IMAGINE BREAKING EVERYTHING E-Book

Lina Munar Guevara

• Herausgeber: Peirene Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 254

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

It's a rainy weekend in Bogotá, and eighteen-year-old Melissa is about to graduate from school. If, that is, she can scrape together the money to pay for the printer she broke. Melissa used to break a lot of things, but after five years of living with her aunt Anahí, she has become much better at controlling her anger. Then, out of the blue and for the first time in six months, Melissa's mother calls her and invites her to spend the weekend together in their old neighbourhood. Melissa is excited to spend time with her, but nervous about returning to the scene of her troubled early adolescence. Will she make it to Monday morning without jeopardising her future – or being swallowed up by her past?

Leseprobe

1

IMAGINE BREAKING EVERYTHING

Lina Munar Guevara

Translated from the Spanish by Ellen Jones

2

3

4

5

And for everyone who made it possible.

6

7

You’ve got to get out of this town, I always say

that’s why I took the initiative, took cocaine

but according to my uncle, who is dead,

No matter where you go, you take it all with you.

I feel full of life but also

I can’t bear it.

You’ve got to get out of this town, I still say,

though I’ve already left.

silvina giaganti ‘You Take It All With You’,  Slow to Turn Off8

9

FRIDAY

‘So, what are you going to do?’

I just sat there. Stiff. Margarita, the admin woman, was looking at me. She was smiling, but her face still reminded me of the one the history teacher always wore. He’d ask a question then grab his marker pen, start tapping it on the desk, and say, ‘It’s not calculus, ladies, there’s a finite number of answers.’ ‘Answer me this, grandad,’ Zapata would murmur, with a hand gesture to go with it. She’d say it quietly so only I could hear. It would make me laugh, but also want to throw my rubber at her so she’d let me think. And the teacher would keep banging on about how it wasn’t calculus or whatever, his dumb way of saying, ‘It’s not that hard, Noriega, answer the fucking question.’ The question asked by Margarita, the admin woman, wasn’t calculus either. There wasn’t an infinite number of answers. In fact, there was only one, and unlike with the 1854 civil war, this time I knew how to reply.

‘Graduate.’

Margarita laughed softly and leaned back in her chair as if I had just told a joke.

‘I mean after that.’ 10

I looked at her. Despite being relegated to the admin building and not hanging out with either the teachers or the students, Margarita had the same air about her, the same tone of voice. It felt different to my previous school. It was as if they, Margarita and everyone else, were all made of the same stuff, something I lacked and was incapable of learning. For her, and for everyone at the high school, graduating was no big deal. It wasn’t a deal at all, in fact it was the natural course of things. Inevitable. But at my previous school, the Corpus Cristi District School, that wasn’t the case. Nobody graduated. Graduating didn’t figure in anyone’s plans, because by that age, people had already started working or living with their boyfriends or had ‘got into trouble’. Sometimes all of the above (like Mum). It was harder to find reasons to stay at school when help was needed at home. But I was going to graduate. That’s what I told my aunt, Anahí, every time I handed her my report card. ‘Not top of the class,’ I’d warn her, ‘but I’ll graduate.’ She nodded, but I was convinced she hadn’t taken it in. That’s why I was surprised the day she called me into her bedroom, where a handful of dresses was thrown over the chair in the corner. She asked what the other parents would be wearing to the graduation. ‘How should I know,’ I replied, but grinned like an idiot all the same. I didn’t give a toss if Margarita the admin woman said I was going to graduate – she didn’t know me – but if my aunt believed it, it might actually be true.

Still, I had my doubts. Five years after leaving Corpus Cristi, I remained scared of waking up back there. ‘You can take a girl out of the barrio,’ Mum’s friend Adela warned 11her when we left, ‘but you can’t take the barrio out of the girl, baby.’ It’s true: you can recognize someone from Corpus Cristi as far off as Korea – they’re the one who, when a car backfires, flings themselves to the ground with their hands over their head. I exaggerate, but only a little.

Margarita, the admin woman, opened my folder.

