Here’s a modern case of Proust’s madeleine for you: Lentils. Lentils cooked in water, lentils baked in the oven, lentils churned into soup. They are your life source. They remind you of breakfast, dinner, and lunch. Your mom serves them with agua panela, whole cane sugar diluted in water. You sit on the wooden countertop as she turns off the gas-stove, the rusty smell of burnt grains licking at iron roof and the cloth curtains that divide the kitchen and your mother’s bedroom.
Everything is black except for some six to seven candles. Romantic dinners, your mom calls them. Romantic, like your musician uncle in Paris stealing pig entrails from restaurant waste bins to craft the gut strings of his lute. Romantic in a dreamlike, forlorn, wary sort of way. Romantic like… Romeo and Juliet.
But everything in life depends on how you see it, doesn’t it? Your brother Daniel is the only one too old to not see that the darkness of these romantic dinners is imposed rather than chosen, the agua panela diluted not for taste but out of necessity. But you, all scrawny limbs and hope-widened blue eyes, cherish these dinners. You tear up at the thought of them. Then again, your eyes also water whenever your friends deign themselves to hug you. It is no surprise one of your middle school nicknames is Colgate: The #1 dentist recommended brand for sensitive teeth.
Your father sometimes writes you letters after spending time together. Mi Partner, he calls you. Thanks for this great weekend. These letters also bring tears to your eyes.
Your mother finds you one day reading them in bed. Hey, she says. Why don’t you cry when I write you letters?
But Ma, you tell her. Your letters say: I left you two thousands pesos. Get some Mayonnaise.
SPACE
You’ve been going to the express grocery store alone since you were six. The unpaved road that leads to the pueblo is a straight dirt road lined on both sides by mortar houses and small convenience stores, the Cota mountains on one end and the town’s center on the other.
Usually Don Fernando mans the cashier, but every once in a while they hire someone to help around. This time it is a teenage girl you’ve seen a couple of times serving bread in the panaderia. She’s about a few years older then you, about sixteen. Every time you order bread she looks in every direction except your eyes and her hands tremble. This time her cheeks become a blotchy firework of blood vessels sprouting in her skin.
Do you want a bag?
You smile. No, thank you. The planet is dying.
Whenever you have enough change left, you buy some tomatoes. No one understands your fixation for raw vegetables. Carrots, broccoli…There’s a large probability you aren’t too saddened whenever dinner consists of radishes you and your brother steal from your neighbor’s back yard.
The only thing that separates your house from the others is a colony of encenillo trees growing into a framed shrubbery that rides up into the mountains. This makes it easy for robbers to slip into homes unseen. They scatter into the trees, always disappearing at the sight of you and your older brothers. Mostly your brothers.
One night, you wake up to the sound of the rustling trees near your window. Mamá! You yell. Take out the shotgun!
What shotgun?! She screams back, successfully throttling your attempts at alarming the trespassers. But they leave, like they usually do. Robbers are such a customary occurrence in your household that they are part of everyday conversation. Did you buy milk? Where’s the other pair of my medias? Did someone try to break in?
SPACE
The year you turn seven, your parents get a divorce. Your mom’s workdays grow longer, until they surpass the realm of waitressing and meander into an assortment of spurt-of-the-moment business endeavors. She waits for you at school, the open trunk of her car overflowing with T-shirts for sale. You call them porn t-shirts even though they’re just topless women in compromising positions. She sells them to your teachers. Some days, she gets out of her car in the middle of bumper-to-bumper traffic to sell strawberries and carpools most of the Cota kids to and from school.
Three years after the divorce, she makes a whole lot of money on a commission for brokering a real estate deal between friends. And so two months after your 10th birthday, on Christmas, she piles gifts into the living room to the point where even the adjoining kitchen seems to overflow. Andrea, Cara, Daniel and you are resolved to hammer wooden planks on the windows to prevent the thieves from getting their hands on them.
You stay up all night doing so and for the next two weeks, you wake up every day to take inventory and make sure everything is in pristine condition. You sift through the presents, including the coupon your father sent you: a voucher to redeem a weekend evening to buy Adidas soccer cleats. You still have the one from the year before, the one for a remote-control car, another for a box of Strawberry pop tarts you have to get shipped in from the States. You have a drawer filled with those IOUS.
Apart from the thieves, Chia isn’t so bad as far as small towns go. A town on the outskirts of Bogota, it is like most other towns that vacationers pass to reach the carretera, the mountainous highway connecting all regions in Colombia. The highest building is two stories tall and most locales are made of brick and corrugated iron rooftops. With a population of merely 12,000, Cota is a family that stretches across brick and mortar, a home to those who tend to be born, raised, and buried there.
