I press the repeat button on the answering machine, and Agustina, who has remained silent throughout, twists her wrist out of my grip, goes into the kitchen, brings back a jar of water, and pours the whole thing on the sofa. It’s got to be cool, she says, hot things are bad, hot things hurt.
BUT LET’S GET BACK to our story, Agustina doll, let’s get back to the bet that was made that Thursday at L’Esplanade. We were so carried away that we talked about nothing else all week, phone calls back and forth, big laughs at the expense of Spider and his limp dick. I made all the preparations for the first round, which was set for Friday at nine, and the others kept stopping by the Aerobics Center or giving me a buzz so I could bring them up-to-date. To refer to the matter without setting off any alarms we started to call it Operation Lazarus, after that resurrection thing.
In an unrelated turn of events, I get a visit at the Aerobics Center from a trio of fat harpies who step out of a shocking lime-green sports car as big as a boat, three dark-skinned blondes so brutally bleached it’s as if they’ve tried to wipe out any trace of color, coconuts, they’re called, I don’t know whether I’m making myself clear, but I’m talking about a depressing threesome, my lovely Agustina, really cheap-looking bimbos. They show up in imitation leopard-print leggings, platform sneakers, and crap like that, all three of them bursting with enthusiasm at the idea of losing dozens of pounds and swearing to God that they’re mentally prepared to start lifting weights, devote themselves to spinning, strictly follow the pineapple diet, practice yoga, and do everything they’re asked, coming three times a week or more if necessary to get their figures back, because that’s how they put it, their figures, so last-generation. What about stepping classes? Oh yes, wonderful, sign me up, And aerobic dance? Oh yes, how exciting, I’ll take that, too, they were signing up for everything and once they had confessed their weights and ages to me and we were on intimate terms, when we were already practically like family, in fact, they hug me and come right out and tell me that they’re Pablo’s cousins by marriage and that it was Pablo’s wife, their first cousin, who personally recommended my gym to them, and, annoyed, I say, What Pablo are you talking about, Why the only Pablo, who else, Pablo Escobar.
Just a minute, lovely ladies, I say cunningly to mask my utter horror, I have appearances to keep up here and it’s obvious from the start that you’ve got too much money, that’s what I say so I don’t have to tell them to their faces that only narco whores like them would think of putting on false eyelashes to do spinning, that no amount of jogging will ever work off those hereditary spare tires, and that their massive thighs, flat asses, and short legs are signs of the lowest social origins.
So I got rid of them, Agustina doll, will you understand me if I say I have to keep a sharp eye out so that the level of the clientele doesn’t plummet? And of course, letting in three mob lovelies like that, relatives of Escobar on top of everything else, would spell the end of the center, which ultimately is nothing but a front for the big money that comes from the laundering, so I kicked the coconuts out, Try the competition, darlings, Spa 92 or Superfigure at Fifteenth and 103rd, you’ll lose weight faster there, I advised them, trusting that Pablo, a businessman first and foremost, would approve of my basic precautionary measures.
But apparently I was wrong. My analysis failed and I screwed myself royally, because Pablo turned out to be a man of honor first and a dealmaker second. But that’s another story, Agustina angel; just hold on to it in a corner of your crazy little head, because it’ll have a role to play later on. For now forget those three women as I forgot them at the time, watching them as they left in a huff and drove away down the street in their lime-green convertible, disappearing from my memory as soon as they turned the corner.
SOMETIMES RAGE AT BICHI stirs in Agustina and she scolds him just like her father, Don’t talk like a girl, she screams at him and immediately she’s sorry, but she simply can’t bear the idea that her father will leave home because of all the things that make him lose his temper, I hate it when my father raises his mighty hand against my little brother, says Agustina, I feel pangs in my stomach and I want to vomit when I see that each day my father is making Bichi more unhappy and withdrawn. But I also can’t stand the idea of my father leaving home.
Come on, girlie boy, don’t just stand there and take it, answer back, hit me harder, my father says mockingly to Bichi as he corners him with soft jabs, taunting him, and I say, Yes Bichito, hit him! hit him Carlos Vicente Jr., show him you’ve got guts, if only you’d come back at him with all the fury of your manhood and testosterone and break that big nose of my father’s, smash his mouth so that he bleeds even just a little bit and then maybe at last he’ll be satisfied and feel proud of you and happy here with all of us, but Bicho is weak, he fails his sister when she needs him most, he only knows how to take it and take it until he’s had enough and then he goes up to his room to bawl like a girl. Then all of my hatred is turned on my father and I want to shout in his face that he’s a monster, a disgusting beast, a tyrant, that he’s a coward mistreating a child, but in the end I don’t say anything because the powers flee in disarray, and panic overtakes me, and then I think that maybe the same thing happens to my mother, who can bear anything so long as my daddy doesn’t leave her.
But our ceremony is something else altogether, because during our secret ceremony Bichi and I become powerful beyond anyone’s control, it’s the supreme moment of our rule and command, our victory ritual. We climb up on the wardrobe, get the photographs out from the crack between the wall and the beam, and put them on my bed, first any which way, however they fall, while we organize everything else with the television turned up loud so that no one suspects. Bichi waits for me without his underwear, while I, with no panties on and that tickling feeling, go down the back stairs to the pantry and steal one of the linen napkins that my mother says used to belong to Grandmother Blanca, the German’s wife. They’re wide napkins, starched, that our mother puts out in the big dining room when guests come for dinner, and they have old-fashioned initials embroidered in one corner. During this part of the ceremony, Agustina must be very careful because her uniform skirt is short and pleated and if it sways the servants will realize that she’s not wearing anything underneath. Taking the napkin would get me in trouble but that would be the least of it, the really bad thing would be if someone told my mother that I was running around with no panties on, because she’d be capable of killing me for that.
I bring a washbowl full of water from the bathroom, and once I’m back in my room we close the door, light the candles, and turn out the light, and with the water in the washbowl we perform our ablutions, which means that we wash our face and hands until they’re free of sin, and then Agustina folds Grandmother Blanca’s napkin into a triangle, makes her little brother lie on the bed and lift his legs, puts the napkin under him like a diaper, shakes on Johnson’s baby powder and rubs it in well, then fastens the diaper with a safety pin. Next we dress ourselves in our vestments, mine an old burgundy velour robe of my mother’s with the black mantilla that my grandmother used to wear to church around my shoulders; yours, Bichi, the diaper, and over the diaper a black kimono with white-and-yellow flowers from one Halloween when they dressed me up as a Japanese girl, we’d like to paint our faces but we don’t for fear that afterward the traces of paint would give us away.