Crux Read online

  The menu of Saguaro’s was similar to that of Roberto’s, with a mariscos flair: spicy shrimp burritos and halibut tacos as well as carne asada burritos, chimichangas, rolled taquitos. Papi was a perfectionist, firing employees for preparing something too hastily, too slowly. He did most of the work himself. Sometimes, he slept behind the counter. From 1994 to 1998, I have almost no memories of my father as he applied himself diligently to Saguaro’s. I had grown accustomed to his absence prior to his departure, but his failure to visit convinced me and Michelle of his indifference. We begged our mother to take us to Saguaro’s, desperate to show off in front of our father and win his love again. We sang, danced, expressed our most fascinating thoughts while sipping horchatas and chewing on chimichangas. He ignored us. A single tendency evidenced a shred of persisting affection: although my father did not pay child support, whenever we visited Saguaro’s, we got food free of charge.

  * * *

  •

  Our maternal grandparents moved into the house in Paradise Hills to help raise us. Michelle and I called them the Cocos. They brought coconuts from Puerto Rico and showed us pictures of a dog named Coco. Mami’s mother, whom she called Mami, had fun cotton-ball hair, like our neighbor Jenny. Her body was a graceful parenthesis, thin, prone to hugging. My mother’s father was thicker and shorter, with silver hair as soft as a rabbit’s, and brown skin that smelled of Old Spice. I had never lived with a man who wore cologne—my dad was always au naturel—and the novelty of my grandfather’s fragrance in the house was delightful. He carried us on his shoulders, and we absorbed his deep, rumbling laughter. The Cocos loved us at first: we were cute. But quickly, they lost patience with us. My sister and I were ill-mannered, almost savage. That winter, they took us to a park and glared at us as we sat on a table. We had refused to use the bench attached to it, in spite of their orders. Michelle and I were chatting about Santa Claus. Santa Claus isn’t real, my grandfather snapped. That’s just your mom, killing herself to please you brats. I brought my eyebrows together and made the ugliest, angriest face I could make. I had suspected that Santa Claus wasn’t real—the story seemed too silly to be actual, unlike the fairy tales I read and the movies I watched, which were all coherent and clearly true. Still, my grandfather’s audacity struck me as cruel: How dare this man take it upon himself to ruin the fantasy? My sister burst into tears.

  My inability to distinguish fact from fiction would persist until I was twelve, but everything religious made me dubious. Initially, I was pious, like Abuela Carolina and my mother desired. I relished the extravagance of my first Communion, my white lace dress and religious-themed presents, the papery feel of Jesus Christ’s body on my tongue. But I felt my mother’s faith wavering amid the chaos of her life. I begged her to take us to church. She was too busy or too tired. I watched a film about a girl who heard the voice of God. I was jealous of the protagonist and watched, mesmerized, as she freed Jesus Christ from a handheld crucifix, causing him to materialize before her in the flesh, life-size, healed. I looked up at the crucifix on our bedroom wall and walked over to it. I pulled it down and, in a strange reverie, ripped the nails from Christ’s hands and feet. I stared at the freed son of God in my hand. He did not grow. The holes in his bloodstained limbs did not disappear. He stayed as he had been, crown of thorns drawing blood on his forehead, arms paralyzed in crucifixion. But now he looked obscene, suffering with his arms outspread for no reason. A horrifying conviction gripped me: I had blasphemed. I searched the ground for the nails I had tossed aside. I searched under the bed. I searched the corners of the room. I searched every inch of the floor. I searched until my mother found me on the ground in tears and told me, with bored eyes, to forget about it.

  * * *

  •

  The Cocos moved back to Puerto Rico. They had concluded we were a lost cause, tainted by the DNA of el Mexicano who had ruined their daughter’s life. There was no point in trying to civilize us. After they left, my mother told me I had to take care of myself and my sister. She taught me to heat frozen meals in the microwave, made me recite rules. Never open the door for anyone. Never leave the stove on. If someone calls the house and asks for Jeannette Del Valle, never, ever say, Mami isn’t here right now. Always say: Mami is in the bathroom; may I take a message?

