By Emilia Arabia
“You look different today,” Esteban said before dropping the menu down on the mahogany table. She tilted her head toward her right shoulder, pursing her lips.
She had been with Yasmin’s friends that morning. They waited for her at the transmilenio stop holding canvas bags filled with spray paint cans. A gust of sweat and patchouli followed Yasmin as she jumped off the red bus. After the bus doors shut, the tang evaporated and she smelled like dizzying paint and cigarettes, just like Yasmin always did. They walked along the brick walls, dodging trash bags and cracks on the concrete, to the Economics building of Universidad Nacional de Colombia and set their bags under the graffiti of Che Guevara. He looked like Jeison, or rather, Jeison looked like him: beret, long hair, moustache, furrowed bushy eyebrows and nostrils upturned in dissent.
Yasmin knew that students would convene under Che after classes and smoke weed on the patchy grass. They would see the new graffiti, vivid and angry within the smoke, calling them to strike against the university’s new deal with the government tomorrow. Yasmin knew what would happen tomorrow because it happened last year and the year before — tear gas would flow through the university, boots would bang on students’ bodies, riot batons would crack windows and heads. Jeison, their leader, would be arrested again, held on bail none of them could afford. She shook the can and drew a red fist on the wall. Whatever happened did not matter to her. She would not be here because she would not be Yasmin tomorrow.
A phone rang. Her friends looked around and Jeison bent his arm around his waist, but she managed to shut the ringing off quickly before he could pull the gun out. It’s probably nothing, she said, but she was going to check if someone was around just in case. She saw Yasmin’s harsh glare in Jeison’s eyes when he told her to take his gun with her. She snuck off around the corner, looking over her shoulder before smuggling the iPhone out of her jean pocket stained with white paint. The caller ID read Esteban Lacouture. She never brought Maria Antonia’s phone to these meetings with Yasmin’s friends in southern Bogotá, but Esteban had texted her saying he would call her at some point during the week. It was Friday, three days after they met, and somehow she knew he would call today. He asked Maria Antonia out to dinner. Osaki. 8 p.m. He said he would pick her up at around 7, to send him her address, but she said there was no need. Her dad would let her use the driver.
She had walked up to the stone building at 8:15. Without any signs or lights outside, it almost disappeared into the starless night. But she had been to places like these before and knew that the secret password was knowing where the door was — hidden around a corner or behind a vase where people who did not belong there would not be able to find it. An elevator ride led her to a dimly-lit salon with a burgundy rug, and a maître d’ led her to Esteban. The roots of his blonde hair were tinted dark red by the overhead light and he sat in front of an empty seat and a full glass of red wine. She apologized for her tardiness; the driver had been stuck in traffic after dropping her parents off at a dinner. That Bogotá traffic, you know, it’s impossible to move in the north, she said while he held the chair out for her to sit. They had settled into silence after, both paging through the menus, until Esteban fixed his gaze on her and told her she looked different today.
She laughed a sincere laugh and set the menu on the table. “Yeah? Who do I look like?”
“I’m not sure, but you look good,” he shrugged, but kept looking intently at her. “So. Maria Antonia. What’s your last name again? I don’t think you told me before.”
She looked at her reflection on the single-pane window behind him. His tall frame blocked her face from view, but her blowout protruded like a wig on his head. That was the real reason she was late — it had taken her hours to remove Yasmin’s beads and feathers from her hair and style it like the girls in Esteban’s Instagram photos. They all had layered hair with bouncy curls which sat perfect on their black turtlenecks and little Louis Vuitton purses with only lipstick inside — they never paid for anything anyway — so she straightened her hair with a hot comb and fished out the black top that looked like silk and the Louis Vuitton purse she had gotten at the flea market from the dresser. A great replica, even if it was bigger than the girls’.
“Santacruz,” Maria Antonia said slowly, as she had practiced, but she understood that a question still lingered in the air. “My dad works in emeralds.”
