One Year of Ugly

by Caroline Mackenzie

‘Steady on,’ said Vicente, hoisting his jowly chin upwards. ‘There’s no need to take that tone. And I’m afraid we haven’t been privy to the details of whatever is afoot this evening. It’s simply been requested of us that we afford you the comfort of our home as shelter, in keeping with our usual line of work. So I’ll thank you kindly not to take that tone again, Yasmin. You are in our home now, after all.’

  A terse silence. All I could hear was Mamá’s strained breathing. She was about to blow.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, hoping to break the tension, ‘how about we all sit down and try to relax until Aunt Milagros gets back.’

  My mother exhaled by way of agreement. The Manriques shrugged and nodded.

  ‘Good, let’s all take a second to breathe,’ I continued. ‘Mamá, maybe you can use the phone here to try calling Papá?’

  There hadn’t been time to grab our things when we made our hasty escape. We had nothing but the clothes on our backs.

  Veneranda raised a finger like a bejewelled sausage link. ‘I’m afraid this is a phone-free household. Too risky to go setting up landline accounts. And we shouldn’t use our cell phones on a night like tonight, just to be safe. Ugly can track anything. Not worth the risk.’

  Mamá blinked at her, seething. ‘So what do you use to communicate – carrier pigeons?’

  ‘Oh goodness, Yasmin, no need to be so snippety!’

  ‘No need at all,’ gurgled Vicente, chins wobbling.

  ‘Of course we use pre-paid cell phones, but tonight we can’t take the risk of Ugly tracking any calls. What if Hector is in Ugly’s custody and he gets a call from you? What then, Yasmin? Ugly’s people would find us in no time. No, no. We’re very well acquainted with proper security practices, given the work we’ve been doing. For years now, I’ll have you know.’

  I was curious to hear what that work was. I knew Mamá was too. All the Manriques had ever told us was that they were hoteliers who’d gotten on Maduro’s bad side. But we also knew they were gagging for us to ask so they could gloat more. We wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. So we shut up and let them lead us back out to the porch. Then we all sat in silence, everyone except the Manriques who took the opportunity to point out all of the architectural merits of their home, though we were an unresponsive audience.

  About an hour later, we heard the distant grinding of tyres over pebbles. Mamá was the first to leap up from her seat and run along the porch to the front of the house. The rest of us followed, breathless, to stand beside Mamá who was watching the approaching jeep like a siren waiting for a ship. It was blasting up the long driveway, almost skidding over the small stones. Then it was in front of us, the driver’s door flung open. Mauricio got out. His face was red, sweating, hair flattened wetly to his forehead. My heart dipped – no one else had come with him.

  He jogged up to my mother. ‘Vanessa …’ he said, almost collapsing onto Mamá, his head flopping forward. She held him upright by the shoulders, bending to look into his face.

  ‘What happened, Mauricio? And where is Hector? Why isn’t he with you? Calm down and tell us everything.’ Mamá’s voice, though strained, was gentle. But her hands were gripping his shoulders so tightly they looked like gargoyle claws.

  Mauricio just kept shaking his head, muttering Vanessa’s name until my mother gave up and shoved him. And I mean shoved. ‘TELL ME WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED!’ Mauricio stumbled backwards over the pebbles. Mamá was seeing red. I grabbed her arm to stop her lunging at Mauricio and she spun around so roughly her chignon came loose, sending dark hair whipping around her face. She was a banshee in that split second, a thing of raw, fear-fuelled rage. I held her with my gaze like I was soothing a bucking mare.

  ‘You’re not helping, Mamá. Stop it.’

  She looked at me. I didn’t know what to expect. Then her chest rose and fell in two great heaves, as if a bellows were hidden under her starched cotton dress. And then, finally, Mamá let herself cry.

  She wrenched her arm from my grip and covered her eyes with her hands, sobbing all the tears she’d pent up for years, since the day we’d been forced out of our homeland and driven into living as clandestine personae non gratae without rights or security – all because Maduro refused to give up his twisted dream of a corrupt socialist utopia. She wept for Venezuela. She wept for her husband. She wept for all of us, caught in the slipstream of Aunt Celia’s deal with our very own devil.

