Winter
June, July, August
If someone had asked me a few weeks ago when the happiest time of my life was, I would have said that it was in the past: my childhood with my grandparents in the big magical house in Berkeley. However, now my answer would be that my happiest days were the ones I spent with Daniel at the end of May, and, barring catastrophes, I’ll be experiencing more of the same in the near future. I spent nine days in his company, and for three of them we were alone in this house with its cypress soul. During those prodigious days a door half opened for me; I glimpsed love, and the light was almost unbearable. My Popo said love makes us good. It doesn’t matter who we love, nor does it matter whether our love is reciprocated or not or if the relationship lasts. Just the experience of loving is enough, that’s what transforms us.
I wonder if I can describe the only days of love in my life. Manuel Arias went to Santiago on a quick three-day trip for some reason to do with his book, he said, but according to Blanca he went to see the doctor about the bubble in his brain. I think he went in order to leave me alone with Daniel. We were completely on our own, because Eduvigis didn’t come back to clean the house after the scandal of her daughter’s pregnancy; Azucena was still in the hospital in Castro, recovering from an infection; and Blanca had forbidden Juanito Corrales and Pedro Pelanchugay to bother us. It was almost the end of May, so the days were short and the nights long and chilly, perfect weather for intimacy.
Manuel left at noon and entrusted us with the chore of making marmalade out of tomatoes, before they started to rot. Tomatoes, tomatoes, and more tomatoes. Tomatoes in the fall—who’s ever heard of that! Blanca’s garden has produced so many, and we get given so many, that we don’t know what to do with them all: salsa, pasta sauce, dried tomatoes, preserves. Marmalade is an extreme solution, I don’t know who might like it. Daniel and I peeled pounds and pounds of them, chopped them up, removed the seeds, weighed them, and put them in the pots; that took us more than two hours, which weren’t wasted, because with the distraction of the tomatoes our tongues were loosened, and we told each other all kinds of things. We added a pound of sugar for every pound of tomato flesh, and a bit of lemon juice, cooked it till it thickened, about twenty minutes, stirring constantly, and then we put it straight into sterilized jars. We boiled the full jars for half an hour, so they were hermetically sealed and ready to be exchanged for other products, like Liliana Treviño’s quince jelly and Doña Lucinda’s wool. When we finished, the kitchen was very dark and the house had a delicious fragrance of sugar and wood smoke.
We sat down in front of the window to look at the night, with a tray of bread, soft cheese, sausage sent by Don Lionel Schnake, and Manuel’s smoked fish. Daniel opened a bottle of red wine, poured a glass, and when he was about to pour the second I stopped him; it was time I gave him my reasons for not tasting it and explained that he could go ahead without worrying about me. I told him about my addictions in general, without going into depth about my terrible life last year, and I explained that I don’t miss having a drink to drown my sorrows, but I do in moments of celebration, like this one in front of the window, but we can drink a toast together, him with wine and me with apple juice.
I think I’ll have to be careful of alcohol forever; it’s harder to resist than drugs, because it’s legal, available, and constantly offered. If I accept one glass, my resolve will be weakened, and it’ll be much harder to turn down the second, and from there it’s just a few sips to the abyss. I was lucky, I told Daniel, because in the six months I was in Las Vegas, my dependency didn’t assert itself too much, and now, if temptation arises, I remember the words of Mike O’Kelly, who knows a lot about it, because he’s a rehabilitated alcoholic. He says being an addict is like being pregnant: you either are or you’re not; there are no half measures.
Finally, after many digressions, Daniel kissed me, softly at first, barely brushing my lips, and then with more certainty, his full lips against mine, his tongue in my mouth. I sensed the faint taste of the wine, the firmness of his lips, the sweet intimacy of his breath, his scent of wool and tomato, the murmur of his breathing, his hand hot on the nape of my neck. He pulled back and looked at me questioningly, at which point I realized I was rigid, with my arms stuck to my sides, and my eyes popping out of my head. “Forgive me,” he said, pulling away. “No! Forgive me!” I exclaimed, too emphatically, startling him. How could I explain that it was actually my first kiss, that everything that had come before had been something else, quite distinct from love, that I’d spent a week imagining this kiss and having anticipated it so anxiously, now I was foundering, and having feared so much that it would never happen, now I was going to burst into tears. I didn’t know how to tell him all this, and the easiest way was to take his head in my hands and kiss him as if in a tragic farewell. And from that point on it was just a matter of casting off moorings and setting out at full sail into uncharted waters, throwing all the vicissitudes of the past overboard.
In a pause between two kisses, I confessed that I’d had sexual relations before, but I’d actually never made love. “Did you ever imagine that it would happen here, in the back of beyond?” he asked me. “When I arrived, I described Chiloé as the ass end of the world, Daniel, but now I know it’s the eye of the galaxy,” I told him.
Manuel’s rickety sofa turned out to be unsuitable for love; its springs were sticking out here and there, and it was covered in Dumb-Cat’s brownish gray hairs and Literati-Cat’s ginger ones, so we brought blankets from my room and made a nest near the stove. “If I’d known you existed, Daniel, I would have paid attention to my grandmother and taken better care of myself,” I admitted, ready to recite a litany of my mistakes, but an instant later I’d forgotten, because in the magnitude of desire what the hell did they matter. I brusquely tugged off his sweater and long-sleeved shirt and began to wrestle with his belt and the fly of his jeans—men’s clothes are so awkward!—but he took my hands and started kissing me again. “We’ve got three days. Let’s not rush,” he said. I caressed his naked torso, his arms, his shoulders, running my hands over the unknown topography of that body, its valleys and hills, admiring his smooth African skin, the color of ancient bronze, the architecture of his long bones, the noble shape of his head, kissing the cleft of his chin, his cheeks, those languid eyelids, innocent ears, his Adam’s apple, the long path of his sternum, nipples like cranberries, small and purple. I returned to my assault on his belt, and again Daniel stopped me, with the pretext of wanting to look at me.
