Joaquina neatly displays her purchases along a wall of the single room she lives in with her brother, Martín, or crams them into a three-level wooden shelf in the corner, as if she’s getting ready to open her own spare, highly specialized tiendita. She does like to dream about the kitchen she’ll have someday, the cooking classes she’s going to take to learn how to use all of these spices, oils, pastes, and perforated cooking utensils. But the kitchen where she lives is shared by too many people, most of them muchachos with sloppy habits and some of them with personalities she finds off-putting and even threatening. Mainly she uses the kitchen to brew her fragrant teas, which she carries back to her room in one of her peltre pots.
Along with her three brothers, she sends some of her earnings back to her parents and younger siblings in Mexico, though not as much as they do. She spends more than she should on clothes, and Martín has given up fighting with her for a share of their small plywood closet, keeping his things in a suitcase and folded in piles on the floor against a wall opposite the one along which she’s arrayed her collection. The earrings she wears, and changes every few days, come stuck onto pieces of cardboard; she peels them off and sticks them on her earlobes. Joaquina has pierced earlobes, but she says she prefers these earrings, and they’re very inexpensive, she buys them at a tienda on the avenue and in Chinatown.
Esteban thinks she lives in a wretched place, and wants nothing more than to free her from it: a three-story building where all the walls have been knocked down and replaced by warrens of plywood cubicles with padlocks on the doors, a kitchen and two bathrooms on each floor. It’s mainly full of Mexicans, most from the states of Puebla and Guerrero, though there are people from other countries there too. Sometimes Joaquina and her brother have to sleep in the bed together, when Martín has day or evening instead of night shifts in the grocery store where he works. Down the hall, her brothers Abél and Juan, the oldest, share another. Each room rents for three hundred and fifty dollars a month. Once, when Esteban and Joaquina were making their way through the plywood-cubicle maze to one of the bathrooms, they came upon a masculine-looking muchacha with hair dyed an unnatural shade of red, dressed in black stretch shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, brandishing a baseball bat embedded with nails at a gringo standing in the open doorway of one of the cubicles. The gringo was trying to talk in a reasonable voice, which was coming out tremulous with fear anyway. He was wearing just a white shirt and a suit jacket and no pants and holding a necktie in his hand, and the woman with the bat was threatening him in a fierce, low voice, telling him that she was going to smash his head in if he didn’t shut up. The man said, OK, OK, and put up his hands. Down at the end of the corridor another muchacha, younger than the muchacha with the bat, an adolescent face and pert, butter-colored breasts, was sitting naked on the floor with the gringo’s trousers, pockets turned out, across her lap, and she was pulling everything out of his wallet.
Joaquina immediately led Esteban back to her room. He was appalled that she could live in such a place, and infuriated with her for being so icily complacent about it. She answered, That’s how that putita works, bringing gringos home and before she even fucks them that big macha bursts through the door. Pinche gringo, she said, it’s his own fault for whoring around. When Esteban vehemently disagreed, her eyes turned to saber thrusts, and she asked if he had a better place for her to live. If she paid any more in rent, she’d have to live like a nun to afford it! Maybe she’ll come and live on his ship? Órale, güey? Would he like that better?
They decided that as soon as they had the money, they’d find a place to live together, no matter what her brothers said. Of course it was a strange existence, with almost everything about it unsolved but for love and his tedious job at a chair fábrica on the other side of Brooklyn, still having to go back to the ship to sleep. Life went on aboard the Urus almost exactly as it had before, though Bernardo and el Primero and his dog weren’t there anymore. Esteban ignored el Capitán in his comings and goings. He bought stamps and stationery for the crew so that everyone who wanted to could finally write home and tell his family and novia where he’d been all these months—only four chose to. Thanks to him, the crew is eating no worse now than before the sardines ran out, but over the last month the crew has been costing him almost as much money as renting a share of a plywood room would.