  I caught Zulema’s eye, jerked my head towards Mamá. With a complicit nod, Zulema took her post at our mother’s side and put an arm around her trembling shoulders. I turned now to Mauricio for an explanation but was stopped by a sparkling, doughy hand on my shoulder.

  ‘We ought to go inside. The girls are frightened by this whole display,’ said Veneranda under her breath, rolling her eyes disapprovingly towards my mother.

  I looked at the twins clutching each other, eyes like anime characters, enormously oval and glistening with tears. I nodded at Veneranda and made my way back into the house. The twins followed, silent and phantom-like, shoeless in their gold fishnets and sequinned uniforms. Mauricio and the Manriques trudged inside behind them. But Mamá stayed where she was, sobbing loudly into her hands with Zulema there for comfort.

  * * *

  Gathered around the marble-topped kitchen island, we listened while Mauricio composed himself enough to tell us what had happened.

  ‘I was in the Pie parking lot valeting when Milagros came. I didn’t know what to say when I saw her – I was shocked, but she wouldn’t explain a thing, just told me to go straight home, get Vanessa and wait for her there. Said she’d come for us as soon as she could. And …’ He paused to gulp air, chin wobbling. ‘And I did what Milagros said. But when I got home, the house was a wreck. The front door was on its hinges and the gate behind it was all twisted, like someone tried prying apart the wrought-iron to get in but couldn’t manage it. The burglar-proofing all over the house was like that, on all the windows the metal was twisted and bent. I unlock the front gate and go in, and I find Vanessa …’ He hesitated and glanced at the twins.

  ‘It’s okay, Papi,’ said Ava, each word sounding fragile as glass. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I find Vanessa on the floor in my bedroom. I heard the baby crying, so I knew where she was. She’d locked the door, I had to kick it in. She’s face down on the floor and there’s all this blood. She’d been shot. I saw the two holes in her back. I saw them.’ He put a fist to his mouth, holding back tears. ‘She was alive, but unconscious. Che was wrapped up in blankets next to her. Her blood was all over him. And there were bullet holes in the windowpanes. I turn her over and her face is grey, grey like Celia’s was when I found her. And the blood was …’

  Veneranda rested a hand on his shoulder. ‘Consider the girls, please. What did you do? Did you take her to the hospital?’

  ‘I … I didn’t know what to do … the baby was screaming and Vanessa was breathing but I couldn’t wake her. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t know. I … I …’

  I wanted to knock his fucking teeth out. Typical Mauricio. Too weak to think clearly enough to take his own daughter to the hospital.

  ‘But Milagros came with Sancho and they took Vanessa and Che to the hospital with my car. She gave me the jeep, told me to follow the GPS, and …’ he looked around at all of us, ‘… and I’m here now.’

  ‘Did she say why people went to the house?’

  Mauricio shook his head at me.

  ‘What about my father?’ I pressed. ‘Is he okay?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what went on in the Pie. I just left when Milagros told me to.’

  I wanted to ask about Román too, was choked by the question, nauseated by how badly I wanted to spit it out. ‘Was anyone else hurt that you know of? Anyone else we know?’ I asked at last.

  Mauricio shrugged listlessly. I exhaled hard through my nose, wishing I could shake him by the shoulders and slam his face down into the marble countertop just for a way to vent my frustration. But what
would that change anyway? Whatever had happened, or was happening, was unchangeable now.

  ‘I’m going to lie down,’ I said. ‘I need a minute.’

  I lay on my back on the top bunk in the bedroom the Manriques had assigned to me, Zulema and the twins. I was sick with fear for my father and Román after hearing what had happened to Vanessa. What was going on? Why would she be attacked at home by gunmen? The events of the entire night were a nonsensical jumble.

  The door creaked open. It was Alejandra, the cut at her hairline freshly bandaged. She crept up the bunk ladder to lie next to me. We lay side by side staring at the ceiling.

  ‘I wish my mother was here,’ she whispered.

  ‘Me too.’

  GOLGOTHA

  Around midnight Aunt Milagros called Veneranda’s unmarked cell phone: she’d be at the house by morning. Vanessa and the baby were at the hospital. Vanessa was alive but in a critical condition, in the intensive care unit. The baby was okay. Then she hung up.