She must have been looking over my marks, checking those numbers that had cost me sweat, blood and tears; every mark out of ten I’d scraped together and that no longer meant anything. Just stains, no more important than a bit of coffee or lipstick on the page: once they’d stamped PASS on the report card, that’s all they became. There it was, in blue ink, the tops of the P and the A slightly faded, but there all the same, and there was nothing the teachers could do about it; not the history teacher, not the calculus teacher, not the catechism teacher, none of them could change it. PASS, bitches. If they’d added things up wrong, if they’d failed to mark an absence, well, they were fucked, because I’d passed every single subject and was going to graduate. Not top of the class, but I’ll graduate.

Then Margarita, the admin woman, made a face and I knew. I knew before she opened her mouth: the printer.

‘I’m sorry, love,’ she sighed, looking at me as though she’d just run over my dog. ‘I can’t give you the green light.’

It all went to shit with that cocksucking motherfucking printer.

The worst thing about this story, the thing we need to remember, is that I’d had the money to replace the printer. At some point in my life, I’d had it, and I turned it into a tattoo, some earrings, and an avocado-shaped coin 12purse. You absolute mug – who the fuck even uses a coin purse? I’ve never used a coin purse in my life, why would I start now? If I was going to spend the money, I should at least have spent it on something I’d use, something good. Anyway, the point is, I promised Margarita I’d pay her first thing on Monday morning.

‘That’d be Tuesday, because we’re not in on Monday.’

‘Even better.’

‘No, no, love. You’re not listening,’ she said with the same smile. ‘It’s not possible.’

‘Please…’

‘The thing is, love, today’s the last day of the accounting period,’ she said, and I nodded, serious, as though I understood the implications of a fucking accounting period.

I told her I’d bring it on Tuesday without fail, that I already had the money (not true), and could she please let me bring it because I needed to graduate, please, my mum was coming all the way from Bucaramanga just for my graduation (not true either, as far as I knew). She looked at me for a moment and I looked back. Margarita, the admin woman, had blonde hair with highlights in it, and square, blue-rimmed glasses that matched the button-up jacket she was wearing. I wondered if she had glasses in every colour and changed them each day depending on the jacket she was going to wear. She had coin purse written all over her, and I thought of offering her an avocado-shaped bribe. But no, people who look like they use a coin purse rarely turn out to be bribable.

‘I have to graduate,’ I said instead. ‘Please, I’ll bring the money on Tuesday.’ 13

‘I can’t—’

‘Tuesday without fail.’

‘I just can’t, darling. If I made an exception for you I’d have to do it for everyone.’

But no one else at this school needs an exception, do they, Margarita? Nobody else has this problem, nobody else is being hounded by a printer. Only me.

‘I’m begging you. Please, after everything that’s… I have to graduate, please.’

‘I—’

‘I’ve done everything, everything they asked of me, the lessons, the tests, the final exams, the community service, everything, I’ve done everything. It’s not fair not to let me graduate because of something that’s got nothing to do with, because of something that… because of a… an accident. Please. I’ll bring the money on Tuesday. I swear.’

She sighed, defeated.

‘First thing on Tuesday.’

I jumped up out of the seat with a smile. Then I remembered I didn’t have the money.

It’s fine, Melissa, this is why you have a job.

I went from school straight to Señor Héctor’s shop. It was two blocks (which felt like three when it was raining) from Aunt Anahí’s house, in barrio La Alborada. I was proud to spend two weekends a month in that little shop, organizing the shelves, cleaning the floor and the toilets. They rarely trusted me to cash up because the till never worked properly and maths wasn’t my thing – infinite answers and all that. I liked mopping the corridors, because I could do it to songs by Sergio Vargas, who Señor Héctor loved, and 14it was nothing but back and forth, like painting a house. Or what I imagined painting a house would be like – I’d never actually painted one. Corpus Cristi was constantly under construction but hardly anyone ever bothered with a final paint job. Most houses remained a colour somewhere between earth and mustard yellow, with concrete columns, and the ones that were painted tended to gradually add on balconies and extra floors painted in different shades or with patches to cover up the graffiti. That was one thing the walls were good for. The whole neighbourhood was one giant canvas.