He began to take off my clothes, and it seemed he’d never finish: Manuel’s old cashmere sweater, a winter flannel shirt, another thinner one underneath, so faded that Obama is just a blot, a cotton bra with one strap fastened with a safety pin, pants bought with Blanca at a secondhand store, short in the leg but warm, thick tights, and finally some white cotton schoolgirl panties that my grandmother put in my backpack in Berkeley. Daniel laid me out on my back in the nest and I felt the scratching of the rough chilote blankets, unbearable in other circumstances but sensual at this moment. With the tip of his tongue he licked me like a candy, giving me a tickling sensation everywhere, awakening who knows what sleeping creature, commenting on the contrast of his dark skin and my original Scandinavian coloring, as pale as pale can be in the places the sun never touches.
I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to the pleasure, wriggling to meet those solemn, expert fingers, touching me like a violin, delicately, gradually, until suddenly I was in a long, slow, sustained orgasm, and my cry alarmed Fahkeen, who started to growl and show his teeth. “It’s okay, f*cking dog,” I told him and snuggled up into Daniel’s embrace, purring happily in the warmth of his body and the blended scent of us both. “Now it’s my turn,” I finally announced, and then, at last, he let me take his clothes off and do with him what I very much desired.
We stayed sequestered in the house for three whole memorable days, a gift from Manuel; my debt to this old anthropophagus has increased alarmingly. We had secrets to confide and love to invent. We each had to learn to adapt to the other’s body, calmly to discover the best routes to pleasure and how to sleep together without bothering each other. He lacks experience in this, but it’s natural for me, because I grew up sleeping in my grandparents’ bed. Clinging to someone, I don’t need to count sheep, swans, or dolphins, especially if it’s someone big, warm, fragrant, who snores discreetly—that’s how I know I’m alive. My bed is narrow, and since we thought it would be disrespectful to use Manuel’s, we made a hill of blankets and pillows on the floor, near the stove. We cooked, talked, made love; we gazed out the window, looked out at the rocks, listened to music, made love; soaked in the hot tub, fetched firewood, read Manuel’s books on Chiloé, and made love again. It rained, and we had no desire to go out; the melancholic Chilote clouds encourage romance.
Now that we could finally be alone without interruptions, Daniel proposed the exquisite task of studying, under his guidance, the multiple possibilities of the senses, the pleasure of an aimless caress, just for the feel of skin on skin. A man’s body can supply years’ worth of entertainment; the crucial points are stimulated a certain way, others require different attentions, some don’t even need to be touched, you can just breathe on them; each vertebra has a story, one can lose herself in the wide field of shoulders, well built to bear burdens and sorrows, and along the hard muscles of the arms, made to hold up the world. And deeply buried afflictions, never-expressed desires, and marks invisible under a microscope are hidden beneath the skin. There should be manuals on the infinite variety of kisses: woodpecker kisses, fish kisses, and so on and so on. The tongue is a daring and indiscreet snake, and I’m not talking about the things it says. The heart and the penis are my favorites: indomitable, transparent in their intentions, candid, and vulnerable; one shouldn’t take advantage of them.
Finally, I was able to tell Daniel my secrets. I told him about Roy Fedgewick and Brandon Leeman and the men who killed him, about distributing drugs and losing everything and ending up homeless, about how much more dangerous the world was for women, how we should cross the street if a man’s coming toward us and there’s nobody else around and avoid them completely if they’re in a group, watch our backs, look to both sides, turn invisible. At the end of the time I spent in Las Vegas, when I’d already lost everything, I protected myself by pretending to be a guy; it helped that I’m tall and skinny as a board, with my hair hacked off and men’s clothes from the Salvation Army. That’s probably what saved me in the long run, I guess. The street is implacable.
I told him about the rapes I’d witnessed and about which I’d only told Mike O’Kelly, who can stomach anything. The first time, a disgusting drunk, a big man who looked hefty in all the layers of rags he wore, but might have been skin and bones, trapped a girl in a blind alley, full of garbage, in broad daylight. The kitchen door of a restaurant opened into the alley, and I wasn’t the only one who went there to scavenge through the Dumpsters in search of leftovers before the stray cats got to them. You could hear there were rats too, but I never saw them. The girl, a young, hungry, dirty addict, could have been me. The man grabbed her from behind, threw her facedown on the pavement, strewn with trash and putrid puddles, and slashed the side of her pants open with a knife. I was less than ten feet away, hidden between the garbage cans, and it was only by chance that she was the one screaming and not me. The girl didn’t defend herself. In two or three minutes he finished, adjusted his rags and left, coughing. During those minutes I could have smashed him on the back of the head with one of the bottles lying around in the alley. It would have been simple, and the idea did occur to me, but I immediately dismissed it: that wasn’t my f*cking problem. And when the attacker had left, I didn’t go to help the girl who was lying motionless on the ground either, just walked quickly past her and left, without looking back.
