The Colour Black

by Maia Walczak

  After a while I get tired of listening and the people’s voices all merge into one hum hum hummm and their heads turn into the squawking heads of birds. And there are some children and they turn into all sorts of animals, running around the room. And then there are some babies too and they are clinging to their mamis except they don’t look like babies anymore because they are now sloths hanging from trees. And I can see a mist dancing around us all and I smile to myself as I fall asleep.

  Alma: Tuesday 4 November 1997

  The biggest problem with the forest is that beneath the magical swirl of mist and birds, the canopy’s orchestra of sounds and the rich damp soil that gives life to it all, there lives a reservoir of oil. For millions of years it’s been there, living peacefully, secretly and undiscovered, and its existence has never been a problem. But now, they say, the forest is an unnecessary luxury. In the words of a close friend of certain US government officials, our forest has, up until now, been ‘an unprofitable waste of space’. According to him it has a wealth of potential (what he actually means is a potential for wealth) and it should be exploited… by none other than his company.

  No consultation is made with the people who live in the forest – neither by the oil company nor the Mexican government – who have signed away the forest so quickly and secretively that nobody even knew it was under threat. No information has been given about how much of the forest will be affected. In fact, nobody knows anything at all, except that it now belongs to someone, and that someone doesn’t see the forest in quite the same way as we do.

  Drilling will begin soon. If history is anything to go by, the indigenous communities living in the forest will be disregarded and removed. We discuss everything in our emergency meeting in the classroom: complex biodiverse ecosystems, the media, protest, compensation. I’m amazed at how many people have turned up at such short notice; it’s a positive sign, but today is a sad day for us all.

  As I walk back home with Silvia I feel grief-stricken. I’m already planning my next article. I have a title and an idea swirling round in my head. Mexico: The US’s Back Garden will be about our forest and the US’s involvement in the environmental destruction of Mexico over the years. I’m going to send it to every newspaper here, in the US, the UK, all over the world. This story needs to reach an international audience.

  I am ready to fight.

  *

  And so my mother’s devastation turned her into a woman of non-stop action. She was the busiest I had ever seen her. She would do anything for ‘our forest’, we all knew it. Even the governments knew it.

  But how careful you have to be if the things you passionately care about are at odds with those with money and power.

  The Colour Black

  Alma: Friday 14 November 1997

  I’ve done it. I’ve finally finished writing this damned article. I should have done this two weeks ago, when the news was fresh, but it’s all been such chaos, there’s been no time. If all goes to plan I may actually have some time to do other things today, like the laundry. Silvia’s run out of clean socks. God, I’ve become a terrible mother these last couple of weeks. But she’s an angel. She hasn’t once complained, she just draws her days away, quietly content. Maybe I could make an extra special dinner for her today to try and make up for it. And read her some stories. Yes, she’d love that.

  Diego came back this morning after four days of being god knows where. He was drunk again, of course.

  He’s sleeping in our room now, and he’ll probably be there for the rest of the day. But I don’t even want him to come out anymore. I want to be alone with Silvia. I need to spend some proper time with her, and I don’t want to have to worry about him. I don’t have time for that any more. I’m sick of this.

  I take a sip of my coffee as I stare blankly at the computer screen. It’s decided. I’m leaving him.

  Silvia: Friday 14 November 1997

  I am lying in bed, snuggled up to Mami and she smells like frangipani and is wearing that nice pink nighty and she is reading me Norwegian folktales about bears and snow and forests and trolls and giants and princesses with long long hair. Mami hasn’t read to me in ages because she hasn’t had any time since the forest got sold by the bad men so tonight she is making up for it with loads and loads of stories, and although I am sleepy I want to stay awake for as long as possible. I don’t want to fall asleep but I can feel my eyes shutting and everything goes dark and I am floating off to the forests from the stories and riding on the back of a big white polar bear…

  It is so beautiful…

  Bang. I sit up. What was that? Mami is sitting up next to me and the moon from outside the window shines on her wide-open eyes and she is breathing fast like she is scared. Then I hear footsteps, the door opens, the lights suddenly go on and there are two men with their faces covered in black. Bang. Mami falls back onto the pillow and blood comes out of her chest. Lots of it, quickly. And I know that Mami is dead.

  Everything goes black and I think maybe I am dead too and then I can see again but like on a black and white TV because there is no colour and even the blood is black now. The men are still here but everything is quiet except I can still hear the bang in my head. Everything is like slow motion and I think it must be a dream. Bright white doves creep out of Mami’s chest, they spread their wings and flutter out of the open window and disappear into the night sky. No, this is a nightmare. And then I feel wet on my leg and I look down and Mami’s black blood is everywhere and I start to scream because this is not a dream. Shut up, says one of the men and he points his gun at me but the other man says no and pushes the gun away. He walks over to me and puts his hand on my mouth and it’s cold and damp and it smells like metal and he picks me up and carries me away. I kick and I fight and then I can’t move. I see Diego on the floor in the kitchen and he is not moving. All I can hear is my heart beating and this man breathing and everything is black and I am waiting to wake up.

