Olga Dies Dreaming: A Novel by Xochitl Gonzalez (2022)
Olga Dies Dreaming: A Novel by Xochitl Gonzalez (2022)
July 2017
A Polish Wake
It’s a myth about motherhood, Olga felt, that the time in utero imbues mothers with a lifelong understanding of their children. Yes, they know their essences, this she didn’t doubt, but mothers are still humans who eventually form their own ideas of both who their kids are and who they think they should be. Inevitably there were disparities (14).
Reality TV
LUCKILY FOR OLGA, white America was nearly as upset over Spice It Up as she had been, albeit for different reasons. When the network tested the pilot, they discovered that white audiences were, in varying degrees, afraid of Olga. In the heartland, people were not bothered by the fact that Olga was Latina; there had been growing pockets of Latin migrants in these areas for years and their service work and tasty snacks had been generally well received. No, they were bothered that she was going to come in and tell them what to do. The reversal-of-power dynamic was too disconcerting. Focus group participants who reported enjoying the show during the screening were calling back hours, even days later to say that they had been haunted-“haunted” was the word-by the prospect of “someone like Olga” coming in and bossing their family around. In coastal suburban enclaves, the show fared even worse. One focus group participant said Olga represented a new “threat” to “normal women.” “It’s bad enough,” this woman was quoted as saying, “that we need to fear au pairs and yoga instructors. Now we need to worry about ‘spicy’ wedding planners?” (44)
August 2017
Novenas
Olga had never had many friends, in part because she loved to spend time with Abuelita, their minds so much alike. Her mother was so black-and-white-rigid with her principles. Her father, a dreamer, lost in impossible ideals. But to Olga, her grandmother was a hustler who actually got things done. She understood the dance, which they did together, often. Both literally, as Abuelita, glamorous and towering in her heels, loved to dance with young Olga, and also figuratively. With her parents absent for such critical years of her life, Abuelita was never afraid to bend the truth, make someone dead or another person missing, in order to procure special tutoring, or a scholarship, or whatever her grandchildren needed. The truth, Abuelita would say, is so much harder to believe than our lie, no? And it’s not like we have bad intentions, ¿sí? Yes! Olga would agree. She loved it all. The high heels, the prayer, the laissez-faire relationship with rules and regulations. Whether born that way or formed into shape from necessity, the two women mirrored each other (122).
Lombriz
HIS MOTHER HAD written to him ceaselessly prior to the PROMESA vote, warning of the dire consequences and utter destruction of the Puerto Rican people that it would bring. But he had faced tremendous pressure, both from his peers and of public opinion-to say nothing of Lin-Manuel Miranda. Plus it was, he felt, a matter of common sense. It was the only real choice and so he made it.
Sort of. Truth be told, though Prieto tried to forget the information he’d seen in his mother’s file, in the months and years following, he often found himself feeling angry with her. He went through and reread all of her letters, running the dates against milestones in his family’s life. He was struck for the first time by her self-absorption, by her single-minded focus on her vision of how the world should be, the lack of interest in their lives outside of what she deemed important about them. Where these letters once filled him with warmth-random reminders that he wasn’t motherless, he was loved-for the first time, he began to feel manipulated by her correspondences. So, when she began lobbying him about PROMESA, he didn’t so much vote for it to enact revenge as he didn’t give her approval the consideration he historically would have. He didn’t care if she was disappointed in him. He was disappointed in her.
For days and weeks after the vote, through the appointment of the panel and the creation of the fiscal austerity plan, he held his breath. Waiting for the angry, scolding missives from his mother that he knew Olga was accustomed to receiving. A waste of his position; a waste of his power. Yet nothing came. After a while, he began to sense that his mother was more than just “a bit” upset. Of course, PROMESA quickly proved humiliating for all who’d supported it. It was nothing more than a private-sector money grab. Whenever the topic of PROMESA came up he’d be flooded with a wave of anxiety, one that was rooted in more than concern for the island. Prieto found himself desperate to apologize to his mother for it. He hadn’t realized how much his status as “the good one” had grounded him (129).
April 2002
April 25, 2002
Querida,
Lately I’ve found myself thinking about the role of women in the world and the important part we play in forcing hands of power to create change. No matter where I’ve traveled, women, when given space, have excelled at organizing and improving their communities. We’re born with barometers in our belly that make us more sensitive to the climate around us and, because we’re so often on the lowest rung of any ladder, we’re naturally inclined to look out for the least among us. Since we’re also burdened by domestic tasks, we’re forced to be more efficient. In a woman’s world, time is the most precious commodity, and we don’t have it to waste.
Of course, the problem is that we don’t live in a world just of women. Not only do men exist, but we are drawn to them and, for complex reasons, they do not treasure time in the same way that we do. It may have to do with an inability to face mortality, or needs of ego, or maybe it simply has to do with the fact that they don’t hear the ticking of a biological clock. What I can say with certainty is that a man has no problem wasting time, especially that of a woman. And they manage to do so in such insidious ways we often don’t notice that it’s happening until it’s too late.
Sometimes it looks like passion-they adore us, they treasure us, they want to be with us in the morning, every night, on the weekends. We, our hearts open, eager to give that love back and warmed by the light of their admiration, comply. We make ourselves available at their convenience, never giving another thought to what we might have done with those moments, hours, and days had they not asked for them. We justify it by saying, but what’s more important than love? Never remembering that when they ask for your time it’s always before and after they’ve accomplished what they wanted to do with their day.
Sometimes it looks like being supportive-they trust us, they need us, they feel we understand them, they believe we make them better. We, overflowing with capacity to care, flattered that we are so special, so chosen, so intellectually equal and necessary, we again comply. We put our energy-our tremendous energy-into strategizing how to achieve their dreams. How to help actualize their visions. Not realizing that the size of their ambitions blocks the light with which to see our own.
Sometimes love looks like being a savior-they seem lost, confused, without direction. We, ever-optimistic believers in change and the power of unconditional love, again comply. We give them guidance, we offer discipline, we go so far as to loan them our vision until they can find one of their own. All while our own dreams gather dust.
Olguita, mi amor, I have heard that this man-this “musician”-wants to settle down. I implore you to walk the other way. Mija, you’re only twenty-five years old! Your own dreams are hardly formed, and I worry that with a man like that-a man who seems so lost himself-you’ll spend your whole life supporting his ideas and his career and his children.
