Solito: A Memoir: Chapters One–Two

Don Dago is the coyote who took Mom to La USA four years ago.

Since kindergarten the nuns have made us embroider handkerchiefs with Feliz Día de la Madre or Feliz Día del Padre in blue or red thread.

The talcum didn’t do anything, and the weird concoction of vinegar, honey, and egg yolk backfired and made her feet stink even more.

The talcum didn’t do anything, and the weird concoction of vinegar, honey, and egg yolk backfired and made her feet stink even more.

With our feet above us and the chambre done, Tía Mali begins to tell me about her suitors. “Fijáte que The Dentist came to visit me today…”

She runs out the door, almost knocking the bedsheet out of the string it’s tied to, and she’s off, click-clacking across the street, fumbling her keys, running past the people already lined up so they can be the very first patients of the day.

After we cover school, we cover my health, and then it’s finally time to critique what they sent last time and discuss what new toy or clothes I want for next time they send me a package.

“Fast. Quick,” Mali says, slashing the air with her palm as she speaks, raising her normally soft voice to emphasize how fast it was.

He looks more like the rancheros in Mexican novelas, except he doesn’t wear a sombrero; a baseball cap covers his bald spot, and dyed black hair protrudes from the sides.

It was days after my seventh birthday, after I’d gone to the U.S. embassy twice to get a visa and it became clear that leaving on an airplane wasn’t gonna happen.

“Your mom drank water from troughs, but she was fine,” she says, now applying mascara, curling her eyelashes. When Mali says troughs, all I can see is Mom in the shape of a cow, then a horse, then in her giraffe costume, kneeling down, drinking dirty water.

“How do I look?” Her voice gets softer when she’s vulnerable, when she asks, like she does every morning.

Roberto Sr.’s hand pulled me from the bulletproof glass, across the linoleum tiles, dragging me out of the glass door, past the guards, past the turnstile, onto the street.

As she says it, she nods. It’s a thing everyone does, but when she does it, it’s so accentuated, like she’s performing at a talent show.

He stacks the calendars in his room next to the pile of folded shirts, and by May, starts using them as kindling for his afternoon fires where he also burns leaves or the day’s trash.

He leaves me at my Catholic school filled with nuns. Most of them are from Spain, but there are some from Costa Rica and Nicaragua. All of them are light-skinned, and they don’t ever smile. They hit most kids with the knotted white cords tied around their brown habits, or with wooden meter sticks.

“She’s still not talking to me,” I respond, short and stern.

First, there’s a local competition, then a departmental competition, where the winners from all the municipalities across our department of La Paz compete for one spot at the national level.

Plus, valedictorians get free tuition and get the next year’s books for free.

Everyone in town reminds me how smart my parents are. They alternated being valedictorians every year. Both first place.

Wooden and crystal rosaries hang between framed pictures of Spain.

He leans toward Mother Superior, almost whispering, “I’ve raised him as my own son. He’s punctual like me. Well behaved.”

I know he feels guilty for lying to a woman of faith, but someone at the market warned him that Jesuit nuns are infamous for calling the police on their students trying to cross the Guatemalan border.

“Premonitions are to be honored. God always sends signs.”

He looks at me, which is my cue to look sad, which I do by looking down at the tiles in front of my shoes.

Don Dago mentions a black backpack—but my Ninja Turtle backpack is bright green: Rafael, Donatello, Leonardo, and Miguel Ángel wield their weapons, frozen in a plastic patch near the backpack’s handles.

“Don’t worry, Chepito,” Mali says as she stuffs another crunchy mango slice into her mouth, wincing as she tastes the sour lime juice mixed with the tart green fruit.

They stick out their necks to hear what name comes out of The Baker’s son’s mouth. Then, when it’s not Don Dago’s name, they wilt like the ferns in Abuelita’s garden when she doesn’t water them.

Every now and then we see people with wicker baskets tied with cloth straps around their shoulders and waists.

We go up mountains. I get scared of how close to the precipice the bus is.

It’s bustling with people, cars, vendors, bicycles.

A teenager with straight black hair that dances on his shoulders when he moves pulls up on his bicycle? Instead of a front wheel and handlebars, it has a bench welded onto it, two wheels under it, and a canopy on top. It looks more like a tricycle.

The bicitaxi is cool. It has mirrors to the side, lights on the canopy, and this horn.

“Carla,” the girl interrupts her mom, glaring, her thick eyebrows scrunched together.

Tecún has one plaza, six benches around the main gazebo painted white, and a Pollo Campero food truck parked on the street alongside other vendors.

Then all the kids dressed as “indios” walked in a procession to church.

He pedals and I think of Dad’s mom, Grandma Socorro, who is almost seventy years old, who never learned to read but whose math is impeccable.

I don’t even want to play; I want to see if Jesús really is that good. No one makes fun of Chun-Li. The contenders pick: Ryu, Guile, Dhalsim, Akuma, Blanka.

The sound of the machines can’t drown all of the kids’ jeers, their annoyance, their “yeah yeah”s.

I was always afraid of him, of his curt manner with Abuelita or his daughters. I was afraid of his deep, almost harsh voice, but I’ve heard other tones here.