GROWING UP AMONG SKELETONS AND RADIOS by Adriana Páramo
1971. Bogotá, Colombia. Mom had been in a foul mood all week. My 19-year-old brother had gotten his 15-year-old girlfriend pregnant. Mom accused her of entrapment, of using ‘you know what’ to keep my brother from becoming someone. He, who was supposed to finish his engineering degree, get a job at a respectable firm and be the family bread winner, was about to start a family of his own.
“With the butcher’s daughter. The butcher’s daughter, of all girls,” Mom said. “All skin and bones. Well,” I heard Mom say, “skin, bones and you know what.”
He must have asked Mom for advice the evening I eavesdropped on them. He sat at the dining table, his eyes cast down. Mom adopted a peripatetic attitude, orbiting around him, shouting things about morality and responsibility.
“What do you want me to say? Huh?” Mom yelled at him first from behind his chair, then again while facing him. “You really did it this time.” She shot an angry look at him; it was the kind of look that could put out candles at the other end of the table. “Be a man. Go fix what you screwed up.” Mom pursed her lips and shook her head. “You weren’t supposed to be like your father. You were supposed to be the man of the house, to look after your five sisters. Now what? Tell me, genius. Now what?”
I smiled at the sound of the word “genius.” Mom slapped the table twice with open hands. The noise made me jolt to attention and I braced myself for my brother’s explosion. I anticipated an outburst; an I’m-not-a-little-boy-anymore type of thing. My eyes ran from Mom to my brother, to the table, to a grain of rice on the floor, to Mom, to my brother. But he said nothing. My big brother ashamed, sat still.
“Go and be a man. Go,” she said. “I hope your girlfriend is happy. I hope that” and she stopped as if looking for the worst possible insult, “I hope that butcher’s daughter is satisfied now that she screwed up your life for good.”
“Connie, Mom,” my brother said. “Her name is Connie.”
A couple of weeks later, it was official. My brother who worked two jobs to pay for college was moving out. He put his guitar in a beat-up leather case, packed his things in a little duffle bag and left without saying goodbye.
Cows brains. That’s what she cooked the day my brother left. Whenever Mom was in a foul mood, we all paid. She cooked angry food, which is to say, we ate angry food in tense silence. The brains kept slipping off Mom’s fingers as she tried to wash them in the sink. My sisters secretly joked that our meal resembled a multiple pregnancy, like a knot of fetuses tripping each other in line to buy tickets to the circus. The brains looked like a conglomerate of cauliflower heads all covered by a thin membrane that made it appear wet. Red blood vessels traversed the yellowish mass.
After the veins and the membrane were removed and the slippery mass looked ready, Mom placed the thing in boiling water. She used bouillon if she was splurging or plain salt if she wasn’t. The day my brother left, she used just salt. As the brains cooked and their surface got tender and malleable so did their smell. It went from gamey to homey; it morphed from alien and backwards to something familiar, something that made our tummies twitch.
On the kitchen counter Mom chopped garlic, onions and tomatoes, although it looked as though she was doing much more than just chopping. She was murdering the white bulbs of the onions and with them, she was killing something else. She swung the hollow green ends to the garbage like she was trying to fly them out of the kitchen. She was one wild chef that day.
“My biology teacher says that the green end is the most flavorful part of the onion,” my oldest sister Dalila said looking at the scallions in the can.
Mom shot her a narrow-eyed, watch-it look. “Who’s cooking, me or the biology teacher?”
We knew better than to take the issue any further and watched silently as Mom sautéed the onions and the tomatoes in reheated pork lard. When the mixture was ready, she jumbled it up with the garlic bits, the cow’s brains and three eggs. She beat the concoction with fury. The fork’s prongs rose and fell breaking the gelatinous texture of the brain, the viscosity of the eggs and in a second, we had something very similar to scrambled eggs packing a ton of proteins and maybe even unsuspected diseases.
“I have a project for my biology class,” my oldest sister said. She was the only one talking. Everybody else knew that Mom was not in a talking mood. We ate quietly.
“I could get an A+ and extra points if I complete the whole thing,” Dalila said. I looked at her and couldn’t help noticing how perfectly shaped her nose was, how much lighter her skin was compared to mine, how when she smiled her teeth shined even and white like marble sculptures.
“About time you bring home good grades,” Mom said. What is it you have to do?”
“An anatomy project,” my sister said. “We need to assemble a skeleton.”
My mother, who had never been known for being squeamish, made no qualms about it. If her daughter needed a skeleton to do well in her class, a skeleton she would get. Or two, as it turned out.
Graves in Colombia are not final resting places. They are a liminal phase of the disposal of human remains. The bodies remain buried for five years after which the remains are disinterred and the surviving relatives are given two options: To up their lease of the grave, or to re-bury the body in perpetuity. In either case the caskets – if still in good form – are reused and the graves re-leased. Disturbing the dead is a good business. When the bodies go unclaimed they are placed in plastic bags and thrown in common graves that are later incinerated or buried for good, depending on the resources of the cemetery. The final touch of social stratification.
A week later, my oldest sister didn’t come straight home after class as she always did. By the time she walked in, it was already dark and everyone had gathered around our most precious possession: a burgundy RCA Victor tabletop tube radio.
“Well? Did you get it?” Mom asked. She was looking for a radio station, moving the needle east and west, tapping the dial, sighing, trying again.
