‘Hello?’
‘I have a drop-off.’
Román.
Shit – a drop-off meant illegals.
I went to the front door, nervous sweat prickling my forehead as I held the knob. I didn’t know if it was Román’s voice or the prospect of welcoming a pack of strangers into our home that had me quaking as I opened the door, but when I did: no Román. Just four grim men carrying two heavy black garbage bags apiece. One was about my age. The others appeared to be well over fifty. They were dressed in button-down shirts and trousers, like they’d been told to walk with their best clothes on their backs. All were thin, dark-skinned and sombre. I felt racist for thinking it, but the older men looked almost identical. Perhaps I’d been living away from Venezuela too long and was only used to the Trinidadian race rainbow now.
Thinking these marginally racist thoughts, I smiled as wide as I could manage. ‘Bienvenidos,’ I said, motioning for them to come inside. As they filed past me, mumbling hello, I dashed out the door towards the annex. It was a slightly adolescent move – running for Mamá instead of handling the men myself – but if there’s one thing every girl has embedded in her brain from the second she has any kind of cognitive function, it’s don’t invite strange men into your home and lock the door behind you (because then it’s your fault for whatever happens next, right?). So with no patriarchal hero figure around, the next best thing was Mamá – what’s sisterhood all about if not dragging a fellow woman into a potential hive of rapists to protect your ass?
Ever since Sancho had started dating Megan, who he was still seeing despite whatever the hell was going on with him and Vanessa, my mother’s business had been booming. Megan had put all her friends onto Mamá, and if I thought us Latinas liked to groom, the whites and Arabs of Trinidad put us to shame.
Well, almost.
Mamá was booked up weeks in advance now, not just thanks to Megan’s friends, but thanks to Mamá’s own Machiavellian marketing strategy. In Venezuela, Mamá had never done waxing. Her thing had always been nails. But demand for epilation was hot, hot, hot in Trinidad thanks to year-round warm weather. So my mother, ever the shrewd businesswoman, began pitching herself as the best waxer in Caracas. ‘Peoples use to come from all parts of Venezuela to see me for waxing,’ she bragged, lying through her teeth. ‘Appointments from six months in advance to book! Ask anybody and they tell you.’
While spouting her false propaganda, she quietly invested in all the waxing apparatus she needed and YouTubed how to wax any and every body part. Then hey presto, Mamá became the most in-demand waxer in West Trinidad.
So, as per usual, the pavement in front of our house was lined with SUVs, CR-Vs and other bright ’n’ shiny automotive behemoths whose owners were in the annex waiting to have their lips, legs, chins, underarms, forearms, taints and vaginas stripped bare.
As I burst through the wreath-bedecked annex door, Mamá shot me a sharp look. ‘Momentito, hija,’ she warned, brushing seasonal red polish onto a broad-backed woman’s nails.
The room was full up: full of Christmas figurines and potted poinsettias, full of shelves stocked with every beauty product known to man, and full of women tapping away on smartphones and flipping through tabloid magazines.
I widened my eyes at Mamá: The illegal invasion is underway!
She widened her eyes back at me: I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me, but wait until I’m done!
Finally, my mother finished with the woman’s nails, stood and wiped her hands on the pink apron she wore to work every day, perpetually dusted with other people’s nail shavings. ‘Señoras, my daughter needs me to check something. I will be only a minute.’
One woman tutted and pointedly raised her Rolex to the level of her oversized Gucci sunglasses. Mamá ignored her and followed me back to the house.
Inside, the men were still holding their garbage bags, standing awkwardly in the living room. Mamá welcomed them like distant family. ‘¡Bienvenidos! Please, make yourself at home. How was your trip over? Any trouble with the coast guard? Ay, you poor señores, please, sit. Are you hungry? Yola, fix a jug with ice water and bring some glasses while our guests decide what they want to eat.’