In La Alborada, on the other hand, graffiti never lasted long at all. Señor Héctor once made me clean the façade of the shop where a tag had been sprayed. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to clean a piece of graffiti, but because this one wasn’t mine, it took forever, and my wrist was sore by the time I was done. People usually left the shop alone, because Señor Héctor didn’t mind selling stuff on credit, plus he’d installed those lights that come on by themselves when someone walks by. The idea of standing under those lights, can in hand, in full view of the world, was enough to discourage most people. Unlike in Corpus Cristi, in La Alborada appearances mattered. Señor Héctor got his fair share of tags even so, but the lights weren’t a total waste because when people sat outside boozing I’d sometimes wait for the drunks to fall asleep before going past and triggering them to come on. They’d get such a fright they’d fall out of their chairs, which was a good laugh.

When I got there, the outdoor spotlights were off because it was still light out. Inside, merengue was playing and Señor 15Héctor was arranging tins of tomato sauce. ‘Tomato purée,’ Aunt Anahí would correct me. I approached Señor Héctor with my head bowed, like when Katya creeps over with her tail between her legs after pissing on the carpet. And he must have realized I’d come to ask for an advance because he didn’t even look at me before saying: ‘There’s no cash, Meli.’

That’s what happens when you trust any old stranger to pay you back, Señor Héctor.

‘Please, Don Héctor. I’ll work the whole month, two months, however long you need, but I need some money super super urgently.’

He went over to the till. I followed him, biting a bit of cuticle off. Mum always used to tell me off for biting my nails, so instead I worried at my cuticles until I yanked them off. Héctor gave me twenty thousand pesos – not even a tenth of what I needed – and dumped a bag of prawns on me that were about to go off.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with a bag of prawns?

‘Fry them up with garlic and olive oil,’ Anahí said, inspecting the bag. ‘We’ll have to peel and de-vein them, but they’re still good.’

‘De-vein’ was a nice way of saying we had to pull out the shit.

‘The digestive tract,’ she corrected me.

‘Which is full of shit,’ I insisted, leaning on the counter. I crossed my arms and sighed. ‘Just some of it,’ I begged her. ‘Just a little bit, please. It would be a loan. I swear I’ll pay you back every peso.’ 16

‘Get the spaghetti out, and some parsley from the fridge,’ she said, opening the bag of prawns. ‘Remember what I said when you broke the printer? Oh, and a lemon.’

‘Yeah, I know, but I’m desperate. Please, I swear I’ll pay. How much parsley? This much? I’ll pay you back double, triple, if you want, even though that’d be usury, but of course you know more about that than I do.’

I loved teasing her for working in a bank, saying that bankers were a bad lot, the worst, and that (unlike Señor Héctor) they never trusted anyone.

‘My my, aren’t you the funny one. Put some water on to boil. I’m sorry, Meli, but I did warn you.’

I sighed loudly, so she would hear my sigh and know I was fed up.

‘Slice the garlic nice and thin.’

‘I’ll pay you quadruple if you want.’

‘It’s not about the money, Meli. Every action…’

‘Has consequences, yeah yeah, but Auuunnntie.’

‘But nothing. Now watch, kid, this’ll come in handy.’

‘I doubt it, unless it’s money,’ I said through clenched teeth.

Still, I watched as she slid the knife along the prawn’s flank (do prawns have flanks?) and, using the tip, pulled out the brown thread with a single tug. Anahí made cooking pretty. It was a pleasure to watch her. And her food was always delicious.