Her voice raised at the end. Esteban called the waiter over and ordered the yellowtail sashimi. She quickly opened the menu and glanced at the dish’s description, then smiled at the waiter and said it was her favorite. She would also be having that.
“Huh. Never heard of you.” Esteban dismissed the waiter with a limp hand. “Is he new to the business, or…?”
She knew that he meant to ask if she came from old money. She let out a boisterous laugh as she rotated the big, green stone hanging on her neck with her fingers. “What do you think?”
He snorted faintly and nodded. But she meant it. Sitting in front of Esteban Lacouture in this dimly-lit restaurant in Bogotá D.C, eighty-six hundred feet and fifteen floors from sea level, she came from old money. Maria Antonia Santacruz was born in a colonial country house in La Calera and now she lived in a penthouse a few blocks away from here. She picked the shiniest and tallest one from the skyline of twinkling buildings behind Esteban, and decided Maria Antonia’s parents had bought it for her as a graduation gift with emerald money.
Behind the bright mass of apartments, she saw zinc roofs and rundown brick houses stacked high atop the mountains. She had walked through those neighborhoods — the invasiones — with Yasmin’s friends, sat on the tree stubs and thrown rocks at the telephone lines on which small tennis shoes hung, tied by fraying laces she knew would rip at any minute. The moon was full and high above the entire city, and the silver halo around it beamed the same white light on all the neighborhoods, even those that did not need the light. As she peered out the window, she felt his gaze fixed intently on her, searching for something on her face.
“What?” She smirked, moving her eyes over his. She knew she looked great, her hair and jewelry glittering within his brown eyes turned hazel by the lights.
It was the same reflection she had glimpsed on her room’s window the morning she met Esteban. She stood in front of her dresser and ran her fingers over Yasmin’s paint brush and cigarette pack, over Maria Antonia’s ring placed next to the Sharpie, as she did every morning. The pearl-cut rock refracted a green light on the dresser, calling her to it, pulling her away from Yasmin — so Maria Antonia it was. With the ring on her finger, she started to feel like her. She placed the tip of the Sharpie on her right upper lip, clasped the golden bracelet around her left wrist, sprayed the perfume that smelled like Chanel No. 5 on her temples and waited for it to dry before fastening the golden chain around her neck. Then she zipped up the black mini skirt and the faux leather boots, and clasped the green earrings on her earlobes as she walked out the door.
Every day as Maria Antonia began with incessant honking from all directions of the four-lane road in front of the studio apartment. A motorcycle sped past as she tried to cross the road, exuding a cloud of grey fumes that clung to her lungs and made her eyes water. Coughing, she began to walk along the row of foggy window panes that concealed small rooms, but the sound of crying, frying and washing machines within them was clear as day. When the rumbling of motorcycles and racket from the apartments subsided into the peaceful rustling of leaves, she knew she had arrived in Los Rosales. Tall white buildings towered over her, their windows revealing high ceilings and furniture that looked miniature from below. Her clattering heels pierced through the early morning breeze.
She stood right in front of Brigard Urrutia, rustling through the documents inside her purse. Every so often, she would peek at the man guarding the front door as he checked work IDs and greeted dark-suited lawyers into the limestone-colored building. A long-haired man approached the glass door and started talking to the guard. She heard coins clinking inside a plastic cup as the guard led the man away, his black boots behind the man’s bare feet. With her eyes fixed on them, she started walking toward the door, boots clattering loudly. The guard was approaching but kept looking back at the man, who had set his cup and himself down on the concrete ground. She swung the door open and walked in, but instead of feeling the dry air from the AC on her face, she felt the warmth of a body grazing her front.
“Uy,” a man blurted. She tilted her head upward to meet his eyes, wide and startled.
He had blonde hair which brushed against his darker eyebrows, bushy like Jeison’s, but relaxed. His nose was upturned and thin, which, like his light hair, gave him an air of foreignness.
