Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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Latin
Heritage
Foundation
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Special thanks to those who collaborated with the reading of various drafts of these translations: Michelle Bacon Curry, Carol
Severino, Darek Benesh, Edgar Moros and Allastair Beattie. Their
various suggestions and points of view encouraged me to keep working on this translation.
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Memories
There I was, intensely lonely, sitting in a corner of that
empty room, releasing my sadness, dragged down by my
memories, evoking the bustle of the last days, the farewells
of my people, the encouraging words from my parents and,
above all, remembering those first experiences in this country. Memories that were planted in my brain then, never to
leave, now jumped inside my mind like hot popcorn in
metamorphosis or shooting stars in their hasty journey to
who knows where.
Fifteen years have passed since then but my memory is
immune to the wear of time. I remember the sweltering
afternoon we arrived in the United States for the first time.
That day I had a strange feeling in my tummy as I did each
time I faced the unknown. The excitement of recent weeks
was combined then with a strange sense of nostalgia, fear
and uncertainty. My heart beat anxiously as the huge plane
shook against the solid land. Land of great poets like Dickinson and Poe and spirited warriors like the Apache Geronimo and Dr. Martin Luther King. Land of immigrants, land
of the American dream. The same land that witnessed the
rise of the majestic Golden Gate, that gave birth to the exalted Lincoln and to the legend of Paul Bunyan and his giant
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My friends
The first days in this country were quite strange. It was
so hot and there was so much humidity in the air that I
thought I couldnt bear it. Often I felt an uncomfortable
sensation of dizziness that made me fade for a few moments. I also felt like the floor was crumbling with every
step I took. I remember going shopping with my parents at
many junk stores in an attempt to settle down in our new
home. I also remember long and sweaty walks because we
didnt have a car yet. Eagleeye Court was a stifling and rickety old university apartment complex where we lived during our stay in the United States.
The first time I saw Cee-Cee and Luddya, they were
playing with other children in front of my apartment. That
day was unbearably hot inside the house and as we had no
air conditioning yet, my Mam allowed me to escape from
that indoor oven, and go out to try to make friends. The sky
was of a pure and splendid blue, and floating in the air,
thousands of cotton flakes that constantly fell off the trees
because of the gusts of wind that shook the branches. My
fear of the unknown has always reflected in a strange feeling
in my tummy. My guts sometimes begin to emit a sharp
sound and I feel a strange emptiness somewhere in my
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anywhere in the world: the Chinese, the Eskimos, the Nepalese, the Romani, the Russians, the Indians, the Arabs, the
Africans, in short, everyone. My Pap always told me about
the people and their cultures and taught me that our smile is
a good ally. Luddya waved her hand, inviting me to get
closer. She stammered a few words as she pointed out the
cotton flakes. She, like the other children, jumped trying to
catch the flakes that trickled between her hands and laughed
incessantly. Her laughter was sharp and lively: it resembled
my friend Irlanda's laughter back in Venezuela, or that
laughter that my Pap protectively kept in the hard drive of
his computer and that he made me listen to when I was sad
or upset. It was a comforting laughter; it was a therapy to
my ears.
Luddya looked at me, said some things to me and
laughed. Her words were a gentle and cheerful whisper but
incomprehensible to my ears. I just smiled because her
laugh was contagious and because of the nerves from being
in that situation, unable to understand those whispers. I
started to jump like they did, trying to catch the cotton
flakes. I just tried to do what the rest of them did. Now I
remember it took me about two months to start making
sense of my friends words, especially Cee-Cees, who had
a particular sound in her pronunciation of eses in ingls.
Cee-Cee lived in 612, two apartments from ours. She
told me her parents had left Korea long ago, when she was
two. Her house didnt smell bad, but the whole apartment
was a mess. Many books, shoes, clothes, and dishes were
always scattered around the living room. They had an old
TV that they probably picked up from the dumpsters. I
think Mam couldnt have lived in that apartment, not even
for two seconds. Cee-Cees mother was young and pretty
and always wore a hat on her head because, according to
Cee-Cee, she was afraid of the effects of ultraviolet rays on
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her skin. Her dad was young but not handsome. He wore a
pair of glasses, thick as the magnifying glasses at school,
which made him look older than he really was. Cee-Cee
was very clever: she was the first in her class and attended a
special class for outstanding students. In the afternoons she
learned algebra from her dad, and also had an innate ability
to play the piano.
Zack was a chubby boy that, like me, had recently arrived to Eagleeye Court, but he came from Alabama. I think
he came a month before me. Like his mother, he had no
trouble making friends. He didnt like playing with the
other boys but only with Cee-Cee, Luddya and me, always
trying to be our leader. Pap used to say that Zack was a
nice girl trapped in the body of a chubby boy, and Clara said
he wasnt straight, that he seemed to belong to the other
side, and indeed he was from the other side because he lived
in 598, the apartment across the hall, just in front of ours.
His mother was a nice woman who occasionally invited us
kids to her apartment to watch Hannah Montana and High
School Musical movies. She said that theyd soon have to
move to join Zacks father in Florida, and Zack was sad
because hed have to leave.
Lala was the girl who lived in 604. She was very tall for
her age and always wore a scarf on her head and a small
diamond on each of her lobes that shone in the distance. I
played in her house a couple of times though her mom
didnt usually allow her to invite any-one into her place,
especially when her mom studied those cards with images of
kings, travelers and skeletons, trying to find meanings and
foretell her future or when holding a pendulum in her hand,
letting it sway from side to side over her other palm trying
to find answers. Lala lived with her gypsy mother, her
brother Petre and her stepfather who was not a gypsy. Lala
said her mother was an expert at preparing tea to cure ills
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of the body and soul, but those infusions didnt help to relieve her own pain. Her mother was suffering because of
having been banished from her own people, her kampania,
from her vitsa, for having married a gage, a man who did not
belong to her people, her culture, and was now in a strange
condition that she called Moraime. Young Hong and his
brother would be in Eagleeye Court only for one year because their dad was a professor at a university in Korea and
they had to return. Those boys kept bothering us all the
time. They misbehaved, yelled at everyone and often tried
to spit on us. Although we never invited them to play, they
were always nearby, looking for any excuse to play with us
or spit.
Luddya was my best friend for as long as I lived in
Eagleeye Court. From the first day I met her, I knew she
would be. Peter, her little brother, was two, and she was
responsible for taking care of him when we were playing
outside. He always imitated her in everything she did. He
was like her real shadow. Luddya was friendly and very
good to me and always smelled of an exquisite fragrance of
strawberries. She said her mother had bought her a perfume
that she used religiously every day even though her mom
didnt have a religion. Luddya had told me that her mother
didnt believe in God. I was a believer, and I think Luddya
was too. I liked spending time with Luddya because she
made me laugh a lot. Her giggle was so funny that it made
me laugh endlessly, and in turn, my laugh made her giggle
relentlessly. It was a circle of laughter. She always talked
and laughed; she was very daring and was only shy when
talking to strangers. Every day after school she went to our
apartment and watched TV with me, except for the No TV
Week, in which we earn points at school for not watching
TV for a single instant. She liked to visit me for the smell of
cinnamon in my house, and I loved her exquisite fragrance
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of strawberries. Luddya lived in 621, downstairs. Her father was from Texas and studied philosophy, and her mother was Russian and liked making desserts and dancing Salsa.
