Come Together, Fall Apart

by Cristina Henriquez

  Beyond knowing that, finally, the invasion had started, it was hard to tell what was happening.

  “lt’s all coming down on El Chorillo,” Reina said after a while, signaling to where the red haze of so many fires could be seen in the distance. El Chorillo was an old neighborhood filled with wood-frame buildings that had been built at the beginning of the century. I wondered why they had started there. Maybe they were taking the neighborhoods one by one. Maybe ours would be next.

  Lights popped on inside houses up and down the block. Our neighbors started appearing on their patios. Everyone was asking what was going on and no one had the answer. From two doors down a man in an untied bathrobe came around and told everyone that he had been listening to the government radio station and that they had advised everyone to stay in their houses.

  “Then why are you out?” Tito yelled, but the man just shrugged.

  My father went inside to call Flor. Miraculously, the phone lines were still working. But what she reported was worse than what we were experiencing. People were prowling around, breaking into cars, knocking on doors and threatening to come in for “inspections.” In the midst of the commotion, every troublemaker had been loosed, feeling they had the right to terrorize anyone. On Flor’s block, the neighbors had set up a patrol with a few of the men gathering weapons—machetes, bats, pipes—and standing guard so that everyone else could go back in their houses without worrying that anyone would break in. One of the men was equipped with a megaphone and was supposed to shout if there was trouble they couldn’t contain. Flor sounded scared, my father told us. She hardly had any toilet paper or any groceries, either, and no one knew when it would be safe enough to go out again or when the stores would be open. My father instructed her to barricade her doors with furniture and to stay clear of windows. He promised, as long as the phone lines were working, to call her every hour.

  After standing on the patio for a while, hearing the same explosions in the distance over and over, it became clear that our house wasn’t in immediate danger. Occasionally, a helicopter or jet flew overhead and the sound of machine-gun fire erupted. I wanted to know what was happening everywhere else, but even after my mother was asleep in the shower and I turned on the television, there was only a fixed screen with a picture of the United States Department of Defense seal on it. I thought about Ubi at his house, his mother at the hospital, Sofia in her room, the worker at the post office, our old house, my school, the Intercontinental Miramar Hotel, my favorite pizza restaurant, Napoli. Sometimes I imagined it all destroyed, crumbled, people buried in the rubble. And sometimes I saw it all standing strong, the fighting something that was happening in our city but somehow much farther away, or at least more contained, enough so that it wouldn’t touch us.

  There was no rest that night. I would doze off for a few seconds before being startled awake again by another boom or by fear. All through the night, because I couldn’t stay still, I saw Reina and Tito and my father wordlessly wandering around the house. We felt compelled to stay alert in case something happened. We bumped into each other, we peered out the windows, and only my mother woke the next morning rested.

  The looting began as soon as it was light. Everyone was taking advantage. People were walking down our street carrying mattresses and office furniture and plastic bags filled with clothes. Our neighbor from across the street told us a story about a man who had gone to an apparel factory and taken hundreds of socks. They were beautiful fine-stitched navy blue trouser socks. The problem, though, was that when the man got home and dumped them on the bed to show his wife, he realized he had taken only the left sock for each pair. The lefties and the righties were probably separated into different bins but he didn’t know. Our neighbor laughed immodestly when she told us this story, slapping her thigh and showing all her teeth. She told the same story all day to anyone passing by and all day I heard her full and billowing laughter, a sound discordant with the blast of machine guns and the clamor of people looting only blocks away.

  My father continued to call Flor every hour. She said that she had seen three Dignity Battalions steal a car in front of her house and that shed heard at least two women on her block had been raped. “Where is the military?” she kept asking. She was hysterical crying. At midday, she reported that things were calming slightly and that she was going to have condensed milk and rice for lunch. I heard my father tell Reina that Flor had asked him if he thought her father had anything to do with this. I knew Flor was adopted but I didn’t know the full story then. The question only made sense to me much later.

  The sound of gunfire was sporadic during the day and increasingly, huge bomber airplanes, sending a heavy, dragging noise reverberating through the air, flew over us. No one went to work. We all stayed near the house, stepping onto the patio sometimes, and flipping through the static on the radio, trying to glean any new information. We kept hearing the same thing: Stay indoors, don’t go near windows, stay tuned. I felt like an animal in a cage: My space was big enough for me to walk around, but I was restless and I kept coming back to the same spots—the front windows, the patio—to see if there was anything new. There wasn’t. It was always the same faces out on the street, always the same small explosions in the distance. Ubi called in the afternoon, but I didn’t want to talk to him.

  My father had answered the phone. When he hung up, he looked at me sternly and said, “Now is not the time, Ramón.”

  “For what?”

  “To deny your friends.”

  I shrugged him off but in truth I felt conflicted. I knew he was right but if it had been any other day, I would have felt justified in my anger toward Ubi. He had stolen the first girl I loved.

  Ubi and I had been friends since primary school. We were paired together on a science project, dissecting worms. Ubi and his mother had just moved to the city after Ubi’s father left them. Almost all the boys in the class were eager about the dissections—we had all been talking about it for a week—but when it came time to do it, I watched Ubi slice down the length of the worm’s body with a steady hand and, totally unflustered, scrape out the different organs one by one, according to our work sheet. All the other boys were goofing around, poking at the worms, rolling them back and forth from one partner to the other. Our teacher was still talking about the first incision when Ubi raised his hand to announce we were done. It wasn’t so much that he impressed me: At first I kept asking to be his partner because he did all the work for me. We talked, though, too, and over time we became real friends, eating together at lunch, riding go-carts on the weekends, getting into trouble. I couldn’t remember a time, ever, when I’d been angry with him. Not until now.

  Later in the evening, I considered calling him back, but after lingering by the phone for a few seconds, I climbed into bed instead, hoping to find some rest.

  DECEMBER 21, 1989

  My father went to work. My mother pleaded with him not to leave, but he told her he had to.

  “All that gunfire is hitting someone out there,” he said.

  I didn’t want him to go either. “What if it hits you?” I asked.

  “There’s always heaven,” he replied. “You told me what it would be like.”

  The color drained from my mother’s face and she hit my father’s shoulder. “Don’t say that, Francisco!”

  My father took her face in his hands and pulled her to him, kissing her right on the mouth in a way I wasn’t sure my mother had been kissed in years.

  “I’ll be okay,” he whispered, their noses touching. Then he left. He had to walk the three kilometers to work because none of the buses or taxis were running. I watched him start out on our street, zigzagging through the people scurrying with more stolen goods—today, apparently, a hat factory had been raided, along with a supermarket, metal carts and all. My mother went back into the shower stall and closed the door, emerging from the bathroom for brief moments, only when the rest of us needed to get in, waiting for ten hours until he came home.

 
That night, we sat at the kitchen table, my father telling us what he had seen. Reina munched on pork rinds since there was little else in the house for dinner. I hadn’t eaten much of anything in two days, but I hadn’t thought much of eating either.

  My father said he had had to duck a few times to avoid sniper fire from various apartment buildings. “People don’t even know what they’re shooting at,” he said. “Everyone has lost their mind.”

  The hospital where he worked was a disaster. Because there was no public transportation running, people had been calling for ambulances when all they really wanted was a ride somewhere. The result was a shortage of ambulances for those who actually needed them. Relatives and friends were walking in carrying their loved ones, many of whom died by the time they got there because the trip had taken so long. He told us about one woman who had walked in with her husband in a wheelbarrow. He had been standing guard outside his corner store and a van had rolled by, the barrel of a shotgun sticking out the window, and he had been shot twice in the legs. Reina instinctively touched her hands to her thighs and winced. My mother, as usual, was quiet.

  “Did you hear anything,” Tito asked, “about what’s going on? Are they close to getting him? You know, things like that.”

  My father shook his head. “It’s too hard to tell. Everyone says something different. Maybe I’ll find out more tomorrow.”

  I saw my mother cast her eyes up toward my father, questioning him.

  “I have to go back,” he said to her. “There was hardly enough help as it was.”

  My mother kept staring.

  “Mariella, they need someone.”

  I could tell it was difficult for my mother to argue. My father had always had a noble and generous spirit. I imagined that was one of the reasons she married him. It made sense that my mother was scared, but in the end, as she always would, she trusted my father to the core of her bones and let him do the things he needed to without standing in his way.

  “I asked around about Ubi’s mother,” my father said, looking at me. “She had surgery, but it went well. The doctors weren’t sure whether to go through with it because she was scheduled for the day when everything started happening around here. They were afraid the electricity would go out in the middle of it. But I heard she was very weak so they went ahead early. She’ll probably be released soon.”

  I had forgotten entirely about Ubi’s mother being in the hospital and a surge of guilt pushed through me. I felt ashamed then at not having called him back yesterday. I could tell my father wanted me to feel that way.

  I phoned Ubi’s mother the next morning. The first thing she asked me, of all things, was if I was okay. I told her I was and that we were all thinking about her, my mother doing special prayers. I heard voices in the background.

  “Ubaldo’s here. You want to talk to him?”

  But I heard Sofia, too. I knew it was her. I could imagine them sitting side by side in his mother’s white box of a room, entertaining her and laughing. I could imagine Sofia with her thin fingers turning down the blanket, trying to be helpful. I didn’t know what she’d be wearing, since I’d only ever seen her in a swimsuit, but I saw her face perfectly, her clear olive skin and a smile that exposed one of her incisors overlapping the tooth next to it.

  “That’s okay,” I said finally. “You should spend time with him. I can talk to him later.”

  I didn’t know whether she was aware that Ubi and I hadn’t talked for almost a week now. But if she was, she didn’t let on. She simply thanked me for calling and told me to tell my mother that she appreciated the prayers. I promised I would pass along the message and hung up.

