One Year of Ugly Read online

  Clocking Mauricio’s uselessness, my father took a few slow steps forward to take Fidel from Ugly. The second Papá had the baby, Ugly took two quick strides to place the gun at the centre of Mauricio’s forehead. Mauricio blinked – once, twice – as the metal made contact, like he’d been jarred out of a daydream.

  ‘Mauricio, you going to join me inside for a chat. Celia had a few outstanding business affairs with me when she die. We going to see how we could rectify that. Sound good?’

  Mauricio just stared up at the gun barrel, going cross-eyed. When he still hadn’t said anything, Ugly lowered the gun. For a split second I was lured into relief, until Ugly struck Mauricio a blow to the jaw. Whimpering, Mauricio cupped his mouth. Thick blood dribbled through his fingers.

  ‘I said – sound good? People answer me when I ask a question, Mauricio, even people who so ignorant they think a man with style look like Boy George.’

  Then Mauricio was nodding quick and frightened. ‘Sound good,’ he said. The words were a gurgle. Blood ran down his chin. He spat weakly onto the grass.

  ‘Nice, man. Let we go inside.’

  Ugly threw an arm around his shoulders, laughing with all the cheer of a homicidal Santa Claus. Mauricio jumped as the arm clamped around him. His skin was grey, bloodless as Aunt Celia’s had been in the coffin. Something about the way Ugly then guided loping, tongue-tied Mauricio towards the house with the gun aimed at his ribs made me think of a circus ringleader cajoling a ketamine-doped gorilla into its cage.

  ‘Hector!’ Ugly called over his shoulder. ‘You come too. Leave that chile.’

  My father handed the baby to my brother. Drawn to his full six feet, he looked every bit the dignified Alpha male. This wasn’t a comfort. I didn’t want my father in there puffing his chest out, facing off with some psychopath. Let Mauricio deal with it! Let Mauricio get a bullet in the head! My mother shared my sentiments. As Papá began following Mauricio and Ugly, she ran across the yard to clutch the back of my father’s shirt. ‘Hector!’ She couldn’t get anything more out than that. Ugly stopped to waggle the gun at her.

  ‘Señora Palacios, I recommend you don’t mix up yourself in my business. I need to speak with Mauricio and Hector.’ He lifted his chin towards the barbecue pit. ‘Best you go flip them burgers like a good little señorita. They smelling burnt.’

  My father gently twisted himself out of Mamá’s grip, kissed the top of her head. ‘No te preocupes. I’ll be fine.’

  At the porch door, Ugly turned once more. ‘No policía, people! Any policía and there go be two sets of brains splattered on the wall in there. If I so much as hear a fucking siren or see a car pull into that driveway, I ain’t asking questions first. Understand? Bang uno and bang dos.’ He pointed the gun back and forth from Mauricio to my father.

  Then they went into the house and all we could do was wait.

  When Papá and Mauricio eventually came out again, my father wore a curious expression, like he was trying to work out a particularly difficult math equation. Still ashen, Mauricio was running a hand over his stubbled chin, murmuring to himself. Ugly emerged from the house behind them, stopping to stand on the porch, a finger running along the gun barrel until we’d all turned, a captive audience in the most literal sense, to face him. When he saw he had our full attention, he waved brightly.

  ‘Nice to meet all you Palacios in the flesh! I go be seeing you again very soon. That a promise from me to you.’ He flashed sterling teeth. ‘And I does never break a promise.’

  THE COCKROACH FAIRYTALE

  That was our first visit from Ugly.

  That was also the afternoon we found out just how Aunt Celia had gone about securing fraudulent residency permits for herself, Mauricio and the twins.

  Now, let me be straight with you: the residency permits came as a total surprise to me and the rest of the family. Because none of us, not even fanatically Catholic, shit-scared-of-everything Aunt Milagros, had bothered with residency permits, fraudulent or otherwise. We’d all moseyed across the twelve kilometres of ocean separating Trinidad from Venezuela in fishing boats in the dead of night – my immediate family first, the pioneers of the Palacios exodus if you will, then Aunt Celia with Mauricio and the twins, followed by Aunt Milagros not long after. Who the hell needs residency permits when you know a guy with a boat?

