‘Yasmin is right,’ said my father, after a long silence. ‘We’re in no position to judge anyone. We have to look at this like an opportunity to help our countrymen find a better life like we all did. We have to be positive. We are going to clear Celia’s debt, and we’ll be standing by our Venezuelan people. It’s our turn to be the Good Samaritan.’
A murmur of agreement rippled through the room. Nothing appealed to a pack of wayward Catholics like a Good Samaritan reference.
‘How will we know when people are coming?’ asked Vanessa.
‘I don’t know,’ said my father. ‘We have to be ready to receive them whenever.’
I looked around the living room. Our house was comfortable enough for my parents, Zulema and me, but even when Sancho had briefly lived with us when we first moved in, things had felt cramped. The couch was also a pull-out bed and there were a couple of unhung hammocks heaped in a corner of the porch, but that would only be enough if a few people stayed with us at a time. How many people would Ugly be sending our way? Would it be whole families, whole cargoes of people crammed into our home? I had so many questions but could see my father was stressed, even as he forced a smile. I stayed quiet. No use asking anything anyway, not when Papá had no control over any of it. Ugly was the one pulling the strings – Ugly and Román.
Papá resumed his pep talk. ‘For now, all we can do is wait until the first people are sent. Just remember, these are our people. They’re going to be desperate, frightened and alone. Let’s treat them with Palacios hospitality.’
Everyone nodded and mumbled that yes, of course, we would welcome them, but no one bought into my father’s spurious enthusiasm. How could we? Ugly could be sending anyone – drug dealers, thieves, murderers, rapists. There was no way of screening who’d be living with us, no way of knowing if we’d be safe in our own homes. A morose silence hung over us, a grey smog, until Mamá said she had a headache and was going to lie down. Then Aunt Milagros said she was going to her second Mass for the day, and Mauricio, maudlin as ever, said he’d go with her. The twins stayed behind, playing with Fidel in the garden while Zulema, Sancho and Vanessa took out the dusty Scrabble set, I guess for something to take their minds off Ugly. Seeing Sancho and Vanessa giggling and finding excuses to touch each other while an oblivious Zulema concentrated on her first batch of letters, I decided to call it a day. But as I was heading to my room, Papá pulled me into the kitchen.
‘I have something for you.’ He handed me a large brown envelope. ‘It belonged to Celia. Mauricio said he thought you should have it – Celia once told him you two used to talk about writing and books a lot.’
My throat tightened. I took the envelope and pulled out a fat sheaf of pages, all typed up in an old-fashioned font. I remembered the antique Underwood No. 5 typewriter Aunt Celia had inherited from my abuela when she died. I thought Aunt Celia had kept it as an ornament, not for actual writing. The several hundred pages held together with a large binder clip proved otherwise.
At the very top of the cover page was a title in capital letters: LOS AÑOS JODIDOS DE MI VIDA. That was Aunt Celia’s foul mouth all right.
I slid the pages back into the envelope and hugged it to my chest, a little piece of Aunt Celia in my arms.
‘Where’d Mauricio find this? Is it a memoir?’
‘It was in her desk drawer. Mauricio said it would be too painful to read anything she wrote so he hasn’t even looked at it. He guessed it might be a novel, but with a title like “The Fucked-up Years of My Life”, my money’s on it being a memoir. You read it and find out for us.’ He chuckled. ‘That Celia and her mouth. Your abuela used to make her gargle soapy water at least once a day, but that only made her swear even more, to prove a point.’
Papá and I stayed in the kitchen remembering some of Aunt Celia’s finer moments until I couldn’t stifle my curiosity any longer with the heft of Aunt Celia’s consciousness in black-and-white print weighing heavy in my arms. Whether it was a diary, a memoir, a novel, I didn’t care – I hadn’t realized how addicted I’d been to that signature Celia vitriol until her death had cut me off cold turkey, left me sick with withdrawal. So like Tony Montana burying his face into that iconic last-hurrah pile of blow, I couldn’t wait a second longer before diving headfirst into my final unexpected hit of Aunt Celia.
A TURD WON’T GROW TAIL FEATHERS (AND OTHER INSIGHTS)
I sat cross-legged on my bed, Aunt Celia’s manuscript in my hands. More than anticipation, I was mostly shocked that Aunt Celia had written this. Not once in the countless conversations we’d had about books and my writing had she ever mentioned that she was also a writer. Or at the very least, that she was writing something. It all made sense now that she’d been so kind in critiquing my work over the years. What else did I not know about the aunt I thought I’d been so close to? First the whole business with Ugly. Now this.
It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I’d get to hear her voice again on the page. Holding the manuscript, I imagined that I could feel the warmth of her hands still on the paper, pictured her sliding each sheet into the ancient typewriter, her red-lacquered fingernails clacking noisily across the keys. I exhaled and removed the binder clip, placed the cover page face down on the bed.
The first chapter was titled La Llegada Sagrada and contained the full account of Aunt Celia’s birth – her sacred arrival, as she’d not-so-humbly dubbed it – which had been family lore since as far back as I could remember, because when little Celia was born, she came out weighing exactly thirteen pounds and with a fully grown tooth. With the baby’s unlucky weight and precocious tooth, Abuela was convinced that Celia was destined to be the Anti-Christ, or at the very least, one of his minions. So she persuaded my abuelo to give Celia up to an orphanage run by nuns. As the story goes, Abuela changed her mind a month later and returned to the orphanage wracked with remorse to retrieve Celia, much to the nuns’ relief (turned out Celia was just as bitchy and loud-mouthed during her first month of life as when she was an adult).
It was no surprise that Aunt Celia’s memoir or autobiography or whatever it was should start off with her brief stint as an orphan, because as the manuscript went on to confirm, she’d never let my grandparents forget that they’d abandoned her:
I’m sitting there at family dinner number one hundred and fucking sixty-two for the year. As if I really need to see Tía Ramona’s moustache more than once a year at Christmas. The men are all outside, smoking cigars and drinking, swapping stories of who has the most mistresses, tugging on their ballsacks to see whose hangs the lowest, and I’m stuck in the kitchen with the women – Milagros plus all those musty old aunts and my mother, radiant with self-satisfaction at another dinner where she successfully made her sisters feel like big fat fucking failures in comparison to her. They’re flapping their gums and respective moustaches, everyone bragging about the usual bullshit, when I hear Tía Mabel telling Mamá she just wishes she could’ve had kids as well raised as us. ‘I’ve always been dedicated to my children,’ breathes Mamá, beaming and bashful.