‘So what do you think, Veneranda?’ Mamá swept her hand across the festive vista of the living room.
Vicente followed Mamá’s hand and blinked at the room with his piggy eyes as if only just noticing the decorations for the first time. He gave a sniff like he was checking a baby’s diaper for poop. Veneranda didn’t even look up at Mamá’s question. She was fiddling with an enormous ruby brooch that dangled from her bosom like a glittering, inflamed nipple. At last, she deigned to raise her head and survey the room.
‘Very nice, Yasmin. Very nice indeed.’
Mamá allowed herself a fleeting moment of triumph.
Until: ‘Such a silly waste to wait for Christmas Day to decorate, though. Just think, now you’re going to have to take it all down again in a week’s time. And that tree – my goodness, you must have had a lot to drink before you decorated it! We aren’t drinkers, Vicente and I, as it’s so dreadful for your health, but we can certainly recognize a drinker’s handiwork.’
She and Vicente chortled and patted their bellies.
We were all in the living room during this little exchange between my mother and Veneranda. Mamá’s eyes looked like they were about to pop out of her skull she was so angry. Papá put his arm around her shoulder, probably anticipating the need to physically restrain her. But Sancho, who’d already downed two strong Irish coffees, whistled long and loud.
‘Mamá, you hear that? That’s some disrespectful shit, man.’
The Manriques shot him a dirty look, but Sancho only grinned at them, leaned to the side and farted. As that interminable fart rippled through the room with what can only be described as panache, Vicente whipped his silk hanky from his pocket and covered his nose with a cry of ‘¡Santa Virgen!’ while Veneranda yelped in horror. But the rest of us, even Mamá, burst out laughing, instantly recalibrating the sour mood of our first holiday as safe-housers. It would forever be fondly remembered as the fart that saved Christmas.
Thank God for Sancho’s flatulence, because there was no room for sourness with the already precarious dynamic of the guest list for our Christmas lunch: myself, my parents, Zulema and the Manriques were one household. Sancho returned home to get his two alleged dullards, the professor and his blind wife. Mauricio had lucked out, and instead of the cantankerous bunch he’d been assigned last time, he and his daughters came with a beret-wearing journalist who smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and said she went by the code name Simone, after de Beauvoir herself, plus a guy in his twenties who Mauricio introduced as being ‘highly educated and very cultured’.
Aunt Milagros came with her second batch of illegals, too: three ‘dancers’ with ass, breast and lip implants. It was clear to everyone but golden-hearted Aunt Milagros that the only thing these three women danced around was a pole, but she introduced them as ‘a troupe of professional dancers’ like such a proud mother hen that no one wanted to tell her the truth. Plus she looked less on edge than usual, and she’d finally washed her hair for the first time since Ugly came a-knocking (even if her nails were still ragged and there was still that odd smoke smell clinging to her clothes), so clearly the dancers were having a positive effect somehow.
Mauricio also brought little Fidel. The Moneybags family needed Camille to work that morning to help with their lavish Christmas buffet. Mrs Moneybags didn’t feel bad about this. Camille was contractually available to work twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, with Sundays off. This Christmas Day fell on a Thursday.
Tough luck, Camille!
With such an eclectic mix of people – hoteliers, dancers, the erudite, the blind, the flatulent, the vain, and the drunk – that Christmas lunch could’ve been an all-out catastrophe. But to my surprise, having so many different characters thrown into one pot turned out far better than expected, because we all had one thing in common: we all loved Venezuela and hated the man clinging to power at its helm. Any lull in conversation could readily be filled with ‘Have you heard about the latest riots in _______?’ or ‘Do you know people are now paying as much as ______ to buy _____? Imagínese, just a few years ago that only cost _____!’
The conversation never stopped. Liquor flowed and sparkling-wine corks flew like confetti as bottle after bottle was consumed. We were having a whale of a time with our illegals, even the Manriques who – despite Veneranda’s claims that they weren’t boozers – were actually sort of fun with a few drinks in them. Or maybe we were all just drunk enough to find their pomposity more funny than annoying.
