Wear Your Home Like a Scar, page 21
I close my eyes, try to absorb the blue sky and green hillsides into my blood, relax with the swaying motion of the bus for the rest of the ride.
Rain collects in buckets and pots and sofrito jars scattered across the floor of our house. The dramatic music of whatever telenovela she’s watching trickles from upstairs. I light scented candles to cover the smell of damp smoke, then balance a glass of milk, a mug of tea, and a bowl of caldo on an orange plastic tray.
“Amá,” I shout. “Did Yerry drop off any bread today?”
Someone shouts and the music swells.
“Amá?”
Someone betrayed someone else or miraculously survived a plane crash and now the violins swell. I pile a few tostadas on the cracked plastic and tentatively shuffle up the steps. The rain falls with a rhythmic plink. Hung in the stairwell are prints of flower paintings, wooden frames around the edges. I remember, when I was younger, Amá would get mad because I’d leave smudges all over the glass. The colors were so vibrant, I had to touch the prints to check if they were real. Now, soaked in water and old smoke, they all look dead.
Her wheelchair is facing the wall when I walk in. “Jesus, Amá,” I mutter.
“Yesenia, querida.” She raises her hand, feeling for my face. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
Jagged lines of soot stagger along the walls like a cursed mountain range. I nudge her hand with my chin. “That’s because the whole barrio is listening to Las Juanas with you.”
“It’s Café con Aroma de Mujer.”
“Whatever.” I press my foot against her wheel and turn her toward me. Water plinks in a can on the dresser.
Her hand flutters like an epileptic moth in the dim light. “Yesenia, let your mother say hello to you.”
“My hands are full. Just give me a minute.” I drag a table over with my foot and set her tray down. Rain drips from the roof, cloudy with insulation and ash, and lands on a towel at the foot of the bed. I toss it onto the pile in the corner and place Amá’s hands on my cheeks.
“There’s my girl,” she sighs. Her smile is almost as cockeyed as her pupils, as if they’re joined by some of El Búho’s fishing line. “How was your day, amor?”
“Fine, Amá.” I wedge the edges of the tray between the armrests of her chair and wrap her fingers around the spoon, guide it to the bowl. “Eat your soup before it’s cold.”
A woman faints on the screen and I press mute instead of throwing the TV out of the cracked window. A phalanx of men rushes to help the woman, most of them overly handsome. Through the thin walls, I can hear the junkie next door playing the violin. It’s more seizure than concerto, but at least he’s learned the concept of rhythm in the past year.
I wipe beads of broth from her chin and light a cigarette. Smoke twists from the burning ebb and dissipates in the gray air. She pauses, spoon halfway to her mouth.
“I thought you switched from menthol.”
I drop the cigarette in a soda can and thumb one from her pack. “I did.”
She just smiles.
I watch the characters play out their silent drama, arguing with each other about who should be the valiant one. The house smells of dampness, of a dog in the river or unwashed clothing. When the wind blows, te lo juro it gets ten degrees colder in here. I close my eyes and visualize smoke filling my lungs, concentrate on the wet air dissolving me. The metal spoon clatters on cracked porcelain. She gives a contented sigh and extends her hand.
“You almost ready for bed?” I light a cigarette and set it in her mouth.
“Thank you, but I was reaching for your hand.” She gropes my elbow, working her way down to my wrist. Squeezing my palm, head cocked and pupils floating like drowned flies in a pool of yellowed milk, she says, “Talk to me.”
“I am talking to you.”
“Real talk. Like we used to.” She jerks her shoulders, trying to move her chair closer.
I light another cigarette. She slowly shakes her head. A bus passes our house, the wet whoosh making our walls shiver. Rain falls in steady droplets from the ceiling, plinks matching my heartbeat.
“Things are great. Let’s get you into bed.”
I push her to her room, lay out her pajamas, and after she calls out that she’s decent, lift her into bed. I kiss her goodnight and her forehead is as cold as a forgotten hallway. She holds my wrist and I turn to leave.