  * * *

  •

  In the summer, when many of our classmates visited islands and amusement parks, my sister and I accompanied Mami on hospital rounds. We sat in doctors’ lounges, devouring snacks, pressing buttons on the TV remote controls, interviewing handsome male doctors who passed through. Do you know Dr. Del Valle? I asked. Dr. Del Valle, oh man, she is so beautiful! they said, or, I love your mother, she’s such a great doctor and just a great human being. I glanced at their fingers, only to be disappointed that they donned shiny rings of commitment. At home, we asked our mother: When are you going to remarry? She had told us she was divorced from our father.

  Never, she said, chin up, tossing her hair. I don’t need a man.

  But we want a father like the ones on TV, we said.

  She grinned. I am your mother and your father.

  * * *

  •

  While shopping for groceries in 1996, my mother bought a Celine Dion music album, Falling into You. She inserted the CD into our stereo sound system. The living room filled with the sounds of the breeze and piano keys twirling inside it like bright yellow leaves. Celine Dion sang about a cold wind in the night. Her voice was strong and soft, like strips of velvet. My mother swayed and joined in: “There were days when the sun was so cruel…” Suddenly, the tone of the song changed, the voice swelled and became defiant: “I finished crying in the instant that you left…and I banished every memory you and I had ever made.” My mother moved every limb, sang at the top of her lungs. Michelle and I felt buoyed by ecstasy as we watched her catharsis, we hugged her hips and danced with her. Then Dion’s and my mother’s voices swerved again, to a sudden tenderness, a softness so vulnerable it could break. They recalled the man’s touch, they were starting to remember: “It’s so hard to believe but it’s all coming back to me…” The piano keys began to chase their voices, a panting tambourine came into the song, the pace picked up: “It’s all coming back…” All of the instruments rushed together in a revelatory leap: “There were moments of gold! And there were flashes of light!” The windows were pulsating, the three of us were spinning. Michelle and I learned the chorus and sang with our mother, the three of us were screaming. Then the song was over. We stared at one another in silence, sweating, eyes glowing, waiting. The next song, “Because You Loved Me,” started. Mami sang, looking at us: “You were my strength when I was weak…I lost my faith, you gave it back to me.” We danced to those songs again and again, shouting the lyrics, falling to the floor, jumping up, watching our mother crying and laughing, crying and laughing, while crying and laughing with her.

  * * *

  •

  Mami enrolled us in ballet classes, swimming classes, piano classes. She wanted to keep us busy so we would not have time to think about our father. I loved piano because sheet music reminded me of hieroglyphs, or little birds reposing on telephone wires. With the smooth feel of cold keys under my fingers I was inspired to improvise, and my father, during a rare visit, heard me play a song I had composed. He said, Wow, you wrote that? I felt a glow so intense I thought I’d catch fire. I decided to play my nameless song at a Christmas recital where I was supposed to play “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” The day of the recital, Mami seemed more stressed than usual, juggling patients, getting me dressed up, doing my hair. She sighed and scolded me repeatedly. I tried to forget my anxiety at my piano teacher’s house. Strangers crowded her living room. My mother had invited a coworker. Papi, predictably, did not come. I swallowed and walked up to the bench. I placed my fingers on the cold, creviced keys, the feel of which filled me with sudden confidence. I played the song I had composed. It started as a si
mple, chipper melody: three high staccato notes repeating amid a descending line of keys. Then it erupted into rhythmic chords that rose and dipped, rose and dipped, until they changed their minds and rose and rose and rose, punctuated always by a low note at the left side of the piano, which made their rising sound miraculous. Suddenly, the rising chords ended in a sound of shattering light. The chipper melody returned, but this time, my fingers were soft and slow, not plucky, and the happy melody sounded sad—a smile with downcast eyes. The chords followed again, legato as well, until they reached a golden high note that echoed, and I finished the song with a double-pounding on one of the lowest keys, stepping on the sustain pedal. I felt tremors in my gut as the final sounds passed through me, and stood from the bench flushed with pride. I turned to the crowd. Everyone seemed distracted; they smiled and clapped without real emotion. Only the piano teacher noticed I had done something unique. She looked enraged. I fought the impulse to burst into tears. After the recital was over, when the guests were socializing, the teacher pulled me aside, hissing like a scarlet-colored snake. Spittle flew into my eyes. You were supposed to play “Rudolph.” I was disturbed by the intensity of her reaction. I decided to quit piano and all of my hobbies; my sister followed suit. Life was not turning out as we had hoped. Creativity was a crime. Innocent creatures were mortal. Fathers left their daughters and broke their mothers’ hearts.

