by Laura Resau
After the last girl gives her speech, a band comes onstage, an indígena band, playing the panpipe music MacGyver played on his cassette years ago. It fills the room, creating landscapes of mountains and valleys and lakes with its wind notes. The musicians blow into their flutes with passion, their cheeks puffed out, their braids swinging. The music swirls around me and sweeps me up and makes my heart swell with pride.
During this time, the judges are conferring in another room, deciding on the winning queens. Five songs pass, and the band moves off the stage as the judges file onto it. All of us girls are onstage, too, in three rows—the tallest in back, shortest in front. I’m wedged in the middle row, hoping that Luz will be one of the winners, since she’s always helped the other girls with the dance steps. Who will the other winners be—maybe Elsa or Cristina? Elsa has always made an effort to be friendly to everyone, especially to the shy girls. I’d be happy if she won.
Doña Amelia stands behind the microphone, excited. “It wasn’t easy, but the judges have chosen the winners. First, we’ll announce the Queen of Sky, then the Queen of Water, and finally, the star, the Queen of Corn.”
The news reporters are crouched in front of the stage, cameras ready to snap photos. In the audience people are whispering about who they think will win. I’m holding hands with the girls next to me, and we squeeze each other’s sweaty hands.
“For the Queen of Sky … Elsa Quimbo!”
Screams and squeals of joy erupt from one row of seats, which must be her family. “Elsa!” they shout, and rush to the stage with flowers. “Sister! Cousin! Niece!” There are at least a dozen of them—parents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. They reach up their hands, whistling and clapping and glowing with pride. Doña Amelia puts a blue sash around Elsa that reads, in Quichua, The Queen of Sky. TV cameramen push through to get a better angle, and the reporters are snapping photos like crazy.
Once the applause calms, Doña Amelia says, “And now for the Queen of Water … María Virginia Farinango!”
The audience explodes in applause and whistles and whoops. I look around, thinking there must be some mistake. I couldn’t have won. My speech wasn’t in Quichua. Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe I’ve gone overboard with one of my fantasies.
But Doña Amelia is looking at me and the girls are hugging me and pushing me forward to receive the sash. Doña Amelia hugs me and whispers, “Beautiful speech,” into my ear. As she puts the sash around me, the journalists are clicking their cameras frantically and Susana is running up to the stage with a bouquet of lilies. No one else runs up to me, no family or friends, but plenty of people I don’t even know are cheering and calling “María Virginia!” The applause goes on and on, and I stand, dazed and smiling, holding the flowers and sweating in the spotlight. Finally, Doña Amelia has to hold up her hands to make the audience settle down.
The Queen of Corn is next. It’s Luz, and as she steps forward, we hug, and whisper “Congratulations” in each other’s ears. In the midst of more applause and photo snapping, her family rushes up, showering her with flowers and cheers.
Maybe I should have invited my parents and brother and sister and cousins and friends and coworkers. It might have been nice for them to be here. It would feel good if all the pieces of my life could find a way to somehow fit together.
We three queens hold hands as Doña Amelia talks about our prizes—all-expenses-paid trips to the Galápagos Islands. I think of myself as a little girl perched in the tree, pretending to be an elegant, beautiful indígena riding in my truck to exciting places. I think of how wishes can come true, but not always in the way you expect. I think of what Matilde said about who I really am. Someone with spunk, someone who lets nothing stop her from reaching her dreams.
chapter 37
ON MONDAY MORNING, I walk from the bus stop to school full of jumpy energy, wondering how people at school will react. My picture along with those of the other queens is on the front page of this morning’s newspaper. The article is long, describing the ceremony and quoting parts from my speech. Anyone in town who missed reading about it in the newspapers will have seen it on the morning news, which showed close-up footage of us queens in our sashes.
Earlier this morning, I was sipping my jugo de tomate in the hotel café when Don Lucho cried, “Look! It’s our Virginia!” My coworkers stopped what they were doing and crowded around the TV in the corner. Even the gringuitos took their noses out of their guidebooks to watch Doña Amelia putting the sash over me.