She looked lovely when she cooked, too, because she enjoyed it. She had an old-school glamour, sort of faded, like those black-and-white photographs of actresses. She gave the impression of being from a previous century, though 17she was barely forty. She had a pianist’s hands. I didn’t say so because I knew she didn’t like her hands, long and thin, perfect for tossing a frying pan around like it was second nature. Yeah, they were a pianist’s hands, though she hardly ever played anymore, and the keyboard in the study was mainly used as a desk, covered in notebooks, invoices and a dusty-leafed succulent. The story goes that my aunt used to play all kinds of things on that keyboard, from Beethoven to Flans, and of course Alejandro Sanz. Anahí loved Alejandro Sanz, and she also liked some of his songs. I bet her hands looked great when they were playing, especially when she painted her nails bright colours. They were a salmon colour right now, which was pretty, but I didn’t tell her that either, because it was boring and I didn’t want her to stop painting them the golds and blues and occasional greens that suited her so well. She’d dyed her hair a reddish brown that suited her too because she was all pale. I, on the other hand, can only ever have black hair because my skin is dark. Anahí has the same brown eyes as Aunt Magdalena, and I have my mum’s honey-coloured ones. A shame, because my dad has green eyes. You’d think he could at least have given me those.

When the olive oil was hot, my aunt put the prawns on to fry. I wasn’t sure whether I liked prawns. The only time I remembered having eaten them was at Aunt Magdalena’s, during a novena, back when she still invited us over. It must have been a long time ago, when Mum and I still lived in Corpus Cristi, when Aunt Anahí was still Uncle Roberto. Aunt Magdalena served them in a glass bowl soaked in a kind of pink slurry, with slices of sausage and adorned with 18bits of lettuce. I remembered how the first one I tried made me want to throw up, but because I still liked Magdalena then, I made the effort to wash it down with a gulp of Coca-Cola. I bet she didn’t de-vein them.

When I put the garlic in to fry, I suspected I was going to like these prawns. The smell wafted around the kitchen. Garlic is super important because it goes with everything, like onion, but, unless you’re making something al ajillo, it shouldn’t actually taste of garlic. You need just the right amount so that it’s overshadowed by the other ingredients. Anahí explained this to me as she stirred the pot of pasta. My job was the parsley. She showed me this cool way of chopping it, see-sawing the knife quickly from side to side, like one of those guillotines they use in stationery shops, zip, zip, zip. I enjoyed that, moving the knife in one direction and then the other, feeling the little bits come off on the chopping board. It was a good way of clearing my head, like mopping or painting a house.

‘Smaller,’ she said, and took the knife off me to do it herself.

As she went on cooking, I crouched down to stroke Katya, who’d got up to stretch at the smell of the prawns in the pan. She was a caramel cocker spaniel with brown eyes and a few grey hairs on her nose. She yawned and stuck out her pink tongue before resting her head on my knees, as she did whenever she wanted me to stroke her neck. I obeyed, and she lay back further and further until she was belly-up on the tiles.

‘Is that nice?’ I asked her, patting her stomach, where she had these little whirlpools of fur. ‘I’m going to sell Katya. How much do you think I’ll get for her?’ 19

‘She’s so naughty you’d have to pay someone to take her off you.’

Katya was my first pet. Well, she was Anahí’s, but now that we’d lived together for five years in her flat in La Alborada, she was mine too, really. In Corpus Cristi I never had pets because a) Mum and I were never home, and b) I wasn’t great with animals. Back then I wasn’t great with people, either. ‘You were no angel,’ as Anahí put it, which was a nice way of saying I was a real piece of shit. I scratched Katya’s belly till she started swiping her paw, while Anahí mixed the pasta with the prawns.

‘Squeeze the lemon on,’ she said, tipping some pasta water into the pan.

I pinched a bit of powdered soap and washed my hands thoroughly before grabbing the lemon. It was already sliced, so I squeezed one half against the edge of the pan. The juice ran through my fingers and made the little strips of raw flesh sting where I’d tugged at the cuticles. I ignored the pain and squeezed out a bit more. It had never occurred to me before to put lemon in pasta, but I’d learned that lemon is a bit like salt. It sort of fixes the flavour. Cooking is full of contradictions, like the one about putting salt in cake mixes. That’s why it’s so interesting. It’s not like solving an equation, following a series of rules step by step until you get to X, boring old X that can never be anything other than itself, X. When you cook, you never know what you’re going to end up with. Even if it doesn’t look like it does in the book, even if it doesn’t taste like it’s supposed to, every dish is worth the effort because you can never make it twice, not really. See, cooking is like magic, transforming 20ingredients, making them disappear and reappear. If you end up with the same as what you started with, you haven’t cooked, full stop. I wanted to have my own restaurant; I probably wouldn’t cook there, but I’d spend hours watching the chef.

