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By Root 2103 0

worse, gringo), after he’d been overcharged for almost everything he wanted to buy, after La Inca prayed over him nearly every morning, after he caught a cold because his abuela set the air conditioner in his room so high, he decided suddenly and without warning to stay on the Island for the rest of the summer with his mother and his tío. Not to go home with Lola. It was a decision that came to him one night on the Malecón, while staring out over the ocean. What do I have waiting for me in Paterson? he wanted to know. He wasn’t teaching that summer and he had all his notebooks with him. Sounds like a good idea to me, his sister said. You need some time in the patria. Maybe you’ll even find yourself a nice campesina. It felt like the right thing to do. Help clear his head and his heart of the gloom that had filled them these months. His mother was less hot on the idea but La Inca waved her into silence. Hijo, you can stay here all your life. (Though he found it strange that she made him put on a crucifix immediately thereafter.)

So, after Lola flew back to the States (Take good care of yourself, Mister) and the terror and joy of his return had subsided, after he settled down in Abuela’s house, the house that Diaspora had built, and tried to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his summer now that Lola was gone, after his fantasy of an Island girlfriend seemed like a distant joke — Who the fuck had he been kidding? He couldn’t dance, he didn’t have loot, he didn’t dress, he wasn’t confident, he wasn’t handsome, he wasn’t from Europe, he wasn’t fucking no Island girls — after he spent one week writing and (ironically enough) turned down his male cousins’ offer to take him to a whorehouse like fifty times, Oscar fell in love with a semi-retired puta.

Her name was Ybón Pimentel. Oscar considered her the start of his real life.

LA BEBA

She lived two houses over and, like the de Leóns, was a newcomer to Mirador Norte. (Oscar’s moms had bought their house with double shifts at her two jobs. Ybón bought hers with double shifts too, but in a window in Amsterdam.) She was one of those golden mulatas that French-speaking Caribbeans call chabines, that my boys call chicas de oro; she had snarled, apocalyptic hair, copper eyes, and was one whiteskinned relative away from jaba.

At first Oscar thought she was only a visitor, this tiny; slightly paunchy babe who was always high-heeling it out to her Pathfinder. (She didn’t have the Nuevo Mundo wannabe American look of the majority of his neighbors.) The two times Oscar bumped into her — during breaks in his writing he would go for walks along the hot, bland cul-de-sacs, or sit at the local café — she smiled at him. And the third time they saw each other — here, folks, is where the miracles begin — she sat at his table and said: What are you reading? At first he didn’t know what was happening, and then he realized: Holy Shit! A female was talking to him. (It was an unprecedented change in fortune, as though his threadbare Skein of Destiny had accidentally gotten tangled with that of a doper, more fortunate brother.) Turned out Ybón knew his abuela, gave her rides whenever Carlos Moya was out making deliveries. You’re the boy in her pictures, she said with a sly smile. I was little, he said defensively. And besides, that was before the war changed me. She didn’t laugh. That’s probably what it is. Well, I have to go. On went the shades, up went the ass, out went the belleza. Oscar’s erection following her like a dowser’s wand.

Ybón had attended the UASD a long time ago but she was no college girl, she had lines around her eyes and seemed, to Oscar at least, mad open, mad worldly, had the sort of intense zipper-gravity that hot middle-aged women exude effortlessly. The next time he ran into her in front of her house (he had watched for her), she said, Good morning, Mr. de León, in English. How are you? I am well, he said. And you? She beamed. I am well, thank you. He didn’t know what to do with his hands so he laced them behind his back like a gloomy parson. And for