  Plus none of us needed false papers to get work. Aunt Milagros worked at an Opus Dei charity that turned a blind eye to her immigration status, Papá had his school driver gig, Mamá ran a nail parlour out of an annex next to our house, I was a freelance translator working from home, Sancho and Mauricio worked under-the-table at a casino, and Zulema slotted herself into the local Colour Me Beautiful spa without so much as presenting a résumé. In fact, her illustrious ‘qualification’ as a Colour Me Beautiful Image Consultant was all we’d been waiting on to get the hell out of Caracas.

  But it turned out Aunt Celia had to get falsified papers for the twins to finish secondary school in Port of Spain. Luckily they’d gone to glamorous English-speaking expat schools their whole lives or else no fake papers in the world could’ve salvaged their educations. Anyway, papers is what Aunt Celia needed for her girls – and that was where Ugly came in.

  He’d provided Aunt Celia with his illicit relocation services that included sourcing a man with a zippy boat, making sure no Guardia or Coast Guard showed up, getting the falsified residency permits, and even enrolling the twins at one of the island’s best public secondary schools. Not hard to imagine that his fee, payable in twelve oh-so-convenient yet virtually impossible instalments, would’ve been sky high. When I heard the amount, I couldn’t help whistling. I knew Aunt Celia and Mauricio had been well off in Venezuela, but this was big money for people coming from a crumbling economy. We’re talking sell-a-kidney money. So – surprise, surprise – Aunt Celia had missed the last two payment deadlines, and seven instalments were still outstanding.

  Papá told us all this after gathering everyone in Mauricio’s living room once Ugly had left. When Mauricio spoke for the first time, wincing because of his bruised jaw and busted lip, he had to pause twice to wipe his leaking eyes. ‘We owe Ugly nearly six hundred thousand TT dollars,’ he said. ‘Six hundred thousand! We’ll never be able to pay.’

  That was for shit sure.

  He slouched forward, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes. His body shook. So much for all his usual macho bluster. Ava, sitting on the arm of his chair, draped herself across her father’s hunched back, hugging him. Papá continued, stone-faced at Mauricio’s culturally uncharacteristic display of emotion: ‘This debt doesn’t only affect Mauricio and the twins.’ My stomach was knotted so hard it hurt. ‘If the money isn’t paid, Ugly is going to make us all suffer.’

  ‘What?’ Mamá’s jaw muscles were twitching, neck stiff as an iron rod. There was that razor-sharp edge of hers, gift-wrapped in pearls and pencil skirts, but forever simmering beneath the svelte veneer. Her eyes were on Mauricio. He was lucky she thought violence was an unattractive trait in a woman or I’m sure she would’ve gone straight for his jugular.

  Papá shot her a look and went on. ‘Since we obviously can’t raise the money, we all have to work off Celia’s debt.’ He exhaled and ran both hands over his hair. ‘Ugly will be back again in one week. We’re to wait here for him – all of us – next Sunday, to find out the details.’

  He looked around the room gravely. ‘It goes without saying that we can’t contact the police. We’re illegal residents in this country. There’s no one who can help us besides ourselves. And even if the police wouldn’t immediately ship us back to Venezuela, Ugly has made it clear that if anyone makes any anonymous reports or any attempt at involving law enforcement, we’ll all be shot. Not just the perpetrator – all of us. We have no choice but to follow his instructions.’

  My mother was doing this thing where she steadily pounds her fist against her chest. She did it for hours without stopping after she found out her mother died a couple years
back, and when we were teenagers she’d do it if she caught us sneaking out or whenever we came home shit-faced from some house party. When she walked in on Zulema getting it doggy-style from her high-school boyfriend, I thought she’d have a crater above her heart from all the pounding. And here it was again, that ominous drumbeat gnawing at my nerves.

  ‘So he’s blackmailing us,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said my father.

  I don’t even know why I was surprised. Our immigrant story is as classic and unchanging as any Hans Christian Andersen fairytale – the tale of the illegal refugees who risked it all to live like cockroaches, hiding in the dank cracks of an unknown society where they hope no one will find them, antennae forever twitching, listening for the heavy boot of National Security, only to discover that the strange new place they call home has all the ugliness of the world they left behind, except worse, because here you’re stripped of rights, dignity, personhood. Anyone can crush you under their heel, splatter your little roach innards, just like Ugly was doing to us.