“If you won’t talk, please sing to me.”
“Amá—” I look at my watch, as if I have someplace to be, as if she could even see it. A fat drop of water lands on my forearm.
“Please, Yesenia.” She squeezes my hand again. I sigh and give in. Even through my pants, I can feel that the chair is wet when I sit.
“What song? Not Juan Gabriel, we always do Juan Gabriel.”
She nestles her head into the pillow and a smile trickles across her face. “Pedro Infante.”
“Why do you keep asking?”
“Because your father loved it.”
“Exactly.” I push the chair back to leave.
“Yesenia.” Her chin trembles despite itself, as she tries to mouth please. “For me?”
“I’ll sing you something but it won’t be Infante.”
She purses her lips and, eventually, nods.
I hum the opening verse to some reggaeton hit I’ve heard on the bus, making up some words, and drag the covers up to her chin, pressing them around her body. Sitting on the night table is a framed picture of her with big hair and a gaudy necklace, shaking the hand of a man in a suit that looks so expensive, I can practically smell the fabric through the photo. She was young, really young. Her first real job, I think, as a secretary at a local bank. The certificate that the man is handing her used to hang on the wall in what used to be her office, back when that part of the house still had walls.
Halfway through the song and her breaths are slower, longer. I ebb from singing to humming and creep away from her bed, minding the few spots that creak.
For a blind woman, she can be incredibly crafty, and before I turn off the light I hide the stuffed elephant she keeps on the nightstand. My father got it for her during a street fair when they were dating. Every night I hide it in the drawer, and every morning, it’s back out again. I tried to tell myself that it was only ghosts, that poltergeists were toying with me, trying to make me insane. Truth is, it’s far worse than that.
It’s love.
The unconscious boy sprawled facedown across the table poked a hole in the vacuum of my chest the minute I saw him. His arms could’ve passed for a January sky finger-painted by a four-year-old. The cloud of bruises started around his bicep, drifting down a fading sun the color of pus. His back was less artistic; the shapes of belt buckles competed with spoons—probably wooden, if they left marks like that—and all a similar shade of scarred brown. I paced in the alley, chain-smoking four cigarettes before I could get my head together to operate.
El Búho goes to work on the back of the kid’s neck. I ask him what the procedure is and he flaps his arm like a mad duck, mutters a bunch of words and the only ones I can pick up are nerve endings.
I laugh to myself. “Are you an electrician now, rewiring sensations?”
He glares at me above his safety goggle. “Deadening them.”
“Oh,” I say, more into my shoulder than aloud.
We started out taking care of TLC, but as more clínicas popped up, we had to branch out into other procedures.
The surgery proceeds in forty minutes of silence, broken only by single phrases. Knife. Melon baller. Corkscrew. Hold it, not there—there. Whether he’s concentrating or angry, it doesn’t really matter: all I can focus on is the pattern of scarred-brown that covers the kid’s back.
When El Búho clears his throat, it’s my father standing over my mother, laughing, as she’s crumpled on the floor. When he re-sterilizes the knife over the flame, it’s the click of my father’s lighter heating the metal before pressing it against my legs. When he coughs, it’s my father with his face in the crook of his arm, hurrying down the steps as dust and particulate matter billow behind him.
A bright white spot flashes in my eyes. I startle and El Búho’s right hand is reared back to smack me again, his left holding down the boy’s head.
“I said get the goddamned nitrous! He’s waking up!”
I scurry to the tank and drag it over, crush the mouthpiece on the boy’s face and, in seconds, he’s unconscious again. El Búho releases his tentative grip and exhales through his nose.
“Send in Isabel. You need to go home.”
The water drips from the ceiling. The people argue on the television. The haunting smoke lingers through the house. My life is a crooked deck of cards: all varying slightly, but basically the same and repeated endlessly.
