Catalina

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

I even loved the way Eugenides felt in my mouth, the way Lo-lee-ta felt in Humbert Humbert’s, but I wanted to think about him, I didn’t want us to be friends. I lived in the real world, and the real world was sad, and he lived in literature, and literature was beautiful. Meeting him, talking to him, seeing that he might leave his fly unzipped, that he might have spinach in his teeth, that he might enjoy the attention of nineteen-year-olds, I couldn’t bear the possibility.

While I was away at school, my grandfather had gotten even better at his silent treatments toward my grandmother. I felt bad for him. He never admitted he was sad, because if he was sad about this, then he had to be sad about everything, and how much sadness could one man take? But when I was home, something changed in him. He wanted to be close.

the bus peeled out of New York, I felt overwhelmed by relief to be leaving them, and that relief gnawed at me. My grandparents took me in, they gave me everything. But I felt nothing for them. I missed my parents, but I do not remember loving them. I might have loved my aunt and uncle as a child but I was so young, I do not remember. Feeling nothing for my family made me feel evil. Broken.

lay motionless in bed, curled up like a hurt animal hiding its belly tenderful with organs. My stomach grumbled but I didn’t have the energy to do anything about it. My skin took on a gray cast. I began to enjoy the weakness that comes from self-deprivation, falling in and out of consciousness felt good, it was so me, I finally looked how I felt. Now I’m awake, now I’m not. Now I remember. Now I forget. I am vertical. Now I am not. I am a rag doll. Henry? Henners? Mr. Kissinger, where did you go?

I did not, no, he yelled all the time and I did not like being yelled at. But fighting him felt like practice for whatever hero’s journey God had set aside for me in the future so I did it anyway. I braced in the doorway for whatever came next.

The problem with being an object of beauty, a beautiful object, is that you exist only when you’re looked at and thus to remain alive you must be constantly looked at, the way some sharks need to be in motion to breathe. It feels like soul death when their eyes are off you.

I stopped by every mirror I saw, every reflective surface. I almost didn’t recognize myself, for the self of the mind is always, or usually, a summer self, and in my mind I was very tan, but in the mirror I looked almost blue. It didn’t look like me. It wasn’t me, but I felt a lot of tenderness toward that girl, that sad, pale little thing. I hoped she had a good support system.

My grandfather spent the whole time napping, and my grandmother looked through issues of Vanity Fair and Hello! magazine that she had borrowed from the library. After the first hour, she fell asleep, too. They had made this four-hour bus ride twice in one day to support me. This is a sweet memory for me. I felt like we had just spent hours playing Frisbee at the beach. A sunny, warm, cozy kind of love. I didn’t feel it often, but once in a while it would hit me. I loved them.

I could not remember a time when I did not want to die. But now I no longer felt like dying. The worst had happened, and here we were.

Immediately upon setting foot in the Andes, the Spanish set out to compile a history of the Inca Empire and of the Andean region. From the very beginning, they were interested in studying the language, the clothing, the flora, the fauna. They wanted to document everything. It was this initial impulse to document the world that they were themselves destroying that made my blood boil. So I rooted against the khipu codebreakers. I hoped that they would never unlock the secrets of the khipu. I hoped that for them, it remained an unfulfilled longing. There were consequences to empire.