When I arrived, I put my suitcase down inside the front door, thinking suddenly: gardenias. The front path needs a hedge of gardenia. In the meantime a bottle of good wine, a gift from a friend with a vineyard, had broken in my luggage and everything was flooded with wet sweetness, the smell of must. I didn’t want to admit to myself that this was a disaster; I told myself it was almost worth the damaged clothes, to smell the old grapes fermented in the climate of a life that had gone. And new clothes could easily be bought; buying new clothes would be an additional pleasure.
Small trees grew in the courtyard. In spring their leaves came, brownish and transparent at first, then broadening, quite quickly, into solid green. I thought of cicadas bursting from their shells, their wings elongating, turning hard in the sun. The courtyard was a sun trap. I began to make a garden. Someone I knew bought a block of land with a derelict orchid house. I asked to see it before it was demolished. Inside I found poor makeshift treasures: a moonflower cactus overflowing the cracked porcelain bathroom basin it had been planted in, succulents flabby from water deprivation and scabbed with old injuries. The orchids were all dead. I carried off the cactus and replanted it, I rescued the succulents, and Neil helped me to lift them from the boot of my car and position them in the courtyard. I carried water to my garden in the early morning, a long sip for every plant.
The gardenias grew tall, making a glossy, broad-leaved hedge. The painter lived on the other side of the hedge. She painted big, realist pictures that I could not afford. If the painter kept her studio windows open, if the night was warm, there was a composite scent: little gardenias and vapor from the turpentine she used to scrub down her failed canvases, cleaning up, starting, more hopefully, again. Then the painter decided that the hedge must be cut down. She was convinced that the wind carried gardenia leaves up into her gutters; she tried to persuade a local addict to clear them. The pitiful and unpaid addict was in no condition to climb a ladder, let alone work at the edge of the painter’s roof; I feared for his life.
The gardenias would have to go. And when the gardenias went, all that was left was the occasional wash of turpentine drifting in the air, saying clean up, start again.
* * *
—
When I came to the apartment with my husband, it was hard to believe that I lived there. We met our neighbors in the elevator with brief eye contact and soft greetings. We knew nothing about the neighbors, and we were not keen to learn. We were relieved to be with one another; we weren’t sociable. Months after we moved I remembered that my old dining table, then a square shape, suitable for two, was extendable. The extra leaves and the detachable handle that fitted into a delicate bolt under the ledge of the tabletop were in storage, as they had been for many years, but when I retrieved them and wound the stiff handle the top opened out, creaking, like a hidden door opening in an ancient house. I slipped in the heavy wooden leaves. Then I reversed the handle, anxiously, waiting to see if the rods that locked each leaf into its neighbor aligned. The rods slid into sockets that had been prepared for them over a century before, the handle corkscrewed for a final time, and the table was tight, whole and long enough for many guests.
We still kept to ourselves; we invited only the children to eat with us. Like myself, the table had been through fire. It may have been one of the things Neil looked at enviously, as he hung paintings in my previous house, gathering pieces of information, pretending to be a lawyer on holiday and a man with community spirit who was helping a woman establish a home.
* * *
—
Not constantly, just sometimes, I feel a sense of dread. Doesn’t everyone? Even Neil, especially Neil. His first life ended when he left his mother’s arms for the people who were going to be his new parents. He was given away. When he met his birth mother, he was in his thirties and they had nothing to say to one another. He was practicing his impersonations of the wealthy and his mother was old, stained with cigarettes, a battler from a life long past.
Those past lives. Like houses filled with breath and even laughter until the point where a key no longer fits a lock, the blond girl is left waiting tearfully by the door that no longer belongs to her lover. Her lover will shrug when he arrives and finds his key doesn’t fit, and they’ll decide to meet in hotels, or not at all. Babies are suddenly handed over, women—and by this I mean myself—fly across a continent, about to begin a long period of solitude, not realizing that that solitude will end and they are just one move away from lying on a sofa with their own hair untied, and laughing and talking softly to a man while the light fades with the traffic noise far below.
Stephanie A. Vega
We Keep Them Anyway
I KNEW HER WELL—and I barely recognized her picture in the paper. In black and white, the colorful shawl and red tablecloth looked ghoulish, the shattered glass around her, otherworldly.
I knew her before she became a sensation at the San Juan fairs. We called her Ña Meli. The woman lived in my neighborhood, in La Chacarita, before they kicked us out and built the fancy park flanking the river that they now call Costanera. It was just a bunch of cardboard boxes and corrugated metal back then. It clung to the lip of the river—muddy, smelly, filled with mosquitoes—like a howling, injured beast.
Ña Meli wrote letters at festivals and fairs. She wrote horrific letters that left you staring at the paper shaking like a leaf. She had a second-grade education and terrible handwriting, but when she wrote the letters, her handwriting changed. Sometimes she used words she didn’t even understand. Once I saw her write an entire letter in Portuguese. It was creepy, before we got used to her.