  ‘Nothing about Hector?’ asked Mamá.

  Veneranda shook her head. Mamá thumped her chest and continued crying. She couldn’t stop now the floodgates were open.

  Obviously I didn’t expect Veneranda to say anything about Román – why would she? – but I couldn’t help croaking out the question.

  ‘Did she mention Román at all?’

  The room went still as I asked it, everyone eyeing me with suspicion.

  ‘No, she did not,’ said Veneranda, a pencilled-on eyebrow raised accusingly.

  I locked my eyes onto a Persian rug hung on the wall. Maybe everyone could see the disappointment on my face. Maybe not. I didn’t care.

  Though I’d been literally at the edge of my seat when Aunt Milagros called, I now slumped back down into the fat leather couch, deflated of the little hope the ringing telephone had brought. I found myself consumed by pessimistic despondency. Again our fate was unhinged and unpredictable, as it had been since long before Ugly, when the Bolivarian Revolution first bared fangs tipped with the gangrenous poison of leftist populism and sank them deep into the sturdy, warm flesh of my home, so that now Venezuela was just a necrotic limb of the continent and we didn’t have a single place to turn, except to a pair of twats like the Manriques. I felt with absolute certainty that wherever we were going as a family, it would always be this way for us – we were collectively hoisting the cross of our unwanted status, marching ahead with dogged determination as though heading along the Yellow Brick Road to Oz in all its brilliant technicolour glory, daydreaming of living out in the open with all the state-sanctioned rights of real-live citizens, when really we were on the straight and narrow road to Golgotha. If Papá wasn’t deported or accidentally shot that night, if Vanessa made it through, they would only be transient triumphs until the next disaster came our way, until some other loan shark with a penchant for Eighties glam-rock fashion came knocking at our door, until National Security caught up with us, or any number of other scum came to leech off our defencelessness. It would always be something.

  * * *

  Four a.m. The bed shook as Zulema tossed and turned on the bottom bunk. Ava and Alejandra, wrapped around each other like twin foetuses atop the duvet of the double bed, were murmuring in their sleep as though having a conversation. My eyes watered with fatigue, but I couldn’t sleep. Any sound, no matter how slight – the rustling of a sheet, the creaking sighs of the wooden house – made me bolt upright, straining to hear a car driving across pebbles.

  I counted sheep, tried Mamá’s stripper-given tips on ‘finding the peace of my inner sanctum’, even recited the rosary just for the soothing effect of the repetition, but nothing could stop me panicking at the thought that Papá and Román had suffered the same misfortune as Vanessa, catching a fatal bullet or blow in the mêlée at the Pie, or being hauled away by National Security. With masochistic vigour, I thought of all the small things I loved about them – Papá’s belly laugh; the guava-jam smell of Román’s fingertips; Papá’s off-key singing while he gardened; the way Román would always pull over when we spotted a fruit-heavy tree at the roadside and make me try whatever local fruit it bore – star apple, pomerac, soursop, barbadine – watching eagerly to see my reaction. Were those the little things that were now destined to fade into sepia-hued memories like the many things about Aunt Celia that I’d already forgotten just over a year later? Small, unremarkable details that merge together to create each uniquely complex human being, but that are the very first to slip into oblivion until the person becomes just a cardboard cut-out, everything they once were simmering down to a concise epithet: A Wonderful Father, A Loving Wife, A Bitchy Aunt, A Workaholic, A Jokester … that’s how everyone is eventually remembered. The multisensory memory of them is stripped down layer by layer: first smell (the scent of their skin, hair, favourite perfume), then sound (a laugh, signature sneeze, timbre of their voice), then the more insubstantial details of how they look begin to soften and blur – the shape of an ear, the lines in a palm, the depth of a dimple – slipping in fat droplets through the sieve of your memory and you can’t do a thing about it. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing Papá and Román that way – first in the crushing blow of hearing they were dead, then slowly, through inescapable evanescence as time went on.

  So I lay awake, but with my eyes shut, zooming in on the details I didn’t want to forget, whispering a rosary I didn’t believe in but knowing that prayer, however empty it felt, was my only way of doing something that made me feel less helpless.

