D
aniela killed herself.
She fried her brains, that’s what I mean.
They said it happened in the theater’s restroom. During the blackout. She broke open an electrical outlet, pulled the wires out, and scraped them down with a nail cutter. Then she stabbed herself in the head with a pair of scissors, two times, and tied the wires to them. Right into her brain. They said that doesn’t hurt, that you can’t feel pain in your brain even if it gets bitten. Then she sat herself down on the toilet, they said. And when the electricity came back on, the volts and amps blew through her at will. They said you just had to see what was left after that. You could peer inside her skull through the holes. Can you believe it? And her panties were wet. But her makeup was intact. Daniela wasn’t one of those lezzies who cries, they said.
Though apparently she was one of those who pees herself, they added.
Nobody actually saw anything, but that’s what they said, that’s what they’re still talking about.
And I believe them.
I say thanks and take off down the shaded sidewalk because the red and blue riot of lights from the squad cars is driving me crazy.
It’s a pretty day. There’s a bit of sunshine, little clouds, an incredible clarity.
“Hey, is it true some crazy woman killed herself in there?” La Gloria asks, coming up to me with that perennial smell of garbage that’s always about her. “Were you there? What happened? Hey, what the fuck are you laughing about?”
“It’s a beautiful day,” I tell her, avoiding the hand that’s trying to grab my arm.
“That’s because somebody wanted it to be that way and pushed some buttons in his office.”
That’s true.
It’s horrible.
It’s as if I had to be reminded that the contentment in my belly was owed to a calf that had been dismembered just a few days before.
Or worse: owed to the person who did the dismembering.
La Gloria insists: “What happened? Was it because of trouble with her lovers? Or did somebody tell her she had AIDS? C’mon, you fag, tell me.”
“It’s none of your business,” I say. “Zip it, shove it up your ass.”
She spits at my feet and walks back to the mountain of garbage covering the dumpsters.
I watch for a few seconds as she starts to dive, dig, salvage.
I’m tired of watching her. Every day, the same corners, the same dumpsters. This is La Gloria, from our neighborhood. The one who eats what you shit. The one who dresses in everybody else’s clothes. The one who picks up cigarette butts at bars. The one who scours the whole city as if it were some free supermarket. You know, that one…barbaric, and so damn young.
Her Lycra’s ripped at the butt. Her dark skin is cellulitefree. Thin and straight, her body. Curly and ash-colored, her hair. So young.
I turn my back on her and continue down 10 de Octubre Boulevard. It doesn’t matter, up or down, but down’s easier. Until the intersection with Vía Blanca. Then left, until the Lacret junction. Then down again to the boulevard. Triangles are always worse than circles. I walk along, contemplating my shadow, which moves ahead of me, until I realize I have no shadow at all to contemplate anymore. I don’t know when but at some point the sky clouded over. I’m afraid I can be slow to notice things like that.
They always told me: “Don’t go around breaking girls’ hearts. Especially the young ones. The younger they are, the worse it is.”
Ten years ago, Daniela was seven years old and I was seventeen. Ten years ago, we were both hungry. Like so many siblings in the tenements, we slept in the same bed; it was her fault I didn’t find out for the longest time about nighttime masturbation, serene and alone. But I never held it against her. I never held anything against her. Not even the way she slapped and kicked at me when she had nightmares. Instead, I’d talk to her.
“Just imagine it, Dani, my little dove. A Harley Davidson. Do you know what a Harley Davidson is? It’s a motorcycle like Uncle Patricio’s. That big, like a couch. You and me on one, on the highway. Can you imagine it? A highway, like in the movies. You know: Kansas, Arizona, Omaha, Salt Lake City, sun, big sky, straight ahead, just straight ahead, right up to the clouded horizon. There’s always lightning on that horizon, you know. Can you imagine it, my little dove? You see the light cut through the sky but the Harley’s engine won’t let you hear the thunder, so you go ahead and it never rains because the clouds run away when they see us, and there’s almost no grass, and everything’s quiet except the Harley’s engine; you’re laughing, and I just go faster and faster. Can you imagine it?”
“Yes,” she’d answer. “We’re gonna do that someday?”
“Just like I’m telling you, my little dove, someday, someday we’re gonna do all that.”