While Amá eats her sancocho, I excuse myself to the bathroom and, silent as a shadow, grab the stuffed elephant from her dresser. I flush the toilet and open the window while the water is still running and throw the elephant into the alley between houses.
She’s stopped eating when I return.
“Where were you?”
“In the bathroom. I just told you that.”
“What were you doing in the bathroom?”
I light a cigarette and laugh.
“Don’t laugh at me, Yesenia,” she snaps. “What were you doing in the bathroom?”
“Christ, what do you think?” In some remote part of my brain, I’m wondering if she can hear my hands twitching. “What people always do in the bathroom.”
She sits, silent but for the breathing coursing in and out of her nostrils. She takes a deep breath and crosses her arms. “I’m ready for bed.”
“Okay, just give me a second.” I wheel her toward her bed and she sticks her arms up like a toddler waiting to be dressed.
“I want you to sing to me, Yesenia.”
“I sing to you every night.” I hand her a pair of pajamas. “Change your clothes first.”
“You’re the only one I see. I don’t need to keep up airs.” She’s gnawing on her bottom lip, and the way her eyes float when she gets angry is almost comical. “I want you to sing.”
“Jesus, fine, whatever.” I start on some cumbia song stuck in my head but she cuts me off.
“Pedro Infante.”
“We’ve been over this before.”
“Pedro Infante, Jerson. Sing it.”
“Damn it, Amá.” I forget and crush my cigarette on the floor under my foot. It sizzles on the damp surface and the mark is indistinguishable. “I’m not singing that fucking song. I don’t care if it’s the only song that won’t…won’t make your head explode. I’m not going to sing that song.”
“But it’s all I have.”
“I’m here!”
Her jaw tightens, lip shivers. “I love it.”
“He loved it.”
She flinches as if I’d hit her. As if she could see me try to strike her. “He loved you.”
“He loved doing whatever the fuck he wanted. He didn’t give a shit who he hurt or who got hurt because of him.”
She swings her hand, swatting dust particles and drops of rain and coming nowhere near hitting my face.
“Don’t you talk about your father that way!”
“Why?” I pace the other side of the bed. “Tell me.”
“Because he was a good man. He provided for us.”
“He was a maldito narco. That’s how he provided for us, when he wasn’t beating us.”
“He gave us this house.” Her chin quivers like the ground during an earthquake.
“They bombed our house trying to kill him!” I knock the picture of her and the man off her night table. “And now you’re blind and you’re crippled and you’re telling me he was a good fucking man!”
“Don’t scream at me!” Her voice shatters into a thousand jagged pieces, chest heaving and shaking so hard the armrest falls off the wheelchair. It clatters on the floor, and I look around and the whole scene comes crashing down on me as if the roof has finally given in and aimed itself for the crown of my skull.
“Dios, Amá.” I rush to her side of the bed, to hold her, hug her, sing to her and apologize but she uses some kind of echolocation and her hand stings hard across my mouth. She wills the tears back into her eyes and her expression becomes marble.
“Get out of my house.”
El Búho answers on the third knock. The light over his door is burned out and streetlights cast a golden pall. The bunny on his right slipper is missing one ear and the left looks comatose. He regards me with leaden eyes and a grunt.
“I need an operation,” I say.
His kitchen is almost as accommodating as his basement surgery: cardboard boxes half-full of textbooks and home repair manuals line the perimeter, and a rainbow-river of wires runs across the chipped linoleum.
“¿Cafecito?”
I shrug and pull out a chair, moving a grocery bag of antiseptic mouthwash, grilling implements, dental floss and packs of mint gum to the floor.
“You know I’m not a brain surgeon, right? I mean, anything can go wrong.” His words come in fits and starts, alternating warnings with preparing coffee. “You’ve seen that yourself. It probably will go wrong.”
“You’re a doctor. You can do it.”
“Yesenia, mija.” He pauses, laughing to himself. “Look behind you. Second stack from the corner, about waist-high. There’s a box labeled head.”