The second time it was two young men, maybe pushers or gangbangers, and the victim was a woman I’d seen in the street before, who was very ill, wasting away. I didn’t help her either. They dragged her into an underpass, laughing and mocking, while she fought back with a fury as concentrated as it was futile. Suddenly she saw me. Our eyes met for an eternal, unforgettable instant, and I turned around and ran away.
During those first months in Las Vegas, when money was plentiful, I hadn’t managed to save enough for a plane ticket back to California. It was too late to think of calling my Nini. My summer adventure had turned sinister, and I couldn’t involve my innocent grandma in Brandon Leeman’s misdeeds.
After the sauna I went to the pool, wrapped in a robe, ordered a lemonade that I spiked with a shot of vodka from the flask I always carried in my purse, and took two tranquilizers and another unidentified pill; I was taking too many different-colored and -shaped tablets to distinguish one from the other. I stretched out on a chair as far as possible from a group of learning-disabled youths, who were splashing around in the water with their caregivers. In other circumstances I would have played with them for a while; I’d seen them many times, and they were the only people I dared mix with, because they couldn’t be any threat to Brandon Leeman’s security, but I had a headache and needed to be alone.
The sweet peace of the pills was beginning to invade my body when I heard the name Laura Barron on the loudspeaker, something that had never happened before. I thought I’d heard wrong and didn’t move until the second announcement, then I went over to one of the internal telephones, dialed reception, and was told someone was looking for me, and it was an emergency. I went out into the hall, barefoot and in a robe, and found Freddy in a very agitated state. He took me by the hand and pulled me into a corner to tell me, out of his mind with nerves, that Joe Martin and Chino had killed Brandon Leeman.
“They gunned him down, Laura!”
“What are you talking about, Freddy?”
“There was blood everywhere, pieces of brain. . . . You have to escape, they’re going to kill you too!” he burst out, all in one breath.
“Me? Why me?”
“I’ll tell you later, we have to fly, hurry.”
I ran to get dressed, grabbed what money I had, and went back to meet Freddy, who was pacing like a panther under the alert gaze of the receptionists. We went outside and tried to get away from there quickly, without calling attention to ourselves. A couple of blocks away we managed to flag down a taxi. We ended up in a motel on the outskirts of Las Vegas, after changing taxis three times and stopping to buy hair dye and a bottle of the strongest, cheapest gin on the market. I paid for a night in the motel, and we locked ourselves in the room.
While I dyed my hair black, Freddy told me that Joe Martin and Chino had spent the whole day coming in and going out of the apartment, talking frenetically on their cell phones, without even noticing him. “In the morning I was sick, Laura, you know how I get sometimes, but I realized that f*cking pair of brutes was up to something and I started to keep my ears open, without moving off the mattress. They forgot about me or thought I was high.” From the phone calls and conversations, Freddy finally deduced what was going on.
The men had found out that Brandon Leeman had paid someone to eliminate them, but for some reason that person hadn’t done it; instead, he’d warned them, instructing them to abduct Brandon Leeman and force him to reveal where his money was. It seemed to Freddy, from the deferential tone of voice Joe Martin and Chino were both using, that the mysterious caller was someone with authority. “I didn’t manage to warn Brandon. I didn’t have a phone and there was no time,” the kid wailed. Brandon Leeman was the closest thing Freddy had to family. He’d taken him in off the streets, given him a roof over his head, food, and protection unconditionally, never tried to rehabilitate him, accepted him with all his vices, laughed at his jokes and enjoyed his rapping and dancing. “He caught me robbing him a bunch of times, Laura, and you know what he did instead of hitting me? He told me to ask, and he’d give me what I needed.”
Joe Martin stationed himself to wait for Leeman in the garage of the building, where he would have to put the car, and Chino stood guard in the apartment. Freddy stayed in bed on the mattress, pretending to be asleep, and from there, he heard Chino receive the news on his cell that the boss was on his way in. The Filipino went running downstairs, and Freddy followed at a distance.
The Acura drove into the garage. Leeman turned off the motor and started to step out of the vehicle, but he caught sight in the rearview mirror of the shadows of the two men who were blocking his exit. Driven by the long habit of distrust, with one single instinctive movement he drew his weapon, hit the ground, and started firing with no questions asked. But Brandon Leeman, always so obsessed with security, didn’t know how to use his own revolver. Freddy had never seen him clean it or do any target practice, like Joe Martin and Chino, who could take their pistols apart and put them back together again in a few seconds. By shooting blindly at those shadows in the garage, Brandon Leeman hastened his death, although they probably would have shot him eventually anyway. The two thugs emptied their weapons into the boss, who was trapped between the car and the wall.
Freddy got there in time to see the carnage and then took off, before the racket died down and the men discovered him.
“Why do you think they want to kill me? I don’t have anything to do with that, Freddy,” I said.
“They thought you were in the car with Brandon. They wanted to get both of you. They say you know more than you should. Tell me what you’re involved in, Laura.”
“Nothing! I don’t know what those guys want from me!”
“I’m sure Joe and Chino went to look for you at the gym, the only place you might have been. I bet they got there a few minutes after we left.”
“What am I going to do now, Freddy?”
“Stay here until we think of something.”
We opened the bottle of gin and, lying side by side on the bed, took turns taking swigs until we were plunged into a dense and deathly drunkenness.
