women and girls her story and as the years went on, she had so many tales, so much hurt to pass on to other generations of girls.

  My mother finished by crushing her cigarette and looking at each of us in the eye.

  As girls in elementary school we used to say to each other, “Carmencita’s going to get you.” It was a game to us. But as we got older, we heard this story less, so we became more concerned that boys wouldn’t be able to get us, not about some boogeywoman.

  “See, if she hadn’t been out . . .” one mother began and the rest continued.

  “. . . with those boys . . .”

  “I’m sure they were guilty . . .”

  “I had to walk by the boyfriend’s house every day. He didn’t even seem sorry . . .”

  They all talked over each other, forgetting for several minutes—lost in the haze of the past constrictions they were passing on to us—that we were there.

  “You remember how fast he was after Migdalia . . .”

  “Didn’t stop to mourn Carmencita . . .”

  “Still lives in Arecibo today. Nothing ever happened to them . . .”

  “¡Ve cómo los hombres engañan las mujeres!”

  My mother had the windows open, but we sat scrunched in between them, so all I felt was an intense heat. I surveyed the six women in the room—most of them our mothers. They came out in their housedresses, stretch pants, oversized T-shirts, and hair dyed a “Boricua bronze,” as we liked to call their particular hair color. Looking at them, spreading in their seats like melted ice cream . . . no wonder our fathers left. I mean at first I was on her side. I really was. But over the past few years, my mother had morphed into someone I could never understand. Didn’t want to know.

  “But this is what our mothers taught us, and this is what we want you to learn: her boyfriend wasn’t just some cualquiera. He was someone we all thought was kind to her. The person who betrayed her was someone she knew, not someone she suspected would hurt her. Of all the rumors we heard, that was the worst one.

  Like you, we didn’t listen to our mothers. We only paid attention to the first part of the Carmencita story, the sex part, but we didn’t heed the love part. Don’t ever be that stupid. Don’t ever trust a man.”

  They told us that we must not live like Carmencita, that we should stay away from men (until an appropriate age of course) or they would be the cause of our destruction. Didn’t we want to marry in white? Be good girls? Make our mothers happy?

  Arrows from under our skirts. Polishing our marble. Warriors scalping hearts. This is what our mothers wanted.

  I discerned the looks on my friends’ faces after our mothers dismissed us from their meeting. “God, I can’t believe them. Telling us that story. I mean, why don’t they focus on how fucked up those boys were?” I said.

  The girls were mute.

  “Why would they blame her? Basically, it was like she was stupid for trusting those boys and then she gets raped and killed. That’s not fair,” I continued.

  I glanced at my friends again. They were still silent.

  “I mean, where’s the proof that he set her up? She didn’t do anything wrong by loving Luis. That could have been any of us.”

  “I never believed that story, but, I mean, they had a newspaper article. What if Carmencita is for real? I mean, none of us have really been in love, so what if she does come to people who are?” Baby Ruthie asked.

  I sighed. “Come on. That’s just a legend. Do you believe in the tooth fairy too?”

  “Okay, well even if that isn’t true, it is true that this girl disappeared. And just think about how our fathers left. What if that’s the way they all are? What if that’s all we have to look forward to?” Alexa asked.

  “Listen, our mothers weren’t always like this.” I tried to emulate my mother’s booming voice as I dramatically strode around the room as we had all seen her do at the height of her fervor. “They were happy once. Things change. I assure you that if they had new boyfriends now, they would feel differently.”

  I knew their stories, heard them. When I was younger, before the meetings, the newly single or unmarried women clamored around our house and said things like, “I’ll die without him, without his love.” Because I never saw them flail and expire, I always assumed it was because their relationships had been maintained in some way. By the time I knew people didn’t literally die from love, my father left my mother and I saw how she died.

  “Just think about how you’ve felt every time you’ve even just liked a boy. Remember how that feels, then imagine what love must be like,” I said.

  I noticed their faces change, open up a bit to let my ideas in, every love/like sensation they had ever felt came flooding back to them, soaking their resistance, drenching their fear, washing the boogeywoman away.

  Seizing the moment, I asked, “What do our mothers want the most?”

  Everyone looked around, but no one answered.

  “I’m confused. I don’t know what they want. Why do they even want us to get married?” Ruthie said.

  My sister Betsy, a bored graduate student on break, popped in and said leisurely, “You know, they’re traditional, there are still some things they can’t shake. I mean it would take a whole other revolution before they get to that point.”