“Ay, perdón,” he said, moving to the side to let her enter the building. “¿Te pegué? (Did I hit you?)”
She shook her head, expecting him to smile and leave through the door now that she was no longer in his way.
“I hope I’m not making you late to work…” he said, his voice tilting up in search of her name.
“Maria Antonia,” she said, her mouth morphing into the confident smile she used every time she became Maria Antonia. To say it is to make it so.
She extended her hand toward him, holding her eyes over his. His hand was soft and uncalloused. She saw the green stone twinkling in his reflection, and the impressed lift of his eyebrows told her he thought it was emerald. His name was Esteban Lacouture. She went to open her mouth and Esteban rolled his eyes, answering the question he saw brewing down her throat: yes, those Lacouture. Now she was impressed, and surprised, that he had fallen right into her lap. We should go out some time, she told him, I’ll give you my number. Her long nails clicked on his phone screen as she typed Maria Antonia, no last name. Boots thumping on the marble floor, she smiled back at him, pale sunlight in her hair.
He had liked that mischievous smile back then, but now he loved it, dim in the night, so the only thing he could see was the deep shade of her open lips as she walked into his apartment. Leaning on the door, he followed her swinging hips with his eyes until she vanished into the dark living room, before trailing behind the clatter of her boots. When he caught up to her, she saw her reflection on his pupils, hazy but still visible under the moonlight that shone through the window. She liked the way he looked at her, as unnerving as it was. His eyes moved fleetingly over each frown line, each freckle, and steadied over the beauty mark she had painted on her upper lip that morning. He grazed his finger over it before softly setting his lips on hers. Even with her reflection hidden behind his closed eyes, she knew Maria Antonia was real and she knew she was her, the most her she had ever been since she birthed this high-class girl under the strobe lights and the clinking of aguardiente bottles six months ago. She felt his eyes on her as she pretended to sleep and she knew Maria Antonia had him.
Pale gold light crept through the curtain and Esteban’s arm felt cold and rigid around her neck. The silk sheets had slipped off their bodies during the night and the morning breeze raised goosebumps on her thighs, but she felt stuck and sweaty in Esteban’s wool sweater. She managed to break free from his grip and sit up on the bed. From here, he looked like a little boy dreaming, his arms around his rising chest, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned. She felt nothing except for uncomfortable nakedness without Maria Antonia’s clothes and boots, which were carelessly strewn on the wooden floor. He had knelt down to unzip her boots last night, his eyes half-closed and twinkling up at her, but she stopped him. Put the blinds down.
Having dressed as Maria Antonia again, she walked out to the living room. Through the wide window, she could see all of Bogotá, its streets far apart and small, hazy in the morning mist. Could she abandon the roar of the sea of protestors marching behind Yasmin for this view of Bogotá, with the brick buildings and green mountains and girls with small purses and judging eyes way under her? He didn’t have a television, though, just a light brown bookcase that reached the top of the ceiling, brimming with books and portraits. She tread along it, running her fingers over the spines of cloth, leather, linen, running her eyes over words she couldn’t make out. A faint alarm sound reached the living room. She ran toward Esteban’s room, hoping the clack of her boots on the floor would drown out the ringing. He had turned to lay on his back, and she saw his back muscles flexing in and out as she dug through her purse. As she sneaked out from his room, she picked up on the third ring.
“Alo? (Hello?)” Yasmin said, her voice dropping.
“¿Donde está? ¿Por qué no ha llegado? (Where are you? Why aren’t you here yet?)” Jeison was yelling on the other side. She could hear metal scraping and hitting the floor, hard. From above, she could almost see them, a bunch of students gripping jagged pieces of wood, breaking into the university and setting up a barricade with stolen barbed wire.
“No me hable así, Jeison, que yo no soy su noviecita pa’ que me ande regañando (Don’t speak to me like that, I’m not a little girlfriend you can yell at),” she barked back. Yasmin’s anger reverberated through the high walls of Esteban’s apartment, creating a cacophony with the dull thumps of Maria Antonia’s heels around the kitchen floor.