It was only while I was filling the pitcher at the faucet that I noticed the parked jeep through the window. Román was in the driver’s seat, talking on his cell phone. A stab of annoyance cut into me. Why had he just left me alone with these potentially dangerous men? I mentally kicked myself: Román was a dangerous man, dummy. Why the hell should I expect him to care about my safety?
I took the pitcher out to the living room. When I went back to the kitchen for four glasses, I didn’t bother looking out the window again.
Mamá, after chatting with the men for less than five minutes, seemed fully assured that they wouldn’t attack me if left alone, so returned to her waiting clients. I sat with the men uncomfortably while they drank their water.
‘What kind of sandwiches would you like?’
They smiled. The younger one shook his head. ‘We don’t want you to go to any trouble, miss.’
‘Yola, please,’ I said. ‘And really, it’s no problem. Hallacas maybe?’
The younger one shook his head again. ‘We don’t want to put you out.’ The older ones mumbled similar things, all smiling kindly.
I could tell, though, that they were only feeling bad to ask for food on top of everything else. It was the sort of thing polite people did, and it softened me up. So despite their protests, I brought them a heaped plate of reheated Jamaican patties from our freezer, and was unsurprised when they tucked right in. After they’d eaten, I showed them around, told them to make themselves at home, and excused myself to get back to work.
I shut my bedroom door softly, some inane compulsion for politeness making me consider the men’s feelings if I were to noisily lock the door, betraying that I still suspected them capable of being a pack of sexual predators.
Just as I’d managed to turn the lock slowly enough to mute the telltale click, a throat cleared behind me. I spun around to flatten myself against the door, the breath sucked straight out of me.
‘¡Verga! How the hell did you get in here?’ I slumped over with relief before quickly snapping myself back upright, realizing the situation I was now in: alone in my bedroom with Román.
He was sitting on my desk chair, facing me. The way the room was laid out, I couldn’t see the desk until I was inside with the door shut. And I’d been so focused on surreptitiously locking myself in that I hadn’t even noticed him there.
‘Sorry,’ he said, standing. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’
‘How’d you think I was going to react? Nearly gave me a heart attack.’ I wasn’t lying. It felt like a rodeo bull was bucking wildly in my chest – but I knew that was just the Román effect more than anything else.
‘Again – sorry,’ he laughed. ‘I want your heart to be nothing but safe.’
He walked over in slow strides to stand over me. I would’ve stepped backwards, away from him, but there was nothing behind me but the locked door – and if I’m totally honest, I didn’t want to move away from him at all. That rodeo bull in my chest was really going apeshit now. Blood was thudding in my ears.
‘I came in through the back,’ he said.
‘I’m not worried about how you came in. I want to know why you came in.’
He rocked back on his heels and shrugged. There was a boyish something about him, even with the gun I’d already spotted sticking out of the back of his jeans.
‘Ever heard that English saying, curiosity killed the cat?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow.
‘So you’re in here because you’re curious? But I thought you couldn’t – how did you put it again – give in to intrigue? That’s what you said in the parking lot if I remember correctly.’
He didn’t bother to answer. ‘I read your work, you know.’
I frowned, instantly self-conscious. ‘My writing? What for?’
�
�Part of gathering intel.’
‘What does my writing have to do with intel?’
He waggled a finger at me. ‘As a writer, you of all people should know that someone’s art is the clearest reflection of who they are. The better I know my subjects, the better I can keep them in line. If I was tracking a writer like, say, Echeverría, I’d know to keep my gun locked and loaded. Someone who’s more of a Neruda, I’d know not to worry.’
Esteban Echeverría and Pablo Neruda? I hid my surprise and snorted. ‘So you go rifling through the twins’ diaries to find out whether or not you should arm yourself around them too?’
He laughed. ‘I only read what you’d been shortlisted for. That’s the magic of this new-fangled Internet thing. Everything just a click away.’
Ignoring his sarcasm, I fought the impulse to ask what he thought of my work, and again, sought out my bitchy spirit animal: Aunt Celia. ‘I’m surprised. Who knew ignorant thugs like you could read.’