Now I turn the block and walk toward the school, my insides leaping around. My coworkers are one thing, but the students and teachers are another. What will they say? Will they act differently toward me from now on? Will I no longer be one of them? I barely reach the gate when a crowd of students rushes over to me, not just seventh graders but upperclassmen, too.
“Congratulations, Queen Virginia!”
“Why didn’t you tell us, Virginia? You’re so modest!”
“Wow! You look beautiful in the pictures!”
All morning long, students I hardly know are asking me to run for class president, begging me to join their clubs, their sports teams, to sit with them at lunch. My teachers keep me after every class to congratulate me.
My science teacher is especially excited. “Virginia!” she says. “We’re so proud of you! Now I understand why your grades haven’t been as high as usual lately. All these rehearsals, all this work!”
I nod. “Yes, it’s been busy.”
“You should have told us what was going on!”
“Yes, I should have.” And it’s true, I should have.
After school, I have an hour before work starts, so Carmen and Sonia and Esperanza and I decide go to the ice cream stall at the food market to celebrate. A few people stop and stare as I pass, and some ask, “Aren’t you one of the queens?”
My friends giggle, loving this. “It’s like being with a celebrity!” Sonia says.
I blush and lick my ice cream cone, a little embarrassed, but mostly happy.
“Hey, Virginia,” Esperanza says, “why don’t you wear your indígena clothes more? Like at work and hanging out. I bet they’d even let you wear them to school instead of a uniform.”
“Why would I do that?” I ask, shifting on my stool.
“Because you look gorgeous in them!” Carmen says, throwing her arm around my shoulder. “Chica, those pictures in the paper were amazing!”
“Maybe,” I say.
“But now you have a responsibility to dress that way,” she insists. “You’re the Queen of Water! You’re representing this organization! It’s your queenly duty, chica!”
A week later, on Sunday afternoon, before the dinner shift, I put on Susana’s anacos and blouse and jewelry—which she insisted I keep as a gift. As I leave the hotel, all my coworkers ooh and ahh and whistle. “¡Qué guapa, esta reina!” How beautiful, this queen!
Outside, I walk down the street slowly, relishing how strangely comfortable I am. I don’t feel the need to scurry along quickly, hiding my face, as I did during all the rehearsals. As I pass, a few people murmur to each other, “Is that one of the queens?” At the square, my girlfriends are waiting for me by the fountain, under an apple tree.
“Yay! You did it!” Carmen says. The girls touch the beads around my neck, the red beads at my wrist, the shiny blouse, the soft anaco fabric, the ribbon wrapped around my ponytail.
“You look so pretty!” Esperanza says.
And Sonia chimes in, “Can you let me try this on sometime?”
Not long after the election, an official invitation arrives at the hotel, addressed to me. The card is thick creamy linen paper with raised gold lettering, with so many swirls and flourishes it’s hard to read.
I already know about the luncheon from Don Walter talking about it. It’s a big deal, with the daughter of the president of Ecuador coming. At the hotel we’ve hosted big, fancy luncheons and dinners before, but nothing quite this big.
The who
le week before the event, Don Walter and the cooks and waiters are excitedly planning the menu and ordering fresh lilies and roses for the table in the formal dining room upstairs. “The president’s daughter!” everyone is buzzing. “Here, in our hotel!”
I can’t quite bring myself to tell them that I will be one of the guests, so I just help them with the preparations, giving a new coat of wax to the wood floors, polishing the banister to a high sheen. I’ve told them I won’t be able to work that day because of a queen commitment, but when I try to tell them the truth, it stops in my throat. I want my worlds to come together, but I’m not sure how. How can I be a queen and a dishwasher at the same time?
Saturday arrives. At eleven, my coworker Quines and I are checking the table, making sure all the napkins are perfectly folded, all the silverware perpendicular to the table edge, the flowers arranged just right.
“Virginia,” he says, placing the glasses of water from a tray onto the table, “if you have time before your royal duties, why don’t you stay and help us? There are only three servers and we’ll be super-busy.”
