I saw a whole generation of boys fall like irredeemable angels. Teenagers with gray skin and missing teeth, reeking of ammonia and urine. Their foreshortened figures flanked the exit to the San Blas metro station on Calle Amposta and the small meadows of Parque El Paraíso, like Mantegna’s Christs. Covered in needles like Saint Sebastian. Sitting or sprawled out any which way. Barely moving, slow and syncopated like broken dolls. With the sublime smile of the crucified. Defenseless but already floating in places where nothing could touch them. I saw them sprout and slacken before finally reaching stillness and decomposing in the mud that collected in our neighborhood that, despite its holy namesake, remained utterly godforsaken.
The first time I fell in love it was with one of those angels. He came flying from the window of his parents’ apartment, which was right above our 375-square-foot ground-floor place, a hypodermic needle planted in his foot. My neighbor Efrén. He wound up dead on the street, half naked, in front of my door. I wasn’t yet six years old, I wore a patch on one eye, and I stuttered. I think it was his mother’s wailing that alerted the other inhabitants of our building, three floors with no entryway, just stairs on the outside. We got there before the police, who took their time responding to any call from our neighborhood, San Blas. To them, to every authority, he was just another dead junkie, the son of some woman dog-tired from mopping stairwells, the apple of her eye who’d probably already ransacked her home numerous times to shoot up more smack.
The truth is, I don’t remember Efrén alive. I only have the image I was able to steal from between the legs of my mother and my neighbor Lola with the only eye I had, as if peering through a peephole. The mothers in my neighborhood didn’t embrace their dead children like the virgins in Renaissance pietàs did. Instead, they hunched over their bodies, screaming, hair wild, eyes swollen, drooling. Shielding their babies best they could, covering them like desperate beasts, calling out to them until they lost their voice there on the sidewalk, as their nails gouged their flesh, departing with them somehow.
Those cries of “No, not my boy!”—if you’ve heard them—never leave you. They remain in the sound files of your memory like death knells, forcing you to shake your head to exorcise them.
Efrén was gorgeous, and the abyss was kind to his gentle features that had yet to reach manhood. An overdose carried him off to the other side. He hadn’t been hooked long, and heroin had scarcely begun to mold his face, just tinged his skin ashen. It was the first time I wanted to kiss anyone. His body was sprawled before a scrawny garden that grew in front of our building, right below one of the entrance arches badly covered by half-dry flowers and ivy veins that barely enshrouded the crude wire structure. In spite of it all, death had chosen a botanical frame with a certain gritty art nouveau flair for Efrén. His mouth was slightly agape and his lips fleshy, not yet withdrawn; his hair was messy and his eyelids somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. If it’s possible for a five-year-old to fall in love, then my love poured completely onto that tragic wreck. My inner life unfurled over that still frame of pain and misery, projecting myself floating, translucent above that corpse, kissing him with the lightness of beings that do not exist, not trying to wake him from his lethargy, not so he would kiss me back. I simply yearned with my entire soul to kiss something so lovely and helpless. Something that seemed fallen from heaven, left like an ex-voto on my doorstep. Something that, amid the sound and fury of drooling mothers and fathers who covered their mouths to repress their sobs, I somehow understood belonged to me.
The Wig was super short, thin as a rake, and wrinkled in such a way that as she stirred, she seemed to be interrupting some inexorable mummification. She was always old. She was made up like a caricature of an old lady, with blue eyeshadow, black liner, red lips, and a perfectly cracked foundation of Mona-Lisa-potato-colored skin. She smelled like dead flowers forgotten in a drawer and constantly whispered a string of unintelligible words under her breath, like a secret prayer laced with poison. The poison had to do with her surly, mocking gaze. Her seriousness wasn’t the judgmental kind, but rather, the type that presaged a hearty laugh, as if every time she looked at someone, an embarrassing secret about them was revealed to her.
She lived alone at the end of the street, a row of three-story redbrick apartment buildings with concrete stairs at the front. That architectural motif repeated throughout the entire neighborhood, occasionally interrupted by some battered lot flush with broken glass, scraps of aluminum foil, needles, and abandoned building materials. If we could’ve spied the pavement from above, those gaps in the rows of apartment buildings must have made it look like diseased gums where enormous teeth had been yanked out with no apparent logic, leaving behind an incurable infection and lumpy holes. Besides the park and the housing itself, the rest was dumping grounds, empty lots where the neighborhood kids played and—when they were old enough to shoot up—where they went to die. We grew up like that: generations of working-class kids dreaming up whole worlds in the very same plots that one day might become our final resting places.
The garden didn’t reach The Wig’s corner. The view from her ground-floor apartment (if she’d ever pulled up the green blinds that covered her window day and night) was of garbage cans.
Our buildings were part of a large Francoist housing development built in the fifties, dubbed the Great San Blas. The former name, Cow Ridge, must’ve stunk of sweat and shit to the fascist authorities. Meanwhile, the debt collectors who combed door-to-door referred to it as “the motherless neighborhood” because they were usually greeted by children who should’ve been at school. It hadn’t occurred to the visionaries of the regime that more than thirty thousand families would expect schools nearby for their kids, and it was years before that need was met. Along with the need for running water and for shops. Workers were never treated by Franco’s regime as anything more than pack mules—to be herded into the city’s outskirts. This generated a class consciousness in the neighborhood that later authorities—during the transition to democracy following Franco’s death—conspired to weed out with jabs of heroin so cheap, they were practically free. In the late seventies and eighties, drugs were the last manifestation of summary executions for dissidents, employed by an old regime that had found a way to survive.