“Yes, ma’am,” my sister said as she kissed each of us in the cheek. Her school shoes were muddy and the blazer of her uniform was splotched with what looked like dry clay.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Mom said.
My sisters and I watched Mom in silence as she worked the knob to the right, to the left, the needle reverberating right on top of the number 92.5, the sports radio station. She had developed a taste for boxing and tonight Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier were fighting The Fight of the Century in Madison Square Garden. She’d been following the career moves of the three Titans from America, who were making history one brutal punch at a time. And so Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman – the Titans from afar – shared Mom’s boxing hall of fame along with two local heroes of the ring: Antonio Cervantes “Kid Pambele” – our very own WBA Jr. welterweight world champion and Rocky Valdez, the youngest addition to the boxing altar.
“What’s going on?” I asked. Mom and my sisters were glued to the radio; Mom sat still, the rosary wrapped around her wrist, her right ear touching the radio speaker, her nose breathing on the dial knob. My sisters bit their knuckles and inattentively played with each other’s hair, gasping with Mom in perfect synch like a claque of old widows.
“It’s a boxing match,” she said absentmindedly.
“What’s that?” I asked not expecting an answer.
Her explanation was fragmented and loquacious.
“Two men. Fight. Muhammad Ali and José Frazier. A square like this,” she said, drawing a box on the back of my hand.
I remember a white handkerchief on her lap, a wooden crucifix perched on the wall just above the radio, her eyes closed shut and flinching as if she were watching a movie underneath her eyelids. Her shoulders jerked inwardly, dodging punches, delivering invisible upper cuts. Mom looked like she was having her own fight against the air in front of her and was winning big time.
The commentator said that Muhammad Ali was calling Joe Frazier “Uncle Tom.” This seemed to take Mom by surprise. She turned the volume down.
“Tío Tom? Tío Tom?” she said. One of my sisters volunteered an explanation, “It’s a book,” she said, but that didn’t make sense to anyone.
“Imagine that. A young man fighting his own blood in the ring.”
The early rounds belonged to Joe Frazier, or José Frazier, as Mom called him. Ali gave away points by leaning on the ropes. Round after round Mom shouted lame insults at Muhammad Ali into the radio grille: “What are you doing, bobo? Get off the ropes, you donkey, you lazy beast, you sloth!”
The fight swung between them; Ali jolted Frazier, Frazier almost dropped Ali. Neither boxer would yield but in the end there was only one winner: Uncle Tom, much to Mom’s chagrin.
The following day, Mom had added Muhammad Ali’s loss to a long list of ongoing grievances. We hadn’t heard from my father in weeks, my brother had moved out, Mom was running out of food, utilities were about to be shut off and now Muhammad. She toiled all day long. I followed her around as she cooked, swept, mopped; when she washed clothes and dishes, while she dusted the house and cleaned the windows. I found it exhausting just to look at her.
Then the doorbell rang. My sister was back from school. She walked in with a grin across her face that Mom understood well.
“Where is it?” Mom asked.
“It is in a plastic bag. I put it outside in the patio,” she said, looking at me, then looking at Mom as if asking for permission to talk about “it” in front of her five-year-old sister.
Just like that. My sister brought a corpse one day after school as if arriving home with a dead body in tow were an everyday thing.
Then the day took on a festive mood. Mom turned the radio on full blast so that she could hear the music from the patio. I trailed behind them wishing to be invisible so that I could witness this moment that promised to be a big deal. A big grown up deal.
“What is it?” Mom asked as she tied her apron around her waist.
“A girl,” my sister said, rubbing her hands together, anticipation lingering in the air.
“How do you know?”
“I packed her with my own hands. It’s definitely a girl.”
“How did you get it?”
“The nuns from school know a snatcher.”
“A body snatcher?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh well. If the nuns know him that means he is a good man and who could blame a good catholic man for making a little money on the side.”
The body snatcher had refused to touch the girl’s tiny body, or what was left of it, by virtue of her age and by the fact that she could have still been in purgatory and purgatory was not a place he wanted to be in touch with. Not in his lifetime. So my sister had rolled up the white sleeves of her uniform shirt, knelt on the moist ground by the common grave, and proceeded to transfer the little girl from the white casket into a plastic garbage bag. It was a girl, my sister knew that much. She had a few cascading curls and a pink sock on one of her feet which my sister carefully slipped off and sent flying into the common grave.
There were no ceremonies, no rituals, no Hail Mary’s, no rest in peace chants. There was an A+ at stake and that’s all my mother cared about. Nothing would stand in the way of her children’s education.
“No girl of mine will grow up to be a beast of burden like me.” That’s what she used to say on good days. On bad days, when any of my sisters brought home anything less than a B, Mom took a spiteful tone.
“It’s alright not to be smart,” she hissed. “There are always kitchens to be cleaned, pots to be scrubbed, floors to be waxed . . .” and she could go on until we all went to bed and only the sister with the bad grades was listening.
We lived on the third floor of an old house that was never meant to be a building. The landlord, out of greed or need or both, had added a second floor to his old house, all in less than a week. The recipe was simple: get a group of cousins and friends. Entice them with free beer and aguardiente. Don’t let them down. They tend to leave with ease when cheated. Get a truckload of cement, a truckload of red bricks, nails, wood, PVC, electrical wires, the works. Expertise is not required. Men know those things intuitively. Build an apartment or something barely inhabitable. After the tenants move in and the rent money starts flowing, repeat. Build a third floor. There isn’t much to see outside, so forget about windows. It’s cheaper that way. Assume that the next tenants are responsible parents and don’t fence the terrace and don’t install handrails to the staircase. Leave it all unfinished. Don’t care. The next tenants are six girls. They’ll fix everything. Women know those things instinctively.