Marriage, when I was young, was a permission slip. The only way, in those days, a young woman could cross the threshold into adulthood. But you and your generation have the chance to be truly liberated-and true liberation is freedom from obligation. Obligation to soothe a husband’s ego, or a baby’s hungry cries.
Your father was brilliant. A dreamer. An idealist. He was a wonderful lover and a wonderful father. I loved him madly. Yet, at the end of the day, I had to accept the choice in front of me: I could spend my time soothing his loneliness and hurt, trying to motivate him back into purpose, or I could spend my time working towards the liberation of oppressed people around the world. Both, you must understand, are expressions of love. The choice isn’t necessarily easy.
I worry that you’re seduced by the money and the life that this guy represents. I worry that you’ve been bewitched by the little bit of limelight you get being next to a man who is the actual star. Have you mistaken the cost of the gifts he likely gives you with the value he has for you? Your Papi used to say that the greatest fool is the man of color who defines his success by the White Man’s standard. I’ll add to that: if he’s a fool, then his trophy wife is to be pitied.
I’m sure my family thinks he is fantastic! I’m sure they find his cars and flash and little bit of fame very enchanting! But to me, what a heartbreak to imagine you selling yourself short to be this guy’s wife. This thug of a guy who spends all his time making music about nothing. No, not about nothing! From what I’ve heard he makes music about money. Having it. Stealing it. Needing it to validate himself. Have you forgotten that when money is what centers someone’s soul, that soul is hollow? This man is so lost he’s ashamed of his own identity-changing his name to hide! Imagine what your father would have said. A man that insecure wants marriage to mark you as his territory the way a dog pisses on a hydrant. A man that insecure will never allow you enough space to find your own way, to express your own voice.
In fact, I can’t help but feel that since you’ve met him, you already seem to have lost your way. What happened to your passion for your photography? What goals are you pursuing beyond spending all your time going where he wants to go with the people he knows?
I won’t try to convince you that this guy isn’t worthy of you. I remember being young and thinking I understood love, too. But I do have to ask questions, in the hopes that you will ask them of yourself. What are his bigger ambitions for himself? When was the last time he asked about yours? Besides your looks, does he value your mind? Does he ask your opinions in public? Does he support your curiosities in a meaningful way? What is his vision for you as a wife and a mother? What is his vision for himself as a husband and a father? Does he ask you if you want to have kids or does he just assume? Does he know that money can purchase things but not joy? What, besides being Puerto Rican, do you even have in common?
Pa’lante,
Mami (135-7)
September 2017
Stoops
Suddenly, I remember being at the hospital with my father, feeling pissed at my brother for not showing up and seeing all the lonely people there, dying. And it was all so clear to me that my brother was afraid. Scared that if we saw him there, near all these gay guys, we’d recognize something about him in them. Which is irrational and crazy, I know, but I’ve always thought that’s really why he never came.”
“Not that crazy,” Matteo offered. “How many Christian fundamentalist homophobes who won’t even buy a wedding cake from someone gay end up being outed? Fear, self-loathing. All of it.”
“Right. So, the question I’m now asking is, if my brother’s need to protect this secret is so intense he’d turn his back on his own dying father, what else would he do? I’d always thought my brother’s goodness defined him, but what if it’s actually his fear? If protecting his image eclipses his impulse to do good? What would that mean about who my brother is?”
“What it would mean, Olga,” and this Matteo said with a wry smile, “is that your brother is just like every other politician” (182-3).
Champagne Dreams
“Did you have a good time at the party?” she asked.
Meegan hesitated.
“At first, I guess.” Meegan sighed. “But then Trip ended up in a pack of his sweaty coworkers doing shots off an ice sculpture, and I got stuck making conversation with all the other girlfriends.”
Olga smirked, more with familiarity than malice.
“‘It’s not the life I chose, it’s the life that chose me,’” she said.
“What?” Meegan asked, earnestly.
“Rap lyric. But the point is, in my opinion, when it comes to men and relationships? We’re all born with our lives set on certain tracks. On your track, unless you go out of your way to buck convention, you will encounter Trip after Trip, always ending up outside of a shot circle with the other girlfriends, who eventually will become wives and then moms. Making small talk, or as you called it, ‘conversation.’”
“What a remarkably cynical assessment,” Meegan offered while collapsing onto the office sofa.
“Let it marinate for a minute, see if it rings true, and tell me later. Or, in a few years.” Olga smiled. She hadn’t meant it cynically at all, in fact.
“Well, so, what about your ‘set track’ then?” Meegan said with a sly smile. “It clearly has Mr. Eikenborn on it.”
Olga looked at Meegan for a moment, her face purposefully blank, before she coolly turned back to her email without saying a word. She was only faintly aware of Meegan rising from the sofa and noisily slamming cabinets while she made coffee before opening her laptop with a loud huff.
“So,” Meegan pronounced, “I’ve worked here for over a year and I have to ask. Why the fuck do you do this? This job, I mean. You don’t have a single, actual romantic bone in your body. You seem to have little respect for marriage, and from what I can garner, only passing regards for the feelings of a man who seems as vulnerable as Mr. Eikenborn.”
Olga stopped for a second to take in her prey. She could easily eviscerate Meegan by telling her that she had watched too much TV as a little girl and that marriage has, historically, never been about romance. She could destroy her intellectual argument by explaining that respecting marriage and planning weddings had nothing to do with each other, and that she pitied her for not grasping the difference. She could ruin her sense of optimism by explaining that Dick was just Trip, but old, the vodka luge antics replaced by circles of self-congratulation for growing their inherited wealth. That she had contorted herself for years to get onto a “track” to meet these very men, only to make that horrid discovery. But before she could answer, she felt her tongue slacken in her mouth, softened by the initial question, and the naïve girl who’d asked it. Meegan, who from Olga’s vantage point had struggled for nothing but to maintain her rose-colored glasses, was asking the question that Olga had not dared to query herself: why the fuck was she doing this work?
She had been a talented photographer. Perhaps not good enough to be a working artist, but surely she could have become a gallerist or a curatorial assistant. What would have happened had she not been so afraid of making her student loan payments? If she’d been a bit more courageous and self-assured? Instead, she took a job with a nice paycheck in a communications department at an ad agency. Not even making the ads. No, she did promotions for the ads, which, even without her mother’s reminders, was so meta it felt useless. But it paid well. Eventually, after she met Reggie, she tried her hand at real public relations. It was then, when one of their celebrity clients was getting married and appreciated her ability to manage events well, that she was asked to do her first wedding.