  I nodded my head, but Betsy kept spitting these random comme
nts at us, some of which we understood and some that we didn’t.

  “Yeah, and they want us to keep our legs closed,” Alexa finally ventured.

  “Or they don’t want us to get felt up by boys in my hallway,” Yahira said, and the girls laughed.

  I gave her a dirty look and tried to not join them. “They want us to get married. And today, we will swear we will never get married.”

  “Are you serious?” Yahira questioned.

  “Yeah,” Ruthie said, but really asked.

  “You’re crazy,” Alexa said.

  Betsy smirked.

  I glanced around the room at the faces of the girls who had mothers who believed the same stuff as mine. Did my mother have such a hard time with her cohort of women?

  “Well, why don’t you explain more, Rosie,” Betsy suggested.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Well, what I mean is that, above all, they want us to get married, but I think instead we should focus on falling in love.” The atmosphere changed greatly. With more confidence, I continued, “They want us to marry and not believe, but I think we should believe and not marry.”

  “That makes sense,” Yahira piped in and the rest of the girls nodded in agreement.

  We started a war. It was a communal effort. I, along with my friends, went down and wrote poetic verses. It was our offering; we did not want Carmencita to be a hungry ghost for all eternity. Chased by the furies, whipped for eternity for being a whore. No, for being a woman. We took turns reciting our poem each night to all those who would listen. Hoping to recruit others who would not applaud her destruction but who would see the wrong in it. In the poem, we rewrote her story.

  The kids gathered around me as I read and the news traveled quickly from porch to porch.

  “That Garcia girl is up to it again,” they murmured from lip to ear out to the four corners of our world.

  But while I stood fighting for human justice, my mother crept up to me. A great silence ensued and I was fooled into believing I had gained the noble art of persuasion.

  “Niña, what are you doing!” she bellowed in Spanish.

  She loomed over me with her housedress on, hair pulled back into a tight Victorian bun, hands on her hips, absolutely ferocious. She snatched our poem and ripped it into two, four, six, eighty, thirty, forty million, zillion pieces, and it spread in the wind like cremated ashes. She marched me home, but I kept my head up as we walked by the neighborhood women perched on their porches who awaited my appearance. I didn’t even bother to look at these women, even though they rumbled, rattled, and hoofed. The fact that they were out there let me know that I had become my mother’s equal.

  But when we got home, my mother thrashed out her words, letting them bounce off the walls. She would not have this, love is a farce, men do nothing but beat and trample on women and so help her God no daughter of hers was going to turn out to be low-life basura de la calle. So she beat me, telling me all the while that this was the way men would beat me. And for each stroke there was a story. She took me through history, through all the ages telling me about the plight of las mujeres.

  In ancient Greece, Penelope waited, weaving for a man who went out into the world and had a helluva time fighting the mighty Cyclopes and the Lestrygonians and shacking up with a different woman in every port. Then there was Julia who lamented over Don Juan, gave up her life, her social standing, all the comforts of the aristocracy, for mere sex. Even the Romantic poet couldn’t make this romantic. After all, her only lot in life was to love again and be again undone.

  “No more victims,” my mother finally whispered.

  But the stories kept pouring forth, even through my delirium.

  The next day at school, though, I rose in esteem in the eyes of my friends. I felt the shift from harebrained girl to leader. I claimed my place among them, confident I could lead them forward. From then on, it was possible to get them to do anything. And from there, our weekly battles ensued. We read about other revolutionaries: Sor Juana, Erica Jong, Julia de Burgos, Sandra Cisneros, Ché, Fidel, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords. We put on berets, puffed out our hair. Wore leather jackets. Donned sunglasses. We even came up with a ten-point plan to keep us organized. We started a newspaper, passed out leaflets, made up chants, gave speeches, had consciousness-raising sessions with the other girls in our neighborhood, in our schools. We were cohesive, we yelled, we marched, and every Saturday until we went to college, we rallied against our mothers.

  At our height, we heard about storms of girls bursting into their mothers’ meetings and pouring out into the streets. And even though it was rare for us to meet any of these other girls, we were filled with hope, awe, and bravado that we had been able to accomplish these feats. By the end of it, we became heroes, and surpassed our mothers in stature. Nonetheless, I believe they looked forward to the fighting because we raised their profile. They were able to spread their word because we spread ours.

