Catalina

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

lived in the real world, and the real world was sad, and he lived in literature, and literature was beautiful.

They were distraught over the fact I did not stop asking for my aunt and uncle, and even more distraught that I was calling my aunt “mami” and my uncle “papi.” They asked me, repeatedly, to now call them mami and papi. I

“They monitor everything, Catalina. They track everything. They listen to our phone calls, they have our houses bugged. They know every book we check out of the library.”

“All of this is for you,” my grandfather would say as my grandmother massaged Tiger Balm into his hands. “As long as you get an education, everything will have been worth it.”

The air quality in our home was not good for me, and when I was twelve, my pediatrician said that I had asthma. I was aghast. I was born nine thousand feet above sea level! My lungs were supposed to be spectacular. Did my pediatrician not know? Who I was? Should we tell her?

But I was not a gold-standard fighting cock. I was just a girl. That part, the fact of my being just a girl, is something my grandmother never forgot and my grandfather seldom remembered.

heard pronouncing “Nabokov” like how Sting says it in the Police song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” NAH-bah-kov. It outed him. Coetzee, Barthelme, those were tells. That he was not one of them. Why hasn’t anyone ever corrected me? It’s tricky, he explained. You don’t want to be the kind of person who corrects someone’s pronunciation, it would be uncomfortable for anyone, and here the racial dimension complicated the question in a very violent way. Besides, he thought there was a kind of condescension in it, a subconscious need to always have an outsider among them to remind them what they were not.

I felt an awful urge to go inside. Jesus lived there, and my love language was bloody sacrifice.

My grandmother stopped watching soap operas and began dressing modestly, longer skirts, no red lipstick, pantyhose. It was a surprising change to see in someone so opposed to docility. I missed the Catholic Church. It was like going from wearing gold to wearing sterling silver.

“At this school, you were a big fish in a small pond. At Harvard, you will be a very small fish in a very big pond, and it is best to approach with humility.”

Boys were easier on me when I did stuff like that. I could disappear for weeks or months at a time, and they didn’t ask questions. Sometimes they didn’t even notice.

Delphine and I looked like two different characters from the same cartoon animator. We had large, dark eyes and dark eyelids and even darker under eyes, like drawings Tim Burton might have discarded for looking too ethnic.

personal. I didn’t understand a ton about American electoral politics aside from what Jon Stewart explained on The Daily Show but I felt in my heart that people who were politically neutral were cowards.

“Are you sure you’re not in Art History?” I returned. At Harvard, it was usually white girls with money who studied Art History, daughters of war criminals, heiresses to fortunes made in something dirty like railroads or sugar.

In the fall of our junior year, my friend Kyle Johnson nominated me for the Signet, an arts and letters secret society so secret that it had a website with the names of members going back one hundred years.

My grandfather and Harvard anthropologists tag-teamed my education on the Americas and the truth is they agreed on the basic story. First came the Spaniards, and with them the Church, then came petroleum, then came cocaine, then came NAFTA, and now we were all fucked.

This cuts so deep especially with the results of the election

Whenever he conquered a new group of people and forced them to become Inca, Atahualpa ordered that the people’s quipucamayocs be killed and ordered that their khipus be burned. He wanted to control the narrative. He wanted history to belong to him. He wanted to erase their memories. He really wanted them gone. There, working, paying taxes, but gone. This was not the last time quipucamayocs were met with violence by a power-hungry regime. When the Spanish invaded, they burned as many khipus as they wanted to and killed the quipucamayocs, too.

But for all his love of exotic, sensuous, beautiful Latin America, Nathaniel didn’t seem too interested in Latine people. He didn’t have very many friends like me, did he?

I felt flattered and humiliated. I wanted to be loved and admired, but I did not want to be talked about.

It was my first time seeing white people dance outside of television and for what it’s worth I thought it was very brave.

At around three in the morning I got a text from Nathaniel. Let me take you on a proper date.

No, not at all. Then after several minutes: Do you want me to fuck you?

I hate your stupid opinions on art because you grew up with cable? I will never take you seriously because your family owns a vacation home?

Childhood religious trauma had made me all but allergic to modest clothing.

I’d never met such a delightfully dressed heterosexual.

I knew this was coming, it happens to every undocumented person in America. It is simply a matter of time. A close family member back home dies. You are unable to leave this country, unable to travel home, to say goodbye, to bury your dead. You can afford a calling card but, try as you might to influence the funeral arrangements, you’re not there. You’re in one of those nightmares where you scream and scream and nobody can hear you. It was our turn now.

real-ass snow, tuning into NY1 News at 5:00 a.m., hoping for a snow day from Mayor Bloomberg.

Real asf

Out of all the different ways there are to be white, being Italian is my favorite.

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.

Let’s say this happens to you. What would you do? Describe your plan below. I’m dying to know.

In public, Byron Wheeler was known for being quick-tempered, prone to excess, a little reckless, a little messy—he could do a better job at hiding his infidelities, for example—but he was brilliant, which absolved him of everything.

The rest of the world is plundered and bombed so rich white people can eat Caesar salad with each other and be inane.

My body was covered in layers of clothing—tights under my jeans, a fuzzy sweater under my coat, gloves—but my face was exposed, and the gravel scratched its way across my chin, my cheeks, my nose, as I rolled to the side of the road. My face! My beautiful face! Nathaniel stopped the car and ran over. “What the fuck!” he yelled. “What the fuck!” “I’m okay,” I said, standing up quickly to prove just how okay I was. I was dizzy. “Just take me home.” “The fuck, Catalina, there’s blood all over your face. I should take you to the hospital.”

Anyway, another thing that kept me from reading the book is that Nathaniel told me to read it and I do not like it when boys tell me what to read.

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.