In Lupita’s mind alcohol became her best ally, her passport to freedom. It gave her access to a world where the fear of being seen, of being touched, of being raped again did not exist.
Manolo had asked Lupita to be his girlfriend during the party, and it was under the effects of alcohol that Lupita received her first kiss and her first caresses, and experienced her first vaginal wetness. From that day on she turned to alcohol every time she needed to feel brave. Three drinks were enough to make her feel like the happiest, most sensual woman. She felt like number one! Never mind that she inhabited a short, chubby body.
The night of her fifteenth birthday, her mother threw her an unforgettable party. Doña Trini had saved for many years in order to throw the quinceañera party of her daughter’s dreams. She rented a ballroom and bought Lupita a puffy tulle dress that made her look fatter than she actually was. When Lupita saw herself in the dress she knew she would not be able to face her family and friends without the help of tequila. Before her big dance she hid in a bathroom stall and chugged half a bottle.
Lupita remembered her grand entrance in front of all her guests and nothing more. She had blacked out. To this day she couldn’t recall the slightest detail from the dance. She didn’t know if she had messed up, or if Manolo had stepped on her foot. Her mind had gone blank. Days later her mother commented how sweet it was that Lupita had cried “tears of joy” when she danced with her stepfather. But Lupita knew that if any tears had escaped her eyes they were surely caused by the revulsion and shame of being in her stepfather’s embrace.
The only memory she had of that night was embedded in her mind months later, when her doctor had informed her she was pregnant. It was then that she learned what the indiscriminate use of alcohol could cause. That was when everything spiraled out of control. That was when her life changed completely. Nevertheless, even though Lupita knew how alcohol had destroyed her life and her family and romantic relationships, she still yearned to get a good buzz. She urgently needed a drink. Hell, not one, several drinks. She no longer cared about the consequences or the hangover. Right then and there she would have given anything to be able to drink herself to death. Or at least drink herself into a stupor so this hellish night would finally end.
LUPITA LIKED TO WASH
She loved to put her hands in the water and repeat her mantra: “Just for today. Just for today I will choose water over alcohol. Just for today I will allow water to cleanse me, to purify me.” Lupita liked living sober. But that clarity made her extremely anxious because she knew she had done so many things she couldn’t remember, things that would cause her much more guilt if she could actually recall them. She would never wish her blackouts on anyone—waking up in some hotel naked, raped, beaten, or in the middle of the street, stripped of all possessions. One of the steps in the Alcoholics Anonymous program was to seek forgiveness and try to repair damages. Lupita had covered this step to the best of her knowledge, but what about the times she had no clue about what she had done, or whom she had hit or insulted? Not to mention maybe having robbed, assaulted, or stabbed someone. But after a session at the washbasin she would feel like her guilt had gone down the drain along with the dirt in her clothes. This is where she confessed her conscious and unconscious sins and let them go down the drain. Without knowing the details she could sense a sacred presence in the water and knew that in her reflection she could find a pure, clean version of herself.
So Lupita bowed to that invisible presence, imploring clarity. She didn’t want to relapse into drinking. She wanted to choose water as her patron, as her protector, as her mistress.
TLAZOLTÉOTL
Tlazoltéotl was an Aztec goddess. She was classified by the Spaniards as the “Eater of Ordure,” although recent research into the pre-Hispanic spiritual world reveals her as a fertility deity that was present in all aspects of life, from birth to death, including resurrection. For each stage of life she had a different name and represented a distinct process, but her presence within temples and in rituals was essential to guaranteeing the conservation of life. During birth, the deity participated as the great purifier. During terrestrial life she was known as the Goddess of Knitters, those who covered, those who clothed. During death she was accompanied by the Cihuateteo (women who had died during childbirth) as she escorted the sun through its path in the heavens and helped it be reborn. She had a temple where men confessed their sins, which when forgiven became light and renewed life. That was her real purpose: to make fertilizer out of that which had been discarded.
Lupita couldn’t help but wonder if someone had washed the delegado’s blood off of the pavement. Where had that water flowed?
The thought of the delegado’s blood running down the drain made her ponder the cold-blooded indifference of nature’s actions. After the cleanup crew was done, that was that! Water solves problems. Water dilutes, cleans, purifies. After the street was washed, pedestrians would have no clue that a murder had taken place there. Water had no need to go after the guilty, to seek them out or judge and condemn them. Water operated by different laws and Lupita liked how it litigated. The washbasin’s justice system was relentless and democratic. Clothes could not be corrupted. Water and soap could put an end to the worst filth without bothering with any petty interests. And after a proper ironing, there was not a single trace of disorder. Something Lupita often thought when she was done washing: “Render unto the earth what is the earth’s and render unto the sun what is the sun’s.” In the case of the delegado’s blood, she wondered what part of it belonged to the earth and what part to the sun. It wasn’t clear. The essence of the blood would travel in the water and eventually evaporate. In that steamy state it would reach the sky and return to the earth again in the form of rain. It would be present both in the memory of the sky and in the memory of the earth.
