[1]

[2]

The North is a Chimera

[3]

[4]

The North is a Chimera

Jos Miguel Plata Ramrez
Ilustrator: Fernanda Valentina Plata Mora

Latin
Heritage
Foundation
[5]

The North is a Chimera

Copyright by Jos Miguel Plata Ramrez, 2013
Ilustrator: Fernanda Valentina Plata Mora
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by
any means, including photocopying, recording, or other
electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other
noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For permission requests, write to the publisher at the
address below.
Latin Heritage Foundation
8 Nunn Avenue
Washington, NJ 07882
www.latinhf.com
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-0615678085
The main category of the book Fiction
[6]

To those who without prejudice

can enjoy these stories.

To my daughters Vanessa and Fernanda,

and my wife Marie Claire who allowed me
to see the world through their eyes.
To little Sebastin Toms.

To Bonnie Sunstein, Carol Severino and Kathy Whitmore who

always encouraged me to write and appreciate
the value of cultural differences.

To all those friends with whom I shared life experiences

in different meridians and parallels.

[7]

[8]

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.

[9]

[10]

We live not only in the presence of different cultural visions but

with different individual modes of perceptions
Mary Catherine Bateson: Peripheral Visions

[11]

[12]

The characters and names in these stories

are products of the authors imagination.
Any resemblance to reality is pure coincidence.

Translated and adapted from the original El Norte es una Quimera

by Jos Miguel Plata Ramrez.
Illustrated by Fernanda Valentina Plata Mora.

[13]

[14]

El Norte es una Quimera

Autor: Luis Fragachn
Me fui para Nueva York
en busca de unos centavos
y he regresado a Caracas
como fuete de arrear pavos.
El norte es una quimera,
qu atrocidad,
y dicen que all se vive
como un pach.
Ay, Nueva York,
no me halagas con el oro,
tu ley seca la rechazo,
no me agrada y la deploro.
A Nueva York
yo ms no voy:
all no hay berro,
no hay vino y no hay amor.
Todo el que va a Nueva York
se vuelve tan embustero
que si all lavaba platos
dice aqu que era platero.
No vuelvo pa Nueva York,
lo juro por San Andrs,
no me gusta hablar ingls
ni montar en ascensor.
[15]

The North is a Chimera

(Venezuelan folk song)
Author: Luis Fragachn
I went off to New York
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, New York,
you dont flatter me with your gold,
I reject your prohibition,
I dislike it and deplore it.
To New York
I'm not going any more,
there is no watercress,
no wine and no love.
They all go off to New York
and come back full of airs,
They got dodo jobs as dishwashers
And say they were financiers.
I wont visit New York any more,
I swear by St. Andrew,
I do not like speaking English or
riding in an elevator.
[16]

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
[17]

blue ox. Planted in my mind, the portrait of a place

crammed with white houses and colossal buildings, as I
imagined this new land of chimeras and illusions.
We descended from the plane and began to walk quickly
following my Pap who slipped between the tumult of men,
women and children. The flow of people that had descended with us from that plane soon dispersed among the constant coming and going crowd of people of all types, sizes
and colors. Except for the ones I had seen on TV, that was
the first time I saw men in long dresses and turbans and
women with exotic clothes and veils that covered much of
their faces. Many stylishly flight attendants and pilots in
sober uniforms walked down the center aisle pulling their
fine baggage; their heads erect and shy smiles drawn on
their faces, surely believing they were the masters of the
place. Meanwhile, I dreamed of a life like that, a rich life of
travels and airports, luxury cars and restaurants of exquisite
desserts in fine glasses with cherries on top, until my Paps
shouts brought me back to the midst of the pulsing tumult,
making me walk faster, pulling my simple, cheap bag behind. Some travelers lined up at pay phones waiting their
turn to communicate with loved ones. Others, engrossed,
read the newspaper or delightfully drank coffee, letting the
evening go before their eyes. I caught a glimpse of a child
crying as a lady squeezed his little hand, dragging him like a
rag doll, shouting at him all the while. My Mam hurried
her step, towing the large bag she had borrowed from my
abuela Mona, and my Pap, with a sheen of sweat on his
forehead, tried to get to the immigration officer so that we
could make our way through Customs.
My sister Clara, who has always been a flirt, hurried her
way through the halls of that airport too, all the while, pretending, with her haughty pose to be a famous artist, feeling
the admiration of all before her. Lots of bright-lighted bill[18]

boards written in English that I didnt understand, luxurious

shops, escalators, and some restrooms, which Id have liked
to use for the strange feeling I had in my tummy, and that
gave me chills. Everything looked amazing, and in the air, a
strange smell of something new lingered. It was the smell of
airport, duty free shops, or simply the smell of a foreign
country. I couldnt wait to see the tall buildings and sleep
on the beds that were waiting for us at my Paps friends
house.
There were about 15 people ahead of us in the line
where we were to check our passports. I remember that I
was a little nervous and embarrassed because the picture I
had taken for the passport was horrible. I still remember the
day of the photo. It was a day that I had gymnastics practice
and Mam had pulled up all of my hair into a kind of bun in
the back. The picture was awful. The haggard image in that
photo looked like a short-haired boy. I was terrified that the
police would look at my picture and ask where the boy in
the passport was. My Pap winked his eye at me in a complicit and mocking way, but my heart was beating wildly
when our turn came.
I asked my Pap what the immigration officer had said to
him about our documents, but Pap only put his index finger vertically over his lips, asking me to keep silent. The
officer took our passports and then asked for other documents, which my Pap handed him politely. Mam was a
little worried but Clara kept watching the people waiting in
the line parallel to us, always with her haughty pose, and
looking over her shoulder, out of the corner of her eye.
After a long time, and at the request of the immigration
agent, a police officer led us into a room where there were
many people sitting, waiting just like us. Apparently, everyone had problems with their documents.
I asked Pap where we were going and he whispered that
[19]

we had to wait at the immigration office because the visa in

his passport was allegedly defective. I didnt get it. I didnt
understand how that couldve happened if that visa had
been granted by the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela. And, as far
as I understood it, Americans hardly make mistakes. My
Mam was worried. Every now and then she reminded my
Pap that wed miss the flight that would connect us to our
next city. My Pap, moody and very helpless, just waited
resignedly to be served. After a long wait, one of the many
immigration officers told my Pap that we were allowed to
continue our journey. Just like that, without much explanation and without courtesy, the officer authorized my Pap to
continue on our trip. Apparently his visa was in order after
all. I couldnt understand why it took so long to realize that
in the country that leads the world in technology. I just
barely heard Pap when, between groans and gestures of
indignation, he muttered: "Welcome to the American
dream." I did not understand what he meant by that yet.
We ran again, but this time to the Baggage Claim. Our
three-hour layover had been consumed in the seats of that
immigration waiting room, lost between our anguish and
the sarcasm of the immigration officers. All of us dragged
along a bag following Pap who occasionally asked people
directions. Our baggage was there, at the foot of the conveyor belt, stacked one on top of the other, with scuffs here
and there and a few broken wheels that further hindered
our hurried march. I thought of the tall buildings and the
pretty white houses that I would find at the end of the afternoon, at our final destination. Pap didnt speak; he just
rushed his step and screamed at us to rush ours. At last we
reached the airline counter to check our tickets and board
the plane that was likely ready to close its gates. The lady
who greeted us at the counter kindly told my Pap that,
unfortunately, our flight was already closed, and that the
[20]

next flight would leave the following day, at five in the

morning.
My father closed his eyes and taking a heavy breath
raised his face to the sky as if searching for answers on the
ceiling of that airport. Calmly, he told us we had missed our
flight. A couple of tears escaped from my Mams eyes and
my sister Clara just looked at me and grinned wryly, her
mouth set in resignation. My desire to see the tall buildings
and white houses would have to wait until the next day.
That night, our first in the country of dreams, we had to
sleep on the gray carpet in a corner of that huge airport.

[21]

[22]

Jungle and snakes

We tried to find a convenient corner in that huge airport
to accommodate all of our luggage and ourselves overnight.
My Pap wanted to be near the gate, so we walked for a
long time, pulling our disabled suitcases until we found just
the right corner. This time we didnt walk hastily but very
cautiously, following my Pap who oriented himself among
the many bright-lit signs, looking for our gate for the next
day. I was tired of carrying my luggage, and I felt the need
to use the bathroom because of that strange feeling in my
tummy. We stacked our bags in a corner that would serve
as the bedroom for our first night in the country of the
American dream. My Mam, Clara and I finally could go to
the bathroom, while my Pap waited his turn to make some
phone calls.
My Pap drank a coffee and read a newspaper that a passenger had left behind in a nearby seat. My Mam lay on the
carpet for a while, trying to relax from that initial stress,
and Clara and I distracted ourselves by watching and counting the people passing before us, counting their numbers. A
chicken sandwich to share, a yogurt and a couple of apples
was all Pap bought in a convenience store because prices
were exorbitant. My Mam just ate a yogurt. Gradually the
[23]

traffic of people passing by our corner decreased. Mam

improvised a bed with our coats where, later that night, we
four lay together. Clara immediately fell asleep but my
Mam and I talked for a while, until fatigue defeated me. I
dreamed I had arrived in our city and was enjoying that
beautiful place with its skyscrapers and huge avenues.
White houses, beautifully decorated, were arranged on the
sides of the avenue we passed through. How nice! It was
exactly like I imagined it. My Pap told me the next day that
he couldnt sleep a wink because of the constant interruptions from the speakers reminding passengers not to neglect
their luggage for an instant due to drug smugglers. And just
when he was about to finally fall asleep, a janitor had decided to polish the floor of the lobby area, right next to us.
Mam woke me up and told me to put my coat on. It
was about time! Pap had already arranged the luggage and
waited in line to check it in. There were many people in
that line. That morning, with no major hassles, we were
flying to our final destination, the one for which we had left
our magical mountain city in the Venezuelan Andes. During
the three-hour flight, I saw through the plane window huge
tracts of land, rivers and clouds that had different unique
forms: they looked like a pile of scattered popcorn or like
the little sheep my Mam used to place in the manger during December and January. Shortly before landing, I saw
only large tracts of farmland. Ma-m told me it was corn.
As we landed, I saw no tall buildings but I assumed that just
meant the airport was far from the city.
Once again, there was the commotion of collecting our
bags, and then, in a line, we walked behind Pap who always guided our steps. I felt the need to use the bathroom,
but my Pap said I could do that once we found his friend,
Caroline. Mam was the one who first saw Caroline, who
had come to pick us up the night before, and had been try[24]

ing to find us among the group of passengers ever since.

Hugs and introductions. The Spanish phrases mingled with
others in English that I couldnt understand and at that time
they just sounded like whispers in the air. "That how the viaje
was, these are my hijas, Wow, ble bla bla bla bli blebla, you had
already met mi esposa, we missed the flight because of the immigration office, the regulations are very strict after September eleventh
... si, yo blaaable blu ble bla bli. " Caroline's truck was
parked right in front of the main exit of the airport. I think I
had never seen such an old vehicle. Bags in the back, and off
we went, straight home.
The road was pretty narrow and on its sides immense
corn fields wobbled and shook with each passing vehicle.
An unpleasant smell of pig poop lingered in the air during
the whole trip. Pap and Caroline talked about how the city
was. With a peculiar accent to her Spanish, Caroline boasted that this small city was the agricultural and farming place
par excellence in the United States. "It's a small town with a
great university, but you must get used to the smell of fertilizer
during this time." Just in that exact moment my dreams of
seeing tall buildings and beautiful white houses faded.
Clara, who had a more tragic look than mine and my
Mams, just told me in a whisper: "Venezuela is Venezuela,
the North is just Jungle and Snakes.

[25]

[26]

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
[27]

stomach that I can never locate. I was afraid of getting close

to those children who I didnt know yet. What could I do?
They had never seen me, and this was the first time I saw
them. I didnt know how to approach them nor what to say.
I couldnt speak Ingls.
My family in Venezuela thinks my Pap speaks ingls fluently just because he completed a couple of classes at a private English academy, but he said he didnt even speak
espaol well, which is his native language. Generally, people
have a big misconception about English learning. That
Fulanito speaks ingls perfectly and he studied it in a private
school I dont know where; that Menganito is very good in
ingls because he lived I dont know for how long in the
United States. That the best ingls is the one spoken in England. Well, I dont really know if there is someone who
speaks a language perfectly. My Mam often got mad when
family members asked about her progress in ingls because
they assumed that just because she lived in the United
States, she had no excuse not to learn it. She said that learning ingls was not so simple, that the older you were, the
harder it was, that loro viejo no aprenda a hablar, that old
parrots never learn to speak. Mam did her best. Clara Isabella and I were always asking for words and phrases from
Pap who, by then, was the only one who could more or
less communicate in ingls.
With that strange feeling in my gut, I approached
the group of children slowly. There they were Luddya,
Peter, Cee-Cee, Zack, Lala and Young Hong, whose names
I later learned. They were trying to catch the tiny cotton
flakes that floated gracefully in the air. Luddya, the most
daring, was the first who noticed my presence, and began
babbling something I couldnt understand. I just smiled
because I knew that smiling as well as crying is part of the
same universal language. They can be understood by anyone
[28]

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
[29]

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
[30]

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
[31]

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.