That’s why I’d gone to register my interest in Business Administration. That was the answer Margarita the admin woman was looking for. I hadn’t told anyone, that would have jinxed it. Well, hardly anyone, because Aunt Anahí knew, and I’d also told Santiago. I’d even told him the bit about the restaurant, but not the whole idea, because I was embarrassed, and embarrassed that I was embarrassed about it. I did tell Zapata, because I was never embarrassed about anything around her: she understood. I told her I wanted to have a restaurant that would be like an ordinary house or flat, where people (it had to be a small group) would come and leave their things in the dining room or living room. We’d give them a glass of wine and they’d go into the kitchen where they’d agree on a menu. Then the chef would tell each of them what to do and they’d help out with the cooking. The chef would give them easy jobs, of course, so they wouldn’t ruin the dinner, but the trick was to make them believe they might ruin it if they did things badly. They’d eat the starter right there in the kitchen while the main course was cooking and then they’d sit in the dining room, and even though the food might not be as good as if the chef had done everything themselves, it’d taste even better to them. And after that they’d have dessert, which really was made by just the chef, because everyone else would be tired by then. 21

‘But you have to open a bunch of restaurants first, Norieguis, to be able to finance it,’ Zapata told me.

And I said, yes, that all I needed was one successful Italian restaurant and that would cover it. That’s why I liked talking to her, because we understood each other. It’s why she always played me her music, too. Zapata was a bit alternative. She was into a lot of weird music, some of it cool, some of it properly weird. When she played it to me, she’d always explain why the singer was doing X or Y, or who they’d been inspired by or why that album was the high or low point of their career.

Her music made me feel something, even the songs I didn’t like. And when I did like them, my God, those ones went round and round my head for days, I couldn’t stop listening to them. It happened with ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)’. When I heard it, it made me feel like I was in this huge country house – rustic rather than elegant. We were having dinner at a heavy wooden table with candles because there was a blackout and I suddenly had to leave. When I left the house, it was daytime, though inside it had been night, and I ran up a dirt path lined with trees that had leaves like curtains. That was the drums, my footsteps through the fields of tall grass and twisted wire fences leading up to a green, green hill, not too high, but when I got up there I couldn’t see anything but the blue sky, and that was where I spoke to God, not my grandad’s God, everyone’s God, and made a deal: that I would change places with someone I loved very much who had died, so that person could come back and I would go to heaven. I never knew who that person was. Sometimes it was me. 22That’s why the song sped up, for the trip back downhill, not too fast, just enough to let the slope do its thing. And I felt so calm and happy because I knew it was the sacrifice I’d made that allowed me to get back. I told Zapata this, that that’s what the song had made me feel, and she said it was a lovely song, wearing a smile that seemed to say she’d hoped it would make me feel that way.

While Aunt Anahí served the pasta, I laid two places at the table. I checked the big chocolate pot sitting in the corner underneath the leak. The damp had got worse because the pot didn’t usually fill up in just one day. I picked it up and emptied it into the kitchen sink before putting it back. There was a dark patch on the ceiling and the paint had cracked. Aunt Anahí came out of the kitchen with the food and Katya in tow, tail wagging. She put the plates on the table and collapsed into a chair.

I took a huge forkful of pasta and didn’t care that it burned the roof of my mouth because it was delicious. The garlic had gone all golden so if you wanted to eat the little slices tucked among the spaghetti, you could. The prawns: so good, especially drenched in the olive oil. I told my aunt how good it was, and she said I needed to have faith in her recipes. Then I begged her again to help me with the money for the printer, but she wasn’t budging. So as a sign of protest I decided to answer my phone. An unknown number had been calling me over and over.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello? Melissa?’

