Bulletproof Vest

by Maria Venegas

  From the window of one of the upstairs bedrooms, Belén had watched the brothers and their cousins trading off. Some would come and others would go, but there were always at least three of them, milling about near the gazebo, and this is why she had decided that Sunday would be the best day to make a move.

  On Sunday morning, not long after the first cock had sung out, she was already putting the finishing touches on his floral-printed dress. The hem was long enough that it dragged on the floor and concealed his sandals. By eight in the morning he was already in the dress and his older sister was fussing with the bow around his waist. His mother wrapped one of her silk scarves around his head and grabbed her umbrella. When the morning service let out, the crowd flooded the plaza. He had not set foot in public since the shootout, but now out he went, arm in arm with his sister and his mother. The trio crossed the plaza, practically right under the nose of the lookouts, before disappearing around the corner. They made their way along the narrow cobblestone streets, keeping their gaze down and walking briskly until they reached the bus station.

  Belén had relatives in the next town over, and that’s where he stayed while his father settled with the feds, the judge, and everyone else who needed settling. Eventually, Fidel recovered, the lookouts went home, and when my father returned almost a year later, he had grown taller—already standing six feet tall—his voice was deeper, and his mother was so proud that she never lost an opportunity to brag about her son and how brave he was—how he had saved his brother’s life.

  Though his father had taken the pistol away and hidden it from him, he would find it and sneak it out to the corral, where he’d practice on his draw or pretend he was in a duel. He’d tuck the gun into the back of his belt and then take three steps away from the wall before turning and aiming the gun at the adobe. He never fired it, until the day he became curious about what it would feel like to be shot. How much could it possibly hurt? He squeezed his arms and legs, finally deciding on the meaty part of his thigh. He gripped his thigh muscle with one hand, pressed the barrel against it with the other, turned away, and fired a single blast. The bullet broke the skin, ripped through his flesh, and went out the other end.

  “You idiot,” his father said, after he had limped back to the house. “You’re lucky you didn’t hit the bone.”

  “That boy has too much free time on his hands,” Timoteo said when he heard about what had happened. “And that can only lead to trouble.” He suggested they send the boy off to the seminary in Guadalajara, and offered to pay for it.

  My father agreed to go, so Timoteo took him to the zapatería to buy him a new pair of shoes. He had never owned a pair of closed-toe shoes; each pair he tried on made him feel as if he had stepped into a new personality. He finally settled on a pair of shiny black shoes that laced up in the front, and in the days leading up to his departure, he often pulled the shoes out of the box and tried them on. Though they were extremely uncomfortable, he liked the way they looked on his feet, liked the way they made him feel—very distinguished.

  The day his father was to put him on the bus bound for Guadalajara, they knew a storm was coming long before the first clouds appeared in the sky. By midmorning, most of the turtles had already vacated the river and crawled halfway up the incline. Still, he and his father saddled up the horses and, uncomfortable as they were, he slipped into his new shoes. When they set out at noon, dark gray clouds had already blotted out most of the sky, and when they were crossing through Santana, it seemed that a war had been unleashed in the heavens. Lightning was striking down all around them, and by the time they reached San Martín, the first drops began to fall. They hitched their horses outside the corner store and stepped inside just as the full wrath of the storm broke out.

  “Buenas tardes, Pedro,” the shopkeeper yelled over the sound of rain pelting the tin roof, and asked where they were riding to in such torrential weather.

  “I’m taking this muchacho to catch the bus to Guadalajara,” said Pedro, as the muchacho hobbled over to the icebox and grabbed a bottle of Coca-Cola for himself and an ice-cold beer for his father. “He’s going off to the seminary to become a priest.”

  “A priest?” the shopkeeper said. “That’s good, Jose, that’s good to dedicate your life to the church, to God,” he said. “Though if this rain keeps up, you might not make it across the river. Maybe you should wait until tomorrow, Pedro.”

  Outside, a few men had gathered on the porch, and the brown muddy waters were already rushing along the cobblestones in front of the store’s stoop.

  “It’s best to finish what we started,” Pedro said, as two men came stumbling into the shop, shaking rain from their cowboy hats and ponchos.

  “Ahora sí se vino el agua, Pedro,” one of them shouted, shaking Pedro’s hand.

  The shopkeeper leaned over the counter, watching as my father hobbled over to his father and handed him the beer.

  “What’s wrong, Jose? Why are you walking around like an injured rooster?” he asked.

  “It’s because of my brand-new shoes,” he said, pulling his trousers up so that the shopkeeper and everyone else could see the full splendor of his polished toes. The shopkeeper took one look at the shoes and started laughing.

  “Well, it’s no wonder they’re tight, you’ve got them on the wrong feet.” He roared.

  The two men in ponchos, his father, and the others on the porch all turned and looked down at his shoes. His feet curved out and away from each other. The place erupted with laughter, and he got down on bended knee and was switching the shoes when another man came barging into the shop, announcing that the river had grown so much there was no crossing it.