  And then I wake up but I am in a car and everything is black and one man says what are we going to do with this little bitch? And the other man says she’ll keep quiet, kids will believe anything, we’ll tell her a story. And then the other man says well if she remembers our faces she’s dead. And then I wet myself. I am seven years old and I want to die.

  Playing Pretend

  My smiling, shiny, artificial Argentine-American parents were lovely. Yes, lovely. Good people. Oscar and Flor Cruz, and their son Donny. Everyone loves good people. They cooked hearty food, they went to church every Sunday, they had many happy friends, and they were always smiling! Even at me! They said I was such a great girl.

  How can I describe what it was like to live with them? It was like a prolonged, uncomfortable wait. A held breath. It was like those times when you go see your friend at their house, except your friend’s not there yet, so you wait for them, and in the meantime you’re stuck waiting around with their family. You put up with that discomfort though, because you know that soon enough you’ll be with your friend, or you’ll be able to go back home to your own family, and you’ll be able to act natural again, to breathe. Except in my case, that held breath lasted eleven years. And there was no promise of a friend, a family member or any familiar face on the other side of that wait. But at least, after all those years, I could finally be alone. Finally I could breathe.

  I don’t remember the first couple of months with my new family very well because I was in bed, delirious. I was having constant nightmares about my parents’ death.

  But, during those first couple of months, the truth was that my artificial mother nursed me through my trauma with what seemed to be all the love of a real mother. My new family.

  They only spoke to me in Spanish. I never went to school. Home educated, they called it. They taught me the usual: math, art, the US version of history, geography, religion, and all the other sorts of subjects you can generally expect to learn at school. We gave thanks to God at the dinner table. I played with them and their son for hours in the
garden. We enjoyed the sunshine. We smiled and we laughed.

  Officially, this family was doing a noble and compassionate thing. They had adopted a Mexican orphan – the innocent helpless victim of the terrible drug wars in that savage neighbouring country. Who could blame the poor child for having an evil drug lord for a dad? Tut tut, poor child.

  As lovely and caring as my new family was, I was taught not to open up. The lesson to be learnt was that you can be a happy good Catholic without speaking your truth; you can still be lovely and smiley to people without letting them into your life too much.

  And so now, homeschooled in rural California, lacking decent English language skills and having no real friends, I was not only half blind but also half mute. A muteness that sunk deep into my core.

  Flor was a stay-at-home mother. She didn’t go out to work like Oscar. It meant I never really had time to be completely alone.

  I definitely didn’t look like my new family. They were all blonde. It was a constant reminder of the past, a constant reminder of why I was different in the first place. Flor’s hair was the fairest, a light gold. For the whole eleven years I was with them she always cut it the same length, just below her ears. Whenever I return to Flor in my memory I have a vision of her standing tall in the garden, her hair blowing a bit in the breeze, with the sunlight shining through it from behind and making her look like she has a halo. Maybe they tried to choose someone who looked a bit like my mother, but they didn’t succeed. My mother was beautiful. Flor was average. Whilst Flor was confident and had a loud laugh, Oscar was quiet and temperamental. He had a big gut that hung over his belt. He wore thick-rimmed round glasses, which I always thought made him look stupid. I also have a go-to memory of him in the garden: he’s digging because he wants to plant a birch tree. He takes a quick pause to wipe drops of sweat off his forehead and to push his glasses up his nose. His breathing is heavy, his short-sleeved shirt has become too tight for him over the years, and he doesn’t look fit enough for the job.

  Sometimes we had a maid around too. Once we had a maid from Colombia. She was really nice to me. Her name was Lorena. I won’t forget her because she was one of the first people I spoke to about my parents. It was just me and her that day. I was fifteen years old. She was the one who’d started to ask the questions, otherwise I would have never said a thing. The conversation started when she said you don’t look like your mama and papa. I replied they’re not my mama and papa. I told her that my parents had been killed because of Diego’s involvement in the drug world. Diego killed on purpose, my mother by accident. Collateral damage. Those men who came in the night, who took away my mother and stripped my world of colour, they were just another weapon in the drug wars.

  I remember she was so sad about what I told her, she actually started to cry. She asked me so many questions, as though she couldn’t quite believe what had happened. I remember, when I went to bed that night it was the first time I started questioning the truth of my parents’ death. In the months and years that followed, it slowly began to dawn on me that Diego would have never been on a cartel hit list. His level of involvement was as insignificant as thousands of others like him. However, Diego’s shady dabblings and his dubious character – despised by even those closest to him as over the years his moral compass deteriorated – meant that he was the perfect decoy. I realised, finally, that those men had come for the sole purpose of executing my mother.

  I never saw Lorena again after the day we spoke about my childhood. I started to wonder if we had cameras rigged in the house, or if she’d been fired after trying to talk to my new parents about it all. The roots of paranoia began to take hold.