After her grandmother died, without that unconditional love, Olga did not know who would ever love her again or what would make her feel worthy of being loved. Weddings, Olga felt back then, could do this. Making people’s dreams come true, Olga reasoned, would provide countless opportunities to be adored, to be valued, to feel important. She reflected now, with Meegan before her, what a wide-eyed assessment that had been. Weddings, she quickly discovered, were about everything except the health of a couple’s relationship. They were social performances, the purpose of which varied from family to family. And they were competitive. Clients wanted to appear more tasteful, more unique, more extravagant, than the hosts of all the other weddings they had been to before. Olga’s success at work, therefore, was not evaluated against how many of her clients’ dreams she could bring to life, but on scores of emotional calculations far beyond her control. It was the ultimate in conditional love. She had grown, she realized, to resent the constant cycle (209-11).
Los Pañuelos Negros
“The media wants everyone, especially people on the island, to think that an independent Puerto Rico is a fringe fantasy that only radicals subscribe to. That the real force is behind the centrists who want statehood.”
Olga was at the end of her patience but promised herself not to interrupt until Reggie was done.
“And with good reason. In the eighties and nineties the government, in cooperation with complicit Puerto Rican sellouts on the island, systemically stymied a strong and growing independence movement. They imprisoned all of the leadership, branded them terrorist organizations, drove people underground. Those they couldn’t imprison they drove into hiding in the mountains of the island. But, as you know, Olga, the wealthy and powerful are lazy, and think that if you can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Back in oh-five, the Feds finally managed to assassinate Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, the most visible revolutionary that Borikén had known in modern times. He’d evaded their capture for nearly fifteen years, in small towns, in the mountains, sometimes in the bigger cities. With his assassination, every leader of every public movement for independence was either dead or in jail. Or so the government thought. And with no visible resistance, they were able to further pillage and sell off our island to the highest bidder.
“This was the White Man’s fatal flaw. They murdered Ojeda Ríos, thinking that the idea of the revolution lived within one man, without ever stopping to consider how he had evaded them for so long. Do you understand what I mean?”
“The people,” Olga said. “The people helped him hide.”
“The jíbaros. The regular country people, for years, shrugged their shoulders when agents would come around asking about this man. ‘No sé, no sé,’ they would say. They adored him, they took pride in his ability to evade the law, because they knew this was foreign law that was looking for him. They understood that he was standing up for them, even if they couldn’t articulate it. It didn’t have to do with him and his personality, it had to do with an idea.”
Reggie’s argument had become abstracted again; she was on the verge of losing patience.
“The people who followed Ojeda Ríos were devastated by his loss and all of Puerto Rico was mourning. We were too blind with grief and anger to see that the revolutionary spirit had already taken root on the island. But not your mother. Your mother saw the opportunity there, and despite putting herself at risk of the law, she made her way back to Puerto Rico to help her people. Revolution, in the past, was meant to be armed. Acts of war and protest claimed by an organization-FALN, the Boricua Popular Army. Your mother, however, understood that such public organization only put a target on our backs and that revolution in the digital age could look different. This is how the Pañuelos Negros were born.
“Our name comes from the bandanas we wear whenever we might be out in public. We don’t even really want to know who our own membership is. Perhaps your mother is the only one who knows every member of our movement.”
“So, if you aren’t violent, what do you do?”
“I didn’t say we aren’t violent, Olga. I just said that revolution is different now” (220-1).
Good Morning, Later
HER BROTHER’S DIAGNOSIS shook her core. The rational part of her knew he’d live a long, wonderful life. But she was feeling far from rational and she couldn’t stop imagining the worst. A life without her brother felt unbearable. Rootless. Recognizing this, though, only made Olga more aware of how rudderless her existence already was. Her brother, who even now, in the face of this illness, was directed by a larger purpose: his fight for others. It provided him a beacon, a way to redirect himself. Olga felt she had been paddling for years in no discernable direction except away from her fear of not being enough.
As a child, when people found out that Olga had been “left,” she could see how quickly she was recast as a victim in their eyes. She felt their pity and it made her feel broken. Damaged. Her grandmother astutely observed that any foible or stumble at school would be attributed, with an air of inevitability, as the ramifications of her being “parentless.” Any success Olga found would be attributed, with an air of disbelief, to her “resilience.” Very early on, Olga and her grandmother calculated that, if given the choice between the two, Olga’s easiest path was to be a success.
This strategy worked well initially: do well in school, excel at a talent, look pretty, make people laugh, solve problems for yourself, don’t trouble anyone, when possible be helpful. Success, then, looked as simple as escape: from the chaos her parents had left in their wake, towards “opportunity.” After high school, though, with her grandmother ill-equipped to guide her through the new terrain of the Ivy League, the goal began to be less clear, her toolbox less adequate. As a result, Olga fumbled in the dark, trying to adhere to a path that led to a fuzzy destination known simply as “success.” In college, she became convinced that meant affirmation by institutional powers. After college, celebrity and its proximity were what she thought she should be striving for. Only in adulthood did she ascertain that no, it was money that would inoculate her from feeling less than.
Her parents, of course, had always viewed success as a White Man’s construction. Her mother used her letters to continually remind Olga of this, to emphasize the futility of her pursuits. Her mother, though, didn’t know what it was to be deemed the thing less important. Less important than drugs, less important than a cause. Her mother didn’t understand what it required to shake that label-“less”-to prove it wrong to the world. A world that, despite how her parents liked to see things, valued the way you looked, the kinds of clothes you wore, the places you went to school, the people you could access and influence. Even her brother, rooted as he was in his place of good, understood all of this. Olga formed her ambitions in reaction to her mother’s absence, but she surely calcified them in rebellion to the very values that led her mother to abandon them in the first place. Grounding her identity in the realm of the material seemed to her the perfect revenge.
Until one day it didn’t.
After Spice It Up and the Great Recession, Olga began to notice that her clients were growing steadily richer while the people doing the work were getting compensated in exactly the same way. Even the rich people appeared less content than before. Simply existing seemed an immense burden to them. Their wealth bought them homes that were “exhausting” to deal with, vacations that were “overwhelming” to plan for. What was required to please them, to make them feel joy on their most joyful day, became increasingly impossible to achieve. Olga raised her prices, inflated her bills, increased her markups. But the money didn’t make any of it feel better. She began, gradually at first, to find not only her actual day-to-day work tedious and stupid, but also the entire project of her life. Around this time Olga noticed that her mother’s notes no longer filled her, even for a moment, with smug satisfaction.