While not everyone knows your mother’s name, ever since she opened up her dessert café on the grand avenue people refer to her as la mujer de los postres. And the times people don’t know you as Mateo, at least you are la mujer de los postres’s son. Everyone loves her. Whether it is because she carpools the town’s kids to school for a commendable rate or donates milk cartons when she doesn’t have enough for herself, who knows. Perhaps if they knew she’d once left their children under the wheel of your then-12-year-old brother while she got out to sell mushrooms in the midst of traffic, they would reconsider. Otherwise, your family is an upstanding part of the familial haven that is the Cota community, a respite from the bustling chaos of Bogota.
Your house is a project your mother adds to over the course of your childhood, growing alongside you and your siblings. Plaster and corrugated iron on the outside, it looked like the typical finca people go to on weekend getaways, a quaint country house. It sits atop a small hill that used to be an indigenous cemetery. When your mother tried to sell the house a while back, about four of the deals suddenly broke right before the contract was going to be signed. The local fortuneteller, the one that reads your future just by looking at a cup of hot chocolate, told your mother that the spirits in the house were content with her.
That same fortuneteller also told your mother that you would be the most successful of her four children. Ese Simon va a ser muy existoso. Despite your resolution on being nothing like your one-upon-a-time childhood hero, even you are grateful to have inherited some of the wiring of your father’s mind. Whereas your mother didn’t go to college, your father studied industrial engineering at the University of Texas. You always thought that he and your mom could have done great things together. She could have provided the motivation and dedication that he lacked, he the brilliance paired with an education that she’d never had the chance to invest in.
But it’s better that they don’t stay together, even if it means that your mother is rarely home because she has to work extra hours to raise the four of you. Seeing her less trumps seeing her with a black eye.
Working longer hours and odder jobs isn’t enough, though. You are eleven when you overhear your mom tell Daniel that you and Cara might have to forego school for the next couple of months. That same day you go around the neighborhood with vinegar, rubbing alcohol, and a cloth rag asking people if they want their car washed.
How much, mijo?
You stand on a wooden porch, looking up at this old woman with a leathery face reminiscent of the roasted pig lechona dishes they sell on every street corner.
Seis mil pesos.
Only six thousand pesos? She laughs, giving you the six thousand plus a ten thousand tip. Tan tierno, el muchacho. A 160% tip honoring the fact that you were just too cute. You’re pretty sure it is more out of pitying kindness than anything else.
SPACE
Your professional prospects branch out over the years. You sell pirated movies at school and even have some classmates working on commission. At twelve you begin working at that pizza place in Chia and weekends at your uncle’s construction site.
Sometimes, however, the most money comes from the most effortless of undertakings, arising from your natural instincts to assuage any sense of boredom edging into your days. One night you are so restless that you decide to work on the English workbook from school. This is your English phase, where you take any opportunity to read or hear, touch anything that radiates those full curved ‘O’s and brash crackling ‘T’s. You finish the entire workbook in one sitting. And you do what any rational fourteen-year old in your position would do and photocopy your answers.
The next day, you sell twenty copies to your classmates for the beautiful sum of 180 thousand pesos. Indeed, the equivalent of three dollars for an entire year’s workload does seem like too much of an awfully good deal to pass on.
Clearly, not everyone is thankful for your thoughtful attempts at facilitating your peer’s lives.
You are called into the principle’s office, where he sits with his bulging beer-belly and a mustache that sits like a puffy Batman decal on his upper lip. All the students call him Mario Bros, so similar is he to the Nintendo phenomenon. His real name is Alex.
Mateo, he says. He has a red folder in his left hand. Valeria told me that you sold her the first two chapters of the English workbook.
I didn’t sell her two chapters, Alex.
Is that right?
You shake your head. I sold her the entire book.
Alex throws the folder unto his desk. Hijueputa, kid. The only thing that saves you is your goddamned honesty.
When he calls your mother to inform her of your probation rather than expulsion, the line is dead. You have to call her twice, you tell him. Alex looks up from his desk. You continue. Once so she finds her phone, then a second time so she picks up.
When she visits the next day, she refuses to sign the academic probation papers in light of your current ‘misdoings,’ papers saying that any further act of misconduct will get you expulsed.
She wears her hair short, brown eyes illuminated by half-moons of rose glittering on her eyelids. She always wears skirts, her legs highways that extend over entire time zones.
No estoy de acuerdo, she tells Alex. I’m not going to sign something I don’t agree with.
What exactly do you not agree with, Jeanette?
