LITMIR.BIZ

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know you don’t believe in heaven, even though you’re wrong because it’s real, but what you can’t argue about is that we’re on earth. And if there’s a heaven, like I know there is, you can be happy. And if not, there’s even more reason to celebrate: we have to make the most of this short while we’re alive. Feel it, Quity, feel the sun. And also, darling, we’re going to be mothers.’ ‘So what, Cleo?’ I was finally able to get a word in. ‘Now we’re entitled to tell the rest of humanity to fuck off?’ Cleopatra sighed: ‘No, Quity, you don’t have to tell anyone to fuck off, but our daughter has the right to be happy and our duty is to take care of her above all else. And yes, we can be selfish like every other mother in the world, even the Virgin says so: if it had been up to her, Jesus would’ve been a carpenter and married to Mary Magdalene. Even if she was a whore, it was better than being a messiah and marrying a cross. Because it’s better for children to live, whether or not they come back to life when they die.’ ‘I’m with you on that, Cleo,’ I said, laughing. But Cleopatra didn’t stop there. ‘The Virgin says that being alive is the best, and Achilles knew as much when he was in Hades. When that guy who took ten years to get home – what was his name? Ulysseem? When he said to him “Oh, hello, king of the dead,” Achilles answered: “Give me a break, Ulysseem: I’d rather be a slave or an indigent” – an indigent is like a poor person, Quity – “and be alive than reign over the kingdom of the dead.”’

      My daughter enjoyed the speeches of the queerer of her two mothers, seeming to dance as we listened to her. As for me, they threw me into confusion. How could she cite The Odyssey almost word for word? She’d never read it in her fucking life. Where the hell did she get things like that from? Maybe the Virgin actually did exist and was into the classics as well as poor prostitutes.

      ‘Look, Cleo, your daughter’s moving.’ Cleo dropped her half-eaten empanada and prophetic tone and rubbed my belly: ‘Hello, princess, I’m your other mum, Cleopatra, the one who feeds the two of you, the one who’s knitting your little clothes. We’re going to leave this place, my baby.’ Cleo turned serious and resumed her prophesying: ‘We’re going to another country. You’re going to be born there, it’s a place with a lot of sun, palm trees, a green sea. The only bad part, the Virgin Saint told me, Quity, is that it’s full of gusanos.’ ‘Oh no, darling,’ I said firmly, ‘you can go ahead and tell your Virgin that there’s no way in hell I’m going to Cuba.’ ‘Quity, I said gusanos, not Cubans.’ ‘And don’t they all come from Cuba, darling?’ ‘Yes, but the gusanos are the ones that leave, Quity. Don’t play dumb.’

      And here we are, in Miami, surrounded by gusanos, or worms, as if all of us who lived in the slum were condemned more or less to the same fate. Of course, these worms aren’t quite the same as the ones in the Boulogne Cemetery: the worms here in Miami are human, mostly claim to miss Cuba constantly, have lots of money and work like crazy. Most Cubans in Miami live off government subsidies in exchange for being evidence of the evils of Socialist revolutions, and all they do is get drunk, take drugs and beat their wives. Even so, you often see their wives on Eighth Street in the mornings, looking for their husbands in the dive bars where they fall like trees. After the seventh drink, the rum hits them like an axe. They begin to lose their height and balance, they run into someone, slur, stammer out a string of curses, wobble for an instant, then hit the ground and it’s over, they stay there until someone picks them up. Helena used to have to go from dive bar to dive bar as well until Torito died, but Torito wasn’t a worm and he didn’t hit Helena. They were the only other ones who followed the same route as Cleo and me: slum – massacre – Miami.

      The worms follow Cleo everywhere, her and the head of the Virgin, that poor homage to the poor that’s now considered a relic. That chunk of painted cement that also survived the massacre and that Cleo lugged across America and all the way up the social ladder until we got to Miami and began to open our numerous bank accounts.