  * * *

  •

  After a heavy rain, the earth in our backyard was covered in countless caracoles—ugly, slimy snails. Lethargic, I asked my sister to help me beautify them with our scented Magic Markers. We decorated the shells of the snails with swirls and spots of colors. The coloring only highlighted their hideousness. Disgusted, I told my sister we had to kill the preposterous caracoles. The thick, tentaculoid roots of a tree bulged and converged aboveground, forming a pool where we often gave Barbies mud baths. We filled the pool with water from our hose and dropped in the coiled creatures. They made satisfactory plops in our swamp. We smiled. The surface rippled and was calm. It felt good to have killed the snails, served them right for being so disgusting. We sat there in satisfied silence, then the wind picked up. Guilt seized us. Save them, Michelle! I screeched, too repulsed to do it myself. No, I’m scared, she said. Darkness crept over the backyard, casting shadows everywhere. We ran back to the house.

  The next morning, I shook my sister awake. Go check on the snails, I begged. Only if you come, she said. We entered the backyard holding hands. We took tentative steps until we reached the roots. The muddy soup had hardened. Two gruesome trails of bubbly, white slime led out of two holes in the dry earth. We were petrified. We imagined the incredible strength of the snails we had tortured. We felt certain these creatures would someday seek revenge.

  * * *

  •

  Everything was vanishing. Even the succulent-thing in my heart had disappeared, replaced by a low-frequency pain and emptiness in my chest. Where did everything go? Nobody knew. The culprit was always: No sé. No sé. No sé. The unknown was the root of every kind of erasure: my father’s departure, our pets’ deaths, the disappearance of the indestructible snails. I remembered a faraway, happy time full of unfrightening mysteries, full of threads that could be pulled. I had nothing to pull now, no path toward understanding to pursue. I had a feeling Papi could answer my questions, or perhaps already had, in his excited whispers about the sky and the trees and el Océano Pacífico. But I couldn’t remember the content of those whispers, and he was a stranger now, I couldn’t ask him anything. What happens when we die? All evidence pointed to: nothing. A vanishing. A simple ceasing to exist. The concept of true nothingness began to form in my brain like a wart. It seemed a worse fate than Hell, but I couldn’t imagine it. It was the unknown again. I needed to comprehend it so it would lose its sinister power. I entered the bedroom, closed the door and sat on the floor. I closed my eyes. Then I asked myself, over and over again: What is nothingness? What is nothingness? I pushed myself against the envisioned blackness, which I knew was not quite nothingness, and erased the empty space that took its place. At first, empty space replaced empty space. I could not go beyond. But after two or three minutes, something happened. It is impossible to describe or fathom in retrospect. The closest sketch I can make is as follows:

  I felt the whole universe rush in through every pore of my body, causing me to swell and expand at the speed of light. I felt the heat of stars flooding my veins, moons bombing my eye sockets, the pink fog of nebulae exploding in my lungs and black holes blowing my heart to smithereens. And then, suddenly, I was infinite. I was everything and nothing at once. I was not only conversing with God, like the girl in that religious film—I was God. I was his black blood, his Milky Way fluids, his fiery guts and his omniscience. I was his voice, saying: Everything is exactly as it is supposed to be.

  After a few seconds, the experience subsided. I returned to my flesh-coated girl-self. It was what some might call a spiritual experience, induced by the hypnotic quality of the repetition. I had perceived nothingness as the most fertile ground in the universe: the seed of life and creation. Death could never prevail; its sowing reaps forever.

