She did it to prove something.
It was like putting your toe onto the edge of a slide greased with olive oil. With those few words, I slipped down the chute, tumbling down the creative rabbit hole in an avalanche of words. A couple of hours later, a first draft of a pretty decent short story was on paper. Thus recharged, I returned to my novel, and wrote chapter after chapter, reconnecting with my characters, falling in love with the story all over again. I only broke focus when the outdoor security light came on in a series of staccato blinks, telling me it was dusk. The bulb of the light had been fading for ages, and would strobe fluorescently into my room for fifteen minutes every day at nightfall before it finally glowed steadily. I went to the window to pull the curtain shut, but something caught my eye. I peered through the louvres – was I seeing right? I leaned into the window, squinted through the slats at two shadowy forms at the far end of the backyard.
There they were. Sancho and Vanessa up against the mango tree, mouths locked, Vanessa on her tiptoes, Sancho with his hand jammed down the front of her jeans.
And just like that, I was struck by a great first line for a second novel:
He was too stupid to know he’d made a huge mistake.
I’m not even going to get into the Vanessa–Sancho thing. Setting aside my own mixed feelings towards her, the girl was seventeen years old. Sancho was pushing thirty, had a girlfriend and a blatant drinking problem, and was nothing if not rapaciously promiscuous, with or without said girlfriend. I was tempted to warn Vanessa, but what did I owe her anyway? She’d been playing up to him from day one, and I’d already been magnanimous enough to temper my frigidity towards her in spite of my Aunt Celia loyalties. I wasn’t getting involved now if she and Sancho wanted to start up some sordid dalliance. So my reaction to catching them at it was like witnessing a Mafia hit – omertà: say nothing to anyone. In any case, we all had too much on our minds to grapple with that Nabokov-styled romance. The entire family was gripped by a pervasive nervous energy as we awaited our first batch of ‘guests’. It was like waiting for an atomic bomb. The landline ringing was as good as an air raid siren. We had no idea when the blitzkrieg of illegal migrants was coming – we assumed, or hoped, that it would at least be preceded by a warning phone call, but who knew? Maybe Román would just kick the door in and send streams of illegals flooding into our living room. We had no idea what to expect.
But one, then several, days passed and nothing happened. The phone kept ringing with no one on the other end besides my widowed abuelo begging Papá to go back to Venezuela and incite a revolution – ‘If Castro could do it with some beatniks and a few dinghies, why can’t you?’ – and vehemently refusing to join us in Trinidad: ‘Venezuela is where I was born and where I will die. What the hell will I do after I’m dead in Trinidad? Where will my spirit roam around? I won’t have a damn clue where to go!’ And Mamá’s family still languishing in Caracas, calling to say there was no toilet paper, no medicine, no vaccines, nothing but canned food, newborns mewling like wrinkled kittens in cardboard boxes at the hospitals, brawls in the street between the Opositores and the Maduristas, newly ordained prostitutes in droves at the borders, young women cutting out their fallopian tubes because where can they get birth control and who can feed a baby. A whole nation rattling its cage, seething with resentment, demanding to know why the hell it couldn’t do socialism Scandinavian-style, with high taxes but pristine streets, a bottomless supply of more high-grade dairy products than even the most robust intestinal tract could possibly handle, and minimum-wage workers still coining enough to go on Mediterranean cruises once a year, the kind of socialism that made El Che nod his benevolent, CIA-executed head in approval and say yes, compadres, you got exactly what I was going for. But our malnourished, rage-filled relatives knew they’d got the shitty end of the socialist stick. Granted not as shitty as the socialism of Nationalsozialistische but shitty enough to prove that not all socialist idealism is created equal.
Whoever picked up the phone would listen and let our family members vent, wishing we could tell them we were rattling with nerves and resentment in our own cage, thank you very much, that we’d hauled ass all the way to Trinidad just to fall victim to Ugly, yet another megalomaniacal prick. But we stayed mum – because no matter what we were going through, at least we could buy Panadol for our stress migraines and toilet paper for our anxiety-induced diarrhoea and groceries for our comfort eating. Maybe the grass here was greener, just fertilized with an equally pungent brand of horseshit.
A PERCEPTIVE MOTHERFUCKER
Trinidad likes to tout itself as this cosmopolitan melting pot, swirling with all the flavours of the race rainbow. But in fact, if you’re not one of, or a blend of, the two majority races on the island, a pall of Otherness follows you like a lingering fart that won’t waft away, the stench manifesting itself in relentless catcalls, the unshakeable instinct that you should always keep your eyes on the pavement, and a keen awareness that you are constantly being watched. For Latinas, a relatively novel addition to the local ethnic pot, this Otherness is exacerbated by a label far brighter, more neon-hued, tinsel-bedecked, and eye-catching than any other: whore. Trinidadian public opinion deems us all, each and every one, a stripper, hooker, aspiring trophy wife, or sneaky conniving slut. No room for the Madonna dichotomy when it comes to ‘Venes’ here. So with my dual labels of Other and Whore firmly affixed the second I stepped outside, I thought it best to opt for the most neutral, innocuous clothing possible when I dressed that Saturday morning for the Lit Fest seminar: black T-shirt and black jeans. (Though granted, I couldn’t fight the Latin grooming impulse that left my hair sleekly blown-out and my nails freshly French-tipped.)
With my all-black armour donned, feet shod in intentionally unsexy Converse, I turned the key in the beat-up Datsun that Zulema and I shared, and tried to ignore the clamminess of my palms. Then I put on the audiobook of Middlesex for the drive, hoping it might ease my nerves. I’d bought it right after Aunt Celia died, thinking it would be easier to listen to High Literature in English rather than read it. But by the time I hit the highway for the long journey down to San Fernando, Eugenides’ intricate prose had only made me more self-conscious about my own literary English. I killed the volume and drove on in silence, but Middlesex also had another unexpected side effect – I couldn’t think of anything but the person who’d recommended it to me. It helped my anxiety to think of her, though: Aunt Celia had never been intimidated by anyone or anything. Maybe I could slip into her bad-ass attitude like it was a superhero costume, equipped with a utility belt that shot laser-like bitch looks and stun guns that radiated scathing put-downs. She wouldn’t have cared what a bunch of literary types thought of her English prose or if they automatically assumed she was some Vene whore. As I’d learned from the manuscript’s account of her teenage years, Celia had an indefatigable ability to bounce back from any situation, no matter how embarrassing, an indestructibly elastic rubber band:
Who would’ve thought César Velásquez would’ve been the one to pop this cherry. Sure, he can kick a ball clear across a football field and hit a home run like no one else at school, but the guy’s so dyslexic he can barely spell his own first name. Lucky for him, I’m already seventeen – how much longer was I gonna wait before doing the deed? Not like I’m Milagros who’s probably already sewn her chocha shut and shaved her pubic hair into a likeness of the Santa Virgen.