  DECEMBER 24, 1989

  I had lost ten pounds. A neighbor brought over a plastic bag full of stale rolls, offering us a few. I ate them happily. The cafeteria at the hospital had been closed for days, and people had already raided the refrigerators and storage closets, but my father managed to bring home some packets of sugar and ketchup and mayonnaise that he laid on the counter for us. We got creative. We mixed coconut juice from the coconut tree in our front yard with sugar and ice. We crumbled our last sleeve of Maria cookies onto a piece of browned lettuce and sprinkled it with beads of sticky rice and flakes of red pepper. We combined beans, Tabasco, and water until it formed some kind of stew. Reina and I performed a mock cooking show to pass the time, speaking in the affected voices of cooking show hosts and indiscriminately combining ingredients to see what we could come up with next.

  The government radio station had been struck and our small black radio offered nothing but a steady buzz. I kept thinking about Sofia and about Ubi, wondering if they were okay. From what I could see, they probably were. The smoke and thunderous booms were concentrated mostly in one area, far from Ubi’s house. Every day I thought about calling Ubi but something always stopped me. It was an immature idea, I suppose, that if I didn’t talk to him for long enough, he would come to understand how upset I was and, knowing that, would have no choice but to stop being with Sofia. If he was a real friend, I kept thinking, he would understand. Even then, I didn’t want to admit what I probably knew, which was that Ubi was better for Sofia than I was. My young ego focused on the fact that my voice was deeper than Ubi’s and that, therefore, that I was more desirable, that Ubi had never even kissed a girl before so he would make a terrible boyfriend. I just walked around the house feeling alternately sorry for myself because of having my heart broken, mad because of being betrayed by my best friend, grateful because in all the chaos Sofia’s postcard wouldn’t be delivered for a long time, and anxious because after the invasion was finally over she would learn how I felt.

  My mother desperately wanted to go to Christmas Eve Mass. She had been talking about it all day. There was a church just down the street from the entrance to our neighborhood, she said. In the morning, Reina declared she was not going anywhere.

  “We can have Mass here,” she said defiantly.

  “Look who won’t leave the house now,” Tito taunted her.

  “This is a different situation! People are getting killed out there.” She waved her hands around in the air.

  Tito shook his head. “No, mami. Same situation, different stage.”

  “You haven’t been outside much either,” Reina said.

  Tito laid a hand to his oiled hair. “But I’ll go tonight. No problem.”

  Reina crossed her arms and muttered a hrmph.

  In the end, we all went. Even Flor met us there. The Mass was at five o’clock and when it was time to leave, my mother—dressed in a gold suit jacket and black skirt, her dark hair washed and loose, curling around her face—led us out the door as if she had been going for walks every day on these streets and today was just one more. Outside, the smell of smoke wafted through the air and stung my nostrils. Along the pavement, papers were strewn everywhere, bunched up near gutters and matted down. We passed two dead dogs, still in the middle of the road. I don’t know why, but I expected to see Christmas decorations, lights and plastic pictures of Jesus up in people’s windows. Even though we hadn’t done anything about Christmas, I somehow thought that other people would have. Maybe I thought that if I got far enough from our house, I would find the Panama I had always known. But what I saw all the way to the church was the same as what I had been seeing from my one vantage point for days—gray sidewalks; over-tall grass and weeds; bits of trash everywhere; everyone on their patios, staring out at the street with absent owl eyes. The invasion had given us the veneer of sameness. We were one people going through hell.

  The church echoed when we walked in. In the front, a pianist tapped the first few notes of each song he would play that evening. The church was a cavern, much larger and darker than our old church. A wooden balcony ran around our heads, occupied by two standing fans. Yellowed glass pendant lamps hung from heavy iron chains, casting dim light over the long dark pews. We all shuffled in, dipping our fingers into what holy water hadn’t evaporated, and slid into a pew near the front. Besides
the pianist and us, only one couple and an older woman were there. My mother knelt and prayed, keeping her eyes on the crucifix that hung behind the altar and pressing her rosary to her lips. She seemed in command here, in her element, while the rest of us sat uncomfortably in the pew—Reina taking quick looks over her shoulder at the open doors; Tito flipping through the missal, making an awful crinkling noise with the tissue-thin pages; my father staring solemnly at his hands; Flor writing out a check for the church to leave during the collection; and me running my fingernail along the grooves in the pew where the wood had weathered and cracked.

  Another older woman came in just before the Mass started. She walked up to the woman already seated and poked her with her cane.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. She was practically shouting and her frail voice bounced off the walls of the church.

  “It’s Christmas Eve,” the woman replied, shouting back, and I realized that neither of them could hear very well.

  “It’s too dangerous for an old woman like you,” the woman with the cane said and laughed. She was missing almost all her teeth, and her gums, brown and purple like a bruised plum, flashed for an instant.

  “Ah.” The other woman waved her hand. “I wasn’t even supposed to live this long. If they’re going to get me, let them come get me.”

  Her friend nodded and sat down next to her.

  Flor started crying. “A woman in my building died of a heart attack from the shock of the invasion,” she told my father through sobs. He put his arm around her shoulder.

  Reina looked at her, disgusted. “So delicate,” she said. “Your name suits you.”