The night that el primero Mark took Bernardo to the hospital, the crew roasted the beef Esteban brought back over a roaring fire on deck, on spits fashioned from long steel pipes. Esteban had forgotten his morning’s anger over Bernardo’s neglected leg; he thought the viejo must be happy now, in a warm hospital bed, being treated by yanqui doctors. At least he’s not here, he thought. Because if the viejo were here, he’d be jodiendo with his corny, insinuating remarks about Joaquina. Puta, the last thing he needed; he felt nervous and excited enough. Esteban intended to go back to the salon and make love to Joaquina there that very night. It was already growing dark, and he pulled out la Marta’s watch. He had to go soon. Joaquina had said that Gonzalo usually closed the salon before eight. José Mateo was heating him a cup of pure beef blood and marrow, said it would be good for his cold. The fire was already going, but Cabezón was still busy hacking up beef. Esteban was hungry, but they hadn’t started cooking yet. They didn’t know he had to go, or where, or why, he hadn’t told them anything. He chose a big hunk of beef out of the pile and impaled it on a wire splicing pin, then cooked it over the flames until it was seared on the outside, the fire’s heat hurting his hands. He ate the cooked fat off the outside first. When he bit into the beef, holding it like a melon in both hands, the meat was still nearly raw on the inside; warmed blood filled his mouth. Then he drank down the plastic cup José Mateo had filled with a thick soup of simmered blood and marrow—marrow which the cook had scraped out of hacked bones. Bueno, this had to be fortifying, no? It probably wouldn’t be very romantic, to bring Joaquina the gift of a big slab of raw beef. He said a quick good-bye and left the ship, still eating. He couldn’t even finish it. He tossed the rest over a fence, let those crazy barking dogs fight over the bloody, rubbery scrap.
When he reached the salon he wanted to die: the shutter was lowered, it was dark. They were gone! But he went to the window and stood in front of the shutter’s metal slats, and then he saw her getting up in the dark. Joaquina had been sitting there in the dark, waiting. She opened the door and he went in and she said, “Ven!” and took his hand and turned to walk him towards the back, but then she let go. “What’s on your hand?” she asked. “It’s sticky.” And he resisted the urge to laugh, and said, “Blood.” He could barely see her in the dark, but he could tell she was looking at him oddly. Suddenly he burped. She said, “Pig!” “Perdón.” “What have you been eating, chamaco naco?” And he had to take a deep breath against the fear and excitement already rising from the sloshing sea of blood and raw beef in his belly, and he said, “Meat and blood, pues. Too much of both, I think.” They kissed, and she said, “Your breath smells like a butcher shop.” And he laughed. Joaquina pulled him through the curtain and said, “Wash your hands.” When he came out of the bathroom, he saw that she’d lit a candle inside a red glass next to a blanket spread over the floor and then the way she was smiling at him. They kissed standing up for a long time.
Then she sat down, pulled the straps of her dress down over her shoulders, and began undoing the buttons of her blouse. He sat on the floor and untied his bootlaces. He had an erection and struggled getting his boots off, and then his socks, as if he was in a frantic hurry. He wanted to say something, something that might calm and anchor him, that would make clear why he was there. And when he stood up to take his pants off, he found himself silently speaking the words, Te quiero, wondering if it was time yet to speak out loud about love.
Then he heard Joaquina saying, “Sticky hands. Runny moco nose. Burping,” and he looked over. “You’re like a human swamp! Leaking and oozing all over! Whole cows vanish into your quicksand, verdad? Caráy! What am
I getting myself into?”
She was smiling, and sitting there completely naked now, her legs crossed at the ankles under the chair, her hands holding on to each side of the seat. He stood there with his pants half-tugged down, bent over, looking at female nakedness for the first time since the burdel in Corinto six months before, when the sight of that puta’s nakedness, her pretty young skin gleaming in the humidity and the harsh light of a bare bulb, had filled him with a sudden, vivid terror of what had happened to la Marta. Now he looked at Joaquina’s chichis, small and upright, coppery pale in the wavering glow from the candle, the little cones of her hardened nipples, and he looked at her slender arms and shoulders, at her soft-looking belly and her long, skinny ribs as she pushed herself up from the chair and came towards him, at her lithe thighs and the triangle of black hair. He let go of his pants and stood up again, and they fell around his feet while he put his arms around her and ran his hands up and down her slender, hard back and down onto her smooth, rounded nalgas and felt her lips warmly touching him there, on his neck, on his cheeks, on his lips. And then she whispered into his ear, “Qué te pasa?” just as he was letting out a long sigh of bewilderment and relief, because she’d stayed whole, her body had stayed whole and he didn’t know what to do now with so much sudden pleasure. And then she was undressing him, pulling his dirty T-shirts up over his head and then he felt her hand on his stiffness through his underpants and she laughed. “Ay no! Ve? Leaking!” His underpants were wet and sticky there. And when she pulled them off, a long spider’s thread of jism flared silvery red in the candlelight as it dropped from his trompeta and they started to laugh. Too much! Qué ridículo. He couldn’t stop laughing. They held each other laughing, each one’s laughter inciting more laughter in the other and she squealed, “Ujujuy! Esteban the Swamp Monster!” with her arms around his neck, and they tumbled down onto the blanket. They were fucking before he knew it, and he came in about two seconds. It was an explosion—more so than even the abundant elephant’s pee of his dreams on the Urus, when he was so dehydrated his bladder had turned to rust. He felt as if his whole insides were collapsing, leaving him so emptied he could hear his own heart pounding loudly in a void. Joaquina murmured, “What a mess, Esteban. Now I feel like a swamp too.” They lay kissing, touching—he burped again—until he was ready for more.