I’d said it teasingly but his smile was gone.
‘You shouldn’t be so quick to judge,’ he said, quietly restrained. ‘Take it from someone who knows the danger of misjudgement.’
Though he hadn’t moved, he seemed to have inched somehow closer to me. We were separated by the width of a feather, my neck arched almost painfully back to look up at him. So close that I noticed then for the first time that there was a thin, barely visible scar that ran across his mouth diagonally like a fine, silvery seam someone had sewn across it. Seeing it felt like I’d uncovered some intimate glimpse of his past, like I should reach out and touch it, ask how it had happened. I could smell the soap on his skin, his spearmint mouthwash, the lingering scent of his laundry detergent. All of it humanized him and emboldened me. Or maybe I was just fucking nuts like Celia, because I wasn’t even a little bit afraid of him.
‘You’re really trying to tell me you’re not a thug? I saw you choke my father with my own eyes.’
‘What you saw was me doing my job.’
‘Exactly – your job as a thug.’
‘It’s not in your interest to condescend to me, Yola. I don’t think you understand the position you and your family are in.’
‘I understand that we’re in this position because of what you do for Ugly.’
His eyes flashed but I held them firm. We were just a guy and a girl doing a tango. Current crackled between us like static. He wasn’t going to hurt me and I knew it.
Like he’d done in the parking lot, he took my chin between his thumb and the knuckle of his index finger. ‘You’re a piece of work,’ he said, and I could tell I’d struck a nerve. It made me laugh. Imagine – an armed criminal, and I’d gotten under his skin by teasing him about being illiterate. Why did he care so much?
The laugh had barely come out before his mouth was on mine. I didn’t pull away. He crushed himself against me, his hardened palms pushing my arms up above my head, clasping my hands, his mouth hot and hungry, the length of our bodies against each other. Pent-up lust rushed through me and in the blinding white heat of that moment, the whole world and everything in it was Román and me and nothing else mattered. Not Ugly’s disapproval of mixing business with pleasure. Not the wellbeing of my family’s kneecaps. Not. A. Fucking. Thing.
It was over as quick as it happened. Like forked lightning illuminating the night for one violently electrified moment before it all goes dark again. He pulled back and that was it – he was gone and I was alone, panting like I’d just leapt out of an airplane and found myself shaky-legged on solid ground again.
As I caught my breath, I felt no guilt for the first time since the unexpected parking-lot tryst. If Aunt Celia could sleep with married men and shame-riddled seminarians and half of Panama City … if people could screw their best friends’ wives and their first cousins … if the whole world could carry on fucking as it pleased, why should I be any different?
GHOSTED
My father was born for safe-housing illegal migrants. Fresh from his afternoon school run and having clearly been given a heads-up from Mamá, he fell upon our new houseguests with all the bonhomie of a Sandals Resort manager, bearing three buckets of fried chicken and a bottle of rum. From the confines of my bedroom, where I was still starry-eyed, giddily recovering from Román and making a half-assed attempt at a translation, I heard Papá’s booming good cheer as he came through the front door. ‘Welcome, gentlemen! I brought food! You rum drinkers?’ A pause. ‘Ha ha! Good man! I needed a stiff rum myself when we made our journey over, let me tell you …’
As the afternoon went by, the men’s chatter with my father grew warmer and louder. Soon the talk of our despised president, Nicolás Maduro, and la Patria was so loud I had to switch on the noisy a/c unit just to drown it all out. By the time I’d finished work that evening, the atmosphere in the house was positively jovial. When I joined everyone, Zulema was back from work, talking with the youngest of the men, and my parents were in gales of laughter at some anecdote one of the older guys had just finished telling.
It turned out that the men were, as I mentioned, cattle farmers. It also turned out that I wasn’t racist, because the three older men were in fact triplets – not identical, but pretty damn close. The younger man was a son of one of the triplets. Their names were José, Jorge, Joaquin, and Javier. The young one was Javier. The older men I still couldn’t tell apart, and neither could anyone else, so that same night we ended up calling them the Jotas.