[32]

[33]

[34]

My first day at school

The first day I went to Welby Elementary School I was
very nervous. As soon as I got up in the morning I felt a
tingling in my stomach. The lady busdriver helped us, assigning a seat to each of us. Luddya was two places ahead of
me, and Cee-Cee sat about three seats behind me, next to
Zack. There were a dozen children in the bus and lots of
free seats. I didnt understand why Luddya, Cee-Cee and I
couldnt share a single seat with so many available. Mam
and Pap, like many other parents, were accompanying me
to the bus stop that first day. Mam gave me a kiss, and I
noticed a tear rolling down her cheek. Pap just smiled and
winked at me as I climbed into the bus. Off to school we
went, heading for my first day of class in this country, leaving a trail of black smoke into the air. Through the glass
window I could see Pap waving goodbye with his hand in
the middle of the trail of slowly dissipating black smoke.
Welby Elementary was a nice, big school with one of the
most beautiful playgrounds Id ever seen. We spent good
times there during the 10:15 a.m. recess. Whether it was
hot, cold or snowy, the teachers always allowed us to play
outdoors. It was only during extremely cold days that we
had to stay inside the building during recess. One day the
[35]

temperature dropped to negative 15 degrees Fahrenheit and

we all had to stay inside watching TV during the entire recess period. Children were assigned to different teams depending on their age and grade. The preschoolers were
assigned to Team One, the first and second graders to Team
Two, the third and fourth graders to Team Three, and the
fifth and sixth graders made up the Team Four. Each team
had a classroom area and each of us was assigned a thin gray
locker to arrange our school supplies and our coats during
the winter.
That first day, everything was very weird. The teacher,
Miss Brown, was very kind to me from the start. She muttered something to the whole class just as she put her finger
on Venezuela on a world map, and for just a moment everyone looked at me and said Hellou. In that exact moment I
felt like a burning flame lit my face causing my cheeks to
blush with a fluorescent light. I also felt a huge desire to cry
during those seconds that seemed like an eternity, but Miss
Browns smile quickly put me at ease. I began then to examine the classroom, the teacher Miss Brown, and some
children that occasionally stole glances at me. For brief
seconds, I only heard an unintelligible murmur. I thought if
I tried a bit harder maybe I could understand something of
what they said. Then I fixed my eyes on their lips and tried
to filter out those whispers, but all in vain; I could understand nothing. Next I focused on Miss Browns lips, and
then something extraordinary happened. I witnessed her
lips disappeared before my eyes, her head vanished and then
her body slowly evaporated out of the window, leaving
behind only her incomprehensible murmurs echoing inside
my head. Each of the children languidly faded and then I
was all alone in the classroom, accompanied only by those
whispers floating in the air that I tried in vain to decipher.
Those were the moments in which I was totally abstracted,
[36]

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
[37]

some of those instruments. Then we went to the school

cafeteria and waited in line to get our lunch. The lunches in
my country were real lunches with soup, with pasta or rice
with meat, chicken or fish, but in the U.S. school lunches
looked like snacks. That day I had a hot dog, French fries
and a glass of chocolate milk for lunch.
From the very first day I realized that schools in Venezuela and the U.S. were pretty different. The desks, the
teachers, the number of students, the school supplies and
classroom equipment were all different. The only similarity
I noticed between my two schools was the pleasant smell of
brand-new erasers and school supplies that permeated the
classroom during the first day of class. Welby Elementary
School was a very nice school, but the worst of that first day
was that as I couldnt speak ingles, I stayed alone in the playground during the whole recess.

[38]

My neighbors smell like garlic

The neighborhood where we lived was not pretty; it was
rather old and abandoned. There were many blocks of twostory buildings where people who came from all over the
world to study at the university lived. In the spring there
were lots of flowers and trees of ma-ny colors that looked
like rainbows. The grass resumed an exquisite green and a
mantle of little white and yellow flowers carpeted much of
it. In the mornings, the fresh smell of wet soil came with
the breeze from the soccer fields that were located on one
side of our buildings. During the first days of spring there
was mud, and lots of puddles formed in the holes that the
squirrels and rabbits had dug after the March rains erased
the last vestiges of snow. Prior to the arrival of spring,
Mam used to say that one felt a joy in the body that told
you that the winter was about to end, but to be honest, I
never had that special inner feeling. My hermana Clara said
she did feel it, but I think she just said that to please Mam.
In the summer the heat and humidity were a little less
than unbearable. It was very hot. I liked the barbecues Pap
prepared with his friends Alvaro Correa and Juanito el
espaol. On those days, I could ride my bike up Eagleeye
Drive with my friends, and I always knew Mam would have
iced pop waiting for us when I got tired of pedaling. Alvaro
[39]

and Juanito el espaol were my Paps friends from the first

moment we arrived. Alvaro, along with his wife Doris,
were the first people we met in the university apartments.
He majored in math and graduated one year before Pap,
and promptly returned to his island of enchantment, leaving
a huge emptiness inside us. Juanito el espaol, in contrast,
became interested in Japanese puzzles and little by little
moved away from his venerated Linguistics, to which he
had devoted his attention for the last ten years. Sometime
later, that interest in Sudoku became a schizophrenic fulltime addiction, which gradually undermined that candid
and capable spirit. He collected all the Sudoku published in
the newspaper, spent hours on the Internet, ordering rows,
columns and boxes. He also bought hobby books crammed
with numbers, which he constantly ordered, day and night,
his eyes bulging, as if watching a miracle of God himself.
His conversations were limited to discussing Sudoku problem-solving strategies and everyone, except my Pap and
Alvaro, began to look at him funny.
While roasting the meat at the barbeques, my Pap
talked to his friends and drank beer. From time to time he
shouted at me not to bike too far, and after a lot of pedaling
on my bike, my Paps eyes got droopy and he fell intensely
in love with my Mam. It was at the end of those cookouts,
when the intense symphony of crickets and cicadas began,
that I would see my parents embrace like in that photo of
their wedding. During the fall, all the grass was covered
with a carpet of dry leaves. The trees turned beautiful colors: red, green, white, ocher. Then, little by little they
began losing their leaves and got rid of their beautiful colors. Pap said that it was the dry leaves that caused my nasty
a-llergies, but I wasnt sure about that, because inside my
house, there were no dry leaves, and I frequently sneezed
anyway. It was that season of the year in which I sneezed
[40]

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
[41]

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
[43]

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.

[44]

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
[45]

always wondered how this picture would look.

Mam has many virtues. She is kind and is always concerned about our food, our clothes and our welfare. She
cooks like a goddess and makes the best arepas in the whole
world. She cares a lot for Pap, and she always hugged him
each time he returned home from his class. My Mam has
always been a beautiful woman, and I noticed that men on
the street would sometimes say things to her or tell her so.
In Venezuela, men on the street used to flatter her, but in
the U.S. it was a bit different. Although men looked at her
when she passed by, theyd hardly ever say a compliment.
They dont know about that. Her blonde hair like the
morning sun would gently slip over her shoulder when I
touched it. She helped me with my homework, and accompanied me every time I went to my violin lessons. The violin teacher at my school always said, "Mrs. Sophia, you look
very young," and that made her very happy, because the
truth is that my Mam was young. She gave birth to Clara
when she was twenty. She is four years younger than Pap.
Mam wanted to be an architect, but she couldnt achieve
that until we returned to our country because education in
the United States is very expensive. She liked painting with
oil colors and listening to jazz. She loved to listen to an
album of a couple of negritos called Ella Fitzgerald and Louis
Armstrong. I think I inherited her love for painting. That
was my Mam, a good wife and the best Mam that anyone
could have. In her portrait, I envisioned her with a beautiful
smile and the delicious fragrance of cinnamon.
Pap was always busy with his class readings. When he
was studying, it was better not to disturb him because he
got upset and yelled easily. He always said that we didnt let
him read in peace. Pap really cared about us and provided
us with everything we needed for studying, dressing and
eating. Mam sometimes argued with Pap because he didnt
[46]

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
[47]

envisioned her with her pretty smile and a famous-singer

pose.
I dont know if I wouldve wanted to be the older sister.
I dont know if I could have been as responsible as my hermana Clara. Caring about your younger sibling seems always to be a responsibility that comes with birth. I dont
understand why older siblings must assume this responsibility if the younger ones arent their own children but only
their siblings. Parents must be responsible for their children. Children should be only children until they assume
the responsibilities as parents when the time comes. I think
I feel good about being the youngest. Being the youngest in
the house has its advantages. Clara said I was a spoiled child
but I was scolded too.
When I get nervous my hands sweat a lot and Ive
never liked that. At night, when the lights went out, I always felt the cold sweat of my hands. When I dreamed of
mythological creatures that spat fire and gobbled entire
herds of sheep and people, I also felt that cold sweat of my
hands. It was a recurring nightmare; I think I started having
it around the same time that the episode of the little children and their adoptive father occurred. I didnt like the
dark, thinking about the death, or pictures. Unlike Clara, I
didnt like pictures because I felt that I didnt get along with
cameras and flashes, and also because my teeth didnt help
me much. Pap said that the picture of me that he liked best
is the one that I had taken when I was six. I dont know if I
could produce a smile like that in our family portrait. In
that picture I envisioned myself making a smile and feeling
the moisture of my sweaty hands.

[48]

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
[49]

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
[50]

Id be a great artist because my paintings were worthy of

exhibition. He believed this more than he believed that I
would be a veterinarian. Pap framed and displayed my
artworks like trophies on our apartment walls, and boasted
to his friends about them every time they visited us. They
said they were very good, but I never really knew if they
said so because they meant it, or just to please my Pap. I
also enjoyed doing handicrafts with play-dough and origami
paper. And although I received several packages of origami
paper once for my birthday, after reading Sadakos story, I
didnt dare to create paper shapes, especially not paper
cranes. I didnt want to count the number of paper figures I
had done, after reading that story, and I didnt want to create any new one either. My dream was different from
Sadakos. My dream was not of origami or play-dough or
paint brushes. My dream was just a dream like any o-ther. I
wanted to be a veterinarian, a famous painter, or perhaps a
pop star like my hermana Clara. Why not? As my dreams
were coming true, my origami paper boxes would remain
closed, stashed away somewhere in the closet of our room.

[51]

[52]

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
[53]

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,
[54]

that fresh oregano smell reminds me of my first period. I

also changed like Clara, only her adolescence came much
earlier, without any particular smell associated with it.
When I asked her to play she said that those were children's
games and that she was no longer a little girl, that she was a
mature seorita, but Mam said that wasnt the truth that
Clara was a seorita, but not mature. In my view, since
Clara was no longer a little girl but not an adult yet, didnt
play dolls with me but couldnt wear make-up like Mam, I
fancied that she was neither more nor less than a little mature girl.