I came back to life many hours later in a room I didn’t recognize, feeling like I was being crushed by an elephant, with needles stuck in my eyes, and no memory of what had happened. I stood up with immense effort, fell to the floor, and dragged myself to the bathroom in time to hug the toilet bowl and vomit an interminable stream of sewage. I lay flat out on the linoleum, trembling, with bitterness in my mouth and a claw in my gut, babbling between dry heaves that I wanted to die. A long time later I threw some water on my face and rinsed out my mouth, horrified at the cadaverously pale, black-haired stranger in the mirror. I couldn’t make it back to the bed but lay down on the floor, moaning.
Some time later there were three knocks on the door that felt like cannon blasts, and a voice with a Hispanic accent said she’d come to clean the room. Holding on to the walls for support, I made it to the door, opening it wide enough to tell the housekeeper to go to hell and hang up the Do Not Disturb sign; then I fell to my knees again. I crawled back to the bed with a premonition of immediate and disastrous danger that I couldn’t manage to pin down. I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I was in that room, but my intuition told me that it wasn’t a hallucination or a nightmare, but something real and terrible, something to do with Freddy. An iron crown was circling my temples, tighter and tighter, while I called Freddy with a thread of a voice. Finally I got tired of calling him and desperately began looking for him, under the bed, in the closet, in the bathroom, in case he was playing a joke on me. He wasn’t anywhere, but I discovered that he’d left me a little bag of crack, a pipe, and a lighter. How simple and familiar!
Crack was Freddy’s paradise and his hell. I’d seen him using it daily, but I’d never tried it because of the boss’s orders, obedient girl that I was. F*ck that. My hands were barely functioning, and I was blinded with pain from my headache, but I managed to get the little rocks into the glass pipe and light the torch, a herculean task. Exasperated, insane, I waited eternal seconds until the rocks burned to the color of wax, with the tube burning my fingers and my lips, and finally they broke and I deeply breathed in the redeeming cloud, the sweet fragrance of mentholated gasoline, and then the unease and premonitions disappeared and I rose to glory, light, graceful, a bird in the wind. For a brief time I felt euphoric, invincible, but soon I came down with a bang in the semidarkness of that room. Another drag on the glass tube, and then another. Where was Freddy? Why had he abandoned me without saying good-bye, with no explanation? I had a bit of money left, so I staggered out to buy another bottle, then came back to lock myself in my hideout.
Between the liquor and the crack I floated adrift for two days without sleeping or eating or washing, dripping with vomit, because I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. When I finished off the booze and the drugs, I emptied the contents of my purse and found a paper twist of cocaine, which I immediately sniffed, and a little bottle with three sleeping pills, which I decided to ration. I took two, and since they had not the least effect on me, I took the third. I don’t know if I slept or if I was unconscious; the clock showed numbers that meant nothing. What day is it? Where am I? No idea. I opened my eyes, felt like I was suffocating, my heart was a time bomb, tic-tac-tic-tac, faster and faster, I felt electric shocks, shakes, death rattles, then the void.
I was awakened by more knocks on the door and urgent shouting, this time from the hotel manager. I buried my head under the pillows, crying for some sort of relief, just one more drag of that blessed smoke, just one shot of anything to drink. Two men forced the door open and burst into the room, cursing and threatening. They stopped dead at the spectacle of a crazy, terrified, agitated girl, babbling incoherently in that room converted into a fetid pigsty, but they’d seen it all in that fleabag motel and guessed what was what. They forced me to get dressed, picked me up by the arms, dragged me down the stairs, and pushed me onto the street. They confiscated my only valuable belongings, the designer handbag and my sunglasses, but they were considerate enough to give me my license and my wallet, with the two dollars and forty cents I had left.
Outside it was scorching hot, and the half-melted asphalt burned my feet through my sneakers, but nothing mattered to me. My only obsession was to get something to calm my anguish and fear. I had nowhere to go and no one to ask for help. I remembered I had promised I’d call Brandon Leeman’s brother, but that could wait, and I also remembered the treasures there were in the building where I’d lived for those months, hills of magnificent powders, precious crystals, prodigious amounts of pills, which I used to separate, weigh, count, and carefully place in little plastic bags. There even the most miserable person in the world could have a piece of heaven at their disposal, brief though it might be. How could I not get a hold of something in the caverns of the garages, in the cemeteries of the first and second floors, how could I not find someone who would give me something, for the love of God? But with the scant lucidity left to me, I remembered that approaching that neighborhood would be suicide.
Think, Maya, think, I repeated out loud, as I seemed to do more and more over the last few months. There are drugs everywhere in this f*cking city, it’s just a matter of looking for them, I protested, pacing back and forth in front of the motel like a hungry coyote, until necessity cleared my mind and I was able to think.
Expelled from the motel where Freddy had left me, I walked to a gas station, asked for the key to the washroom, and cleaned myself up a little. Then I got a lift with a driver who dropped me off a few blocks from the gym.
I had the keys for the lockers in my pocket. I stood near the door, waiting for the opportunity to go in without attracting attention, and when I saw three people talking to each other approaching, I pretended to be part of the group. I crossed the reception hall, and when I got to the stairs I ran into one of the employees, who hesitated before saying hello to me, surprised by the color of my hair. I didn’t talk to anyone at the gym—I suppose I had a reputation for being stuck-up or stupid—but other members knew me by sight, and several employees by name. I ran up to the dressing rooms and emptied the contents of my lockers on the ground so frenetically that a woman asked me if I’d lost something; I came out with a stream of curses, because I hadn’t found anything I could get high on, while she stared at me openly in the mirror. “What are you looking at, lady?” I shouted and then saw myself in the same mirror she was looking at and didn’t recognize that lunatic with red eyes, blotchy skin, and a black animal on top of her head.
