Avalanche
by
Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro
She speaks first, and I lose the shyness and the suspicion about her presence. She says she does not like how the nurse looks at her. She also says that because of that, because of exactly that same look, she stabbed her husband. For the same fucking reason, the same accusatory staring eyes. She felt he was conspiratorial. She also says, or rather hums, an imaginary melody in tumbao conga rhythm, while imitating the voice of Shakira... Te aviso, te anuncio que hoy renuncio, a tus negocios sucios. Then she moves her hips on the bed and shakes her shoulders and says, kind of quietly, that very soon the zolpidem tablet will allow her to go to sleep. Then she does that gesture with her hand and fingers as she says “come here.” And I do. I get out of my bed, which is at the other end of the room. I walk, touching the mint green walls, feeling their porosity. I do not stop to count the grid pattern of the carpet on this occasion. I do not look through the barred window, or glance at the sprinkler in the bathroom which remains unused because it is locked. Nurses do not allow us to take a shower without supervision.
I approach her. Lisa? Megan? Melanie? Noelia? Oh my god, I don’t know. I do not remember her name. I am humming a reggaetón, like her, but I feel drowsy, dizzy from the pills they gave me a while ago. Pills to calm us down, to tranquil us. I move closer. I know the exact warning from the nurses: we must respect the individual space, we must avoid touching, avoid gestures that could easily be confused with violence. My approach is definitely against the rules. She wonders why the sky is blue, and she asks me that. Why the Irish cream liqueur mixes well with Ambien? Why are there so many gods, so much confusion and so many sacred books: the Bible, the Koran, the Pentateuch, the Book of Mormon? And why am I here with her, sharing this room, isolated from the rest of the population? What is my sin? What do I purge? I answer that I'm cleaning a cocaine vice that got out of hand. Yolanda left me and since then I couldn’t stand sober again, or alert, or on two feet. “Yolanda?” she asks, and suddenly tells a story about a cousin of hers whose name was Yolanda too. And I sing the song of Silvio, or the one whose name I always forget. Maybe Paquito Guzman from the portorican salsa movement.
“When we were little girls,” she says, “when me and my cousin were six or seven years old, we wanted our tits to grow at all costs, at any cost. Do you know what we were doing?”
“No,” I reply, and suddenly my vision blurs.
“I can not tell you, because you are a dyke,” she says.
I return to my bed and fall asleep.
I don’t tell her the issue about my mother. I just tell her about the white powder that used to be my everyday necessity. Whenever I bring up the subject, Melisa, or whatever her name is, tells me of her hysteria attacks, or her aggressiveness. I tell her that at one point I was having a meeting with a group of colleagues and I apologized and retired to the bathroom just to taste a few white lines. It was a real shame, because when I came back, they all noticed the residue on my nose. I tell her that and she starts laughing as if it were the end of the world. For some reason that bothers me a lot, but I do not verbalize it, because by this time, I’m already liking her. And this is the day the nurses let us share handshakes, and let us hug and grab each other’s hands, not just us, not just her and me, but all of us in the clinic because out there in the world, something terrible has happened. Apparently something so terrible that we we are not allowed to see any television for several days. My roommate finds out from another patient who saw the incident before medical personnel removed the television equipment. It was the collapse of several buildings in the city of New York. Two planes were the white powder, the snow, the avalanche, and two twins towers were the nostrils. They had sucked deep, deep, to the chest.
That same night, the fever and sweats initiate for me. I shudder and I shiver in the teeth, and I want them out of my gums. And I wish I had hidden in my mouth some minuscule vestige of the substance that leads me to paradise. With the tip of my tongue I rummage through the corners and between each of the grooves of my oral plaque, the resin dental covers, to see if by chance my sense of taste detects, however improbable, a miniature piece of dust. One hemisphere of my brain blinks a sign that reads Moron, how could you think you have traces left? Fucking drug addict, you are so pathetic, but the other hemisphere ignores the signs and continues the treasure hunt. Nothing happens. There are no rewards. That night, my body rattles with a lot of aches. It upsets my muscles, my joints, and when the nurse comes to give me the dose, I say “bitch, my head hurts as if I am going to explode,” and she says I have high blood pressure...
High as Yolanda. Her stature. Yolanda who cannot stand me. She hates my things. I do not mean enough for her. An agglomeration of ice crystals forms in my mind... A white layer covers the house and land silently and slowly. It's snowing and it is our winter holidays. We travel outside the island this time and Yolanda comes with me, but she surprises me by saying she wants to leave me; she will not follow me anymore. I react badly. Terribly. More cocaine, and I crawl until my nostrils and the septum fall asleep, and until I no longer feel my tongue.
