Laughing with Román afterwards as we took stock of our respective grass burns, knee scrapes, the splinters that had dug into us, the stinging nettle we hadn’t noticed rubbing us raw, I already knew this wasn’t just some guy I was fucking. I’m not saying he was The One. But he was Something. Something more than the Ben Browns of the world.
We dressed and lay back on the crab grass, temples touching, and like we’d done two nights before, we talked until it was nearly dawn, sharing our deepest fears …
‘Dying before I publish a novel.’
‘Having to kill someone.’
(I was relieved he hadn’t already.)
Talking about our best childhood memories …
‘Listening to Aunt Celia’s ghost stories.’
‘Getting stoned with the other barrio kids.’
And our worst …
‘When no one turned up to my quinceañera.’
‘When my father left and my mother died.’
As that night’s conversation proved, and the conversation three nights later, then a week later, and on and on as our need for each other became increasingly insatiable and we saw each other with reckless regularity, Román and I were from different worlds, like Lady and the Tramp, crossing the divide thanks largely to our mutual lust and a shared love of books.
Román had read everything. He said it was how his English had gotten so good. Growing up, he’d pillaged the English and American lit sections of the National Library in Caracas. He knew everything written by García Márquez inside and out. Borges, Lorca, Allende, Ionesco – they were Román’s old friends. And he didn’t only read fiction. He knew all about the Spanish Civil War, about the Pinochet dictatorship, the Cuban Revolution, about Trujillo, Bolívar, Guevara, Castro, Zapata. I learned to hide my shock at how well read he was, at his effortless quoting of American, British and even Trinidadian authors.
One night a few weeks into sleeping together, we were squeezed in the back of the jeep sharing a joint. He’d exhaled and said, oh so breezily: ‘The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.’
I’d inhaled, held the smoke, coughed. ‘What?’
‘Bukowski. You know him? An American poet. That line made me think of you.’
Hardly what you’d expect of the guy who broke Mauricio’s thumb without batting an eye. But that’s the human animal for you – full of surprises.
No matter how in-depth or expansive our conversations, though, he avoided sharing the precise details of how he’d got involved with Ugly. ‘I had the skills Ugly needed and I was backed into a corner. I had no other options to get out.’ That was the most he ever said about it, and as one month of us sleeping together rolled into two, I learned to stop prying. At least I knew he wasn’t a murderer and that he didn’t enjoy what he did for a living, even if he happened to be gifted at it.
It was all blissfully addictive. The danger of it, the anticipation, the thrill of fucking him that never seemed to wane. I was sucking the sweetness straight from the sugarcane of life, just like Aunt Celia had instructed, and my teeth could rot and fall out of my skull because of all that sugar and I wouldn’t care.
That said, I still couldn’t ignore my guilt. It was always there, an acrid, unrelenting nasal drip that left an especially bitter aftertaste whenever I heard my parents venting about ‘Beelzebub’. I turned, of course, to Aunt Celia to quell my guilt, because here’s something you didn’t know, and that I didn’t know either until reading the memoir: Aunt Celia had married Mauricio knowing that he was a full-fledged criminal. Yup – Mauricio. And the whole damned family had known about it from the get-go, including my parents. So to justify my own wildly irresponsible relationship with Román, I kept sliding down the time tunnel to 1984, the year Mauricio had picked up Aunt Celia in that Miami nightclub and rocked her world with the finest booze, blow and bourgeois lifestyle money could buy, while Aunt Celia lapped it all up and worked her womanly magic to get herself the trophy wife status she’d always aspired to. The year she married a criminal and no one in the family did a thing to stop it.
First thing I do after slipping on the pink diamond (three carats, thank you very much) is tell my parents there’s going to be a flashy Miami wedding. No parochial backyard nuptials for this bride. I tell them we’ll be flying the whole family up to the States for the occasion, taking everyone shopping for new suits and dresses – all on Mauricio. And my gown! Hoop skirts, beadwork, lace, corsets!
In this hubbub of sex, drugs and wedding planning, no one, not even my abuelo, thought to ask what the groom did for a living. All anyone could think about was packing their bags for the big trip to the almighty USA. Even Celia didn’t quite know what Mauricio did for work. When it had come up on the first or second date, he’d just said he was a businessman.
‘What kind of business?’
‘The lucrative kind.’
And the platter of lobsters or caviar or the bottle of vintage champagne, or whatever the hell it was, had been served and distracted them, and the whole question of Mauricio’s livelihood was skated over. Until, three days before the entire Palacios family was scheduled to jump on a plane to Miami, two men snatched Celia in a mall parking lot, in the middle of the day, like it was nothing at all to grab a woman and toss her in your trunk. Which is what they did. Celia was taken to a warehouse where they unceremoniously burnt her forearms with cigarettes and broke her wrist before taking her back to her car at the mall with one simple message for her husband-to-be: get the fuck out of Miami.
As I’d learned with absolute disbelief on my first reading, Mauricio had in fact been a smuggler back in 1984. A smuggler of drugs? Nope. A smuggler of trafficked humans? Wrong again.