She began to wonder if the only person she was enacting revenge on was herself.
Sometimes, like now, a feeling of unease would come over her and last for days, a strange kind of melancholy with no starting point or definitive end. A therapist she was forced to see at the fancy college told her this feeling was likely a longing for her mother, a suggestion Olga had rebuffed by storming out of the room. But over the years, Olga revisited this conceit, quietly wondering what her life would be like had her mother deemed her worthy of her time and affections. What would she, Olga, have done with all the energy she’d spent convincing anyone and everyone else that despite this lack, she wasn’t broken? So, although Olga very well knew that her mother’s affections were fickle, when Reggie said that she needed her, Olga could hardly stop herself from wondering, what if the therapist was right? What would happen if she could alleviate that longing? What sense of peace and purpose might she find for herself if given the chance to earn her mother’s admiration (272-4)?
May 2016
May 20, 2016
Prieto,
Borikén, the original name of the island from which you and I descend, means Land of the Noble Lord. This name was given by the Taíno, the native people. For centuries, the Taíno lived in small, organized communities, until 1508, when a man named Ponce de León arrived. In short order, he robbed and cheated the Taíno of their soil and freedom, leaving them subjects and slaves to the Spanish. After the Spanish pillaged the island of its metals and ores, they claimed land that previously belonged to no one and stole African bodies to work it. In time, these acts of horror led to the birth of the Puerto Rican people as we know them today-a mix of Taíno, Spanish, and African blood. Our nation born, some might say, from the pain of colonialism. I, however, choose to see our people as birthed from the Land of the Noble Lord.
I believe this because for nearly as long as Puerto Rico has existed as a place oppressed, we have fought to break free. The year 1527 saw our first slave rebellion. In 1848, our first outright revolt. And of course, in 1868, el Grito de Lares. Each rebellion undermined the same way. Puerto Rican traitors. Weak-minded individuals, full of self-loathing. Who didn’t believe in the power of their Taíno blood, the strength of their African ancestors. Individuals who could only hear the voice of the colonizer, whispering to them that without a white master nation, we, Borikén, would fail.
In 1898, after four hundred years of Spanish dominion, Puerto Rico had its first free election as an independent nation. We did not know that as we took this step towards self-determination, one of our own-a true lombriz named Dr. Julio Henna-was meeting with U.S. senators, convincing them of the treasure to be had if they annexed Puerto Rico. Their nation-America-was restless after the collapse of slavery. White supremacists were desperate for new Brown bodies to dominate; the capitalists salivated for new lands to exploit. And so began their destruction of Puerto Rico.
The next year, 1899, nature assisted. A great hurricane came to the island, killing thousands, leaving a quarter of the population homeless and wiping out all the coffee crops the jíbaros had been growing. With our people bankrupt and hungry, the gringos came and stole whatever was left. The Americans took farmland, they taxed crop exports, and, in the greatest blow, they took over our schools and our language. They forced on us a second-class citizenship, one where we could be drafted into their wars, segregated by their racism, but not allowed a voice in our own governance.
But we never stopped rebelling. Some refused to become citizens, refused to fill out their census forms, refused to identify as one race when we were always made of many. We insisted on our language, insisted on flying our old flag. We rebelled in ways big and small. Boricuas like Pedro Albizu Campos began to organize our people. We began to rise up, but just as quickly, traitorous snakes would sell us out, telling the police of our plans and actions, getting Nationalists assassinated in the streets.
Elected officials are the favorite henchmen of this puppet American democracy. In 1937, months after ordering the massacre of Independendistas in Ponce, a Boricua governor legalized the sterilization of our women. If they couldn’t kill us off in the streets, they would stop our growth in the womb. In 1948, lombriz officials passed la Ley de la Mordaza: on the world stage America bragged about freedom of speech, while in Puerto Rico, we “citizens” were imprisoned for flying our flags, singing patriotic songs, speaking aloud the belief that we, the children of Borikén, could exist independent of an American master. Governors like Luis Muñoz Marín, or Pedro Rosselló, or this current pendejo, García Padilla. They distract us with rhetoric, pocketing money with one hand and tightening our chains with the other.
Prieto, this boot has been pressing down on Puerto Rico’s neck for far too long, held in place by politicians of our own kind. I had taken pride in the fact that you, my son, were different. That you were trying to lift the boot off. That you were “our champion” on the mainland. Now, I no longer feel so sure.
For months, I’ve been writing to make what should seem the obvious case as to why you cannot support PROMESA. Yet, I see nothing in public from you but silence. You’ve yet to indicate how you will vote. No op-eds, no official statements against this garbage legislation. Is this indecision? Or is it treachery?
This will be my final plea. This bill you will vote on, PROMESA? It’s not a promise, but a death sentence for our people. The last bit of pressure that will finally break our necks. It’s designed to worsen our people’s lives while stuffing the bankers’ coffers. It forces puertorriqueños to foot a bill run up by gringos and our complicit compatriots. Anything this American government feels we owe them was paid for, in full, by the land and crops and lives that their imperialism has already stolen from us.
And so, I will wait. To see if you will be my son of the Noble Land or just a son of a bitch.
Pa’lante,
Mami (297-9)
October 2017
“Necesitas Una Limpia”
THIS WASN’T THE first time something like this had happened to her. She was old. These things happened. The first time she was younger. In college. She’d fallen asleep at a party and woke up with some guy humping her. He came on her leg. For some reason it gave her night terrors and her roommate complained to their resident counselor and the resident counselor confronted her, and that was how she ended up in the school psychiatrist’s office. When they told her she was likely grappling with abandonment issues.
She had come home for a long weekend or maybe it was spring break, she couldn’t remember. Her grandmother had taken one look at her and said, “Necesitas una limpia,” then took her to some bruja she knew who lived on the other side of the park. The woman had wrapped her naked body in a white bedsheet and lit velas all around her. She prayed over Olga’s body and made her lie there until all the candles burned out, and then she cut Olga’s shroud open with scissors and bathed her in Agua de Florida and rose water while she swatted her back with eucalyptus leaves. When it was over, Olga had never felt cleaner or more loved or more at peace. The night terrors stopped.