[55]

[56]

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
[57]

usually find any kind of furniture you might need for a

house, as well as a couple of Asians lurking about. Most
things were in such excellent condition that at first you
were suspicious as to how someone could think of throwing
out furniture that was in such a good shape. If someone was
available to help and you could secure a vehicle, then you
could easily assemble your home in just a couple of nights.
The problem was to guess the right time when people decided to throw out their furniture in good condition and get
that furniture before the Asians who seemed to have secret
information, because you always saw them carrying heavy
stuff, or sitting on large pieces of furniture waiting for help
because they themselves could hardly carry them. That was
how we found our first air conditioner one night. Now I
remember, that was the first night we all could sleep peacefully without having to get up in the middle of the night
because of the sweltering summer heat or the annoying
noise that the used fans made. Other nights we also found
and carried on home a lamp, a desk chair, a microwave and
our first SANYO TV. The day we found a washing machine,
we went home sad because even among the four of us,
Mam, Pap, Clara and I, we couldnt carry it on to our
house and we had to leave our trophy halfway home, at the
mercy of some Asians, who like hyenas in search of carrion,
had already assumed that sooner or later we would abandon
our cargo.
Many nights we always went for a walk with the hope of
finding something in good condition and that we could carry it home, like the night when my parents found a nice
dresser while there was a big party at the residence complex. In the center of all the blocks, the university celebrated the welcoming and farewell annual party for international students. It was the welcoming to those just arriving, like
us, and the farewell to those who, having fulfilled their
[58]

academic commitments, happily or sadly, left for their

homes overseas, in other countries. I remember that day
the party had started early in the afternoon with plenty of
food. Burgers, hot dogs, popcorn, ice cream, salads, pancakes, donuts, bagels and sodas of all kinds. Earlier they had
organized some games for children and young people where
I participated in a bike race and won a book to draw in even
when I didnt win the first place. The party was quite an
event, well organized, with many decorations and signs
alluding to the welcome and farewell, and with a crew of
firefighters to protect the integrity of the participants in the
bike races. The university television channel and the local
press were also there to cover the event.
With the party so lively, so many people, and most
Asians captivated by the food, Mam and Pap had the
chance to go around and check if there was any piece of
furniture available. In fact, that night there was a nice cedar
dresser with a large beveled mirror that they agreed to carry between the two. I was with Clara eating some hot dogs
when we heard a loud noise that attracted all attendees
attention. It was like the sound of the crash of a vehicle with
another car, and the succession of glass breaking and falling
to the ground in slow motion. Everyone ran to where the
sound came. People swarmed around the dumpsters to see
what had happened and the firefighters and journalists
wanted to be the first one to check what it was. Clara and I
squeezed among the people, who were surprised and
laughed out loud, and in the front row we could see Mam
and Pap, ashamed, in the middle of the crowd shaking the
glass off their bodies. The next day Pap told me that in an
effort to go unnoticed in the crowd, and not to attract the
Asians attention, they had decided to carry the dresser on
their heads and shoulders and run quickly to the house, but
with the short vision that the load allowed, they didnt real[59]

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.

[60]

The North is a chimera

My Pap liked a Venezuelan folk song. He always listened and sang the same tune. When he was at the computer he listened to it, while taking a shower he sang it so loud
that our garlic-smelling neighbors could hear it. When we
travelled on those long summer trips, he always listened to
it on the car CD player over and over again. He told me
that the song was composed by a musician named Fragachn
and that one of the best performances was that of Cecilia
Todd, a popular Venezuelan singer who sang like a goddess
... "Me fui para Nueva York/ en busca de unos centavos/ y he
regresado a Caracas, como fuete de arriar pavos/ el Norte es una
quimera/ que atrocidad..." Pap used to say that the United
States would always be a chimera for all foreigners, but I
didnt understand what chimera meant and I always asked
him what it was. He wrinkled his brow and always answered the same way, "Its an illusion, a dream or a fantasy
that never comes true. A fantasy that only for some people in this
country can come true." He also told me about a hideous
mythical creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a
dragons tail that spat fire and swallowed whole herds. My
Pap said that this system of government was that monster
that consumed us slowly and that scorched us with its
greedy and burning flames, and also that the American
[61]

dream was just a plain illusion because not everyone in this

country was treated in the same manner and with the same
respect.
My Mam loved living in the United States. She said that
everything was convenient and you could find in stores
anything you can imagine. Besides, in the city where we
lived people obeyed traffic signals, and there were never
traffic jams in the streets. "I always arrive on time everywhere I
go." Although she didnt like living in the Eagleeye Court
apartments because of the small space, the rusty stair railings, and our neighbors cooking smell, she said it was a
lovely city. People were friendly; they were always willing
to help and solve problems. The city was clean and people
generally respected and obeyed the laws and regulations.
Clara also loved living in the United States. She said she
didnt want to return to Venezuela, and Pap got mad and
said she didnt understand many things yet. I didnt understand many things either, but he didnt get angry with me.
My hermana said she wanted to go to college in the United
States, and Pap said it was unthinkable if you didnt get a
scholarship. Clara liked to visit her friends; she liked their
large and luxurious houses, fancy houses like the ones I
imagined before coming here. She loved to play the piano at
her friend Bryns house, and loved to sing and play with
two voices and four hands just with Bryn. She liked the
technology of that country. She liked to listen to her Mp3
and sing solos aloud. She always had her earphones on,
hardly hearing Mam when she asked help cooking. Clara
wanted to make her life in the American dream, and
thought of Venezuela only when she chatted over the Internet with her friends Chuchu, Gaby, Yovany, and skinny
Milexi.
I liked living there too, but I wanted to return to Venezuela. I liked playing with my cousins and eating hallacas in
[62]

December. I enjoyed going with Mam and Pap to buy los

estrenos, the new clothes for Christmas Eve and New Year. I
liked eating ice cream at Mimos and I liked the smell of
fireworks while accompanying my cousins to burn the
aoviejo on the last night of the year. But I also loved going
to school in the United States. It was different. Everything
was different, the classrooms, the teachers, the children,
everything. In school in Venezuela we were not allowed to
talk during class. The teacher always wrote on the blackboard and we took notes in our notebooks. She spoke and
we listened. She decided and we accepted. My grandparents
always told me I had to behave well at school, and I think
what they meant by that was not to talk in class and to dutifully abide by everything the teacher said. The teacher always chose the same girls for the school programs, shows
and dances. I only performed at an end-of-the-year show
one time, and that happened because the teachers favorite
girl didnt attend the final rehearsal. In the classroom, we
couldnt use watercolors because, according to the principal, Sister Taria, we would likely stain the floor and our
uniforms; and at the library, we werent allowed to touch
and handle the books because the librarian said You can ruin
them. What I liked the most about the Venezuelan school
was playing at recess with my friends Sofia, Irlanda and
Julia.
In Welby Elementary School everything was different.
The teachers were caring and it seemed as if they enjoyed
teaching. All children talked, we asked questions and the
teacher always encouraged us to think and respectfully criticize our classmates work. In writing class, the teacher
helped us to create our own stories. We thought, wrote,
reviewed, and edited; repeating that cycle again and again. I
wrote a story about a boy named Michael Money once. In
the classroom we had a TV to watch videos on, and also a
[63]

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
[64]

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
[65]

morning class. Megan, my Paps very good friend, let her

son Oliver take his nap with his Great Dane dog. Dogs were
treated like humans and I dont think we did that in Venezuela. A teacher from my school always said, "I dont have
children but I have two dogs and a cat." In Venezuela, animals
are just pets and for me, they only spoke Spanish. Despite
my insisting to Luddya that roosters crowed Keekeereekee,
she assured me that they said Cock-a-doodle-doo. Cee-Cee,
on the contrary, said that roosters in Korea crowed Kko kko
dek and when we finally asked Luddyas mom to clear things
up, she told us that roosters crowed Kukareku. It seems as if
roosters spoke different languages with a single crow. In
Venezuela, we celebrated Labor Day on May 1st but in the
U.S. they told me that Labor Day was held the first Monday
of September. There were so many different things in our
cultures that when they finally told me that the day of love
and friendship was celebrated in both countries on February
14th, my friend Claudia from Colombia told me that Valentines Day in her country was celebrated in the month of
September.
My Pap, like me, liked hallacas very much. The warmth
of family closeness, his friends, the morning guayoyo, the
snowy mountains of my city, the Universidad de Los Andes,
which was his great pride, the pabelln and cachapas with
cheese and pork. He liked the blackberry wine from El
Valle, the pastelitos andinos from la Parroquia, the December
feasts, the smell of fireworks, the paraduras, the homemade
remedies such as the little pile of salivated yarn on the
childs forehead to cure hiccups, Serenata Guayanesa, Cecilia Todd, Lilia Vera, Gualberto Ibarreto, Simon Daz, the
caimitos, the bread from Tovar, corvina with fried plantains
and salad on the lake seashore, green mango with salt, the
traditional firewater with fennel and peppermint, my
Mams delicious wheat arepas, the guarapo de panela and
[66]

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.

[67]

[68]

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
[69]

walked down the corridor and passed by. I spied on their

eyes trying to count the times they blinked during their
journey through the hallway until I could no longer see
them. My Paps friend, the African man, was the absolute
champion. He never blinked the whole way. The lady next
door seemed to have a problem in her eyes because every
three steps she took, she blinked about ten times. The Japanese woman from the other apartment was a mystery. I
never knew when her eyes were open or closed. Sometimes
I thought she was sleepwalking and that she never opened
her eyes at all.
I always wondered if Asians saw the world like us, or if
instead, they saw everything a little more elongated. With
the tips of my fingers I stretched the skin of the corners of
my eyes, pretending to emulate their slanting stares. Sometimes I stretched my skin so much that my vision blurred,
became diffuse and I couldnt even make the shapes of
things out. My lashes created a strange visual effect that I
dont know how to describe and my eyes got tired and began to tear. I felt deeply sorry for Asians if they endlessly
suffered the same discomfort I felt with just a couple of
seconds, while trying to look through my stretched eyes.
What a pity!
I always watched those who passed by my house window. I counted the number of blinks: Luddya twelve, her
father three, seven for Lala the gypsy, zero for my Paps
African friend (thats why he was the champion), the express mailman four, Sammy, who lived in 607, five, Juanito
el espaol, whose eyes absorbed ordered rows, columns
and squares of numbers in Sudoku, eight, the Jehovah's
Witness who always passed by with his worn Bible, six.
Almost all of them blinked. I always wanted to write down
the number of blinks for each of them, to keep a detailed
record and keep track of their most memorable perfor[70]

mances, but I never had a pen and paper handy to do so.

Neither did I want to miss a moment by the window searching for pencil and paper. So I just tried to remember the
counts of each, but it was impossible. I could only remember a few, and especially, I remembered the absolute champion. In the moments when no one passed by the window, I
would count my own blinks. It was impossible! Once you
are aware of your blinking, you cant stop. I did it repeatedly and sometimes so fast that I couldnt even count. I tried
not to blink while mentally counting, but I couldnt make it
to eight in my own mind. My eyes began to get irritated
and I couldnt help it, I began to blink. I rubbed my eyes
with the palms of my hands and Mam scolded me. She said
I could get an infection if I rubbed my eyes without first
washing my hands. But who had the time to wash your
hands when you felt the need to rub your eyes? My mom
always grumbled.
The hot, moist Eagleeye Court afternoons passed slowly
in front of my window, especially on those days when I
wasnt allowed to visit my friends Cee-Cee and Luddya. My
memories faded away out of my window, like the afternoon
steam faded away in the midst of the evening symphony of
crickets and cicadas. The memories of my people, my
friends in Venezuela, my school and my family came to my
mind. The afternoons withered through my memories, my
Mams rumblings and over all, through my blinks and my
other peoples blinks.