  AUNT MILAGROS’S RAT

  Faint sunlight brightened the room. I climbed quietly down from the top bunk and made my way along the hallway. The kitchen was empty, but the smell of fresh coffee told me I wasn’t the only one awake. Hearing muffled voices, I wandered through to the porch.

  Sitting at a claw-footed bronze table over still-steaming coffee were my mother and Aunt Milagros. A blanket around her shoulders, Mamá was drawn, decades of anti-ageing moisturizer and months of drinking the strippers’ detoxifying kefirs and organic collagen-boosting elixirs undone by a night of unbridled crying that had left her looking withered as a dried apricot. Aunt Milagros stood and opened her arms to me, but I didn’t move, trying to interpret the look on her face. To decipher whether the turn of her mouth, angle of her eyebrows, meant she was about to tell me what I’d been dreading all night.

  She walked towards me, pulled me into her, rubbing her hands roughly over my back. ‘It’s okay, chama, your father’s safe.’

  Instantly my shoulders dropped, jaw slackened, every muscle that had been tightly knotted for hours unwinding, loosening, lungs spreading like wings as I drew a deep breath of relief.

  She stepped back, cupping my face. ‘He’s absolutely fine.’ And then her eyes dropped for a fraction of a second. Fuck. It wasn’t all good news. ‘He’s not hurt, but he was caught up in the raid. He’s at a holding centre now …’

  ‘Holding centre or deportation centre?’

  She dropped her hands from my face. ‘Deportation centre.’

  I understood why Mamá looked like such a wreck. Even worse than when Princess Diana died, a clear memory though I was only five, because it was the first and only time I’d seen Mamá cry, for the woman she called ‘her style icon’.

  ‘They’re not going to take any action against anyone yet,’ said Aunt Milagros. ‘There’s still a lot of processing to do with all the dancers they picked up. Even the local staff are being held there, so no one is being tossed onto a boat back to Venezuela just yet.’

  Not being chucked back to Venezuela – yet. About as reassuring as being told at point-blank range that you’re not going to be shot in the head yet.

  ‘Let’s be positive, Yola. I’m confident that through my connections we can get Hector asylum here.’

  Her connections? I shook my head then, realizing that it made absolutely no sense that Aunt Milagros had all of this information to begin with.

  ‘How do you know what happened to Papá? How a
re you involved in all of this?’

  ‘Why don’t you get yourself a cup of coffee and I’ll tell you everything.’

  * * *

  As soon as I was back in the kitchen, the burst of relief I’d felt that Papá was okay – tempered as it was by knowing he’d been caught – was quashed by my fear for Román.

  I’d have to find some way, any way, to ask Aunt Milagros if she knew of his whereabouts. She had to know something, given that she’d been there waiting for us in the jeep, exactly where Román had told us to go. Steeled by the knowledge that Aunt Milagros obviously had secrets of her own interactions with Román to reveal, I decided to flat-out ask what I needed to. Fuck whatever eyebrows it raised or questions it led to.

  Making my way back out to the porch equipped with the prop of hot coffee that I couldn’t possibly swallow, not with the lump of anxiety in my throat over Román’s wellbeing, I saw that Mamá had come inside and was lying on the couch with the back of her hand across her eyes. Her cheeks were wet.

  I leaned over her, touching her shoulder gently. ‘Mamá …’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said without moving her hand from her eyes. ‘I just need to get my thoughts together.’

  ‘Want me to stay with you?’

  ‘No, go talk to Milagros. There’s a lot to be filled in on. I need my time to think.’

  On the verandah with Aunt Milagros, I immediately tried segueing into the right line of conversation to find out if Román had been hurt: ‘So Vanessa and Che are okay?’

  ‘They’re keeping Vanessa in ICU until she’s more stable,’ said Aunt Milagros. ‘But she’s young and strong. They’re cautiously confident that she’ll pull through this, and keeping an eye on Che for signs of emotional trauma, but physically he’s fine.’

  ‘And …’ I faltered, sipping at the coffee. ‘And was anyone else we know hurt? The doormen or the manager … Román … any dancers?’

  Aunt Milagros took a moment before answering, watching me almost slyly.