Maya's Notebook: A Novel (31 page)

In Las Vegas I went for entire days without exchanging a greeting, without a single word or a gesture in my direction from another human being. Solitude, that icy claw in the chest, had beaten me to such an extent that it never occurred to me that I could simply pick up a telephone and call home in Berkeley. That would have been all I needed, a telephone; but by then I’d lost hope.

At first, when I could
still run, I prowled around the cafés and restaurants with outdoor tables, where the smokers would sit, and if someone left a pack of cigarettes on the table, I would swoop past and grab it, because I could trade them for crack. I’ve used every toxic substance that exists on the street, except tobacco, although I do like the smell of it, because it reminds me of my Popo. I also stole fruit from supermarkets or chocolate bars from the station kiosks, but just as I couldn’t master the sad trade of prostitution, I
couldn’t learn how to rob. Freddy was an expert, having started stealing when he was in diapers, he claimed, and gave me several demonstrations with the aim of teaching me his tricks. He explained that women are very careless with their purses; they hang them on the backs of chairs, put them down in stores while they choose or try something on, drop them on the floor in the hairdresser’s, put them over their shoulders on buses—that is, they go around asking for someone to relieve them of the problem. Freddy had invisible hands, magic fingers, and the stealthy grace of a cheetah. “Watch carefully, Laura, don’t take your eyes off me,” he’d challenge me. We’d go into a mall, and he’d study the people, looking for his victim. With his cell phone stuck to his ear, pretending to be absorbed in a loud conversation, he’d approach a distracted woman, take her wallet out of her purse before I even saw, and then calmly walk away, still talking away on the phone. With the same elegance he could pick the lock of any car or walk into a department store and walk out five minutes later through another door with a couple of watches or bottles of perfume.

I tried to put Freddy’s lessons into practice, but I didn’t have the knack. My nerves failed, and my miserable appearance made people suspicious; they followed me in stores, and on the streets people kept clear of me. I smelled like a sewer, my hair was greasy, and my expression desperate.

Halfway through October the weather changed. It started to get cold at night, and I was sick. I had to pee all the time and got a sharp burning pain, which only went away with drugs. It was cystitis. I recognized the symptoms because
I’d had it once before, when I was sixteen, and I knew it could be cured quickly with antibiotics, but without a doctor’s prescription, antibiotics are more difficult to get hold of in the United States than a kilo of cocaine or an automatic rifle. It hurt to walk, to straighten up, but I didn’t dare go to the hospital emergency ward; they’d ask me questions, and there were always police on guard duty there.

I needed to find a safe place to spend the nights and decided to try a homeless shelter, which turned out to be a badly ventilated shed with tight lines of cots. There were twenty-odd women and lots of children. I was surprised by how few of these women were as resigned to misery as I was; only a couple of them were talking to themselves dementedly or picking fights, the rest seemed quite sane. Those who had children were more determined, active, clean, and even cheerful. They bustled around their kids, preparing bottles and washing clothes. I saw one reading a Dr. Seuss book to her four-year-old daughter, who knew it by heart and recited it along with her mother. Not all street people are schizophrenics or crooks, as some think; some are simply poor, old, or unemployed, and most are mothers who’ve been abandoned or are escaping from various kinds of violence.

On the wall of the refuge there was a poster with a phrase that has become forever engraved in my memory: “Life without dignity is not worth living.” Dignity? I understood all of a sudden, with terrifying certainty, that I’d turned into a drug addict and an alcoholic. I suppose I must have had a shred of dignity left, buried among the ashes, enough to make me feel an embarrassment so sharp that it
was like being stabbed in the chest. I started to cry in front of the poster. My distress must have been very obvious, because soon one of the counselors came over and led me to her tiny office, gave me a glass of iced tea, and asked me my name in a friendly way, and what I was using, how frequently, when the last time had been, if I’d received treatment, if there was anyone they could contact.

I knew my grandma’s phone number by heart—that’s one thing I hadn’t forgotten—but calling her would mean killing her with sorrow and shame, and would also mean obligatory detox, rehab, sobriety. No way. “Do you have any family?” the counselor insisted on asking me. I exploded with rage, as I used to do all the time, and swore at her in reply. She let me get it out of my system, without losing her cool, and then she gave me permission to stay the night in the shelter, violating the rule; one of the conditions for acceptance was not to be using alcohol or drugs.

The shelter supplied fruit juice, milk, and cookies for the children, coffee and tea at all hours, bathrooms, telephones, and washing machines—useless for me, because I only had the clothes I was wearing, having lost the plastic bag with my few meager belongings. I had a long shower, the first for several weeks, savoring the pleasure of the hot water on my skin, the soap, the foam in my hair, and the wonderful smell of shampoo. Then I had to put the same stinking clothes back on. I curled up in my cot, calling in murmurs for my Nini and my Popo, begging them to come and take me in their arms, like before, and tell me that everything was going to be all right, not to worry, they were looking out for me, lullaby my baby, lullaby and good night, sleep tight my sweet, little piece of my heart. Sleeping has al
ways been my problem, since I was born, but I was able to rest, in spite of the lack of air and the snoring women. Some of them cried out in their dreams.

Near my cot a mother
had settled down with her two children, a little baby still breast-feeding and an adorable little girl of about two or three. She was a young white woman with lots of freckles, a bit overweight, who must have been left without a roof over her head quite recently, since she still seemed to have a goal and a plan. When our paths crossed in the bathroom, she’d smiled at me, and her little girl had stared at me with her round blue eyes and asked me if I had a dog. “I used to have a puppy dog called Toni,” she told me. When the woman was changing the baby’s diapers, I saw a five-dollar bill in one of the compartments of her bag, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. At dawn, when there was finally silence in the dormitory and the woman was sleeping peacefully with her children in her arms, I slipped over to her cot, rummaged through her bag, and stole the five-dollar bill. Then I snuck back to my cot, ducking down low with my tail between my legs, like a bitch.

Of all the errors and sins I’ve committed in my life, that’s the one I can least forgive myself for. I stole from someone more needy than me, a mother who could have used that money to buy food for her children. That’s unforgivable. Without decency, you fall to pieces, lose your humanity and your soul.

At eight in the morning, after coffee and a bun, the same counselor who’d dealt with me when I arrived gave me a piece of paper with the address of a rehabilitation center. “Talk to Michelle. She’s my sister. She’ll help you,” she said. I ran out of the place without saying thanks and threw the paper in a garbage can outside. Those five dollars were enough to buy me a dose of something cheap and effective. I didn’t need any Michelle’s compassion.

That very same day I lost the photo of my Popo that my Nini had given me at the academy in Oregon and that I carried with me all the time. It struck me as a terrifying sign, meaning that my grandfather had seen me steal those five dollars, that he was disappointed in me, that he’d left, and now no one was watching over me. Fear, anguish, hiding, fleeing, begging, all melted together into a single bad dream, day and night.

Sometimes I am assaulted by the memory of a scene from that time on the street, a memory that flares up inside me and leaves me trembling. Other times I wake up sweating with images in my head, as vivid as if they were real. In the dream I see myself running naked, screaming voicelessly, in a labyrinth of narrow alleys that coil like serpents, buildings with blank doors and windows, not a soul to ask for help, my body burning, my feet bleeding, bile in my mouth, all alone. In Las Vegas I believed myself condemned to irremediable solitude, which began with the death of my grandpa. How was I to imagine back then that one day I would be here, on this island in Chiloé, incommunicado, hidden away, among strangers, and very far from everything familiar, without feeling lonely.

When I first met Daniel,
I wanted to make a good impression, erase my past and start fresh on a blank page. I wished I could invent a better version of myself, but in the intimacy of shared love, I understood that this was neither possible nor advisable. The person I am is the result of what I’ve lived through, including the drastic mistakes. Confessing to him was a good experience, proving the truth of what Mike O’Kelly always says: our demons lose their power when we pull them out of the depths where they hide and look them in the face in broad daylight. But now I don’t know if I should have done it. I think I frightened Daniel, and that’s why he didn’t reciprocate with as much passion as I feel. He probably feels he can’t trust me. It’s hard to blame him; a story like mine could scare off the bravest guy. It’s also true that he was the one who provoked me to confide in him. It was very easy to tell him about even the most humiliating episodes, because he listened without judging me; I suppose that’s part of his training. Isn’t that what psychiatrists are supposed to do? Listen in silence. He never asked me what happened, only what I’d felt at that moment, in telling it, and I would describe the heat on my skin, the palpitations in my chest, the weight of a crushing rock. He asked me not to reject those sensations, to accept them without analyzing them, because if I was brave enough to do that, they would open like boxes and my spirit could break free.

“You’ve suffered a lot, Maya, not just from what happened to you in adolescence, but also from being abandoned in your infancy,” he said.

“Abandoned? I wasn’t abandoned at all, I can assure you. You can’t imagine how my grandparents spoiled me.”

“Yes, but your mother and father abandoned you.”

“That’s what the therapists in Oregon said too, but my grandparents—”

“One day you’ll have to examine that in therapy,” he interrupted me.

“You psychiatrists resolve everything with therapy!”

“It’s pointless to bury psychological wounds—you have to air them out so they can scar over.”

“I had enough of therapy in Oregon, Daniel, but if that’s what I need, you could help me.”

His reply was more reasonable than romantic. He said that that would be a long-term project, and he had to leave soon; besides, no sex is allowed in a patient-therapist relationship.

“Then I’m going to ask my Popo to help me.”

“Good idea.” And he laughed.

In all that horrible time in Las Vegas, my Popo came to see me just once. I had got some heroin that was so cheap I should have suspected it wasn’t safe. I knew of addicts who’d been poisoned and killed by the shit dealers sometimes cut the drugs with, but I was really desperate and couldn’t resist. I snorted it in a disgusting public washroom. I didn’t have a syringe to inject it with; maybe that’s what saved me. As soon as I inhaled it, I felt like I’d been kicked in the temples by a mule. My heart bolted, and in less than a minute I saw myself wrapped in a black blanket, suffocated, unable to breathe. I slumped to the floor, in the foot and a half between the toilet and the wall, on top of used paper that stank of ammonia.

I vaguely understood that I was dying, and far from being frightened, I felt flooded with great relief. I was floating on black water, sinking deeper and deeper, more detached, as if in a dream, happy to fall softly to the bottom of that abyss and put an end to the shame, to go, go to the other side, escaping from the farce my life had become, from my lies and justifications, from that despicable, dishonest, and cowardly being I’d become, that being who blamed my father, my grandmother, and the rest of the universe for her own stupidity, that unhappy creature who at just barely nineteen years old had already burned all her bridges and was ruined, trapped, lost, that skeleton covered in rashes and lice, that miserable wretch who’d go to bed for a drink, who’d robbed a destitute mother. I wanted to escape forever from Joe Martin and Chino, from my own body, from my whole fucking existence.

Then, when I was already gone, I heard shouts from very far away:
Maya, Maya, breathe! Breathe! Breathe!
I hesitated for a good long while, confused, wanting to lose consciousness again so I wouldn’t have to make a decision, trying to disengage from myself and fly off like an arrow into the void, but I was held to this world by that urgent voice calling to me.
Breathe, Maya!
Instinctively I opened my mouth, swallowed some air, and began to inhale, the shallow gasps of someone breathing her last. Bit by bit, astonishingly slowly, I came back from the final sleep. There was nobody with me, but in the small space between the stall door and the floor I could see a man’s shoes on the other side, and I recognized them. Popo? Is that you, Popo? There was no reply. The English moccasins remained in the same place for an instant and then left noiselessly. I stayed
sitting there, breathing with difficulty, my legs shaking and refusing to obey me, calling him: Popo, Popo.

Daniel didn’t find it at all strange that my grandfather would have visited me and didn’t try to give me a rational explanation for what had happened, as most of the psychiatrists I’ve met would have. He didn’t even give me one of those mocking looks that Manuel Arias tends to give me when I start to get what he calls esoteric. How was I supposed to not fall in love with Daniel, who as well as being gorgeous is so sensitive? Most of all, he’s gorgeous. He looks like Michelangelo’s
David
, but his coloring is much more attractive. In Florence, my grandparents bought a miniature replica of the statue. In the shop they were offered a
David
with a fig leaf, but what I liked best were his genitals; I hadn’t seen those parts in a real human yet, only in my Popo’s anatomy book. Anyway, sorry, I got distracted—back to Daniel, who believes that half the world’s problems would be solved if every one of us had an unconditional Popo instead of a demanding superego, because the best virtues thrive with affection.