The whole building looked like a sequence of unfortunate afterthoughts. Our small terrace, nothing more than a slab of cement, protruded over the second floor, threatening to collapse and bring the building down with it, an architectural feature that kept Mom in constant state of paranoia.
While my sister took the body out of the bag and placed it on the cement, my mother organized a bonfire in one corner behind oxidized tin barrels and pieces of broken lattice. Both made several trips in and out of the house, until they gathered enough cooking utensils, detergent, bleach, an assortment of scouring products and several steel wool pads of varying grades. Mom placed over the fire the same colossal pot she used every Christmas to prepare tamales from scratch. They sat on Coca-Cola crates around the boiling pot. My mother tended the fire with a twisted yet lady-like pose, knees and ankles touching together away from the heat, eyes locked on the girl’s dead body, an aura of childish curiosity suspended above her.
Maybe it was the fire, maybe the excitement of having a dead body a few meters away from me, but that day I confirmed how stunningly beautiful my sister was. How sitting next to Mom, there could be nothing so spectacular as the sight of Dalila’s face shimmering in the dying sun. She looked womanly as she stirred the cauldron, with the uniform shirt unbuttoned a bit exposing the beginning of her generous breasts, the nascent smile, the teeth, the impish dimple on her right cheek. I understood that day why our cousin Fernando, who had come from Mariquita to visit, had wrapped his arms around her one afternoon when they thought nobody was watching. They had locked lips, did a little dance with their heads and he caressed her face with the back of his fingers. And watching them made me want all of that for me. I wanted to know what being a woman felt like.
My sister hiked up her skirt mid-thigh and tucked its pleats between her shapely legs. They were pale and silky but her knees were hairy and blotchy as if they were not part of the same body. She’d been shaving behind my mother’s back and must have cut her knees with the blade. I held my breath and prayed that Mom didn’t notice. But Mom was in an unusually winsome disposition and whistled to the music as my sister scraped the skin off the little girl’s bones. The clarion screech of scouring sounds filled the large patio reaching all the way to the back wall of the kitchen where I stood tiny and awkward. The only other kid in the house was the little girl my sister was cooking in the terrace; the only other little girl I was allowed to be close to was being dismembered behind oxidized tin barrels and pieces of broken lattice that would never make a fence.
A familiar smell made its rounds in and out of our house. The aroma was an octopus-like tang with over reaching tentacles. It was the same smell of bone soup. The same bone soup Mom fixed at least twice a week. A trip to the butcher, a big bone preferably with some meat still on it, add water, salt, green onions, rice, a few beans, when available, sprinkle with cilantro, and the house smelled like the kitchen of a mom-and-pop restaurant.
A few hours later, the fanfare was over. The sun sank behind the mountains, the house throbbed with the noises of the night: sirens, screeching cars, the barking of all the stray dogs in the world, and the city – a jungle of asphalt and criminals – that I saw from the kitchen window revealed itself to me with intermittent flashes of sad low-wattage yellow lights.
My mother came into the kitchen and turned the radio off as she let out an exasperated sigh. My sister followed in silence. She’d been crying. Something had happened in the terrace. I desperately wanted to know but I knew better than to ask. I knew the drill too well. Whenever I dared interrupt an adult conversation or asked inopportune questions, I got a familiar al baile de las gallinas no van las cucarachas. In a hen’s party, cockroaches are not welcome. Grown-ups were the hens. I was the cockroach.
“Either you put too much caustic soda or too much bleach,” Mom said to Dalila who came out of the bathroom in pajamas. Her uniform in her arms ready to be washed by hand.
“The monjas didn’t tell me how much stuff I needed.”
“Something disintegrated the bones. Ask the nuns at school tomorrow.”
The A+ seemed unattainable now and Dalila was crying. Mom was undeterred.
“Can you get another one?” she asked my sister who had me now sitting on her lap.
“I’ll have to check with the guy at the . . . ,” she paused and covered my ears so that she could say the word cemetery as if I knew what a cemetery was.
The night my sister melted the little girl in Mom’s pot, we were sent to bed earlier than usual. I woke up in the middle of the night. Mom wasn’t in bed. I tiptoed my way out of the bedroom I shared with Mom and went looking for her. She was outside in the terrace, sitting low on a Coca-Cola crate, wrapped in a wool ruana, smoking a long, skinny, white cigarette. Plumes of white steam and smoke rose from her mouth. A blast of icy wind did something with her hair; it made it rise in patches like wild stalagmites caught up in the moment. She extinguished the cigarette and proceeded to bury her face under the ruana, and her back swelled, and her shoulders rolled up and down like choppy waves. I had never seen Mom cry and wondered if that was what mothers looked like when they cried. Maybe she wasn’t crying but just shivering. Maybe she was both. She must have gone outside the house to get away from the terrible sounds of the leaky faucet in the kitchen and the paint peeling off the walls, the malfunctioning toilet, the bed fleas doing their strident summersaults with whirring wings and steely fangs – all those unbearable noises of the night.
A few days later, my sister arrived from school with another corpse. This time it was an old man. Surely his bones would endure my sister’s scraping and acid-bleach concoctions better than the little girl’s. After the bones were scraped, boiled and bleached, the painstaking task of putting them together for Dalila’s class began.