“What color is snow? And do not tell me white, because that's what everyone says and I assume Yolanda that you are smarter than everyone else because you had enough time by my side.”
“It is clear,” she says. “Transparent.”
And I watch Noelia at my side, who pouts and complains that she does not want the unflavored food served at the institution. I still do not tell her about my mom because I know she is also keeping secrets, and I can not tolerate that.
“Le ro lo le lo lei, le ro lo le lo lei. Sabes que, estoy a tus pies. Contigo, mi vida, quiero vivir la vida y lo que me queda de vida, quiero vivir contigo. You know, I'm at your feet.”
“I can not tell you,” she answers.
Then my roommate ignores me and continues with cadenced melodies, choruses repeated, waving her hands as if she is playing the drums. She is performing an invisible güiro too, and a guitar, a flute, a piano. She dances the shoulders, with a forward move and then a back one, tongue flicking, fingers snapping. She’s still not telling me the hidden event with her cousin. She doesn’t know I also have secrets, and I know how to hide them.
The next night all we do is talk about transcendental issues, and that's when I say that the Vulgate is something like another Bible but in another language, which I fear is Latin, and please do not tell me that it is another holy book, do me a very great favor and stop saying that, because it is just like the Bible, I say. And incidentally, the Pentateuch does not count either...
“Why don’t you tell me about your cousin named Yolanda, for the love of god?”
“Because you are a cachapera.”
“What does it matter?” I cry, raising my voice, speaking from my lungs.
And then we are quiet because we know we will soon be visited by one of the supervisors, perhaps the graduate, and she will ask us to shut up. Four minutes and twenty-five seconds pass and the graduate comes and takes our temperature, pressure, and orders us to keep it quiet, or else. Then she leaves.
I think of the weight of millions of snowflakes, one piled above the other on the flannel hat Yolanda is wearing, on her face, in the small spaces that hold her GAP coat, on the black scarf that she always carries. The flakes embed in my hand, freezing my skin when I slap her. I think I could submerge in this ocean full of whites. To my misfortune, it is not cocaine. And I think of it, and unintentionally, as I think about it, I begin to touch my vagina. I wake up with a gasp of astonishment, like a little shriek my mouth can’t get rid of. Then I do. The whispered shout falls from my lips, like when I snore and disturb my own dream, a smooth snort like the mooing of a cow, and suddenly I stumble in front of Lisa. She is looking at me when I open my eyes. She has big eyes that do not blink...
The nurse looks at me until she believes I swallowed them. The pills. She stays to watch me shower, control my movements, study with neat obligation each of the times I rub with water, soap, shampoo with a conditioner. I ignore her, and she leaves me alone. Today it’s cold on the floor and I don’t have to do group therapy, or sing "Yo quiero tener un millón de amigos," or comply with the schedule of stained glass painting, vocational therapy with plastic or ceramic wicker in order to make a red heart that says I miss you, Yolanda, come back to me, please.
My roommate approaches me. “Too close! Stay away,” says the nurse. She tells my roommate to go to the other side of the room, far from me, and she does so reluctantly. She sits in a chair, a little way off. In this recreational room we share a TV (which is off again), several chairs, a mahogany table, a plastic cup with ants, the newspaper, and a leftover cake on the mahogany table with something that should have been a guava pastry. Sitting there, she begins to talk to me again.
“Silvio Rodriguez is not the one who sings it,” she says, “Braulio is the artist. Wait, never mind, it’s Pablo Milanes.”
I change the subject and start talking about mom. “She is dead,” I say. “Three years ago. But she is still in my house. Her spirit is walking in the rooms of the house. And she is real.”
As real as the zolpidem tablet that the nurse then puts in our mouths. The nurse monitors that we do not spit them out. They must be taken in front of her. Then she checks our mouths after we swallow the cup of water. But I've learned to hide it up in the gum, because they only inspect under the tongue. I hide it well, and the graduate nurse does not realize my maneuver. Then, back in my room, I cough it out and hand it over to Melina, like a friendship offering. She in return makes of it a gift to her gods and their instruction manuals, I mean, all the sacred books in which she does not believe.
She believes in bullets though. She believes in shootings. Shots in the air. She stands against the war that comes from drug distribution and violence. Noelia tells me about her aches. She even confides in me how other people attacked her in the past, how her aches were worse then. She pulls at the hair on her body with her fingers. But it hurts too much when she pulls the pestañas, the eyelashes, and she stops. She concentrates then on pulling the eyebrows. She does it with the tip of her thumb and forefinger. With expertise. With patience.