Every time I went to her house, her mother offered us pieces of brownies, warm and sweet-scented, and when I bit
into them, the brown crumbs were trapped in between my
teeth until I wiped them with the tip of my tongue. Pap
wouldnt let me go to the movies with Cee-Cee and her
parents, but he would let me go with Luddyas family, because he said they were friendly even though her mother
didnt believe in God.
There were many other children that from time to time
played with us around Eagleeye Court. There they were
Gloria, Lucas, Charlie, Meysent, Xavi, Vanessa and her
sister Fernanda, Courtney, Mike, Tatiana and her sister
Vernica, Joan, Laurie, Nicole, Pam, Marie Claire, Michael
Oliver and little George, Paul, Katie, Dana, Juanita,
Sebastin, Gloria, Mallory, Samuelito, the Colombian
womans son, Austin and many other children from Japan,
China, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, and Mongolia who lived
nearby but that I never could distinguish who was who because most of them shared a common trait that I never
knew how to describe. It wasnt the shape of their eyes, nor
that enigmatic oblique look. I was certain about that. There
were always lots of them. And even though my best friends
were Luddya and Cee-Cee, the day that Zack moved to
Florida never to return to Eagleeye Court again, a single
tear escaped from my eye and rolled down my cheek just as
he waved his hand saying goodbye from the rear seat of his
mothers car.
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daydreaming in that classroom, amid a river of impenetrable sounds, until Miss Brown, without me realizing how she
had come back there, asked me with a reassuring smile "Victoria, aryu orait?" making me awaken from my trance, and
making all the children reappear at once, as if by magic.
That day I just managed to draw and color a few pictures
that I still keep today. I noticed that the classroom was very
different from those I was used to in Venezuela. There were
computers and televisions, and there was no chalkboard.
There were no desks like in my former school but five sets
of tables and chairs grouped with four students each. In my
group there was a girl from Japan, one from the U.S. and a
boy from India, and our tables were arranged so that we all
could face everyone when we were working. In our Venezuelan classroom, all desks were arranged in long rows
facing the blackboard. We couldnt talk among ourselves
and no one could look at the classmate's face in front, just
her hair and her upper back. For a long time, I only saw the
same hair tie that held my friend Sofias straight hair. Besides the teachers face and the faded gray blackboard, my
sight from that desk was only hair and ties.
Team Three recess was at 10:30 in the morning, so
that all children headed to the playground, and although it
was nice and tempting, I sat down to watch other children
play during the agonizingly long twenty-minute break. I
never felt so alone in my life. I didnt know any of those
children, and my friends Cee-Cee and Luddya were not in
my same Team Three class. None of those children would
talk to me unless I learned to decipher those enigmatic
murmurs, and I knew that would take some time. At about
eleven o'clock we had a sort of introductory music class,
and the teacher showed us the different instruments in her
class like the piano, violins, flutes, drums and lyre. I assumed that wed have the opportunity to learn how to play
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constantly. The winter was very long, very gray, and above
all, very cold. There was only snow and layers of ice on the
roads, on the trees, on the lawn. Everything got frozen.
The snow is another story.
In our neighborhood there were a few Americans, some
Latinos, many Hindus and a ton of Asians. My Mam said
that they all were from China, but the truth is that my
friend Cee-Cee and her family were from Korea, Luddya
and her mom were Russians and her father was from the
United States. There were also Japanese, Thai, Arab, African, Spanish, Chinese and Gypsies like Lala and Petres
family. I knew that because my Pap told me so. I didnt
know how he could differentiate the Chinese from the Japanese people, or the Korean from the Thai people. To me,
they all had a very similar trait that I couldnt tell for sure. I
wasnt sure if it was their eyes, their oblique gaze or the
absence of folds in their eyelids. At first I could only differentiate my friend Cee-Cee as being from Korea because she
was my friend, and Kyoko, a Japanese girl from my class, as
being Japanese because she had given a cultural presentation
about her country, dressed up in a cute pink kimono with
blue stripes and a thick sash around her tiny waist. In fact, I
think many of my friends from school had the same problem: they thought I was Mexican, and even though I explained it, they failed to understand that Mexico and Venezuela were two different countries.
There were a lot of people living in our neighborhood,
but there were many open spaces too. There was a large
parking lot with many cars and two large containers located
in the center, one for garbage and one for recycling. In the
green areas there were a few swings and two large wooden
boxes filled with sand so that younger children could play.
In the back of our block, where we often played, there
were many pines, oaks and huge cottonwood trees full of
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squirrels. The summer winds shook the leafy trees, and tore
thousands of cotton flakes in each burst. The whole sky was
covered with a sort of rain of tiny cotton flakes floating
gently everywhere. It was beautiful! It was like falling
snow, but without the cold and moisture. We all played at
catching the tiny cotton flakes. Some afternoons the chipmunks played near us, but they never let us catch them.
There were also large and small squirrels. In my country
there are cats and dogs in the streets, but in the United
States what you usually saw were many squirrels, rabbits
and raccoons.
In the afternoons, when I came from the school bus
stop, I always walked around all the blocks to get to our
apartment. Walking close enough to some open windows I
could perceive different smells coming out of them. A few
were nice like those from my house that always had a cinnamon scent, or Luddyas house when her mom prepared
brownies, but the vast majority of windows gave off a horrible stench. It made me want to vomit. It was the stale
smell of garlic after frying. The steam and fried garlic stench
coming out of some neighbors windows was so strong that
my Mam often woke in the middle of the night wanting to
puke and feeling impregnated with the smell of garlic in her
whole body. My Mam said it was the same smell she found
in the university bus when it was all crowded, and every
time she passed by the front of some aromatic windows she
always covered her nose with the tip of her pointing finger
and her thumb. She said she wanted to move into a neighborhood where her neighbors didnt smell like garlic, but
Pap said wed live in those apartments because they were
cheap, we had free internet and cable and also because
theyd be our home only for four or maybe five years.
One of our neighbors windows gave off that strange
smell at all hours of the day. Sometimes in the early morn[42]
ing when I walked to wait for the school bus, I passed and
breathed a mouthful of air near the window to check if during the night the stench had disappeared, but no, it was
always that nasty smell of fried garlic that made my stomach
sick. In the afternoon after school, I prepared myself at the
beginning of the corridor and held my breath. I walked fast
holding the air in my lungs. I passed by the first apartment,
then Paps African friends apartment, I could hardly hold
the air in my lungs any longer and hurried my steps, passing
in front of the apartment of some Americans, then my garlic smelling neighbors apartment, walked faster, knocked
on our door in a hurry, still holding my breath until my
Mam opened the door and I unloaded my breath and filled
my lungs with the pleasant smell of cinnamon. Mam scolded me because she said it was dangerous to hold your
breath, but I liked it. Clara told me that she preferred to
walk down the other wing and avoid the smell of garlic
because it could stick into your body. I thought this must be
true, because the girl who lived in that apartment also had a
garlic smell all of the time. Her mother used to accompany
her to the bus stop (because she was younger than I) and
when they passed by, they left a trail of fried garlic lingering
in the air.