Now to highlight one of our esteemed guests: the supposedly oh-so-educated and cultured young man staying with Mauricio. His name was Kingsley De Oruña Willoughby and he insisted we call him by his alleged nickname, King.
No comment.
King was the sole penniless heir to a wealthy English rose (the Willoughby) and a high-born Spaniard (the Oruña), two lovestruck Cambridge alumni who’d given their cold, aristocratic parents the finger by eloping to the backwaters of rural Venezuela just before completing their degrees, thereby forfeiting their inheritances in favour of near-annual cases of dengue fever and their little monarch, King.
He shared this curious backstory as a preface to why he’d joined the Venezuelan military in a desperate move to give himself a better future – and believe me, that preface was necessary for drumming up sympathy, because there wasn’t a person present who would’ve applauded any member of the Venezuelan armed forces. King had been a soldier since he was eighteen, and now that he was in his mid-twenties, he said he just couldn’t stomach being part of Maduro’s strong arm any more.
‘The army was all I felt the world had to offer me. It presented me with a luminous future where I could protect the rights and liberties of our great Bolivarian Republic.’
An intake of breath from Zulema, Vanessa and the twins, chins propped in their hands, eyes swimming. Even Mamá and Aunt Milagros were swooning.
‘I harboured aspirations of being a soldier akin to a knight of the highest order, defending our nation, our people, rescuing damsels in distress.’ A wink at the ladies.
I rolled my eyes.
‘But then I saw that Maduro was using the army as a tool of oppression, a club with which he could bludgeon the nation …’
To cut a long story short, he deserted, and that meant he had to find himself out of Venezuela ASAP. So King hopped aboard the Trinidad-bound pirogue parade. Despite his parents’ Spanish and British nationalities, he’d only ever been registered as a Venezuelan citizen, so was hiding out in Trinidad illegally until Ugly or Román or whoever managed to get him a British passport, legit or otherwise.
And now here he was at our dining table, all bulging biceps and panty-dropping military stories. I didn’t like the guy. The fact that he strutted around with his chest puffed out like a preening, arrogant rooster while forcing people to call him King had a lot to do with it. But I was the only one who felt that way. Everyone else was eating up the tales of King’s army adventures. Especially Vanessa. She was laughing in that demented way women laugh when they’re really into someone. Anything King said was met with squeals of ‘You didn’t!’ and bouts of wild giggles. There was also a whole lot of hair twirling, eyelash fluttering, the usual.
I wasn’t the only one to notice Vanessa’s sycophantic flirting. King was obviously well aware – and so was Sancho.
My brother was unsurprisingly already drunk by the time King regaled us with the story of his parents’ grand plan for rebellion gone awry. So when Sancho saw Vanessa throwing her head back to howl with laughter at every quip, stroking King’s arm, shaking her prodigious tits at every opportunity, well, you can only imagine how hard he began pounding the drinks. By the time the sun set on that Christmas Day, Sancho was in extraordinary form, singing American carols and Trini parang and Venezuelan folk songs, and pretty much any other song, no matter how addled, that came into his head. He’d even dug out Papá’s old cuatro and was strumming it with all the flair of a rock-star guitarist, though he wasn’t really making music, jus
t adding to the general mayhem. Mauricio, the twins, Aunt Milagros, Zulema, the journalist, the professor and his wife, my parents, even the inebriated Manriques all cheered and clapped while Sancho performed for us. The strippers danced around him in a circle, not writhing on the ground with genitals splayed, but like folk dancers, clapping their hands above their heads, jiggling their silicone derrières and yipping. Aunt Milagros beamed with pride and I clutched my stomach, eyes streaming with laughter at the chaos.
It was one of our best Christmases. The only thing missing was, of course, Aunt Celia.
