Velorio Read online

  As Mami started to drift into sleep, I rushed back to Marisol. I put her on my shoulders like my school backpack and we set off. She wasn’t as heavy as I thought she would be and the night was dry and quiet. All the wind of our island must’ve left with María. That’s why it was so hot after María went far away. For so many days, everyone thought all the dust in the air and the dead sun that dully shone overhead meant God would soon be returning to Earth to pick up his favorites and take them back home to heaven. I thought so too. Maybe that’s why Marisol was no longer here. She probably didn’t want to leave that place and return to all of this.

  I knew I had to be careful because all the light was gone. The governor mandated a curfew. Mami overheard it on the radio and applauded him for it. “It’s better to stay safe. To lock ourselves away from all the maleantes that are out on the roads.”

  “But how will anything ever get fixed, Ma?”

  “The police are out there working.”

  “But they have their own houses to worry about.”

  “Yes. That’s true. That’s why Rosselló requires us to be back in our homes. It’s for everyone’s own good.”

  I had told her that I heard Yesenia—a cranky older girlfriend of mine—say that they were stealing the life.

  “What life?” Mami asked.

  “The life of everyone. The trucks. The ones that are carrying all the energy.”

  “El diesel?”

  “I guess.”

  Mami paused and could only look toward my bedroom. It was as if she were trying to speak to God again through Marisol.

  MARISOL AND I moved through the darkness. I wanted to find a place to leave her for the night. I knew I wouldn’t be able to see well and that it would be dangerous to tiptoe my way down the cracks and fissures in all the roads. Not to mention the inflated river. If the police people found me, I wondered if they’d take Marisol from me, or try to hide her death from the official numbers being reported to the old government. Mami told me Tío knew of makeshift gravesites. That there were so many stranded bodies drowned by the force of water pillaging houses. And because all the phone lines were destroyed, the alcaldes of all the towns and cities on the island could not justify their dead to Rosselló. I knew that in order to keep my Marisol away from all that, she needed the fresh air, the moon or the burning sun, anything to keep her here with us, however small a piece of her I could trap in this world.

  As very young girls, we often played tag and escondite and there was a favorite cave of ours we often used. It was carved into the side of a white coral mountain, where for some mystical reason, tall grass and shrubs refused to grow. We began telling stories to each other every night before bed about the cave. The stories we made up were terrible. Things to keep us awake and scared. Those games felt serious, so we did anything to win. I never liked climbing rock after rock just to catch Marisol fleeing from me. So the stories became more frightening. Such things as how all the older boys would take little girls against their wishes and make them bleed. That Don Papo would be seated on his butaca right at the mouth of the cave, under its long yellow teeth. We’d joke that he’d soon enough turn to stone there, rocking back and forth in his usual rhythm all while he watched the boys as they performed the ritual. Papo, with that same intense desire he watched us with. Every day. How his hands clutched his crotch, his eyes dead and heavy.

  We moved along, inching our way toward the cave. Marisol started to gain weight and I needed to catch my breath. Soon enough we reached the gravel road that diverged from the main street, the path that took us to the cave entrance.

  I grew tired. There was a fallen ceiba tree serving as a barricade between the gravel and the asphalt. The ceiba’s long roots lifted from the ground, a drawn curtain exposing the heart of the earth. I wedged us between its gray roots and sat her on the red dirt while I caught my breath. There, Marisol could wait. She could wait until the stars stopped shimmering and our island returned to the ocean bed. Her jeans were now stained with dirt. A red so familiar.

  There was a time when Marisol had a jevito named Ezekiel. And he was older. Much older than me or Marisol. Mami had tried her best to warn us about the types that would linger around schoolyards. I watched them together just before the two of us walked back home. He’d drive up in his rusty Civic and wait at the school entrance for Marisol. She’d tell me to stay in the cafeteria while she caught up with Ezekiel.

  I questioned her about Ezekiel, and she snarled back at me to “let it be.”

  “He’s going to take you to the cave and perform the ritual,” I’d say.

  “Qué graciosita. The only ritual he’ll perform is the one where they take him to the hospital.”

  “But Mari . . .”

  “Cami, enough.” She put her arm over my shoulder and kissed my cheek. “And don’t go telling Mami about any of it.”

  “Okay.”

  I SAT NEXT to her and put my hand on her knee. Her head fell to my shoulder and it was just the two of us again, sleeping in the backyard watching the cucubanos light up the darkness with green specs of light, flickering until they died.

  We got up and kept trekking the gravel road. The darkness would occasionally leave as the clouds revealed the moon. While I marched, I felt her long curly hair whip against my shoulders; her head slumped to its side. I thought of all the things we could now do together, now that she was away from her muddy prison. Now she could be a spirit overseeing Utuado.

  When I reached the cave with Marisol, I sat her on a stone that resembled a stool, next to a rustic rock with a cemí hieroglyph carved onto its face. A rock from the before times when Taínos used the caves as shields to outlast the huracanes. Marisol could live there and the cemí would bear good omens to her and a safe passage between our two worlds.

  “Okay, Mari. I will leave you here. Wait for me until I can return and take you to la plaza.”

  Marisol’s body twitched and bent over the ancient rock, her head slumped down, and her hair danced and twisted.

  “This is the place of our ancestors, Mari. Don’t worry. I’ll come back for you.”

  Her hands fell to her sides and she tumbled from her stool onto the dirty ground. The gardening gloves I placed to hide her stink loosened and detached, her hands were now exposed. I hesitated to help her up because I knew she was angry, that she might be maniática again and thought maybe all I should do was leave her there without saying goodbye.

  WHEN I RETURNED to our house, Mami was pacing in the living room. I walked into that dark space and she froze.

  “Dónde carajo were you, Camila?”

  “I was seeing the river, Ma.”

  “The river?” She crossed her arms and looked away, patting her toes against the tile floor. The clicking sound echoed in the silence.

  “It looked scary, Ma. All swollen and moving against the moon.”

  “The river!?”

  She stomped toward me and grabbed me by my ear.

  “¡Que sea la última vez, Mari!”

  “What?”

  “Cami!” She corrected herself. “¡Que sea la última vez, Cami! If I tell you to stay here because it’s dangerous out there, you listen.”

  “Okay, Ma.” I tried to jerk my head away from her grip. “Okay!”

  She let me go and disappeared into the kitchen. She brought back her transistor radio and set it on the couch and turned it on. I stood there waiting for her to cool off. Ojeda began again with his yelling. Kept saying how all the towns en el campo were completely wiped out. I thought it funny because we were still here. Waiting.

  Ojeda started an hour segment on his radio show where he’d dedicate that time to reading names of those who were lucky enough to call and check themselves in as “safe.”

  He’d read their names out: José Gabriel Hernández, Yarizel Guzmán, Adien Medina, Carlos López López, Ninoshka Díaz. I couldn’t help but hear those names and think only about all the people that were unable to call in. And there was Mami, curled up agai
n next to the radio, next to Ojeda. How she must’ve wanted desperately for him to comfort her, to tell her that people were on their way. That Rosselló would ride in with God and all his chariots and personally come to deliver us.

  “Tomorrow we are going down to the Shell. We need to fill up the candungos with gasoline. The car is low on gas,” she said.

  “But why? Have you been using it? There’s no way out of Utuado. All the roads are gone and . . .”

  “Cállate, Camila. I’ve been looking for help. Everything’s closed or the lines are impossible.” She paused. “But we need to try.”

  She patted her hair down. She looked exhausted and her eyes, in that dark living room, were like two black blotches of paint.

  “We are getting up early, Cami. At four in the morning we walk to the Shell.”

  “But what about curfew? It doesn’t end until six.”

  “Stop it, Camila.”

  And then she finally broke, she started sobbing.

  “There aren’t enough trucks. There aren’t enough drivers. There isn’t enough . . .”

  I could only make out in those words that there wasn’t enough diesel for power.

  “The energy?” I asked.

  “Yes, hija, the energy. That energy is important to keep everything working.”

  “Can it bring things back to life?”

  “Ay, mija. Just forget it. I’ll figure this out. No te preocupes.”

  “No, Ma. I’ll go too. I’ll go with you tomorrow.”

  MAMI AND I walked early the next morning toward the Shell. I carried our candungo like a newborn puppy, embracing its red plastic skin with my thick arms. Mami didn’t say a thing to me. Occasionally she would pet my back and gently press me forward. I felt an urgency in her. One that she tried hard to contain within herself, so deep down it was splitting her in two.

  When we made it atop the road, atop the hill that overlooked the barrio, the Shell station was swarmed with metal—a line of cars wrapped around the station and disappeared long into the stretch of road, so far away you could no longer see the multicolor in the darkness. I think it reached la plaza miles away. I knew it reached God. There were so many people, too, camping with umbrellas ready for the sun, and all their candungos swarmed and dotted their feet like red periods.

  “Ma, what are we going to do?”

  “Get in line.”

  “But we’ll never make it. They’ll run out.”

  IT WAS FOUR hours. Ma would check her wristwatch every hour to keep time. She must’ve been tallying the score, ready to take it to God as evidence of his disappearance.

  The row of cars that were lined next to us only moved every twenty or thirty minutes, so they weren’t going much faster than us. In that waiting, I wished to bring up Marisol. To tell Mami that Marisol was now free and that we didn’t need the people to come take her away. I wanted to yell out to her, “I found her a new home, Mami!” and watch as she gushed with joy. But I knew she wouldn’t appreciate what I had done. How difficult it was to resurrect our Mari and bring her back to life. Mami needed Marisol in that room. It kept her waiting for all the promised people to arrive in their camouflage, in their uniformed trucks with the entire lost aide.

  “I can see the pumps, Cami.” Mami jumped out of the line to get a better look. By now the morning sun was bright and heavy. We managed to catch the shadow of the mountain, so we weren’t suffocating under the sun. But behind us, people wore their sweaty faces with frustration. Those that came prepared opened their plastic umbrellas and we all began to look as wilted as a field of flowers harvested and left to die on top of the boiling road.

  “But we are still so far, Ma.”

  “As long as we make it, it won’t matter.”