One day my parents were invited to the wedding of
some good friends from the university. Clara and I stayed
home. She was 14 and she was responsible for the house
when they were not home. My Mam was excited because it
had been a long time since shed gotten to go to a party
with my Pap, so from early morning she began to prepare
the clothes theyd wear for the wedding. She spent hours
washing and straightening her hair to have it sleek and silky
at the party and made herself up like a movie star. Exquisite
perfume, the kind she liked. She was radiant and beautiful
like the photos of her wedding. My Pap dressed up in his
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usual dark suit and went down to wait in the car for my
Mam to finish getting ready. My Pap impatiently honked
from the car and my Mam: I'm coming! My Mam went out
hastily, and in her eagerness to walk faster and reach the
honking car quickly, she didnt realize that the neighbors
had installed an exhaust fan in their window. The strong
warm flow of air and its fried garlic smell covered Mam
completely, from head to toe. My Mam was so impregnated with that rancid smell of fried garlic, that my Pap had to
roll all the car windows down on their way to the wedding,
and once there, they sat in a corner of the room and didnt
dare to dance for their shame and fear of being discovered
as the cause of the stench that had flooded the entire hall.
My Mam spent nearly a week trying to remove, with scents
of cinnamon and lemon, that unshakable smell stuck on her
skin, and since then, she hated that smell so much that she
quit using garlic in her kitchen, and our meals didnt have
that characteristic flavor any longer.
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Pictures
My Mam loves pictures. She always struggled to buy
enough picture frames to display our best photographs.
There were pictures everywhere in our small apartment, on
the coffee table, on top of the fridge, the washing machine,
the shelves, in the small bookcase, and the cabinet where
the TV sat. There were also pictures of us in my parents
room and in ours. The only place where there were no
pictures was in the bathroom, but my Mam was thinking
about sticking a Vincent Van Gogh poster on that door; she
had bought it at Goodwill for 90 cents.
My Pap used to say that pictures were not good because
they reflected only a single moment of our lives, and that
moment would be captured forever or, at least, until the
color and the image on the paper withered and disappeared
completely. Mam, on the other hand, said that she loved
them because pictures reflected peoples personality and
virtues. Besides, she said that with so many photographs she
was always surrounded by the people she loved and so, even
when no one else was home, she never felt alone. Mam
wanted us to make a family portrait to immortalize a moment like my Pap said. She said that every time we looked
at that picture, we would see our virtues; the good qualities
which she said each of us had. Clara, Pap, Mam and me. I
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hug her except when drinking many beers. Those were his
most loving moments. Pap said we were making a sacrifice
in this country so that we could then live better in our own.
His job was studying and learning about peoples cultures
and languages. He was quite intent on learning everything
and when I had questions, he always had an answer, though
sometimes his answers werent entirely true. Of course,
Pap read a lot and he asked us to read a lot too. He liked
the Rolling Stones and Venezuelan folk music. When he
was in a bad mood, he didnt speak to anyone; but when he
was happy, he was very funny, teased everyone and always
made us laugh. In his portrait I envisioned him furrowing
his brows and holding a heavy book under his arm.
My hermana Clara is four years older than I and, by that
time she no longer liked to play with me. She preferred
friends her age. Clara always said we should grow and mature, but my Mam said she was mature for certain things
and not for others. I understood what Clara meant, because
a person changes little by little. She said that you know you
have changed when you realize you have traded your dolls
for nail polish. Clara is very intelligent, and though I never
saw her studying she always got As in all her classes. Sometimes, in those sweating-hand nights, she let me sleep with
her, and also allowed me to hug her close and kick my fears
out. No matter how much she argued with me, in the end,
she wound up giving me kisses and hugging me tightly.
Every time we went out, she always looked after me; she
took care of me and felt the responsibility of a big sister.
Clara also learned to bake brownies like Luddya's mother,
and she often baked them in the dark winter evenings. Clara
liked pictures very much. In her camera that Pap had given
her, she had a thousand images of herself in a thousand poses. She said she was rehearsing for when her fame-time
came. She sang and had many photos taken. In her portrait I
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Paper dreams
"If you can make a thousand origami cranes, your dreams will
come true." I read that once in a book in my school. It was a
very sad story about Sadako, a Japanese girl suffering from
leukemia. She wanted to live as long as her friend Kenyi.
The atomic bomb that was dropped on the people of Japan
long ago had ravaged them ever since. She began making
little paper cranes with the hope of reaching one thousand
figures and thereby achieving immortality. She only managed to make a hundred before fulfilling her dreams of
eternity, though she died on some unknown day.
I always wondered if you could actually reach immortality. My Pap said that after we died wed go to heaven and
wed all meet there, but I didnt like that idea. I was afraid
to die. Sometimes, at night, a terrible anguish wrinkled my
heart and I wept bitterly at the thought that we had to die.
At the end of the day you realized that we were just fleeting
through this world, and after death, nobody would remember us. Each of us will eventually die and nobody can avoid
that. That made me panic and it hurt my soul. I wondered
what it would be like after death. Would people wear the
same clothes they were wearing at the time of their death,
or would they wear the clothes their relatives picked out for
them before putting them into the coffin? If that was the
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case, then heaven wouldnt be very fair, because some people would wear better clothes than others. Would everyone
be dressed in white? Would there be absolute equality? My
Mam told me that a friend of hers died when she was very
young, and I wondered if people who died young stayed
young forever, or if, on the contrary, they grew up, got old
and then what? Would they die? Again? My Mam got distressed when I commented that I had dreamed of missing
teeth because, as abuela used to say, that supposedly was an
unmistakable sign of the nearness of death. My Pap joked
that dying wasnt the problem, the problem was the length
of time we would be dead. Back then, I couldnt understand
what he meant by that.
My hermana Clara had her own dreams; she wanted to be
a singer. She kept singing all the time. She sang from the
time she got home from school until Mam would get annoyed and ask her to keep quiet. She sang in the school
choir and from the day she was given a solo in her choir, she
sang the same tune all the time. Clara sang her verse day
and night; Pap, too, sang his favorite song ceaselessly. I
preferred to play the violin. Clara told me she wanted to be
a singer; she wanted to be famous. I, however, wanted to
be a veterinarian. I liked animals; especially baby ones. I
liked puppies, kittens, bunnies, foals. Of course, I didnt
like insects or those wild animals that were dangerous.
Once Luddya and I found some nestling sparrows lying on
the ground behind the apartments, almost dying, and we
tried to feed them with the worms that abounded in the
base of the pines after rainy days. But the baby birds didnt
make it, so we decided to dig a hole in the ground and give
them a Christian burial. It was possible that the dead sparrows went to heaven too.
I liked drawing with my crayons, or painting with watercolors or even my Mams oils. My Pap said he believed
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Mature girl
Clara didnt like to play dolls with me anymore. I think
she didnt enjoy it since the day she became seorita. It was
while on our vacation in the Sur del Lago, in ta Nulas
house. That day we had been playing soccer outdoors in the
relentless heat with all the boys and girls from the block.
Clara said she needed to go to the bathroom because she
had a distinct warm feeling throughout her body, a strange
tingling inside and an unstoppable urge to pee.
When I went to look for her, Clara was still inside the
bathroom; she was very scared and asked me to get Mam
Sofia. Mam went into the bathroom and soon they both
came out hugging each other with tears in their eyes; I
didnt understand why. Pap came and asked what was happening. Mam told us that Clara had come into womanhood, that she had just crossed the threshold of puberty,
that her little girl-body had started to become a seoritas,
that her hips would soon begin to grow to reach Mams
round shapes and size, that her breasts, like little April
flowers, would spring up sooner than later, that she just
wasnt a little girl anymore and then I began to cry. My
world collapsed because my playmate and companion on
scary nights wouldnt play with me any longer. Pap just
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hugged her and said nothing, but his gaze met my Mams
with a hint of resignation.