Jeison started ranting about her tardiness, her lack of commitment to the movement, but she lost herself again in the view of Bogotá. Maria Antonia held it all in her hand as she set her palm against the clean window pane, but the people walking down there, small as ants, would soon belong to Yasmin as she set the city up in flames. It electrified her, that she could own everything, be everything, whenever she wanted to.
“Ya salgo para allá (I’m on my way).” Her boots screeched on the marble as she turned around.
Esteban was leaning against the wall, watching her. He felt there was something strange about her — her leather boots didn’t fit her right. She started to walk toward his room, but he put his bare chest in front of her.
“Did something happen?” he grazed his thumb over her cheek like he had done last night. Her skin felt rough, somehow angry.
“No se preocupe (Do not worry),” she said lowly, tensing her face away from his hand, and hurried off to his room.
Esteban furrowed his brows at Maria Antonia’s formal language, so unlike the girl who had ordered him to give her his number and put the blinds down. He kept his eyes on her as she opened the door, her gaudy purse swinging on her shoulder. She looked back at him as she banged the door behind her. The mark he had lovingly gazed upon as she drifted off to sleep was gone from her face.
——
Yasmin’s heart beat to the thumps of hundreds of feet marching behind her down Avenida NQS. Her shoulder rubbed against Jeison’s as they swerved around a line of parked cars, the friction creating a spark she hoped would blow up at any moment. The students’ chants — demands for free and universal education and justice for murdered and imprisoned students, she supposed — seemed to dissolve into her name, a howl that resounded through Bogotá and made the entire city know who she was. Yasmin.
A sharp hiss came from the back and her neck jolted. Someone was waving a flare high up above the moving mass of people, lighting the dark night with red. The smoke obscured the crowd. She saw the people disperse. Her heartbeat faltered. They all fluttered around, shielding their eyes from the smoke, coughing. Jeison was yelling at them to keep marching, keep fighting.
She pushed her fist into the air and snatched Jeison’s megaphone from his hand, putting it close to her lips. “Mataron a Daniel! El estado mató a Daniel! (They killed Daniel! The state killed Daniel!)”
The roar of people as they began to march brought Yasmin back. She held all of them in her closed fist, and the rush of blood in her ears drowned out Jeison’s spouting. A long line of cops stood still at the end of the avenue, their riot shields and bats promising to destroy the shared body. It marched toward the riot guard regardless, with one body, one mind that angrily mourned the murdered boy, whose name it had forgotten by now.
“¿Qué son esas uñas? (What are those nails?)” Jeison’s voice cut through the admiring wails of people behind Yasmin. “¿Qué le pasa, por qué parece una perra burguesa? (What’s wrong with you, why do you look like a bourgeoisie bitch?)”
She saw his eyes, half-closed in confusion, focused on her fist. In his reflection she could see Maria Antonia’s long french-tips still glued to her nails, resting on her palm. He looked at her again and she saw Maria Antonia’s face in his reflection as she put her fist down. Jeison went to grab her shoulder, the crowd stopped moving. She could only hear the thump of her sneakers on the concrete as she ran to the end of the avenue, up to a faceless soldier. She saw the beads and feathers bouncing up and down, blurry and tangled in her hair, on the cop’s riot shield. Who did he think she was?
The cop unsheathed his riot baton as she reached the barrier. She heard Jeison scream her name from behind, asking her if she was crazy, but she didn’t stop running until she heard the crack of his ribs. His body thumped on the concrete, limp and jerking under the kicks of the cop’s boots.
“¡Cogieron a Jeison! (They got Jeison!)” Someone from the crowd shouted. Yasmin was swallowed by the heat of the bodies crying out for Jeison on one side, the rattling of Jeison’s bones on the other.
