But I don’t want to talk about that today. I want to talk about the beginning, and the question of whether or not I was ever male isn’t the beginning of anything, I don’t think. It started that day I saw you guys there in the slum. It was really early and you arrived all fresh and happy like you were ready for a picnic, you even had hiking boots and hiking trousers on, the kind of clothes you’d use to go on holiday to the jungle. You thought going into the slum was like going on safari. Well, how do I know what you thought, but you seemed not to realise we dressed like normal people, like everyone else, in work clothes, or clubbing clothes, or around-the-house clothes, not like you who showed up ready to hunt a bear or walk on some shifting sand dunes. Daniel was looking sophisticated. Such a handsome man. I liked Daniel when I saw him that day, those blue eyes and that silver hair of his just killed me. Well, Quity, you were no virgin yourself, and you know that before you I didn’t want anything to do with chicks, I’d never gone beyond sucking some pussy when one of my more depraved clients wanted to pay extra for the show. But I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about Dani. I thought he was a cop because he was taking pictures and pretending not to the whole time we were eating breakfast, but he also looked too posh to be a cop. Also he was with you and I thought you were on the production crew of some TV show. You looked like one of those slutty chicks who come to the slum to film some documentary or buy some coke, a bit of a hot mess. I had you pegged from the start. And look at us now, my queen! Whoever would have imagined it? Two happy mums with a terrace overlooking the Caribbean and international fame! Ever since the Virgin’s first miracle in the police station I knew my life was going to be charmed, but I never in a million years imagined I’d be here today, the mother of your daughter, in a mansion and on TV all day long. Well, I did imagine that when I was little: I wanted to be a showgirl and be on TV, I wanted to be on TV more than I wanted to be a showgirl actually. And did it work out? Yes and no. I’m on TV but I’m not a showgirl, I’m more like a sort of nun even though you say I still look a bit like a whore. Still, I know I’m famous because I can talk to the Virgin and not because of my tits, even though they’re pretty big. For someone who claims to be straight, I have to say you went pretty crazy for them, and when I got these huge nipples that you love so much and that cost us a fortune to redo in Miami you made me feel like the wolf that nursed both Remus and Romulus.
Yes, Quity, my love, I realise I’m only on TV because of the Virgin and because of everyone that died, and because you wrote almost all the lyrics of the cumbia opera that shot me into the stratosphere of worldwide Latin stardom. And now you’re writing this book and I imagine you selling it to Hollywood and some little Salvadoran boy playing me. No, the Virgin hasn’t had a single complaint about it. She’s been a star for two thousand years, you think she doesn’t love fame? I don’t know how, I guess it was etched on her eternal mind and her mortal heart and so she still loves it. It may seem impossible, she still enjoys fame even though she’s been dead for like two thousand years! Oh, not dead, I meant she’s been immortal for two thousand years. Your Greek gods loved fame too. And no, Quity, it’s not that hard to believe they loved it if they made us, or if the ones who made them are the same as the ones who made us. Oh, you’re so difficult. I don’t even know why I love you; you never give me a break even for a second, as if I didn’t have enough with little María Cleopatra, who you don’t pay any attention to, my love, even though you had the privilege of carrying her in your womb. I know God made lizards too and you can’t understand lizards even though we have the same father. I think I understand Juancho pretty well: ever since I changed his pool and started giving him organic frogs and Patagonian salmon he looks at me lovingly. He wants to be comfortable and eat well and be loved, does that sound so strange to you, silly billy? Everyone wants to be loved, even rocks want to be loved. And I’m not just spouting bullshit here. It’s my turn and I’m going to keep recording my comments, Quity. You can write whatever you want but I want to tell my truth too. I know you never said I was stupid but in your book I come off like an idiot, so you’re going to put all this that I’m saying in there too, my sweetness, and if you don’t, you can take me out of your book completely. Or I’ll add it in myself. I have the right to make myself heard.
So, that morning, I thought Dani looked like some posh police officer but since you were there too I thought you guys were from the TV or something and that you must be making a secret documentary. I don’t know why you needed to be filming in secret, but then again, I didn’t think it through. Anyway, I didn’t really care because I knew I was going to end up on TV eventually. The Virgin told me that much, and then I was sure of it on the morning when the Virgin Mother disappeared because of Susana’s howling and carrying on, do you remember? Yeah, I know you wrote about it, but I’m just remembering it now and I guess I’m asking more out of nostalgia. Because we’ve shared so many memories, because I don’t even know how to think about myself without talking to you. Susana threw her wheelchair aside and jumped up howling, splashing through the mud like a little girl with her legs all cured, praising the miracle and swearing she’d give me a spot in the next season of her show. I got kind of pissed off about the shouting: ‘Do you have to be so loud about it? The Virgin doesn’t like it,’ and sure enough, the Holy Mother disappeared without even giving me a kiss goodbye like she normally does. She just said, ‘Pray, my daughter, and God will help thee and care for thee,’ or something like that. In Spanish, too. The Virgin hardly speaks Spanish at all now we’ve moved her to Florida, have you noticed?
4. Quity: ‘The virgin spoke like some medieval Spanish girl’
The Virgin spoke like some medieval Spanish girl and the days would always start with the first cumbia. Everyone said whatever they felt like saying using their own choice of syntax and together the songs created a cumbia language to tell all the different stories. I heard about love and gunshots, backstabbings and sex, happy cumbia, sad cumbia, angry cumbia all day long. Now I don’t want to hear cumbia ever again. That’s why we have the white living room, the bulletproof glass, the air conditioning. I write about what happened and nothing, or almost nothing, changes around me: my daughter grows noisily in another part of the house and Cleo gets older and confuses herself with one of the rich, bleached, useless ladies of Miami. Even though she’s the religious one, I’m the monk in this family. Cleo lives surrounded by change, with the windows thrown open and constant shouting, the way we used to live back in the slum. We’d set up a communication system that used stolen mobile phones, but it was useless: the habit of spreading the word by shouting across the slum won out. ‘Ginger’s got new teeth’, ‘The cops are coming down the motorway’, ‘Jessica’s got a new boyfriend’, or whatever the news was, from shack to shack. The constant stream of information never let up, or if it did it was because someone had turned up at someone else’s shack in person. Never mind what time – all it took was a package of sweets or crisps, salami and beer, and the party would start or continue. That’s how it was: happiness radiated from the very heart of the slum. It might have looked like it was because of the Virgin and Cleo, but it was us, it was the power of us all coming together.
I know that now, but I can’t take any noise at all these days. I think if someone played a cumbia at full volume right this second, I’d gun them down. I can’t be around people, I almost never go out, I’m like the modern version of the madwoman in the attic: the lunatic in the bunker. Curiously enough, this isolation is the best indicator of adaptation to American society. I’m part of the Bunker Club, a group of sick nutjobs locked in incubators as hermetically sealed and impenetrable as they are self-sustainable. I could go two years without leaving and there are others who are equipped to be locked away for ten or twenty, but I always thought that once you lock yourself in, you never come back out. Like that monk from Cuzco who spent twenty years stuck in a cave painting pictures from hell, and you think, of course, what else would you paint if you were trapped in a cave for twenty years, and when he came out, he came out dead. I go outside sometimes, to feel the sun. I take little María Cleopatra to the beach and we make sandcastles and sand angels and she laughs, happy to have one of her mothers all to herself. I distance myself from her too: I think about our time on the island in the Paraná Delta where I slept away the better part of my pregnancy