I remember that Clara didnt care much the day I told
her about Taylor, the boy with an angel face that I liked
from the very first moment I saw him at Welby Elementary
School. It was important to me and I told her how I had
tried to approach him during recess to closely look at those
gorgeous blue eyes, and to suggest to him that I liked him,
because my Mam said it was not okay to say that to a boy
directly, but she said no-thing about allusions. I wanted to
be near him, to know what he thought, to know where he
was from, to know what he liked to do and of course, to
know whether he liked me even if only a little, because that
would make me intensely happy. But he slipped away
quickly; he moved away from me all frightened, ran and
looked back at me like a deer escaping the murderous rifles
in hunting season. He looked at me from the distance and
bent his head down, wanting to escape from my persecuting
gaze each time he felt he was observed. Taylor was the first
boy that made me sigh, the first for whom I felt that
strange, indescribable feeling of falling in love. But that
illusion quickly vanished like the firework smoke vanishes
during New Year Eve in Venezuela. It was important to
me but not to Clara who took it like a joke and even ridiculed me in front of my parents telling them of my platonic
love.
Clara became seorita in a fleeting moment. Her behavior changed that very day. She didnt like my games or
my important secrets anymore; she was only interested in
her own affairs. Seoritas affairs. I think the day that happened to me it was no different except that I wasnt playing
but helping my mom in the kitchen. I felt a slight tingling in
my abdomen and a strange feeling of being wet just as I cut
the oregano to flavor the meat for lunch, and from that day,
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My house furniture
My Mam said that our home looked like the apartment
of a college student during our first months in Eagleeye
Court. We had very few belongings and the truth was that
it dismayed me. After having everything at our home in
Venezuela, coming to the United States and not having all
the amenities was very discouraging. Professor Caroline,
my Paps friend, had lent us a dining table, a sofa, and a
chair for our bedroom. Pap had bought a couple of used
fans that made a lot of noise and our first mattresses were
our own clothes and then a rather uncomfortable inflatable
mattress, the ones you can get at WalMart for 12 dollars.
During the months of May, June, July and August it was the
season when many students were leaving the residence
complex and many others were coming, and between moving out and moving in, many chose to leave their furniture
behind, right next to the large dumpsters, with the hope
that someone in need could use it. Many said it was much
cheaper to leave the furniture behind and buy new than
paying to move it to another city or country.
During those months you often saw sofas, microwaves,
mattresses, lamps, radios, chairs, tables, cabinets, televisions, computers, cooking utensils, clothing, winter shoes,
fans, air conditioners. In short, around those bins you could
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ize that the fire truck was parked right next to the dumpster
and they collided with the truck right in front. Not only the
mirror of the dresser but the windshield glass of the fire
truck had broken from the impact. Journalistic curiosity
came to understand what had happened and decided to
write an extensive report on the dangers of the moves in
our residence complex and the nightly routine of the
Eagleeye Court tenants.
How embarrassing! That was the first time my parents
appeared together, photographed next to the dumpster of
the residences, on the front pages of all local newspapers
and on the university TV channel, with the stunning news:
"International students risk their lives in their need to furnish their homes in Eagleeye Court." Shame wouldnt let
them go for a walk out at night in search of furniture for the
house anymore. Pap said we could buy the furniture we
needed when they sent the money from Venezuela. That
would take time.
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computer on which we researched information for our projects. In the United States, children were the ones who
talked the most in class, not the adults. We worked in
groups and at the end of the projects we always went for a
walk to a park or to the children's museum. Each of us had
an assigned job within the classroom, such as watering the
plants, feeding our hamster, preparing class materials. And
every Friday morning we sat on the carpet to reflect on
what we had done during the week and to plan the next
tasks. The truth is that I feel there was a great difference
between the Venezuelan schools and the American schools.
Pap said he liked some things about America such as our
city-based school district system, the efficiency of the postal
service, some of the beautiful places that reflected the touch
of Gods hand like the Rocky Mountains and Niagara Falls,
and of course, he loved Whitey's ice cream that we often
ate at the Coral Ridge Mall in Iowa City. But he wouldnt
like to stay in America, or get used to the American lifestyle. Living off bank loans and working your entire life to
pay the home mortgage or school loans. Many credit cards
but many debts to the bank as well. It was a vulgar paradox
because people became slaves of a system promoted in the
name of total freedom. According to Pap, it was very easy
to spend and get debts in this country. People generally
respected and obeyed the laws and regulations but not so
much out of social courtesy, which many people there had,
but because of the large fines to which they were subjected.
In the town where we lived, the people were friendly, but I
think that was the exception and not the norm. Pap said
there was a double morality, but I didnt understand what
he meant until I heard about the little children and their
adoptive father some time later. Pap also said he didnt
want to stay illegally in this country; he said he and Mam
would have to get divorced and marry Americans to fake
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marital status in order to get expedited citizenship documents as many of our friends from Chicago had done, between struggles and tears, but absolutely convinced of the
truth of the coveted American dream. He also said that you
needed a lot of money to attend college, and those who
couldnt afford to repay the loan to the bank just couldnt
study. How sad, because studying at college in Venezuela
was free but the problem was getting admitted and the constant strikes. Pap didnt like the way many police officers
in the U.S. watched us. He said they looked at us as if we
were suspicious or guilty of something.
My father studied peoples cultures, and said that each
city or town had different ways of behaving and that each
culture saw the world in a very particular way. The Japanese claimed that the sun was red, but that was crazy because everyone knew it was yellow. Americans were said to
have gray eyes and hair, but in Venezuela that same person
would have blue eyes and canoso hair. In Venezuela there are
no gray eyes; there are only black, brown, blue, gatos and
aguarapados eyes. Color is a sensitive topic in the United
States, especially if it is the color that people wear on their
skin. At school, there was a big fuss one day because one
boy called another boy "Nigger" and that is a banned word
in English, or at school, but I never knew since when. In
Venezuela, when you want to show affection to someone
you can call them negro, negra, negrito or negrita as we called
my hermana Clara.
In Venezuela we learned that there were five continents,
but in the U.S. they assured me that there were seven, and I
always wondered where the other two were that Venezuelans didnt know about. Pap also said that students in Venezuela attended his classes all perfumed and dressed up, but
in America they attended class in pajamas and flip-flops, and
many didnt even brush their teeth before going to the early
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lemon, the juicy semi-hard cheese, and so on. Pap said that
the North was a chimera.
Off we went around the mall. Inside the car, my Pap
played his music, singing his favorite song and making up
the lyrics of the song: "... I went off to Eagleeye Court / to
make me a few bucks / now Im back in Caracas, riding herd on a
buncha dumb clucks / the North is a chimera / what an atrocity /
and they say you live there like a king / Oh! Eagleeye Court / you
dont flatter me with your gold / I reject your prohibition, I dislike
it and deplore it / to Eagleeye Court / I'm not co-ming anymore /
Theres no watercress / no wine and no love.
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Blinks
From my living-room window I could see the long hallway that connected all the neighboring apartments. I could
see almost everybody as they left their homes and crossed
the corridor to reach the stairs, which were close to my
window, and go downstairs. In the courtyard below I could
see the grass and some trees where my friends and I used to
play. There were two swings in the yard and many bikes
lying all around. My friends and I never parked them in the
racks, just left them in the grass out of laziness. Besides,
Pap said nobody would steal anything from the outdoors. A
little farther you could see cars in the parking lot. Lots of
cars. I could recognize my friend Luddyas dads car, white,
always covered with a layer of dust that made it look almost
gray; Cee-Cees moms, a dark colored one, I didnt know
whether it was blue or black, with a silver figurine on top of
the hood, and my Paps: red, shiny and still with a brandnew smell. I could also see the dumpsters stuffed with garbage and recyclable material in the center of the parking lot
and a random piece of abandoned furniture that hadnt yet
been detected by the Asians.