  Mauricio was swearing under his breath and snivelling while Ava rubbed his back. I wanted to yank him up by the hair and tell him he had no goddamned right to cry. We had nothing to do with Aunt Celia’s deals with some flamboyantly dressed Trinidadian criminal. Mauricio should’ve been the one paying off the debt or working as Ugly’s pawn, not us. Ugly could stick Mauricio in thigh-highs and a wig and put him on a street corner to work off the debt as far as I was concerned.

  Unable to tolerate the sight of Mauricio crumbling in on himself, I fixed my eyes to the dining table where Aunt Celia and I had had so many long lunches together. She’d never said a word about Ugly or about getting fake permits – had she? I skipped through the last times I’d sat with her at that table. True, she’d mentioned she was making jewellery to sell at artisanal fairs, which I’d found strange because she always seemed to revel in the luxury of housewifedom, but I’d had the impression that the jewellery thing was because she wanted a hobby, not because of any financial problems.

  I trawled through all of those final conversations, each a vivid snapshot, like I was thumbing through a picture book, searching for some clue of Aunt Celia’s secret, until I came to the lunch we’d had just before she died. My very last conversation with Aunt Celia and it had been so stupid.

  ‘I don’t have any girlfriends here, Tía. You expect me to go out clubbing alone? How pathetic.’

  ‘You know what’s pathetic? When in a few years you’re blowing out the candles on your thirtieth birthday cake with your cats. Life is short, bruja. You’re twenty-four – get out there, fuck a few frogs, kiss a couple princes, then you’ll hit two birds with one stone.’

  ‘What two birds?’

  She’d counted them out on her fingers. ‘You won’t waste your youth on pointless fucking chastity, and you’ll find yourself a husband in the process.’

  ‘Jesus, give it a rest with the husband thing.’

  ‘Listen, Milagros has enough spinster bitterness to last our family a lifetime. Can’t have you winding up like that tragedy.’

  ‘¡Verga! Poor Aunt Milagros.’

  ‘Oh, she fucking looked for it. She’s had her legs superglued shut since her quinceañera, always more concerned about finding Jesus than finding a man, la gran idiota. Let me tell you something, Yola. Life is not some box of chocolates like they say in that movie. Life is a big piece of sugarcane.’

  ‘Sugarcane?’

  ‘Yes, a maldito sugarcane! You have to bite down hard and suck as much sweetness out of it as you can. Don’t be afraid to sink your teeth in, chama, it’s the only way you’ll ever draw out the sugar.’

  I should’ve told her what she meant to me right then. I should’ve said, ‘Aunt Celia, you’re the most entertaining, insightful, foul-mouthed bitch I know, and I love you for it.’

  But I’d never say that. We never say the things we feel. We keep our mouths shut until the only option is regret. Maybe if I’d have opened up more to her, she would’ve told me about her debt to Ugly.

  My attention was wrenched back to the present by a thudding on the front door. All heads whipped around – Ugly back already? Mauricio peered up at the door through his fingers. Though it was his house, he didn’t move from his chair, a quaking six-year-old hiding under his bed from the bogeyman. Rolling his eyes at Mauricio in exasperation, my father motioned for all of us to stay seated, then went to open up.

  ‘Yes?’

  To my – and everyone else’s – surprise, a girl’s voice answered from the front step in Venezuelan-accented Spanish.

  ‘Does Mauricio Benitez live here?’

  ‘Sí.’ Papá opened the door fully and stepped aside.

  The girl came in, pulling a suitcase behind her. Colour flushed her cheeks as she saw the room full of people staring at her. She looked like she was in her late teens, with free-flowing dark curls and almond eyes. Her denim jumpsuit showcased a nipped-in waist, hips that called to mind African fertility carvings, and bra cups that spillethed over. Her eyes found Mauricio instantly. He stood up, grey-faced.

  ‘¿Vanessa, qué carajo? What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to live with you.’

  We watched on in confusion as Mauricio went to stand beside the girl. Like a mood ring, his face had gone from grey to deep vermilion.

  ‘Everyone, this is Vanessa.’ His eyes were on his feet. ‘My daughter.’

  As if our family didn’t have enough bullshit to deal with.