  * * *

  •

  Of course, I didn’t understand the experience in those terms. All I knew was that it felt amazing. Quickly, I learned I could repeat it. Every time I asked myself What is nothingness? over and over again, my body’s borders yielded and I experienced that internal eruption for an eternal instant. It became a guilty pleasure, a comforting ecstasy, a cure for all of my existential anxiety. Whenever I could, I locked myself in the bedroom and stimulated my mind with the question until the astronomical climax came. I told no one. I could not hope to explain it. I feared that what I was doing was wrong.

  CURATIVE BOOKS

  My reading tastes evolved in middle school. I selected romance novels from the Price Club book section because their covers featured beautiful women who looked like real-life princesses surrounded by darkness and fog. They often featured soft-core porn, but they didn’t corrupt me; my mother translated the difficult English words for me—a man’s bulge referred to his elbow, and nipples were a sort of beauty mark. I also read Goosebumps, whose ghoulish creatures I thought lurked in our garage.

  It dawned on me that every story revolved around a conflict. No fairy tale or book was any good without toil and trouble. The absence of a father meant I was interesting. Every conflict in my life, I concluded, was a blessing. Suffering fertilized me like a storm nourishes flowers. It was better to be interesting than to be happy. Please let me have a life of calamity, full of villains, pining, betrayals, damsels in distress, beasts, curses, near-death experiences and apocalypses, I beseeched God, repeating my wish a hundred times every night. I was sure that if I prayed longer than anyone, He would hear my voice. But I punctuated each prayer with a supplication: However, please, please let my mother pass her test and please help her live happily ever after. For as long as I could remember, my mother had been studying for the internal-medicine certification exam, failing to pass each year despite hundreds of hours highlighting passages in tomes, downing coffee after coffee, never taking time off. Every gift I gave my mother as a child had a de-stressing theme (a mug urging her to stress less, a self-help book on managing stress, a mouse pad with a quote about relaxation). No matter how much I prayed, she failed the exam by several points each year. Eventually, I grew so frustrated with God that I ceased praying. That same year, my mother passed. But that would not happen until 2002.

  * * *

  •

  Our iguanas, which had survived the die-off during our father’s deterioration, vanished from the cage Papi had built for them. My sister and I were accustomed to loss and barely noticed. Our neighbor Jenny spotted one of the reptiles, enlarged to twice its original size, basking on a tree branch in her backyard. Jenny called our mother. She was busy with patients. My mother called Papi. Our father arrived with a plan. I couldn�
��t remember the last time he had stepped into our house. I watched his every movement, transfixed. Papi pushed a wire through a long plastic tube and created a loop at one end with the wire. He slipped the noose around the iguana’s neck, tightened it, and yanked the lassoed reptile from the tree. My sister and I squealed and applauded, so proud of our father the superman. He left as quickly as he had come.

  Sometime later, Papi brought over two long ropes and plastic black hoops. He tied the ropes to a tree branch and knotted the black plastic loops at their ends. Use them, he said, then departed. Michelle tiptoed and grabbed both strings with her hands. No, not like that, I said. I stuck my arms entirely through the plastic loops, up to my armpits, lifted my legs behind me, and kicked off. They’re for flying! I cried, and pretended to soar, ignoring the strain of suspending my legs parallel to the earth. Michelle and I took turns, giggling with glee. The trees watched us with their large eyes. Their smiles seemed to stretch. Their twigs trembled, raining leaves down all around us. We flew. We flew for so long, with such abandon, that I ceased to feel the plastic loops under my arms—I felt I was literally soaring over the land. When my sister told me she wanted to stop, I ignored her; I pushed her higher and higher. Finally, I noticed the blood soaking through our shirts. We had rubbed our armpits raw. “Look at me,” I said, grabbing my sobbing sister by the shoulders, my heart pounding. “We can’t tell Mami.”

  I was afraid of myself, afraid of what the incident revealed. I hid the balled-up bloody shirts in a corner of our closet. My mother found them anyway. I walked into the bedroom as if on cue. She turned toward me. In her eyes, there was fear—fear of me.