There were four things the neighborhood said about The Wig: that she’d worked in the black market up in the mountain caves; that she was quite a competent witch; that casting spells had left her bald; and that it was best to avoid her or, failing that, to treat her with extreme caution if you had no choice but to share a landing or the line at the produce market with her. It was hard to not gawk at the very curly, exceedingly shoddy synthetic hairpiece that graced her head. But you had to find a way. The Wig was not just her nickname, it was also a trigger for her maliciousness, and it was not in
your best interests to provoke her.
It drove me wild to run into her and deeply inhale her scent; it was like snorting moths. I knew I was supposed to fear her, but I was moved by her appearance, her irregular, trembling strokes of eyeliner, her sloppy lipstick application. It reminded me of my own clandestine makeup sessions, the cosmetics hastily applied in my grandmother’s bathroom by the hand of a five-year-old not particularly gifted with a brush.
My baby steps into cross-dressing were a four-foot quick-change artist’s imitation of an old witch who peddled secondhand goods and smelled like a funeral home.
The men in my neighborhood truly feared her. Rugged factory laborers, construction workers, waiters, vendors, scrap collectors, folks who did what they could to get by—all alike would lower their gaze and mumble “Good afternoon” to her like kids addressing a priest in the years following the civil war. It was comical, actually, to see them with their chests peeking out of half-buttoned shirts, passing her on their way to the bar after back-breaking workdays, intimidated by a woman who seemed so fragile.
Hardly anyone could even remember her real name. And while everyone knew her nickname, it was never spoken in her presence, not just because it was cruel and spiteful but mostly out of a fear of her reaction. Everyone addressed her as “ma’am.”
Once, two women who lived on the same street as The Wig, both of them pregnant, went for a walk to relieve the swelling that comes with carrying a child during a particularly sweltering summer. One of them had suffered circulation problems in her legs since she was a girl, and had to walk to alleviate the swelling of the purple floaties on her ankles. The two young women had made a habit of strolling together in the evenings, chatting about the news and routines of their pregnancies, fears, dreams, and the latest gossip. In a neighborhood where everybody knew everybody else, there was always some rumor or other, and an eager audience for scuttlebutt.
The woman with the purply legs usually harped on about her dream of a matador son who would buy her a big house “like the radio said El Cordobés bought for his mother.” The other, slightly younger, envisioned a very handsome son, “kinda blond, with light eyes,” she would say.
They had just started out on their walk when they saw The Wig approaching
from the far end of the street and, exploiting the distance, quickly heaped on their lazy, cruel jokes about the old woman’s looks.
“Stop, stop, I’m gonna piss my pants,” pleaded the one with the swollen feet to her younger counterpart, who employed a quick imagination and a viper’s tongue. They were both young, in their early twenties, and reveling in all the cruelty youth is capable of. Which is a lot. Regrets and restraint come with decrepitude, as does selfishness, when suddenly we find ourselves on the flip side of life and acknowledge that there’s hardly an ugly thing that won’t eventually find us.
They managed to stifle their laughter and brutal razzing long before crossing paths with The Wig. When nearly by her side, both began to smile deferentially in anticipation, the proper attitude afforded an older neighbor. But they didn’t have a chance. The Wig stopped short in front of them, her little body a dead bush that seemed to take up the entire sidewalk. The pregnant women tried to say good afternoon, but the words caught in their throats like acid reflux. Most likely, their instinct was to bring their hands to their bellies. The old lady’s gaze—present and absent at the same time—radiated something that could wither everything in its path, be it flowers, joys, or placentas. Then The Wig leisurely lifted her left hand up to the pasty hole she had for a mouth and stuck in her thumb, sucking on it with gusto, swabbing it around, savoring it with loud slurps, all while keeping her eyes glued on the two women. For them, time had stopped. They embodied a low-frequency but paralyzing fear underscored by a vast discomfort and helplessness. Once The Wig had her thumb well lathered in saliva, she calmly brought it straight from her mouth to the cheek of one of the pregnant women. The one with the viper’s tongue. The one who dreamed of a handsome, gorgeous son. Kinda blond, with light eyes.
She couldn’t dodge the thumb; she had no time to react. The old lady traced a straight line of spittle from the cheekbone to nearly the chin of that young face plump with pregnancy, declaring loudly, and with a lizard’s voice: “Monkey.”
I barely knew Damián. He and his mother rarely left the house, and when they did, he was always covered up and obscured by a stroller hood. People said he couldn’t walk and suffered a skin affliction that made exposure to the sun lethal. He didn’t speak. He died of a stroke at the age of six, lying on a couch at home, watching television. When they arrived to pick up his corpse, his mother placed a handkerchief over his little hairy face so they wouldn’t tease him on his way to the morgue.
My mother’s circulatory problems cleared up, and instead of a matador, she gave birth to a trans daughter who still has yet to buy her a big house.
You discover that you’ll end up becoming a woman from the examples that surround you; from your thirst for role models; from your need to take part in the legacy, the inheritance some women bequeath to others, of which men know nothing.
It was a bad idea to press your luck with The Wig. That tiny lady exuded power from every one of her stretched seams. Of course, I spoke to her as soon as I got the chance. It’s not that I expected to acquire the ability to ruin pregnancies or other terrible powers. Or maybe I did. But I understood that there was something encircling her, something that caused her to be rejected, and it made me very sad. I pictured her doing her makeup each morning with the clumsiness of someone whose nervous system is no longer entirely her own, someone who already has ceded a part of her anatomy and abilities to the darkness to come. Even still, she never missed an appointment with that mask, just as I never missed the construction of mine every morning. The difference was that hers, at some point, must have exuded power and beauty, even though now it was in shambles. If we had known how to look, surely the shadow of her splendor was still there, but the ability to see it eluded us. My mask was one to hide behind, a mask of shame and fear, something I shouldn’t have needed, or even known existed, at that age.
That was why I had to speak to her, because there was some inheritance, ...
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