This reflection troubled Lupita’s soul. She was washing the pants that she had soaked in the bucket of soapy water the previous night. Traces of her urine and the delegado’s blood had permeated the fabric. This combination of fluids would travel through the drain in unison and the water would contain the memory of them both. On the one hand, water washed away the evidence of what had transpired, but on the other hand, it transported the delegado’s and Lupita’s essences, and Lupita didn’t want to remain in the water’s memory under such conditions. She wanted to be swallowed by the earth and to remain in darkness long enough to feel new. She didn’t want to share her shame with anyone. She wanted to travel down the drain and through the pipes without being noticed, to snuggle in the arms of the magnificent Grandmother in an underground cave where no one could see her, where she could exist in peace and without judgment. It was easy to remove traces of urine and blood from clothes, but it was more complicated to dispel them from memory. They were embedded in Lupita’s memory, and there was no way to eliminate them. “Just for today,” Lupita said. “Just for today I will let water purify me.” Yet the images of what she had witnessed still did not disappear from her mind, from her skin, from her nose, or from her eyes in spite of being so tired that it was hard to focus her vision on the pants she was vigorously washing in the washbasin.
However, her prayer was heard, and the water took a detour down the drain. Just like the ocean tides answer the moon’s calling, so did the drain water answer Lupita’s petition. It exited the drain through a miniscule leak in the pipes that connected Lupita’s building to the sewage line, and it impregnated the earth. When the soil was moist enough, the water seeped down into an underground cave where it fell drip by drip. A very important ceremony had taken place there three nights before.
Three nights before . . . under a full moon, Concepción Ugalde’s face looked spectral, illuminated by the torch she held in her hand. Doña Concepción was a shaman, widely respected by the council of elders in her community. To them she was better known as Conchita. She was a woman of undecipherable age, with a kind face and long gray braids. Her feet slowly slid along the rocks inside an abandoned und
erground cave. The white walls had been formed thousands of years back by runoff from underground rivers high in calcium carbonate. In time, the constant flow of water had formed petrified waterfalls. Conchita was escorted by men and women who walked behind her in complete silence and in a straight line, each one of them carrying a torch. They walked along a tunnel until they reached a wide chamber shaped like a half-moon. The place was a wonder to behold. Imposing. Water spouted from the white rocks of its surface and fed into four springs, each of which pointed toward one of the four cardinal points. The water from the springs flowed down a channel to the center of the chamber where all four streams congregated, forming a sacred well. The water swirled as it flowed to the center, giving off a pleasant aroma.
A stone staircase with thirteen steps descended down each slope toward the well. Conchita climbed down and entered the water. From a pouch that hung from her neck, she produced a small circular piece of obsidian, and she raised it toward the sky. In that instant a small ray of moonlight shone through a crack in the cave and illuminated the stone Conchita held between her fingers. The rest of the people began to chant as a young man joined Conchita in the water and received the stone. His name was Tenoch, and his black eyes shone as bright as the obsidian. His earlobes were stretched with gauges, and he had a labret piercing—all three pieces of jewelry made of the same volcanic material. Conchita said to him, “May the light shine strongly through the darkness in which our people have fallen. May our warriors triumph over the forces that prevent us from seeing our true face in the face of our brothers. Lord Quetzalcóatl, you who purified your bodily matter and set it ablaze to become the Morning Star, you who faced the black mirror and found liberation from its deceitful reflection, help us free the spirit of our people so we can look upon the rebirth of the Fifth Sun with refreshed eyes.”
Lupita, of course, had no idea about the underground chamber where the water from the washbasin flowed after it went down the drain, or about the events that had transpired in it three nights earlier. Her mind was in a state of confusion. She still couldn’t even focus her eyes. They felt like there was sand in them because she hadn’t slept at all. This had definitely been the second worst night of her life. The worst night of her life was when she had accidentally killed her son. When she saw the toddler fall to the floor and not get up, Lupita set her bottle aside and fell to her knees beside him. She took her son’s flaccid body in her arms and realized he was dead.
Lupita had held him in her arms firmly and didn’t let go all night. She didn’t budge a fraction of an inch from the position she settled in, and she was unable to remove her gaze from the boy’s face. Her son’s body lost warmth and got rigid, and so did hers. And just like she had practiced throughout her childhood, she tried to evade the moment by concentrating on an external event. As moonlight had entered the room through a window that was right behind her head Lupita carefully observed how her own shadow drew a half-moon shape on her son’s face. As the night wore on, she had all the time in the world to observe how that shadow changed.