The terrace was littered with white pieces of paper. On them, with brown marker, my sister had written: F for Femur, T for Tibia, C for Clavicle, U for Ulna and so on.
After labeling the parts, my sister gathered them in groups – right hand, left foot, upper torso, etc. while my mother, drill-in-hand, readied herself to assemble the parts of a man that was once a whole.
“I got this at a junkyard,” Mom said, brandishing a spool of twisted wire that seemed to have been used for everything. She unraveled the wire, pressing the bits that were too twisted to be used, and made them reusable again, cutting them in different lengths with a pair of oxidized pliers that I’m sure she bargained for at the same junkyard. When Mom wasn’t cutting wire or drilling holes into the old man’s bones, she was looking over my sister’s shoulder at a rectangular poster of the skeletal system that Dalila had borrowed from the nuns.
“This looks like it goes here,” Mom said, pointing at a mound of bones then at the diagram. Her guesses went both unchallenged and unheeded. My sister understood that every one of Mom’s uneducated outbursts were mere attempts – clumsy yet loving – at being part of a school life that was never offered to her.
That Sunday, when all the bones had been assembled in place and lacquered to a shiny oak shade, the man-project was ready. My sister revealed it first to Mom, ta-da! and Mom to the rest of us, ta-da! We hugged, did silly celebratory hip dances, and drank hot cocoa with more milk than water just for the occasion.
“Should we give him a name?” Dalila asked.
“Carlos Santana, like the guitarist, please Mom, please,” another sister pleaded.
“If we are going to name him after a singer, it has got to be José Feliciano,” my middle sister suggested.
“José Feliciano? The blind guy?” Mom asked. “Isn’t it enough that the man is already dead? Let’s call him Mammy Blue, like the song your brother used to sing to me before he got in the sack with the butcher’s daughter.”
“Mammy Blue? That’s not a real name,” Dalila said.
“Well then, the old man shall remain unnamed. Everyone to bed,” Mom said clapping her hands. “Case closed.”
The old man was a hit at the school. So much so that after giving my sister a well-deserved A+ and the promised extra points, the nuns asked that the skeleton be donated to the science department.
“We’ll think about it,” Mom said, claiming ownership of the skeleton. Her first objection was mainly moral. Mom had recently heard rumors of certain sexual liaisons taking place at the convent in charge of my sisters’ school. What bothered Mom was not that the nuns were not able to keep their chastity vows.
“One thing is a nun and a priest, a nun and the milk guy,” Mom said, “but this nun-on-nun business? I think not,” and she wagged her index in the air. No.
During the days that followed the project, we all grew fond of the man-skeleton and the idea of donating it to the nuns seemed to fade away with each passing day. Mom hung it in different places around the house.
The shotgun layout of our house made it impossible to escape the skeleton’s presence. Not that we would have wanted to; he was now a part of the family and whether we were eating, doing homework, or cooking, the old man was always in plain sight. It was first hung by a screw at the base of its skull above the oxidized frame of a window overlooking the patio. His whole body fell against the opaque glass and when the sun hit a specific angle, the skeleton projected its shadow along our dining table and its eight mismatched chairs. The light peeked through his ribs leaving little white arches on a set of crocheted coasters.
Mom used to stare at him as she did her chores. As she swept, as she cooked, as she prepared the starch for my sisters’ uniform shirts – a thick mixture of flour and water in which she dipped the shirts’ collars and cuffs before ironing them.
The man-skeleton didn’t last long in the same position. Mom had to move it because it blocked the only source of sunlight in the house. It was next pinned against the wall by the dining table: arms stretched out like Jesus, which Mom thought was very nice, very Christian but had to be moved again because the weight of his body was stretching the nylon keeping his bones together. In time, the man-skeleton ended up hanging from the ceiling just before the bathroom door. We either had to move his legs to one side so that the door could be open or spread his legs apart and make our way in and out of the bathroom by ducking our heads just beneath his crotch.
The landlord was knocking at our door twice a day now, sometimes three times. Mom went from politely apologetic, to humiliated, to outright desperate. From opening the door and offering him café con leche, to hiding, to teaching us how to shut the curtains, turn the radio off and tiptoe our way around the house so that the second floor tenants could not alert the landlord that Mom was indeed home.
A heavy cloud of tension moved in with us. Mom said very little, my sisters brought home good grades and did chores in silence while I did what I was supposed to do. I made myself invisible, light, undemanding. I watched Mom take pictures down, empty drawers, throw things in plastic bags. Dalila took the skeleton down, kissed him on the teeth when Mom wasn’t looking so that we could have a laugh, and put it in a box. My sisters and Mom had a few emergency family meetings behind closed doors, which Mom got to calling women’s councils. I was not allowed in. The meetings were stuff for gallinas. I was a cucaracha. One night as I kissed Mom good night, she said, “Promise me. Promise me,” she repeated, “that you’ll forever be my little girl.”
“I promise,” I said with one hand flat on my five-year-old heart.
Then Mom cupped my face in her hands and made a long litany of confessions I did not understand. She told me she was tired and felt she could not go on. She leaned in and whispered more in my ear, told me more about why she needed me to be her little girl forever. She gave it all to me, in my cheek, in my ear, her despair so spiky and her need so big, they got tangled up in my hair, her words so hushed I thought I was dreaming.