[71]

[72]

Teeth through a lens

Many people in this country saw their lives through a little hole. They were quite sure they enjoyed the best moments of their lives capturing images through the lens of a
camcorder. The birth of their children, their growth, their
first tooth, their first parties, their first day of school, their
vacations and family gatherings, their weddings; in short,
time passed and so did the important events in life, all
through the lens of their cameras. It was important for them
to film these moments so that they could keep them captured for posterity in those tiny memory sticks. I wonder if
its not more important to record those extraordinary moments in our minds. I also wonder if they realized that they
werent enjoying each moment live and direct, but through
a small screen. It was as if they were watching T.V. They
ruined those special moments because of the focus, the
zoom, the shutter, the battery and many other things.
Keeping memories doesnt just mean having a lot of
tapes or memory sticks stored so that one day we can decide to look at those images. When I have my own children,
if indeed I get married and get to have them, Ill surely
prefer to enjoy those important events in the moment and
refuse to be a slave to cameras and lenses. Id like to pre[73]

serve those memories in my mind, even if they fade little by

little. Id like to keep those memories alive as I grow older,
and this requires that I mentally review each of the experiences every day; when I have stored too much, I just will
have to select only the best experiences and reject others
that are not so nice, remembering them each day as if they
had recently happened. That way I think I can keep the
most important moments of my life in my memory without
depending on the cameras.
I wasnt so sure I could get married. Every time I saw
my teeth in the mirror, I doubted that I could. I had ugly
teeth. Two of my upper teeth were stacked upon each other. When I slid the tip of my tongue over my upper teeth I
could feel the irregular surface in front. They looked like
the roads across the plains in my country - full of bumps
that make the journey very slow and rough. Once we went
to a city in Apure, and that trip was so irregular and ugly like
my teeth. When sliding my tongue on that surface, it
tripped between my two crowded teeth. They were fused
like Siamese twins. With the tip of my tongue I kept visiting
each of the streets of my teeth, the street of my upper teeth
and street of my lower teeth. This journey was slow, uneven and ugly. It seemed as if I were polishing my teeth, one
by one, with the tip of my tongue. I had that journey fixed
in my memory like I had the feeling of my tongue in contact
with the uneven surface of my teeth or like the feeling of
my tongue in contact with the chewy chocolate remains in
my teeth after eating those delicious brownies in Luddyas
home. For those picture days at school, I preferred not to
laugh but to give a shy smile so as not to show my crooked
teeth. Who could like my crooked teeth if I didnt even like
them? That was the same shy smile that captivated my Pap
in the picture I had taken when I was six.
[74]

My Mam said I would soon change those teeth, and that

instead of the Siamese ones, I would get a couple of new,
bright, and white ones that would perfectly fit in the mold
of my gum. Each in its original place. But the truth was I
wasnt too sure about that. It had been long since the visit
of Ratn Perez, the Venezuelan Tooth Fairy. I wasnt sure he
had an American visa to come to the States either, or perhaps, he had been denied it like many others in my country
who, even with proof at hand that they had no intention of
staying illegally in this country, kept with their hopes and
dreams of visiting this land of God, buried in the offices and
arrogance of the U.S. Embassy employees.
I remember once my Mam pulled one of my teeth out
with a little thin string. Between my nerves and excitement
to get rid of that wobbly passenger, I swallowed it. Mam
told me it was one of my baby teeth, a milk tooth, but to
tell you the truth, its taste was like blood and not like milk.
Milk has a milder flavor. That night the tooth fairy didnt
visit me because I didnt have any teeth to show as evidence
of my suffering and, although I was alert every time I went
to the bathroom the next day; I never saw the so-called
baby tooth again.
I wanted my Siamese teeth to get loose soon so that my
Mam could pull them out with a thin sewing threads and I
could smile with pleasure. That day I would start to believe
that indeed I could get married because my smile wouldnt
be ugly any longer. From that day on, Id be able to laugh
or smile shyly like in the photo that my Pap liked. From
that day on I could even let anyone take a picture of me or
to let them capture my smile, my teeth, without the Siamese ones, through the lens of a camcorder.

[75]

[76]

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
[77]

to take us to school in his two-door Chevrolet Corsa and get to

school before 7:00 a.m. Our schools in the United States
began at 8:15 a.m. and we had more time to sleep. Best of
all, we had a school bus. Luisa told me that at first people
were very confused with that change in the clocks, and
there were lots of delays in schools and workplaces. Then
people forgot about it. However, in the United States, people were accustomed to this adjustment of the clocks during
winter and spring.
In the weekly newsletter Pap received from the residence halls, it
said that November 2nd was the official day when all clocks
needed to be turned back at two in the morning. It also
suggested, for convenience, that people set their clocks
before going to bed the day before, so that when they woke
up the next day, all clocks were already adjusted to the
right winter time. My Pap said he just preferred to adjust
all the clocks at two in the morning, as officially planned.
As my Pap liked clocks, and there were about eight clocks
in my house, distributed across the living room, dining
room, bathroom and bedrooms, plus the watches he had for
his personal use, I figured it would take a long time to adjust each one of them. My Pap had about five wristwatches
that he had bought and two more that we had given him for
his birthday. Almost all of his watches were cheap yet very
beautiful.
Excited about the delay of the clock that would allow us
to sleep one extra hour, I asked Pap to wake me up when
he was adjusting the clocks. I wanted to look at the sky
through the window to see if something happened while my
Pap turned back the clocks. Why at 2 in the morning and
not at 4 or 5? That was fascinating. Would it have anything
to do with the morning as such or with the positioning of
the planet into a new orbit? or was it just a matter of con[78]

venience? But convenience at 2 in the morning? Mam asked

Clara and me to go to bed at 9 p.m. so we did. After my
prayers, I thought about how convenient itd have been for
Pap to have adjusted the clocks before going to bed. I also
remembered the bustle of the school in Venezuela and Sister Tarias early morning preaching to start the day. The
part about becoming a good and honest citizen was something to take seriously. My Pap said that Sister Taria was
right, but he also said that the nuns from my school were
like gold-digging women on the prowl for someone else to
support their expensive habits.
I was trying to sleep that night but many memories of
my school, my family and my friends in Venezuela came to
my mind. That kept me busy for a while. Ten p.m. and I
was still thinking about Sofia, Julia and Irlanda. I wondered
whod be the new leader of our team and whod have replaced me in my left-handed desk in Miss Yaneths classroom. 10:35 p.m. I turned on my side and I covered my
head to see if I could sleep. With eyes closed, I tried to
think of nothing and for an instant I just heard my own
breathing. I stayed in that position for a long time, trying to
keep myself warm under my blanket. I turned to the other
side and noticed that the surface of my bed was very cold
and, when I pulled up the blanket to tuck in my head, one
of my feet was exposed to the cold outside the blanket.
That wasnt good because Mam always said that chilly feet
meant a bad cold. I decided to get up and put on the thermal socks Pap had bought us at Walgreens. I looked at the
clock on our night table and saw that it was already 11:05
p.m. I thought that in three hours, my Pap would have to
get up to adjust the clocks.
Soon it was 12 o'clock midnight and I was still thinking.
I turned in my bed over and over and even though I tried, I
couldnt sleep. I got up and went to my parents room and,
[79]

from the narrow opening of their doorway; I noticed that

they both were sound asleep. I went to the bathroom and
returned to my bed, which was completely cold again.
Clara was sound asleep on the upper level of our bunk bed
and I assumed that her bed would be warm and cozy. I
thought of sleeping with her, but shed surely wake up
grumpy and would ask me to go back to my bed, so I decided to go to mine instead. I lay and curled up on my side,
with the blanket covering me entirely listening to my
breathing. I turned to the other side, and then did some
more half turns. The last time I checked our clock it was
12:53 a.m.
I woke up, startled, and saw the clock. It was 2:25 a.m.
I figured my Pap would be adjusting the clocks and got up
to look out through our room window. I could hardly see
out because of the fog on the glass; everything looked very
dark. I kept looking at the darkness through that window
for a moment. In the living room, the clocks indicated the
same time as our night table clock and, in his room, I saw
Pap snoring and all his watches organized in a line on his
night table. I wasnt sure then if it was 2:25 a.m. of the
recently adjusted wintertime or 2:25 of the previous falltime. Probably it was 3:25 of the previous fall time and
Pap would have already adjusted all the clocks including
ours. And if that was the case, then Id have slept at least
two hours and I had missed the moment of the transition.
What a big question! I thought about waking up Pap to
make sure but hed likely wake up growling and would
surely scold me for being awake at that hour. I went to bed
hoping to wake up when I heard the noise Pap made every
time he got up and dragged his steps on the floor.
A bit later I woke up startled again and looked at the
clock; it was 2:40 a.m. I had slept only ten or fifteen
minutes. I assumed then that Pap would be awake adjusting
[80]

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!
[81]

[82]

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,
[83]

after a night of heavy snow, the landscape around Eagleeye

Court and the whole city was very beautiful. Everything
was covered with a cold layer so white and spotless that it
often irritated my eyes. It was like a Styrofoam carpet and
with every step you took, you could sink up to your knees.
In some places, where the city trucks didnt plough the
snow and didnt pour salt to melt it, the snow could reach
up to my chest. My dad sank up to his waist once. Playing
in the snow was fun. You made igloos and angels, you could
dig caves that connected with each other, and you could let
yourself fall backwards, knowing that you wouldnt hurt
yourself because the snow eased your landing. You could
also sled or snowboard slide on the slopes and hills of the
golf courses. Clara and I liked to sled every Sunday and we
also enjoyed tasting, mouths wide open and tongues out,
the snowflakes that fell from the sky and flew trembling to
the ground.
During the months of January and February the cold was
over-kill terrifying. It was very, very cold. It was simply
unbearable. Temperatures dropped to an average of zero
Fahrenheit and everything, absolutely everything froze.
Some days the temperature could drop even further. I remember the day that the thermometer announced negative
22 degrees Fahrenheit, the school alarm system was activated, and we got the class-cancellation call. In those days it
was very dangerous to go outside because if you werent
very well-protected, your fingers and ears could freeze and
literally break off. During those days, the air you breathed
froze and hurt the inner walls of your nose. It was a dry and
penetrating cold that slipped between any gap in your
clothes and seeped into your bones. You felt a pain and
burning sensation hard to describe. Even with insulated
gloves, your fingers got numb and you had to rub your
hands together.
[84]

Ice storms were much worse because with the snow, at

least, you could play but it was difficult to do that with solid
ice. Ice storms and blizzards were very dangerous. Trees
became frozen and a crystalline layer of ice covered all their
branches and gave them the appearance of glass trees. The
weight of the ice caused the branches to break and fall off
unannounced. The streets were also covered with a layer of
ice, several inches thick, which frequently caused cars to
slide out of control. My Mam was afraid of driving her car
during those days and my Pap said that he was too but had
no other choice. During those days the landscape was not as
white but crystalline. Although it was beautiful to see glass
everywhere such as the trees, the cars, the apartment exterior walls, it was very dangerous too.
During winter, the days were very short and the nights
much longer. The extra daylight hours we enjoyed during
summer, were stolen from us during winter. It usually got
dark at four in the afternoon. That was very weird because
in Venezuela it never got dark before seven in the evening.
Everyone stayed at home longer and Pap said we should
wear sweaters inside the house because gas for heating was
too expensive. Mam used to make soups to keep us warm
and since we couldnt open the door or windows to ventilate food smells, our cinnamon-scented candles evaporated
much faster during those months.
One day, while preparing a pumpkin cream, Mam was
telling my Pap that the big difference be-tween the U.S.
and our country was that many people in Venezuela, like
public employees, didnt consider or respect the time of
others. In the North, time was like gold, and Mam hated
that anyone made her waste her time. As Mam still needed
a few things for the pumpkin cream, she beckoned me to
check the weather on the Internet and asked me to go shopping with her at Walgreens. I got out of my bed and noticed
[85]

that the weather forecast showed 8 degrees Fahrenheit.

Brrrrrrr, it was pretty cold, but it could have been worse. I
put on my thermal underwear, which stuck close to my
body from my ankles up to my neck, over the regular cotton underwear I was wearing. Then I put on a pair of cotton
pants and a T-shirt. Over the cotton pants I put on my jeans
and I also put on a pullover. Two pairs of thermal socks, my
waterproof boots, a woolen sweater, a scarf to cover my
throat and to put it over my nose to warm up the air I
breathed, earmuffs, a hat to cover my head, a long coat and
a pair of gloves to protect myself from the effects of the
cold weather on my body. When I was all dressed up and
ready to go, my Mam changed her mind and said she preferred to stay home because she was too lazy to wear so
many layers of clothes for just a few seconds at Walgreens
and because her recipe could wait until the next day. I decided then to take off my gloves, the hat, then my earmuffs
and scarf, the long coat, the woolen sweater, my pullover
and cotton shirt. Then I sat on my bed and began to take off
my waterproof boots and when I was about to take my jeans
off, my Mam yelled from the kitchen: "You know what? Its
better to go to Wal-greens today because it seems that tomorrow it
will be much colder. "Oh No! I said. This happened to me very
often when it came to my Mams decisions.
Winter in that city was pretty when it had just started.
The white snow and the crystallized landscapes were beautiful indeed. But there were so many other things during
winter that left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. I didnt
like the briefness of days and the darkness at four in the
afternoon; neither did I like the snow on the roadsides that
mixed with the dirt from car tires and made a chocolate-like
sticky mud, nor the extensive daily ritual to get dressed and
undressed in layers. I didnt like the freezing rain that hit
my body like sharp needles, or the harsh cold that would
[86]

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!