That woman must be dead by now, she thought (341-2).
July 2017
A Polish Wake
It’s a myth about motherhood, Olga felt, that the time in utero imbues mothers with a lifelong understanding of their children. Yes, they know their essences, this she didn’t doubt, but mothers are still humans who eventually form their own ideas of both who their kids are and who they think they should be. Inevitably there were disparities (14).
Reality TV
LUCKILY FOR OLGA, white America was nearly as upset over Spice It Up as she had been, albeit for different reasons. When the network tested the pilot, they discovered that white audiences were, in varying degrees, afraid of Olga. In the heartland, people were not bothered by the fact that Olga was Latina; there had been growing pockets of Latin migrants in these areas for years and their service work and tasty snacks had been generally well received. No, they were bothered that she was going to come in and tell them what to do. The reversal-of-power dynamic was too disconcerting. Focus group participants who reported enjoying the show during the screening were calling back hours, even days later to say that they had been haunted-“haunted” was the word-by the prospect of “someone like Olga” coming in and bossing their family around. In coastal suburban enclaves, the show fared even worse. One focus group participant said Olga represented a new “threat” to “normal women.” “It’s bad enough,” this woman was quoted as saying, “that we need to fear au pairs and yoga instructors. Now we need to worry about ‘spicy’ wedding planners?” (44)
August 2017
Novenas
Olga had never had many friends, in part because she loved to spend time with Abuelita, their minds so much alike. Her mother was so black-and-white-rigid with her principles. Her father, a dreamer, lost in impossible ideals. But to Olga, her grandmother was a hustler who actually got things done. She understood the dance, which they did together, often. Both literally, as Abuelita, glamorous and towering in her heels, loved to dance with young Olga, and also figuratively. With her parents absent for such critical years of her life, Abuelita was never afraid to bend the truth, make someone dead or another person missing, in order to procure special tutoring, or a scholarship, or whatever her grandchildren needed. The truth, Abuelita would say, is so much harder to believe than our lie, no? And it’s not like we have bad intentions, ¿sí? Yes! Olga would agree. She loved it all. The high heels, the prayer, the laissez-faire relationship with rules and regulations. Whether born that way or formed into shape from necessity, the two women mirrored each other (122).
Lombriz
HIS MOTHER HAD written to him ceaselessly prior to the PROMESA vote, warning of the dire consequences and utter destruction of the Puerto Rican people that it would bring. But he had faced tremendous pressure, both from his peers and of public opinion-to say nothing of Lin-Manuel Miranda. Plus it was, he felt, a matter of common sense. It was the only real choice and so he made it.
Sort of. Truth be told, though Prieto tried to forget the information he’d seen in his mother’s file, in the months and years following, he often found himself feeling angry with her. He went through and reread all of her letters, running the dates against milestones in his family’s life. He was struck for the first time by her self-absorption, by her single-minded focus on her vision of how the world should be, the lack of interest in their lives outside of what she deemed important about them. Where these letters once filled him with warmth-random reminders that he wasn’t motherless, he was loved-for the first time, he began to feel manipulated by her correspondences. So, when she began lobbying him about PROMESA, he didn’t so much vote for it to enact revenge as he didn’t give her approval the consideration he historically would have. He didn’t care if she was disappointed in him. He was disappointed in her.
For days and weeks after the vote, through the appointment of the panel and the creation of the fiscal austerity plan, he held his breath. Waiting for the angry, scolding missives from his mother that he knew Olga was accustomed to receiving. A waste of his position; a waste of his power. Yet nothing came. After a while, he began to sense that his mother was more than just “a bit” upset. Of course, PROMESA quickly proved humiliating for all who’d supported it. It was nothing more than a private-sector money grab. Whenever the topic of PROMESA came up he’d be flooded with a wave of anxiety, one that was rooted in more than concern for the island. Prieto found himself desperate to apologize to his mother for it. He hadn’t realized how much his status as “the good one” had grounded him (129).
April 2002
April 25, 2002
Querida,
Lately I’ve found myself thinking about the role of women in the world and the important part we play in forcing hands of power to create change. No matter where I’ve traveled, women, when given space, have excelled at organizing and improving their communities. We’re born with barometers in our belly that make us more sensitive to the climate around us and, because we’re so often on the lowest rung of any ladder, we’re naturally inclined to look out for the least among us. Since we’re also burdened by domestic tasks, we’re forced to be more efficient. In a woman’s world, time is the most precious commodity, and we don’t have it to waste.
Of course, the problem is that we don’t live in a world just of women. Not only do men exist, but we are drawn to them and, for complex reasons, they do not treasure time in the same way that we do. It may have to do with an inability to face mortality, or needs of ego, or maybe it simply has to do with the fact that they don’t hear the ticking of a biological clock. What I can say with certainty is that a man has no problem wasting time, especially that of a woman. And they manage to do so in such insidious ways we often don’t notice that it’s happening until it’s too late.
Sometimes it looks like passion-they adore us, they treasure us, they want to be with us in the morning, every night, on the weekends. We, our hearts open, eager to give that love back and warmed by the light of their admiration, comply. We make ourselves available at their convenience, never giving another thought to what we might have done with those moments, hours, and days had they not asked for them. We justify it by saying, but what’s more important than love? Never remembering that when they ask for your time it’s always before and after they’ve accomplished what they wanted to do with their day.
Sometimes it looks like being supportive-they trust us, they need us, they feel we understand them, they believe we make them better. We, overflowing with capacity to care, flattered that we are so special, so chosen, so intellectually equal and necessary, we again comply. We put our energy-our tremendous energy-into strategizing how to achieve their dreams. How to help actualize their visions. Not realizing that the size of their ambitions blocks the light with which to see our own.
Sometimes love looks like being a savior-they seem lost, confused, without direction. We, ever-optimistic believers in change and the power of unconditional love, again comply. We give them guidance, we offer discipline, we go so far as to loan them our vision until they can find one of their own. All while our own dreams gather dust.
Olguita, mi amor, I have heard that this man-this “musician”-wants to settle down. I implore you to walk the other way. Mija, you’re only twenty-five years old! Your own dreams are hardly formed, and I worry that with a man like that-a man who seems so lost himself-you’ll spend your whole life supporting his ideas and his career and his children.
