Catalina

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

It didn’t matter who they were. It mattered who I was.

In García Márquez, people in love experienced bouts of vomiting, psychosomatic fevers, and real catatonia. I wanted to make boys sick, too. This is how I wanted to be loved.

“My mother is dead,” I said. What a line.

“So you just say things, sometimes?” he asked, tying the laces on my white leather Oxfords, shoes my grandmother bought specifically so I could wear them to parties with boys. “Like, you say whatever you want? Because it amuses you?”

“I guess I’ll see you around,” he said. “No,” I said. “Stay.” “Me?” he asked, unnecessarily. “I’m bored and you’re not boring.”

“You’re very good at this,” he said. “What am I good at?” “Flirting effectively.” “Effectively! Wow. What do you think my goal is?” “I’m not sure,” he said. “But I never turn down a challenge.”

You can’t pretend you don’t give a shit when you’re comping a secret society. You clearly care, a lot. The thing about being at Harvard is that in order to be there at all, you would have had to be the kind of person who applies to Harvard. You weren’t necessarily a megalomaniac if you went to Harvard, but it helped if you were.

Kyle was the first classmate at Harvard I told I was undocumented, even before Delphine. It was a different time. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas would not publicly come out as undocumented on the cover of The New York Times Magazine for three more years.

What I sometimes dreamed of, in my most private, impossible dreams, hidden inside a vault, safe within a safe, was to be a boy reporter on the eve of a revolution.

I figured out quickly that in order to learn about Latin America, I had to go to Anthropology or Literature. There were no professors of Latin American History at Harvard. Real live Latin Americans taught in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department but the professors and TAs for most of my Anthro classes were white. Like Darth Vader, Mickey Mouse, and Henry Kissinger, I have always known about anthropologists.

Inside the lecture halls, seeing Latines from all over was thrilling, even if I had little interest in befriending them. The Latines from Texas were not like the Latines from Alaska who were not like the Latines from Matamoros who were not like the Latines from the Bronx.

Telemundo had told us that Latines looked like Mexican-born Polish actresses for so long that I’d almost forgotten what we looked like, but here we were, everything at once.

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.

“You’ll see I marked you down because the point of the paper was to use primary sources.” “You mean the point of the essay,” I corrected him. “And I was my primary source.” “Sometimes I wish Uribe had just killed me,” he said under his breath.

“I told him he only talked to me because I was pretty and charismatic and he said I wasn’t that charismatic.”

We saw pictures of him with a girl I assumed was his ex. You don’t need a description of her. It’s a police sketch of a pretty white girl.

I could see, from the outside, how someone might think I would be good for the job, but that’s because they didn’t know shit about me. Still, if the DREAM Act somehow did pass, I didn’t want to look back and realize I had done nothing to fight for the bill. I had, in fact, done nothing—none of the teach-ins, sit-ins, hunger strikes, phone banking, or risky media appearances—but if it passed, I would benefit from all of that labor anyhow. I’d be able to have a life.

If I made my eyes glaze over, like really glaze over, he looked like the drummer from the Strokes.

I was so hungry but had already decided no food would satisfy me, nothing sweet, nothing savory. For a minute I wondered if what I wanted was sex, but then realized that what I wanted was to punish everyone who ever laid a finger on me.

Now that I had Nathaniel’s attention, I had no idea what to do with it. He was looking at me and I was looking at myself being looked at. It’s a powerful thing, being an object, but it’s boring. All you have to do is sit there.

“My rabbi friended me on Facebook last night,” he said as we started to walk to Kirkland House. “I spent all morning scrubbing my profile of anything remotely offensive.” “I can make it offensive again,” I said, too quickly.

i loooooveee this banter

Nathaniel wanted to take over my grandfather’s spot at the head of the table, condemned forever to the first slice of cake, the choice cut from the roasted bird, the final say. I just wanted him to kiss me.

“My grandma is a nanny and my grandfather owns a construction company.” “Oh, awesome,” he said. “That is really cool.” The truth, that my grandmother didn’t work but occasionally babysat for neighbors, and that my grandfather was aging out of being a construction worker, was not something Nathaniel had earned.