The woman arrived out of nowhere. Running from God knows what, as we all do. She built her home out of burlap, sticks, and Styrofoam—a shelter out of nothing. She was poor among the beggars.
Not a week after she arrived, Ña Meli showed up at my house and said, “I have a letter to write for you.”
I stared at her like she was crazy, which I honestly believed she was. I was trying to take a siesta on a bunk I had made out of old tires and plywood from the junkyard where I sometimes worked. I had a second job as a guard at a nightclub and had gotten in late the night before. In shorts, covered in sweat, using my T-shirt as a pillow, I was trying to catch a sliver of shade under a weathered cardboard awning.
She stood firm as if she were a government official or something, with a threadbare pink towel on her head like a turban.
“Give me a piece of paper and quinientos guaraníes,” she said.
I threw a half-eaten guava at her. Five hundred guaraníes in those days bought you an empanada and maybe even a bottle of Coca-Cola.
She shrugged.
“I guess this Fulvio guy doesn’t mean anything to you then,” she said over her shoulder as she turned and walked back down the dirt path between our houses.
That first time, after I threw the piece of fruit at her, I stayed put. I didn’t give her the satisfaction of sitting up from my nap and calling after her, much less following her, but I wanted to. How the hell did she know about my brother?
* * *
—
It goes without saying that everyone in La Chacarita was poor. Who would pay five hundred for a crazy woman to write a letter? But she would goad us with hints until curiosity got the better of us. We all resisted, as best we could, but no one ever fully walked away.
People would try to negotiate with her, but she held firm at five hundred. The letters were eerily precise. If you don’t believe in these things, you probably have your reasons, but the handwriting, the very phrasing—it was as if someone else had taken her hand.
We got used to it. We would see her running over to someone’s house to sell a letter, like her purse was on fire. She would call out and say, “So and so wants to write you a letter!” She would stand there with her plastic Bic pen and ask for paper and quinientos guaraníes.
It had to be done right then and there though, or the moment was lost. “The visitor left,” she would say. And if you didn’t have money, “Too bad.” She was disciplined, that Ña Meli; she walked away. The poor person who had denied her was left with the doubt.
Ña Meli was not that much older than me, maybe thirty when I first met her, but she acted like my grandmother. She acted like she had already been through it all and back, and she didn’t take nonsense from anyone.
It wasn’t all that frequent at first, the letter-writing. How Ña Meli made her living back then, I don’t know. But we all managed.
* * *
—
A few days after I threw that guava at her, curiosity got the better of me. I waited to see if she would come by, but eventually I walked over to her shack.
“Ña Meli,” I called in through the little window in the front.
She whistled first and then called me over from the back. She was washing clothes in a plastic bucket on a wooden plank.
“Ña Meli, about that letter.” I wasn’t sure how to go about asking her.
She wiped her hands on her shirt, a colorful man’s shirt, and said, “Watch out for the mud over there,” as she led me to a couple of stools next to her house. “There’s no way to keep this place dry…”
Once we were seated in the little patch of shade next to her house, she asked me if I had brought paper. I said I didn’t have any but I did manage to get five hundred guaraníes. I showed her the money and she smiled.
“I don’t have any paper either,” she said.
We sat there for a while, not saying anything. Swatting at flies, we followed the neighbor’s chicken with our eyes as it pecked at the dirt.
Finally, she said, “I have a pen. I’m sure we can find cardboard or something around your house. You have anything to eat?”
Ña Meli was very scrupulous. “I tell everyone,” she insisted, before she took my five hundred guaraníes, “you pay to see if someone answers. If no one does, I can’t help that.”
When we got back to my house, I gave her off-brand cola and leftover soup. She was hungry. She wrote a short note for me on a piece of cardboard, but it wasn’t from my brother. I never told anyone.
Most of the messages—and this I know firsthand as well as from her telling me—most were not of great importance. Nothing life-shattering. Most.
But she wrote lots of letters.
* * *
—
Where Ña Meli eventually made her money was at the fairs leading up to the feast day of San Juan, selling letters to adolescent girls. They came in pairs and bought letters for laughs, for the thrill of dabbling in the occult. Those kids had money to burn. Ña Meli would charge two thousand per letter outside the neighborhood, sometimes more, and people paid. She made a good living after a while.
After the first year working at San Juan fairs, people started coming to see her year-round, at the little house she had pieced together just down the dirt path from mine, and she always produced something that either delighted or horrified them. Either way, it kept them coming back.
Even fancy people came after a while. Some drove cars as far as the dirt road would allow them and then continued on by foot. A pregnant woman once paid me a thousand guaraníes to watch her car, just like that, as if I had been standing there waiting for a car to watch. I was waiting for the bus. I pocketed the money and went on my way.
