Boarding the plane, I could not get Mama’s words out of my head: Remember, Julio, only ask of him what is due to us. What he never gave us. The plane took off and slowly Puerto Rico became a dot in an endless blue sea, and I knew I had obeyed her. Flying into that night sky, Mama was alive and I understood why she had held onto him even when she was leaving a world that would now and forever mean nothing to her. I was happy and felt less alone. I looked out the window; the stars were in my face again and I was sitting on Mama’s lap like an obedient child.
Originally written in English
Y
by José Rabelo
Santurce
You think of Samira with a kind of guilty feeling — the best student, the most promising girl in the twelfth grade — now missing. Optimistically, you don’t believe she’s dead; she has just disappeared, location unknown.
You look at her photos on Facebook: one with her boyfriend, El Gato, murdered weeks earlier in the Manuel A. Pérez projects, that older boy who came to pick her up every afternoon in an old Mercedes-Benz.
You remember your student, her caramel face, long black hair, and the mole on her right elbow in the shape of a cockroach. That’s how she described it, anyway. Maestro, have you ever seen a cockroach wearing a wig? Well, look, there’s one right here. Then she took your right hand and made you feel the texture of her birthmark.
Again you think of her with a kind of guilty feeling, because you never talked to her about the dangers of the street. Combinatorial operations; absolute values; linear and quadratic equations; inverted functions; variable isolations; ratios and proportions — advanced mathematics doesn’t allow room for other subjects.
Nobody’s heard from her for two weeks. Her mother suffers at home; she’s all run out of tears. A long-time widow, and now she’s lost her daughter too, that’s what Señora Vélez, the social worker, said. Samira went out and didn’t come back, just like that — a purebred puppy lost in the wild jungle of Río Piedras.
The students didn’t know anything either.
Best case, she went off with a new boyfriend, said one of the boys in the classroom.
El Gato got her hooked on the meat. Who knows, someone might’ve kidnapped her to steal her kidneys, a goth girl suggested. Sorry... not to be so morbid. She could’ve just left the country with someone to go become a dancer, everyone knows Samira was into that nonsense, she continued.
That girl is dead, said a Pentecostal girl, so she can’t snitch on El Gato’s killers.
Her name always struck you as attractive: Samira. You even looked it up in the dictionary once. Samira: of Islamic origin, a woman who tells stories at night, a female entertainer. You look at her Facebook photos again. She’s dressed as a belly dancer, in a black-and-gold costume covered with small metallic bells; everyone applauded when she won the talent show. You saw her leave with El Gato after the show that Thursday night, and you remember that she didn’t come back until the following Monday.
You can’t relax at home; an inaudible call compels you to leave the comfort of your apartment. You want to find the equation that will solve this mystery, and you wish for a new use of polynomial functions that would decode Samira’s location. You long to touch the oblong mole on her elbow again, to determine how chance had planted it on her young skin.
You get on the train at Sagrado Corazón to see the city by night. It dawns on you that the map on the wall resembles a folded arm: the shoulder in Santurce, the elbow in Río Piedras, the hand in Bayamón. At the elbow you enter the subterranean part of the route — the underground, an inferno. You can’t see the urban landscape; the windows reveal only darkness. You catch your reflection in the glass. You haven’t shaved recently, so you look like a vagrant, a drunk sick with dengue fever. You don’t see Samira. You get off the train and wander through the streets filled with bookstores, ruined buildings, bars, walls covered in urban art, the street dormitories of junkies recently introduced to the alternative life, and murals of dogs and cats. Deep down you consider the probability of running into Samira. If you found her, you’d ask her why she wanted to disappear. A homeless man tries to bum a cigarette; you say you don’t smoke. Asshole, he says without resentment, staggering off down the street. If you found her, you wouldn’t question her, you’d offer to help her — after all, you’re just her teacher, not her father or relative — and you’d notify the social worker. Down a dark street, you see a man pull out his cock, moving it like a dead serpent. This is what you’re looking for, daddy, come get it, it’s not easy to find around here. You act like you don’t see or hear him. You come to the public square. Cops remove a handcuffed man from a patrol car and take him into the station. Nobody would care if you found her — let her live however she wants, die however she wants, disappear however she wants. At that elbow on the map, Río Piedras, you squash a cockroach on the ground near the station.
That night you dream of Samira: you find her in the classroom dressed in the black-and-gold outfit from the talent show; she’s the teacher, you, the only student in a room illuminated by black candles. From a desk you watch her, glowing, self-absorbed, solving equations on the chalkboard. She turns around to begin class; the bells ring in the background. This is what we call the inverse ratio, with the constant Ω. This kind of ratio also appears in natural processes and phenomena, for example... In the middle of her explanation, a gust of wind slips in through the recently opened door. All the candles go out; the moon provides the only illumination for what comes next. El Gato enters and undresses in front of a silent Samira. She keeps looking at you, as if wishing to continue the math lesson. He’s in front of her, naked, his skin covered with tattoos — skulls, tombstones, feline sex acts, men with pistols in place of their genitals, and women with breasts like curled-up cats. He strikes her and throws her on the floor. She seems to enjoy the beating. You stay motionless, paralyzed. You don’t want to stand; watching her suffer makes you feel good, so you watch her enjoy it, smiling passively, bleeding from the nose. El Gato positions her on the desk to take her. He’s panting, they’re panting, moaning, licking each other. You feel them licking your neck, and then you’re panting, it’s you moving on top of her, you feel your cock inside of her. El Gato is no longer there — you’re El Gato now — your arms spread on the desk, which creaks, and your arms are cat legs. You growl, you meow, and your tail quivers with pleasure. She sticks her claws into your chest. The pain wakes you up.
You don’t turn on the light to shower. You scrub your body vigorously as you try to remove the filth from your skin and your brain. You’ve seen cats clean themselves with their tongues, passively, parsimoniously, with all the time in the world, but yours is not a cat bath — it’s tense, exaggerated. But the water doesn’t eradicate the filth you feel, the dirt you harbor. It runs bloody in the darkness, down the drain that’s darker still.
When morning comes you have no desire to get up, to go back to the school. You decide to stay home with the memory of the dream, the sensation of claws embedded in your chest, and the thought of Samira presenting a report on inverse trigonometric functions. She herself was inverse: she wasn’t a normal adolescent; she acted like an adult, a teacher, erudite. She spoke more than the rest of the kids combined, and her conversation was substantive. Maestro, if so many people live happily off government benefits without needing to study, why do us kids have to study so much? Maestro, if God knows everything, why did He create the devil?