This wasn’t indiscipline. He’s just finding ways to help me make ends meet.
And that’s that.
SPACE
You’ve always been gangly, a toothpick away from disappearing altogether. Your friends sometimes call you sancudo de finca, so similar are your limbs to those of a Mosquito Hawk. After the summer of sophomore year, you come back a good few inches taller than most of your friends. You are six feet and two inches of wiry bones and taut taupe skin. But it’s really your eyes that turn heads. Eyes a dark blue that tend to alter people’s focus.
Those eyes, along with your naturally sociable persona, get you places. Of course, it also screws you over as well. You become friends with many girls from grades above you. This is good and all, except that most of them end up pursuing you. And some of them have boyfriends that you are not entirely aware of.
One day Oliver and co. corner you in the hallway. Despite being two years older, he has been held back a year. Twice. The first time was in Kindergarten.
Hey, Vasquez. He walks up until you can smell Chocolatina Jet in his breath. Are they doing communal showers again in Cota? What, you can’t even manage to wash your own fucking pants?
You just smile. Yeah, I got these at the Lost and Found, Rodriquez. What do you think?
The truth is, you did get the pants at the Lost and Found. Since uniforms are so expensive, you just go and say that you’ve lost a medium-sized pair.
You think you’re funny? Oliver shoves you, his hands a whiplash spring displacing you about ten inches.
Your friend Rodrigo, built like a grenade, steps towards Oliver. Let him go, Diaz.
Oliver has you backed up against the lockers by then. His forearm presses against your throat. Want to hear a real joke? The heat of his whisper scorches your neck, his chuckles vibrate against your body.
You passing 9th grade? You wheeze it out with whatever air you have left.
Marica hijueputa. That’s when you see stars. And while you cower against your locker, hands covering your nose, you see Rodrigo jump forward, busting out some punches while Andrea is called over to defend his wimpy-ass little brother once again. Once Andrea comes into the picture, a towering mass of muscle revered by all students with a remote interest in the varsity soccer team, everyone disperses.
The bell rings and your brother pats you on the back before heading off to class. There, there. A day in the life.
Rodrigo reaches out his hand to you crouched on the floor.
You walk with him to class, staring ahead, angry. Angry at the thought that you can’t man-up and face your own battles, angry that you always back-out like a pussy.
Don’t worry, he says. Parce, I’ll always be here to protect you.
And that’s when you make a decision. Never again will anyone fight your battles for you. Fuck that.
Later that day, your nose starts bleeding again in the middle of an exam. After the teacher refuses to let you go to the bathroom, you make sure to drip blood all over it. By the end of class, you hand in what could have been the vestiges of a crime scene.
On your way back home you are stopped right before reaching the bus stop, by the two guys that always colonize those hidden bus street corners. They point a knife at your stomach. Your give them your cellphone, the same cellphone you got last week because they had stolen your previous one. Five days of polishing cement, fifteen hours of molding dough into a thin pizza crust, gone.
SPACE
This is the year that you create a dynamic excel program that dispatches the correct answers to the Physics and Processes exam you’ve been exempt from, which you sell for almost 250 thousand pesos. Three sales lead to the 750 thousand pesos that you later channel into Mixed Martial Arts classes. This is also money you invest in a gym membership after one too many times of being referred to as flaco. You’ve always hated that word.
Junior year is also the year you cease to have any free time at all. You have a job at practically every corner of the university, the library, administration. But you are a pit of energy boiling in an outwardly brittle shell. So much energy, in fact, that you manage to take up a job waiting at Andres Carne de Res from mid-afternoon to mid-morning, sometimes on school nights. This fine restaurant and nightclub, isolated on the outskirts of Bogota and rampant with high-scale clientele and inspiring a national reverence for its cheeky alternative Colombian décor, sees the metamorphosis of your career possibilities. Amidst the bottle-cap-dotted counters you are offered to interview for an account executive position in Bogota. It is also in this backdrop of glowing iron trinkets hanging from the ceiling amongst Colombian flags, that you are offered a modeling contract.
You go to the gym at 6AM, go to school, and work until 2 AM. Some nights, you take your shirt off and go outside to read for class, the cold Cota air being the only sure thing to keep you awake. Even without plentiful time to study, you always manage to get good grades. Even if teachers see you and automatically assume that you are a dimwit pretty boy.
The teacher that you will always remember, however, is Luis. Luis Sampér. He teaches Life and Religion. He is a chubby man with swollen hands so white and mottled with red they resemble raw slabs of meat. The guy is a priest, and he is a badass.
