Broken Doll: A daughter's suicide in another country

236 er heart isn’t yet hanging by a thread. But it soon will be. It’s the night of May 10, 2015 and in her house in Regla, on the outskirts of Havana, Cándida López receives a call from her daughter Mayara Alvite in Quito, wishing her a happy Mother’s Day. Cándida recalls a bright, loving conversation, dampened only by the anguish of physical distance. Her daughter seems livelier and more upbeat than she has been recently, more like herself. Which is reason enough for Cándida to recover a bit of the calm she’s rarely felt since October 2014, when Mayara sold her dead father’s house in San Miguel del Padrón and decided to emigrate to Ecuador to try her luck with her girlfriend, Waday, a Broken Doll A daughter’s suicide in another country Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated by Rahul Bery dispatch H BROKEN DOLL | 237 forty-year-old, half-Chinese woman Cándida has always detested because she is very controlling of her daughter, only twenty-three. From the night of the phone call on, Mayara, despondent and in an unfamiliar place, becomes progressively glummer until, on the morning of May 12, Cándida receives another phone call from her daughter’s number. It is Waday. It is a dam which the events come bursting through. “When I woke up that day I hadn’t felt like having breakfast,” she says. “I didn’t even want to get out of bed. I had a tight feeling in my chest. I didn’t know what was happening to me.” Cándida, petrified, deep in the tunnel where they tell her over and over again that, yesterday night, from a beam in a closet, with a luggage strap, your daughter, Mayara h a n g e d herself. her blood pressure goes through the roof. Everything Cándida does from now on—her relentless crusade for the return of her daughter’s body, the brief moments of trying to think about anything else—she will do with her nerves pulverized, sunk deep into a cancerous struggle that will manifest itself in di≠erent ways, with one horrific constant: the feeling of having nothing to lean on, nothing to look forward to. Forty-five minutes after the conversation with Cándida, Waday—whom everyone calls La China—calls again and talks to Cándida’s sister-in-law. She needs five thousand dollars, she says 238 | CARLOS MANUEL ÁLVAREZ disdainfully, and power of attorney, authorizing her to deal with the process of getting the body repatriated. On her way back from the polyclinic, still unsettled and clinging to the ever fainter possibility that this is some cruel trick, Cándida decides she’s not going to send any money to La China, firstly because she doesn’t have any, and secondly because under no circumstances will she give one penny, and far less power of attorney, to that harpy. And then Cándida gets another idea. “La China murdered my daughter,” she says. “My daughter was full of life. A mother can’t be wrong. More than anything, my daughter loved and respected life.” And a while later: “If they bring her, I’m going to dress her up real nice. If they don’t let me dress her, I’ll kiss her, I’ll touch her. I want to do it all.” And so, during that first week, caught between blind rage and unlimited a≠ection, Cándida visits di≠erent organizations in search of help. She goes to the Calzada and K. funeral home. She goes to the o∞ce for public assistance at the Ministry of Foreign A≠airs (Minrex). She goes to the Council of State. She goes to the Ecuadorian embassy. She goes to the National Center for Sexual Education (Cenesex), where her daughter was an activist. She goes to the studios of Kcho, an artist with some influence in political circles. She goes to the cathedral to speak to Cardinal Jaime Ortega. She goes to see the city’s historian, Eusebio Leal. She writes letters to President Rafael Correa and—why not?—the Telesur journalist Walter...