One Year of Ugly

by Caroline Mackenzie

  ‘Neat.’

  The SUV rolled on past those same splintered houses teetering on drill pipes, past Cedros where my family and I had alighted, and several other sleepy villages, until we came to Icacos – one of those mystical corners of Trinidad that people know of but where few have been. Its mysticism has been earned mostly because it is, to use a Trini expression, behind God’s back, an unholy four-hour drive from Port of Spain. But there’s another factor contributing to its mystical atmosphere: it is an infinite galaxy of coconut trees. There are so many coconut trees that when you’re driving through them, it starts to feel like you’ve submerged yourself in one of those Magic Eye posters from the Nineties – you know, the ones where you’re supposed to see the hidden image of a dolphin but all you can see are colourful dots and squiggles?

  We drove through all those dizzying coconut plantations for what felt like forever until we bumped along a dirt road that ended at long last on a dismal strip of beach looking out onto the faded blue outline of Venezuelan mountains, just across the Gulf. I understood now why the spot was special. La Patria was so close you felt you could reach out and touch it, could almost smell the tear gas clouding the streets of Caracas, hear the echoes of army batons cracking into protestors’ skulls and the self-righteous bristling of Maduro’s moustache as he looked out over it all from the balcony of Miraflores Palace.

  Román took off his sunglasses and turned to face me.

  ‘Milagros is gone.’

  He said it so matter-of-factly I could only stare at him.

  ‘Are you telling me Aunt Milagros is dead?’ I asked finally.

  ‘No – though she nearly could’ve been.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘She’s not dead, just gone.’ He turned to look out at our homeland. ‘Back in Venezuela.’

  I stared out over the placid aluminium ocean like it would make my eyes telescopic, as if I’d be able to see Aunt Milagros on a distant mountain peak, her linen clothes flapping in the wind, cigarette smoke streaming above her to merge with the clouds.

  ‘That was the best I could do for her, and I could get myself murdered for it. I did everything I could.’

  I tried to interrupt him, but he flashed a palm to stop me.

  ‘Ugly wanted her in the ground for putting his business in jeopardy. As in: throat cut, bullet in her head, dead, gutted and buried. Do you understand?’

  I felt like a hernia had just ruptured in me. I clutched at my stomach.

  ‘I got her out of here and she’s safe,’ Román continued. ‘As far as Ugly knows, she’s dead. But I had to tell you the truth because she can’t contact any of you herself. It’s too dangerous. I couldn’t do anything better than that for her. She understood that.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Poor, sweet, lost-her-marbles Aunt Milagros back in the hellhole of Venezuela. I know you’re thinking that’s better than being dead, but my head just couldn’t wrap itself around the idea of her actually narrowly escaping murder. I mean, we were illegal immigrants, but middle-class illegals. Middle-class people are conditioned to fear cancer, inflation, mortgage-rate spikes, greenhouse gases, pesticides, the rampancy of HPV, the incurability of premature baldness, the perils of fucking tooth decay. Murder is simply not on the middle-class person’s list of quotidian fears – why the hell else did we leave Venezuela if not to eschew the disarmingly unfamiliar threats of murder, starvation, death-due-to-no-medical-supplies? So maybe my synapses just couldn’t truly connect the dots of what Román had done for Aunt Milagros, or maybe I was in emotional shock, but all I felt was fury and a sickening sense of injustice that any of this had happened to Aunt Milagros at all.

  Román was still talking. ‘Ugly said she couldn’t be trusted in that state of mind. She could’ve led the police straight back to him. He insisted, Yola. Do you have any clue what could happen if Ugly ever finds out I betrayed him? Do you know the position I put myself in for you, for your family?’

  I stayed tight-lipped, still reeling. Aunt Milagros was back in Maduro’s near-dystopian abyss. She could easily be shot or stabbed for a cell phone, a bracelet, any trinket while walking the streets. Without a job or money, how could she pay the soaring black-market rates for basic food? What if she was hurt while making her way back to Caracas? Would a hospital have any supplies to help her? People were killing and blackmailing each other for sugar and diapers, far less real medical supplies and proper food. Román may have saved her from murder, but only to condemn her to a slower death.