Yuri would come over and listen for a while, then leave. Yuri was a very boring older brother because he was never hungry. He’d dropped out of college to sell marijuana and PC components.
It was Yuri who pressured my mother to let me go on scholarship. “We’re too crowded here,” he said. “My clients come over, they see so many people and get nervous.” Later, he found a lover for my mother so that she left the house too. Some guy from Miramar, high up, you know. “And don’t worry; I’ll take care of Dani. She’s gonna be better fed and looked after with me than you anyway.”
Mamá let herself be talked into it. I can’t blame her.
I let myself be talked into it. Daniela never forgave me.
Seven years old. Daniela was just seven years old when I broke her heart.
She never sent it off for repairs. She learned to like the dripping of her fractured baby bottle. It lulled her at night; it gave her life a different beat.
When I came home from school, I’d lie down next to her, just like before, and I’d talk to her about festivals up at Dunlop Square, and about Mardi Gras and San Francisco.
“Stop talking shit,” she’d say, and turn her back to me.
Yuri would sometimes come by and take a look at us, and it seemed like he felt sorry for us.
Yuri is sitting alone at the table. Standing next to the wall, the sergeant is smoking. But he doesn’t count. Yuri builds a wall with dominoes. Then he knocks it down with his finger.
“I already know.”
I sit down facing him, pick up a few of the dominoes, and build half a Stonehenge. Daniela was always intrigued by that sort of thing. Dolmens, menhirs, that stuff; neolithic drunken sprees, all that bullshit.
“We hafta keep going. Do you hear me, Omaha? We hafta let go, let go of old baggage,” he says, raising his head to see beyond me. “What you got there?”
The man coming in is pushing a little boy in front of him.
“You can keep him overnight. But I need him back early tomorrow. You can pay me the usual.”
“What’s your hurry?” Yuri takes stock of the boy, who smiles at him.
“He’s my sister-in-law’s nephew. That’s the hurry. Like I said, the usual.”
The man leaves.
Yuri gets up. “Come here,” he says to the boy.
I follow them.
In the back bedroom, Yuri sits the boy on the bed and offers him a cold ham-and-cheese snack and a TuKola from a little table. He watches for a while as the boy eats and drinks, then he gives him a Nintendo DS.
“I can’t stand it when they bring them to me like that,” he says. “They don’t last the night.”
I shrug and go back to the living room.
The sergeant’s at the table, pawing a domino. He blinks like a kid who’s been caught in the act, drops the domino, and returns his three hundred pounds of fat and muscle to their post.
I stick the first DVD I find into the player and throw myself on the couch.
Wesley Snipes with glasses and a sword. Just what I need.
It starts to rain outside.
That night two weeks ago it was also raining out on Santa Catalina.
Héctor. Héctor and I shared a desk in primary school. He’d lend me his pencil. He’d let me play with the toy soldiers that he brought to school behind his mother’s back. His hair was very blond, practically white, dry, curly.
He hadn’t changed much.
“Omaha,” Héctor said, “decide. We’re not gonna be here all night.”
Daniela looked scared. The other girl, her friend, did too.
When he was a kid, Héctor had been a loner. He only played with me. Now he’d switched playmates. And multiplied them—by a lot.
Those five guys looked very capable of waiting all night. But maybe they weren’t.
They’d certainly seemed impatient when they stepped in our path and dragged us to that garage in Heredia.
I am not your rolling wheels, I am the highway, I am not your carpet ride, I am the sky…
screamed Chris Cornell from the Panasonic on the Chevrolet’s hood.
It seemed possible.
“Your brother’s gone too far, Omaha,” Héctor told me. “He’s stepping on my territory. Gourmet meat is his thing, and that’s fine, but selling weed is my business, and given how tight it’s been, the last thing I’m looking for is competition. I hafta send him a message, okay? It’s not that I wanna do you harm but I’ve got my buddies and the neighborhood watching me. That’s all it is, so relax, nothing’s gonna happen to you. Just decide already. Which of these two?”
Both girls stopped looking my way.
“C’mon, your sister or her little friend. You decide.”
“All so that I turn around and let my brother know that you threatened us with a switchblade and—”
“What switchblade? Do you see a switchblade? Any kind of knife? Do you think we need that?”