I was sure everyone felt her absence in their own way. I felt it in sudden stabs that would catch me off-guard – like when Mauricio’s household arrived without Aunt Celia leading the way. Every Christmas, she would sweep into the room with all the devilish glamour of Cruella de Vil, always dressed in sumptuous reds, décolletage on spectacular display, diamonds flashing. It was an ongoing competition between her and Mamá – seeing who could one-up the other at family get-togethers – but at Christmas, my mother’s Sophia Loren sophistication couldn’t hold a candle to Aunt Celia. Aunt Celia was Zsa Zsa Gabor and Marilyn Monroe rolled into one. Even the Christmas tree would look dingy and grim compared to her. She’d fill the whole room up with her glitz and glam, her extravagantly wrapped gifts, the undiluted coarseness that seemed so incongruous amidst all the seasonal good cheer. As full as our house was with family and illegals that day, the fizzle and pop of Aunt Celia was still noticeably absent – at least for me.
And then another stab – when I thought of how, ever since we were kids, she’d regale us with the real story of Christmas, told in a deliciously sarcastic tone of false wonderment – ‘Long ago, there were these blue-eyed, blond-haired, generally unwashed people frolicking around a freezing cold land called Scandinavia. These people, called pagans, would celebrate Yule to commemorate the return of the sun and the end of the darkest days of winter …’ – with endless interruptions from Aunt Milagros, who would work herself into a frenzy listening to the blasphemous history of how various pagan traditions merged into the ‘commercialized, vulgar shit show that you kiddies know and love as the Birthday of your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’. It was hands-down my favourite tradition.
Although no one spoke about that missing chunk of our Christmas celebrations, and no one tried re-telling the story, to Aunt Milagros’s relief, I’m sure, I knew I caught a thickness in his voice when Papá pointed out that there were no Christmas crackers to pull at the table. Aunt Celia had taken an unexpected shine to this lingering British tradition in our adopted country, and had brought dozens of expensive crackers to our last two Christmas lunches in Trinidad. ‘What, a whole childhood watching dubbed English Christmas specials on TV and you don’t expect me to love this shit? That’s how neo-imperialist brainwashing works, coño, I can’t help it!’
So there were no Christmas crackers or paper crowns, no pagan stories, and Mamá took the win for Best Dressed for the first time in our family history. Even so, I don’t think for a second that Aunt Celia was forgotten. I think she was so present in all our minds that we didn’t need to talk about her at all.
When the singing and dancing finally came to an end at God knows what time, the professor drove Sancho’s car home with Sancho catatonic in the back. Everyone else slowly filtered out after that, my father insisting that Mauricio, who was drunkenly singing a teary-eyed ballad about being a widower at Christmastime, let one of his daughters drive them home. The Manriques passed out sitting upright on the couch, mouths hanging open like soggy, spitty caves, and soon it was just me, Zulema and my parents in the porch, sipping the very last of the rum-infused sorrel juice, laughing over the antics and anecdotes of the day. Then suddenly Mamá jumped up from her chair, paused to get her balance, and ran into the house.
‘What’s with her?’ slurred Zulema.
‘¿Quién sabe?’ said Papá, giving a little burp.
I had no idea either. A moment later, Mamá returned holding two small wrapped boxes.
‘For my princesses,’ she said, flushed and sweaty from all the booze. With her pink, dewy cheeks, grinning from ear to ear, she was pretty as a schoolgirl.
We’d completely forgotten to exchange gifts amidst all the hangovers, hectic preparation and drunken festivities of the day. Zulema and I were about to hastily run inside to get our parents their gifts but Mamá stopped us. ‘Mañana, mañana. I just wanted to give you these now, while it’s still Christmas. Can’t have a Christmas go by without a little something for my princesitas.’
Zulema and I opened our carefully wrapped boxes. Matching gold earrings. Mamá always got us matching jewellery. It was the closest she could get to forcing us into identical outfits like she used to do when we were kids.
We both pulled her into a group hug and Papá moved behind her to enfold all three of us in his arms as best he could.
That was how we ended that Christmas Day, all knotted together, not knowing where the tail-end of the year might lead, but drunkenly confident that we could all get through it so long as we had each other.
NOW OR NEVER
I was woken by my cell phone vibrating on the nightstand. I cracked an eye, grabbed the phone. One a.m. Private number. Suddenly I was wide awake.
‘Hello?’
‘I’m outside.’
A shiver ran through me at the sound of his voice, like a drop of ice water had rolled down my spine.