He was a honey smuggler. Apparently raw honey was one of the hottest commodities on the international black market. Molasses-infused pseudo-honey being de rigueur in Miami food stores at the time, there was sky-high demand for the real deal. So Mauricio was part of a very small but very lucrative honey-smuggling operation bringing in high-quality honey from an apiary in Turkey, then selling tiny jars of the liquid gold for hundreds of US dollars to an exclusive Miami-based clientele. Of course they could’ve just set up a legitimate honey importation business, but apparently all the paperwork and regulatory hassle wasn’t worth it. It was easier and more cost-effective to just smuggle the stuff in.
Frankly, I’d never heard anything more ridiculous, and although it was disturbing to know that Aunt Celia had been briefly kidnapped and even had her wrist broken by Mauricio’s enemies, the fact that it was all because of illegal honeypots was, well, ludicrous.
My opinions aside, the fact was: Mauricio and his blushing bride were in danger, and they had to get the fuck out of Miami, just like they’d been ordered to do. The wedding was cancelled, the gigantic dress was stuffed into a suitcase, and Mauricio and Celia skedaddled back to my grandparents’ rambling old house in rural Venezuela. The day after they returned, the rest of the Palacios left, as scheduled, on their trip. After all, flights had already been booked and no one had told them to get the fuck out of Miami.
When that freeloading family of mine gets back to Venezuela from their holiday, they force Mauricio and me up the aisle of that dinky shack they call a church, where I’d already had to suffer through the sacraments of baptism, First Communion and Confirmation. If I could’ve choked on the wafer when the priest stuck it on my tongue, just to put myself out of the excruciating fucking humiliation of it all, I would’ve. The reception is in my parents’ backyard, under crêpe-paper wreaths crafted by the industrious spinster hands of Milagros, a dismal quarter moon shining down on the cast still on my wrist.
So even after Mauricio’s smuggler rivals had tortured Aunt Celia and ruined their wedding plans, she still went ahead and married the guy. And what really gave me hope: the whole Palacios family had accepted Mauricio, even knowing what had gone down.
After re-reading that chapte
r for the umpteenth time on a particularly guilt-ridden evening, I decided to sound my father out. How flexible would he be if Zulema or I were hooking up with a criminal?
He was standing over the stove, frying ye old corned beef with onions and diced tomatoes, when I brought up Aunt Celia’s wedding and the circumstances surrounding it. I took it as a good sign that he was in stitches by the time I’d finished recapping her version of events.
‘We couldn’t believe it when Celia called to say the fancy Miami wedding was off.’ He wiped his eyes, gasping with laughter. ‘And that they had to leave the country because of rival honey dealers. I mean, really?’
‘She was so smug when she got engaged,’ he continued. ‘She must’ve called your Aunt Milagros once the entire time she was in Miami, then the second she got that ring, she called every day to gloat about her wedding plans. But, man, did Milagros enjoy that Miami vacation when the wedding was called off. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her smile so much – from ear to ear.’
‘So what happened to Mauricio? How’d he turn out so … you know, like he is now, if he was such a jefe?’
Papá shrugged. ‘Even honey smugglers burn out, I guess.’
I decided to put a feeler out. ‘Didn’t it upset everyone that he was a criminal, though? The whole honey thing was stupid, but it was still illegal. Aunt Celia still got hurt because of it.’
‘The thing is,’ said Papá, nudging the sizzling corned beef with the spatula, ‘Mauricio is a good guy. He used to have so much more spunk. When we met him, it was all kind of glamorous to be honest, because he was so glamorous. No one really cared about the honey thing … I guess because it was so absurd.’
He prodded the corned beef thoughtfully. ‘I think Celia just sucked the life out of him. I know you two were close, but Celia was a difficult woman. Hardly anyone could tolerate her except when she was on form with her storytelling and her jokes. Trust me, you don’t know the half of what she put that man through when they got divorced.’
‘I got a pretty graphic idea from the memoir. But to be honest, Mauricio deserved it. She wrote about him cheating a lot.’
‘Mauricio had his indiscretions, you’re right. But he was always in love with Celia. That never changed.’
I raised a disbelieving eyebrow. ‘So why’d he have those “indiscretions” if he was oh so in love?’
Papá patted my head like he used to when I was little. ‘Amor, the sooner you learn just how stupid human beings are, the better. Ever since old Freud came around, people like to think everyone has some deep-seated reason behind what they do, but the truth is, sometimes temptations crop up and people make stupid decisions. That’s all there is to it. And that’s all there was to Mauricio’s screw-ups.’
‘So if I started seeing someone who was a criminal like Mauricio, would that same truth apply? Sometimes people just make stupid decisions?’
Fat hissed and spat in the frying pan. My father narrowed his eyes at me. ‘Why would you ask that?’
‘No reason,’ I said airily. ‘Just asking for conversation’s sake.’ But I couldn’t meet his eyes.
Papá turned to face me squarely. I pretended to inspect my nails.
‘You sure? No reason at all?’ he asked.
‘Yes, relax! It was just a hypothetical question.’
I left that conversation more anxious than ever about what would happen if Román and I were found out. But I still held onto that teensy shard of hope – Papá knew that sometimes people did stupid things just because they couldn’t say no to temptation. If there was ever a shoe that fit when it came to my choices with Román, that was it.