At first it had covered just his eyes and forehead, but later the shadow bathed the boy’s face in black, only to slowly recede and become a partial eclipse once more. Lupita concentrated her thoughts on lunar eclipses. She thought that maybe Galileo Galilei had lost a child in his arms just like her, on a night just as sad as this one, and thus had discovered that only a round shape that comes between the sun and the moon can project a circular shadow, providing irrefutable proof that the earth is round and that it orbits the sun.
For the whole night she had not allowed her mind to dwell on anything other than the trajectory of the planets in the cold quiet of space. She also thought about how the earth gets cold when it’s not in direct sunlight, and how the cold disappears when the sun rises again over the horizon. But that night—the worst night of her life—Lupita knew that warmth would never return to her body. Not the next morning, or the next day, or the next week or month, because she understood that she had just murdered the sun.
It took her a long time to be able to sleep at night again, and a lot longer for her body to recover the warmth she had lost. When she went to prison, the walls of her cell felt warm compared to her cold skin.
LUPITA LIKED TO FEEL SORRY FOR HERSELF
Of course she was not aware of it. Her thoughts and feelings perfectly fit the psychological description of a victim suffering from seriously low self-esteem. She had been convinced of her own worthlessness for so many years that she irrevocably placed herself below others, thus obeying an unconscious desire to feel insignificant. That was how she was brought up, and that was how she had lived her whole life. Her deep and hidden thoughts had been in control of her existence for years and would only emerge at the most critical times with the intention of re-creating ad nauseam what it meant to live a life of misery. For that matter, she had no memory of having experienced even a glimmer of well-being in her entire life.
“Poor me” was the phrase that came to her mind repeatedly, as a choir of imaginary mariachis responded “Oh, my heart!” And again “Poor me,” and then the chorus: “Suffer no more.” The lyrics and tune belonged to a song performed by Pedro Infante. Lupita wondered why tragedy had knocked on her door once more. Why hadn’t she stopped for a couple of minutes at the diner where she usually used the bathroom during her rounds? What might have happened if she had disobeyed her doctor’s orders to drink almost a gallon of water every day to alleviate her urinary problems? She rapidly came to the conclusion that even if she had not pissed her pants, some other horrible thing would have happened. She just couldn’t win. Everything seemed to be stacked against her. What would have happened if instead of being four feet nine she were five feet eleven? She might have been assigned to the touristy parts of town, like the Zona Rosa. What if instead of weighing 160 pounds she weighed 120? She could have been a game-show girl on En Familia con Chabelo. What if she had passed the GED when she joined the police? What if her stepfather hadn’t raped her? What if her husband hadn’t beaten her so many times? What kind of life would she have now? A different one, that was for sure.
First of all, she wouldn’t be washing her clothes by hand at the crack of dawn so she could avoid her neighbors, who would very likely bombard her with questions about the delegado’s unusual death. Of course, her unusual timing backfired and caused exactly what she had meant to avoid. The splashing of the water as she furiously scrubbed woke everyone in her building. She could hear Doña Chencha—a voice coach for street vendors—clear her throat with gargles earlier than she usually did. She heard Don Simon flush his toilet and she heard the unmistakable creak of Celia’s door opening.
Lupita rinsed her pants in a hurry to avoid Celia. As she was wringing them she felt a splinter pierce her finger. The fear of facing her neighbor was suddenly unimportant, because the blood from the wound prevented her from figuring out what type of splinter it was. Lupita was sucking on her wounded finger, trying to remove the splinter via suction, when Celia appeared on the patio with an offering for Lupita: a cup of guava atole and a tamal torta. Lupita broke down in tears. She was deeply stirred, knowing that her experience the previous day could have such an effect on Celia. They hugged, and Celia also broke down in tears as an act of solidarity to her friend. This is quite the act of love, Lupita thought, and not because of the tears. Celia usually woke up late in the day, but today she had gotten up before dawn and had overcome her vanity, stepping out of her house without doing her hair and makeup. All to go out and buy Lupita her favorite breakfast.
Of course, when Lupita saw that Celia was also carrying a copy of the notorious tabloid El Metro, it became clear that her gossipy friend didn’t want to just comfort her. She wanted to know more about the bizarre circumstances surrounding the delegado’s death. Her curiosity had to be infinite, because not even when María “La Doña” Félix died had Celia gotten up early to question Lupita about the details, even though she knew Lupita was assigned as security detail at
the funeral and had been in the presence of a number of celebrities.
“Did you see yourself on the cover?” Celia asked.
Lupita didn’t want to know anything, or see anything for that matter, but Celia shoved the front page in her face. While doing so, Celia noticed that Lupita stained the newspaper with blood as she held it. She asked what had happened, and Lupita explained that it was just a splinter. Celia immediately offered to help. She took her friend by the hand and dragged her back into her apartment, where she had every tool necessary for the extraction—scissors, tweezers, magnifying glass—plus a manicure set and a waxing toolkit, both of which Celia also pulled out.