My mother was doing this thing where she steadily pounds her fist against her chest. She did it for hours without stopping after she found out her mother died a couple years back, and when we were teenagers she’d do it if she caught us sneaking out or whenever we came home shit-faced from some house party. When she walked in on Zulema getting it doggy-style from her high-school boyfriend, I thought she’d have a crater above her heart from all the pounding. And here it was again, that ominous drumbeat gnawing at my nerves.
‘So he’s blackmailing us,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said my father.
I don’t even know why I was surprised. Our immigrant story is as classic and unchanging as any Hans Christian Andersen fairytale – the tale of the illegal refugees who risked it all to live like cockroaches, hiding in the dank cracks of an unknown society where they hope no one will find them, antennae forever twitching, listening for the heavy boot of National Security, only to discover that the strange new place they call home has all the ugliness of the world they left behind, except worse, because here you’re stripped of rights, dignity, personhood. Anyone can crush you under their heel, splatter your little roach innards, just like Ugly was doing to us.
Mauricio was swearing under his breath and snivelling while Ava rubbed his back. I wanted to yank him up by the hair and tell him he had no goddamned right to cry. We had nothing to do with Aunt Celia’s deals with some flamboyantly dressed Trinidadian criminal. Mauricio should’ve been the one paying off the debt or working as Ugly’s pawn, not us. Ugly could stick Mauricio in thigh-highs and a wig and put him on a street corner to work off the debt as far as I was concerned.
Unable to tolerate the sight of Mauricio crumbling in on himself, I fixed my eyes to the dining table where Aunt Celia and I had had so many long lunches together. She’d never said a word about Ugly or about getting fake permits – had she? I skipped through the last times I’d sat with her at that table. True, she’d mentioned she was making jewellery to sell at artisanal fairs, which I’d found strange because she always seemed to revel in the luxury of housewifedom, but I’d had the impression that the jewellery thing was because she wanted a hobby, not because of any financial problems.
I trawled through all of those final conversations, each a vivid snapshot, like I was thumbing through a picture book, searching for some clue of Aunt Celia’s secret, until I came to the lunch we’d had just before she died. My very last conversation with Aunt Celia and it had been so stupid.
‘I don’t have any girlfriends here, Tía. You expect me to go out clubbing alone? How pathetic.’
‘You know what’s pathetic? When in a few years you’re blowing out the candles on your thirtieth birthday cake with your cats. Life is short, bruja. You’re twenty-four – get out there, fuck a few frogs, kiss a couple princes, then you’ll hit two birds with one stone.’
‘What two birds?’
She’d counted them out on her fingers. ‘You won’t waste your youth on pointless fucking chastity, and you’ll find yourself a husband in the process.’
‘Jesus, give it a rest with the husband thing.’
‘Listen, Milagros has enough spinster bitterness to last our family a lifetime. Can’t have you winding up like that tragedy.’
‘¡Verga! Poor Aunt Milagros.’
‘Oh, she fucking looked for it. She’s had her legs superglued shut since her quinceañera, always more concerned about finding Jesus than finding a man, la gran idiota. Let me tell you something, Yola. Life is not some box of chocolates like they say in that movie. Life is a big piece of sugarcane.’
‘Sugarcane?’
‘Yes, a maldito sugarcane! You have to bite down hard and suck as much sweetness out of it as you can. Don’t be afraid to sink your teeth in, chama, it’s the only way you’ll ever draw out the sugar.’
I should’ve told her what she meant to me right then. I should’ve said, ‘Aunt Celia, you’re the most entertaining, insightful, foul-mouthed bitch I know, and I love you for it.’
But I’d never say that. We never say the things we feel. We keep our mouths shut until the only option is regret. Maybe if I’d have opened up more to her, she would’ve told me about her debt to Ugly.
My attention was wrenched back to the present by a thudding on the front door. All heads whipped around – Ugly back already? Mauricio peered up at the door through his fingers. Though it was his house, he didn’t move from his chair, a quaking six-year-old hiding under his bed from the bogeyman. Rolling his eyes at Mauricio in exasperation, my father motioned for all of us to stay seated, then went to open up.
‘Yes?’
To my – and everyone else’s – surprise, a girl’s voice answered from the front step in Venezuelan-accented Spanish.
‘Does Mauricio Benitez live here?’
‘Sí.’ Papá opened the door fully and stepped aside.
The girl came in, pulling a suitcase behind her. Colour flushed her cheeks as she saw the room full of people staring at her. She looked like she was in her late teens, with free-flowing dark curls and almond eyes. Her denim jumpsuit showcased a nipped-in waist, hips that called to mind African fertility carvings, and bra cups that spillethed over. Her eyes found Mauricio instantly. He stood up, grey-faced.
‘¿Vanessa, qué carajo? What the hell are you doing here?’
‘I came to live with you.’
We watched on in confusion as Mauricio went to stand beside the girl. Like a mood ring, his face had gone from grey to deep vermilion.
‘Everyone, this is Vanessa.’ His eyes were on his feet. ‘My daughter.’
As if our family didn’t have enough bullshit to deal with.
NAVIGATING THE BULLSHIT
Here was the story with Vanessa, Mauricio’s first kid on the side and illegitimate little Fidel’s predecessor by seventeen years in the potentially still-unravelling yarn of Mauricio’s evidently long history of infidelity. As we eventually found out, she was the product of an extramarital fling Mauricio’d had while visiting his parents in the rural hamlet of Isla de Gato. Ever since Vanessa was born, he’d been visiting annually and regularly sending money to Vanessa’s mother, entirely unbeknownst to Aunt Celia, of course. So when, through the ever-active Venezuelan gossip network, word filtered all the way back to Isla de Gato that Aunt Celia and her formidable bitchiness were out of the picture for good, Vanessa decided it was time to make a better life for herself with her dear old daddio. She found a man with a boat all on her own, and made her way to Trinidad, then up to Port of Spain, relying on her outstanding physical attributes and a wardrobe consisting primarily of Lycra to get free transport and food along the way.
The bulk of this information would be gathered the following day when Mamá, under the guise of the Kindly Aunt, invited the twins over to her nail spa in our annex for free after-school mani-pedis in a transparent bid to plumb them for intel on Vanessa.
Since I share my mother’s proclivity for family gossip, I was also waiting on the twins to turn up that afternoon, grappling with that same incredulous hangover feeling like when you can’t quite believe what went down the drunken night before. Did I really do nine Jägerbombs? Did I really kiss/sleep with/get fingerbanged on the dancefloor by ______? Had Ugly really happened? Were we really being blackmailed? Had yet another of Mauricio’s side kids actually manifested in our lives?