I put everything back in the lockers any which way and threw my dirty clothes in the garbage, along with the cell phone. Brandon Leeman had given it to me, and his murderers had the number. I took a shower and washed my hair quickly, thinking I could sell the other designer handbag, which I still had, and get enough to shoot up for several days. I put on the black dress and stuffed a change of clothes into a plastic bag, but made no attempt to put makeup on; I was trembling from head to toe, and my hands barely obeyed me.
The woman was still there, wrapped in a towel, with a hair dryer in her hand, although her hair was dry, spying on me, calculating whether she should alert the security guards. I tried out a smile and asked her if she’d like to buy my bag, told her it was an authentic Louis Vuitton and almost new, that my wallet had been stolen and I needed money to get back to California. A sneer of contempt marred her features, but she approached to examine the handbag, giving in to her greed, and offered me a hundred dollars. I gave her the finger and left.
I didn’t get far. The top of the stairs looked out over the whole reception area, and through the glass door I distinguished Joe Martin and Chino’s car. Possibly they’d been parking there every day, knowing that sooner or later I’d go to the club, or maybe some snitch had told them of my arrival, in which case one of them must be looking for me inside the building right at that moment.
After a frozen instant, I managed to keep my panic in check, retreating toward the spa, which occupied one wing of the building, with its Buddha, offerings of petals, birdsong, the scent of vanilla, and jars of water with cucumber slices floating in them. The masseuses of both sexes were distinguished by their turquoise-colored smocks; the rest of the staff, almost identical girls, wore pink smocks. Since I knew how the spa worked—that was one of the luxuries Brandon Leeman had allowed me—I was able to slip down the corridor without being seen and enter one of the cubicles. I closed the door and turned on the light indicating that it was occupied. Nobody would be disturbed when the red light was on. On one table was a water heater with eucalyptus leaves, smooth massage stones, and several jars of beauty products. Ruling out the creams, I gulped down a bottle of lotion in three swallows, but if it did contain alcohol, it was a minuscule amount and no relief to me at all.
I was safe in the cubicle, at least for an hour, the normal time for a treatment, but very soon I began to feel anxious in that enclosed space, with no window, just a single exit and that penetrating dentist’s-office smell that turned my stomach. I couldn’t stay there. Putting a robe that was on the massage table on over top of my clothes, I wrapped a towel into a turban on my head, smeared a thick layer of white cream on my face, and leaned out into the corridor. My heart skipped a beat: Joe Martin was talking to one of the pink-smocked employees.
The urge to take off running was unbearable, but I forced myself to walk the other way down the corridor, as calmly as possible. Looking for the staff exit, which shouldn’t be far, I passed several closed cubicles until I came to a wider door, pushed it, and found a service stairway. The atmosphere there was very different from the friendly universe of the spa: tile floor, unpainted cement walls, harsh lighting, the unmistakable smell of cigarettes, and feminine voices on the landing of the floor below. I waited for an eternity flat up against the wall, unable to go forward or back into the spa, and finally the women finished smoking and left. I wiped off the cream, left the towel and robe in a corner, and descended into the bowels of the building, which we club members never saw. Opening a door at random, I found myself in a big room, crisscrossed by pipes for water and air, where washing machines and dryers thundered. The exit door didn’t open onto the street, as I’d hoped, but to the pool. I backed up and curled up in a corner, hidden by a heap of used towels, in the unbearable noise and heat of the laundry room; I couldn’t move until Joe Martin gave up and left.
Minutes went by in that deafening submarine, and the fear of falling into Joe Martin’s hands was replaced by an urgent need to get high. I hadn’t eaten for several days; I was dehydrated, with a whirlwind in my head and cramps in my stomach. My hands and feet went to sleep, I saw vertiginous spirals of colored dots, like a bad acid trip. I lost track of time—an hour might have gone by or several, I might have slept or passed out a couple of times. I imagine staff came in and out to do loads of washing, but they didn’t find me. I finally crept out of my hiding place and with an enormous effort stood up and walked with leaden legs, leaning on the wall, feeling faint.
Outside it was still daytime. It must have been about six or seven in the evening, and the pool was full of people. It was the club’s busiest time, when office workers arrived en masse. It was also the time when Joe Martin and Chino should be getting ready for their nocturnal activities, so they had most likely left. I fell into one of the reclining chairs, taking a deep breath of the chlorine-scented air. I didn’t dare dive in; I needed to be ready to run. I ordered a fruit smoothie from a waiter, cursing under my breath because they only served healthy drinks, no alcohol, and charged it to my account. I took two sips of that thick liquid, but it tasted disgusting, and I had to leave it. It was futile to delay; I decided to take a risk and walk out past reception, hoping that the rat who’d alerted those villains had finished his or her shift.
To reach the street I had to cross the parking lot, which at that hour was full of cars. I saw a member of the club from a ways off, a fit guy in his forties, putting his gym bag in the trunk, and I walked over, blushing with humiliation, to ask him if he had time to buy me a drink. I don’t know where I got the courage. Surprised at this frontal attack, the man took a moment or two to classify me; if he’d seen me before he didn’t recognize me, and I didn’t fit his idea of a whore. He looked me up and down, shrugged, got into his car, and drove away.
I had done many imprudent things in my short existence, but up to that moment I had never degraded myself this way. What happened with Fedgewick was a kidnapping and rape, and it happened because I was reckless, not shameless. This was different, and it had a name, which I refused to pronounce. Soon I noticed another man, fifty or sixty years old, big paunch, wearing shorts showing his white legs with blue veins, walking toward his car, and I followed him. This time I had more luck— or less luck, I don’t know. If that guy had turned me down too, maybe my life wouldn’t have gone so far off the rails.