And then there was the other thing that gave me hope: honey-smuggling was only the first of Mauricio’s criminal endeavours. The manuscript revealed that the family turned a blind eye when Mauricio proved himself incapable of making a buck without the thrill of possible incarceration nipping at his heels. He was a born career criminal – not just for novelty honey crime either – and it all came to light in 1985.
Having only worked as a mediocre catalogue model in Panama City and then as a cocktail waitress in Miami, Celia’s job options were limited. Mauricio was even less employable, his skillset centring entirely on honey-smuggling. So Celia and Mauricio were living in Celia’s childhood bedroom, much to Milagros’s annoyance (she’d enjoyed being the only golden egg still under her parents’ roof), and had to do chores around the house in lieu of paying Abuelo rent. It was a humiliating arrangement, especially for Mauricio who had lost his red sports car, his chrome-and-glass Miami penthouse, and all the other luxuries of his honey gangster life, driving him into a slump of self-pity.
This cabrón husband of mine. What the hell did I even marry him for? I should’ve kept my ass in Miami and made my own money instead of letting him sweep me off my feet. Now all he does is sleep all day, listen to sports on the radio and harass me to bring his meals to the room because he can’t even strap on a pair of balls big enough to face up to my parents. Qué pendejo. Only leaves that room once a week when I drag his ass out to do the chores my father asked him to do. Then he goes straight back to bed.
What am I supposed to do with a dud like this? I’m twenty-three! I want to live, I want money and freedom and not to have to hear Milagros preaching about her goddamned Salvation Army work, like she’s some martyr we should all be lighting candles to at night. So I take matters into my own hands, make a list of my and Mauricio’s strong points: I’m resourceful, know how to write, can mix a mean cocktail, have a great ass. Mauricio: good with logistics, organized, well acquainted with the workings of the criminal underworld, great hair. I scrape together a list of more than twenty ideal jobs we could get ourselves – anything to get the fuck out of my parents’ house. And when I re-read the list, I actually get excited that we’re gonna get out of here. We can really do this if Mauricio would just get his shit together. I practically skip to that dank, depressing bedroom, the drapes always closed, the damn sports radio always droning in the background like a buzzing horsefly. Mauricio’s in bed, como siempre. I hand him the list – come, on, Mauricio, get excited about something again, get your ass out of bed for the love of Christ – but he crumples up the list and tosses it on the floor. I smack the motherfucker on the back of the head. I’ve started doing that a lot. Only way to get the anger out.
‘You don’t like my ideas?’
Mauricio digs out a toothpick from somewhere beneath the sheet and cleans between his bottom teeth.
‘I don’t want to deliver letters just because you say I’m good at logistics. I’m not a damn mailman. Your ideas were stupid.’
‘¡Vete a la mierda!’ I yell, kicking the bed because if I don’t kick that then I’m gonna kick him. ‘A mailman is a knight in shining armour compared to you! You can’t keep lazing around in bed all goddamned day like a puto koala bear!’
He stops picking his teeth, intrigued. ‘Why a koala?’
I can’t help it. I smack the back of his head again. ‘They sleep twenty hours a day! You think I want to be married to a koala de la gran puta? You think when this baby comes you can just feed it eucalyptus leaves?’
‘What baby!’
Hold your horses. That wasn’t how Celia told Mauricio she was pregnant, because she wasn’t. She wouldn’t be pregnant with Ava for another eight years thanks to Mauricio’s low sperm count and occasional erectile dysfunction, a side effect of the coke he snorted ‘recreationally’ until the early Nineties. However, Celia knew that what Mauricio needed was a good kick up the ass to get him back to being the slick, flashy honey-smuggler she’d fallen in love with.
It was the right move.
Mauricio threw his sheet off and leapt, leapt, out of the bed to swing Celia around in his arms. He was thrilled at the prospect of becoming a father. His spark was officially back.
Celia waited five weeks to tell Mauricio that she’d miscarried the imaginary baby. By then, he’d already set up his new business: breeding Orinoco crocodiles for
the leather trade. Illegally, of course. Because that was the only way of doing business that gave Mauricio an entrepreneurial hard-on.
More on the illicit croc business later. Point was, the family knew all about Mauricio’s new criminal venture, and no one made Celia leave him. So why couldn’t my family accept Román and me being together too? Enforcing Ugly’s blackmail wasn’t all that bad. There were worse crimes a prospective boyfriend could commit.
(You know what they say – never underestimate the power of denial.)
LONG LIVE THE KING
Early March. Nearly three months into our safe-housing sentence. The hedonistic decadence of the Carnival season was finally over – two unimaginably unproductive months strung together by nothing but glamorous fêtes, glittering masqueraders, moko jumbies stalking the streets on twenty-foot stilts, Blue Devils leering, mud-covered percussionists wielding bottles and spoons, steel orchestras beating their pans day and night in a musical orgy that sends rhythm reverberating right down into the bedrock of the island until it all culminates in the bacchanalia of Carnival Monday and Tuesday.
One Year of Ugly Page 13