He is one of those professors who curses and explains concepts as if you were buddies exchanging small talk over a bottle of beer. He always singles you out whenever he talks about something relatively blasphemous.
And these pagans… he walks over and motions to you. These lecherous heathens, who spend their time fornicating, from party to party, from puta to puta, are unos guevones, a bunch of morons.
He ends up being your therapist. Not like a legitimate, meeting and office practice type of therapist. He is more like a grounded mind that you sometimes share a sandwich with or visit after class. Sometimes you talk about your father.
You talk about how the day he visited after he’d met his current wife, your sister Cara blew up at him, told him he was like an ATM that didn’t dish out cash. She’d almost punched him in the face.
You are seventeen by now. You’ve never lashed out though, no matter how much you want to. Not when he promises to pay for your school tuition, not when he doesn’t come to Bogota for lack of funds and yet manages to cross the Atlantic to visit his stepdaughter in Spain. You consume this rancor alone, hoping that by not returning his I love you’s on Whatsapp and by ignoring his calls you are conveying a message. Your way of lashing out is fleshed out in dreams where you beat him up after he bruises up your mom real good or where you simply tear at him with the truth about your indifference. He can die, for all you care. Except that he is very much alive. And whenever he calls you are greeted with the same words:
“My lovely son, do you still have that Citibank account?” This is his mechanized phrase set to insinuate that he is indeed interested in decreeing a fatherly contribution now or in the near future. It has become his standard greeting.
One afternoon, you sit outside on the school benches of the soccer field you usually practice on.
Luis tears apart a croissant. Have you ever thought about forgiving him? You know, ceasing to expect things from him so that he stops disappointing you?
You just stare out into the fields. He doesn’t affect me. I don’t give a shit about him.
He slurps on his coke. All I’m saying is, he’s in Medellín or God-knows-where with his wife, preaching that newfound Christianity you tell me he’s into these days, happy as a clown. And meanwhile, you’re here wallowing, pissed off at the mere thought of him.
So what, I should just forget everything he’s done and absolve him for what he hasn’t?
I just think you need a peace of mind. That’s all.
SPACE
Senior year, you’re sure you want to go to Hochschule Esslingen in Germany to study Automobile design. With your Italian citizenship handed down by your immigrant grandmother, you can afford to go there and live in a social housing condominium.
It’s December and El Niño has started rolling around with its cold rainstorms. You ask the director at the Bogota Academy of Design for classes in return for sweeping up the sleet near the classrooms in current remodeling and repair. Given that they have no one else to clear up the hail that sifts through the windowless rooms, he concedes.
The weekends that you don’t work, you stay up drawing, perfecting the fluidity and dynamism of the shadows, trying to stay in tune with the scale and creating a realistic dimensionality.
For the first time in your life, you think there is a clear path ahead of you. You’ve always admired those people, people who are passionate about one thing and spend their lives honing their craft. It is one of the reasons you are so in love with the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with blacksmiths and locksmiths, with the Michelangelo’s and Da Vinci’s whose lives revolved around perfecting their art. Now, most people do everything. Multi-faceted. That is the societal goal. You are the prime symbol of this ideological wave, an amalgam of wits and beauty, tailored with a fine athleticism that impresses where it doesn’t spellbind and artistic hands that can pave three dimensional objects after enough practice. You aren’t Andrea, whose passion for soccer will probably end up with a professional contract with los Millonarios, nor are you Daniel, whose detached examinations will build the basis of his law practice. You aren’t your sister, whose indecision clings to her like a long-lost child.
So mercurial is she that, despite having your father whip up money for her first semester at Los Andes university, she has no qualms about dropping out.
She sits on the kitchen countertop, brown eyes puffy and tears streaming down her cheeks. She is tall and thin, just like you, except that her black hair runs like silk down her spine. Where you are bronze she is pale, almost translucent. Her recent complexion can only be compared to ash.
No puedo. I can’t do this, Mami. I feel like I’m drowning here. I can’t stay.
Your mother, never one for grand displays of affection, takes Cara’s nineteen-year-old frame into her arms, encasing her in her chest as if to protect her from the world. Cara has always been the consentida of the family. Most women in a household of men are.
You spend the last semester of your senior year working on your application for Germany. The month before your graduation is full of family meetings with everyone brainstorming how to raise enough funds to send Cara to Argentina to study graphic design. Everyone whips in: Daniel a bonus he got at work, Andrea some of the money he raised for college before he got his scholarship. Even you give some two-figure tips you’ve gotten at Andres.
The days crawl forward and you receive various notifications about the upcoming graduation ceremony.
One evening, you find your mom in the kitchen drinking her late night coffee, pouring over the costs of airline tickets to Buenos Aires.