Marriage, when I was young, was a permission slip. The only way, in those days, a young woman could cross the threshold into adulthood. But you and your generation have the chance to be truly liberated-and true liberation is freedom from obligation. Obligation to soothe a husband’s ego, or a baby’s hungry cries.
Your father was brilliant. A dreamer. An idealist. He was a wonderful lover and a wonderful father. I loved him madly. Yet, at the end of the day, I had to accept the choice in front of me: I could spend my time soothing his loneliness and hurt, trying to motivate him back into purpose, or I could spend my time working towards the liberation of oppressed people around the world. Both, you must understand, are expressions of love. The choice isn’t necessarily easy.
I worry that you’re seduced by the money and the life that this guy represents. I worry that you’ve been bewitched by the little bit of limelight you get being next to a man who is the actual star. Have you mistaken the cost of the gifts he likely gives you with the value he has for you? Your Papi used to say that the greatest fool is the man of color who defines his success by the White Man’s standard. I’ll add to that: if he’s a fool, then his trophy wife is to be pitied.
I’m sure my family thinks he is fantastic! I’m sure they find his cars and flash and little bit of fame very enchanting! But to me, what a heartbreak to imagine you selling yourself short to be this guy’s wife. This thug of a guy who spends all his time making music about nothing. No, not about nothing! From what I’ve heard he makes music about money. Having it. Stealing it. Needing it to validate himself. Have you forgotten that when money is what centers someone’s soul, that soul is hollow? This man is so lost he’s ashamed of his own identity-changing his name to hide! Imagine what your father would have said. A man that insecure wants marriage to mark you as his territory the way a dog pisses on a hydrant. A man that insecure will never allow you enough space to find your own way, to express your own voice.
In fact, I can’t help but feel that since you’ve met him, you already seem to have lost your way. What happened to your passion for your photography? What goals are you pursuing beyond spending all your time going where he wants to go with the people he knows?
I won’t try to convince you that this guy isn’t worthy of you. I remember being young and thinking I understood love, too. But I do have to ask questions, in the hopes that you will ask them of yourself. What are his bigger ambitions for himself? When was the last time he asked about yours? Besides your looks, does he value your mind? Does he ask your opinions in public? Does he support your curiosities in a meaningful way? What is his vision for you as a wife and a mother? What is his vision for himself as a husband and a father? Does he ask you if you want to have kids or does he just assume? Does he know that money can purchase things but not joy? What, besides being Puerto Rican, do you even have in common?
Pa’lante,
Mami (135-7)
September 2017
Stoops
Suddenly, I remember being at the hospital with my father, feeling pissed at my brother for not showing up and seeing all the lonely people there, dying. And it was all so clear to me that my brother was afraid. Scared that if we saw him there, near all these gay guys, we’d recognize something about him in them. Which is irrational and crazy, I know, but I’ve always thought that’s really why he never came.”
“Not that crazy,” Matteo offered. “How many Christian fundamentalist homophobes who won’t even buy a wedding cake from someone gay end up being outed? Fear, self-loathing. All of it.”
“Right. So, the question I’m now asking is, if my brother’s need to protect this secret is so intense he’d turn his back on his own dying father, what else would he do? I’d always thought my brother’s goodness defined him, but what if it’s actually his fear? If protecting his image eclipses his impulse to do good? What would that mean about who my brother is?”
“What it would mean, Olga,” and this Matteo said with a wry smile, “is that your brother is just like every other politician” (182-3).
Champagne Dreams
“Did you have a good time at the party?” she asked.
Meegan hesitated.
“At first, I guess.” Meegan sighed. “But then Trip ended up in a pack of his sweaty coworkers doing shots off an ice sculpture, and I got stuck making conversation with all the other girlfriends.”
Olga smirked, more with familiarity than malice.
“‘It’s not the life I chose, it’s the life that chose me,’” she said.
“What?” Meegan asked, earnestly.
“Rap lyric. But the point is, in my opinion, when it comes to men and relationships? We’re all born with our lives set on certain tracks. On your track, unless you go out of your way to buck convention, you will encounter Trip after Trip, always ending up outside of a shot circle with the other girlfriends, who eventually will become wives and then moms. Making small talk, or as you called it, ‘conversation.’”
“What a remarkably cynical assessment,” Meegan offered while collapsing onto the office sofa.
“Let it marinate for a minute, see if it rings true, and tell me later. Or, in a few years.” Olga smiled. She hadn’t meant it cynically at all, in fact.
“Well, so, what about your ‘set track’ then?” Meegan said with a sly smile. “It clearly has Mr. Eikenborn on it.”
Olga looked at Meegan for a moment, her face purposefully blank, before she coolly turned back to her email without saying a word. She was only faintly aware of Meegan rising from the sofa and noisily slamming cabinets while she made coffee before opening her laptop with a loud huff.
“So,” Meegan pronounced, “I’ve worked here for over a year and I have to ask. Why the fuck do you do this? This job, I mean. You don’t have a single, actual romantic bone in your body. You seem to have little respect for marriage, and from what I can garner, only passing regards for the feelings of a man who seems as vulnerable as Mr. Eikenborn.”
Olga stopped for a second to take in her prey. She could easily eviscerate Meegan by telling her that she had watched too much TV as a little girl and that marriage has, historically, never been about romance. She could destroy her intellectual argument by explaining that respecting marriage and planning weddings had nothing to do with each other, and that she pitied her for not grasping the difference. She could ruin her sense of optimism by explaining that Dick was just Trip, but old, the vodka luge antics replaced by circles of self-congratulation for growing their inherited wealth. That she had contorted herself for years to get onto a “track” to meet these very men, only to make that horrid discovery. But before she could answer, she felt her tongue slacken in her mouth, softened by the initial question, and the naïve girl who’d asked it. Meegan, who from Olga’s vantage point had struggled for nothing but to maintain her rose-colored glasses, was asking the question that Olga had not dared to query herself: why the fuck was she doing this work?
She had been a talented photographer. Perhaps not good enough to be a working artist, but surely she could have become a gallerist or a curatorial assistant. What would have happened had she not been so afraid of making her student loan payments? If she’d been a bit more courageous and self-assured? Instead, she took a job with a nice paycheck in a communications department at an ad agency. Not even making the ads. No, she did promotions for the ads, which, even without her mother’s reminders, was so meta it felt useless. But it paid well. Eventually, after she met Reggie, she tried her hand at real public relations. It was then, when one of their celebrity clients was getting married and appreciated her ability to manage events well, that she was asked to do her first wedding.