“Let’s say this is the parent cord. Okay?” I wanted him to stop talking, and he’d do that sooner if I pretended to know nothing. “Now, picture a bunch of strings hanging from this arm, and each one of those strings has knots. Those strings can also have their own strings with their own knots, those are called subsidiary cords. Let me know if this is too boring.” “No, not at all. It’s super interesting.”

“If you’re trained, you don’t have to touch them to know.” “I don’t think you’re right,” I said softly. “I don’t know what to do about you,” he said.

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

What Goldman Sachs was to Harvard seniors is what the U.S. Army was to me and my high school classmates.

The first story was a very serious story about two young men in love, and there was a lot of sex in it, and a lot of fighting. It was clear that this was a serious story. The second story was about a garden snake that eats a puppy.

Meeting his father before sleeping with him felt wrong, but this is how boys are sometimes. They get excited.

Did I want to be Nathaniel’s girlfriend? No. I wanted him to fuck me. Him particularly. Something about the hard turn upward of his chin. I could take or leave the rest but that I loved. It could make me shy.

like i get her!

Emasculation at the hands of the state is a very cunning thing for the state to do because men will never see it coming from the state. They’ll blame the subjects in their own kingdoms, the women and children to whom they are lords. The only people to whom they are lords.

One reliable fact about gaggles of men is their method of camaraderie building, a spot of rape to soothe the nerves or distract them from a lack of organizational forethought. They redraw maps into the night in White Nights cosplay, thinking up brilliant new constitutions for the republic on the way to the bathroom. And they rape.

So I learned that!

The honest-to-god truth is that even though I had not worked on my thesis at all, and even though I didn’t even have a topic, I was 70 percent sure I would win a thesis prize. Why not? It was a stretch, but so was everything.

If something magical was going to happen to me, ever, it was probably going to happen in December.

“Well, I am an artist, too. And in my opinion, artists don’t need to have a life of great suffering in order to make art, not necessarily anyway. I would even venture to say most artists have not lived lives of incredible suffering.”

It was cold—the cold feels colder in New England, the dark looks darker. It’s personal.

Men! Men men men men men men men. I knew what they were thinking. I had read Freud and Norman Mailer, Murakami and Díaz and Bellow and Nabokov Nabokov Nabokov and I was submerged in the world of indie rock so I was intimately familiar with the music catalog of Ryan Adams. I knew what I could aspire to in the eyes of a sensitive man. “Oh, Maria, Maria / She fell in love in East L.A. / To the sounds of the guitar / Played by Carlos Santana.”

Part of the problem is that my ability to achieve an orgasm did not depend on anyone else, or even on whether or not I was turned on. It was mechanical. Anyone could have me writhing on their floor because it wasn’t about them. It was about me. I could have five or six orgasms and still be stunningly bored. After I came, I was ejected from Olympus and became fully human again. After all that hullabaloo, this was an orgasm.

had a dream about you,” I said, lying. “What did you dream about?” “Your hands.” I couldn’t say it without laughing. “Does that work on guys usually?” “Usually. I’m running out of tricks.” “Good. I like you without the tricks.” “No, you don’t. That’s just something you have to say because it’s decent.”

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

I never cared much for Central Park. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d give up my life for Central Park, I recognized its majesty and beauty and, you know, proletariat vim. I simply did not like nature.

This is how Teddy loved his animals: He killed them, stuffed them, then kept them to look at forever. “I would like to see all harmless wild things, but especially birds, protected in every way,” he said. Okay. Imagine shooting a fucking plover.

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.

“You’re just being provocative. You could never work for a hedge fund because you’re not dead inside.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, which I had just finished reading. There is a chapter called “The Part About the Crimes,” part three, I believe.

Nathaniel and I began to meet in smaller and smaller places—like any empty stairwell at the Peabody during my lunch breaks—and we began to consider each other the most exciting people in the world, which is what meeting someone in increasingly smaller spaces will do.

I had learned that accusing a cultural institution of being a parody of itself was always a legitimate opinion and usually a conversation-ender.

He was the Roman wing at the Met, and I wanted to carve into him with a knife.

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