“I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand? Are you stupid or something? It’s trouble,” he screeched, voice cracking in fury. The veins on his neck bulged like barbed wire. “You might as well forget applying to those fancy schools—they won’t want you. Tell me, have I raised an idiot? Eh?”
No, that’s you, I thought and bit my knuckle, mind racing. I didn’t know yet what I was going to do. I couldn’t tell anyone what I had found out; I could not see myself telling Ana or Gracia. Nor could I run away to Cali or anywhere else, to get lost in a barrio with prostitutes, drug addicts, and the displaced; I would be killed. I had no money, no bank account that I knew of—he gave me an allowance every week to buy arepas after school, more if I was going to a street fair or shopping. “Do you know nothing?” he cried. I remained frozen, afraid to stay for what other awful things he might say. Afraid to go.
Finally he stopped. He knelt on one knee at the coffee table between us, removed his tobacco pouch and papers from his shirt pocket. “The school deadlines are the end of this month,” he said, and jerkily began to roll a cigarette. “You don’t realize, mi hija, but some people would think nothing of kidnapping or killing you. And I can’t protect you forever. So leave, or it will only be a matter of time.” He spilled some leaves and swore—“Imbécil!”
“Imbécil?” I said at last, rising. “You raised me. And I do realize it. Protect me—you think I have no idea what goes on around here?”
He crushed the cigarette between his lips, snapping the filter, cursed, and rerolled it. The embers flared. Smoke, leafy and sweet, trailed me up the steps.
CHAPTER THREE
The next morning, Papi had been up for an hour when I stowed my book bag in the back of the car. He, Luis, and some farmhands faced the just-risen sun with Papi’s back to me. The courtyard fountain sloshed, drowning out their talk. Fidel sat on its lip, dazed, and flicked the ash of his cigarette. When I said, “Let’s go,” he looked up in surprise and irritation and pitched the butt onto the stone pavement. Papi’s voice boomed as he headed for the house, chiding me for skipping breakfast. When I told him I’d grab an arepa outside school, he said, “You eat too many of those greasy things. Get inside.”
Sulking, I followed. At the dining table we sat in silence. The smell of coffee, eggs, and warm bread trailed Inez as she set our plates in front of us, and Papi his tinto. “Eat up,” he said, digging into his gallo pinto. “You’ll need a lot of energy if you’re going to wear that frown.”
“How do you expect me to feel, after last night?” I asked.
“I’m sorry for blowing up,” he said. “Finish those applications, and you can go to all the masses you want. I used to be quite devout at your age.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“If I still talked to family, I would tell you to ask them.”
I chewed slowly, the beans and rice flavorful but lukewarm. Other than Tía Leo, Papi didn’t speak to relatives—because of his divorce, he’d claimed. “Divorce isn’t such a big deal,” I said. “Gracia’s parents are Catholic, and they’re divorced. Why would anyone hold that against you?”
“It wasn’t just the divorce. I brought a lot on myself, especially after your mother left, but I never turned my back on family.” He scraped the last of the beans and rice from his plate with quick, harsh strokes. “I crawled to them on my belly, but they turned their backs to me. Tell me, what choice does that leave?” Someone opened the front door—Luis. He announced that an alpaca had gone missing, a young one. A field hand was searching for it.
“Couldn’t have gone far,” Papi said. He shoved his chair away, tied his bandanna around his head, and groped his shirt for his sunglasses. When I was little, I had liked this look of his and used to call him a pirate until he chased me around the house.
“I’m sure he’ll find it soon enough,” Luis said, fist on hip. “No use you wasting your morning digging through brush.”
Papi breezed past him. “Morning light is best. Won’t be the first time.”
Now I wondered: had Papi’s brothers been killed along with my grandparents or suffered a different brutal fate, and were our other relatives alive or not? Surely we must have aunts, uncles, cousins somewhere? Our land included his parents’ old property, and he rented their cement-block house to a tenant farmer’s family. Minutes later, Fidel and I wound along the narrow country roads and past the plots of such farmers, their houses little more than shacks. Once, when riding along in his pickup, Papi had told me how he had thought his family wanted for little until he was twenty-one. That spring he spent two months in Bogotá with an older cousin, ate at fine restaurants and attended the theatre for the first time, danced at clubs with beautiful women. When he returned, everywhere in the countryside there seemed no escape from poverty. That day we’d driven for three minutes before we finished passing the displaced. “Los miserables de Dios,” he muttered even as he waved, speakers booming Rachmaninov.
Late that afternoon, in the muggy upstairs office of our house, I combed through a Spanish-English dictionary. My elbow pressed upon the pile of applications. Papi had filled out some of the information—his careful block handwriting scrawled across the boxes at the top—and Sister Rosemary ticked off and completed the rest. Twenty minutes remained for the session, but we had not even finished two forms. “You’ll need to write a lot faster and not make so many mistakes if you’re going to take regular subjects in English,” she said. Her pale eyebrows rose.
“If it’s so easy for you, why don’t you write it?” I slouched, dropping the pen. “Isn’t my father paying you?”
Jaw set, she thrust the pen back at me. “For tutoring, yes. Not baby-sitting.”
My face burned through to my scalp. I snatched the pen. “The questions in the boxes—I don’t even know how to answer some of these.”
She lifted a form, glancing over it. “Which ones?”
“Like this one: Describe your participation in clubs, leadership roles, or volunteer organizations.”
“Straightforward enough, don’t you think?” She replaced the form before me, folded her hands in front of her.
I hesitated, then wrote, La Maria Juventud Para Justicia Social. After a pause, I added: Secretary & Event Organizer. What did they know? It certainly sounded impressive.
The nun looked over what I’d written and frowned. “La Maria Juventud? Is this true?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m very involved. Why do you care?”
Her lips made a thin line. She shrugged, then nodded at the form. “Please, finish.”
Papi poked his face in the doorway at six o’clock and asked if she would join us for dinner, then about my progress. She showed him the incomplete forms, and he pouted, stroking his stubbly chin. “I want all eight of these in the mail, Federal Express, by Monday,” he said.
Could I miss the deadlines on purpose? What if the forms weren’t ready, and I had to wait another six months to apply again? I wanted to be with Manuel, not in my father’s swivel chair, an oversized dictionary in front of me, next to a woman who had never been in love. “But aren’t there admission tests?” I asked. “I’m not
