I raise my eyebrow. I thought they were South American.
We’re speaking mythically here.
Bárbaro points the light down the hole but that doesn’t improve anything.
Would you like to see inside? the Vice-President asks me.
I must have said yes, because Bárbaro gives me the flashlight and the two of them grab me by my ankles and lower me into the hole. All my coins fly out of my pockets. Bendiciones. I don’t see much, just some odd colors on the eroded walls, and the Vice-President’s calling down, Isn’t it beautiful?
This is the perfect place for insight, for a person to become somebody better. The Vice-President probably saw his future self hanging in this darkness, bulldozing the poor out of their shanties, and Bárbaro, too — buying a concrete house for his mother, showing her how to work the air-conditioner — but, me, all I can manage is a memory of the first time me and Magda talked. Back at Rutgers. We were waiting for an E bus together on George Street and she was wearing purple. All sorts of purple.
And that’s when I know it’s over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end.
I cry, and when they pull me up the Vice-President says, indignantly, God, you don’t have to be a pussy about it.
—
THAT MUST HAVE been some serious Island voodoo: the ending I saw in the cave came true. The next day we went back to the United States. Five months later I got a letter from my ex-baby. I was dating someone new, but Magda’s handwriting still blasted every molecule of air out of my lungs.
It turned out she was also going out with somebody else. A very nice guy she’d met. Dominican, like me. Except he loves me, she wrote.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to finish by showing you what kind of fool I was.
When I returned to the bungalow that night, Magda was waiting up for me. Was packed, looked like she’d been bawling.
I’m going home tomorrow, she said.
I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.
Nilda
NILDA WAS MY BROTHER’S GIRLFRIEND.
This is how all these stories begin.
She was Dominican, from here, and had super-long hair, like those Pentecostal girls, and a chest you wouldn’t believe — I’m talking world-class. Rafa would sneak her down into our basement bedroom after our mother went to bed and do her to whatever was on the radio right then. The two of them had to let me stay, because if my mother heard me upstairs on the couch everybody’s ass would have been fried. And since I wasn’t about to spend my night out in the bushes this is how it was.
Rafa didn’t make no noise, just a low something that resembled breathing. Nilda was the one. She seemed to be trying to hold back from crying the whole time. It was crazy hearing her like that. The Nilda I’d grown up with was one of the quietest girls you’d ever meet. She let her hair wall away her face and read The New Mutants, and the only time she looked straight at anything was when she looked out a window.
But that was before she’d gotten that chest, before that slash of black hair had gone from something to pull on the bus to something to stroke in the dark. The new Nilda wore stretch pants and Iron Maiden shirts; she had already run away from her mother’s and ended up at a group home; she’d already slept with Toño and Nestor and Little Anthony from Parkwood, older guys. She crashed over at our apartment a lot because she hated her moms, who was the neighborhood borracha. In the morning she slipped out before my mother woke up and found her. Waited for heads at the bus stop, fronted like she’d come from her own place, same clothes as the day before and greasy hair so everybody thought her a skank. Waited for my brother and didn’t talk to anybody and nobody talked to her, because she’d always been one of those quiet, semi-retarded girls who you couldn’t talk to without being dragged into a whirlpool of dumb stories. If Rafa decided that he wasn’t going to school then she’d wait near our apartment until my mother left for work. Sometimes Rafa let her in right away. Sometimes he slept late and she’d wait across the street, building letters out of pebbles until she saw him crossing the living room.
She had big stupid lips and a sad moonface and the driest skin. Always rubbing lotion on it and cursing the moreno father who’d given it to her.
It seemed like she was forever waiting for my brother. Nights she’d knock and I’d let her in and we’d sit on the couch while Rafa was off at his job at the carpet factory or working out at the gym. I’d show her my newest comics and she’d read them real close, but as soon as Rafa showed up she’d throw them in my lap and jump into his arms. I missed you, she’d say in a little-girl voice, and Rafa would laugh. You should have seen him in those days: he had the face bones of a saint. Then Mami’s door would open and Rafa would detach himself and cowboy-saunter over to Mami and say, You got something for me to eat, vieja? Claro que sí, Mami’d say, trying to put her glasses on.