[87]

[88]

It doesnt smell like Christmas

If you grew up in Venezuela, you can probably remember how important and family-oriented the last night of the
years celebration is. The preparations before the big night
are an exciting part of this celebration. It is a great event:
the food, music, drinks, grapes, fireworks, rites and los
estrenos, the brand-new clothes. Los estrenos are a Venezuelan
idiosyncrasy. Regardless of whether you are rich or poor,
almost everyone is looking forward to that night to show off
their new clothes. In many cases, los estrenos are even more
important than food. Many buy their clothes well in advance so as not to run out of time during the last days of the
years hullabaloo. Some people, like my Aunt Alicia, wear
yellow underwear on that last night, as good luck for the
upcoming year.
Days before the big celebration, our families got together to prepare our Christmas-season dish par excellence: the
delicious hallacas! My parents and aunties conversations
were always the same: where to find high-quality banana
leaves, how very expensive the meat was, how difficult it
was to find the thread to tie the hallacas, that my family
never use capers because they give a bitter taste, that our
neighbor made hallacas with an eastern Venezuelan style,
[89]

that chickpeas should be left to soak overnight to acquire

the desired consistency, in short, a whole range of culinary
phrases I used to hear every year. My two grandmothers
were good at making hallacas, but unlike my Mam, they
never actually make them. My Mam made the best hallacas!
Sofia and Julia also said the same thing: that their moms
prepared the best hallacas, but I didnt believe it because
Julia's family was from Caracas and people from Caracas
prepare hallacas with the stew cooked, and Sofia and her
family were from Punta de Araya and they put sliced egg on
top and, as my abuela Madi used to say, you shouldnt put
eggs on hallacas.
When we were preparing our hallacas, there were always lots of people at home. My Pap bought beer and
wine, my uncles played dominoes, and my cousins used to
play video games or go outside to play soccer. Although
there were always many people in the house, we were the
ones in charge of the preparation: my hermana Clara prepared and arranged all ingredients on the table, I always
washed, cleaned and selected the banana leaves, my Mam
added that delicious seasoning and my Pap tied them up.
First, Mam smeared annatto oil on the banana leaf and put a
small flour-dough ball on it that she slowly flattened with
gentle and rhythmic movements to form a thin round tortilla. Then on top of the tortilla dough she put this delicious
stew full of pork, turkey, chicken, and beef, followed by
the olives, raisins, chickpeas and trimmings of onions and
peppers. Then she wrapped it up in two separate leaves,
one small and one large, and finally she handed it to my
Pap for the final tie-up. When sets of fifty units were
made, my Pap put them to cook on a wood fire for four
hours, in a fire that he always improvised in the backyard.
Besides the delicious hallacas, my Mam always made pan de
jamn, as exquisite as those prepared by Tanner in Chicago
[90]

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
[91]

couldnt really explain why. Every year, that last night, at

the same time, just when that so popular song played on the
radio: "The church bells are ringing, announcing that the old year
leaves ..." I felt the need to look out through that window. It
was like a ritual, it was a special moment for me indeed. I
remember when I used the little wooden chair to reach the
window, and then it was not necessary anymore. I had a
very special feeling at that moment. The smoke from the
firecrackers and fireworks mingled with the delicious smell
of hallacas, ham-stuffed bread, and baked pork leg, and the
sound of mortars drowned the tunes of Neguito Borjass
gaitas and the clamor of laughter and voices of the people in
my family. That's a vivid memory I carry in my heart and in
my memory.
When we moved to the United States I knew itd be difficult to travel to Venezuela for Christmas and New Year.
Pap told us that there wouldnt be enough money, and that
was difficult to digest. During the time in Eagleeye Court
there were never many New Years hugs, or the excitement
of the whole family, nor was there Pilloposs gaitas nor
hallacas. I didnt have my window to give me a moment
either. There were no fireworks or that particular smell of
firecrackers. There were only phone calls and on the other
side of the line, family weeping and missing our repeated
absences from their Christmas parties. Worst of all, in
Eagleeye Court, it didnt smell like Christmas!

[92]

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
[93]

marked 2:00 p.m., all of our guests showed up with their

parents at the room door as if by magic, each holding a gift
in their hands. Pap used to say the he likes that about
Americans: punctuality! I was excited because all my friends
had arrived and wed soon be skating, and best of all was
that they brought gifts for me. My friends stayed and their
parents promised to pick them up at 6:00 p.m. Americans
plan every single thing.
As if they had rehearsed it before, each of my friends
handed me their gifts and sat neatly on the chair waiting to
be told the plan of the party. Mam said it didnt really look
like a party because they were all sitting quietly and waiting
for instructions. Besides, the lounge music was very low.
My Pap announced what the plan was: first we would iceskate for two hours, at 4:00 p.m. we would have pizza and
pop, then one more hour of ice-skating and at 5:30 p.m. we
would finally cut and eat the cake. Ready to go, with instructions in mind, we all went to get our ice-skates at the
office next door, and returned to the room to try them on.
When all the children took their shoes off, the small
room was filled with an unpleasant odor of unwashed feet.
It was a strange scent that reminded me of the smell of pig
poop we experienced that summer day we had arrived in
this city. My mother, covering her nose with the tip of her
thumb and forefinger, looked at me with wide eyes trying
to figure out which child was the owner of that rotten
smell. Pap chose to leave the room with the excuse of asking the manager of the place something and Clara was so
absorbed in her reading of Twilight in a corner of the room
that she didnt even show a face of displeasure. Those excited faces, eager to put on their ice-skating boots, showed no
sign of disgust at that stinky air. Who would it be? Could it
be Luddya, Cee-Cee or Juanita? Or could it be Anika,
Kamilli or Glory? Or perhaps it was Lala, Meysent, or Aus[94]

tin? Or it could have been Mike, Tatiana or Katie? Who was

it? All faces were innocent. Could it be the smell of wet
carpet due to the accumulated snow, which was dragged
from the street inside the Mall on peoples shoes? I hurried
up and I firmly tied my ice-skating bootlaces to my ankles
(because that was the secret to not falling while iceskating), and went out on to the ice.
After ice-skating we ate pepperoni and cheese pizza,
then we ice-skated for a little while more. Later we cut the
cake with a hesitant singing of "Happy Birthday to You" and
finally, the ritual of opening the gifts. That day I received
several boxes of origami paper, a novel by Lisi Harrison, a
beautiful gypsy pendulum to foretell the future, a sweater
with the logo of the glorious University of Iowa Hawkeyes,
a school diary, several pairs of earrings and some small bottles of nail polish. At 6:00 p.m., as scheduled, all parents
paraded by the room looking for their children because they
surely would have a hectic schedule the rest of the day. We:
Thank you for coming, and our guests: Thank you for inviting
us. Everyone immediately left the room with happy faces,
and I was certain that one of them took only half of that
unpleasant and stinky odor on their feet because the other
half remained inside those ice-skating boots, waiting to
share that special honor with the next customer.
My previous birthday parties in Venezuela were very
different. The only planning involved the cake, the snacks
and refreshments for the many guests who usually attended.
Many children were invited and their parents always stayed
to catch up, because Pap bought beer, fell in love with my
Mam, and it was then, he said, when the party got better.
At my parties, we usually had lots of candy and a few cheese
tequeos that my abuela Madi used to fry. My aunties and
some of Mams friends met in the kitchen to talk and
smoke and, in the living-room, my Pap's friends loud
[95]

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
[96]

satisfy the Americans, and especially with lots of stinky feet

smell.

[97]

[98]

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,
[99]

Charles Fortachn, Cheo Garca and Annie, Raulito Ortega,

Aunt Eli, Lillian and some others who always shared with us
in many grill-roasted piglet parties with Puerto Rican flavor.
I remember Indiana and its beautiful landscapes, New
York with its huge concrete jungle, the intoxicating billboards of Times Square and its streets full of people and
garbage, Boston with its history, its ice statues during winter and the hospitality of Tonino Scavo, Emy and Carmen.
Washington D.C. and its sober monuments and museums,
Chattanooga, Nashville and Louisville in Kentucky with its
beautiful parks. Atlanta with its huge traffic and the state of
Georgia with its beautiful Stone Mountain, Orlando and its
dreamlike theme parks, Miami and its beaches, Alabama
and its culture, New Orleans in Louisiana and its tasty Cajun food. Memphis, Tennessee and the birthplace of the
King, the most visited family house in the United States
after the White House. Missouri and its great view of the
Mississippi, St. Louis and its gigantic metal arch, Kansas
City and its Crown Center, Iowa City with its corn farms,
its delicious Whitey's ice cream and the sincere friendship of
Marco and Roda Prada, Erika, Benjamin and little Diego,
with whom we spent unforgettable evenings along with the
inevitable potato taquitos with guacamole and chipotle. Des
Moines and its Grays Lake, lonely Nebraska, Saint Paul and
its tribute to Schulz, Minneapolis and its interior corridors
and the Mall of America, Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. We also visited Norman, Oklahoma and
our good friends Rene, Denice and little Benjamin, the
water parks in Dallas where we met this kind waiter named
Marcus, whom we immediately nicknamed Che, because of
his Argentinean accent. Las Vegas and its astonishing play of
lights in the middle of the desert, San Francisco and its
Golden Gate and Seattle and its amazing Space Needle.
[100]

These are some of the places and special people I remember

from those trips and those stays in regular hotels, roadside
motels, good friends homes and national parks.
Once we were visiting some Venezuelan friends in
Memphis, Tennessee, on our way to Dallas, Texas. Pap
had been telling his friend Gerardo Soldado, and his neighbor, about our tours around the geography of this country
and the number of cities wed visited during our vacation.
At every moment the neighbor interrupted my Pap with
hints of disbelief, But is that true? And did you really sleep in
the national park? Id never heard that before, and you really drove
that long? And why is that you have visited so many places? My
Pap, tired of so much impudence, sarcastically replied: "We
were on a tour promoting our album." The neighbor didnt
interrupt him anymore.

[101]

[102]

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
[103]

21st, in Thailand on April 13th, the Inti Raymi or the Inca

New Year celebration in Upper Peru was held between
June 21st and 24th, during the winter solstice, and the Jewish
new year came on September 22nd.
At school we had a lesson about stereotypes. The teacher, Miss Kummel, said that the United States is a multicultural society because people from all over the world converged there and that each cultural group had different ways
of thinking and behaving. Like my Pap, Miss Kummel told
us that we should always show respect for the habits and
beliefs of others. However, she didnt allow Li Jiang, the
Chinese girl, to open her lunchbox in the classroom, because, according to Miss Kummel, a strange smell of garlic
filled the classroom and gave her a terrible allergy on her
white skin. She didnt either allow Anith, the Indian boy, to
bring his dad to class during one of his class presentations to
tell us about a trio of gods formed by Brahma, Vishnu and
Shiva, which Anith said, were the real gods of this world.
However, she did allow Aletha's father, Mr. Achrazoglou,
to accompany her during her presentation of the Greek
traditions. Miss Kummel asked us to do research on the
Internet, and write a list of the characteristics of some of
the cultural groups living in the United States. For that
homework she asked us to search in different sources and
that we could ask our parents or relatives. She asked us to
investigate about the Arabs, Latinos, Roma, Americans,
Africans, Asians, Russians and African-Americans.
On the Internet I found that the Russians shared the
world's largest country, and that it occupied an eighth of the
land of the planet. It was a multicultural country and its
culture originated from the Eastern Slavs. The Roma were
an ethnic group of Hindu origin, dating from the Middle
Kingdoms of India with common characteristics but very
diverse among the subgroups. The Lowara and the Kalderasha
[104]

were two of several groups who had settled in the United

States. They celebrated the Feast of Fertility during March
and the Festival of Life during September or October. The
Arabs were a very different anthropological ethnic group
and their identity was due to several criteria such as their
language, their genealogy and their nationality. Latinos, on
the other hand, were not an ethnic group that shared a particular race but shared Spanish as a common language and
the term Latino was officially adopted by the United States
government in 1997 to refer to people whose origin was
any of the Spanish-speaking countries of North, Central,
and South America. They were from the Chileans up to the
Mexicans. I read that Africa was a vast continent where
many cultures came together. It was the birthplace of the
homo family, and about the Kenyans I read that their nation
was named after the highest mountain in the country. Also
that children in school learned English and Swahili. The
term Asian didnt refer to all the people who inhabited that
continent but those from the Far East, Southeast Asia or
South Asia. I read that Korea was a territory shared by two
sovereign countries and their people liked to prepare
kimchi. African-Americans were Americans of African
origin and depending on the region where they lived in the
States, they had different types of cuisine, including the
delicious Cajun taste that you can get in Louisiana. Finally I
read that the U.S. was a multicultural country of almost
305 million people. There was so much to read on the Internet!
Besides, my Pap told me that the Arabs lived in Spain
for many years until they were kicked out, that many Russians were good writers like Boris Pasternak and Anna
Akhmatova. He said that the Roma were commonly called
Gypsies, that some African-Americans used a different English vernacular language, that Kenyans were exceptional
[105]

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
[106]

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.