Joaquina, as she’d vowed, ate him alive. Then they lay there a long time, holding each other tightly, his lungs feeling twitchy and gilded again, riled by the heavy, sweet fragrances of the salon …
During the three days in mid-November that Joaquina’s other novio, the lawyer from México, visited, Esteban felt more trapped on the Urus than ever. The lawyer was staying in a hotel in Manhattan. He’d been a client of Joaquina’s in México, when she’d worked as manicurist in a salon in the city’s colonia of Polanco. Joaquina insisted that she had to see the lawyer, that she’d never lied to Esteban about the lawyer, and so he had no right to be angry. Esteban vowed to break with her forever if she went to see this little lawyer who paid to have his hands manicured. Joaquina sent both Esteban and his mother to la chingada on a blisteringly foulmouthed comet of insults and abuse, and promised she’d never set eyes on Esteban again.
And maybe she wouldn’t have, if five days later, on his way to work, Esteban hadn’t found himself standing outside the salon window with one wrapped rose in his hand and a suffocating head cold, in perfect imitation of his first attempt to win her. They completed the new ritual by coming back to the salon after Gonzalo had closed up to make love in the back again, on a blanket on the floor, only this time without a candle. Then Joaquina had him sit fully clothed with the blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his bare feet submerged in a pot of scalding water, and told him that he should never, but absolutely never, ask her what had transpired with the lawyer.
“It’s finished between us,” she said. “And if you ever bother me about it again, güey, you’ll learn what it’s like to believe in God in the land of indiosl”
Joaquina’s room is where they usually make love now, and only when she’s sure none of her brothers is around. Joaquina has her brothers’ constantly shifting work schedules constantly memorized. All three of her brothers have black hair, and two are darker complexioned than she is. But Abél has Joaquina’s nutmeg-and-cream complexion, with more freckles. All three brothers are given to constant hard slaps on the back and bewilderingly slangy salutations, and they travel in packs whenever they go out, they and a bunch of other muchachos. They seem to neither like nor dislike Esteban, to neither approve nor disapprove of his seeing their sister, though Martín, whom he sees much more frequently, is the friendliest. Most of all their stance towards Esteban and their sister seems worn like a hard-faced mask, not out of personal meanness but out of an impersonal meanness they think enhances and protects their own and her stature—so his future brother-in-laws irritate him, he being accustomed to outwardly much easier-going tropical port town ways.
