Violeta

(Excerpt)

Many years later, as she walked down the aisle in a startling blue dress, Violeta would remember the stories her grandma would tell her over dark coffee in the living room of their Araucan hacienda.

The days had probably been humid, the cicadas in their perpetual mating season. Violeta and Mama Julia lay prone in the sweltering sun as Julita (who had the unfortunate coincidence of sharing a name with her employer, but the luck of counting on a diminutive to make the distinction clear) came back and forth from the kitchen bringing more fried goods, more dark coffee.

Young Violeta would ask questions. Mama Julia would draw into her extensive archive to answer them. Young Violeta would listen attentively, dip more fried plantain in Julita’s aji, dream of past and future lives.

Violeta’s parents had met at university. Margarita would sneak out of her literature course to attend Julian’s production one. Julian would slip passages of Margarita’s work into his avant-garde films. They fell in love as they documented wars, protested politics, fought for the poor. Mama Julia, who cared not for politics or the arts, thought it was the stuff of romance.

The truth is that Margarita and Julian’s luck had been more than cosmic. They knew how to pronounce words with the same intonation, their grandmothers had played bridge in the evenings during Virgilio’s presidency. Their last names spoke of a clase dirigente, ‘never more than two calls away from any president’.

‘And my little one, you must remember,’ Mama Julia would add (and in that moment elegantly and almost imperceptibly turn her gaze towards the kitchen where Julita would be sheltering from the sun), ‘it was God that gave you the privilege of belonging to this class. The biggest act of love towards Him and your family is to never throw that away.’

And it was true. The weight of this clase dirigente hung on the shoulders of the country like a 24-karat talisman. A talisman that saw all, that separated light and darkness at its will.  Where it shone light the crops would grow and the cicadas would sing. Nothing much would happen where it didn’t. Decay resulting from neglect.

Julian and Margarita accepted their luck as sunlit rebels. Her light brown curls glimmering with the afternoon sun, his freckled hands caressing a cigarette as they lazed on a sloped lawn between classes. After many dances of hating the brightness of their structure, but loving too much everyone in it, they had arrived at a sort of unspoken consensus (unspoken because verbalizing it would reveal its absurdity), exercising their defiance within the safe confines of approval.

They married in church, bought a house in a trendy neighborhood (not without some brow-raising from Mama Julia, who thought the area to be nice for a restaurant—safe—, but not for a decent person’s house—too new). And so it was that, on a bright October day in 1994, Violeta arrived in a sunlit home. Her skin was peppery. They named her after a flower.

Violeta bloomed. Her face the beauty of generations past, of ethnicities long un-acknowledged. Iberian nose, Liberian hair, Siberian eyes. Strangers would stare at her uniqueness, her happiness.

Like her parents, she looked at the talisman in the eye. Much like Mama Julia’s eyes, this eye was both graceful and vigilant. Giving and unforgiving. She understood that you could either lean into it or resist it, but never ignore it.

She didn’t just lean into it but dived. Dived with the carelessness and confidence of a teen at a pool party. Or rather, she climbed. To every table she could dance on top of, to every stage that would admire her contoured beauty, the delicateness of her voice.