Blood dripped from his nose as he held out his arm toward her. She turned around and pushed through the crowd, looking for an escape from the emptiness left inside her by the broken crowd that no longer looked at Yasmin.
“Yasmin, marica, ¿está bien? ¿Qué le paso? (Yasmin, dude, are you okay? What happened?)” A man held her arm tight. She saw Yasmin in his reflection and her nostrils were invaded by cigarette smoke. She nodded and knelt down.
The brick was heavy and warm in her hand as she threw it toward the riot guard. She felt the mass behind her stop and watch its trajectory, drop its eyes on her. Their general. Yasmin stood still and looked at the bottles, cigarette packs, rocks, broken concrete and rocks flying overhead, like shooting stars in the night sky. The riot guard started to retreat deeper into the avenue as the protesters yelled, shooting cannons at them. Her laughter was pierced by the shattering of glass behind her. A shard sliced her cheek. The flowing blood was hot, almost scalding, against the bite of the Bogotá cold.
She walked away, leaving a mass of people, beaten and bloodied, behind in the avenue. The gash was still pulsing, still breathing life into her, as she closed the door behind her. She was Yasmin with the patch of blood on her face, the sweet rush of pain and anger electrifying her from the inside out. Maria Antonia could never feel this, lest it ruin her manicure. Her phone was ringing on the dresser. Esteban. Yasmin let it ring.
——
The riots in La Nacional had gone on for two weeks and Esteban had not seen Maria Antonia since the morning she escaped out his front door, leaving one of her emerald earrings and her beauty mark scattered on his bed. He texted her every day to remind her of her earring — it probably meant a lot to her, being an emerald and all — but she just said she would come for it eventually. For the meantime, he kept it in his bedside table on top of his copy of The Stranger, surrounded by condoms and hoops and pearls left by ex-girlfriends and one-night stands when he asked them to leave. It shone a green light on the wooden cabinet, like a shiny cross in an altar. When he stared at it, he almost prayed that she would call him back.
Did he do something wrong? Did she have a boyfriend or something? None of the guys at the country club knew her. They said they would remember her if they did when Esteban showed them the only photo he had of her, laying on his bed, his silk sheets and sweater covering her body. Everyone in Bogotá — or at least, everyone who mattered — came to know Maria Antonia Santacruz, the girl who had left Esteban Lacouture high and dry and naked. Serves you right for all the girls you’ve done that to, Juan Manuel told him, but Esteban just told him to shut up and keep looking. They were almost done with the stack of yearbooks on his coffee table and all of the dead-eyed rich girls with ties and private-school skirts rolled up to their thighs were blurring into one. None of them had Maria Antonia’s piercing stare that went right through his pupils, her confident grin, her last name.
Juan Manuel asked if he was drunk when “they met,” air quotes included. His parents said the same, even if they did not phrase it like that, when he asked them if they knew about a Santacruz family that worked in emeralds. As her texts became more and more sparse, his friends started to taunt him with the girl he had seemingly made up. With every joking mention of her name, the feeling of Maria Antonia’s arms around his neck vanished from his memory until she became an urban legend amongst his friends, like Bloody Mary when they were in primary school. But she texted him back one Monday, saying she had spent the week in her family’s house in La Calera to escape from this mess of a city.
That glimpse of the Maria Antonia he had dinner with led him to Brigard Urrutia on Tuesday, two weeks after they met. He paced around the reception since the law firm opened, watching lawyers clock into work, leave for lunch, and come back. A girl in a pencil skirt, followed by a security guard, eventually asked him to leave. He wanted to tell them his dad knew Brigard and Urrutia so they would just leave him alone, but he kept quiet. The sky started turning orange when Esteban decided to cut his losses and go home. Maybe Juan Manuel was right, maybe she never did exist. But he still longed to feel her piercing gaze on him, wished to ask why she left that morning.