  His father had another beer, and then another, and once the rain subsided a few hours later, the shop cleared out and they unhitched their horses and rode back up to the ranch. The bus to Guadalajara was long gone.

  11

  YOU SAY JERUSALEM, I SAY PARIS

  IT’S EARLY JULY, just after the summer solstice, and it seems that as soon as the sun disappears below the horizon, it’s already coming back up behind the green hills of the British countryside. I’ve just spent the spring semester of my junior year studying abroad in Granada, Spain. Once the program ended, I stayed in Spain for a few weeks before traveling up to London with a friend and hitchhiking to Glastonbury. A truck driver picked us up and drove us most of the way, and as we flew past Stonehenge, the man told us that he had received a phone call earlier that day, a relative calling to say that his father had passed away.

  “I never really knew my father,” the man said. “He left when I was young.” We gave him our condolences, though it seemed off, because he wasn’t so much sad as conflicted—unsure of what he should be feeling. I assumed that the day I received that call, I’d have a similar reaction—not sadness, but indifference. The same indifference I had felt when, before leaving for Spain, I had heard that my father had been extradited and was now in prison in Mexico. As far as I was concerned, he deserved to rot in his prison cell.

  In Glastonbury, my friend and I had met up with three long-haired and bearded guys from Chico and a girl named Abigail from Maine. We had all been living in Spain and had made plans to meet up at the Glastonbury music festival. When the festival ended, I stayed on to work, to help clean up the fairgrounds. It paid forty pounds per day and included room and board. I’d been at it for a week and had saved enough money for the last leg of my trip, for Paris.

  On the day that I leave the fairgrounds, I hitch a ride into town and call home from a depot. My mother answers and tells me she’s going to Jerusalem with a group from her church. Their return flight connects through Madrid, and she’s going to see if she can change her return date and stay in Madrid a few extra days so that we can see each other.

  “I’m not in Spain anymore,” I say.

  “Where are you?” she asks.

  “In the south of England,” I say. “I’m heading to France in two days.”

  “What do you want to
go there for?” she says. “You don’t even speak the language. What if you get lost? What if something happens to you? Why don’t you come meet me in Madrid? Maybe we can even fly home together.”

  I try explaining that I don’t want to go to Madrid because I’ve already been there at least three times and, besides, I’m flying back to Chicago at the end of the month. We can see each other then, but she insists that I come meet her.

  “Fine,” I say, wishing I had never called home. “Why don’t you call the airlines and see how much it will cost to change your ticket, see if it’s even worth it, and I’ll call you back in a few days.”

  A few days later, I’m checking into a youth hostel in Paris. I spend countless hours wandering through the winding cobblestone streets, hanging out in cafés, and window-shopping at the boutiques. I sit in the park that’s across the street from my hostel, writing in my journal and sketching out my design ideas—bohemian-style blouses, skirts, and dresses. I’ve been there for a week and am strolling along the Seine when a tall man with jet-black hair comes up to me. Though he hasn’t been running, he seems to be out of breath. He’s speaking rapidly and asking me something in French.

  “Yo no parlo francés,” I say.

  “Do you speak English?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Chicago.”

  “You’re not an American,” he says, shaking his head, digging his hands into his sides and taking a deep breath. “Where are you from?” He narrows his eyes as if to get a better look at me.

  “Mexico,” I say, though Mexico feels like a distant ancestor I’m no longer even related to.

  “Ah, Mexico,” he practically shouts. “I knew it.” He holds his index finger firmly in the air. “I’ve never met a Mexican before, but I can tell you’re not an American.” He throws his shoulders back as if that’s the end of that conversation. “I saw you from across the street, and I knew I had to talk to you. And don’t think that I’m talking to you just because you’re a woman. There are plenty of young women walking around,” he says, holding his arms out and pivoting. “But there is something about you, something about the way you walk. It’s, it’s, it’s as though you knew something.” He folds his arms and looks at me as if he were expecting for me to hand over the keys to the universe. “Are you a writer?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “I’m a student.”

  “Ah, a student,” he says. “And what is it that you study?”

  “Economics,” I say, and tell him that my focus is international trade, though I don’t bother trying to explain how someday I hope to be a fashion designer. I imagine I’ll be importing fabrics from one country and exporting clothing to another, thus having a solid understanding of international trade seems like a good place to start.

  “I’m a writer,” he says, pulling up on his hair with a tight fist as if trying to relieve a migraine. “I’ve been locked up in my apartment for the last three months revising my novel. I just finished it. You’re the first person I’ve talked to in weeks.” He fumbles in his shirt pocket and pulls out his cigarettes, opens the pack, and holds it out to me. Though I don’t smoke, I take one, and soon we are sitting on a bench overlooking the Seine and I’m spilling my guts to him about Mathew.

