Spotting a good catch is about numerology. A good man should ALWAYS be tied to two crucial numbers: 6 and 0. Six represents the minimum of figures that should be coming into his bank account every month (in US dólares, claro), and the number of inches his cock should exceed to make him worth your while. Zero represents the ideal number of living parents, siblings, children and former marriages attached to any prospective husband worth considering.
Not to mention the wild anecdotes that served as ample fodder for fiction:
It was a night made of magic ingredients – hairspray, disco balls, and rich boys. How was I to know it’d end in the worst kinds of shots (tequila, gun, mug)?
I was amped. Fingers hovering over the keyboard, I wet my lips, waiting for the first line of the next chapter to come to me, the one that would blow people’s minds, have the Cervantes Prize judges creaming themselves. But the cursor just blinked at me on the screen (judgementally, if cursors can be judgemental) as my hands stayed poised above the keys. I was stumped. I tried putting a few lines onto the page, but anything I wrote sounded contrived and flat, nothing that would leave any literary-award judge gagging for more.
I opted for procrastination in a bid to get the juices flowing. Started browsing the Internet for local writing workshops. Now that I knew Aunt Celia the Clandestine Literary Wonder had been offering shrewd writing advice all along, it was time to find some other, equally useful source of writing camaraderie. To my surprise, I discovered that there were lots of literary events going on locally, and in San Fernando, the island’s southern capital, the annual Bocas Lit Festival was underway. Scrolling through the festival website, I found myself getting nervous. I only wrote in Spanish, and the thought of attempting to write in my second language, far less read aloud my attempts at English prose, had always deterred me from doing any due diligence on Trinidad’s literary scene, if there was a scene at all. I’d always felt that my intellect knocked itself down a few pegs when I expressed myself in my second language, and I wasn’t willing to make myself that vulnerable when it came to writing. My words were my guts spewed onto a page, intestines laid out in rows of black and white. I couldn’t chance laying those guts out with a language in which l was anything less than native-level flawless. But now Aunt Celia was gone and I needed writer folk for feedback.
After combing through the festival programme, I settled on a lecture by a London-based literary agent – no workshopping my writing or reading anything aloud to strangers. An easy way to dip my toe into unknown waters. I registered for the lecture, already jittery about interacting with other writers. Trini culture was warm and hospitable, but the social scene was cliquish – I imagined the sphere of the local literati being even worse.
A few minutes after registering, a little ping! on my cell phone told me I’d gotten a confirmation email from the festival. I looked at the email on the phone screen, then went back into the inbox and scrolled down until I came to the last email I’d gotten from Aunt Celia. Sent three days before she died, telling me I needed to pick up a copy of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.
About a hermaphrodite! Why don’t you write about one of these transgender people? Everybody’s eating that shit up right now. Nothing gets people going like someone fucking around with their genitals. Write about it, Yola! Go get yourself a man-made penis for research ja ja! Then maybe you’ll win yourself a Pulitzer like Eugenides.
I’d written back a one-liner:
You have to be American to win a Pulitzer.
It made me sick to look at my final, dry email reply. But I still read it every other day.
Feeling that familiar dull throb of missing her, I was tempted to take another read of the manuscript. But then I remembered why the manuscript had inspired me in the first place. Not just because of the writing, but because I had to put some quality shit on paper too, to prove myself to Aunt Celia if nothing else. I closed my novel manuscript and opened a blank Word document. A quick short story would stir the creative pot. Sensing that intangible something that sends the words flooding out of you, I wrote the first line:
She did it to prove something.
It was like putting your toe onto the edge of a slide greased with olive oil. With those few words, I slipped down the chute, tumbling down the creative rabbit hole in an avalanche of words. A couple of hours later, a first draft of a pretty decent short story was on paper. Thus recharged, I returned to my novel, and wrote chapter after chapter, reconnecting with my characters, falling in love with the story all over again. I only broke focus when the outdoor security light came on in a series of staccato blinks, telling me it was dusk. The bulb of the light had been fading for ages, and would strobe fluorescently into my room for fifteen minutes every day at nightfall before it finally glowed steadily. I went to the window to pull the curtain shut, but something caught my eye. I peered through the louvres – was I seeing right? I leaned into the window, squinted through the slats at two shadowy forms at the far end of the backyard.