  And it was all Ugly’s fault – and Román’s. Forcing us to bring strangers into our homes, driving Aunt Milagros crazy from paranoia then punishing her for it. And to think Román wanted me to pat him on the back, to condescend to thanking him for not murdering my aunt.

  He’d gone silent, was looking at me like he was eyeing a pit bull, not quite sure if or when I’d lunge at him. But what could I say or do that would make a difference now?

  ‘Take me back to my car,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Yola—’

  ‘RIGHT NOW!’ Something snapped in me with an almost audible crack. ‘You think you’re some kind of Prince Charming because you didn’t murder one of my relatives? Well, thank you very much for your magnanimity. Is that why you didn’t come around? Because you didn’t have the balls to tell me what you did?’

  I knew I was being unfair, but together with my fear for Aunt Milagros’s uncertain future, that sense of injustice that Román and Ugly were responsible at the root made me want to scream and gnash my teeth, shatter the windscreen. The whole mess of it all only reminded me that we were helpless, that back-handed favours like the one Román had done Aunt Milagros were the most we could hope for in our position. And the only thing that made me feel better about that helplessness was to vent that rage at Román, no matter how ungrateful and illogical that made me.

  His expression hardened the more I laid into him, until, by the time I was done, his face was a stone mask.

  We didn’t talk the entire drive back, as clusters of houses grew denser, as ramshackle produce stands morphed into air-conditioned grocery stores, as potholes became shallower if not sparser, children more clothed and less pot-bellied. Only when we got to the pseudo-urbanity of San Fernando did I feel collected enough to speak again.

  ‘How could you do that to her?’

  Román exhaled. I couldn’t tell if it was out of exasperation or relief that I’d at least spoken to him. ‘Why do you have to be so hardheaded? What else could I have done to help?’

  It was even more infuriating that I knew he was right – in our under-the-radar lives, all people like us Palacios had was the helping hands of our oppressors. Isn’t that how it always goes? You have to be grateful for the employer who hires you under the table, even if it’s doing bitch work for below minimum wage. You have to smilingly accept the boss’s hand on your ass because any lip from you and all he has to do is put in a phone call to National Security to report that his housekeeper has no papers. Sure, Román had helped, but he was also responsible for creating the situation that had led to Aunt Milagros needing help in the first place. I couldn’t bring myself to swallow my anger and kiss the oppressing hand just because it had the dual power to protect.

  ‘I don’t know, Román, I don’t know what else you could have done. I don’t know your world. But you could’ve come up with something better.’

  ‘Something better like what? Stick her in a top hat and magically pull her out in some suburb in South Florida? Venezuela was the only option there was. How can you sit there and be pissed when you know I had no other choice but to send her back there?’

  I should’ve got out of the car right then, listened to the tinny little voice in my ear telling me he’d done all he could, should’ve pulled the door open and dropped and rolled out of the moving SUV right there on the San Fernando High Street before I said something I’d regret. But I didn’t.

  ‘You and the same old record: “I didn’t have a choice. I work for Ugly and b
eat people up and stalk them for a living because I have no choice.”’ I spat every word at him. ‘You knew exactly what you were sending Aunt Milagros back to, so why don’t you take some accountability for your actions for once?’ And then, because I was an irrational fucking bitch: ‘You’re a piece of shit, just like Ugly, except what makes you worse is you’re doing this to your own people. You’re the reason families like mine had to leave, you’re why my whole entire life is in chaos, you’re the reason people all over the world look at us like refugee scum when a generation ago we were the richest country on the continent, you’re why everything has gone irrevocably to shit. Because the people in charge are opportunistic fucks like you who pat themselves on the back thinking they’re fighting the good fight for the socialist Bolivarian dream when all they’re really doing is personally benefiting from shitting all over broken, helpless people. Exactly like you do.’

  At the pharmacy parking lot I whipped off my seat belt and was about to get out of the SUV without another word, but Román grabbed my arm.

  ‘What now?’ I was already regretting what I’d said to him, knowing I’d crossed a line, but was still too upset, or maybe just too stubborn, to take any of it back.

  ‘I can’t believe you don’t see how much I’ve risked for you,’ he said. His tone was softer than I’d ever heard it, but I was just too damned angry. I pulled my arm away and got out of the car.