[107]

[108]

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.
[109]

Payments from Venezuela began to get scarce because of

foreign exchange currency problems in our country and on
many occasions, my Pap was told that his part-time job in
the States was hanging on a thread, and that there wouldnt
likely be a new contract for the following year. The whole
country was plunged into a deep crisis. Many of my school
friends said their parents had lost their homes and I didnt
understand how someone could lose a home, unless it was
because of one of those fierce tornadoes that often hit the
Midwest of this country. That was the time when my Pap
decided to donate plasma for a few green bills a month and
it was also when he began to bring home some bread, milk,
eggs and cereal from the Food Bank of the Crisis Center, which
according to Pap, helped low-income families with food
and their first needs. But the times I accompanied Pap to
the Crisis Center, I realized that most of the low-income families attending there were the Latinos living in our city.
Every day at the Crisis Center, there was a constellation of
Mexicans, Panamanians, Ecuadorians, Colombians, Hondurans, Venezuelans, like us, and many others.
The price of a gallon of gas increased from $1.54 to
$4.05 and Pap said we couldnt use our car often; wed
only use it for true emergencies. Our Sunday trips to eat
out in restaurants were limited to one per month and those
visits were usually to some fast food restaurants, which
were cheap and at a walking distance to where we lived.
Many Sundays we had to stay home because there was not a
penny for gas, let alone to pay for food out. Pap reduced
our allowance from $20 to $5, and at times, the month
passed straight on and our allowance was kept as a promise
for "when he got the money from Venezuela." Those were the
times when I was sure that my Pap could be right about his
chimera because the economy of this country didnt favor
me.
[110]

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]

driver. Pap was sandwiched in the crowd, and I amused

myself by watching the people, their gestures, their movements and attitudes, the a-mount of clothes they were
wearing, how they talked and how much of what they said I
could understand. It was an unintelligible murmur to my
ears most of the ti-me. The cambus was very crowded and
the heat mixed with a strangely sweet and rancid smell. It
was a different smell. It was a smell I wasnt used to. It
wasnt the same smell I perceived during my ride on the
school bus. It was a peculiar scent. It spoke by itself. It was
a smell of bodies, from the people traveling on the bus. It
was the smell of different cultures.
The cambus continued its trip; it headed to Mormon Trek
Avenue. Inside the cambus, there was literacy everywhere
you looked, on posters and signs on the ceiling, in the
newspapers and books as thick as the Bibles of Saint Mary's
church, which I used to study for my First Communion, in
the cell phones texting, and in the magazines. Some people
talked among themselves. The man sitting next to me was
sleeping and an Asian woman was sitting with her face up to
the ceiling and her eyes closed as if in a deep meditative
trance. A black guy was listening to music with his headphones on, and a white young man was trying to solve a
crossword puzzle in the newspaper. The cambus was turning right onto Highway 6 and the sweet musty smell was
stronger.
All of the windows and doors were closed. The cam-bus
was completely full, and the air inside was very heavy and
dense. A woman was eating something that looked like
pasta. That seemed very unusual to me because we never
ate pasta in the morning. She was using two wooden sticks
to hold and carry the food to her mouth. I felt the urge to
tell her to keep her food for later, but I didnt do it because
I wasnt sure if she was a black belt like my ta said. Smells
[112]

communicate a lot about people. They can communicate

feelings such as fear, excitement, sadness or joy. They also
commu-nicate things about people, their genders and cultures. Smells help us form opinions about others. Mr. Chokichi, a friend of my Pap, always said he sensed a different
smell when traveling in the cambus. It reminded him of the
smell of sheep meat he perceived from people's sweat when
he lived in Turkey. He said that the food smell in the
cambus didnt bother him, although he preferred the smell
of grilled fish with which he grew up in his native Takayama.
However, that smell could be unpleasant for some people
like me, for example. The sickly sweet and rancid smell in
the cambus became more intense when the cambus passed
by the Veterants hospital.
The mother of Dewi, my friend from Indonesia, on-ce
told us that some days the smell of certain people on the
cambus reminded her of the smell of perfume men used in
her country when they went to the mosque. That day I
didnt perceive that perfume she talked a-bout but a different odor. It was a sweet musty scent, perhaps curry or fried
garlic. The cambus windows we-re so fogged from the peoples breathing that it was very difficult to see outside. I
kept watching people. The cambus was much more multicultural and smelly than our school bus which only smelled
a bit like fried garlic from that little girl next door on certain occasions. My Pap was caught in the middle of the aisle
awkwardly holding the top handles and certainly trying to
breathe shallowly amid that haze of mixed smells.
I recognized Aniths dad, standing beside my father, and
I remembered that trio of gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva,
about whom Anith spoke so insistently and of whom I only
knew their names. I wondered why Miss Kummel hadnt
allowed him to visit our class and talk about them. Sometime later, during a cultural diversity festival at the universi[113]

ty, I went to a booth that sold a delicious seasoned chicken

curry, and I saw Aniths dad again. That was when I dared
to ask him about that Hindu trinity, and the man looked
puzzled, looking at me with a question-mark face. I had to
tell him that I was in Aniths same class, and then he briefly
told me that Brahma was the true creator of the universe,
that together with Vishnu and Shiva the three formed the
Trimurti, the most important trio of deities of Brahmanism,
a new side Hinduism that had begun in India with the invasion of the subcontinent of the Aryan people. Vishnu was the
Preserver god of the universe, whose mission was to balance the forces of good and evil, and Shiva was the Destroyer god of the universe, with three eyes, riding a white bull,
carrying a trident and wearing necklaces of skulls. That
brief explanation caused me many nights of sweating hands
and restless sleep, thinking about that three-eyed god riding
a white bull and, since the macabre news of the death of
Minsoo and his siblings, in my nightmares it was grouped
with that mythological creature with a lion's head, goat's
body and the tail of a dragon that threw fire and swallowed
whole herds, which my Pap used to talk about.
Cee-Cee said she and her mom rode the cambus regularly. She said that during rainy days she too could perceive different scents in the cambus like the smell of curry,
instant noodles, fried garlic, cigarette smoke and perfumes.
I preferred the cinnamon smell of my house or the fresh
smell of wet earth that lingered in the spring air at Eagleeye
Court. The cambus made another stop at Madison Avenue,
and I was caught between those cultural essences. The old
Chinese couple downstairs thought the smell of their medicinal herbs was refreshing, but for me, that smell was
hard to tolerate. I preferred the smell that emanated from
Lalas house when her mother Drina prepared potions to
heal people with illnesses. Juanito el espaol always said
[114]

that the cambus smell often resembled the Spanish tortillas

that his father used to cook in his native Elche.
The ride on the cambus that morning was a very smelly
and multicultural trip. The cambus reached the MacBride
Hall stop, right on the Pentacrest. Most of us got off at that
stop by the rear door. A few people stayed seated. I guessed
theyd get off at the last stop, Schaeffer Hall. I watched how
the cambus kept going after we got off, turned right to take
Clinton Avenue, and moved far from its departed passengers,
pushed on its trail of smoke and fumes; all of us scattered in
that cold, white, snow-packed city, with our own warm
smells of our own cultures.

[115]

[116]

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
[117]

one could use it except for some teachers who whispered it

when they shared their coffee during the school recess. My
friend Aleeya always told me that her older brothers could
never enter the Mall downtown unless they lifted their
sagging pants up to their waists, walked without their usual
swag and remained silent, just to please the whims of a policeman who was posted at the Mall entrance. I guess that
policeman was connected to some of the school teachers
because he also said that the Chicago Kids were a lot of trouble.
Like me, Kathleen was passionate about crafts and painting. Generally, our work was distinguished from the rest of
the students during our Art classes. We had created an exquisite artistic rivalry and the other children were the ones
who always judged our drawings and paintings. For special
days such as Valentine's Day, UNICEF day, and Welby
Elementary School Day, Mrs. Ash always planned activities
associated with the celebration. I remember that for one
Mother's Day, I designed a card with a cute baby, a heart
and a mother with her arms outstretched towards the baby.
The drawing was beautiful and I also wrote a beautiful poem that said:
To my dear mom Sofia:
There are no words beautiful enough to describe you,
They are soundless words.
I cant find ways to let you know how much I love you,
Like the sun to the moon, like flowers to the rain.
You're the best mom
Pretty as the morning dew, as the spring flowers,
Like the winter sun, like the warm smell of brownies ...
I love you Mom. "

[118]

That day Kathleen didnt want to work on any craft. She

preferred to read while the rest of us worked on our cards.
When Mrs. Ash noticed this, she called for Kathleens attention and asked her why she wasnt working like the rest
of us. Kathleen looked up from her book and, with a gesture of reluctance shrugged her shoulders and said, Because
I have no mom, I just have two dads.

[119]

[120]

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
[121]

looked at her and said nothing. Mam asked me to wash and

clean the bathroom and asked Clara to vacuum the car-pets,
roll them up and then sweep and mop the floor under it
thoroughly. Clara began to vacuum the carpet and Pap got
up from the recliner and went to his bedroom without saying anything. Mam took advantage and moved the recliner
to clean the cobwebs and dust accumulated under it. While
washing the toilet, sink, tub and mirror I listened to music
on my Mp3. Mam grumbled more loudly because she said
if I focused on the music my work wouldnt be good. Mam
cleaned the kitchen, washed the dishes, emptied the fridge,
wiped it out, and arranged everything over again. When I
finished cleaning the bathroom, Mam asked me to organize
the food and cans in the pantry and asked Clara to change
the sheets on the beds. One chore after another, from one
place to another, no break. Pap also moved from one room
to another without helping on cleanup day, while Clara
changed the sheets and pillowcases on our beds. It was always the same: Pap got upset and threatened to go to the
library because in that house he could hardly read.
Mam didnt put down her dancing broom; she clung to
it like my Pap when he got drunk and fell in love with her
intensely, like my thermal clothing clings to my body. She
swept, then she mopped and all of us had to remain motionless until the floor was dry. Noon came, no breakfast no
lunch and still Mam cleaned, tidied up and gave orders to
us, to clean windows, mirrors and walls with bleach because of the winter mold, to arrange our shoes, to remove
the free hooks to organize the closet, to tidy and clean our
little desk up, to put the chairs and furniture back in place,
to put more clothes in the washer, then move them to the
dryer and then fold them. There was always plenty to do on
Saturdays in that small apartment on Eagleeye Court.
[122]

Four oclock in the afternoon, no breakfast, no lunch

and no snack, and my Mam started complaining of pain in
her lower back because of too many chores, and she also
began her sermon about keeping the house in order, "You
dont help to keep the place clean; we need to maintain the house
neat. Your Pap doesnt help clean up in this house at all, and
Clara and you must learn for when the time comes." Pap said
nothing but the preaching put him in a bad mood. At 6 p.m.
Mam finished her ritual. The apartment was spotless, shining like a diamond and our tummies, as my abuela Mona
used to say, "Stuck to our spines.

[123]

[124]

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
[125]

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
[126]

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.