There they were. Sancho and Vanessa up against the mango tree, mouths locked, Vanessa on her tiptoes, Sancho with his hand jammed down the front of her jeans.
And just like that, I was struck by a great first line for a second novel:
He was too stupid to know he’d made a huge mistake.
I’m not even going to get into the Vanessa–Sancho thing. Setting aside my own mixed feelings towards her, the girl was seventeen years old. Sancho was pushing thirty, had a girlfriend and a blatant drinking problem, and was nothing if not rapaciously promiscuous, with or without said girlfriend. I was tempted to warn Vanessa, but what did I owe her anyway? She’d been playing up to him from day one, and I’d already been magnanimous enough to temper my frigidity towards her in spite of my Aunt Celia loyalties. I wasn’t getting involved now if she and Sancho wanted to start up some sordid dalliance. So my reaction to catching them at it was like witnessing a Mafia hit – omertà: say nothing to anyone. In any case, we all had too much on our minds to grapple with that Nabokov-styled romance. The entire family was gripped by a pervasive nervous energy as we awaited our first batch of ‘guests’. It was like waiting for an atomic bomb. The landline ringing was as good as an air raid siren. We had no idea when the blitzkrieg of illegal migrants was coming – we assumed, or hoped, that it would at least be preceded by a warning phone call, but who knew? Maybe Román would just kick the door in and send streams of illegals flooding into our living room. We had no idea what to expect.
But one, then several, days passed and nothing happened. The phone kept ringing with no one on the other end besides my widowed abuelo begging Papá to go back to Venezuela and incite a revolution – ‘If Castro could do it with some beatniks and a few dinghies, why can’t you?’ – and vehemently refusing to join us in Trinidad: ‘Venezuela is where I was born and where I will die. What the hell will I do after I’m dead in Trinidad? Where will my spirit roam around? I won’t have a damn clue where to go!’ And Mamá’s family still languishing in Caracas, calling to say there was no toilet paper, no medicine, no vaccines, nothing but canned food, newborns mewling like wrinkled kittens in cardboard boxes at the hospitals, brawls in the street between the Opositores and the Maduristas, newly ordained prostitutes in droves at the borders, young women cutting out their fallopian tubes because where can they get birth control and who can feed a baby. A whole nation rattling its cage, seething with resentment, demanding to know why the hell it couldn’t do socialism Scandinavian-style, with high taxes but pristine streets, a bottomless supply of more high-grade dairy products than even the most robust intestinal tract could possibly handle, and minimum-wage workers still coining enough to go on Mediterranean cruises once a year, the kind of socialism that made El Che nod his benevolent, CIA-executed head in approval and say yes, compadres, you got exactly what I was going for. But our malnourished, rage-filled relatives knew they’d got the shitty end of the socialist stick. Granted not as shitty as the socialism of Nationalsozialistische but shitty enough
to prove that not all socialist idealism is created equal.
Whoever picked up the phone would listen and let our family members vent, wishing we could tell them we were rattling with nerves and resentment in our own cage, thank you very much, that we’d hauled ass all the way to Trinidad just to fall victim to Ugly, yet another megalomaniacal prick. But we stayed mum – because no matter what we were going through, at least we could buy Panadol for our stress migraines and toilet paper for our anxiety-induced diarrhoea and groceries for our comfort eating. Maybe the grass here was greener, just fertilized with an equally pungent brand of horseshit.
