by María Ospina
Hey nabe:
I don’t know if you’ll like this card. My grandma always gives me cards she buys at the stationary store, she goes there and looks through them. She doesn’t have any reason to buy one or anyone to buy it for but she thinks they’ll come in handy some day or maybe its to entertain herself for a little while or she thinks they’d be nice for me to have. She collects them: cards for love, humor, friendship, aniversaries, engagements … she even buys condolense cards sometimes even though no one died LOL. When I go visit her she sits down and shows me every single one, cracking up the whole time. I laugh with her sometimes but other times I think she’s off her rocker. She always gives me my favorite as a gift, she gave me this one so I could send it to someone and I thought of you. Thanks for talking to me today, I told the others that I know you from before. I have some questions for you:
Why do you live alone, do you have a boyfriend, do you like rock music, what do you do.
Bye!
Jessica
Dear Jessica:
Thank you for the card. I saw you playing ball with the other girls in the front yard yesterday and waved to you, but I guess you didn’t see me. I spend a lot of time at home so the next time you go out, just look up and you’ll find me. I’ve been living in Bogotá for almost a month. I live alone. My parents and siblings live in the United States. I left a really boring job back there a little while ago, and I’m looking for a new one. I decided to start fresh here, where I was born.
I love rock music. Until recently I had a boyfriend who played drums in a punk band, so we went out a lot. What bands do you like? Can you recommend one from around here?
I’ve been thinking of ways for you to get out of there. How much longer do you have? What year of school are you in? I’ve been thinking that if you want to leave, you can stay here as long as you need. I have an extra room with a bed. You could run away whenever you like. When you leave the home with the others, for example. (About that: Where do you go?) We could go to a rock concert or just talk. My phone number is 245-2912, and you can call me whenever you like.
Hugs,
Aurora
Aurora reread the letter on her computer screen and decided it would be better to copy it out by hand so it seemed less formal. She thought about adding something in the first paragraph about coming to Bogotá to finish a novel, but she worried it might make her seem strange in Jessica’s eyes. Suspicious, even. So she didn’t. In the end, she erased run away and wrote leave. She took out hugs and put bye, which seemed younger, less intimate. She considered cutting the detail about the ex-boyfriend, which she’d invented (she was once obsessed with a girl in her class who played guitar in a rock band), but she decided to leave it. The letter seemed bland, but she felt as if her mental drought, that wasteland she found herself in after moving to a different country, wouldn’t let her write anything better than descriptive phrases. She drew a few flowers around the edges of the page (they turned out pretty badly) and folded the sheet into a small rectangle that she stuck to a box of rose-shaped chocolates filled with fruit liquor that she’d bought recently to give to Jessica if she got the chance. When she finally worked up the nerve to ring the bell at the old mansion that morning, she was slow to let go of the box as Gilma pulled it through the grating. She imagined Jessica hiding the chocolates in the section of the closet assigned to her, or under her bed. Maybe she would eat one every night, nestled under the blankets, or else she’d scurry to the third floor to wolf one down before the six o’clock Rosary. She would snap the chocolate in two with her front teeth to get at the sticky sweetness of the elixir inside. Slide her tongue into the hollow of the cracked rose. The effects of the liquor would fade quickly, but she’d feel happy and sleep peacefully. She would escape, for a moment, the frustration that radiated from her letters. Though she’d never really liked chocolates with fillings, Aurora had bought herself a box too. That way, whenever she ate one, she could imagine Jessica devouring a dripping rose in pace with her, as if by divine synchronicity.
Aurora spent several nights at the window, looking for Jessica’s face behind or in front of the curtain’s veil. Once she saw a body wrapped in what must have been a towel walk back and forth a few times in front of the window with the flower. She thought it was Jessica parading around, ready for her shower, and imagined her being aware that she was out there, searching for her. But her face never appeared clearly through the glass.
The following week, Aurora was just getting back to her apartment in the middle of a lightning storm when she saw Jessica and four other young ladies running toward the home. They shrieked with excitement at every thunderclap, elated the way children are by storms. They held their books over their heads to protect their hair from the ravages of the downpour. A flash of lightning made them seek refuge under the eaves of the corner store. Jessica reached Aurora’s building just as another thunderclap sounded.
“It’s crazy out here! You know, lightning killed a soccer player the other day right in the middle of a match, burnt him to a crisp. Stuff’s no joke. Look at me, I’m soaked through.”
She was out of breath. She passed the back of her hand across her face to free herself of the drops of water collecting in her lashes and then locked her eyes on the fence that surrounded her days, avoiding Aurora’s gaze.
“Really? I hadn’t heard.”
“Yeah, a guy from Deportivo Cali, my dad’s team, may he rest in peace.”
Aurora drew a bit closer as if to offer the protection of her open umbrella, even though the roof was already shielding them from the rain. She reached out to catch a drop that slid down Jessica’s jaw, magnifying her skin. Surprised by the invasive touch, the young lady arched away from Aurora’s hand, revealing a slight tremor in her blushing cheeks, then locked her eyes on the ground. She flew off at a sprint when she saw the other girls approach the old mansion, as if set free, letting out a few excited yelps on her way to the fence where Gilma waited for them with a giant umbrella.