[127]

[128]

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.
[129]

Ive treasured that notebook ever since, and every time I

read it I still perceive the pleasant smell of wet earth. I remember for one of my Language Arts classes we were asked
to write a poem entitled "I am." That day I couldnt do it
because my creativity was off, my ideas didnt flow and,
above all, it wasnt a day of heavy rain. I got a bad grade in
that poetry class. I've never been a school poet; I could
never write a poem for school demands. Perhaps I can only
write accompanied by rain, on gray days and with a blue
feeling in my chest. Some time later, watching the rain fall,
I really did write that poem. I wrote it in my notebook full
of feelings and words that I never shared, breathing in the
smell of wet earth...
I am ...
I am nice and outgoing
I wonder why I cant fly
I hear music
I see colors
I want to be ...
I am nice and outgoing
I pretend to be a famous popstar
I feel happy
I worry about dying
I cry when people lie ...
I am nice and outgoing,
Life is not always fair
What is up always comes down
I dream of love
I am a good friend,
Sister and daughter
I long for peace
I am nice and outgoing.
[130]

Nightmares at night and during

the day
That morning, I woke up startled by the phone ringing.
Pap came to our room and from the doorway told us that
classes were cancelled because something macabre had happened with a few little children who lived near the school.
Alarms sounded throughout the city, and the news on the
T.V. and radio was as confusing as my nightmares of the
night before had been. That news shook me up so much that
from that moment on, I had constant nightmares about firebreathing chimeras and three-eyed gods riding white bulls
at nights, and during the day, recurring states of mental
absence during class. My body responded to the physical
tasks at school, but my mind was focused only on that grim
and coldblooded murder of the little children. I thought,
with bitter feelings, of the death of Minsoo, whom I had
only seen a couple of times during school recess at Welby
Elementary. The city hadnt been shaken up so much since
the time, years before, when a university grad student had
murdered his advisors and some class-mates in a fit of academic jealousy.
The university news channel updated information every
[131]

minute... "A six-foot tall man, large-framed, Caucasian, about

forty years old is missing... the gunman fled from his home early in
the morning to an unknown location... the police have been carefully searching every inch of the city..." I had been studying
some glimpses of American history, its independence, some
of its leaders and its Constitution for a Social Studies test
the night before. In my dreams, many of the people I had
just discovered came to life. Malcolm X was trying to save
his skin, running frantically in front of a horde of whitehooded men. There would be no mercy for colored men in
the colorless mens realm even though Jefferson had proclaimed that "all men had been created equal." But
equal to whom? Many of the emancipating leaders of this
country were dark-skinned and for that reason their lives
were always in danger... "Liberty, equality, fraternity" were words without content for many people. Like
Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali, my
Pap, my hermana Clara and I were dark-skinned, as dark as
the darkness of the Venezuelan plains, and therefore would
experience the same fate... "First, the man attempted to commit
suicide by jumping off a bridge but having no success, he crashed
his speeding car against another car that was parked along highway I-80, where he died... the search was over..."
"...The police received a call from the runaway man himself at
6 a.m. announcing the tragedy at his home..." My Pap had no
reason to fear because his visa was in order, just as he had
been told by the immigration officer who had checked us
that first time, and although he was dark skinned, that document would save him from that horde of white-hooded
men, but my sister Clara and I had no passport at hand...
"Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process... " My heart
was about to explode. "When police entered the house, the
dead bodies of a woman and four children lay on the bed in an
[132]

eternal sleep... a three-year old girl, a five-year old girl, a boy of

eight and another boy of ten years... all adopted children, brought
from an Asian country to be offered the freedom of a promising
future and the long-awaited American dream..." Ali would survive because according to Pap, he was and will always be
the true champion of all times, and could knock all white
men down, one by one, with his powerful right-hooks that
put many other champions down for the count, but his
countrymen, King and X, were not as physically strong as
he was... "The man first killed his wife, who resisted in vain and
died in their bed. What was once a bed of love is now a bed
of hate and death. Then it was the children, one by one, carefully calculated, in the prime of their fragile dreams, with accurate
and fierce swings of the bat that repeatedly and abruptly sunk,
breaking their little heads full of fantasies and dreams, full of joy
and dreams... The same bat that had previously cherished
baseballs in the Sunday meetings in which Minsoo participated, surely dreaming of becoming a Major League baseball player... "The legitimate right to bear arms is
granted by the constitution" ...in the se-cond or third
amendment? The American dream had been broken... the
fire-breathing monster had devoured Minsoo.
"...His reputation as an honest banker was challenged by an
allegation of misappropriation of a thousand dollars, allegations
that would soon break out and explode like gunpowder in this small
conservative town..." My Pap stood before the horde again,
this ti-me because he was an immigrant who would potentially pilfer somebodys job in this country; this time, his
part-time job in this land of grace, rather than saving him,
would condemn him to death like many others had succumbed to hate some years before, and many others still
succumb to the inhuman health system and the antiimmigrant federal laws that claimed, like divine justice, to
be impartial... "The creator has granted certain inal[133]

ienable rights, among these rights are: life, liberty

and the pursuit of happiness... " What part of that
declaration did the KKK men not understand? Where were
those principles of liberty, equality and fraternity? A few
had enjoyed independence while others were still subdued...
"...First the man tried to suffocate the children with carbon
monoxide from his car and then he decided to wait for the comforting sleep and the frustrated major league bat... He left phone
messages to his relatives announcing that his children were
already leading the heavenly court with the Almighty God.
Their disfigured heads, like rotten apples, were resting on
their bloody pillows, still imbued with the guardian angel
prayers of the night before. My Pap, Clara and I had finally
fallen into our pursuers hands and were sentenced to die in
the flames... " We the people of the United States, in
order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility..." ".... The man
would have settled on that fateful finale during the previous evenings Mass, which hed attended with his entire family... It
would be a perfect ending for him; a life free of worries and
dishonor to his wife and children. More than the American
dream, he was giving them the entrance to Paradise. The
fire began to burn fiercely under our feet and the dreadful
cries of my father, my sister and my own drowned in the
smoke and the crackle of the voracious flames...
"...Provide for the common defense, promote the
general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty
for ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution ... " Reputation and morals
walk shoulder to shoulder in this country.
The ringing phone woke me up and I saw my Pap in the
doorway. Fortunately, the nightmare was over, but the
other, the real one, started with that grim news
[134]

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
[135]

my Paps in the morning when he was about to take a

shower. But his wasnt anything like theirs. Theirs were
enormous, huge like Spanish salami or Mexican sausages
displayed on the supermarkets lighted-shelves; on the contrary, my Paps was little, crumpled like a wet little chick
nestled amid a nest of hair, tiny and shy like a little newborn hamster.
I must have been in shock, in a state of distress, perplexed, with my huge eyes open, round like in Japanese
cartoons, mulling thoughts, imagining movements and
comparing those familiar moans, similar to those that came
from my parents room on my nightmares and sweatyhands nights, until my Mam, who had been napping until
that moment, saw the bodies over my shoulder and dragged
me to the earth again, with a loud shout. I didnt know
what to say nor how could I see that perversion. My Mam
asked me tirelessly from where I had retrieved those images, and I couldnt tell her they had shown up out of the
blue, perhaps because of the virus, that I hadnt done anything wrong, that it wasnt my fault, that this was the first
time I saw something like that; I was speechless, I could say
nothing, not even a word. My mouth didnt respond to my
intention to speak. I just began to cry inconsolably out of
embarrassment at having been found watching what I didnt
want to see. Mam could delete those images from the
computer right away, but the images of my first encounter
with sex remained in my memory forever. With a pat on
my shoulder, my Mam said, "It's time to talk about sex."

[136]

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,
[137]

meditation, discussion, stress, happiness, sadness, tears,

laughter and walks reflected in that small diploma. That
night during dinner Pap reminded us that our time to return to our country was approaching. That day I began to
feel nostalgia, and the memories of my experiences in this
country began to show up in my mind frequently.
The preparation for our trip back to Venezuela began
the day after the commencement ceremony. Our visas began a kind of countdown in which we were allowed ninety
days of legal residence in the U.S. from the time of the
ceremony. All legal transactions needed to be done in advance and not at the last minute in order to send to the
consulate and the Secretary of State all the official transcripts, the Hague Apostilles, medical records, a list of
household goods, in short, all the evidence to prove we had
been legally living in this country. Clara, Mam and I felt a
lot of nostalgia from that day on, and a few tears rolled
down our cheeks secretly. My Pap was happy; he said we
would soon return to our country. The North was a land of
opportunities, but only for few people. To my Pap, the
North was still a chimera, but according to my Mam, the
chimera was in my Paps mind and in my nightmares.
Mam always said that we all had a North, but my Paps
North was the South.

[138]

Goodbye to Eagleeye Court

The nostalgia had begun some months earlier, I think
since the day my Pap reminded us that the date of our return trip was approaching. Mam had been packing things in
protective paper for some time before, and I think that
helped make everything ready for the day when the big
truck came to take our belongings to the container that
would travel by sea to the burning Maracaibo port.
Everything was already planned; the container would
leave with our belongings via Miami-Jamaica-Port of Maracaibo, two weeks before us, including the new furniture we
had bought and the used pieces that we had picked up outside. Pap handled all the steps and paper work for renting
the truck and the container, which cost an arm and a leg.
That day we all worked together, moving things from the
house to the truck: Mam, Pap, Clara, her friend Bryn,
Cee-Cee, Lud-dya, Sammy, my Paps African friend, the
twins Tania and Damaris Prez-Cano, Cuban friends who
had recently moved, with Arturo Matute, to a nearby
apartment, Javonn, and even Juanito el espaol, whose
addiction still gave him endless sleepless nights trying to
solve the maze of numbers, dared to put aside his Sudokus
to lend a hand, and me. For the last two weeks, since our
belongings left, our apartment had the same look it had
[139]

when we moved that August afternoon, nearly five years

ago. We had kept only few personal belongings, our
clothes, suitcases and two air mattresses on which we slept
for two weeks.
It was hard to believe that our time in the United States
was over so soon. My Mam always said that ti-me was
ephemeral, that our lives passed by and we didnt notice. I
had come losing my baby teeth, and I was leaving with my
seoritas identity and fears, and with my new smile without
Siamese teeth. For a long time now, my new teeth had fit
the mold of my gums. Clara was also leaving with many
dreams and her high school secret-love stories. She had a
couple of farewell parties at her friends Bryn and Olivias
houses where they hugged, cried and remembered happy
times. I had none.
I remember going to Luddyas home, very early in the
morning, the day we left for Chicago and then for Venezuela. Luddya was in her room and her mom gave us a square
of brownie. That was the last Russian brow-nie I tasted. I
told her it was time to say goodbye, and she just nodded her
head. I wanted to give her a big hug, but she just showed
me a shy smile, and I noticed that her eyes were wet. She
said she would always be my friend. She would be moving
to Texas soon and would call me from there to give me her
new phone numbers. I left her place with a lump in my
throat, breathing hard and with that strange cold sweat on
my hands. Then I went to Cee-Cees house. She gave me a
necklace of little stones as a symbol of our friendship. She
gave me a hug and I felt my body shudder. I left with a huge
void that gnawed my soul. It occurred to me that my departure had become a huge bird that pecked at my insides or
the mythological creature that spat fire inside myself. That
was my farewell to Eagleeye Court: simple, very sad and
with lots of sweat on my hands.
[140]

We left our apartment before eleven o'clock, Pap

closed the door and handed the keys to the manager who
had previously checked the entire apartment out -- floor,
walls and its many little holes my Mam had nailed to hang
our portraits. Behind that door there were many memories,
many stories, laughter and tears, and the memory of that
afternoon with the oregano smell when the essence of
womanhood came to me accompanied by my Mams tears
because my breasts and my hips would soon begin to sprout
like spring flowers. Walking toward the taxi ahead of us,
my Mam drowned in sad tears, Clara, with her eyes swollen since the farewell parties, looked at me with the corner
of her eye and gave me a grimace of resignation, and Pap,
though sad, promised us better times would come. I walked
towards the taxi, with a larger lump in my throat, with a
deep sorrow that gnawed at my chest. The huge bird slowly
devoured my being, and I had an ugly feeling, as ugly as the
March snow, chocolate-like and dull. That snow which had
offered us its whiteness and softness in November, but in
March, was just a worn, tanned and opaque waste, fading
with the first rains of spring. I turned to look back towards
our apartment door, full of dreams and memories. Some
new residents were arriving at the residences, carrying suitcases and looking for the numbers of their apartment, like
we did our first day. When the cab left, through the glass of
the window, I could see my friends Cee-Cee and Luddya,
who, from the base of the tree where we buried the orphan
sparrows, waved goodbye. Their images clouded between
the window glass and my tears -- which I couldnt hold a
moment longer -- dispelling that fresh and pleasant strawberry smell which gradually faded away to nothing. That
was the last time I saw my friends from Eagleeye Court.
[141]

[142]

