Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

And I don’t blame him, there’s something about Violeta’s ramblings that make them seem prophetic. Corina feared that Sleepy Joe would do something to her, to my little sister Violeta, such a pretty and helpless woman, and so ignorant of sex although she had developed into a woman, a beautiful woman, my sister, quite pretty, damn it, and what a brew of hormones was bubbling in her. I wasn’t sure if Violeta knew what she was doing when she sunbathed nude on the roof, knowing Sleepy Joe would be around. I think she was tempting him, provoking him on purpose, just because that was one more way to torment him. Anyway, I didn’t want to sit back and do nothing and see whose interpretation of the situation was right, Corina’s or mine. Whatever the case, I thought it would be best if I enrolled Violeta in the school in Vermont.

I don’t think it was such a great torment, Mr. Rose; it wasn’t as if I were sending a kid off to slaughter. It’s a wonderful school, with teachers who specialize in the education she requires, very expensive, on the edge of a forest. Fortunately, Bolivia’s friend Socorro Arias de Salmon takes care of the tuition; she says it’s something she had with my mother, a pending debt. In many ways, I think that my sister is better off in the school, she who always hated the city. Imagine what it is like for someone who can’t stand physical contact to have to deal with crowds, buying cards for the subway, standing in line, making transfers, the eternal maze of stinking tunnels, the noise, people going up, people going down, people shoving. At school on the other hand she had the expanse of green, the sky, the trees, and the peace of the world, and they teach her not to be so selfish and to live among others, I mean to understand them better, which is something she doesn’t know how to do. In the end it wasn’t a bad choice. They specialize in cases such as Violeta’s; they understand her and are educating her, which is important, because I understand that Violeta never did well in regular schools, where she scratched and bit her classmates and sometimes she too would come back all beat up. Be that as it may, I can’t forgive myself for sending her there; the guilt is eating me alive.

I’m not sure if you can say, Mr. Rose, what made me so drastically rebel against Violeta. Except that I wanted to live my life, is that a sin? Finally a life of my own, a chance to worry about something that wasn’t Violeta, Violeta, Violeta. My dealings with her have always been tormenting, ever since the plane brought us to America. I noticed something weird that very first day, after five years apart, but I wrote it off as the behavior of a spoiled child, because I knew that those who were too pretty also tended to be whimsical. To begin with, she had shown up at the airport with a stuffed toy giraffe, which I thought was a big mistake. Even at that age I had a keenly developed sense of the ridiculous and when we walked onto the plane I felt the other passengers give us that look that said, Oh, God, don’t let those girls with the giraffe sit near us. You know the look, the one saved for those returning from Mexico with mariachi hats or from Disney with Mickey Mouse ears. Fortunately, no one sat next to us. She let me buckle her seat belt but didn’t respond when I wanted to talk about Bolivia’s new car.

“You know who Bolivia is?” I asked her.

“You know who Bolivia is?” she returned the question.

“Bolivia is your mother and she’s waiting for you in America.”

“Your mother waiting for you in America.”

“Yours too.”

“Yours too.”

“Yes, good. Bolivia is your mother and my mother and is waiting for us both. With many presents. In America.”

It wasn’t true that Violeta was frightened about her first time on a plane, as Doña Herminia had warned me. Violeta simply wasn’t — frightened or anything, she was simply not there and thus ignored me, until I tried to take the giraffe away from her, then she screamed.

“We have to put it up in the bin! The giraffe, Violeta. You can’t keep it with you. The stewardess said that all personal items had to be stored in the overhead bin, those are the rules,” I tried to explain to her. Before Manninpox, I was always very respectful of rules, and I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t part with the stuffed animal, when it had been made clear that we should heed the rules for the safety of all.

I knew very well what a plane crash was like because two years earlier, when I was ten, a DC-4 had taken a nosedive into our neighborhood. The passengers and many people on the ground had died, especially those having lunch at a restaurant called Los Alegres Compadres. Our lives had been marked by that accident, the only major event that had happened in the history of Las Lomitas. Some of the dead were people we had known, including a girl from our school. And for months afterward it was as if we were in a movie, with the trained dogs looking for bodies at the wreckage site, and police tape surrounding the area. Everything connected to the event had been a major commotion — the Red Cross, the funerals, the prayer sessions, the news stories on television — and for a few days we were the center of the world. There was also a sense of triumph among the neighbors who could have died but had by some miracle survived.

The residents of Las Lomitas were lower middle-class, that is, we only ever traveled by car, and in other neighborhoods we joked that this had been our only opportunity to die in an airplane crash. Who could have known at that moment that two years later I’d be the first person from the neighborhood to get on a plane? That’s why I wasn’t going to allow Violeta to ruin everything by not putting the giraffe in the overhead bin as the stewardess had ordered.

“Listen to what you’ve been told, Violeta. Or are you deaf?” I demanded. “It could be very dangerous!”

Even then it was part of my character to give respect to authority, especially uniformed authority, as I demonstrated by marrying a cop. It was a hang-up that I got over quickly here at Manninpox, but that stewardess on my first flight with her indigo-blue uniform and red scarf around her neck must have seemed like the very owner of the sky to me. I was so fascinated by her confident and stern manner as she made her way up and down the aisle serving juices and giving orders that I swore that one day I’d be a stewardess. Fortunately, those types of pipe dreams don’t always play out, because a few years later I saw Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts and I swore I’d become a prostitute. I struggled a bit with my sister for the giraffe, but she was making such a racket that I gave up.

“You didn’t cry as a baby. Where did you learn to shrill like that? Hasn’t anybody taught you how to speak?” I told her, even mocking her somewhat.

When it came down to it, the things that made me superior to her were my age, the English I’d learned in school, the double-A cup bra, and the patent-leather shoes with the princess heels that Leonor de Nava had bought me just for the occasion. Not to mention the collection of Condorito comics that Alex Toro had given me the afternoon before when we said good-bye, but that I’d left behind because it had not fit in the luggage. I came to the conclusion that I didn’t quite yet like this hysteric sister that had been my fate, and that I missed Cami and Pati very much.

But how could I not love Violeta, so white and so pretty, with her long wavy hair and those green eyes that looked like jewels, as if in that perfect little face someone had set two stones of light that faced not out but inward. Alice lost among the underground marvels she encounters, that’s who Violeta was and continues to be. Not much later, I felt bad about having been rough with her. A bad start for a new life, I thought, and tried to talk to her about other things but to no avail: she didn’t let go of the giraffe and she didn’t let out a single word. She immediately pulled her arm back if it grazed mine, and I was too tired to deal with all her sensitivities. To make the flight that left at noon from the capital, I had awakened before dawn and traveled several hours on the bus with Leonor, and after the emotional good-bye and all my expectations of what awaited us, I fell asleep and for a bit did not have to think about Violeta.