“They’re not perverts! They’re sick people, and that’s who nurses try to help, sick people. There are people with all sorts of unpleasant diseases, like… like… like H,I,V, and nurses have to take care of them.”
Uh-ohhh. As soon as “HIV” passed her lips, she wanted to snatch it back from out of the air. Any example was better than that one… pneumonia, tuberculosis, Tourette’s syndrome, hepatitis, diverticulitis… anything. Well, too late now. Brace yourself—
“Hahh!” Mother barked. “Everything is perverts with you! Now it’s maricones! La cólera de Dios! Is that why we paid all those tuitions? So you can chill up with dirty people?”
“Chill up?” said Daughter. “Chill up? You don’t say ‘chill up,’ it’s ‘chill out,’ or just chill.” Magdalena immediately realized that given the totality of her mother’s insult, “chill up” was the least of it. The only thing to do was to rub it in harder. So she resorted to the E-bomb: English. “Don’t try to speak English colloquially, Estrellita. You always get it wrong. You don’t get the hang of slang, do you. It always makes you sound clueless.”
Her mother went silent for a few beats, her mouth slightly agape. Gotcha! Magdalena knew that would get her. Answering her in English almost always did. Her mother had no idea what colloquially meant. Magdalena didn’t, either, until not all that many nights ago when Norman used it and explained it to her. Her mother might know hang and possibly even slang, but the hang of slang no doubt baffled her, and the expression clueless was guaranteed to make her look the way she did right now, which is to say, clueless. When Magdalena let her have it in English like this, it made her crazy.
Magdalena took advantage of the additional milliseconds the hiatus granted her and cast a real glance at Lazarus. The clay statue, almost life-size—not stone, not bronze, but ceramic—was the first thing you saw when you came into the casita. What a miserable saint to have to confront! He had caved-in cheeks, a scraggly beard, a pained expression, and a purply biblical robe—hanging open, to better exhibit the leprosy sores all over his upper torso—plus two clay dogs at his feet. In the Bible, Lazarus was about as low as they came, socially… a beggar with leprosy sores all over his body… begging for crumbs of bread at the gates of a swell place belonging to a rich man named Dives, who didn’t give him the time of day. The two of them, Lazarus and Dives, happened to die at about the same time. To make a point—namely, that in Heaven the last shall be first and the first shall be last—and that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God… Jesus sends this poor devil Lazarus to Heaven, where he dwells in “the bosom of Abraham.” He packs Dives off to Hell, where he burns alive eternally.
Magdalena was baptized as a Roman Catholic and had always gone to Mass with her mother, her father, and her two older brothers. But Mother was a real Camagüey country girl. Mother believed in Santería—an African religion that slaves had brought to Cuba… replete with spirits, magic, ecstatic dancing, trances, potions, ground roots, divination, curses, animal sacrifices, and God knows what other hoodoo voodoo. Santeríans began to match up their hoodoo gods with Catholic saints. The god of the sick, Babalú Ayé, became Saint Lazarus. Magdalena’s mother and father were light skinned, as were many believers by now. No way, however, could Santería ever shake loose of its social origins… slaves and simpleminded country guajiros. This had become a handy needle for Magdalena in the mother-and-daughters.
It hadn’t been like this when she was a little girl. She was a beautiful, irresistible creature, and her mother was very proud of that. Then, at age fourteen, she became a very beautiful, irresistible virgin. Grown men would sneak looks at her. Magdalena loved that… and how far were they going to get with her? Not one inch. Estrellita watched over her with the eyes of an owl. She would have loved to revive the role of the chaperone. It hadn’t been all that long since Cuban girls in Miami couldn’t go out on a date without Mother coming along as chaperone. It could become a bit… off. Sometimes the Mother-chaperone was pregnant with Daughter’s soon-to-be sibling. Bursting with child herself, she