‘Always dedicated, Mamá? You mean except in the case of a helpless infant who’s committed the blasphemy of being born with a tooth, of course.’ I couldn’t help myself. She’d fucking asked for it.
Mamá’s looking at me like she wishes she’d clothes-hangered my former foetal self long before she had a chance to squeeze me out with that unholy tooth.
‘Your mother is a good mother, Celia,’ whimpers Tía Mabel, the brownnoser.
‘Ha! A good mother who dumps her newborn with a bunch of sexually repressed religious fanatics who think they’re married to the protagonist of a two-thousand-year-old storybook? Good mother my ass. Tía, let me tell you something – you can call a turd a peacock, but it still won’t grow tail feathers.’
Mamá wouldn’t leave her room for two days after that, and I was banned from attending the next four family events. Win-win.
I kept reading voraciously. The writing was sharp, witty and merciless, just like Aunt Celia. And written in the present tense with a neatly crafted linear narrative, it read like an intimate diary, but one that was juicier than fiction. Only when a stack of pages were face down beside me and the stripes of light falling through the louvres were the hazy pink of sunset did I put the manuscript down, wanting to ration the rest of it as long as I could. It was strange, reading her writing. I was hooked, but at the same time, the more I read, the more I felt the hole in my chest widening – I hated that I couldn’t call Aunt Celia right then to tell her what I thought of her work.
The only way to ease the ache of that hole, a raw and ragged-edged wound newly opened by the discovery of her writing, was to keep reading.
In the wee hours of that morning, I finally forced myself to stop. I’d followed Aunt Celia from that dank orphanage to my abuelos’ rural ranch, and was now smack in the drama of her wild teenage years. I stopped myself there even though there was so much more to read, just a few more chapters until her debauched twenties, which I was already so fondly familiar with thanks to the many stories she’d told me. But I made myself resist the magnetism of the manuscript – this was my last fix of Celia so I had to eke it out.
I tucked the manuscript into my nightstand drawer, still thrumming with the energy surge from reading good writing, and I knew then how I’d keep Aunt Celia’s memory alive. I’d prove to her, dead or not, that all our conversations about reading, writing, books we loved, books we hated, authors we couldn’t live without, authors we thought could eat shit, all of that talk hadn’t been for nothing. If she could secretly pen a bona fide tome without ever making a single claim to being a writer, I had no excuse not to finish my own opus. I’d show Aunt Celia I could write.
The next morning I was charged, ready to put pen to paper. It was time to forge ahead with the novel draft. Before our departure from Caracas, I’d been working doggedly on it for nearly a year while grappling with the usual procrastination pitfalls – trawling social media, colour-coordinating my wardrobe, staring at my cuticles, Googling how to stop procrastinating – and I had only a few chapters left to write, along with a few plot holes to fill. But then came our upheaval to Trinidad and it was all too easy to put the book on the back burner. Now, though, Aunt Celia’s memoir had given me exactly the jolt of inspiration I needed to get back to the literary grindstone. There were her classic Celia-esque insights for starters:
Spotting a good catch is about numerology. A good man should ALWAYS be tied to two crucial numbers: 6 and 0. Six represents the minimum of figures that should be coming into his bank account every month (in US dólares, claro), and the number of inches his cock should exceed to make him worth your while. Zero represents the ideal number of living parents, siblings, children and former marriages attached to any prospective husband worth considering.
Not to mention the wild anecdotes that served as ample fodder for fiction:
It was a night made of magic ingredients – hairspray, disco balls, and rich boys. How was I to know it’d end in the worst kinds of shots (tequila, gun, mug)?
I was amped. Fingers hovering over the keyboard, I wet my lips, waiting for the first line of the next chapter to come to me, the one that would blow people’s minds, have the Cervantes Prize judges creaming themselves. But the cursor just blinked at me on the screen (judgementally, if cursors can be judgemental) as my hands stayed poised above the keys. I was stumped. I tried putting a few lines onto the page, but anything I wrote sounded contrived and flat, nothing that would leave any literary-award judge gagging for more.
I opted for procrastination in a bid to get the juices flowing. Started browsing the Internet for local writing workshops. Now that I knew Aunt Celia the Clandestine Literary Wonder had been offering shrewd writing advice all along, it was time to find some other, equally useful source of writing camaraderie. To my surprise, I discovered that there were lots of literary events going on locally, and in San Fernando, the island’s southern capital, the annual Bocas Lit Festival was underway. Scrolling through the festival website, I found myself getting nervous. I only wrote in Spanish, and the thought of attempting to write in my second language, far less read aloud my attempts at English prose, had always deterred me from doing any due diligence on Trinidad’s literary scene, if there was a scene at all. I’d always felt that my intellect knocked itself down a few pegs when I expressed myself in my second language, and I wasn’t willing to make myself that vulnerable when it came to writing. My words were my guts spewed onto a page, intestines laid out in rows of black and white. I couldn’t chance laying those guts out with a language in which l was anything less than native-level flawless. But now Aunt Celia was gone and I needed writer folk for feedback.
After combing through the festival programme, I settled on a lecture by a London-based literary agent – no workshopping my writing or reading anything aloud to strangers. An easy way to dip my toe into unknown waters. I registered for the lecture, already jittery about interacting with other writers. Trini culture was warm and hospitable, but the social scene was cliquish – I imagined the sphere of the local literati being even worse.
A few minutes after registering, a little ping! on my cell phone told me I’d gotten a confirmation email from the festival. I looked at the email on the phone screen, then went back into the inbox and scrolled down until I came to the last email I’d gotten from Aunt Celia. Sent three days before she died, telling me I needed to pick up a copy of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.
About a hermaphrodite! Why don’t you write about one of these transgender people? Everybody’s eating that shit up right now. Nothing gets people going like someone fucking around with their genitals. Write about it, Yola! Go get yourself a man-made penis for research ja ja! Then maybe you’ll win yourself a Pulitzer like Eugenides.
I’d written back a one-liner:
You have to be American to win a Pulitzer.
It made me sick to look at my final, dry email reply. But I still read it every other day.
Feeling that familiar dull throb of missing her, I was tempted to take another read of the manuscript. But then I remembered why the manuscript had inspired me in the first place. Not just because of the writing, but because I had to put some quality shit on paper too, to prove myself to Aunt Celia if nothing else. I closed my novel manuscript and opened a blank Word document. A quick short story would stir the creative pot. Sensing that intangible something that sends the words flooding out of you, I wrote the first line: