Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“Violeta doesn’t forget,” she said at times.

“What, Little Sis? What is it you don’t forget? Is there something Violeta doesn’t want to remember?” I ask her, but she doesn’t respond.

Every time I called her in Colombia, her godmother said the same thing. “Violeta doesn’t want to get on. She’s small, the phone frightens her, I’ll tell her you said hello.” Cami, Pati, and I were always on the phone, if we ever fought about anything, it was about that, because whoever grabbed the phone first would hog it, and yet my sister Violeta was afraid of the phone. What can I do, I thought, to be able to forget about her, or to free myself from the burden of having to go look for her. Besides, Bolivia assured me that the nena was fine and that soon we would all be together. Once, I tried to tell her that things with Violeta were not going as well as she thought. I told her, “Yesterday I tried to talk to the girl, and I heard the voice of her godmother calling her. ‘Come, Violeta, come talk to your sister. What a horror this girl is, hiding in there again, all afternoon in there and no one can get her out.’ Are you listening to me, Bolivia? Violeta’s godmother said yesterday that the girl had spent the whole afternoon hiding there.”

“Hiding where?” my mother asked me.

“I don’t know, Bolivia. Hiding somewhere or behind something, some furniture, a door. I don’t know. The problem was that she had been there all afternoon.”

On that occasion, as on others like it, Bolivia uttered one of her favorite phrases, the one that annoyed me the most, and which she repeated until the day before her death: “Don’t worry, everything is alright.” Everything is alright , those three words summed up my mother’s philosophy.

These days, I call Violeta every week despite of the long lines to use the only phone in our section. But with her nothing is easy. I know she’s angry with me, that she hasn’t forgiven me for putting her in that school so far from home, and I know she has reason to hate me, I hate myself for having done it. So she comes to the phone but says nothing, it’s up to me to sing her the song about the snake from Tierra Caliente that smiles so that you can see its teeth, that one and others from Cri-Cri the singing cricket, which was her favorite character as a child, and that’s how I spend the ten or twelve minutes, singing “Sleepy Piggies,” “Cleta Dominga,” or “The Baker Bunnies,” until I have spent all the minutes on my card. But don’t think that Violeta is dumb or retarded. On the contrary, she’s exceptional. Strange but exceptional, and with an inability to tolerate lies. She knows perfectly well that if I’m calling her it is not to tell her about things as they are, that I hide from her that I’m in prison, and hide from her what happened to Greg, and hide a bunch of other things, that in some way I also hide from myself. The difference is that with me the lies help me live, but they suffocate her. We all live lying to each other, sometimes more and sometimes less, sometimes maliciously and sometimes for pity’s sake. Dr. House has said this, and he’s right. The unvarnished truth is not something that is very useful, and it doesn’t figure in any etiquette manual. But that’s not how things work for Violeta. She tells no lies and doesn’t wish to hear any; measured words and those with various meanings nauseate her. The psychologists have explained to me that Violeta doesn’t know how to interpret evasions and insinuations. That’s why when I call her from Manninpox she freezes and goes silent. Or she doesn’t come to the phone and that’s the worst, that’s how she defeats me, leaves me reeling all week.

“No more. Big Sis quiet. Big Sis quiet,” she told me when I began going around in circles and inventing stories to avoid telling her the real one. Since then, she has not said a word more.

And even so, I’m afraid to tell her the truth. It’s not easy to tell your younger sister that you’re caught up in the mother of all messes and that it’s possible you won’t see her for a very long time. Or maybe I don’t tell her for precisely the opposite reason, because deep down I’m convinced that any minute now I’m going to awake and this castle of horrors, this unrecognizable place, as if from a macabre fairy tale, will disappear. And I’ll go look for her immediately at her school in Vermont, and I’ll take her with me, and promise her I will never again have boyfriends who think living with her would be hell. Although it’s true, it is hell. But so what? Violeta might be a mess but she’s my sister, I love her deeply and I need her. How history repeats itself, or I should say how we repeat it stupidly without knowing it. Violeta and I were always forgotten about when Bolivia brought home one of her boyfriends. For the little lovebirds, my sister and I became like the plague, the little problem that fucked up pretty Mommy’s romance, so young but with such big, needy daughters. Every time a man lived with us, Violeta and I were superfluous, latching on, not really part of the script, or the main obstacle challenging the future happiness of the couple. When Bolivia died, I was left in charge of Violeta, and when I decided to live with a lover, Violeta automatically became the burden. History repeating itself. I’m telling you, the problem is we don’t learn. We fail miserably and then we do the exact same thing afterward. That’s why I sent Violeta off to that special school way up north in Vermont. You understand? I wanted to be happy and she was a burden. I guess I did the same thing as Bolivia, lured by the illusion of happiness. It’s a mistake, you know? The basis of all troubles and miseries are the dreams of such foolishness. That’s not what life is about, period. And it’s not that I’m telling you I’ve been miserable, it’s not that. I imagine there are those who have had it much worse. Or maybe I simply wanted to escape from a closed box by sending Violeta so far away. Look at it this way. For all those years, who was I? What memories do I have of my adolescence? Not many really; I was a closed box. I was the one who cared for Violeta, not much else. Once Mike sent me to buy cigarettes. Have I told you about Mike? It doesn’t matter for now; let’s just say he was one of my mother’s boyfriends. I was eleven years old, maybe twelve. Mike had invited Bolivia, Violeta, and me on one of his business trips, and that had become a whole adventure in and of itself. I had never been in such a fancy hotel and could not imagine that there would be a more luxurious place in all the world, a two-star hotel that I thought deserved all the stars of the firmament, and on the top floor, we found a soda vending machine and ice. We took up two rooms connected by a door, each room with its own bathroom and television, and in the bathrooms little bottles of lotion and shampoo. It was paradise. But the hotel happened to be located on a big avenue with lots of traffic and many lanes, a highway. I went down with the money Mike had given me, asked at the bar for the brand he smoked but they were out, went outside and asked at another place with no luck, and another one, and nothing. Someone said that I could probably find the brand across the way, and I did just what my survival instincts told me not to do: I crossed the highway. I didn’t want to show back up in the room without the cigarettes, so maybe I didn’t mind Mike so much, and at that point was insanely grateful to him for having brought us to that wondrous place. But in any case, I didn’t have a problem, I crossed the avenue with a group of others and nothing happened. I bought the cigarettes intending to go back and before I realized it I was under a car. I opened my eyes, and there I was, under a car, with my nose inches away from its metallic belly and my dress pressed down by one of the rear tires. An Asian man who must have been the driver was crouching on all fours, and when he saw me, he screamed. Aside from the Asian face and the belly of the car, I began to see legs and shoes and I knew there was a commotion around me. I heard an ambulance siren approaching. “It’s a girl,” a woman’s voice said, “she’s dead, she’s dead.” And then I understood that it was me, I was the girl who was dead. But I wasn’t in pain, in fact I didn’t feel anything at all, so I pulled my dress free with one tug, picked up the cigarette pack and coins that were scattered right beside me, I scooted out from under the car, I stood up as quickly as possible, and ran as fast as my legs would allow. I crossed through the other lanes hearing the brakes screech right beside me. At the hotel I hid behind some plant until they stopped looking for me and then went into the bathroom of the lobby. I washed my face and dried it with the paper towels, soaked the part of my dress that the tire had run over and dried it with the hot-air hand dryer, fixed my hair as best I could, and checked in the mirror to make sure there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. After a few moments, I went back up to the room, gave Mike his cigarettes and change, and said nothing. In fact, I’ve never told anyone about it, although I can still see it today as clear as if I were watching a movie. And if I’m telling you now, Mr. Rose, it is for you to understand that I was no one. I was no one and nothing happened to me. My stuff didn’t count and it wasn’t worth recounting, that simple. And don’t think I suffered because of it; it was just the way things were.