get a tattoo. Where? On the back of my neck. I know a guy. I’d love to stay here forever. And that’s when Johnny didn’t know anyone. He said: this is a very hard country. But he lived like a tycoon, he got a new car every six months and went on paying the same lease. He received unemployment benefit that nobody checked up on, and that was what paid for the motels where we fucked, or the lobster we ate at Key West, or the VIP passes for the salsa bars he took me to in Little Havana. Johnny lived off money from his wife – half gringa, half Ecuadorian – and he even bought designer underpants. He zealously fed his little American dream in fear that if he forgot to feed it one day, it would keel over in front of him like a starving baby bird.
Maybe I should stop seeing you and find a gringo to marry, I’d say to him. And Johnny would lunge at me, push me against the wall and shove his hand up my skirt: come here, beibi. Because Johnny was a whore, he wanted to resolve everything in the bedroom. Let go of me, you bastard. I’d push him off me and leave.
I was always in a bad mood on the way back and the Captain began to notice. Did you quarrel with your boyfriend? The Captain always spoke to me very formally. No, sir, I don’t have a boyfriend. What a waste. On that flight there were four air hostesses, two old ones and Susana and me. Susana insisted that the Captain was in love with me. I knew which part of me the Captain was in love with: he could barely tear his eyes off my ass. But he had nothing to offer me in return.
Then, my brother struck gold. He wrote me an email telling me he was getting married: her name was Odina and she was Puerto Rican, but she lived in Los Angeles. He had met her online; as he didn’t have a visa, she had come to see him, and Bob’s your uncle, they sealed their love. He didn’t introduce me to her because I was flying, or so my mother had told him. He described her as beautiful, brown-skinned and slim, and she came with the right dowry: the green card. I called the airline, told them I was really ill and then shut myself away for three days to cry: 88, 87, 86… And that’s how I fell asleep, obsessing over my brother. I was sure the whole thing about pushing me to become an air hostess had been his strategy to get me away from the only computer in the house, where he chatted all day long, year after year, looking for a wife, until he stumbled upon that Puerto Rican bitch.
They had a church wedding here, and a civil ceremony there. My brother, in his correspondence with her, had made out that he was incredibly religious. On Odina’s side, there was a large party of friends and relatives. Common as muck, the lot of them. On our side, we had some second cousins from a village. Also common as muck. They all had children, and they all dressed the same. In the church, a girl sat next to me and told me that when she grew up she was going to come to the city and work for a company. Her hair was combed in segments, hard and crispy with hair spray. I imagined her in the city, a few years older, working from sun-up to sun-down in a little stuffy office that she would travel to and from on the minibus. She would bring her lunch in a Tupperware box, and dye her hair with cheap blond dye that would turn orange in the sun, so she’d switch to a copper mahogany tone.
The priest gave a sermon about good love, intended for procreation, and bad love, intended for enjoyment. Then an emaciated nun sang the Ave Maria.
The celebration took place in a large, ramshackle old house in the city centre. Odina’s family paid for it, because in line with tradition, the bride paid for the party and the groom paid for the honeymoon. There would not be a honeymoon right away because Odina had to go back to work. Odina was a nurse. Odina was far from “slim”. She was fat. Odina’s parents were classic “wannabe” types. So were mine, though they didn’t even know what it meant to be “wannabes”. That night, there were so many white fairy lights strung up around the terrace it was like being part of some Caribbean royalty. The L-shaped buffet table was overflowing with hundreds of hot and cold dishes: mainly seafood. Gustavo was the supplier, although my father hadn’t bought fish from him for years because his prices had gone up so much. They had invited Gustavo to the party, but he excused himself. I don’t go to parties, he said. Nobody insisted. It would have been awkward to explain the presence of that hairy old man, stinking of fish and all leathery from the sun, tucked away in a corner with his bottle of rum. And his black girlfriend.
Didn’t you invite Olga? I asked my mother. Olga who? she said. Gustavo’s girlfriend. My mother had no idea who I was talking about.
In the toilets they had all kinds of perfumes to overpower the smell of dancefloor sweat. On the tables were Polaroid cameras for the guests to use. On the dance floor there were tiny holes that pumped out a floral-scented mist. At midnight they let off fireworks spelling out the names of the bride and groom in the sky; followed by more which read Just Married, in English. A trio sang boleros, then an orchestra played and later, after the dinner, a DJ took over, flooding the elegant perfumed air of the celebration with reggaeton, which “Odi” was crazy about. Odi’s hips swayed like a poisonous snake, and yet my mother and father gazed at her like she was some kind of angelic apparition. Every so often they would let out a sigh and look at each other and nod, no doubt thinking: we’ve struck gold. Odina called them mummy this, daddy that, and she called me “sistah”. She threw the bouquet straight into my arms, but I stepped back out of the way, letting it fall to the floor. There followed a couple of bewildered seconds when everyone expected me to bend down and pick it up, but instead I turned and walked towards the door.
Tony was just arriving: he’d said he wasn’t coming because he had to work late at the stationery shop. His uncle had made him a partner, big fucking deal. Like all the men, he was wearing white trousers and a coloured shirt – turquoise, in his case. He had gelled his hair and combed it back, like mobsters do. He had a goatee, and although he said hello and kissed me on the cheek, he gave me a resentful look. I asked him why he was arriving so late and he said: I just finished work and thought, why not go and congratulate my buddy? Apparently, they were buddies now, but when Tony was going out with me, my brother thought he was a failure, a fokin’ loozer, a small-town waste of space, a broke guy who’d never give me what I deserved. What did I deserve? My brother reeled off some things – things I couldn’t remember now – while I traced lines between them, sewing them together, drawing a tangled web.
Aren’t you coming in? Tony was still standing at the door, looking at me. From inside, my brother’s deep, husky voice drifted out, singing I want to tell you everything I like about you… You missed the photo for the newspaper, I said to him. He didn’t reply, just clenched his teeth.
Julián had dated the girl in charge of the social section of the paper; apparently, she had promised him a half-page spread. This was no mean feat, as there were queues of people waiting to get their faces in there.
On the night of the wedding, this was the photo:
In the centre, the bride and groom in pure white apart from Odi’s bright red lips. Then the women, two mothers and a grandmother, ancient divas in their organza dresses printed with wild flowers. The two fathers, in garish shirts: one parrot green, one bright orange. The best man, Julián, accompanied as always by his obscene biceps, this time with some scrawny eye-candy hanging off them, dressed in yellow. The bridesmaids: on one side was Odi’s friend Tanya, a smoking hot Cuban in a sparkly top with a plunging neckline, very “bling”, and on the other side was me, dressed all in black like I was at a funeral, champagne in hand, looking anywhere but at the lens.
The day the newspaper came out, there was the photo, but in black and white. It seemed Julián didn’t have enough sway to get a page in colour.
Let’s go in, insisted Tony. I turned my back on him and lit a cigarette.
The sound of his new shoes going into the party, moving away from me yet again, made my belly ache with sadness. But not for me, or for him; but for the fishermen’s beach where we used to screw, which was now a hotel. And for the terrace of the hotel where we used to screw, which was no longer there. For the wasted years.
After that night I never saw him