  I had met Mathew my sophomore year, and we had been together ever since. Back when we had met, I was already planning on studying abroad in Spain and he talked about maybe studying in Ecuador the same semester. It was kind of perfect—we’d go off to opposite ends of the globe and come back to compare notes. But when it came down to it, he decided to go to Spain with me instead. We had been in Granada for only a few weeks when he’d started acting like my guardian, asking where I had been over the weekend, who my new group of friends were, and why I was hanging around and camping out with “the druggies.” The last thing I needed after having traveled so far away from home was anyone questioning me or acting like my mother.

  “I broke up with him,” I say, taking a drag and choking on the smoke. “Though it was only supposed to be a temporary ‘you go your way and I go mine, and we’ll pick up where we left off when we get back to school’ sort of break. You know what I mean?” I say.

  “Uh-huh,” the man says, grinning at me. I go on with my story, telling him how Mathew had left Spain the minute classes let out, but I had stayed a bit longer. He had gone backpacking around Italy with some of the other girls from our university, and after he’d been gone for two weeks, I received a seething letter from him. A letter that opened with three cutting words: You fucking cunt. He despised me, not because I had broken up with him in a crowded café in the middle of the day and had sat emotionless across the table from him as the tears streamed down his face, but because even before we had left for Spain, I had cheated on him and somehow his friend Melissa knew all about it. She had known about it the whole time we were in Spain, but had waited until they were sharing a bottle of wine in Florence to tell him everything. The thing that hurt the most about the letter was that I couldn’t even defend myself against it. He was still traveling and I had no way of reaching him and telling him that Melissa had gotten the story wrong. Sure, I had kissed this particular guy, but I would have never slept with anyone else while I was still with him.

  “Anyways,” I say, “I’ve written a few poems about the whole ordeal in my journal.”

  “I thought you weren’t a writer,” he says, cocking his eyebrow and looking at me as if I’ve just come into focus.

  “I’m not,” I say. “I was just venting.”

  He asks if I want to read him any of it, and I tell him no, thank you, because I know that if he saw the things I write in my journal, all the things I keep locked away in my head, he’d think I was insane.

  “Another time perhaps,” he says, smiling and offering me another cigarette. We smoke and watch the pastel hues ripple across the surface of the river as the sun goes down behind the silhouette of the buildings.

  The next day, I take the Metro to the Père Lachaise Cemetery and visit Jim Morrison’s grave. I’ve never been to a cemetery; the only image I have of one has faded in my memory, the way plastic flowers tied to a cross and left on the side of the road fade in the sun. My cemetery sits on a hill in the outskirts of town, and though there must be numerous graves beyond its iron gates, in my version there is only the one, and I see it exactly as it was described to me—a mound of dirt marked with a simple wooden cross, though where there was one cross, there are now two, side by side.

  Before leaving Spain, I had called home and Sonia told me that my grandfather had passed away. He should have died years ago, I thought. When he was first diagnosed with diabetes, he should have dropped dead right then and there. Had he died then, my father would have never talked my brother into going back to Mexico. It seemed anyone who went back to that distant, dusty land never returned.

  After leaving the cemetery I pick up a phone card, and on my way back to my hostel, I find a pay phone and call home.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Sonia says, when she hears my voice.

  “In Paris.”

  “You’re not even in Spain yet?” she says. “Mom has been in Madrid for like four days waiting for you.”

  “Why did she change her ticket? I told her I’d call her back.”

  “I don’t know, but she’s really worried about you,” she says. “You better call her.”

  I jot down the name and number of the hotel and call right away, ask for Pascuala Venegas in room 504.

  “That guest checked out this morning,” the woman says.

  “Are you sure? She didn’t say if she was going to a different hotel or if she was leaving the city for good?” I ask, though I know it’s too late—she had come and gone and we had missed each other.

  On my way back to the hostel, no matter how hard I try to drown out her voice, I can practically hear her asking all the things she has always asked: Why are you like this? Why can’t you be more like your sisters? W
hy can’t you just talk to me? Why are you so distant?

  All the questions for which I don’t have answers.

  * * *

  When I return from abroad, I spend two weeks at home. I’ve been away at college for three years and no longer have a room. On the night before I leave for school, my mother insists that I stay with her.

  “Madrid was horrible,” she says, while we lie side by side in the dark. “I sat in a plaza scanning every face that went by, thinking that one of those faces might be you. It was just awful.”

  “Why did you change your ticket?” I say.

  “I thought you would be there.” We lie in silence for a long time. “Mateo was a good man,” she says. “You shouldn’t have left him. I really would have liked for you two to have gotten married.” I stare into the darkness and think that maybe I should tell her what really happened. Tell her about the letter he sent me, about how each time I have called him since I got back, the minute he hears my voice, he hangs up. “Can I ask you something?” she says.

  “Sure.”

  “Did you have sexual relations with him?”

  This question catches me completely off guard. My mother and I rarely talk about anything, but we certainly never talk about sex. Perhaps what’s even more shocking is her thinking that after having spent more than a year with Mathew, I may not have had sex with him. I can hear her breathing, can feel her waiting while I contemplate whether to tell her the truth or not.