Smells of fennel and peppermint

The day we arrived in Caracas after nearly five years I
had a tremendous sense of insecurity and that tingly feeling
in my guts that always accompanies me. The national guards
looked at us suspiciously and asked us where we came
from, what we brought in our bags and if we wanted to
exchange dollars. The bustle of airports is something that
has always bothered me. We stayed in the baggage hall
nearly two hours waiting for a suitcase that never came. No
one was responsible. The airline officials said they couldnt
do anything. They didnt know what could have happened.
We were coming to our land and experiencing some of its
idiosyncrasies.
The sounds of a large airport, the national guards irresponsible excuses to get money, the sticky heat, the car
horns that never sleep, the native cunning of taxi drivers
trying to charge us an arm and a leg in dollars to take us to a
nearby hotel in La Guaira made me feel that I didnt belong
to that place. La Guaira was just a brief stop in our trip to
our city of magical mountains. The Andean mountain range
was waiting for us with its exquisite peaks covered with a
white blanket. Through the window of the small twinengine, I looked at the relative closeness of those mountains
[143]

covered with snow, and it reminded me of the ice of the

harsh winters of that small town embedded in the Midwest
of the United States. I recalled its natural beauty, the crystallized trees, the bitter flavor of frozen snot and all the
other discomforts that ice brings. The family and some
friends were there to welcome us to our city. Hugs and
kisses, and many expressions of how much we had grown.
The first days were full with lots of flavorful Venezuelan
food and many parties in the relatives homes. At first I had
this strange feeling of not belonging to that country.
Gradually everything became more routine. Invitations
to eat with relatives dwindled more and more, until we
were eating at our house every day, doing our usual things
and gradually fitting into the lifestyle of a small town saturated with vehicles and endless queues. Going back to the
Venezuelan educational system was very strange to me. It
wasnt easy to understand. The operation of the two school
systems was incredibly different. In five years, I had gotten
used to the rather different classes and teaching processes in
the United States. From a system where you never miss a
single day of classes in the entire school year, I went to a
school system plagued by strikes, riots and tear gas. From a
system where religion is completely absent I went to a system tied to Catholicism, Virgin Day celebrations and
paraduras. In a system where writing was conceived as a
process, I went to a system that valued the finished product.
I began to learn again to belong to that system. I
had no other choice. In English language classes I had to
learn to memorize endless lists of verbs in present, past and
participle to show the teacher my ability to pass exams with
good grades, and even though I spoke English fluently, my
English language teacher told me that that was not important. I had to prove, like everyone else in the class, my
ability to memorize to pass his subject. If the English class
[144]

goal was for students to communicate in English and I could

do it without any problems, having to prove my ability to
memorize seemed a contradiction. The teacher never understood that. Later, I found out that he got that position in
English because there was nothing in his area of ex-pertise
to be offered.
Clara immediately started her first semester at the College of Sciences, auditioned and was admitted in the university chorale. When we first arrived, she met Toms in one
of her classes and from the first day she brought him home
so that Mam and Pap could meet him. He became her
boyfriend after six months of dating, home visits, movies,
and dinner invitations. They were like bread and butter,
like the two sides of a coin that complemented each other.
He was a musician and an avid reader; she was a singer and
a dreamer. The ideal couple. They spent whole afternoons
in our living room. She sang and he accompanied her with
his guitar. Mam always wondered when Id bring home my
Toms, but I myself didnt know if I could really find a Toms
who could complement me.
Soon, each of us was immersed in the advantages and
disadvantages of our own culture, with its Venezuelan
smells and flavors: Pap in his job at the university and his
predilection for the aromatic morning coffee. Mam painting her beautiful oil and charcoal paintings that she exhibited and sold in the main market with its traditional scents.
Familiar smells, smells of identity, the smells of the market
of my town: smell of pastelitos, chicha, papeln. Smells of
fennel and peppermint. Clara with her fascination for singing and science, and I, in my high school classes, between
my real and virtual friends on the Internet, and my adolescent worries such as my acne that bloomed each day on my
face like weeds. Acne and I had a love-hate relationship for
some years. Our Eagleeye Court memories were fading
[145]

little by little, as everyday life embraced and consumed us

in that small city of magic mountains and endless queues.

[146]

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
[147]

work and her economic stability.

With Carla and Mercedes I enjoyed extraordinary moments during our high school time. Our classroom trips to
La Mucuy or La Culata, the senior proms, and our complicity in our English tests so that all of us could get good
grades. At the end, English language classes were merely a
mechanical torture of countless verbs in present, past and
participle.
In college I met Mara Jos and Vernica. I think after
my Mam and Clara, they have been my best friends of all
time. With Mara Jos and Vernica I went to the bars for
the first time, we serenaded their boyfriends; along with
Clara and Toms, we attended concerts in the bull-fighting
coliseum and the Cesar Rengifo Auditorium.
We flew gliders from Tierra Negra and bunji-jumped
from the Viaducto Miranda, without their parents' blessing or
mine. We studied, went on vacation to Punta de Araya and
Choron; we argued, got angry, shared, and graduated together. Mara Jos has always been like a sister. She was the
one who offered good advice when I got excited and swore
to run away with Franco if Pap wouldnt accept him. The
truth was that the illusion didnt last long; it vanished like
firework smoke, it vanished like my first platonic love that
captivated me with his pretty angelic face, it evaporated
when I knew that Franco and Julia, my childhood friend,
had been dating for some time, and when I realized that Id
never have dared to run away or do something behind my
parents back.
My friends have always come in pairs, except for the
trio of my childhood, and have shaped some of the stages of
my life: Irlanda, Julia and Sofia walked away with my childhood illusions, fantasies dreams and Barbie dolls. Luddya
and Cee-Cee shared my experiences as a child and teenager
in a different culture; Mercedes and Carla accompanied me
[148]

with my adolescent fears and complaints in a rediscovery of

my identity. Mara Jos and Vernica came along with my
dreams of independence and responsibility, and Mam and
Clara will always be there for me my entire life.

[149]

[150]

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.
[151]

Toms went home one night as so many others and asked

my parents for their blessing and consent to marry Clara. I
think that was Claras happiest day and the saddest for my
Pap, although he knew that his daughters happiness was
with that man that brought her joy and accompanied her
harmonically and emotionally.
Mam always dreamed of a huge and fancy wedding ceremony for her daughters, but the truth was that Clara and
Toms decided on a very simple one, in a small village in
the Andes Mountains, at an altar made out of stones designed by Juan Felix Sanchez, the great architect of the
Pramos. On the wedding day, my Mam wept for joy, my
Pap took Clara to the altar, and I felt intensely lonely like
that first day of school during recess in the United States,
when I hid myself in my notebook with the smell of wet
earth to call forth dreams and fantasies.
After my graduation from the Graphic Design College, I
applied to a graduate program at the Universidad de Los
Andes and the Universidad Central in Caracas, at the Institute of Fine Arts and at the Advanced Design School. The
truth is that Id have preferred to have been accepted into
the grad program in my own city because moving to a different place always involved a myriad of complications. The
first year I waited for admissions acceptances from these
programs that never came. One of those because they
wouldnt accept more graduate students due to a shortage
of faculty, another because they only admitted three candidates each year, and I was ranked seventh on their list, another because they were not interested in my research proposal, and the last one because they felt I didnt meet the
minimum financial requirements to pursue the program. I
applied for grants and scholarships, I sought funding to fulfill my dream in our beloved land, but my illusions were
cracking rapidly from the denials of countless government
[152]

offices that I visited and endless paperwork. I wasnt sure if

my dreams were about to break or if they were already
broken.
Pap was a firm believer of our identity and a defender
of our values. He said we should never sit idly by and accept
difficulties; we should look for alternatives and we should
fight through difficult situations. Our nation was a great
pearl, a pearl that we should all give the shine it deserved
with hard work and determination. There will always be
opportunities waiting for us in this great country. This
country had opened the doors to many immigrants, French,
Portuguese, Italians, who had prospered in this land of
blessings, and we, Venezuelans, surely could prosper in our
own land. We could be prophets in our own land. Our
dreams for this country were intact and our hopes were
planted here.

[153]

[154]

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
[155]

lyrics to his music La ex-seorita ya ha decidido que hacer/

pa su clase de maestra, a otra tierra se mudara, mientras que esta
susodicha, solo piensa en nueva fecha y en su dilema/ Ay, qu
problema/ y yo sin novio, ensayo que ir a decir, seguro voy a
morir, cuando mi pap se entere, y aunque l, otra solucin prefiere, no acepta la decisin, porque en la universidad, ni estudiar ya
pueeeeeede Decisiones, Ave Mara/ cada da
"The former Miss has already decided what to do/ for her master class, she would move to another land, while the abovementioned girl, just thinks of her deadline and her dilemma/ Oh,
what a problem... and I with no groom, I drill what Im going to
say, I will surely die, when my dad finds out, and though he prefers
another solution, he does not accept the decision, because at my
college, I cant study anymooooooooore... Decisions, Hail Mary/
every day...

[156]

Back to the chimera

It has been 15 winters since I came to this city for the
first time. I had the same feeling in my tummy the day I
flew from Caracas to Chicago. This time I didnt miss the
connecting flight to my small town with lots of corn and
pig-poop smell during summers. The immigration officer
didnt find anything suspicious in my passport either. After
all these years I'm back at Eagleeye Court. Although the
North was a chimera as my father used to say, he helped me
with the applications and paper work to study in the art
program that I wanted to and that I couldnt get into in my
own country.
I was assigned an apartment in the 300s lot. I nostalgically remembered my friends Luddya and Cee-Cee. After our
return to Venezuela I never heard from them anymore even
though we had sworn to keep in touch. I also remembered
my old neighbors from Eagleeye Court: Sammy, Ken,
Channel, and the twins Tania and Damaris. I remembered
Juanito el espaol and the sudokus that ended his linguist
dreams, the African guy, champion in my blinking contests,
I also remembered Javonn, Lala the gypsy with the scarf
covering her long hair, and I briefly recalled the moment
when Zack said goodbye from his mother's car as he left
Eagleeye Court bound for Florida.
[157]

Before boarding the plane, Pap gave me a present

wrapped in shiny paper making me promise to open it once
I was fully installed in the Eagleeye Court apartment. He
gave me a warm hug, took a lock of my hair that bordered
my eyes and gave me a gentle pat on my cheek. I noticed a
slight tremor in his eyes and his voice cracked. My Mam
couldnt hold her tears any longer, and hugging me tightly,
told me to never forget that they would be always there for
me. Clara gave me a sisterly hug like the one she gave me
when she left with her wedding dress to start a new phase of
her life with Toms amid singing and guitar chords. My
friend Ma-ra Jos was there too; she said goodbye with
another sibling hug. Everyone was waving me goodbye
from a distance as I climbed the stairs of the little plane that
would take me to the capital.
After three days of buying some used stuff at the Goodwill stores with the money I had saved over the past year, I
settled into that apartment of old walls, peeling paint, and
rickety and rusty metal railings. My bed, a desk, a fan, a
few cooking utensils, a small TV and a stereo were my first
pieces of furniture in that place. The memories of that hot
afternoon when we arrived at those apartments after an
odyssey, and the warm feeling invading my body combined
with the fresh smell of oregano during my first period came
to my mind. I also recalled the murky image of Luddya and
Cee-Cee waving goodbye through the taxi glass window,
ten years before. I remembered Luddyas laughter and the
smell of fresh strawberries, our first night sleeping in our
own clothes, and I thought I heard the noise of the old fans
in an effort to cool the room that first night. I remembered
those naked bodies that suddenly emerged from the computer screen and my embarrassment at the feeling of being
discovered, the images of the small children with their
heads disfigured by the evil bat that stole their dreams and
[158]

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

[159]

[160]

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.
[161]

Gatos or Aguarapados eyes: It refers to the greenish

or hazel eyes.
Guarapo de Panela: Brown-sugar cane infusion.
Guayoyo: Light-brewed black coffee.
Hallacas: A Venezuelan tamal-like cornmeal with beef,
pork, poultry and vegetables wrapped in banana leaves.
Hermana: Sister.
Ingles: English.
Los Estrenos: Brand new clothes for the New years
celebration.
Mam: Mother.
Negro, negra, negrito o negrita: Dark skinned people,
Sweetie, Darling, etc.
Pabelln Criollo: Traditional Venezuelan dish made out
of white rice, black beans, fried eggs, pulled beef and fried
yellow-plantain slices.
Pap: Father.
Pastelitos Andinos: A fried rounded-pastry. It is usually
stuffed with beef, chicken or cheese.
Paraduras: Traditional festivities in the Venezuelan
Andes held between January and February to honor the
Christ Child.
Pan de Jamn: Stuffed-ham bread usually prepared during
Christmas season.
Papeln: Brown-sugar cane blocks.
Pramo: Andean Mountains.
Rancheras: Mexican sobbing songs.
Seorita: Young woman.
Sur del Lago: Small towns settled around Maracaibo
Lake southern borders.
Taquito: A small taco.
Tequeos: A fried stick of cheese covered with dough.
Ta: Auntie.
[162]

About the Author

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
[163]

"Latin Heritage Foundation 2011" with his short-story entitled Punto Final

[164]

About the Illustrator

Fernanda Valentina Plata-Mora is an artist by vocation.

She studies in the ninth grade at La Salle High School, and
spends most of her time drawing, reading, singing and playing the violin. After living in Iowa City for five years, she
currently lives with her parents and two siblings, Vanessa
and Sebastian in Merida-Venezuela.

[165]