“Soon, all of us are going to play a game,” Mom said in a mischievous voice, but the corners of her mouth betrayed her; they pulled downward the way they did when she was sad. It was a game to teach the landlord, the jokester, a lesson.
“We’ll stay up all night until it’s really, really dark outside. Then we’ll sneak downstairs very quietly,” she said in a hushed voice.
“Like mice?” I asked.
“Exactly. Like mice.”
My sisters and Mom packed everything they could in cardboard boxes. Every day of the week, one box disappeared. When there were only two of them left, Mom said to Dalila, “Take the damn skeleton to school tomorrow.” Mom looked around as if taking stock of the empty house and added, “The nuns can have José Feliciano or Mammy Blue or whatever the hell his name is. They win,” she said arms up in the air in surrender.
The following day, we had our last angry meal in that house. It was dark inside. Either there had been a power cut or the utilities had finally been shut off. By the light of a kerosene lamp, Mom cooked bone soup in a kerosene stove and the food tasted of smoke and fuel. Nobody complained. We ate, thanked God for providing us with the food, and Mom for cooking it. Gracias madre, que dios se lo pague y le de la salud.
Then we stayed up all night and waited in silence until it was really, really dark outside.
* * *
Three years after the fight of the century, we gathered once more around our beloved tube radio. This time for “Rumble in the Jungle,” a fight for the World Heavyweight Championship between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, also known by Mom as Jorge Foreman.
Things had changed around our home. Father was gone, so was my brother. My oldest sister had dropped out of school and was working instead. My second oldest sister had also dropped out of school, had a job and married a man who worked for a bank. A “sperm bank” my other sisters joked. Mom laughed at the joke but quickly decided it was too vulgar and told my sisters to stop teasing about those things.
“Let’s hope he’s not the donor,” Mom said and patted her chest all flustered. The joke was lost on me, but my other sisters seemed amused. It would take me twenty years to learn that the marriage to the bank man was not exactly a marriage of love but of convenience. My sister had married him on the condition they both contributed a chunk of their salaries to support the rest of us. It kept our family afloat for as long as the marriage lasted. Two years.
“This is going to be good,” Mom said, wrapping the rosary around her fingers. “Ali’d better get off the ropes this time. He’s what, thirty something? He can’t compete with this kid Jorge.”
Ali started the fight with a ferocious attack and the audience went wild. We could hear the spectators in Zaire chant Ali Boma Ye! Ali Boma Ye! an African mantra that put my two sisters, Mom and I, all in trance and seduced us with its foreign cadence. We didn’t know what it meant and didn’t care. We were high on Ali and chanted along with our invisible African friends Ali Boma Ye! Ali Boma Ye!
Mom slammed the table with her palm. Grains of salt reverberated on the wood. She kept the thumping going on and on until she fell into a steady five-beat rhythm. After the first few minutes of the fight, Mom’s pounding became part of the noises from Zaire, and my sisters and I started smacking our own palms against the table Ali Boma Ye! Ali Boma Ye! and it felt like we were building something big, a tribe of women warriors, a clan of angry, thump-crazy, sweaty women fighters.
Then all of a sudden, Ali went to the ropes and allowed Foreman to hit him. I heard Mom cry, “No, no, Jesus help him. God, get him off the ropes, please Heavenly Father.”
But Ali had different plans. He spent round after round leaning on the ropes loyal to his “rope-a-dope tactic,” absorbing Foreman’s punches, taunting him with comments like “Is that all you got, George?” or “My Grandma punches harder than you do” which made Mom snort a chuckle or two.
Toward the end of the fight, Ali sprang from the ropes, delivered a killer sequence of flawless blows eventually sending Foreman to the canvas. The fight was over in round eight and Ali reclaimed the WBA/WBC Heavyweight titles. We jumped and hugged each other because Ali’s victories were our own.
When the fight was over, the commentator disclosed the translation of our feverish African chant: Ali Boma Ye! meant Ali, Kill Him! Mom, being the God-fearing woman she was, started counting beads. She faced the radio as if directing her repentance towards Zaire and whispered an apology to Jorge Foreman for wishing him dead.
“We don’t speak African, Lord. Forgive my girls and this old sinner. We’ll never chant anything we don’t understand. And please, heal poor Jorge’s eyes; Ali really did a number on that guy. Amén.”
Mom switched the radio off and let her fingers linger over its burgundy surface as if saying good night. She moved it back against the wall and placed a white crocheted coaster over it. She looked at it before leaving the kitchen, again before switching the light off, and went back to rearrange the coaster so that it fell loosely over the grill. The thing looked like a deformed giant’s face with the speaker grille forming a high forehead, the knobs serving as eyes, and the bank of lower buttons resembling a toothy mouth. The ivory teeth remained a mystery to all of us. Mom knew that one button was for something called short wave and another for long wave; the other buttons, whose function nobody knew, went unused and eventually got stuck with food debris and the grease suspended in the air of our kitchen.
Mom’s RCA Victor tube radio had two big knobs on each side. The one of the far right corner was the tuner for both AM and FM bands. The large left knob had two functions: Its inner part controlled the on and off and the volume, while the outer part moved a red cable inside a transparent cabinet for best reception. Getting the desired radio station required patience and want, both qualities Mom had in abundance. That radio was her life. It brought news all the way from around Bogotá and countries beyond Colombia to our dimly lit kitchen. It was as if we the children were holding her hostage and her only ties to the outside world – beyond the confines of the stove – were the waves of information crackling through the radio.