While he roots around in the fridge, I unstack piles, unearthing a box of neurological textbooks. He beckons with his hand, digs halfway down and grabs a book with a black cover. He leafs through pages while eating rosquillas caleñas from a bag, crunching louder than it seems possible on rings of baked yuca, then spins the book to face me and jabs a finger on a diagram of the human brain.
“Right there, right there, and right there are where your memories are stored.”
“I told you you could do it.”
“It’s not,” he gestures inarticulately, “erasing a tape or something. It’s brain surgery.”
“And?” On the stove, the coffee coughs and sputters.
“And those two spots, I could never get to. Not without turning your head into a skull-full of porridge.”
I get up and pour us two cups of coffee. “So what are you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
Fingers of steam rise from the coffee like smoke, like ropes of thick gray ash that carry cinders and souls. I sip and expect to taste ash.
I point to the last set of ridges. “What about there?”
He tilts his head, considering. “Possibly. But it’s an incredibly risky procedure.”
“But you do surgery on people with kitchen tools every day.”
“Exactly. And I’m still saying this one is a bad idea. Shouldn’t that tell you something?”
I pause a moment, thinking. “How would you do it?”
“I just told you the brain surgery you’re asking for is incredibly risky and now you want to know how it’s done?”
“No,” I say. “I suppose not.”
“There are just…there are so many things that could go wrong. I could do it and make you a drooling idiot. You could lose any memory you have of him. You could lose random ones and keep the ones you want gone. I could slip and nick another lobe, like this one.” He lays a gnarled finger on the next section. “The one that controls language.”
“Okay.”
“While I’d enjoy you not being able to argue with me, it might affect other aspects of your life. As in, you and your—”
I swat away the idea. “Yeah, I get it.”
We sip our coffee until it’s only grounds scattered in the bottom of the cup. He offers some of his rosquillas caleñas but I wave them away. I try to stare a hole through his skull, to climb in and rewire his risk-assessment ridges. He won’t meet my eyes.
Eventually, he stands and stretches. The edge of the sky bleeds pink, drop by drop, ray by ray, bathing the emerald mountain in morning. He tells me that he needs to take a shower and eat breakfast because there’s a consultation scheduled in two hours. He pauses before going up the steps, turns and raises his gaze to mine. It’s taken four hours to meet my eyes.
“I used to know a girl once, a singer, back when I was still fighting.”
“So that wasn’t a joke?”
“I didn’t always look like this.” He looks down at the buttons of his shirt, stretched tight and nearly popping free. “She had one of the most beautiful voices I’d ever heard—still, to this day—that could’ve taken her anywhere in the world. Kind of looked like you, actually. The only thing holding her back was the idea that things were always better on that other stage.”
I flip back the edge of a box, pick at a veterinary surgery guide.
“You’re going to do this regardless, aren’t you?” he says.
“We’re not the only clinic in the city. Hell, there are two others on this block. But I trust you.” In a digging motion, I press a spoon to my forehead until white dots materialize like stars on the horizon. “Either way, he can’t be in here anymore.”
El Búho only nods. The spoon tinks on the tabletop.
“Go home and sleep.” His footsteps echo in the hallway. “You can come in tonight.”
The day passes in a breath, and I kneel beside Amá, tucked under her covers as if she’s sleeping, though I can tell from her breathing she’s awake. I can’t remember a single scene from my entire day. El Búho’s voice echoed down the hall; then I was tiptoeing across Amá’s floor, a thief in my own house.
She rolls over and grunts, still pretending, and her hand falls on the edge of the bed next to mine. I lay mine over hers and sing in a voice barely louder than eyelashes blinking. I swallow bile and dig my fingernails into my thigh and sing the Pedro Infante song she and my marica father loved. She manages to keep the appearance up and can control her breathing, but the tear welling in the crevice of her right eyelid gives it away. I kiss her forehead and remove my hand, then slink away into the rainy night.