For our first family dinner with Javier and the Jotas, Papá inserted the extra leaves into the dining table and we all ate together, minus Sancho, who’d also received a couple illegals of his own that afternoon. Mamá, with the help of Javier, who was apparently hoping to become a chef, prepared a feast to rival a Christmas luncheon. At dinner, one of the Jotas presented Papá with a bottle of expensive Venezuelan rum as a thank-you, which my parents found touching. All I thought was that the Jota had come here all the way from Venezuela with nothing but two garbage bags of his belongings, yet he’d still managed to prioritize rum.
The bottle was cracked open at the table and the rum drunk out of tumblers, straight. By the end of the dinner, there wasn’t a single one of us who wasn’t properly drunk. We all said goodnight like the best of friends.
But after I’d gone to bed, when I heard my doorknob turning with a creak, I jolted upright, all goodwill instantly evaporated. The Jotas! Come to rape and pillage!
The door opened. It was Papá. He sat on the edge of my bed. ‘Gordita, I know Javier and the Jotas are good people, but lock that bedroom door day and night whenever you’re in here.’ He spoke softly, as though ashamed of himself for not trusting these men we’d known for all of a few hours.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Good girl. Sleep well.’
I knew I would, Jotas or not – my guilt over Román had finally been expunged by the temporary satiation of my need for him, and my insomnia was gone along with it. I slept like the dead that night, dreams of Román dancing in my head.
Javier and the Jotas turned out to be excellent houseguests. They had warm, simple country manners, were considerate and helpful, cleaning the common areas of the house until everything shone, even folding the laundry that my mother perpetually left in the dryer, which was used as a communal closet between loads. In the evenings, Javier cooked dinner with Mamá and the three Jotas drank with Papá out on the back porch. They even cheerfully succumbed to Zulema’s insistence that she do their colours for free, as a gift. Javier actually wore the flamboyantly teal button-down she bought him because ‘you, like, need at least one teal item in your wardrobe as a Spring, Javi.’ After a few days, it felt like they really were distant relatives who’d dropped in for a visit.
In the other Palacios households, it seemed their first batches of illegals were equally pleasant for the most part. Sancho had a young married couple, both university students who’d been beaten and tear-gassed during a protest and decided that spearheading the people’s revolution against Maduro
wasn’t really their cup of tea.
Aunt Milagros had a family of five: two unwed parents and their three small children. Though she vehemently lamented their living and reproducing in sin, they were harmless enough.
Mauricio had the worst deal out of everyone, and for this I was secretly grateful to Román. Why shouldn’t Mauricio have the worst deal seeing as he’d dumped all of us into his mess?
They had nine men staying with them – a bunch of guys looking for a better life, for adventure, for something to dull the boredom. Who knows.
As Mauricio complained to my father, they were messy, flirted relentlessly with the twins and Vanessa, and ate more than Mauricio could afford to feed them. Disaster!
But deserved (for Mauricio anyway).
The more time passed, the more I blamed Mauricio for everything. He had the casino job after all, so there was no reason for Aunt Celia to have been left indebted to a criminal, out on a ledge all alone with no help. Mauricio claimed he hadn’t known about any of it, but that was no excuse as far as I was concerned and also reeked of bullshit. How’d he think the girls were able to go to public school without some string being pulled? Whatever the real story, it still boiled down to Mauricio driving Aunt Celia to take desperate action to take care of the twins though she had no financial means of her own. Whether he knew what went down or not, he was still accountable.
What I couldn’t work out, though, was why Aunt Celia had embroiled herself with Ugly, with or without Mauricio’s knowledge. Why stick her neck out to someone like Ugly if she couldn’t possibly pay him back? Why shoulder the burden alone?
I knew I’d never know the answers, but the questions were still a lump in my throat I could never seem to swallow.
One Year of Ugly Page 7