In the days following that inopportune touch, Aurora answered the intercom several times in the hope that she would hear Jessica’s husky voice through the speaker. But it was always someone else, selling something or asking for something she couldn’t give (food, money, her soul). She waited in vain for a new letter to appear in her mailbox. In the mornings, she skipped her walk downtown so she could monitor what was going on in the home. Until one day a school bus stopped out front and Aurora watched fifteen young ladies walk out carrying boxes and poster-board cutouts of sheep decorated with cotton. She figured they were the Lamb of God. (Or were they the docile flock of the Gospels? This was no time to reflect on the difference between being led as a disciple and being chosen for sacrifice.) The sincere hugs that the two nuns, convinced of their role as shepherds, doled out to each young lady as she passed through the doorway disturbed Aurora, as did her inability to imagine whom they might be off to convert. She searched for Jessica among the group and noticed that she’d cut her hair short, to her shoulders. Had she done it to look more like her? Just before getting on the bus, Jessica looked up at Aurora’s window. They waved to each other. Aurora wanted to make some gesture to invite her up but couldn’t, and she scolded herself for being such a coward. When all the young ladies were on board, an old nun pushed her wide body forward and ended the procession by clambering into the bus. The door closed, and they drove off. Jessica did not look for Aurora through the bus window as she would have liked.
The week after that, Aurora rang the doorbell of the boarding home with a letter asking what Jessica had thought of her proposal and inviting her again to come up and talk for a while. She suggested a system for communicating at night that involved signs they could make from their respective windows to set a day and time for their meeting, and closed with the first lines of a famous poem by Saint John of the Cross, which she assumed Jessica had learned from the nuns.
On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings—oh, happy chance!—
>
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.
But when a small, thick nun (did they all get like that over time?) opened the door, Aurora pretended to be a representative from the neighborhood alliance coming to announce an upcoming poll about the former combatants living in peace homes. She thought about rewriting the letter without the poem but in the end decided to leave it in. The next day, after constant surveillance, she saw Gilma step into the front yard and ran downstairs to give her the envelope.
Jessica did not appear at the window any the next few evenings. At least, not during Aurora’s watch, which ended when she couldn’t fight off sleep anymore and gave in to the dark night.
One afternoon punctuated by sun showers, a taxi stopped in front of the old mansion. The car’s horn initiated a procession of young ladies, who hurried out to collect the dozens of grocery bags that one of the nuns had brought back with her. Between comings and goings, Jessica exchanged whispers with a girl who had long, curly hair and seemed much older than her. Aurora had never seen her before. She was tall and vaguely resembled a draft horse; her thick eyebrows gave her a serious look. She exuded a sense of superiority out of sync with the breezy cheer of the others. When she tilted her head to look up at Aurora’s apartment, their eyes locked. Aurora could distill nothing from that neutral gaze, which deliberately concealed inflection. So she forced herself to keep looking at the young lady, trying to mimic her tenacious indifference. They stared at one another until Jessica tugged on her companion’s arm and they entered the home together.
The unsettling gaze of Jessica’s confidante hobbled Aurora’s obsessive investigation in the days that followed. She grudgingly returned to studying the men’s building and noticed that women sometimes joined them on the balconies. The discovery bored her. She put away another letter that she’d written to Jessica, hoping she might read it inside a cave of made of her blanket. In it, she told her that she’d be at her aunt’s house in Armenia for a while, to spend Christmas and New Year’s there and see if she could straighten out her sleeping habits and her head. But she’d be back. Was Jessica taking a trip? To see her grandmother, or to her mother’s place? If she didn’t want to go back to the home, she could call her or send an email, and Aurora would go pick her up wherever she was. She closed by saying that she didn’t know how many more months she’d be living in Bogotá and that they should take advantage of being so close before she left. After a few days of holding onto the letter without making up her mind to deliver it, Aurora took it to a mailing service so Jessica would receive it officially and without raising suspicion.
When she returned in January, Aurora opened her mailbox to find gas and electrical bills and an invitation to a neighborhood alliance meeting to discuss “the scourge of peace homes.” Nothing from Jessica. The old mansion seemed to have shut down, as if it was on some strange kind of hiatus.
One afternoon, on the way back to her apartment, Aurora caught sight for the first time in a long while of five young ladies walking arm in arm away from the home. Jessica was intertwined with the long-haired one who had searched Aurora out from the street. Her hair had grown a bit. Her new friend was proudly packed into her sweater, her nipples aimed skyward, exercising the power of a more advanced puberty. Their whispers were interrupted by laughter as they walked toward the traffic light. Aurora picked up her pace on the other side of the street and called to Jessica. She looked over but did not respond to the hand waving at her. Then she turned back, trying to ignore the shame she felt at the greeting. Wanting to return to her former bliss, she squeezed her friend’s arm a little tighter, allowing herself to be pulled along by the rhythm of her stride. They kept walking, careful not to fall out of step. Aurora hurried to cross the street and catch up to them. Jessica brought her mouth to the other’s ear and said something that produced an explosion of laughter. Aurora thought of the secrets that had tormented her when she was in school, whispered by different girls more than a decade earlier. She hated that they still upset her. The young ladies turned the corner and disappeared from sight.