I looked at them.
Héctor had really grown up. Quite a bit. The others too. I remembered them vaguely from primary school too. No. They didn’t need any of that.
Daniela’s little friend was still holding one of the sunflowers the actors had given out to the audience. The play had been fun. There were a lot of kids in the audience. There were a lot of laughs.
“Get my sister outta here,” I finally told Héctor. “I don’t want her to see anything.”
The guy shakes his umbrella at the door and comes in.
“Got anything?” he asks.
Yuri nods. The guy takes out his wallet.
“And the other thing?”
Yuri nods.
“Thank God.” The man puts two bills down in front of him, on the table. “I had a fight today with the union guys, because of last week’s payroll. I told you about it…so I’m short. And when I get home my wife is going to want me to take her to the movies, and my daughter’s fighting with her husband so she comes over now and then just to talk crap and…”
Yuri keeps nodding. He takes a couple of joints from his pocket and gives them to the man, who then heads to the back room.
“Gimme one,” I tell Yuri.
“No,” he responds. “No, unless you pay for it.”
“Fuck, man, I’m your brother.”
“Debt between brothers is the worst thing in the world.” Voices.
The man’s voice. I think I also hear the boy. I’m not sure.
They took Daniela out of my sight. Two of them grabbed the other girl. Héctor pumped up the volume.
I didn’t look at her face as I unbuttoned her jeans. Or as I pulled them down. Or as I pulled down her panties. Her navel was pierced. It was a tiny Chinese lion’s head, with a miniscule gemstone. Maybe it was just some piece of glass. Yeah, that’s probably what it was.
I felt the tip of Héctor’s boot on my butt.
“Not like that. Fuck her from behind. So she’ll feel it. So you’ll both feel it, you and her.”
They turned her around. They bent her over the hood of the car.
I realized the best thing to do was get it over with as soon as possible, and I acted accordingly. She was good. She didn’t scream.
“Okay,” Héctor said as I zipped up my fly. “Tell your brother to keep his paws off my business. You were great, really. Just ask her.”
I turned around, very slowly.
Daniela was behind me, at the garage door. Two of them were holding her; she had a handkerchief stuffed in her mouth. They’d held her there the whole time. Her jeans were at her knees. A third guy, at her back, moved away.
Daniela heaved as if she’d been holding her breath for hundreds of years.
The guy pulled up his zipper.
I don’t know what was worse: that she saw me or that I saw her. Or knowing that she’d seen me, or knowing that she knew that I knew she’d seen me, or knowing that she knew I’d seen her.
Maybe I should have asked the other girl, her little friend, what was worse.
But I didn’t. I never saw her again.
The woman leans against the doorframe, her hip pointing. “Hey, Yuri, what about me? Are you gonna pay me or what? Look, I don’t want any trouble with you but you can’t disrespect me.”
Yuri stretches in his chair.
“I’ve got your stuff, girl. But it’s not time for me to give it to you yet. I’m about to make an investment, and I could need it at any moment. I’ve got a live one. Let it go for now, come back Thursday. Look, I’m not lying.” He takes a wad of bills and fans them out. “Your stuff is right here, but listen to what I’m telling you…Of course, if you really need it, I’ll gladly…I mean, you know that, right?”
“You know how it is, Yuri…” She comes in and stands by my side.
She smells divine.
“I don’t think there’s a problem waiting till Thursday.”
And she heads for the back room.
Yuri puts the bills away and lights a joint. He blows the smoke in my face.
“Don’t look at me like that. You just never had the balls for business.”
That’s true.
I’m just Omaha, you know.
Omaha, with the happy face.
The one who crosses the street without a lick of sunlight. The one who doesn’t get wet at the beach when it rains. The one who knows how to talk to kids. The one who sells his only pair of shoes today and then tomorrow somebody gives him a motorcycle. The one who never pays but always invites. The one who leaves for church and comes back from the cabaret. The one everybody knows, and who everyone thinks tastes like honey. Or like really cold beer. Or smoked cheese. Or snapper. It’s a matter of taste. The one who came to stay. The one who’s always leaving. That one, yes, Omaha. The one you want to be.