Thinking of Las Vegas makes me feel nauseous. Manuel reminds me that all this happened to me just a few months ago and is still fresh in my memory, assures me that time will cure, and one day I’ll talk about that episode in my life with irony. That’s what he says, but it doesn’t apply in his case—he himself never talks about his past. I thought I’d come to terms with my errors, that I was even a little proud of them, because they’d made me stronger, but now that I’ve met Daniel, I wish I had a less interesting past so I could offer myself to him with dignity. That girl who intercepted an overweight man with varicose veins in the club parking lot was me; that girl ready to hand herself over for a shot of booze was me too; but now I’m someone else. Here in Chiloé I have a second opportunity, I have a thousand more opportunities, but sometimes I can’t get the accusatory voice of my conscience to shut up.
That old man in shorts was the first of several men who kept me afloat for a couple of weeks, until I couldn’t do it anymore. Selling myself like that was worse than going hungry and worse than the torture of abstinence. Never, not drunk or drugged, could I avoid a profound feeling of degradation. I always felt my grandfather watching me, suffering for me. Men took advantage of my shyness and my lack of experience. Compared to other women who were doing the same thing, I was young and good-looking; I could have arranged things better, but I gave myself in exchange for a few drinks, a pinch of white powder, a handful of yellow rocks. The more decent ones let me have a quick drink in a bar, or offered me cocaine before taking me to a hotel room; others just bought a cheap bottle and did it in the car. Some gave me ten or twenty dollars, others kicked me back out onto the street with nothing. I didn’t know you should always charge first, and by the time I learned, I was no longer prepared to carry on down that road.
I finally tried heroin with a client, directly into the vein, and I swore at Brandon Leeman for having kept me from sharing his paradise. It’s impossible to describe that instant when the divine liquid enters the blood. I tried to sell what little I had, but no one was interested; I only got seventy dollars for the designer bag, after pleading with a Vietnamese woman at the door of a beauty parlor. It was worth twenty times that, but I would have given it away for half as much, my need was so urgent.
I hadn’t forgotten Adam Leeman’s telephone number, or the promise I’d made to Brandon to call him if anything happened, but I didn’t do it, because I was thinking of going to Beatty and appropriating the fortune in those bags. But that plan required a strategy and lucidity I completely lacked.
They say that after a few months of living on the street, a person is definitively marginalized; you look destitute, you lose your identity and social network. In my case it was faster; it took just three weeks for me to reach bottom. I sank with terrifying speed into that miserable, violent, sordid dimension, which exists parallel to the normal life of a city, a world of delinquents and their victims, of crazies and addicts, a world without solidarity or compassion, where people survive by stepping on everybody else. I was always high or trying to get high. I was dirty, smelly, and disheveled, increasingly crazed and sick. I could barely keep a couple of mouthfuls of food in my stomach. I coughed constantly, and my nose was always runny. It was an effort to open my eyelids, glued together with pus. Sometimes I fainted. Several of my jabs got infected. I had ulcers and bruises on my arms. I spent the nights walking from one place to another—safer than sleeping—and in the daytime I looked for hovels in which to hide and rest.
I learned that the safest places were the most visible ones. I would beg with a paper cup in the street at the entrance to a mall or a church, which can trigger feelings of guilt in passers-by. Some would drop a few coins, but nobody ever spoke to me. Today’s poverty is like leprosy used to be: people find it repugnant and frightening.
I avoided the places I used to go to regularly, like the Boulevard, because that was Joe Martin and Chino’s patch too. Beggars and addicts mark their territory, like animals, and keep within a radius of a few blocks, but desperation made me explore different neighborhoods, without respecting the racial barriers of blacks with blacks, Latinos with Latinos, Asians with Asians, whites with whites. I never stayed in the same place for more than a few hours. I was incapable of carrying out the most basic tasks, like feeding or washing myself, but I managed to get alcohol and drugs. I was always alert, like a hunted fox, moving quickly, not talking to anybody. There were enemies on every street corner.
I started to hear voices and sometimes found myself answering them, although I knew they weren’t real, because I’d seen the symptoms in several residents of Brandon Leeman’s building. Freddy called them “the invisible beings” and made fun of them, but when he got bad, those beings came to life, like the insects, also invisible, that used to torment him. If I caught a glimpse of a black car like that of my pursuers, or anyone who looked familiar, I’d slip away in the opposite direction, but I didn’t give up the hope of seeing Freddy again. I thought of him with a mixture of gratitude and resentment, not understanding why he’d disappeared, why he couldn’t find me when he knew every nook and cranny of the city.
Drugs kept hunger at bay as well as the many bodily aches and pains, but they didn’t calm the cramps. My bones felt heavy, my skin itched from being so dirty, and I got a strange rash on my legs and back that bled because I scratched so much. I’d suddenly remember I hadn’t eaten for two or three days, and then drag myself to a women’s shelter or the Saint Vincent de Paul soup kitchen, where I could always get a plate of hot food. It was a lot harder to find somewhere to sleep. At night the temperature stayed in the high sixties, but since I was so weak, I felt cold all the time, until someone at the Salvation Army gave me a jacket. That generous organization turned out to be a valuable resource; I didn’t have to wander around with bags in a stolen supermarket shopping cart, like other strays, because when my clothes stank too much or started to get too big for me, I exchanged them at the Salvation Army. I got several sizes skinnier. My collarbones and ribs were sticking out, and my legs, which used to be so strong, looked pathetic. I didn’t have a chance to weigh myself until December, when I discovered that I’d lost close to thirty pounds in two months.