I felt a thrill go down my spine. I hadn’t heard her voice since my birthday, seven months ago. 23

‘Meli, are you there? Can you hear me?’

‘Mum? You got a new number.’

‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘Oh, it’s so nice to hear your voice, love.’

She said she was going to be in Bogotá at the weekend.

I almost dropped the phone. Were my hands sweating?

‘I’d love to see you,’ she said. ‘We could spend the weekend together.’

The weekend. The weekend together. The whole weekend together. I was so surprised that I only clocked that I hadn’t said anything when she asked, worried: ‘Have you got plans already?’

‘What? No, of course not. I want to see you.’

‘Then I’ll come and pick you up tomorrow, darling.’

24

SATURDAY

One of my first memories of our flat in Corpus Cristi is of kneeling on the sofa, my hands and forehead pressed against the window. I was trying to check if the hopscotch I’d chalked on the pavement the day before was still there, but I couldn’t quite see from the living room. The radio was on in the kitchen and because the flat was tiny you could hear Joe Arroyo singing wherever you went. It started to smell like burnt plastic and gas, so I knew Mum had turned the oven on. I ran to the kitchen barefoot, and Mum told me off because I might get spattered with hot oil or step on something. I ignored her, running over and asking what she was making.

A chocolate cake, from a box. We were going to take it to Aunt Magdalena’s – she was organizing a piñata that day. Mum turned the box over and read the instructions out loud. I remember the yellow cardboard against her painted nails, their purple and black stripes. How old would she have been? I was about four, so Mum must have been about twenty.

‘Want to help?’ she asked.

I nodded and she lifted me up onto the counter. She touched my nose and told me to hold the plastic bowl while 25she poured in the instant mix. A cloud of brown powder rose up. The kitchen filled with the smell of chocolate. Mum turned up the radio and started dancing as she opened the drawer to get out the utensils. She’s always been a good salsa dancer and, like with everyone who’s good at salsa, it was obvious even when she wasn’t dancing, even when she was doing something as simple as opening the oven door. I wanted to ask her about Dad, but didn’t, maybe because it was a nice day and soon there would be chocolate cake.

My dad was a black hole that killed conversations. If you got too close, bam! he sucked out all the air. That hasn’t changed. And it wasn’t fair because, back then, I always wanted to talk about him. Not to him, never to him, just about him. Even much later, after he left, after he left for good, you could still feel him in the flat, like a kind of ghost, hiding in the most unexpected places. Sometimes he showed up in a dirty sock he’d left behind that had got mixed up with all the others. Sometimes he was the way Mum smelled when she came home at dawn, or the sound of one of his local friends laughing, or that feeling of wanting to cry – ‘to mewl’, as he’d put it. Sometimes he was silence itself, inside the flat. The silence that, back when he was around, Dad would use to give Mum a fright. Out of nowhere he’d sing out into the silence – not properly, just an off-key shriek or two, before falling quiet again as though nothing had happened. It still makes me laugh. Not just because of that voice he’d use, but because of Mum’s reaction, too. He only ever did it when she was there. ‘Ay, Andrés,’ she’d scold him, slapping him on the arm as he laughed. That’s why he did it, so she’d tell him off, to annoy her. It didn’t have 26the cruelty he did everything else with, he was just fooling around. Sometimes, when the flat was silent, I would still expect to hear him singing. People say I’ve got a half-sibling somewhere in town. For all I know there’s a whole bunch of them out there.

I could have asked Mum, but it was a nice day, and we were listening to salsa in the car. We were in a silver Chevrolet with Bogotá license plates. It was Adela’s, Mum explained. We were going to hers for the weekend, she said. Outside, people were walking, shops were open, a taxi driver went by with his arm hanging out of the window, so close I thought it was going to get caught on our wing mirror. All completely normal, except none of it was normal, because Mum was there, sitting next to me, and we were going to spend the weekend together.

‘I’ve missed Bogotá,’ she said, ‘the movement, the chaos.’