A PERCEPTIVE MOTHERFUCKER
Trinidad likes to tout itself as this cosmopolitan melting pot, swirling with all the flavours of the race rainbow. But in fact, if you’re not one of, or a blend of, the two majority races on the island, a pall of Otherness follows you like a lingering fart that won’t waft away, the stench manifesting itself in relentless catcalls, the unshakeable instinct that you should always keep your eyes on the pavement, and a keen awareness that you are constantly being watched. For Latinas, a relatively novel addition to the local ethnic pot, this Otherness is exacerbated by a label far brighter, more neon-hued, tinsel-bedecked, and eye-catching than any other: whore. Trinidadian public opinion deems us all, each and every one, a stripper, hooker, aspiring trophy wife, or sneaky conniving slut. No room for the Madonna dichotomy when it comes to ‘Venes’ here. So with my dual labels of Other and Whore firmly affixed the second I stepped outside, I thought it best to opt for the most neutral, innocuous clothing possible when I dressed that Saturday morning for the Lit Fest seminar: black T-shirt and black jeans. (Though granted, I couldn’t fight the Latin grooming impulse that left my hair sleekly blown-out and my nails freshly French-tipped.)
With my all-black armour donned, feet shod in intentionally unsexy Converse, I turned the key in the beat-up Datsun that Zulema and I shared, and tried to ignore the clamminess of my palms. Then I put on the audiobook of Middlesex for the drive, hoping it might ease my nerves. I’d bought it right after Aunt Celia died, thinking it would be easier to listen to High Literature in English rather than read it. But by the time I hit the highway for the long journey down to San Fernando, Eugenides’ intricate prose had only made me more self-conscious about my own literary English. I killed the volume and drove on in silence, but Middlesex also had another unexpected side effect – I couldn’t think of anything but the person who’d recommended it to me. It helped my anxiety to think of her, though: Aunt Celia had never been intimidated by anyone or anything. Maybe I could slip into her bad-ass attitude like it was a superhero costume, equipped with a utility belt that shot laser-like bitch looks and stun guns that radiated scathing put-downs. She wouldn’t have cared what a bunch of literary types thought of her English prose or if they automatically assumed she was some Vene whore. As I’d learned from the manuscript’s account of her teenage years, Celia had an indefatigable ability to bounce back from any situation, no matter how embarrassing, an indestructibly elastic rubber band:
Who would’ve thought César Velásquez would’ve been the one to pop this cherry. Sure, he can kick a ball clear across a football field and hit a home run like no one else at school, but the guy’s so dyslexic he can barely spell his own first name. Lucky for him, I’m already seventeen – how much longer was I gonna wait before doing the deed? Not like I’m Milagros who’s probably already sewn her chocha shut and shaved her pubic hair into a likeness of the Santa Virgen.
Well, joke’s on me – two years of tolerating Semi-Literate César all because of his superstar athlete status at school and guess who gets dumped two hours after spattering his Spiderman sheets with the remnants of her hymen?
Think that first disastrous sexual escapade put Celia off sex, men or erotic adventurism? No le importó un carajo. In fact, seventeen-year-old Celia decided it was time to take her loins out on the town. She was determined to make up for that one disappointing notch in her belt. If Milagros is going to be the Virgin Mary of the family, then I’ll be its Mary Magdalene – before Magdalene gave up hooking. Maybe Abuela was right after all to think that thirteen-pound, tooth-endowed Baby Celia might have been the Anti-Christ.
Aunt Celia got a kick out of homing in on her targets at parties, ensnaring them with a come-hither stare and a shimmy of her legendary tits, then bedding them by the end of the night. It was shameless sexual adventurism, all about collecting experiences like she could stick them in a stamp book. That’s not to say she wasn’t aware of the risks of her libertine adolescent sexuality. She even shared one of the tricks she used to stop herself getting pregnant, the Prophylactic Pineapple.
All you have to do, according to Catalina del Valle, is eat three whole pineapples in one go if you get into trouble. Being the proactive young woman I am, I figure if I have half a pineapple a day, I’ll keep up a steady enough level of whatever pineapple magic keeps the bambinos away. Sounds like basic biology to me. And Milagros always says I’m no good at science – pfft.