I faltered for a split second, unsure of what to say, how to play coy, then thought: fuck it. After all, I’m the one who told him to stop beating around the bush. It was now or never.
‘I’m coming,’ I said, throwing off the duvet and lowering my feet to the shock of cold tile. I didn’t even bother changing out of my oversized Ted Nugent T-shirt or putting on shoes. Knowing Román was outside waiting had hit me with a thousand-volt charge, set the tips of my fingers, lips, tongue tingling. All I wanted was to get to him, give in finally.
I tiptoed out to the living room, past the Manriques on the couch. My skin prickled with anticipation. I could feel the pink rising in my cheeks, my lips reddening, every sense heightened. Hand on the doorknob, I was about to slip out the front door when a loud grunt stopped me dead. I swivelled my head around. It hadn’t come from the Manriques. They were perfectly still in their upright sleeping positions. And then I realized the porch doors were flung open. Through them, I saw my parents entwined around each other in the hammock, my mother’s head on my father’s chest. Another grunt from Papá, sliding into his usual thunderous drone of a snore. Mamá, who’d definitely been drunk off her ass to fall asleep in the hammock, didn’t even flinch at the sound. Her face was soft, gentle for once in sleep.
Guilt, the party-pooping wet blanket that it is, cloaked itself over me. I let go of the doorknob. How could I sneak out to see Román when he was the threat hanging over my parents? I looked at them in that hammock and just couldn’t do it. I let go of the doorknob and went back to my room, determined. Whatever was brewing between Román and me had to end.
I shut the bedroom door, leaned against it, closed my eyes. Tried not to think of him out there, waiting. An eternal minute passed. My feet twitched, every inch of my Román-charged skin urging me to turn and run out the door.
The phone vibrated again in my hand. I stared at it. Private number. I threw it on my bed, counting each time it buzzed. If I could make it through ignoring this call, I’d be okay. I’d have walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Lust and have come out the other side, guiltless, loyal to my family.
Finally the buzzing stopped. I slumped forward, resting my hands on my knees. I’d done it.
I pictured him frowning at the phone, confused. Putting the jeep into gear, pulling away from the house and never coming back except to deposit illegals. No more steamy bedroom rendezvous or surprise Savannah appearances. I’d never get a chance to discover any other faint or hidden scars, would never taste his mouth again, feel his hands gripping my waist, his body p
ressed into mine.
That was what broke me. Never let anyone tell you that lust isn’t the most potent of human motivators – or the most destructive.
Like a shot I was out the bedroom and out the front door, praying he’d still be there.
And he was.
‘You took your time. And I see Seventies rock T-shirts are a uniform of yours?’
I was in the passenger seat, Román’s eyes running over me slow, muddling my senses so I felt hot and cold all at once, wanting to shiver while heat rose up like some serpentine, hungry thing from the pit of my stomach.
‘I can’t stay,’ I said, trying to convince myself that I really wasn’t going to.
He gave a lopsided smile. ‘I wasn’t planning on us staying.’ He shifted the jeep into gear but I put my hand on his, felt his knuckles broad and hard gripping the gearstick.
‘No, I mean I can’t stay out with you. I can’t – I shouldn’t do this. My family …’
He paused, wet his lips with the tip of his tongue and exhaled, then shifted back into park and looked at me. Everything in me was dissolving with that look – my guilt, my resolve, everything but the need for him. He leaned in to me. My lips parted, mouth lifted up towards him, eyes fluttering shut. But he brought his mouth to my clavicle, bare where the T-shirt had slipped off my shoulder, and made his way slowly upwards as my neck curved itself like a bough, pliant as the warmth of his mouth moved along my skin.
He could’ve done anything to me right then. I was all his. But he pulled back and grazed his thumb over my lip again – his custom now. ‘Your fucking mouth,’ he murmured, looking at it. If I didn’t get out of the jeep right then, that second, that would be it. I bit my lower lip where he’d touched it.
‘I’m going back in. You know why I can’t …’
‘I know, flaca. Let me know when you can.’
One Year of Ugly Page 11