      But the road was long. That bright morning on the island when we began to think only about the three of us, we went for lunch at Fondeadero dressed in what little we had. Cleo wore the clothes of the lady who owned the house, the TV talk show host diva who’d taken Cleo under her wing and given her the keys to her mansion in Tigre so she could go whenever she wanted. I put on some men’s clothes, who knows who they belonged to but they were the only things that fit me at that point in the pregnancy, which wasn’t so very far along but I was already showing. Cleo’s six-foot-two frame managed to squeeze into the clothes of the TV queen who’d been a model in her day, so my girlfriend adorned herself in tight-fitting but authentic Versace, all ruffles and animal prints. ‘Just because it’s short on me that doesn’t mean it’s any less elegant,’ she assured me from under the straight blonde wig that drove me crazy because it made her look like a cross between Doris Day and a builder. That lunch was a feast. We had spaghetti bolognese under the gaze of the immigrant great-grandfather with a gelled moustache who’d opened the restaurant at the beginning of the last century. We were about to become immigrants ourselves. The yacht arrived that day. Daniel had sent it, along with visas and passports for both of us. It took us to Montevideo. From there we went to Miami by plane, as one should. He’d changed our identities a bit: I ended up being Catalina Sánchez Quit and Cleo achieved one of her most impossible dreams: getting her name on her documents. Since then, finally and forever, her name has been Cleopatra Lobos. Lobos, meaning wolves. Sometimes when we argue, I tell her she’s a whore right down to her last name: in Ancient Rome, a wolves’ den was another way of saying a brothel. But she says it’s impossible to offend her these days. ‘Quity, my love, I’ve been through it all, nothing can humiliate me now. Especially not this moralistic fever that’s come over you since we got to Miami. You wanted me even after you saw first-hand the whore I was, so don’t come to me with this crap now, dear.’ We left with a little bit of cash, some ten thousand dollars I’d saved and another five thousand that Daniel gave us. As Cleo likes to say, ‘Money attracts money,’ and here we are with a lot of money, two rich ladies in the developed world.

      3. Cleo: ‘It was all thanks to the Virgin Mary’

      It was all thanks to the Virgin Mary

      who changed my entire life:

      the miracles started happening

      and even the slum seemed alright.

      Oh, Quity, if you’d only started the story at the beginning you’d understand things so much better. What’s the beginning? There are loads of beginnings, my sweetness, because there are loads of stories, but I want to tell the story of this love of ours, which you don’t remember too well, Quity. You tell some things like they happened and some of the other things, well, I don’t know what you do, my love, you say all kinds of stupid stuff. So I’m going to tell our story myself. I’m going to record it for you, my darling, and you’re going to add it to your story. Wait, wait, little Cleopatra just came in. What are you doing in here, my little dove? Didn’t Mummy tell you to stay downstairs? Yes, go downstairs, sweetheart, let Mummy finish her work and then she’ll come and play with you. Yes, okay, I’ll come down and we’ll play Barbies. Sorry, anyway, now I’m back, I’m going to turn off the phones and close the door so I can tell the story in peace.

      I’m not going to be able to tell the whole of it: there are things I still don’t know. I don’t know if I even want to know them. It’s not going to change my life, but I’m curious, and it eats away at me a bit, like being hungry or horny. It’s just curiosity. I don’t get what you don’t understand about it. What drew Eve to the apple? You have no trouble pretending to be curious when you want to annoy me! How do I know what drew Eve to the apple, my love? They’re red, they smell nice, she must have felt like biting into it. I don’t think it’s something I should really have to explain. Anyone ought to be able to understand curiosity – except you, Quity, since you’re practically an extra-terrestrial. And don’t play stupid, don’t send me to ask the Virgin because I’ve already told you hundreds of times that the Virgin doesn’t like it when I ask her about every little thing. She makes a face like she’s annoyed, clams up and not even God could make her talk. Well, maybe God could make her talk. But the fact is, she gets her knickers in a twist if I ask her too many questions. I don’t know why, maybe she gets sick of all us mediums, we’re

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