* * *
—
The feast day of San Juan falls on the twenty-fourth day of June, but there are celebrations, fairs, carnivals, and processions all over the country for two or three weeks leading up to it. As soon as it gets cold we look for the traditional foods and the games with fire—pelota tatá, toro candil, things like that. Finally, on the night of San Juan proper, we burn the effigy of a man; we light a San Juan of rags and kerosene on fire and we cheer as we watch him burn.
These days it’s all very modern, and it’s harder to find the real, traditional games, but back then when Ña Meli and I started working the fairs, almost every San Juan had a real toro candil, a live bull with real fire burning on its horns, and people of faith or good drinking walked over hot coals without burning their feet. Boys waited in line to impress the girls as they climbed greasy poles for prizes and kicked the pelota tatá, a ball of cloth lit on fire.
We crossed paths frequently in the month of June. I had some experience as a mechanic and picked up work setting up the Ferris wheels that were all the rage at the time. I piled on whatever job I could get.
The whole month, Ña Meli would work at two or three different San Juan fairs every day, one after the other. She had a cardboard sign that read, “Madame Melie Labé,” but everyone knew her as “Ña Meli who writes the letters.”
At the fairs, she would set up with a red tablecloth and wear a shiny turban and a colorful tasseled shawl. As her fame grew, she invested in a stack of envelopes and letter-writing paper. Over time she added things to her stand. I have to admit it had a certain flair.
* * *
—
Ña Meli wrote me a dangerous letter once, an ugly, painful letter. The ghost was not all that literate so it was all jumbled up with terrible handwriting. Still, I knew who it was. I knew what he was trying to tell me. In truth, I had known all along. He was a small-time agitator in a forsaken town; it didn’t take much imagination to guess what happened.
When they caught my brother, a neighbor tipped me off. I left my drunk father to fend for himself and abandoned the tall bushes of yerba mate I knew he would never get around to harvesting.
As Ña Meli wrote the letter for me I thought, What good does it do me to know it was muddy after the rain and he slipped? And I told her. I said, “Ña Meli, be careful. You can’t go around writing things like this.”
She smacked me on the head with her purse and said, “Imbécil! It’s not me. They visit me.”
I didn’t know what to tell her.
“Read it if you want to, burn it if you don’t, I don’t care,” she said. “Just don’t leave it lying around, you incompetent badulaque…” She gave me another smack with her purse for good measure and continued the string of insults as she walked away.
* * *
—
Once, she found a round glass light fixture on the side of the road and brought it home on the bus. She showed it to me.
“What do you think it looks like?” she asked.
“I don’t know, a glass light fixture?” I answered.
“No, you idiot,” she said. “A crystal ball, don’t you see?” She lifted it so I could see it up close. “No?”
It did look like a crystal ball in her hands. It was a kind of white frosted glass, and I could see it getting milky or dark with the light.
“Supernatural,” I said.
She showed it to me later, after she had made a Styrofoam base for it and covered it in scraps of tinfoil. It looked like a legitimate crystal ball.
What really made her name, though, was her seal. She sealed her letters with red wax and a stamp. The stamp, I know for a fact, was a small wooden block with the letter “M” in relief. She saw it on the street one afternoon while she was running to catch the bus. She missed the bus for that stamp and had to wait another hour and a half for the next one, but she said it was worth it. She said she believed it was “sent.” I believe it was dropped by a distracted nanny hoisting some pampered baby’s bag into a fancy car. But what do I know?
The point is, she sealed her letter with her “M” in red wax, and handed it over for the person to read on their own time. Anyone could recognize one of her letters with that red “M.”
* * *
—
Ña Meli always wore a colorful turban when she worked at fairs. She took it seriously. From time to time, she would change them. She said the thing would begin to weigh on her, a
s if she had been standing for hours in a light rain.
She never told me this herself, but I heard that sometimes ugly things came to her, ugly spirits. “Bad visitors,” they called them. But she felt that, having given her word and having charged up front, she could not deny even these “bad visitors” their time. She would write down the message and seal the envelope and ask the addressee not to read it.
“Burn it,” she would say. “Don’t read it.”
Knowing that people are curious, and once they pay they want their money’s worth, she would write at the end of these letters a second warning in her own handwriting, simply stating, “Burn this. Do not keep it.”
But even then, I doubt anyone followed her instructions. Everyone wants souvenirs, even of the worst things.
* * *
—
I often saw Ña Meli in her element, sitting behind her red table with the fancy turban and her homemade crystal ball. Whenever she was at a fair, hers was, without a doubt, the longest line.
But that last San Juan season before she died, the whole month of June, she looked like she could evaporate. Like she could disappear.
There were a lot of bad letters that season—not evil spirits, but spirits who had suffered, and the suffering weighed on her. She changed her turban four or five times a day. She told me she felt like it was raining all the time.
“You don’t look good, Ña Meli,” I told her one night as we waited for the last bus back to La Chacarita.
She was carrying a heavy bag with the tablecloth, the turbans, and the crystal ball, and I offered to help her. I guess I was getting soft.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Page 35