The year I turned eight, Mom introduced me to “Aqui Resolvemos su Caso,” a thirty-minute long radio show dedicated to heart-broken and jaded women. The dejected writers sent letters to the hostess, whom they considered to be their advisor, friend and confidant. In return, the hostess offered her best advice and as a token of respect for the writers’ privacy, a nickname, sometimes a single word, sometimes a combination of words that best described the brokenhearted correspondent.
If the advice-seeker wrote on the subject of being under pressure to have sex, the answer started with: Dear Harassed. If the question was about whether or not she should forgive the man who deserted her, the answer started with: Dear Abandoned. Or, if the correspondent was in love but not ready for marriage, she was addressed as Dear in Love but Hesitant.
At 4:30, right after coming back from school, Mom would tune into Radio Todelar. The show hostess, a woman with a motherly-sounding voice able to elicit the most intimate details of the lives of her heart-broken writers, gave us a warm welcome. Bienvenida, Amiga, making it clear that the show was all about women.
The letters were mainly from working class women, literate enough to write and mail a letter, but marginalized enough to seek a stranger’s opinion and believe in it. A husband walked out on a woman and their ten children. The landlord, a man with a great heart, had offered her to take care of the lot in exchange for her company. She’s broke and desperate. What should she do?
Mom sneered as she ironed our bed sheets. “A landlord with a great heart? Huh? And he just wants her company? I know what company means. Even I know.”
The man of the house had been sneaking into the maid’s quarters while the lady of the house slept. The maid was now pregnant and her employers wanted nothing to do with her.
Mom held the iron in the air and turned to face the radio. “Dear Pregnant,” Mom said imitating the hostess’ voice. “If you didn’t want to end up with your belly full of bones, you should have kept your legs crossed. Next letter.”
A young man had threatened his girlfriend with leaving her unless she gives him la prueba de amor, a proof of her love.
Mom rolled her eyes. “That’s the oldest tale there is,” she said folding the bed sheet in half. “Let him leave you. Good riddance! La prueba de amor? La prueba de amor? Who falls for that one nowadays?” Mom shook her head and folded the bed sheet again and again until it was all tidy and flat and looked like she had just bought it.
“The only true love is a mother’s love. Everything else is a lie,” she said, this time eyeing me from across the dining table turned into ironing board.
Mom licked her index finger and tested the bottom of the iron with it. It made a pss, pss noise and a plume of steam rose up from iron and finger.
“Listen and learn, Adrianita,” she said looking at me, through me, with one of her solemn looks. “All men are the same. They have this one thing in mind and want only this thing from women.”
She wouldn’t say what the thing was.
Our RCA Victor radio was life, everything that pulsated beyond the confines of our home, the radio delivered right there in the comfort of our kitchen. It wasn’t just the boxing and the jaded women. There was also the news, bullfights, soccer results, the schedule of the power cuts, soaps and music, especially boleros. Mom said that through music, I could learn everything there was to know about love. It could be sweet like a bolero or bitter like a tango.
A bolero was, to my mother, a sort of stethoscope for one’s heartbeat. The most versatile piece of music there was for it could be dedicated, sung, hummed, and danced to. A lover could drink himself senseless listening to one, or many, and even kill, if the bolero carried a rage swift and mindless enough.
When Mom listened to boleros, the air stood still and the pendulum of time stopped mid-sway. Her eyes became smaller, like a little girl’s, and the veins on each side of her neck bulged like contained dams. If she sang, her voice came out like a lament, as if that specific bolero were the exact story of her life. If she hummed to one, a throat drone reverberated in the air like a Taiko drum. And when she sang, she was on a league of her own, especially Friday evenings at 6:30 when Boleros en Su Ruta, came on the radio.
Mom’s face mellowed down, deep sadness hovered around the yellowish 60-watt bulb illuminating the kitchen. She listened to Leo Marini and Hugo Romani with a passion I didn’t know she could store in her heart because to me, she wasn’t a woman, she was a mother and those were two very different things. A mother was self-sufficient, tireless, and required basic maintenance. A woman, on the other hand, had needs, secret needs. I knew this from listening to radio soaps. A woman’s heart was a labyrinth, a complicated maze framed by minefields that no man could walk in or out of without setting off.
Verdad Amarga, Bitter Truth, was one of those boleros that made Mom morph into a woman. She would sing the two first verses in duet with Hugo Romani. Yo tengo que decirte la verDad/Aunque me parta el alma/No quiero que después me juzgues mal/Por pretender callarla. Yo sé que es imposible nuestro amor/Porque el destino manda/Y tú sabrás un dí a perdonar/Esta verDad amarga. I have to tell the truth/Even if it breaks my heart/I don’t want to be misjudged later/For trying to conceal it. I know our love is impossible/Because it is our destiny/And one day you’ll be able to pardon/This bitter truth.
Her voice, clear; her cadence, impeccable. Her hands moved away from her chest in semicircular offerings as if she were delivering a speech.
By the third verse, Mom’s face was a bit contorted; it was as if Hugo Romani was tugging secret strings underneath her skin. Her voice quivered as she delivered the third verse with an angry undertone. Te juro por los dos/Que me cuesta la vida/Que sangrará la herida/Por una eterniDad. I swear/That it’s costing me my life/That this wound will bleed/For an eternity.