After her grandmother died, without that unconditional love, Olga did not know who would ever love her again or what would make her feel worthy of being loved. Weddings, Olga felt back then, could do this. Making people’s dreams come true, Olga reasoned, would provide countless opportunities to be adored, to be valued, to feel important. She reflected now, with Meegan before her, what a wide-eyed assessment that had been. Weddings, she quickly discovered, were about everything except the health of a couple’s relationship. They were social performances, the purpose of which varied from family to family. And they were competitive. Clients wanted to appear more tasteful, more unique, more extravagant, than the hosts of all the other weddings they had been to before. Olga’s success at work, therefore, was not evaluated against how many of her clients’ dreams she could bring to life, but on scores of emotional calculations far beyond her control. It was the ultimate in conditional love. She had grown, she realized, to resent the constant cycle (209-11).
Los Pañuelos Negros
“The media wants everyone, especially people on the island, to think that an independent Puerto Rico is a fringe fantasy that only radicals subscribe to. That the real force is behind the centrists who want statehood.”
Olga was at the end of her patience but promised herself not to interrupt until Reggie was done.
“And with good reason. In the eighties and nineties the government, in cooperation with complicit Puerto Rican sellouts on the island, systemically stymied a strong and growing independence movement. They imprisoned all of the leadership, branded them terrorist organizations, drove people underground. Those they couldn’t imprison they drove into hiding in the mountains of the island. But, as you know, Olga, the wealthy and powerful are lazy, and think that if you can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Back in oh-five, the Feds finally managed to assassinate Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, the most visible revolutionary that Borikén had known in modern times. He’d evaded their capture for nearly fifteen years, in small towns, in the mountains, sometimes in the bigger cities. With his assassination, every leader of every public movement for independence was either dead or in jail. Or so the government thought. And with no visible resistance, they were able to further pillage and sell off our island to the highest bidder.
“This was the White Man’s fatal flaw. They murdered Ojeda Ríos, thinking that the idea of the revolution lived within one man, without ever stopping to consider how he had evaded them for so long. Do you understand what I mean?”
“The people,” Olga said. “The people helped him hide.”
“The jíbaros. The regular country people, for years, shrugged their shoulders when agents would come around asking about this man. ‘No sé, no sé,’ they would say. They adored him, they took pride in his ability to evade the law, because they knew this was foreign law that was looking for him. They understood that he was standing up for them, even if they couldn’t articulate it. It didn’t have to do with him and his personality, it had to do with an idea.”
Reggie’s argument had become abstracted again; she was on the verge of losing patience.
“The people who followed Ojeda Ríos were devastated by his loss and all of Puerto Rico was mourning. We were too blind with grief and anger to see that the revolutionary spirit had already taken root on the island. But not your mother. Your mother saw the opportunity there, and despite putting herself at risk of the law, she made her way back to Puerto Rico to help her people. Revolution, in the past, was meant to be armed. Acts of war and protest claimed by an organization-FALN, the Boricua Popular Army. Your mother, however, understood that such public organization only put a target on our backs and that revolution in the digital age could look different. This is how the Pañuelos Negros were born.
“Our name comes from the bandanas we wear whenever we might be out in public. We don’t even really want to know who our own membership is. Perhaps your mother is the only one who knows every member of our movement.”
“So, if you aren’t violent, what do you do?”
“I didn’t say we aren’t violent, Olga. I just said that revolution is different now” (220-1).
Good Morning, Later
HER BROTHER’S DIAGNOSIS shook her core. The rational part of her knew he’d live a long, wonderful life. But she was feeling far from rational and she couldn’t stop imagining the worst. A life without her brother felt unbearable. Rootless. Recognizing this, though, only made Olga more aware of how rudderless her existence already was. Her brother, who even now, in the face of this illness, was directed by a larger purpose: his fight for others. It provided him a beacon, a way to redirect himself. Olga felt she had been paddling for years in no discernable direction except away from her fear of not being enough.
As a child, when people found out that Olga had been “left,” she could see how quickly she was recast as a victim in their eyes. She felt their pity and it made her feel broken. Damaged. Her grandmother astutely observed that any foible or stumble at school would be attributed, with an air of inevitability, as the ramifications of her being “parentless.” Any success Olga found would be attributed, with an air of disbelief, to her “resilience.” Very early on, Olga and her grandmother calculated that, if given the choice between the two, Olga’s easiest path was to be a success.
This strategy worked well initially: do well in school, excel at a talent, look pretty, make people laugh, solve problems for yourself, don’t trouble anyone, when possible be helpful. Success, then, looked as simple as escape: from the chaos her parents had left in their wake, towards “opportunity.” After high school, though, with her grandmother ill-equipped to guide her through the new terrain of the Ivy League, the goal began to be less clear, her toolbox less adequate. As a result, Olga fumbled in the dark, trying to adhere to a path that led to a fuzzy destination known simply as “success.” In college, she became convinced that meant affirmation by institutional powers. After college, celebrity and its proximity were what she thought she should be striving for. Only in adulthood did she ascertain that no, it was money that would inoculate her from feeling less than.
Her parents, of course, had always viewed success as a White Man’s construction. Her mother used her letters to continually remind Olga of this, to emphasize the futility of her pursuits. Her mother, though, didn’t know what it was to be deemed the thing less important. Less important than drugs, less important than a cause. Her mother didn’t understand what it required to shake that label-“less”-to prove it wrong to the world. A world that, despite how her parents liked to see things, valued the way you looked, the kinds of clothes you wore, the places you went to school, the people you could access and influence. Even her brother, rooted as he was in his place of good, understood all of this. Olga formed her ambitions in reaction to her mother’s absence, but she surely calcified them in rebellion to the very values that led her mother to abandon them in the first place. Grounding her identity in the realm of the material seemed to her the perfect revenge.
Until one day it didn’t.
After Spice It Up and the Great Recession, Olga began to notice that her clients were growing steadily richer while the people doing the work were getting compensated in exactly the same way. Even the rich people appeared less content than before. Simply existing seemed an immense burden to them. Their wealth bought them homes that were “exhausting” to deal with, vacations that were “overwhelming” to plan for. What was required to please them, to make them feel joy on their most joyful day, became increasingly impossible to achieve. Olga raised her prices, inflated her bills, increased her markups. But the money didn’t make any of it feel better. She began, gradually at first, to find not only her actual day-to-day work tedious and stupid, but also the entire project of her life. Around this time Olga noticed that her mother’s notes no longer filled her, even for a moment, with smug satisfaction.