As he walked to his car, he heard boots clacking on the concrete on the other side of the sidewalk. Before he could call out her name, he found himself trailing behind Maria Antonia, too conflicted to catch up to her. She kept walking south, down the last block in Los Rosales, down a road Esteban had never driven down, let alone walked. The stars on the purplish sky shone more light on the street than the crackling streetlights. He had to dodge deep cracks on the sidewalk and children who were splashing on the flooded potholes and running across the road in front of fast, busted Jeeps. Girls in green joggers and men on motorcycles stared at him as he walked along the two-story houses that looked like apartments but smaller, shorter, dilapidated and dirty. But Maria Antonia, far in front of him, never stopped to look for directions on her phone — which seemed like a smart idea, being where they were — or look around at the jungle that surrounded them. She just stopped in front of an orange building and went inside.
A bomb went off two blocks away from that street the next day and Maria Antonia still hadn’t responded to Esteban’s texts or calls. He called off work early and sat on a bench in the corner of that apartment at noon. A dog with its ribs sticking through its skin joined him, dropping down near the bench. He had to bat fleas away from his feet as he mulled over what he would say to Maria Antonia. He would tell her that he liked her and he didn’t care that she lived here, among the exploding exhausts of motorcycles, the sizzling empanadas stalls, the children running barefoot on the trash strewn on the concrete — even if he actually did. His parents would definitely care. Sirens wailed far away and a red bus whooshed and stopped a few steps from Esteban’s bench.
He watched a young woman with big hair jump off the bus and wondered if it was safe for her to take one of those in the current state of the city. His neck turned to follow her. There was something about her small nose, her lips, pink and pale, that made his eyebrows furrow. She walked up to the building with a slight swing of her hips. He knew the woman was Maria Antonia the second she closed the white steel door. Then he was pounding on it, his silver watch digging on his wrist. Maria Antonia opened the door and looked up at him. She had an ugly scar on her cheek. Her features looked harsh and all wrong.
He had pushed her out of the way before she realized it was Esteban, and he was already in the middle of the room, looking around. She ran to stand in front of him and fixed her eyes on his pupils, seeing the mattress on the tile, the beige pillow, the dresser, with the scattered jewelry and perfume and cigarettes, the windows boarded with aluminum sheets.
“What the fuck…what is this place?” Esteban said in a low voice. She felt rigid hearing his dull footsteps on the yellow tile, but she managed to take off Yasmin’s snarl and put Maria Antonia’s smile on her face instead.
He met her downturned eyes with that unsettling glare. “Who are you?”
His footsteps and the bang of the door reverberated through the room, drowning out her lie. I’m Maria Antonia, Esteban. What do you mean, ‘who are you?’
Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? The bathroom tile felt cold against her feet as she stared at herself in the mirror. A yellow, sickening light over her. Shaky hands. Concealer, beads, feathers, necklace, ring, boots, jeans. The earring. She put it all on, slowly, her eyes on the woman in the mirror. The green earring made her earlobe sag. The reflection in the mirror looked like cutouts from a magazine haphazardly stuck together. She saw the woman pluck strands of hair tangled with beads and feathers, unclasp and drop a necklace. She saw the concealer dissolve and drip down the woman’s cheeks.
Drip, drip, drip, drip. The glasses and beads and all of those things laid on the tile, pooling around her feet like a snake’s old skin. A nondescript face now stared back at her. Its mouth’s corners curved, revealing a wide smile with yellow teeth. Its eyes softened, closing slowly, shyly, but then they shot open and hardened into a confrontational stare. As its features lifted and dropped, morphed and steadied, the reflection looked like the people she used to be — Maria Antonia, Yasmin, all trapped within the mirror. But the reflection wasn’t anything but a skeleton, all sunken eyes and pale cheeks. Someone who isn’t and never was glared back at her, and she tried to give her a name.
Emilia Arabia is an international undergraduate student from Colombia at Carleton College in Minnesota. Her work explores Colombian society through a sociological perspective, focusing on class inequities, gender roles, and identity, blending magical realism with psychological realism.