Public washrooms were dens of delinquents and perverts, but there was no choice but to hold my nose and use them, since the ones in stores or hotels were now out of bounds. They would have kicked me out before I could get in. I didn’t even have access to gas station washrooms; employees refused to lend me the key. And so down I went, almost sliding down the banister of the staircase to hell, like so many other abject beings who survived in the street, begging and stealing for a handful of crack, a bit of meth or acid, a swig of something strong, rough, and brutal. The cheaper the alcohol, the more effective—just what I needed. I spent October and November in the same state; I can’t remember with any clarity how I survived, but I do remember the brief moments of euphoria and then the degrading hunt for another hit.
I never sat down at a table. If I had money I might buy tacos, burritos, or hamburgers that I’d throw straight back up with interminable heaves on my knees in the street, my stomach in flames, my mouth split open, sores on my lips and nose, nothing clean or kind, broken glass, cockroaches, garbage cans, not a single face in the crowd that might smile at me, no hand to help me. The whole world was populated by dealers, junkies, pimps, thieves, criminals, hookers, and lunatics. My whole body hurt. I hated that f*cking body, hated that f*cking life, hated lacking the f*cking will to save myself, hated my f*cking soul, my f*cking fate.
In Las Vegas I went for entire days without exchanging a greeting, without a single word or a gesture in my direction from another human being. Solitude, that icy claw in the chest, had beaten me to such an extent that it never occurred to me that I could simply pick up a telephone and call home in Berkeley. That would have been all I needed, a telephone; but by then I’d lost hope.
At first, when I could still run, I prowled around the cafés and restaurants with outdoor tables, where the smokers would sit, and if someone left a pack of cigarettes on the table, I would swoop past and grab it, because I could trade them for crack. I’ve used every toxic substance that exists on the street, except tobacco, although I do like the smell of it, because it reminds me of my Popo. I also stole fruit from supermarkets or chocolate bars from the station kiosks, but just as I couldn’t master the sad trade of prostitution, I couldn’t learn how to rob. Freddy was an expert, having started stealing when he was in diapers, he claimed, and gave me several demonstrations with the aim of teaching me his tricks. He explained that women are very careless with their purses; they hang them on the backs of chairs, put them down in stores while they choose or try something on, drop them on the floor in the hairdresser’s, put them over their shoulders on buses—that is, they go around asking for someone to relieve them of the problem. Freddy had invisible hands, magic fingers, and the stealthy grace of a cheetah. “Watch carefully, Laura, don’t take your eyes off me,” he’d challenge me. We’d go into a mall, and he’d study the people, looking for his victim. With his cell phone stuck to his ear, pretending to be absorbed in a loud conversation, he’d approach a distracted woman, take her wallet out of her purse before I even saw, and then calmly walk away, still talking away on the phone. With the same elegance he could pick the lock of any car or walk into a department store and walk out five minutes later through another door with a couple of watches or bottles of perfume.
I tried to put Freddy’s lessons into practice, but I didn’t have the knack. My nerves failed, and my miserable appearance made people suspicious; they followed me in stores, and on the streets people kept clear of me. I smelled like a sewer, my hair was greasy, and my expression desperate.
Halfway through October the weather changed. It started to get cold at night, and I was sick. I had to pee all the time and got a sharp burning pain, which only went away with drugs. It was cystitis. I recognized the symptoms because I’d had it once before, when I was sixteen, and I knew it could be cured quickly with antibiotics, but without a doctor’s prescription, antibiotics are more difficult to get hold of in the United States than a kilo of cocaine or an automatic rifle. It hurt to walk, to straighten up, but I didn’t dare go to the hospital emergency ward; they’d ask me questions, and there were always police on guard duty there.
I needed to find a safe place to spend the nights and decided to try a homeless shelter, which turned out to be a badly ventilated shed with tight lines of cots. There were twenty-odd women and lots of children. I was surprised by how few of these women were as resigned to misery as I was; only a couple of them were talking to themselves dementedly or picking fights, the rest seemed quite sane. Those who had children were more determined, active, clean, and even cheerful. They bustled around their kids, preparing bottles and washing clothes. I saw one reading a Dr. Seuss book to her four-year-old daughter, who knew it by heart and recited it along with her mother. Not all street people are schizophrenics or crooks, as some think; some are simply poor, old, or unemployed, and most are mothers who’ve been abandoned or are escaping from various kinds of violence.
On the wall of the refuge there was a poster with a phrase that has become forever engraved in my memory: “Life without dignity is not worth living.” Dignity? I understood all of a sudden, with terrifying certainty, that I’d turned into a drug addict and an alcoholic. I suppose I must have had a shred of dignity left, buried among the ashes, enough to make me feel an embarrassment so sharp that it was like being stabbed in the chest. I started to cry in front of the poster. My distress must have been very obvious, because soon one of the counselors came over and led me to her tiny office, gave me a glass of iced tea, and asked me my name in a friendly way, and what I was using, how frequently, when the last time had been, if I’d received treatment, if there was anyone they could contact.
I knew my grandma’s phone number by heart—that’s one thing I hadn’t forgotten—but calling her would mean killing her with sorrow and shame, and would also mean obligatory detox, rehab, sobriety. No way. “Do you have any family?” the counselor insisted on asking me. I exploded with rage, as I used to do all the time, and swore at her in reply. She let me get it out of my system, without losing her cool, and then she gave me permission to stay the night in the shelter, violating the rule; one of the conditions for acceptance was not to be using alcohol or drugs.