Then came the fourth verse and with it, Mom’s surrender. She delivered it in a broken whisper, while Hugo Romani, in the background, carried on with the song. Tal vez mañana/puedas comprender/Que siempre fui sincera/Tal vez por alguien llegues a saber/Que todavía te quiero. Maybe later you might understand/That I was always sincere/Perhaps someone will help you see/That I still love you.
By the time the guitars had quietened down and the radio show host had taken his audience to commercials, Mom looked older and spent. Her pain, mysterious and intricate, was somehow also my pain. It was a sharp ache that spoke of a loveless marriage and a heavy chain made out of six links – one for each of her children. By the time the last bolero of the evening was playing, I had already promised myself that I would never leave Mom’s side, I would never get married, I would never go anywhere without her. Mom needed protection, particularly after Boleros en su Ruta, when she was at her most vulnerable. I was there to kiss her tears away. I was there. A ponytailed, three and a half feet tall woman-in-the making.
And while Mom sighed at the sound of her boleros and while she jeered and sneered at the brokenhearted writers of Aqui Resolvemos su Caso, all I could think of was the ever growing number of people living inside the radio. Muhammad Ali, Jorge Foreman, José Frazier, the singers, the bullfight narrators and its toreros, all of these scorned women, and even the woman with the monotonous voice that spoke in Radio Sutatenza, a PBS station, all of them crammed in a 20-inch long radio? I made it my mission to look after the people living inside the monster-looking radio.
I sat behind the radio and sneaked a peek through the holes in the back panel. I saw lights and tubes but not people. Mom was busy in her bedroom and I seized the moment. I picked a few grains of cooked rice and pushed them through the holes in the back of the radio. I didn’t understand how sweet Mom, good-hearted Mom, catholic Mom could listen to all these people all day long without sparing them something to eat. I was convinced there were lots of starving artists inside the radio.
Whenever Mom wasn’t looking, I sneaked some food for the people in the radio. Stale bread, leftovers, mashed potatoes, anything was better than no food at all. Then it occurred to me that with all the talking radio people did, they were also thirsty. So I squirted some water through the front grille and the back holes. Something fizzled inside the radio.
That’s when things started to go wrong. Mom was visibly worried. What could possibly be wrong with an RCA Victor? They were supposed to last a lifetime. Once, in the middle of La Ley Contra el Hampa, a soap about cops and bad guys, the radio overheated. Mom stared at it for a long time. “Don’t you die on me,” she said, rather begged, and we understood the solemnity of the moment. She caressed it. Shook it lightly. Cleaned the grille with an old brush and toothpick in hand, erased any traces of dust between its teeth. The radio crackled. She was about to lose her only connection with the outside world. And while Mom did everything she could to keep the radio alive, I did everything possible to keep all the radio people well fed. That was the least I could do to help Mom in these difficult moments when the radio threatened to fill her kitchen with nothing but silence and the buzz of black flies.
Then the radio started to lose its voice. I grew increasingly worried that the people inside it were also dying and frantically doubled my food rations. Mom fanned the radio with a paper fan that had Spanish ballerinas printed on it. This cooling treatment didn’t cure the radio’s voice problem. Mom’s stares became longer and graver.
“What am I going to do without my radio, huh? No music? No news? No nothing?” She stared at it, untied her apron and threw it on top of the radio. “That’s all I need,” she said before she stormed out of the kitchen. Her face was tense and her lips quivered. Her world was about to go mute. Her connection to the world was about to be forever severed.
One morning the tuning dial got stuck. The red needle didn’t move, the static was louder than ever and a faint coil of smoke rose above the Bakelite buttons. The radio spurted and shook in little convulsions, the voices drowned by a noisy whir. I heard Mom sob.
“No, no my radio,” she said. “No my RCA Victor.” She disappeared only to re-emerge undeterred and defiant, screwdriver in hand. She lifted the radio and carried it to the patio. Mom was about to examine her precious tube friend under natural light. I followed her.
As she removed the four screws that fastened the back panel to the frame of the radio, I noticed that nobody had eaten my food. The mold crept out of the box through the holes. My hands felt cold and damp. The fungal cardboard panel fell onto Mom’s lap followed by green hairy-looking balls of rice, velvety bread crumbs, wispy maize beans, and all the diminutive black flies in the world. Only then did it dawn on me that I might have killed Mom’s radio with my feeding frenzies.
“Any idea who did this?” Mom asked. Her face was red with anger. The vein on her right temple throbbing furiously.
Any attempt at lying would have been futile. She could see right through me, through every living creature. Nobody could fool her. She could smell a lie before our brains concocted one. So I looked down ashamed. My eyes swelled with tears.
“What were you thinking? Huh? Malcriada.”
Mom whispered in her raspiest voice. She shot a hateful look at me then at the rotten banquet spread all over the belly of her beloved radio.
“What-were-you-thinking?” she repeated, this time louder. “Huh? Huh?” Her hands open, palms up gyrating in the air like she was screwing in light bulbs. Then she did something with her mouth. I will never know whether she was about to let out a yell or a laugh, but I still remember the suspended O she formed with her dark lips, followed by a prolonged sigh that made her shoulders slump. She looked at me, at the sky, back at me, at the radio, the rotten food spilled all over, back at me.
“Nobody lives here,” she said tapping the top of the radio with the screwdriver. “Don’t ask me how this radio thing works, but no one lives here, see?” Mom said nobody and no one many times as she proceeded to clean the mess I had made.
The radio never worked again.