  A skinny man with a gray baseball cap was peddling his chrome bicycle up to the row of cars next to us. Boils and puss scarred his face, but he seemed nice. He smiled and spoke to the passengers of the parked cars. He would stop at each window and say something I couldn’t quite make out.

  “Ma, el viejo.”

  “I see him, Cami.”

  She started cracking her knuckles as the skinny man peddled toward us. The people in front got mouthy and I knew what he was telling them.

  By the time he reached us, Mami didn’t even ask what we already knew.

  “When is the next one coming in?” She finally said to the viejo.

  The man slowed to a stop and sighed before he spoke.

  “No sabemos. It could come later today or tomorrow. Since we can’t communicate, we don’t know when.” He stopped speaking directly at Mami and began addressing everyone, even those in their cars. “You can stay here and wait, maybe leave your car and come check on it from time to time.”

  “¡Sí, claro!” A man in a purple Explorer shouted and he wiggled out of his spot and sped off.

  Mami now looked too tired to stand. I told her I’d stay in line and wait for the energy. She didn’t fight me and started off back home.

  The energy didn’t come until past curfew. The owners of the Shell almost shut it down but the police who were parked at the pumps let them continue for a few more hours. According to Mami, they had to start staking out gas stations because of all the thieves. As I filled my candungo, I was feeling happy because soon I would get to visit Marisol.

  There was so much noise near la plaza. All the generators that used energy to power homes droned into the night and I was glad Mami didn’t live too close to all those people.

  I RETURNED TO the cave and found Marisol still in one piece. I carried the red candungo full of energy and placed it next to her. I picked her up and pressed her cheek against my lips and almost threw up my insides, so I jumped back from where she sat. She was a touch darker and greener. Her face was bloated, and her smell was hard to digest. There were trails of red ants lining her limbs and other white things, like grains of rice, collecting and wriggling in her sores. The missing pinky finger looked like it was gnawed down to its bone. She was messy but still in one piece.

  “The people have finally come to fix things, Mari.” I tried approaching her but she wasn’t happy. Her eyes were bulging out from their sockets and she was crying. Like Mami. Like everyone these days.

  “I saw them in town. They said they would get started on the energy soon. That food and water were more important, so they are setting that up first. Little camps where people go to get something to eat.”

  Marisol looked at me with her plum eyes, those bruised ugly things, and kept crying.

  “I know that, Mari. I know that there’s never enough to go around.” I started pacing in front of her. “And you don’t have to remind me to take care of Ma. You’re not there! She can’t go get the food. She doesn’t want to leave Ojeda and her radio.”

  I stomped away from her. I became angry.

  “I’m doing my best, Mari. I’m doing my best!” I yelled.

  Her swollen body fell from the stool and thumped to the ground. I ran up to her and held her. She no longer smelled rancid to me. I had to take her out to the sun. To la plaza. The dampness of that cave was killing her, the darkness was blinding her sight.

  I knew she could still hear me so I fed her slowly. I took the candungo of energy and poured some into her mouth. It was the fuel she needed to spark back to life, and we set off, her ugly body hanging off my back.

  As we walked, the smell followed, and we passed the lines and lines of people waiting for the energy to come in on those metal trucks, I knew they looked at me and they whispered to each other about how smelly and bloated Marisol looked. But no one stopped us. The smell didn’t bother me.

  I walked her to the center of la plaza, to La Iglesia Parroquia San Miguel Arcangel, the old church in the center of town, to see God in person and speak as close to his ear as possible. All the people below were still fighting over which ration of water belonged to them, people were still lined up at the Shell gas station looking for energy, some had been waiting for days, inching closer to it, and thei
r faces spoke of sadness.

  None of that mattered to me and Marisol. I took her ugly beautiful brown body and we snuck through the pried gate of the churchyard, Marisol so brown, so green and stiff. We climbed the sidewalls with the same determination we had when we trekked to the cave for the first time together. We made our way up between the two short bell towers and climbed higher and closer to God. We were never supposed to be there, but no one was watching, and there I showed Marisol how the big people decorated all the houses without roofs. As if planting blue fields so wide, the ocean and sky met us there and we all became a soft blue blanket. They put up those blue tarps suspended over all the abandoned homes almost as if to tell us “we are coming,” or “we will be back.” But they never returned.

  I saw us all suffering in Utuado and I imagined everyone on our entire island suffered too. All of us wishing for something different, how we straddled onto hope, how we walked as though we were ghosts. And all that was to come, all that we dreamed through, toward something new, felt necessary.

  Bayfish

  There are no tales to justify our death so I can only speak of terrors. In the night, I heard us sing as a collection. First it was Banto. Then Urayoán. Then Cheo. We got to mind that we’d create a new fire for the world after the calamity hit Puertorro. It was called a calamity, but Ura saw himself as a prophet. He saw the opportunity. Something to start fresh.

  Banto came to me as he always did, with his round legs and stubs for arms. He knocked on the door of my outpost, a modest and simple shed I built with a hatchet. It was just under el puente of our barrio in Florencia. I liked my shed because it was wedged under the shoulders of that concrete. No matter how hard the wind blew, no matter how large and mean she got, my place was going nowhere.