  But now, our war is over.

  I wake up surrounded by my friends. I had fallen asleep in my mother’s living room.

  Yahira has taken my place among the girls. “We want to talk to you,” they might as well say in unison.

  I’m too tired to fight, plus Alexa has blocked the doorway, so I feebly nod my head. “What’s up?” I say in an overly chipper voice.

  “We want to tell you our stories.”

  I want to roll my eyes, but I feel like these furious girls might smack me down. “Fine, tell me your sad, sad tales.”

  “You know, when Hugo walked out on me, Rosie, for the first time, I felt what your mother felt.”

  Punch one. The last bit of sleep rolls off of me. “I doubt that. You would compare yourself to that woman?”

  “Yeah, I would.”

  “How can you even say that?”

  “Rosie . . . I wish I could explain what it feels like to have someone leave you. It’s like someone ripped out your heart. Stomped on it, bruised it all up, and shoved it back into your chest.”

  “This happened one time, and all of a sudden what we believed in and fought for just disappeared?”

  “Yeah, Rosie. Once is enough.”

  All the girls nod in agreement.

  Yahira continues, “For almost a year he told me he loved me. One day, he just changes his story. You’re watching marble crack, Rosie. Something you thought was so solid, isn’t.” Yahira sits down, exhausted.

  Ruthie picks up, “Everything, including me—especially me—he drops. And he moves to Alaska. Moved me out of his life so easily.” She shakes her head. “And that’s probably how your mom felt when your father left.”

  I stare at Ruthie hard. But I don’t say anything. I just listen.

  Alexa finishes off, “It’s pathetic. I stalk the phone and will him to call, but he doesn’t. One day he loved me, the next he won’t speak to me, and there is just no way I could ever make sense of that. I feel like I’m banging on this door. I can see him but he just refuses to open. So, I think I know what your mother felt when your father x-ed her out of his life—confused, lonely, like I’m spinning off a cliff.”

  Yahira then speaks, “We don’t expect you to understand, but we wanted to tell you.”

  “You don’t want to hear what I have to say?”

  “No, we know what you’ll say, and this is not about you anymore. Think about what we said instead.”

  “No, I’m going to state my piece too. I never said love was easy, but I wanted us to believe in it because I thought it could be a balm on future hurt and make us better people. To be so cold, to be so joyless, to be like our mothers . . . I didn’t want us to be them. I mean, no, I wasn’t in a relationship, and maybe that’s what allowed me to keep believing in love. Maybe you won’t always find the love you are looking for in a relationship, so I say, separate those two things. Are they really the same thing?”

  “In the end, Rosie, they are the same thing because that is where we get love. So until we find a different mode of loving, love is going to cont
inue to suck.” They get up to go, but as they walk by my mother’s bookcase, Yahira turns around and delivers her coup de grâce: “We didn’t even need a boogeywoman.”

  “Betsy, can you believe these traitors?” I had tried to talk to my friends again yesterday, but they refused to listen to me. Baby Ruthie called me quixotic. (Me? How did she think she got her name?) Angry Alexa said I didn’t know shit about shit. And Yahira said I was Jane Eyre delusional and didn’t live in the world that she and the girls lived in. Then. Then, they said that absolutely, under no conditions, would they come out to war, and stomped away.

  “Rosie, they’re hurt. What do you expect from them?”

  “To get up and start fighting again.”

  “Like they have reason to. Rosie . . . please. The problem is that you don’t know how they feel. Maybe you need to go find a boyfriend, have him break your heart, then come back and tell me how you feel.”

  “Ha. Very funny. How come no one sees my side?”

  “Cause as far as everyone is concerned, you’re wrong.”

  “Okay, can you just be a big sister and tell me how I can fix this?”

  “Yeah, I have the magic answer. See their side of it. Seriously.”

  My father. El Malo.

  He looks thinner than I remembered, but I haven’t seen him too often over the years. He has dishes in the sink and shuffles around the apartment in his house slippers. His black skin that used to be firm now folds on his cheeks. His short brown afro has sporadic gray hairs and he has started smoking again. Something he had always joked that he had given up for my mother and her love. When he sees me looking at his lit cigarette, he reminds me of the time I was eight, and I had pleaded with my uncle to give up smoking the day after someone came to school and told us of its dangers. My father laughs now and tousles my hair like I am eight again.