  NAVIGATING THE BULLSHIT

  Here was the story with Vanessa, Mauricio’s first kid on the side and illegitimate little Fidel’s predecessor by seventeen years in the potentially still-unravelling yarn of Mauricio’s evidently long history of infidelity. As we eventually found out, she was the product of an extramarital fling Mauricio’d had while visiting his parents in the rural hamlet of Isla de Gato. Ever since Vanessa was born, he’d been visiting annually and regularly sending money to Vanessa’s mother, entirely unbeknownst to Aunt Celia, of course. So when, through the ever-active Venezuelan gossip network, word filtered all the way back to Isla de Gato that Aunt Celia and her formidable bitchiness were out of the picture for good, Vanessa decided it was time to make a better life for herself with her dear old daddio. She found a man with a boat all on her own, and made her way to Trinidad, then up to Port of Spain, relying on her outstanding physical attributes and a wardrobe consisting primarily of Lycra to get free transport and food along the way.

  The bulk of this information would be gathered the following day when Mamá, under the guise of the Kindly Aunt, invited the twins over to her nail spa in our annex for free after-school mani-pedis in a transparent bid to plumb them for intel on Vanessa.

  Since I share my mother’s proclivity for family gossip, I was also waiting on the twins to turn up that afternoon, grappling with that same incredulous hangover feeling like when you can’t quite believe what went down the drunken night before. Did I really do nine Jägerbombs? Did I really kiss/sleep with/get fingerbanged on the dancefloor by ______? Had Ugly really happened? Were we really being blackmailed? Had yet another of Mauricio’s side kids actually manifested in our lives?

  I was standing at the kitchen window, lulled by the drone of a heavy downpour on our roof as I brewed coffee and mused on what Ugly might expect us to do. Though it was obviously a surreal situation to be in, I felt relatively sanguine about the whole thing. We hadn’t even discussed it when we got home from the fiasco of Mauricio’s barbecue-turned-blackmail-bonanza the night before. I’d overheard my parents speaking in hushed tones, Papá saying that he’d told Ugly flat-out that no daughter of his was going to be prostituted to clear Celia’s debts if that’s what he was thinking, that Ugly would have to kill him first. ‘He said killing me could be easily arranged but I’m off the hook because he’s a “mogul” of the relocation business, not the prostitution industry. That’s all he said. He wouldn’t tell me what we have to do.’ Anyway, with my instinctual fear of
sex slavery mercifully off the table, I felt no need to panic. Or who knows, maybe it was just emotional shock and my brain had numbed itself to the reality of what it actually meant to be blackmailed by a criminal.

  Just then, what had been Aunt Celia’s car came tearing through the rain to stop in our driveway, Ava at the wheel. She and Alejandra tumbled out in their school uniforms, running towards the annex and squealing at the rain. I took my coffee, grabbed an umbrella and ventured out, holding the mug close to breathe in the steam while my flip-flops squelched through the sodden grass, flecking my calves with mud.

  In the annex, the twins’ muddied sneakers and socks were heaped at the door. Ava was already seated at Mamá’s table, having her nails filed. Pornographically wet in her uniform, Alejandra was draped across the couch like a lounging Cleopatra, wriggling her newly liberated feet and pointing her toes like a ballerina warming up. When they all turned to see me, I was met by a chorus of ‘Hola, Yola!’, which no one ever got fed up of singing at me any time I walked into a room.

  My mother arched an eyebrow at me. ‘You’re not expecting any freebies this afternoon too, I hope? You know that everyone who walks into my spa is a paying customer – I don’t care if you’re my mamá resurrected from the dead. This is just an extra-special treat for the girls.’

  Treat my ass. What she wanted was the inside scoop. But I did too, so helped speed things along. I joined Alejandra where she was stretched across the couch. ‘So,’ I said, smacking my lips at a bitter sip of black coffee, ‘what’s she like?’

  I waited eagerly for the onslaught of bitching at how much they hated their unfaithful father and this unwelcome interloper in their home. But instead: ‘Oh my gosh, Yola, I know it’s such a mess but Vanessa is such a sweetheart.’

  Mamá and I shared a confused glance.

  ‘She really is sweet,’ added Ava, nodding earnestly at my mother.