  I frothed with a confusing combination of rage and regret the whole way up to Port of Spain. I cried until my head throbbed and my face was a swollen, mottled mess. I wasn’t only crying for Aunt Milagros, but for the bitch-slap of reality that my family and I were among the most vulnerable of vermin in this country. I’d thought of us as cockroaches before, hiding in the shadows. But we were worse than that, because at least a roach had a hard shell. The fuck did we have to protect us?

  By the time I got home, though, my shock and anger had cooled, gelling into a dry, hard crust of regret. Because with a clearer head, I realized that things were definitively over with Román. I knew the pride he had, the love of country he’d revealed while we lamented Venezuela’s fall from grace over many a shared joint, the two of us stoned, misty-eyed with homesickness. I’d taken that patriotic pride and shat all over it. And I’d done it even though I could see how hurt he was that I wouldn’t acknowledge what he’d risked. No, he wouldn’t be with me after that. However much I tried to justify my outburst, it wouldn’t be good enough, and I’d never be able to take it back.

  Though I could hardly pull another dengue stunt and mope in bed all day, I gave myself one week to abandon hygiene, grooming and healthy eating as I mourned Román’s now inevitable disappearance from my life – at least in a romantic capacity. While scarfing cheese puffs in two-day-old pyjamas, I tried not to keep replaying the harshness of what I’d said to him, cursing my inability to thwart all those genetically wired impulses that allow pop culture to accurately peg Latin women as ‘feisty’, ‘fiery’ and ‘mothafuckin’ crazy as shit’. How could I not have seen past my instantaneous emotions to recognize that Román had risked his life to do right by me and my family? I’d made my own bed of pure shit and now I had to lie in it and breathe in the stink.

  On day seven of unwashed hair, too few showers, and too much junk food, I began the gruelling process of getting myself together, turning to familiar salves: writing and Aunt Celia.

  I clutched Aunt Celia’s manuscript like a talisman. I don’t know how else I would’ve survived the pain of pushing Román away. Because Aunt Celia had done the very same thing when she divorced Mauricio in the late Nineties, experiencing the same conflicted, guilt-riddled suffering I was feeling. So I slipped into the story of Aunt Celia and Mauricio’s divorce like it was a vat of numbing cream – like if Aunt Celia could justify divorcing a man she loved, I could justify what I’d said to the man I loved. Or maybe I read it over and over because I hoped Román would come back to me in spite of what I’d said to him, just like Mauricio never left Aunt Celia, proposing to her almost annually with extravagant rings, even though she always took the ring and always said no.

  Just before Aunt Celia divorced Mauricio, he was almost definitely fucking every single woman who crossed his path. The bee-sting incident had only cooled his loins for a hot minute. Ava was less than a year old when Celia’s suspicions spiked. Mauricio had called one day to say he’d be gone overnight to do a big croc-hide shipment. Celia said sure, no problem, and hung up. Then, obeying her woman’s intuition, she dug through Mauricio’s belongings until she found the one thing that told her exactly where Mauricio would be: chicken feathers stuck to the sole of his leather boot. She scooped up the baby and drove straight to the fowl farm where María (the former cold-sore-afflicted beauty queen who Mauricio had tried hiring as the new nanny) lived with her brother’s family. María’s brother had been selling chickens to Mauricio as croc food from day one, so Celia knew exactly where to go. She found the farm in darkness except for a light burning through the window of a small annex round the back of the main house, where María lived. She crept up to the lit window, and when she peeped through, there was Mauricio balls deep in that failed pageant queen whose skyward giraffe legs were almost scuffing the ceiling while Mauricio pounded away.

  Celia didn’t do a thing. She went home calmly. The next day she paid a few unscrupulous friends of Uncle Ignacio’s to beat Mauricio senseless. Which they did.

  Believing the beating to have been arranged by rival crocodile breeders, an oblivious Mauricio went on screwing around as he saw fit – which meant every day, often with different women, even more often with Beauty Queen María. Celia was beside herself. But the angrier she got, the more she kind of felt like screwing too. She’d scream at Mauricio and throw things at him and once even stabbed him in the thigh with an ice pick, but then after every fight, they’d screw, screw, screw. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise then that when Ava was barely over a year old, Celia accidentally got herself knocked up with Alejandra.