  *

  I wasn’t in touch with the Cruz family anymore. I used to be, just after moving out, but never that often. I was too busy enjoying being alone. I had craved being alone for so long, I didn’t even bother to try meet new people in that first year of freedom. And over the years that followed, as I faced up to the truth of why my mother was killed and why I had been given away to this fake family, I phased them out. It was surprisingly easy; after a while they gave up trying to stay in touch with me. I wondered if it had anything to do with Donny. I’m guessing they got distracted though, because the last time I saw them Flor was six months pregnant with twins. I don’t know why she still wanted children at that age. She would have been almost fifty by then. It was an awkward meet up. We’d stuck to email contact for a long time before that, and the occasional phone call, but the contact got shorter and less frequent: the occasional Happy Birthday or Merry Christmas message, without questions and without an invite.

  It was strange, I didn’t know if Flor was the woman who’d looked after me when I was ill, tucked me into bed each night, and made me a birthday cake each year, or if she was the woman who, seventeen years ago, turned a blind eye to the truth, and agreed to feed me a lie. Of course she was both, but my head still refused to understand it. A huge part of me hated them for the lie they lived, and yet sometimes I’d get a flashback of something nice we once did as a family and I caught myself smiling.

  And Donny, my fake brother, sometimes I still wondered about him. Though he was just under a year older than me, he didn’t constitute a friend. Our relationship was strange and ultimately awkward. A true example of how you can feel lonely even in others’ close company. But I had a lot of memories of him. I wondered what he was doing these days.

  *

  Silvia: Saturday 31 July 2004

  It’s Donny’s fifteenth birthday today and he has some friends over and Flor and Oscar have made a barbecue in the garden. I haven’t really met many of Donny’s friends before, but there is this one boy, Josh, who I have definitely seen around. He looks like Brad from California Heights on TV. I don’t usually care much for boys, I think romance is stupid, but Josh is an exception because he is so hot. Anyway, I made sure I was wearing my favourite dress today.

  So we were all in the garden. The air smelled of smoke and cut grass. Me being me I didn’t really talk to anyone, even though inside I was like oh my god Josh is so beautiful and I was praying for there to be a moment where it was just me and him and he’d start talking to me and suddenly realise that I’m amazing, the most amazing person there. He’d tell me that actually he didn’t really like Donny all that much and was just here for the free food. We’d laugh, talk, have a lot in common, and then we’d kiss! It would be a slow, romantic kiss. And then… then we’d run away together! Leave Donny and everyone behind!

  It’s not that I hate Donny, I don’t, but he’s just not my real brother. Same with Oscar and Flor, they’re okay, but sometimes I wish I could just run away.

  Anyway, that never happened of course. I didn’t talk to Josh. I’ve never even talked to a boy, apart from Donny. That’s the other reason I want to run away. I never meet anyone. I don’t have any friends of my own. I wish I went to school like normal kids. I want to meet people like they do on California Heights.

  I was sitting on one of the chairs in the garden, and I was looking at the boys and thinking about Josh. They were all standing in a big group near the veranda and talking to each other and laughing and acting cool. Oscar was at the barbecue, taking care of it and singing along to some old song that was playing on the radio. I think by this time he’d had quite a lot of wine ’cause his face was all sweaty and he looked pretty happy. I wanted to talk to Josh but that wasn’t going to happen. I felt silly. I went inside the house to my room for a while and just lay on my bed feeling like a fool and wishing I was more confident. Flor came to check on me. I said I was okay. Just tired. She told me to come outside ’cause they were just about to do the cake. She waited for me while I went to the bathroom. And that’s when I noticed it. I had started my period.

  ‘Welcome to womanhood!’ said Flor, when I plucked up the courage to tell her. ‘I thought it would never come!’ she said, because apparently fourteen was pretty late to start.

  And although it was all so embarrassing I suddenly felt k
ind of excited. My boobs are finally gonna grow! Maybe then Josh will fancy me. Flor gave me a pack of maxi pads and she came to my room and looked in my wardrobe and handed me a dress.

  ‘This one’s red,’ she said, ‘so if anything happens it won’t show.’

  She left the room. I changed into the dress and looked at myself in the mirror. I’ve heard people say on TV that red is sexy. Although I can’t see red I suddenly felt really sexy! And I walked out back into the garden feeling more confident than ever before because all of a sudden I was now a woman. And Donny was like how come you’ve changed? And all his friends turned round to look at me, and I said because I spilled coke on my dress, and he said oh and gave me this strange look, which I couldn’t figure out.

  Donny: Saturday 31 July 2004

  It’s my fifteenth birthday and we’re having a barbecue. Mom and dad are not being overly embarrassing, which is good. Silvia’s just come out of the house wearing a different dress. It’s a red dress. Why has she changed? Johnny wolf whistles under his breath and the boys snigger. Your sister’s hot, says Josh. She’s not my sister and she’s not hot, I say. Then I laugh because I suddenly feel awkward. They laugh with me. She doesn’t seem to have noticed.

  Books and Monsters

  Jack had listened to my story, trying to suppress a look of horror, with the occasional tactful interjection. But now he was silent, just shaking his head and looking out at the horizon.

  ‘Silvia?’ he said at last.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How come they didn’t kill you when they came for your parents?’