“Bitch! Freak!”
Aurora felt the disembodied slur was somehow directed at her. She jammed her finger trying to open the first lock on her front door, and climbed the stairs reading the water bill as if she could soften the blow of the insult with the solidity of a report in cubic centimeters. She entered her apartment and went to the window but did not see the young ladies. Her eyes landed on the shelter for former combatants, on the rooftops of other houses, and on Bogotá’s mountains, soaring in their dark-green integrity, brushing against one another chaotically but appealingly. The timeless solidity of those peaks drove home the insignificance of the puny buildings that carpeted the city. The more Aurora thought about how brief her stay might be, the more she was moved by those eternal mountains. Compared to them, her presence was as fleeting as the elixir that spilled from her chocolates onto Jessica’s tongue.
That Saturday, the home’s white curtains were gathered on either side of its windows, revealing a table set up for ironing in the second-floor chapel. Aurora was excited to imagine that this was a permanent change, that some December epiphany had led the nuns to stop hiding their labors away in dark corners and clouding the view for others. Or were the young ladies rebelling against their interference? Several of them rocked their bodies back and forth over the table, rubbing the irons in their hands across white cloth, aided by the pressure of their bellies. Uniforms and nun’s habits hung from the walls. Wrapped in a towel, Aurora watched them for a while. Jessica’s new friend, perhaps anticipating her future as a despot, set her iron down on the table, looked up at the fourth floor of the El Zipa Apartments, and walked over to the window. Jessica followed her, and both girls stood there staring at Aurora with the same studied neutrality. Then her friend closed the curtain with a swift, definitive movement. Aurora pulled her brand-new drapes shut and stepped away from the window. She still had so much to learn about salvation.
She figured a walk might take the edge off the feeling that she had an old refrigerator rattling shrill and off-key in her chest. That was when she saw the dog. She was with the neighborhood car washer. He’d started calling her Capricho even though she wasn’t his. He knew how to respect her secrets. Every night, Capricho went out unseen, never revealing the sanctuary she found but always returning at first light. Aurora felt relieved (or was it grateful?) to see the dog every day, with her pride and her decorum, making the rounds along her block.
What if she let herself be adopted? Aurora would open her home to her. She’d give her the empty bedroom so she could spend her nights at rest, on the floor or in the bed, whatever she preferred. She’d make her soups with the fattest bones at the butcher’s. She’d rub the dog’s flowery breast. Battle her fleas. But not all at once, of course; she didn’t want to startle her with a sudden onslaught of hospitality. She’d let her go out alone a few times every day and respect her surly, solitary nature, trusting that it would fade with time, that she would gradually forget the aged bone, the unexplored hilltop, her instinct for crossing the street. That the parasite would become a guest. She’d appeal to her nobility. And when Capricho was ready, she would take her somewhere new, inventing a pedigree for her that some gullible veterinarian would vouch for. This time, she would plan the invitation more carefully. The dog would surely be welcoming. Wasn’t the guest always also a host?
In her house now at rest, Aurora turned on her computer and dragged her old novel to the trash (though the gesture seemed less definitive than throwing something in the actual garbage).
The next morning, Aurora saw a few young ladies in the front yard, sheltered in their prison of love, chatting as they weeded between the bushes, watered the lilies, and swept the dirt from the sidewalk. It troubled her, it exasperated her, that they were all so happy, that they embraced their mysteries unfazed. Jessica wasn’t among them, but the other one was. So she tossed a few chicken bones into a grocer
y bag, grabbed a rope, and set off down the block, forcing herself to look away from the old mansion and wondering how she was going to convince Capricho, so peaceful in her lucid and joyful solitude, that there was no better idea than being saved.
FAUNA OF THE AGES
But how is our story of love to be if I am food to you, and you the eater of me?
A mouse to a crow, Kalila and Dimna
SEPTEMBER 22, 2004
My days are a waking nightmare. My nights, too, I guess. Maybe it’s a question of numbers. The whole thing is because of a bunch of fleas that ended up sucking on my legs when the cat whose fur they used to live in moved out with its owner and I rented her apartment. Their offensive has been unrelenting. Last week I counted forty-eight bites on my body. This week the number went down because I’ve declared insecticide war on the little buggers. I imagine this drove a few to jump from my balcony in search of other lodgings.
The struggle has given me an intense nervous tic. I imagine I’m being bitten every ten seconds and slap various parts of my body hard, hoping to squash one in the act. But I never know if it’s really them or not. Estefanía once said that Bogotá is a special city because every time you go to the movies you get bitten by a flea. She applauded this form of solidarity, which can’t be found in most first-world latitudes. But I doubt that the new movie theaters thundering in shopping malls today, with their antimicrobial seats made of imported plush, are particularly appealing to fleas. My mother, who described the bubonic plague in detail to us when we were very young, added a scientific fact to the discussion: fleas prefer women to men.
I want to test this theory, if I don’t die first like a martyr full of itchy stigmata and dangling scabs, with irritated eyes that see potential bloodsuckers in every speck or fleck floating around.