In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Nohora Viviana Cardona 37 The Faker Graciela isn’t my mom, but I love her as if she were, which is saying a lot. She started giving me lessons about men for my own good (as she always said) after I turned twelve and men began to give me catcalls in the streets when I’d go on errands with her. I’d turn all red, but the truth was I liked it. I began to pay closer attention to myself in the mirror. First, I put on lipstick: the sparkly kind that tasted like grapes, a gift from my friend Patricia who lived down the street. Next came eyeliner: “It makes your eyes look bigger, as if you were at least fifteen,” Patricia said. Then there were the dresses. I wanted dresses like the ones worn by a certain young actress in the nighttime soap opera; they were pleated and my legs looked beautiful in them. Graciela didn’t like how I was changing. She’d tell me she thought I was going to end up lost, but I never understood her. After all, what’s wrong with wanting to be pretty like the actresses on television? Around that time Graciela became a widow, and we both fell on hard times. She didn’t want me to work; I was too pretty and poor to be able to stay decent in any job I was offered. At least that’s what the women who pitied our obvious poverty kept saying. One morning, dressed up in a black chiffon hat that I’d never seen her in before and with an enormous suitcase in her hand, she told me that we were leaving to travel from town to town to sell what was left of the merchandise from her dead husband’s store. We travelled on ramshackle buses through dusty towns where the only place that seemed to escape the misery was the church. Invariably, Graciela would visit the church as soon as we arrived in a town and just as we were about to leave. She would always leave an offering, light a white candle and pray for many things: for the soul of her dead husband, for the success of our business and, especially, for my virtue. I think it was during one of those prayers that I began to want to wriggle free of my virtue; I realized it was getting in the way of everything. I knew I wouldn’t have to wait much longer. Cloudburst 38 One day my ruin arrived, as Graciela had predicted, in the form of Danilo. I liked him from the first time I saw him, so I let his anxious hands invent my woman’s body and decided it was better to feel than to dream. He gave me presents when I satisfied him, but he also gave me beatings that not a single one of my tricks could prevent. I said goodbye to him with a kiss on the mouth and without much remorse though I also thanked him for the things he taught me in the very bed to which I began to bring all the others. Now, after so many Danilos, I think of him as rather clumsy, because everywhere I’ve been, I’ve experienced a lot. While Graciela was selling her knickknacks, I discovered that I had something to sell that no one would ever haggle over, unlike Graciela with her umbrellas, discoloured by too muchsun,orthelittleblacksewingkitsthatseemedtomagically multiply inside the cookie tin where she kept them. It didn’t take her long to figure out the business I was running. First she insulted me, then she wept for my sins, and finally she begged me to go back to being a good woman. I wasn’t interested, though, at least not in the way Graciela meant it. I said goodbye to her with a kiss on the cheek and with many regrets, because I had learned to love her. My life has changed since then, and I’m becoming an increasingly efficient lover. It’s not that I’ve learned from every man I’ve ever been to bed with, because after all, most of them are the same. They’re all in such a brutish rush as soon as they take off my skirt, and they all like the same balancing acts I’ve become so good at performing, though sometimes awkwardly, so they think I’ve never done it like that before. Then...

Share