Mom’s second best friend was a small portable transistor radio she used to lock in the closet. She had a special place for it, next to her wallet, underneath her cotton underwear, where it was dark and dry, and no termites could get to. It came out of the closet only at night to be Mom’s bed companion. It was a black small rectangular thing with a worn out dial, paint chipped off the holes on the speaker and a narrow plastic window through which the numbers of the radio stations were no longer visible. She knew her transistor well, like a woman knows her husband. She knew its whims, its strengths and weaknesses and how to get the most out of it.
Mom, her black transistor and I had exquisite rendezvous in bed. Every Wednesday at 9:30 pm, she would turn her bedroom lights off and invited me to join her under the sheets so that we could be frightened together. The youngest of my other sisters was 14 going on 15 and therefore too old to be under the sheets with Mom. But me? I was still 8 going on 9, still lovable, still smitten with Mom, still her most loyal follower. And because I was still easy, Mom was easy on me. So I gladly jumped in bed with her and waited for whatever Mom, the radio, and the night might deliver.
The idea was to listen to horror stories and to gasp, and tremble and scream without care.
“Almost time,” Mom said and my heart made loud thump noises inside my ears. She opened the closet and cleaned her transistor with a cloth. She grabbed the dial with a steady hand and moved it between stations looking for El Código del Terror, a Tales from the Crypt a-la Colombiana.
We heard music, cut off news, static, commercials, more static. Mom closed her eyes as she moved the dial, willing the station to come forward. The red needle obeyed her instructions canvassing the stations from corner to corner of the plastic window. She was focused; the frown between her eyebrows looked like the letter H had been carved into her tanned skin.
She pulled the antenna out and pointed it at every space between the cardinal points until we heard the macabre laughter. Loud and clear the cackle from the crypt announced the beginning of El Código del Terror. Gently, as if not to disturb the voice, she would bring the transistor to bed, under the covers, and tucked it between our heads with the antenna sticking out towards the window where the reception was best.
I could hear heartbeats, some mine, some Mom’s. We clasped our hands together, her calloused hands and mine; I felt her hot breath on my neck and smelled her clothes, a fusion of soap and onions.
Our favorite horror story was about good men trapped in salamanders’ bodies and bad men whose rotten deeds were punished with an invasion of such salamanders.
One night we heard the story of a trapped man who had fallen into the curious hands of a young boy. He dismembered the salamander-man little by little: first the tail, then the limbs, then he performed a vicious dissection just to see the salamander’s heart without realizing that he was dismembering a human being. The trapped man screamed in pain a loud Nooooo! But the boy, pure at heart, could not hear his cry. The shriek pierced through our ears and both, Mom and I, screamed in unison with the trapped man, first, Noooooo! followed by Ay Dios Mío. Suddenly Mom’s hands were squeezing my shoulders while mine turned into fists beating on the mattress in panic. We wriggled under the sheets, toenails tearing on something, panting, mouths half-open, eyes shut, her legs wrapped around mine, my head buried somewhere in her armpit.
“Are you scared?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. You?”
“Of course, not.”
The salamander story must have been a hit with the audience because we listened to several variations of the original tale. Like the one about an evil lawyer who cheated a widow of the mansion she inherited from her deceased husband. The swindler moved in the widow’s property thinking that he was set for life. Unfortunately, after he moved in, so did a horde of men-possessed salamanders. The evil man, utterly repulsed by their invasion, set out to exterminate them all by his own hand. Every time he tried to kill one, he had to hear the man inside the salamander pleading for his life and as he imparted frantic blows on the amphibian. On and on, the lawyer heard their moribund shrieks never fully realizing the nature of his curse. Naturally, he lost his mind. And crazy and abandoned, the salamanders ended up eating him alive, gnawing at his flesh, invading his body through every available orifice.
“That’s what you get for taking advantage of women,” Mom said, the sheets over our heads swelled with her words.
The horror was solid, a tangible furry hand caressing our necks. There was nothing outside as terrifying as the program. The terror that Bogotá brought upon its citizen at night was nothing compared to what we experienced under the sheets. People were being robbed, women violated, children abused, pedestrians mugged. There could have been a civil war brewing around the corner of our house but nothing would have been as terrifying as the tales from El Código del Terror.
The transistor’s successor was a wall to wall turntable-radio console complete with two waist-high detached speakers. It was a handcrafted monster made of solid wood and veneers and had an AM/FM radio with knobs the size of my hands. The three-speed turntable discreetly hidden under the hinge-top lid infused our house with a dose of finesse Mom had never experienced before. Her little kitchen radio along with the transistor were a thing of the past. Soon the bottom half of the radiola was filled with 33 rpm Long Play vinyl records, bone, shellac and Bakelite 78 rpm’s and a formidable collection of 45 stackable records.
In the years to come, Mom played vinyl LP’s of instrumental music by world renowned orchestra directors like Frank Purcell, Raymond LeFevre, and Paul Mauriat. Someone introduced us to Richard Clayderman, the French pianist that made Mom heave a dramatic sigh whenever she looked at the album cover and her tiny eyes framed by dark circles met his deep blue irises, his thin blond hair and a set of wonderful teeth, all of it punctuated by dimples that were not too big not too small but just perfect, and made his Ballade pour Adeline sound like a divine gift delivered to our Victrola by God himself, even after the twentieth time.
Mom never looked back.
Adriana Páramo’s essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review, FMagazine, Waccamaw Journal, Latina Voices, and Lip Service Stories.