And she believes in the shots she saw, and in the ones she heard. She walks like Meg Ryan in the film "Prelude to a Kiss," not the Meg of the movie "You Got Mail" with Tom Hanks, but that day of the shooting she did not walk; she ran. Ran and hid. She believes in her father’s gun the morning he shot her mother, and her sister and her brother. She was the only survivor. Two of the bullets remained inside her body for hours. Just as a cell divides and then becomes a zygote, a fetus, an embryo, a baby, bullets inside the body--one near the cheek, one in the scapula--are ticklish and then they sting. They hurt when the doctor takes them out, you want them to leave the bullets in the skin, in the muscle, in the bone.
“Anyway, I wonder how it is to see the ghost of your mother and please tell me everything in detail,” she says, waving her arms, gesturing with her body and face, exaggerating the minutiae.
I explain: “Mami ran through the rooms of my house and opened the door, and broke glasses, and turned on the stove or closed cabinets. This frightened Yolanda greatly. So I think she left for that reason too.”
Mami took off after Yolanda left me. I do not know if in solidarity. I do not know if by default. But mami had announced her departure. She told me by drawing with her incorporeal finger on the surface of a mirror. I bathe with very hot water and the steam creates a layer on the mirror that creates a surface for writing messages. I want to reincarnate, mami wrote with her own calligraphy. I want to be reborn, this time in the body of a pretty straight hair, gray eyes negrita, a bold and daring baby that wants to come and enjoy life. There is a pregnant woman I've seen her walk the streets singing; she is happy. No other children. I will stop coming to see you, because I want to return to the world to live like a pretty black girl.
“And you? What did you do?,” I asked Melania. “What did you do with your cousin for you two to grow tits?”
I think of white dragons that are created at the cusps of avalanches. I suck them into my wide nose until it is broken. I swallow fire while I say goodbye to my nose. There is a guessing game about white dragons from the Middle Ages, that someone told me once. What flies without wings, and strikes without hands? Flying. Hitting. Slapping.
“Nos mamábamos los pezones,” she says. “We sucked our nipples until we passed out.”
And in that very moment, she pulls up the blouse with the pirate logo of Armani Exchange on it. And I can see her breasts without any bra. Faded. Decayed. Available. I start walking towards her, and as I walk, I touch the mint green walls. But I do not count the grid pattern of the carpet. I do not look through the barred window, nor do I glance at the bathroom. I go straight to Lisa, Melisa, Melania, Noelia. I do not remember her name. And then I suck them one by one, as she falls asleep with a double dose of hypnotics. They look like a hologram, just puffy nipples, transparent, translucent. Like salamanders. Whitish. Cold and snowy. I begin to mourn. I cry because they are not Yolanda’s. END
Meet the author...
CV: Tell us a bit more about your narrator. Will we see her in a longer work of fiction?
Pizarro: Yes. Actually, she is the heroine of a previous short story collection Ojos de luna published in 2007 in Spanish, and now she reappears in Saeta, the poems, a document about resistance, memoirs and history, about being a black African descendant woman, a Puerto Rican woman, a rebel, a cimarrona. The first time, in 2007, she was the narrator of a ten-page story. Now she comes back in a 132 page long metaphora that speaks about what people are able to do in dreadful conditions.
CV: What are some of the challenges of writing in two languages?
Pizarro: The limitations of not knowing every single adequate word or phrase for a specific action or definition in the targeted language. But challenges like that are like an aphrodisiac. I love them because they also challenge my intellect and emotions.
CV: How do you feel about writers’ categories? Which category(ies)--if any--suit you best as a writer?
Pizarro: I guess I feel ok about writers categories; they do not bother me. I know I am just a writer, but I also know that readers need organized ideas, and categories are definitely part of that. I think the category that fits me best is cimarrona writer, a rebel female writer who happens to be Puerto Rican, Caribbean, Afrodescendant, and lesbian.
CV: Are you currently working on new fiction?
Pizarro: My new work of fiction is entitled La Macacoa, a book about creative writing exercises that I had with me since I started a creative writing workshop in 2007. In it, I share my experiences teaching literature. The basic message to young writers is that you are not just a writer; you are an artist.
CV: Who do you envision as the main audience for your work?
Pizarro: Those who chose the path of the nonconformist, the rebels who defy the establishment and truly want to be unique and to do exceptional acts in this particular time and space. Those are my main audiences.