The shelter supplied fruit juice, milk, and cookies for the children, coffee and tea at all hours, bathrooms, telephones, and washing machines—useless for me, because I only had the clothes I was wearing, having lost the plastic bag with my few meager belongings. I had a long shower, the first for several weeks, savoring the pleasure of the hot water on my skin, the soap, the foam in my hair, and the wonderful smell of shampoo. Then I had to put the same stinking clothes back on. I curled up in my cot, calling in murmurs for my Nini and my Popo, begging them to come and take me in their arms, like before, and tell me that everything was going to be all right, not to worry, they were looking out for me, lullaby my baby, lullaby and good night, sleep tight my sweet, little piece of my heart. Sleeping has always been my problem, since I was born, but I was able to rest, in spite of the lack of air and the snoring women. Some of them cried out in their dreams.
Near my cot a mother had settled down with her two children, a little baby still breast-feeding and an adorable little girl of about two or three. She was a young white woman with lots of freckles, a bit overweight, who must have been left without a roof over her head quite recently, since she still seemed to have a goal and a plan. When our paths crossed in the bathroom, she’d smiled at me, and her little girl had stared at me with her round blue eyes and asked me if I had a dog. “I used to have a puppy dog called Toni,” she told me. When the woman was changing the baby’s diapers, I saw a five-dollar bill in one of the compartments of her bag, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. At dawn, when there was finally silence in the dormitory and the woman was sleeping peacefully with her children in her arms, I slipped over to her cot, rummaged through her bag, and stole the five-dollar bill. Then I snuck back to my cot, ducking down low with my tail between my legs, like a bitch.
Of all the errors and sins I’ve committed in my life, that’s the one I can least forgive myself for. I stole from someone more needy than me, a mother who could have used that money to buy food for her children. That’s unforgivable. Without decency, you fall to pieces, lose your humanity and your soul.
At eight in the morning, after coffee and a bun, the same counselor who’d dealt with me when I arrived gave me a piece of paper with the address of a rehabilitation center. “Talk to Michelle. She’s my sister. She’ll help you,” she said. I ran out of the place without saying thanks and threw the paper in a garbage can outside. Those five dollars were enough to buy me a dose of something cheap and effective. I didn’t need any Michelle’s compassion.
That very same day I lost the photo of my Popo that my Nini had given me at the academy in Oregon and that I carried with me all the time. It struck me as a terrifying sign, meaning that my grandfather had seen me steal those five dollars, that he was disappointed in me, that he’d left, and now no one was watching over me. Fear, anguish, hiding, fleeing, begging, all melted together into a single bad dream, day and night.
Sometimes I am assaulted by the memory of a scene from that time on the street, a memory that flares up inside me and leaves me trembling. Other times I wake up sweating with images in my head, as vivid as if they were real. In the dream I see myself running naked, screaming voicelessly, in a labyrinth of narrow alleys that coil like serpents, buildings with blank doors and windows, not a soul to ask for help, my body burning, my feet bleeding, bile in my mouth, all alone. In Las Vegas I believed myself condemned to irremediable solitude, which began with the death of my grandpa. How was I to imagine back then that one day I would be here, on this island in Chiloé, incommunicado, hidden away, among strangers, and very far from everything familiar, without feeling lonely.
When I first met Daniel, I wanted to make a good impression, erase my past and start fresh on a blank page. I wished I could invent a better version of myself, but in the intimacy of shared love, I understood that this was neither possible nor advisable. The person I am is the result of what I’ve lived through, including the drastic mistakes. Confessing to him was a good experience, proving the truth of what Mike O’Kelly always says: our demons lose their power when we pull them out of the depths where they hide and look them in the face in broad daylight. But now I don’t know if I should have done it. I think I frightened Daniel, and that’s why he didn’t reciprocate with as much passion as I feel. He probably feels he can’t trust me. It’s hard to blame him; a story like mine could scare off the bravest guy. It’s also true that he was the one who provoked me to confide in him. It was very easy to tell him about even the most humiliating episodes, because he listened without judging me; I suppose that’s part of his training. Isn’t that what psychiatrists are supposed to do? Listen in silence. He never asked me what happened, only what I’d felt at that moment, in telling it, and I would describe the heat on my skin, the palpitations in my chest, the weight of a crushing rock. He asked me not to reject those sensations, to accept them without analyzing them, because if I was brave enough to do that, they would open like boxes and my spirit could break free.
“You’ve suffered a lot, Maya, not just from what happened to you in adolescence, but also from being abandoned in your infancy,” he said.
“Abandoned? I wasn’t abandoned at all, I can assure you. You can’t imagine how my grandparents spoiled me.”
“Yes, but your mother and father abandoned you.”
“That’s what the therapists in Oregon said too, but my grandparents—”
“One day you’ll have to examine that in therapy,” he interrupted me.
“You psychiatrists resolve everything with therapy!”
“It’s pointless to bury psychological wounds—you have to air them out so they can scar over.”
“I had enough of therapy in Oregon, Daniel, but if that’s what I need, you could help me.”
His reply was more reasonable than romantic. He said that that would be a long-term project, and he had to leave soon; besides, no sex is allowed in a patient-therapist relationship.
“Then I’m going to ask my Popo to help me.”
“Good idea.” And he laughed.