During some summer afternoons, when I didnt have
much to do and the heat outside was unbearable due to high
humidity, I liked to watch, from our window, those who
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My Paps clocks
During one of the first days of November, clocks across
the country were delayed an hour. That was the only day of
the year with 25 hours, although they were officially 24 and
the same hour was repeated twice that day. We also had a
day in March or April with only 23 hours. That delay of the
clock in November indicated the beginning of a long and
very cold season. It was the transition between fall and winter. Temperatures began to drop slowly from October and
suddenly you realized that winter had arrived. That was a
very beautiful transition. Around the city, the trees were
full of different shades and colors, which gradually vanished
as the trees lost their leaves. Streets were carpeted with a
nice layer of yellow ocher leaves, and on clear days, in the
splendid blue sky, you could see countless families of geese
traveling southbound and the trails airplanes left behind on
their journey to Chicago, Moline or perhaps St. Paul, Minnesota.
My cousin Luisa told me that the government in our
country had decided to turn back the clocks for half an
hour. I think that strategy was used to help childrens
health, since they had to wake up so early to attend school.
I remember when we lived in Venezuela, Clara and I had to
get up at 5:45 in the morning to get ready and wait for Pap
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the clocks. I got up and went to his room, which was right
next to ours. There they were: my Mam all curled up like
she used to sleep and my Pap, facing down, with one arm
hanging off the bed. His watches were still arranged in line
on his bedside and all showing the same time as the clock in
our room: 2:40 a.m. I wondered one more time: Would it
be 2:40 a.m. fall-time and my Pap hadnt woken up, or, if
instead, he wouldve woken up and set all the clocks and
watches while I slept? If that was the case, I hadnt slept
only fifteen minutes but an hour and fifteen minutes. I assumed that my Pap had fallen asleep and I decided to wake
him up:
- " Pap, Pap, wake up. You should adjust the clocks", said I
in a whisper, trying not to wake Mam up.
My Pap woke up, looked at me stunned and
bleary-eyed and said:
- "Whats happening Victoria? What are you doing awake at
this hour? Go to bed. Your Mam and I just set all the clocks about
ten minutes ago. Seize the time! You have an extra hour to rest."
The next day I woke up very tired. It was half past seven
a.m. in the new wintertime and I told Mam that I hadnt
had much sleep. I told her that I had gotten up and had been
watching the sky through the living room window at 2:25 in
the morning. In disbelief she said:
- "Not true! You must have been dreaming. Your Pap and
I stayed here in the living room adjusting all the clocks and went to
bed at 2:30 a.m. You were asleep at that hour."
How difficult all that was. More difficult it would be to
explain it. The two of us were in the living room at the
same time: 2:25 in the morning of that same day, but curiously neither of us saw each other. I know my Mam was
not lying, but neither was I. That was the truth!
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Frozen snot
Winter was the longest and coldest season of the year. It
began in November and lasted until the end of March. If
you had bad luck, you could still get a few heavy snowstorms in mid-April; that occurred the last year we lived
there. The early days of our first winter in America were a
lot of fun. The afternoon I saw the snow for the first time, I
was really excited. I remember we went out for a ride in
the car to the Old Capitol, on Clinton Street. We wallowed, like preschool children, in the snow that accumulated rapidly. That first snowy day was wonderful. Pap dared
to play with us, throwing snowballs at us that left us oneeyed for an instant.
During November and December the cold weather was
still tolerable. From November on, the different kinds of
rain that Mother Nature gave us during that season began.
There was water rain, freezing rain, snow flurries, snow
showers, sleet rain, and there was also a kind of tiny icy
drop rain very similar to the tiny white sugar grains my
Mam bought at Walgreens or Fareway. When we had heavy
snow showers, the cold temperature was less intense than
when we got sleet and ice storms. The snow accumulated
because of the frequent snow showers and also due to the
low temperatures that didnt let it melt. In the morning,
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sneak inside my skin and would come up to my bones making me shiver. My joints got rigid and the skin of my face
turned blue and got numb. My saliva became thicker, and
worst of all, my snot froze!
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and a juicy baked pork leg to celebrate our last supper, which
of course, wasnt holy at all.
Los estrenos night started early for children. I remember
my mother dressed me at four in the afternoon because my
excitement of wearing los estrenos was larger than my
Mams patience. My parents used to dress up at six and
wait for all our relatives to arrive. Our house was the chosen one for that night. The whole family gathered: we listened to music, danced, talked about los estrenos; we told
jokes and family stories, laughed, lit off lots of fireworks
and ate. It was a special night. It was a night to share as
family. That night we didnt listen to melancholy Christmas
carols but the joyful and contagious rhythm of the gaitas,
such as Gaiteros de Pilloposs or El Gran Coquivacoas gaitas that
my Pap liked very much. The sound of gaitas mingled with
the noise produced by fireworks and that particular firework smell gave the whole Christmas season a magical
touch. Without a doubt, that smell was Christmas. Minutes
before the announcement of "Happy New Year" we prepared for the hugs and kisses of the family. We ate grapes
and made wishes to ourselves while we waited for the
countdown. I remember that I didnt often make wishes
though. The countdown was led by the radio speaker who
bellowed: 10 ... 9 ... 8 ... 7 ... 6 ... 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
Happy New Year! Hugs, kisses, tears and many good intentions without New Years resolutions.
During that night, before New Years arrival, I always
felt the need to look out through the kitchen window. I
remember doing it ever since I developed use of reasoning.
I looked at the darkness on the horizon and saw the colorful
fireworks sparks in the distance, appearing suddenly and
then drawing like in slow motion, beautiful colorful figures,
and then I listened to their mighty roar. It was a very special
and powerful moment for me; I always did this and
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My Birthday
My Pap had decided to hold my birthday celebration in
a small childrens room at the Coral Ridge Mall in Iowa City,
next to the ice-skating rink. The rental deal offered a combo that included the room, soft drinks, pizza, cake and the
right to invite 12 children to ice-skate for four hours. Mam
said it was a good deal because the place was very comfortable and also because she wouldnt have to clean the place
up after the guests left, as she always did at our birthday
parties in Venezuela. And since it was the end of March,
there was still too much snow accumulated outside the
house to think about doing something outdoors.
The room was a small place in which there were 25
chairs neatly arranged around a large rectangular table in
the center, with a bright tablecloth that matched the color
of the ceiling. The floor was covered with a thick olive
green carpet, and hanging from the ceiling was a large colored sign that read "Happy Birthday." The party was scheduled from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. We had arrived about twenty
minutes before the starting time, as the lady who booked
the room had suggested, to blow up a few balloons that
Mam stuck on the room walls. At 1:58 p.m. we were the
only ones in the room: Mam, Pap, Clara and I, anxiously
waiting for the guests. Suddenly, when the wall clock
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voices mingled with the beer and the high volume of boleros that could be heard up to two blocks away. The youngest ones played, ran around the house and ate candy, too
many cheetos and pop.