She began to wonder if the only person she was enacting revenge on was herself.
Sometimes, like now, a feeling of unease would come over her and last for days, a strange kind of melancholy with no starting point or definitive end. A therapist she was forced to see at the fancy college told her this feeling was likely a longing for her mother, a suggestion Olga had rebuffed by storming out of the room. But over the years, Olga revisited this conceit, quietly wondering what her life would be like had her mother deemed her worthy of her time and affections. What would she, Olga, have done with all the energy she’d spent convincing anyone and everyone else that despite this lack, she wasn’t broken? So, although Olga very well knew that her mother’s affections were fickle, when Reggie said that she needed her, Olga could hardly stop herself from wondering, what if the therapist was right? What would happen if she could alleviate that longing? What sense of peace and purpose might she find for herself if given the chance to earn her mother’s admiration (272-4)?
May 2016
May 20, 2016
Prieto,
Borikén, the original name of the island from which you and I descend, means Land of the Noble Lord. This name was given by the Taíno, the native people. For centuries, the Taíno lived in small, organized communities, until 1508, when a man named Ponce de León arrived. In short order, he robbed and cheated the Taíno of their soil and freedom, leaving them subjects and slaves to the Spanish. After the Spanish pillaged the island of its metals and ores, they claimed land that previously belonged to no one and stole African bodies to work it. In time, these acts of horror led to the birth of the Puerto Rican people as we know them today-a mix of Taíno, Spanish, and African blood. Our nation born, some might say, from the pain of colonialism. I, however, choose to see our people as birthed from the Land of the Noble Lord.
I believe this because for nearly as long as Puerto Rico has existed as a place oppressed, we have fought to break free. The year 1527 saw our first slave rebellion. In 1848, our first outright revolt. And of course, in 1868, el Grito de Lares. Each rebellion undermined the same way. Puerto Rican traitors. Weak-minded individuals, full of self-loathing. Who didn’t believe in the power of their Taíno blood, the strength of their African ancestors. Individuals who could only hear the voice of the colonizer, whispering to them that without a white master nation, we, Borikén, would fail.
In 1898, after four hundred years of Spanish dominion, Puerto Rico had its first free election as an independent nation. We did not know that as we took this step towards self-determination, one of our own-a true lombriz named Dr. Julio Henna-was meeting with U.S. senators, convincing them of the treasure to be had if they annexed Puerto Rico. Their nation-America-was restless after the collapse of slavery. White supremacists were desperate for new Brown bodies to dominate; the capitalists salivated for new lands to exploit. And so began their destruction of Puerto Rico.
The next year, 1899, nature assisted. A great hurricane came to the island, killing thousands, leaving a quarter of the population homeless and wiping out all the coffee crops the jíbaros had been growing. With our people bankrupt and hungry, the gringos came and stole whatever was left. The Americans took farmland, they taxed crop exports, and, in the greatest blow, they took over our schools and our language. They forced on us a second-class citizenship, one where we could be drafted into their wars, segregated by their racism, but not allowed a voice in our own governance.
But we never stopped rebelling. Some refused to become citizens, refused to fill out their census forms, refused to identify as one race when we were always made of many. We insisted on our language, insisted on flying our old flag. We rebelled in ways big and small. Boricuas like Pedro Albizu Campos began to organize our people. We began to rise up, but just as quickly, traitorous snakes would sell us out, telling the police of our plans and actions, getting Nationalists assassinated in the streets.
Elected officials are the favorite henchmen of this puppet American democracy. In 1937, months after ordering the massacre of Independendistas in Ponce, a Boricua governor legalized the sterilization of our women. If they couldn’t kill us off in the streets, they would stop our growth in the womb. In 1948, lombriz officials passed la Ley de la Mordaza: on the world stage America bragged about freedom of speech, while in Puerto Rico, we “citizens” were imprisoned for flying our flags, singing patriotic songs, speaking aloud the belief that we, the children of Borikén, could exist independent of an American master. Governors like Luis Muñoz Marín, or Pedro Rosselló, or this current pendejo, García Padilla. They distract us with rhetoric, pocketing money with one hand and tightening our chains with the other.
Prieto, this boot has been pressing down on Puerto Rico’s neck for far too long, held in place by politicians of our own kind. I had taken pride in the fact that you, my son, were different. That you were trying to lift the boot off. That you were “our champion” on the mainland. Now, I no longer feel so sure.
For months, I’ve been writing to make what should seem the obvious case as to why you cannot support PROMESA. Yet, I see nothing in public from you but silence. You’ve yet to indicate how you will vote. No op-eds, no official statements against this garbage legislation. Is this indecision? Or is it treachery?
This will be my final plea. This bill you will vote on, PROMESA? It’s not a promise, but a death sentence for our people. The last bit of pressure that will finally break our necks. It’s designed to worsen our people’s lives while stuffing the bankers’ coffers. It forces puertorriqueños to foot a bill run up by gringos and our complicit compatriots. Anything this American government feels we owe them was paid for, in full, by the land and crops and lives that their imperialism has already stolen from us.
And so, I will wait. To see if you will be my son of the Noble Land or just a son of a bitch.
Pa’lante,
Mami (297-9)
October 2017
“Necesitas Una Limpia”
THIS WASN’T THE first time something like this had happened to her. She was old. These things happened. The first time she was younger. In college. She’d fallen asleep at a party and woke up with some guy humping her. He came on her leg. For some reason it gave her night terrors and her roommate complained to their resident counselor and the resident counselor confronted her, and that was how she ended up in the school psychiatrist’s office. When they told her she was likely grappling with abandonment issues.
She had come home for a long weekend or maybe it was spring break, she couldn’t remember. Her grandmother had taken one look at her and said, “Necesitas una limpia,” then took her to some bruja she knew who lived on the other side of the park. The woman had wrapped her naked body in a white bedsheet and lit velas all around her. She prayed over Olga’s body and made her lie there until all the candles burned out, and then she cut Olga’s shroud open with scissors and bathed her in Agua de Florida and rose water while she swatted her back with eucalyptus leaves. When it was over, Olga had never felt cleaner or more loved or more at peace. The night terrors stopped.
That woman must be dead by now, she thought (341-2).