Whenever he and Joaquina manage to steal some time alone together, in the little plywood room, heated by a small electric heater with glowing orange coils, the air so spice scented that even his sluggish nose can smell it, Esteban is the one who sometimes still finds himself conquered by his secret inhibitions. While Joaquina sheds her outward restraints, takes control, does what she wants, until, with voracious hands and mouths and finally their whole bodies, they’re eating each other alive. Sometimes she mounts him and goes away, far away inside herself, traveling the secret paths of her own pleasure, eyes closed, lips silently mouthing some lost language, until she cries out and quakes and her cheeks flush almost ashen blue and her eyes open as if waking from a hundred years’ sleep to find him still there, still watching—a little unnerved over having been left so far behind, but glad to have been found again; then it’s his turn to let go, if he hasn’t already. She tells him it isn’t always like this, that it has to be love and even then, it won’t always be like this. What does he know? Chocho Joaquina, he lives now for their time together, in this little room. He thinks there’s no better answer to life than this. She also cuts and files his toe- and fingernails, snips his cuticles, sands his soles with a pumice stone, rubs lotions all over his feet, and tells him that now he can never make fun of men who have manicures and pedicures ever again. Joaquina loves Esteban with a solicitous tenderness and exacting passion that dissolve his self-doubts and fears or startle them away like a flock of crows. Her love comes out of the same seemingly bottomless well of emotion that causes all her moods and outbursts, from rage to hilarity. When she’s sullen her face seems to deflate, she turns into an abuela with enormous, blind person’s eyes that accuse the world of a whole lifetime of unendurable grief. And when she’s ebullient, her smile stretches ear to ear in the most deliriously childlike way, her eyes shining as if they’re telling silent jokes only cats can hear. He sometimes feels frightened that so much emotion can dwell inside one slight frame: he’s seen her topple in a split second from giddy affection to blaspheming, sobbing fury, sometimes with no provocation other than being overwhelmed by so much love that she can’t control.
Esteban has told her everything about himself now—pues, almost everything. Joaquina knows about la Marta, even about her watch, which he still carries in his pocket. She leaves Esteban alone when he sinks into one of those faraway moods, gnawing at his thumb, sniffling and snorting. Joaquina broods over him, and has a talent for finding practical solutions to his most unnameable dilemmas. It was her idea to start going to the Friday night dances in a certain Salvadoran restaurant in another part of Brooklyn, which draws Centroamericanos from all over New York, and even, regularly, a pair of black ex-soldiers who’d been stationed at the U.S. military base at Palmerola, Honduras, where they’d picked up an honest enthusiasm for the local muchachas. A live band plays música tropical there on Friday nights, and he and Joaquina share a few beers and dance in that nalga-swinging Centroamericano way that at first she found tastelessly lascivious, and still has her
doubts about. The restaurant is owned by a middle-aged woman, Doña Chilcha, who’d been a barracks chef in Salvador, and who, when she’d foreseen the way the war was going, had fled to Nueva York with her five children. On his very first Friday night there, Esteban met a fellow Nica who worked as foreman at a chair fábrica, and who wrote down its address and the name of the nearest subway stop and told him to come by on Monday morning. He’s met refugees from the Salvadoran and Guatemalan wars and death squads there, including a doe-eyed, skinny chavala chapina who’d had sixteen members of her extended family disappear, and until recently had been living with a group of nuns in Coney Island, who’d helped her to get out of Guatemala and were extremely kind to her, though somehow that very kindness had made it impossible for her to cure herself of a paralyzing sorrow. But then, at a Friday night dance there last winter, she’d met the Salvadoran college student, and soon after had left the convent house and moved in with him. Their love struck Esteban as rapturous and mature, they both had night jobs, and she was still attending high school by day. One of the cooks in back, slapping out a perpetual train of pupusas, was from Nicaragua too: she had a son who’d died fighting in a BLI, another still living in the contra camps, and two more children with her in Brooklyn, and she’d wept and embraced Esteban when he was taken back into the kitchen to meet her, introduced as a survivor of the war, a former soldier in a BLI. Esteban sat at a table one night listening to Nicaraguans of three generations arguing about the Sandinista military draft with the same ardent vehemence they might have skewered each other with at home if they were all one family, until the muchacha named Barbara, who hadn’t been saying anything, got up from the table in a flood of tears over her lost novio and fled the steamy-smoky, packed restaurant to collect herself out on the sidewalk in the cold air. Esteban saw her shadow through the fogged window and was about to get up and go outside and weep with her, but her older sister put a hand on his forearm and told him to just let her be, that this happened every time they came here. But many who come to that restaurant on Friday nights are so young and have already been here for so long that the wars that have been ravaging the isthmus for at least a decade are like a dark fairy tale to them, and they already consider themselves Nuyorquinos as much as anything else; they tower over their parents, growing up tall and radiantly chubby faced because here even the tap water is supposedly good for you—at times Esteban, who’ll turn twenty in January (for five months he and Joaquina will be the same age), so burdened by the war that broke his heart, feels like an irrelevant abuelo around these jokey jovenazos, most of them actually a bit older than he.
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