When piata-time came - and even though my Pap
begged adults to not participate in the shower of candy and
small plastic toys, for which we all fought hard but after a
while nobody wanted - adults were the majority who
jumped into that frantic toys sharing. After piatas we always had a couple of children crying due to the physical
struggle during the candy shower. I think if that tradition
were part of American life, piata parties would be carefully planned, with a foam stick to break the piata and with a
fire-fighter unit ready to prevent disasters.
Most of the guests came to the party with the false
promise of sending my gift the next day but, of course, I
never received them. If I was lucky, I could get about four
gifts from that dozen guests who always arrived late to the
party, talked, ate, got drunk, danced and left much later,
perhaps at dawn, when there was no more money to chip in
and buy more beer. The rituals of farewell at these parties
were memorable: the guests: "We're leaving, it's so late" and
my parents, "But why? Dont you like the party? The party is
still on fire, stay a little while longer, we are about to sing Ay que
noche tan preciosa." Our guests: Well, but only a little longer."
And that farewell often lasted over an hour, between the
"We're leaving" from our guests and the "Why so soon?" from
my parents. The truth is that our parties and social gatherings had changed dramatically since we moved to the United States. From the huge and frenzied get-togethers we
turned to the structured and carefully planned parties with
pizza and soda. My first birthday party in the United States
was as follows: short, few children, carefully planned to
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Promoting an album
Each summer, Pap planned our vacation to get to know
a bit more about the United States. Pap always said that
vacation was sacred and that in the same way we cultivated
our body with exercise and our mind with reading, we
needed to cultivate our spirit by travelling and learning
from the experiences. Every summer we left Eagleeye
Court, with a different destination, rolling down those
roads, through those blessed lands of God.
During our five summers there, we traveled to almost
all sides of that vast country. Our trips had limited budgets
but, the truth was, we never had struggles, hardships or
hard times. I have fond memories of many people and many
of the places we visited, and of course, I remember some of
them more intensely than others. Chicago will always have
a special place in my heart and always will be the big windy
city, huge skyscrapers and white houses, as I once imagined
the United States before coming to this land of chimeras and
opportunities. The friends we made were like our family
for as long as we lived there. I always remember Tanner,
Yelitza, Valeria Estefana and Kamilli, Pedro, Ingrid and
Sebastian, los viejos Juan and Carmen, who prepared delicious arroz con gandules, rice and beans, and the best chichato
ever, Janet and Jennifer, Elias, Brandon Polaco, Kasha,
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Stereotypes
Stereotypes are neither the fellows who fix stereos nor
those who sell them. According to my Pap, stereotypes are
the beliefs or ideas that most people have a-bout the behavioral patterns of others, of other cultures and other peoples.
Pap says we live in a world of stereotypes and that many of
those stereotypes come from the reality. As my Pap was
studying different people and their cultures, he was always
talking about it, "People have no respect for other cultures. We
should be sympathetic to the behavior of others. People are not as
we usually picture them.
Many people think that the world is exactly as each of us
perceives it and judge others who are different because they
dont behave like us, because they dont have our same
customs, our same habits and ways of thinking. They think
it is nonsense that other people dont do what they do. In
every corner of the planet, people perceive the world in
different ways and their lives are simply different from
ours. My Pap told me that only 35% of the world celebrates the New Year on January 1st. Many people dont
know that. At that time, in India, people celebrated the
new year on March 19th, in Ethiopia on September 12th, in
China they celebrated the Lunar New Year on January 29th,
Muslims celebrated it on January 31st, Persians on February
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runners, that Koreans were excellent taekwondo practitioners, that Americans had very interesting legends like
Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, and that Latin Americans were
as culturally diverse as the teeth in my mouth.
On the other hand, my ta Nela in Venezuela said that
the Arabs usually sold fabrics, that gypsies foretold the future with crystal balls and that their curses were treacherous indeed, that Africans played soccer with coconuts, that
Americans were all who lived in the American continent
but that people in the U.S. believed they were the only
Americans, that all Asians spoke Chinese, ate rice with chopsticks, and that they all were black belts in kung-fu, that
Russians were communists and that was very bad, that the
blacks in the United States invented rap and, of course, that
Latinos liked dancing.
Wow, it was difficult to agree on peoples characteristics with so much information. Everyone thought something
different and it was difficult to know whom to believe.
From the people I met at Eagleeye Court I could say that:
Luddya, my friend, who was from the United States, liked
pancakes but didnt like brushing her teeth because, she
said, people in the movies got up, dressed, had breakfast
and left the house without brushing. Her mother, who was
Russian, didnt believe in God but was a very nice person
and cooked delicious cakes. Cee-Cee, who was born in
Korea, neither ate with chopsticks nor was she a black belt.
She didnt like going outside on sunny days during summer
but was very good in math. Lala, my gypsy friend, had no
crystal ball at home but was a faithful believer in the pendulum of truth and her mothers Tarot. Evelyn, my hermana
Claras Mexican friend, loved to eat corn and beans but
didnt sing sad rancheras, as my friend Courtney used to say.
My Paps African friend was very friendly, the champion of
my blinking contests, and I never saw him play with any
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coconut although he liked to play soccer. Islam, our Egyptian neighbor, didnt wear a turban or veil on his head, but
his wife used a headscarf all the time. Javonn, the child who
came from New Orleans, always talked by yelling, wore his
pants half down his waist and was the best runner in class,
and I, who came from Venezuela, liked to make friends but
didnt like dancing as my ta Nela said about Latinos.
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My allowance
During our first year in the U.S., my Pap used to give $
20 monthly to each of us for our personal whims. Clara
spent her allowance right away, but I saved mine and always
had some money for special occasions. My Pap said that
with the money he received from Venezuela and the money
he earned in the United States from his part-time job, he
collected a decent sum, enough to cover our basic needs
and also to cover few little extras.
I remember every Sunday we went out to eat at a decent
restaurant like Olive Garden or Outback, to watch a movie at
the cinema or play ping-pong at the Coralville Recreation
Center. We also visited Erika, Benjamin and Diego, my
Paps friends from Iowa City, or when my parents decided
to stay home, I was allowed to visit Luddya or Cee-Cee. On
some occasions my parents allowed Clara to go with her
friends to the mall or visit some of their houses. Although
the money that my Pap received didnt allow us to travel
to Venezuela for Christmas, it allowed us to live decently
and enjoy our vacations in the States. I remember that during our third year, all of a sudden, the large country's economy weakened and the situation began to worry my Pap.
According to the T.V. news, that economic recession was
the worst and most difficult since the Second World War.
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The Cambus
The cambus was the university bus that always pa-ssed
near our stop when we waited for our school bus. It was big
and gold with black stripes, which distinguished it from
other city buses. Pap always took it because he said it was
much cheaper riding the cambus than driving to the campus
and having to pay for parking. Though free, riding the
cambus had its drawbacks.
One day in February when we had no class at Welby Elementary because it was Presidents Day, Pap asked me to go
with him to the university main library to return some
books. It was early in the morning and the winter cold
made our waiting at the bus stop more difficult. When the
cambus arrived, it was very hard to board it because of the
number of people who had made a great commotion, but
once inside, people moved back and sat down to allow others to get in. I could sit in one of the last seats left, but my
Pap had to stand throughout the whole trip, which lasted
about thirteen minutes. That day, the cambus was completely crowded, and due to the extreme cold of winter,
the heat was on. The tumult and the heat made our trip
more difficult.
