“About your cleaning habits, what do you think?”
“I don’t have many,” he said, but he responded to one question after the other honestly and sincerely. That’s how I first got to know him. He told me that before he joined the police force, he didn’t shower every day.
“How often? Weekly?”
“Let’s say a couple of times a week. But after joining the police I had to take a freezing shower every day.”
“Do you ever shower with hot water, or warm water?”
“That’s for sissies, for faggots,” he told me, and then admitted he didn’t know how to swim, that he had been terrified of water as a child because he grew up in Colorado, where his father worked at a barley farm owned by Coors.
“How is that pertinent?”
“Because there wasn’t a lot of water there, and whatever water there was they used to irrigate the barley fields.”
Moreover, his mother thought that water was dangerous because water opened the pores, and the open pores made the body vulnerable to infections and illnesses. She had only taken two full baths in her whole life and was proud of that, because for her cleanliness wasn’t about taking baths; on the contrary, she thought that if one wasn’t dirty, there was no reason to bathe, and that those who bathed a lot must be hiding some unspeakable sickness, because there was no other reason to explain such behavior.
“So according to your mother,” I told him, “the cleanest ones are the ones who wash the least.”
“Something like that.”
“You said your mother took two full-body baths. Do you remember the occasions?”
“The first on the day of her baptism when she was eleven years old. In her hometown, kids were baptized by plunging them into the Dunaj.”
“What’s the Dunaj?”
“The Dunaj, the Dunaj! Don’t you know it? The Dunaj is the biggest river on the planet.”
“The biggest river is the Amazon,” I said, sticking up for my own. “The Amazon that runs through where I come from. But no one thinks of plunging a girl into it to baptize her, because the piranhas would feast on her. But let’s leave it at that. Everyone has a right to think that their river is the biggest. But tell me about the second bath your blessed mother took.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think she ever told me, but there were only two, I’m sure of that, I heard her mention it a few times. She bathed my brothers and me body part by body part, feet and hands, face, ears, and neck, but she’d never put us in the bathtub, that was for lepers and the ill, according to her.”
“It’s okay, Greg,” I said, because I noticed distress in his voice, as if the memories weren’t pleasing.
It wasn’t long before I’d find out that the problem wasn’t just the mother. Greg as an adult also resisted bathing. My coworkers bragged how their husbands washed their things before doing it and then showered afterward. But that wasn’t going to be the case with me, neither before nor afterward. At that moment, of course, I couldn’t have fully known, so I just responded with the kind of consolation that entails offering someone who tells you a sad story about his life with an even sadder story about your own.
“We all have our issues,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder. “Take my Aunt Alba, Alba Nava, Leonor de Nava’s sister-in-law, aunt to my almost sisters, a rich woman with no kids who lived in an enormous house.”
“Who lived in an enormous house?”
“Alba Nava, the sister-in-law of… look, it doesn’t matter, a rich woman in my town. I’m from Colombia. Anyway, this Alba Nava kept her huge house very neat, with a tiled pool in between the living room and the dining room, a pool for fish, but there were no fish in it, not even water. It was empty the whole week except for Wednesdays, the day on which my half-sisters and I went with Leonor to visit Alba. Then the pool was filled, but with us three.”
“Wait, what three?” asked Greg, whose mind was always somewhere else.
“Well, us three, me and Cami and Pati Nava. Us three, the three girls, they’d put us in the pool on Wednesdays.”
“In the water, with the fish?”
“I told you, there was no water or fish. What I’m trying to tell you is that Aunt Alba made us get in there, in that empty pool, for the whole visit. So that we wouldn’t get her house dirty, capisce? When it was time to serve tea, she’d bring us hot chocolate and crackers with butter and marmalade that we had to eat there, inside the pool, being very careful that not a single crumb fell outside.”
“That’s pretty pathetic,” Greg said.
“What I’m trying to say is that it’s as awful to be too clean as it is to be dirty.”
My strategy for solace must have worked, because two weeks later, the man was proposing to me. I said yes, without even thinking about it twice, and said to myself, María Paz — only it wasn’t María Paz but my real name — you did it, and I congratulated myself with little taps on the back of my shoulder and told myself to have a nice day, pretty little María Paz, you hit the jackpot finally, you’re going to marry a gringo and become a real American, so from now on have a very nice day every fucking day of your life. The thing is that my mother had come to America but she had never become a real American. Violeta and I grew up in this country, but for us also it was as if we remained at the threshold without being able to step into that enormous and bright hall. We had arrived but we hadn’t gotten here yet. Because getting to America is not landing in Phoenix, Arizona, or Dallas, Texas, or finishing high school with honors, not even speaking English without an accent. America is hidden inside America, and to truly penetrate it, a visa is not enough and neither is a Visa card, nor a green card, nor a MasterCard. All that helps, but they don’t definitively make you a real American.
For me, Greg signified access through the big door. Finally, I’d be a hundred percent American. You know what that means as far as papers? Bolivia had been able to get a green card for herself, but they had denied them for us, her daughters. In time, she had been able to normalize Violeta’s situation with the help of the mental health institute that confirmed that the girl was autistic and could not be deported because she could not take care of herself. But I remained outside. Bolivia wanted to get me in by claiming me as a mental case also, but I refused. So I behaved normally during all the psychological exams and wasn’t diagnosed with anything. Bolivia had gotten her green card when she applied for it through proper channels, but times had changed by the time I applied, and I was denied. That’s why I had to use false papers when I began to work for the survey department of the cleaning products company. It’s easy to get papers. Maybe you’re not aware of this, but the business for false documentation is a multimillion-dollar industry in this country. The problem is if they catch you, you go straight to prison. But I was saved. My marriage to Greg would allow me to obtain the proper paperwork and give me the rights to residency and work. I was going to marry a gringo; what more could I ask for. I was going to marry all these legal rights and a white American.
Of course, later I’d discover that he was a Slovak. From Slovakia, a country that before then I did not know existed. And that, even today, I confuse with Estonia and Slovenia. Greg was born in America, of Slovak roots. His mother, the one who did not bathe, was a Slovak. Comical, if you think about it. After so much suffering about being considered a foreigner, I came to find out that if you dig a little, every American is something else, from another place, and feels nostalgia for some town in Japan, or Italy, or whatever mountain in Lebanon. Or Slovakia. As for Greg, he was most nostalgic for kapustnica, a traditional soup made from fermented cabbage, and he took great pride in making it as his mother had made it, and his grandmother and great-grandmother before that, and so on all the way back to Eve. Greg and his kapustnica, a nightmare for me, for I don’t like strange foods: scrambled eggs with surprises in them, or let’s see what the spoon scoops out on this miraculous fishing expedition, nothing worse than soups that are like the sea, turbid and full of critters. I don’t go for that. I need to know exactly what I’m eating. If it’s rice, rice, or beans, beans. My tongue is a cowardly creature that hides in its cave and is terrified of strong flavors or weird textures. All the fears that I don’t have as a person, my tongue has. I’ll do anything, except to taste something I don’t recognize. In that, we were very much alike, Greg and I. He too had a phobia of unknown and suspicious foods, but of course he didn’t think of kapustnica as such. For him, kapustnica was the thing, the queen of soups, the eighth wonder of the world. I once tried to prepare a typical Colombian dish so he’d try it, so he’d learn a little bit about where I’m from. I made him ajiaco, a traditional Bogotá-style stew with three types of potato. Well, I was able to find two of the potatoes in a market for Colombian products and substituted for the third. For our native potato, which is small, yellow, and very tasty, I used the pale and sweet Idaho, but it didn’t matter, Greg would never notice. And instead of the guascas, which is an herb we add to the stew, I put some marijuana leaves, also Colombian and easier to get here. The rest was all according to the recipe, corn from the cob, chicken, capers, heavy cream, and avocado. I got emotional cooking, tears almost welling up in my eyes; it’s a whole ceremony to cook native dishes in a foreign land, something patriotic, like singing the national anthem or raising the flag. You feel as if it is you, your ancestors, your identity that are simmering in the pot. I spent a whole Saturday getting the ingredients and all of Sunday morning making it, and even took the trouble to explain to Greg that it was a pre-Columbian dish and then had to tell him what pre-Columbian was.