Ma. The school is ordering the graduation gowns this week.
She looks up with a smile. That’s great, hijo.
Yeah. You need to sign a few papers so they’ll order them.
Oh you can sign them. She looks back down and waves her hand.
You learned to forge both of your parents’ signatures when you were six, and you’ve been signing every document from Kindergarten onwards. A part of you wonders why you even thought to ask.
SPACE
The next day in class, you get up to leave when Luis calls you over from his desk.
Oiga, Mateo.
He asks you about what you are going to study. It dawns on you that this is the first time anybody has asked. When you tell him, he lies back in his chair, elbows flayed outwards, head braced on his hands. Germany, huh? How does your family feel about that?
You scratch the back of your neck. I, uh, haven’t told them yet. They haven’t asked.
His eyes narrow. After what seems like an eternal silence, he leans over his desk. You’re one of the brightest kids I know, Mateo. Whatever you do, you’ll kill it.
You nod. Gracias, Luis. And with a quick smile, you leave.
SPACE
The first thing you do when you get home is thrust all your auto designs unto your bed. After you’ve sorted the sketches for the application, you gather them into one of those manila folders your brother Daniel is so fond of. And when you hear the front door open, you run down the stairs, folder in both hands.
Cara closes the door behind her. She wears sweatpants and a sweatshirt that swallow her whole. You walk up behind her as she heads for the fridge. Is mom with you?
Hello to you to, Mateo. No. She grabs a carton of milk and begins heating up some coffee your mom brewed during breakfast. When you sit down on the wooden island, she looks up at you.
Que?
I thought you were helping her out at the postreria.
I was. She shrugs. My feet started to hurt.
You look up at the clock, knowing fully well that if your mother is working alone she won’t be back until midnight.
So you head out the front door and walk into town until you reach Dulce Camino. Once you see your mom clearing up the dessert display trays, you rush over to take them from her hands. I’ve got them, Ma.
She has the light pink apron on that Daniel got her for her birthday, the one with the three cupcake vector logo splayed out at the front. Two concave wells hang below her eyes and her jeans are dusted with a thin layer of flour. She sighs when you walk in, pausing with a soft smile. Gracias, hijo.
An hour later, once you’ve helped her carry over all the baking supplies back home, metal rustles as you open the front door.
You grab the folder you left at the kitchen table and follow your mother into her room.
Ma, I want to show you something.
She takes off her earrings and hangs her apron on the back of her bathroom door. Estoy mamada.
It’ll just take a sec, ma. You reach into the folder.
She begins to peel off her shirt, sloughing off her pants. I’ve been working since 6 AM, Mateo. Mañana.
And as she gets under the covers and closes her eyes, you feel your artwork grow warm and soften under the sweat of your hands.
SPACE
On graduation day you wake up. You place some cereal in the microwave until it’s lukewarm and soggy. While you wait for your coffee to brew, you sift through the ribbon cords you’d been allotted with your gown. Valedictorian. Red. Excellence in Academics. Gold.
Cara walks in, swimming in her oversized pajamas, a big smile plastered on her face. A part of you expects her to hug you.
Mami! Oigan! Her voice scrapes your ears. Cara rushes towards you, a bounce in her step. When your mother and brothers rush into the kitchen, Cara places one hand on your shoulder.
You feel her left hand appear from where it has been hiding behind her back. You hear paper crinkling.
Guess who’s going to the Argentina University of the Arts?
Arms fly out. Cara embraces your mother. Limbs and smiles intertwine. You smile and give Cara a hug. Felicitaciones, you say. You drink your coffee but it has grown cold.
SPACE
The night of graduation, you hit a punching bag for about thirty minutes, your heart and every other muscle practically bulging at the seams. When you get home, your muscles are already hot-wired into the most beautiful pain. You take off your clothes and get into the shower, the water scalding on your skin.
You slip on that white button-up shirt that you love, then that beige coat that makes people think you are a towering product of money and conceit, accustomed to staring down whatever waltzes into its line vision.
You’ve always been Mateo. The smart one. The pretty one. The Most-Likely-to Succeed. You aren’t afraid of thieves or the spirits that live in your home. You don’t need to be fawned over. You don’t need anyone’s help. You don’t need people to care.
You’ll model, study, work some more. You’ll graduate Suma Cum Laude with a degree in Economics in Bogota and by then your family will have nicknamed you Fantasmito. Ghost, because you’re almost never around. You look at the Hochschule Esslingen application on your desk, already slipped into a manila folder with an address postmarked in Germany. You throw it away before you close the door behind you.