At the second stop, a few people tried to climb on and
fit into the small space that was left in the aisle near the bus[111]
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Kathleen
Kathleen was a girl who came from Chicago to study at
Welby Elementary School the last year I studied there. She
had moved from Chicago because her father had found an
important job at a bank in our city. She was a brilliant student and always excelled in almost everything she did.
Kathleen wasnt the kind of student that many of our teachers called the Chicago kids.
According to our teachers, many of the Chicago kids came
from difficult homes and their behavior in school was a big
issue. Many of these children came with their families from
their city to our city in search of a better life. Most of them
were African-Americans, and they almost always qualified
for free meals, food stamps and many other government
social welfare programs. I remember well that many of the
teachers from our school were alarmed by the high number
of new students coming from inner city Chicago and suburban Illinois. Along with these children, there were new
customs, new habits, new patterns of speech and behavior
coming to our school, and this caused fear and gave goose
bumps on the pale skin of many of our school teachers.
In fact, since I started hearing the phrase the Chicago Kids
in the school teachers whisperings, it occurred to me that
this phrase was as offensive as that forbidden N word. No
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Saturdays at home
Saturdays at home were very annoying. From early in
the morning, Mam would get up with the intention of
cleaning the apartment up. She peeked into our room and
asked us to get up and help with the household chores. I
usually got up right away, but Clara liked sleeping a lot
more than I did. When I got up, my Pap was already reading in the recliner in the living-room. He said he should
take advantage of the quiet while we slept. Mam would
return to our room and begin to grumble because Clara
didnt get up right away. That was a genuine ritual every
Saturday.
Mam put the chairs upside down on the dining table,
picked up the center table with the portraits and placed
them on the couch. She also picked up the piano seat and
the desk chair. That annoyed Pap a little. He lifted his legs
so that Mam could pass the broom under it; he also grumbled because he said he couldnt read with all that fuss. No
breakfast. There was no time to cook anything because of
my Mams desire to clean our house. Mam kept picking
things up and dancing with her swinging broom around
every corner of that little apartment. Every now and then
she asked, "Whose is this?" pointing to books, notebooks,
pencils or anything that was not in its right place. Pap
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Kashia Schwarz-Grier
The last time I remember seeing her was the day we visited the town of Kalona for the first time. I saw her sitting
on a chair outside an Amish bakery, with her gaze lost in the
horizon. Her face taciturn and her body relaxed, as if in a
meditation posture in the middle of that chilly, cloudy day.
It was Kashia who once told me, during recess, that her
mothers town was Amish and that during her vacations she
worked in her moms bakery, but during the week she
stayed with her father, who lived in this city, after the divorce. She told me that her mothers town was a good place
to visit. She lived between two worlds: that of her mothers
and her Amish customs, and that of her dad and his city
customs.
Kashia Schwarz-Grier studied at Southwest Junior High.
She was a very tall girl, with very white skin, blond hair like
the sun and a couple of spring-blue eyes. A fringe of hair
escaped from the hat she always wore and partially covered
her face as she wrote in her notebook. She sat at her desk in
one corner of the Language Arts classroom; a lonely and
distant girl. She never spoke in class and almost nobody
heard her during the recess, except when she said "I'm American" after burping during lunch. She didnt take the bus
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like everyone else did; her dad took her to school every
morning and left her at the door. That man was very tall,
the tallest man Id ever seen in my life, except the one we
once saw in a museum in Orlando, Florida. But surely, he
was the tallest living man I've ever seen.
I still remember our first visit to Kalona. It was in late
February of our third year in the United States. It was after
my Pap's birthday. I remember there was still snow on the
roads and it was very cold. Our friends had come from
Chicago to celebrate my Pap 's birthday and spend a few
days in this city. My Pap thought it was a good idea to visit
this charming village with the company of Tanner, Yelitza,
Valeria Stefana and Kamilli. Kalona was a small town in
Iowa and, according to Pap, was founded by the Amish
people around 1846. They were simple people, who resisted the advances of technology and modernity. They did not
use electricity and generally worked at home.
Through the window, I looked out as the changing landscape transitioned from our city to Kalona. As Clara had
decided to go in Estefanas car, I amused myself by pressing
my nose, my lips and cheeks against that cold glass window.
My breath fogged up the glass with each breath and, for a
few seconds, all images were distorted by my warm breath,
and then they harmonized until the next breath. So I saw
the snow on prairies passing by, cows, mills, rivers, corn
and pig farms, farmers carrying food for their animals, and
all that country landscape of the U.S. Midwest. I remember
that as soon as we got out of the cars that day, I recognized
Kashia Schwarz-Grier sitting with an immense sadness in
her gaze.
One day while we were getting ready to start Art class,
Mrs. Griffin received a phone call in the classroom. She had
fearfully approached Kashia and whispered something in her
ear. Kashia instantly turned pale, said nothing, her gaze got
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lost in the void and her ears blocked. She stood with her
face contorted and left the room slowly, as if counting each
of her steps. Kashia Schwarz-Griers father had suddenly
died of a heart attack. The Language Arts teacher told us
that death surprised him in the lobby of an airport while he
was waiting for his flight to who knows where. That news
really bewildered me because every day I saw the tall man
when he left Kashia Schwarz-Grier early in the morning,
always first, kissing her forehead. I wonder if maybe she or
her dad had dreamed of missing teeth the night before.
After a week Kashia returned to school again, but she
never spoke anymore, not even during lunch after she
burped. Soon, she began to miss class regularly, then she
attended school no more. According to Mrs. Griffin, she
had moved in with her mother in Kalona, because her father
could no longer take her to school. Kalona will always be a
very charming little town in Iowa and my memories of it
will always be linked to my memories of Kashia SchwarzGrier, her blonde hair like the sun, her blue eyes like the
spring sky and her tall dad who no longer accompanied her
in the mornings.
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Rainy Days
Spring brought with it a wealth of sensations, smells and
feelings in each of us. That season was the transition from
the harsh cold of winter to the sweltering summer heat. It
was the awakening of nature, the end of winter dormancy.
Gradually, the snow disappeared with torrential rains, the
trees were covered with new leaves, the stems of multicolored little flowers and green grass reappeared beautifully.
Mam said she felt alive and it was time to offer her skin the
benefits of the rising sun. Clara loved walking under the
pouring rain when she returned from school, and my Pap
liked the sound produced when heavy rain hit the roof of
our apartment and the smell of rainbows.
In contrast to the others, when the days became gray, I
felt blue. Rainy days made me feel melancholy, and I felt a
strong urge to write. During those days, on my bed, I created dreams and let my feelings fly while watching the rain
falling through the window. During those gray days, the air
in my room got impregnated with a fresh smell of wet earth
-- the smell of rainbows -- and little by little my notebook
was filled with feelings and letters that never were shared.
For several springs, there were many rainy days that allowed me to fill with black ink each of those white pages.
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Sex
In those days, our home computer had been infected
with a potent virus that was affecting all servers of the University. I spent my afternoons online chatting and reading
the blogs of some of my school friends. Mam always scolded me because I spent too much time in front of the computer, but she never scolded Pap who spent much longer
periods in front of his laptop... She always grumbled, "You
must be careful... the Internet is not as good as you think... behind
those wires and connections there are also unscrupulous people...
beware of not chatting with people you dont know."
I remember one day I was chatting with my friend
Courtney when multiple windows suddenly opened on the
computer screen like jumping popcorn. On stage appeared,
several sculpted women's bodies, oily and naked, with lush
hips, vaginas like peeled apples, and gelatinous breasts,
disproportionately huge like Halloween pumpkins. All of
them were rhythmically and symmetrically moving their
hips, in various yoga positions and whispering sad groans.