Remembering Aunt Celia’s account of her pineapple bingeing (which eventually led to chronic diarrhoea) and her many scandalous conquests, my nerves were quelled, the drive went by quicker than expected, and before I knew it I was at San Fernando Hill, the hub of the Lit Festival. When I found my way to the right room, the other attendees were pretty much what I expected: artsy locals who eyed me in a way that said we see those labels stuck to your forehead, a few old folk grasping at their last possible opportunity to realize their literary dreams, and then a handful of wanderers like me. I call us wanderers because we all had the slightly confused, wholly insecure look of an illiterate who’s just wandered into a room full of highbrow writer types with high-strung attitudes to match.
An hour later, surprisingly satisfied with the lecture despite not quite grasping everything the British agent said because of her sharp nasal accent, so different from the lilting, sing-song Trini intonation I was used to, I stood skimming the parking lot for the Datsun. How is it that there are things as wondrous as stem cell cloning and artificial intelligence, but no one has figured out whatever cerebral hiccup is responsible for you invariably forgetting where the hell you’ve parked your car?
I shaded my eyes with my hand, sweat patches blooming on my mercilessly heat-absorbent black T-shirt, and slowly scanned the rows of second-hand Japanese cars. No Datsun. Still no Datsun. Then, as my gaze fell straight ahead of me: no Datsun. But Román.
He was leaning against a black jeep wearing a grey T-shirt and blue jeans, looking at me from behind dark sunglasses. For a couple seconds I was too stunned by the sight of him to move. Suddenly the sun felt hotter. I was more aware of everything. The sound of my own breath, the moisture on my upper lip, the sweat slowly slipping down the hollow of my lower back, the smell of brakes and hot concrete. I was having the same reaction as I would in the guy-walking-towards-you-on-a-dark-street scenario, but if the guy was, say, Brad Pitt (circa 2001).
The moment stretched itself out as endlessly as silly putty, Román looking at me silently with an unreadable expression, not a bead of sweat or an armpit stain on him to dilute his James Dean cool, until I got my shit together and made my way over, channelling Celia in a bid to keep any hint of blushing, hip-sashaying damsel at bay.
I came to stand in front of him. ‘What are you doing here?’
Amused, he tilted his head slightly at my question, a cat smiling at an interrogative mouse. ‘Someone in the family leaves Port of Spain, I have to make sure they’re not up to some kind of mischief, like popping into the San Fernando police station, for instance.’
Why did I want to smile back so badly? I tried holding my breath, anything to stop his pheromones working their chemical magic.
‘As you can see, I didn’t go to any police station, so you can trot on back to your boss now.’ Aunt Celia would’ve been proud of how convincingly bitchy I sounded. ‘Or maybe you should be scurrying off to check up on someone else in my family. How do you
know they’re not all at police stations right now?’
Román wasn’t fazed. He started counting out my family members on his fingers. ‘Your father’s at the dentist having a root canal. Zulema’s at the beach with her colleague from the Colour Me Beautiful spa.’ He went on to say what each and every person was doing that day, rounding it off with: ‘And Alejandra told her father she’s going to a movie with a friend, but really she’s with Mikey Stollmeyer, who she’s been seeing after school for the last five days instead of going to her friend Rebecca’s house to study.’
He flashed his palms at me and shrugged: that’s my job, what can ya do?
I was horrified. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t impressed.
‘Fine,’ I said, playing nonchalant. ‘Then you must’ve known I was at a lecture and not going to the police.’
‘I did know. A lecture with Lizzie Atherton, an agent at W&W.’
I swallowed, every heartbeat a horse’s hoof to my ribcage.
He pushed his sunglasses up onto his head. His pupils shrank in the bright light and I saw that his eyes were a mossy hazel. Of course. Couldn’t just be standard dirt-brown like more than fifty per cent of the global population.
‘I came here to have a word with you,’ he said.
‘About?’
‘You’re interesting to me.’ That unnervingly cool, even tone. ‘And I know I’m interesting to you.’
One Year of Ugly Page 5