“Well, Quines.” I pluck off a few wilted rose petals, stalling. “Actually, this is my royal duty. I’m a guest at this luncheon.”
He nearly drops the tray of water glasses. “What? You’re eating with the president’s daughter?”
“I should change now, actually,” I say, and run downstairs, leaving him there, bewildered.
An hour later, I’m dressed in my indígena clothes, sitting with the other queens at a long table with the president’s daughter. Panpipe music is playing lightly from the speakers, and reporters and photographers are snapping photos and talking to the more-famous guests—senators and city council members. The president’s daughter looks about thirty years old, around Susana’s age, and is an expert on mingling and posing graciously for pictures. She wears a tailored blue suit with a white ruffled blouse and low heels and a pretty pin at her neck.
Niçoise salad is the first course, which I spent all morning making, arranging the hard-boiled eggs and olives perfectly on each of the twenty-five plates. Daintily, I pick up the proper fork to use for the salad, and notice that two of the councilmen use their main-course forks by mistake.
I know the menu by heart. Next will come cream of asparagus soup topped with blue cheese crumbles, then sautéed chicken in a mushroom-raisin-wine sauce garnished with curlicues of carrot and sprigs of fresh cilantro. The cilantro and carrot curlicues were my idea, from a magazine I read, and Don Walter agreed it would be a nice touch. Finally, for dessert, dark chocolate mousse layered with fresh raspberry coulis and topped with a dollop of whipped cream.
As Quines collects our dirty dishes, I whisper, “Delicious salad.”
He shakes his head, grinning. “Good thing Lucho lent you Modern Etiquette,” he whispers back. Before rehearsals, he and Lucho would quiz me on which spoon to use for soup, which for iced tea, when to put the napkin in your seat to signal you’ll be back or on the table to signal you’re finished.
During the soup course, the president’s daughter starts talking to me. “What a lovely blouse you have. Those flowers must have taken someone a long time to stitch!”
“Thank you,” I say, a little tongue-tied. I remember Modern Etiquette. When someone compliments you, say something nice back. “Your outfit is beautiful too. I like your pin.” It’s a gold cameo with a creamy pink face in the center.
We sip our soup soundlessly. Everything looks different from this spot at the table, compared with when I’m clearing dishes. It’s easy to revel in the elegance, trust that everything will flow smoothly, like silk. And I can sink into this, but at the same time, I can imagine the scene in the kitchen—Quines and my other friends whizzing around and sweating and frantically getting twenty-five plates of food ready, making them look perfect, timing all the courses so they’re the right temperature when they come out: the salad cool and fresh, the soup hot but not too hot.
“Mmm,” the president’s daughter says. “This soup is delicious, isn’t it? I’ll have to ask for the recipe to give to the cook at our house.”
I want to say, Thank you! The blue cheese topping was Quines’s idea. I want to tell her I picked out the soup with Don Walter and went shopping at the market for the ingredients and helped blend up the asparagus. I want to tell her these things, but they might shatter my image as queen.
But I wonder, what if I tell her the truth about my life? Will she still think I belong at this table? Is she willing to know what’s beneath the surface, behind the scenes? Or is she content to take me at face value, a cardboard cutout queen?
“The soup’s easy,” I say. “Steam the asparagus, sauté garlic and green onions, add some cream, blend it up, add salt and pepper.”
“My, that does sound easy,” she says. “So you enjoy cooking?”
“Actually, señora, I work here. I’m a dishwasher, but when we have big events I shop and cook, too. And I help with serving sometimes, but I can’t today.”
She stares, her spoon midair. “What an extraordinary girl you are! Tell me, how did you end up working here?”
Through the whole mushroom chicken course I tell her about going back to Yana Urku and needing money for school, and finding this job. As I talk, she nods and asks me questions, truly interested. It’s as though the fabric scraps of my self are being sewn together, in tiny, almost invisible stitches, with the finest of threads.