By their side were men with tanned and muscular torsos,
their members rising in front of them, bright, and above all,
enormous, in a pelvic dance, and with their hands they
played with their penises, rubbing them. I'd never seen
anything like that, even though a couple of times I had seen
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Diploma
After many sleepless nights and tons of reading hours,
Pap defended his research study. In a modest room, five
professors along with my Pap, discussed and evaluated the
topic that had kept him busy much of his time in the United
States. That night we went out to dinner to celebrate what
was one of Paps accomplished goals in this land of dreams
and chimeras.
The commencement ceremony came later, an afternoon
during the last May that we lived in the United States. We
attended the ceremony with formal attire, but the ceremony wasnt as formal as Pap was expecting. Mam said that
those ceremonies were much more solemn in Venezuela
than in the United States. More than an Aula Magna, the
commencement ceremony was held at the sports arena of
the university campus. There were many people, some of
them nicely dressed up and others with not-so-elegant outfits for the occasion. One by one they walked to the stage,
got hooded, picked up their diploma, and returned to their
seat. A few words by the president of the university and it
was over. The ceremony lasted less than half an hour, but
for Pap, it took four years and ten months to obtain that 10
x 15 diploma with the Latin inscription: philosophi doctor.
There were almost five years of so many hours of reading,
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My girlfriends
You live each stage of life with friends who shape you
forever. I never had the same relationship with my childhood friends after my return. Sofia, Irlanda and Julia became a sort of reference in my childhood stories. When I
occasionally saw any of them in the street by chance, we
always promised an afternoon visit to catch up on the stories of our lives and remember those pleasant moments of
our childhood. Sofia and Irlanda were always charming, but
Julia often passed by me in the street and just cracked a sad
smile of jealousy.
My friends from high school meant different things; I
had very enjoyable times with them. We shared teenager
secrets and confessions about the boys we loved, the sneaking kisses and our games spinning the bottle, in which we
cleverly planned to kiss the boys we liked. Carla and Mercedes are still good friends. After our high school graduation we kept in touch almost daily until each of us began
college. After a lot of anguish about her admission, Carla
began enthusiastically majoring in History at the Humanities
College, but she soon got lost amid the din of strikes of the
students movements and unions. Mercedes, however,
started promptly studying dentistry like her dad, and was
always planning to establish her private clinic, her social
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Broken dreams
Pap was right. The North was a chimera. Sometimes it's
too late when one recognizes that others are right. Our
identity is Venezuelan. Pap has always taught us attachment
and love for this tricolor country full of goodness and imperfections. My Mam doesnt even remember our life in
Eagleeye Court, and Clara says that if she had met Toms
before we moved there, shed never have gone with us; she
surely wouldve escaped with her boyfriend like Carolina
did, when her family moved to Spain. I dont think I would
change our scents and flavors for any Taco Bell, McDonald's
or Dunkin Donuts promise. The early morning coffees, the
traditional rice and beans, the Andean soups, the brown
sugar cane infusions with cheese, the delicious hallacas, the
fancy cell phones with no credit, the power point presentations that everybody shares online, the university strikes
and the tear gas smell are something that is within us. It's
part of our identity.
Pap retired from teaching but not from his research and
now hugs my Mam more often without the help of many
beers. Mam paints less and reads more, and rarely goes to
the Main Market to sell her artworks. Claras life is divided
among her singing, her passion for Science and her Toms.
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Decisions
Daily decisions are always difficult to make, but those
that radically change the main sail that guides our journey
are much more difficult. Clara said its not the major decisions but the minor ones that changed the north, the pace of
our lives -- the everyday decisions, the every-second decisions. Mam said that our future was not written, that each
of us sculpted our destiny at will because if it were written,
we wouldnt hesitate much before so many decisions, before so many possible walks of life. Pap said that life wasnt
full of coincidences as many people said, but it was full of
causalities. Each step we take is accompanied by countless
consequences.
Studying in my country was an excellent idea, but the
national bureaucracy was as ingrained in our identity as the
morning coffee, the alma llanera and the habit of asking for
credit. It was Mam who despite her hesitation suggested to
me the idea of studying abroad. Why not? Maybe my
dreams were not here in my city, in my country. The bitter
pill would be to convince my Pap that our nation wasnt far
from becoming a chimera too.... Certainly, the North was a
chimera, but the South also showed its lion's head, goat's
body and tail of a dragon. It was time for decisions... like
that song by Ruben Blades that I hummed making up new
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illusions, the angelic face of Taylor, my platonic love, fleeing like a frightened deer, the rainy spring afternoons and
my notebook with the smell of wet earth, Kashias intense
blue eyes and her tall dad who accompanied her to school
no more, the smell of wet earth in the spring and the endless symphony of crickets and cicadas of summer afternoons. The memories and reminiscences of those years ran
through my mind like shooting stars.
I remembered the gift that I had kept in my purse since
my Pap handed it to me that day at the airport after his
gentle pat on my cheek. I tore the paper and noticed it was
a compact disc he had recorded. I thought of those recordings with my and Claras voices that Pap taped when we
were little. He surely had recorded them on that CD for me
to always remember. That reminded me of my gay and
joyful laughter which was kept for many years on my Paps
computer hard drive and that we always used as a comforting therapy. I also thought that the CD might contain some
words of encouragement for the difficult times during my
studies. I decided not to guess anymore...
In a corner of that empty room, I sat on the floor to listen to the disc, hugging my legs and resting my solitude on
my chin... Cecilia Todds harmonic and melancholic voice
burst into the room ... "I went off to New York / to make
me a few bucks / now Im back in Caracas, riding herd and
a buncha dumb clucks / the north is a chimera / what an
atrocity / and they say you live there like a king... / To the
beat of the music, in the midst of that terrible loneliness, I
felt a tiny pearl tear slide down my cheek.
Iowa City, City of Literature (UNESCO), May 2012
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Glossary
Abuela: Grand-mother.
Alma llanera: Venezuelas most popular song. It is
considered a second national hymn.
Aoviejo: A life-sized doll of an old man representing
the old year.
Arepa: A popular Venezuelan flat and round grilled or
fried patty made of flour. The food with which it may be
stuffed varies among scrambled eggs, chesse, ham, beef and
chicken.
Aula Magna: A solemn red-carpeted room where universities confer diplomas/degrees
Cachapa: Corn-based pancake.
Caimito: Tropical fruit.
Canoso: (Adj.) Gray-haired person.
Chicha: A Venezuelan drink made from fermented
maize.
Chimera: An illusion, a mythological fire-breathing
creature.
Espaol: Spanish.
Fulanito y Menganito: Mr. So and so.
Gaitas: traditional music from the western region of
Venezuelan.
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Jos Miguel Plata-Ramrez was born in Mrida, Venezuela. He has a Bachelor of Literature and a Master of Linguistics from the University of Los Andes, Venezuela, and a
Doctorate in Education from the University of Iowa, USA.
He has been a Professor of English as a foreign language at
the University of Los Andes since 1997. He has several
academic publications in the areas of reading and writing of
English as a foreign language. Some of his short stories have
been published in various fiction anthologies of the
Asociacion de Escritores de Merida, Venezuela. He was
awarded first place in the international short story contest
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"Latin Heritage Foundation 2011" with his short-story entitled Punto Final
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