  That was the last straw from Mauricio. It really pissed Celia off that she was pregnant again. It was time for Mauricio to face the music. She set his car on fire. Smashed his entire collection of expensive watches. Fed his leather shoes to stray dogs. Put red wine in a spray bottle and spritzed his suit collection with merlot. Mildly poisoned his food so he suffered constant diarrhoea, nausea, cold sweats. Then when she still wasn’t satisfied, she told him she was filing for divorce and kicked him out of the house, which, as it turned out, is when Mauricio spent the week at his parents’ home in Isla de Gato, a visit so productive it yielded Vanessa nine months later.

  Despite Vanessa’s conception, which Aunt Celia would never discover, Mauricio did appear truly devastated upon his return from Isla de Gato. He couldn’t understand why Celia would break their family apart. She told him she didn’t love him any more, just to hurt him. She said the way he talked, walked, smelled drove her crazy, turned her stomach, made her sick. She called him a scumbag, a loser. She said she wished she’d never taken that shot with him back at the nightclub in Miami, that she wished Ava had a decent father, that she should abort the baby in her belly so it wouldn’t have to grow up with Mauricio for a dad.

  The one thing she never told him was that she’d seen him cheating with María.

  Though Celia divorced him, dragged his name through the mud and humiliated him in front of the judge, Mauricio never moved out. Celia, still very much in love with her now ex-husband, never wanted him to anyway.

  So maybe I could blame my irrationality on genetics – maybe that was just our feisty, fiery, mothafuckin’-crazy-as-shit Palacios way.

  My regret piqued when Román informed my parents of Aunt Milagros’s true fate. I wished he hadn’t. Because all of a sudden, Román the Villain became Román the Hero. Beelzebub became Christ Reborn.

  Mamá: ‘The way he put himself in danger to protect crazy Milagros … he’s a saint.’

  Alejandra: ‘I knew a guy that hot couldn’t be all
bad.’

  Mauricio: ‘A true venezolano! I knew it the minute I met him, that he’d never harm his Bolivarian brethren. ¡Viva la República!’

  Papá: ‘I will be forever indebted to him. God bless Román. Que Dios le bendiga.’

  Everyone: ‘¡Que Dios le bendiga!’

  It was further proof that Román did care about me and, by extension, my family, risking his own skin just to reassure my parents that Aunt Milagros was safe.

  He also stuck his neck out to give Papá a warning: Ugly would be making all of us compensate for Aunt Milagros’s near-fatal error. Things were about to get even more interesting for us Palacios.

  THE BEST EVER AD FOR SUPERGLUE

  By the time Ugly came a-calling, I was ready to crawl on hands and knees begging Román’s forgiveness. I would’ve found a way to take him aside whether or not my family and Ugly were there, just for any chance to apologize. But when Ugly turned up on the day Román had forewarned, he was alone.

  I was in the porch watering the ferns and orchids that hung in wire baskets when I heard Ugly knocking on the front door and announcing himself.

  ‘Hector! Come out, come out wherever you are! Ha! Ha! Ha! Don’t make me huff and puff and blow down the house. Ha! Ha! Ha!’

  Prick.

  I watched through the glass-paned doors as my parents let him in and led him to the living room. A second later my mother told me to wake Zulema. ‘Ugly wants to speak to everyone,’ she explained tersely.

  When Zulema and I went to the living room, Ugly was sitting on the couch with his legs crossed like a dandy, clad in an absurd denim suit and holding a curved cane that seemed to be a bent piece of iron rebar.

  Seeing my sister and me, Ugly spread his arms in greeting. ‘¡Qué placer! My Spanish really getting good, eh?’

  Zulema, the daft bobblehead, complimented his accent. I sat in the chair furthest from Ugly and said nothing. We were all there – my parents, Zulema and I – but Ugly wasn’t in any rush to get down to business. Once we sat, he withdrew a neatly constructed joint from his jacket pocket, which he lit with a heavy gold lighter. After what felt like a decade of him lazily smoking, Ugly dropped the joint filter into his empty teacup and leaned back against the couch, folding his hands behind his head. He was right at home, the shitbag.