While Quines is clearing the dishes and the others are setting out coffee, I notice the sweat beaded on their foreheads and I can see in their eyes that they’re swamped. I know they need to serve the rest of the coffee and deal with the cream and sugar and then there’s the chocolate mousse with fresh whipped cream that will droop if it’s not brought out soon.
“Excuse me a moment,” I tell the president’s daughter, and put my napkin on my chair. I breeze into the kitchen and sure enough, there is a tray of chocolate mousse, the whipped cream dollops just on the verge of sagging.
“Thank goodness, Virginia,” the cook says. “Please, take it out now!” I emerge from the kitchen with my head high, as though it’s attached to a golden string, the platter of mousse balanced on one upturned palm. Quines has just cleared the last of the main-course plates, and he gives me a surprised but grateful smile when he sees me with the platter.
Everyone turns to me as I put down their dessert, and says politely, “Thank you, Virginia,” or “Thank you, señorita.”
I am not at all invisible. I am the served and I am the server. I am queen and I am dishwasher. I am rich and poor, indígena and mestiza, and no one can put me in a box.
I save the last mousse for myself, sit down, choose the small dessert spoon. Then I notice the president’s daughter. She has waited for me to take my seat before starting to eat. We raise our spoons in a kind of toast and dig in.
All week, more articles and pictures of me and the other queens have appeared in the newspaper. Don Walter cuts them out and puts them next to the others above his desk, and Don Lucho tapes some behind the café bar.
“Virginia!” Don Lucho calls to me on Saturday morning. “You have some visitors.”
I’m sitting at a café table, covered with pink eraser dust, sipping orange juice and trying to solve a geometry problem. My head is full of isosceles triangles and hypotenuses and formulas. I’m trying to get all my homework done today, because tomorrow morning is the big procession, the culmination of all the queen events, when I’ll be paraded through the city with Luz and Elsa.
I put down my pencil, glad of a break. “Who is it?”
“The president and his daughter,” Don Lucho says, walking over to me, peering at my homework. “She wants to hang out with you, since you’re best friends now. She brought her dad along.”
“Don Lucho!” I say, hitting him playfully.
He laughs and flashes his gold tooth.
“Do I really have visitors?”
“Yes, Your Highness. A woman and a man. But they d
idn’t give their names.”
Maybe it’s Susana and José, here to tell me last-minute instructions for the big parade tomorrow. It could be anyone, really. For the past two weeks I’ve had all kinds of unexpected visitors. One young man who made dolls for tourists wanted to make indígena queen dolls, and he took my picture to use as a model. A photographer from France came, too, and we did a modeling shoot near Lake Mojanda for his magazine.
I take my hair out of its ponytail, smooth it back, and wrap the band around again. I brush the eraser dust from my skirt and breeze past Don Lucho, whispering, “And stop calling me Your Highness, King Lucho!”
With a smile still on my face, I walk to the foyer and look around, but no one’s there. I go to the doors and glance outside.
The smile disappears.
It’s them.
chapter 38
NIÑO CARLITOS AND THE DOCTORITA stand before me like pieces of an old dream I can’t quite forget. For months I’ve dreamed of the satisfaction I’d get from them seeing me crowned queen. I’ve imagined their reaction to the newspaper articles, the TV clip. I’ve imagined how the Doctorita would have to eat her terrible words. I’ve imagined them coming and begging my forgiveness. But I’ve never imagined it happening so soon.
I thought it might happen in the distant future, once I’m a grown woman with an important job and my own house and a husband and children. I try to make my legs move to turn, to run back inside and hide somewhere.
The Doctorita spots me through the doorway. It’s too late to run. I force my feet to walk out the door. I stand across from them on the sidewalk. They stare silently. Niño Carlitos’s gaze is especially intense, full of feeling. Guilt? Happiness? Sadness? Hope? I can’t tell. There’s a toddler girl, holding on to his hand. The boys are shyly hanging back, behind the Doctorita. Her face is chubbier than I remember, her belly bigger, her hips wider. Her hair is dyed an orangey color, with gray-brown roots showing. She’s wearing a dress I’ve never seen.