OFTEN when she was alone, Isabel hugged her father’s photograph while her mind played back that morning… She is fifteen… it’s the last kiss she will ever give her mother…
The terror of that afternoon attacked her whenever it wanted to.
The shrink she’d seen briefly years ago told her that her preoccupation with that kiss, that morning, and with her father, was her brain desperately trying to supplant the horror of that afternoon.
Mostly it worked.
Isabel knew that it was this momentary heaven set against the hell that had driven her to succeed, so that she would never again get close to that life, and could help others to avoid similar fates.
She replayed the morning over and over, seeking both comfort and pain from each tiny detail. It wasn’t pretty, but it had been her life.
IT’S 7:15 AM and Isabel’s mami is flaked out, flabby and naked. Isabel is standing over her. Mami is beautiful, apart from her bruises. Her boyfriend is sprawled out beside her and the yellowing sheet with pink flowers half covers the couple. He’s been mami’s boyfriend for two weeks. Isabel has chalked him up as staying twelve nights straight. Suddenly, his arm moves and the snarling tattoo on his bicep, a wolf, disturbs her. Scares her.
She runs to tidy up the mess from the adults’ party from last night. She tosses out soggy trays of half-eaten nachos and curling pizza, and using her fingers as stoppers manages to take out six of the eight empty beer bottles in one trip and lays them like bricks on the wall she’s been building outside. She’s already folded the newspaper he’d brought home with him from the plant. That was the only good thing about this one: twice a week he brought home the newspaper. Her mami never bought one, preferring to zone out in front of the TV.
Last week Isabel gave a speech for the local Rotarians’ school citizenship contest and her teacher said she might win a prize. Her mami could sure use the money.
After Isabel picks up and folds her mother’s clothes, she silently slides open the bedside table drawer and takes out her father’s photo, their only picture of him. Mami hides it in there to avoid trouble with the boyfriend. Isabel loves how handsome he was; she strokes the glass protecting his movie-star hair. She holds it to her heart and turns her head to the bed.
She reviles this man with the wolf tattoo. If her father were here, he’d fix him. Isabel’s black eye shines back at her from the glass. She touches it gingerly but it throbs, and in her fright she drops the photo-frame.
Her mother flips up in bed, instantly terrified: “No wake him,” she mouths. The boyfriend stirs and the two females are frozen but he rolls over, smothering his wolf under the pillow.
Maria Rosa slides very, very slowly out of bed. Ignoring the stains on yesterday’s dress, she slips it over her head. She looks around the trailer, nodding approval at Isabel’s housework, and whispers: “Vaya, go to school,” and adds, “Rápidamente,” as if she needed to. Isabel is happy to escape from Wolfman.
She is an odd fifteen-year-old: she loves school and hates weekends. Maria Rosa’s boyfriends fancy their Friday and Saturday nights wild, so there’s hell to pay on the mornings when there is no school to flee to.
Her mami walks her to the trailer park gate, one of the few tokens of motherhood left. It’s as much routine as mami can muster. Very gently she stretches up to brush the bruise around Isabel’s eye with her lips, smiles and says, “?Chao pescado!” See you later alligator, or a close approximation of it. It was her father’s expression, apparently.
Isabel embraces her mami, careful to avoid the welt on her back, and leans down to kiss her beautiful cheek, and caresses it, knowing to ignore the foul breath of morning and alcohol.
They part, and Maria Rosa turns around to saunter back.
Isabel stands at the gate watching her.
Her mami is singing the bolero hit she’s sung ever since Isabel was in a stroller: “Bésame, Bésame mucho…” Isabel thinks it’s for her, but her mami is singing, and swinging her hips, in the hope that Willy the trailer park manager will see her.
11
IN 1968, LAND-LOCKED Bolivia was South America’s most destitute country. Within its rigid, polarised society, the grinding poverty of the Andean Indian majority had more in common with sub-Saharan Africans than with the lifestyle led by their Spanish-descended elites.
The host in the presidential library tonight is el presidente Barrientos. He drops into the sad leather armchair. He and all his guests are smoking the prized new Cuban Cohibas.