Chapter 7: Fiesta Night

Chapter 7: Fiesta Night

            I awoke to the sporadic explosions of fireworks. It was Saturday and I could not have been more content. My parents, along with many of the residents of San Ramón had departed for the beach, and I was left alone with Esperanza. It was silent throughout the house. Outside the sun was peaking over the lake, and the birds were announcing the dawn of a new day. Slightly spreading the curtains of my window, I spotted a green guardabarranco with its blue-eyed tail gazing over the same majestic sight as I was.

            “Buenos días, chiquito, did you sleep alright?” Esperanza never knocked, but intuitively inferred when it was an appropriate time for her to enter my room without annoying me. “Are you sad that your parents are gone? Oh, poor thing, left all alone during the festivities. But it’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

She drew the curtains wider and opened my windows to let the brisk breeze of warm air into my dark stuffy room. The startled guardabarranco nervously hopped unto an adjacent branch at the sound of opening windows, but then settled down after finding the disturbance negligible.

            “Very beautiful,” I concurred. “The backyard looks like the Garden of Eden, don’t you think?  It’s too bad I can’t go out for a walk today, with all the commotion on the streets and all. Are the iguanas awake yet?” I inquired, still admiring the turquoise bird.

 “I put a tray of lettuce out for them, but they haven’t come down yet. They are capricious little creatures, those garrobitos. Sometimes they come down earlier than I wake up, in the darkness, when is no food for them yet. Other times they wait until it’s really hot and by the time they are hungry the lettuce has been burned to a crisp! Aren’t you hungry, Carlitos? If you want, I can make you some eggs with gallopinto. I know the cook isn’t here today, but I’m not too bad a cook myself.”

Esperanza was not simply my maid. She was my china, and no, I do not mean to say she was my Chinese woman. The term comes from the verb chinear “to hold in one’s arms,” and she, along with my mother, had reared me. She had instilled in me an appreciation for nature from a young age, coming into my room at odd hours to show me strange creatures she knew would interest me, or some obscure fruits I had never thought edible, or plants which she would later boil to alleviate my irregular breathing, always with the gentle concern of a mother. Esperanza and I shared the same delight in the arboreal creatures whose habits remained constantly perplexing to us. We spent many afternoons outside coming up with theories concerning the peculiar customs of grasshoppers, butterflies, moths, iguanas, birds, frogs and especially leafcutter ants, which she called zompopos. These robust insects were of chief interest to us due to their organized way of life and their effect on my mother’s garden.

My mother took as much care in trimming her bonsai trees as the zompopos, but the latter could meet her demands for symmetry so, she often ordered the gardener to pour a white poison which looked like talcum powder into their colonies to the revulsion of Esperanza and I, who considered these insects to be the most peaceful creatures alive, for they were strictly vegetarian, did not bite, and only utilized bits of leaves agriculturally, as fertilizer, in order to grow their own fungus-crops in underground caverns.

“Esperanzaaa!” my mother would yell, “There is a tarantula in the dining room. Kill it, please.” And soon enough, Esperanza came through my bedroom door, which I kept ajar solely for her, showing me the little beast concealed in her coarse hands, implying with a smile that we should liberate it in the garden without my mother’s knowledge.

After breakfast, I found the backyard almost lifeless on account of the fireworks. The guardabarranco had flown away, and the iguanas, frightened by the apparent war in the sky, had not come down from the mango trees. I sat sweating on a rocking chair in the terrace reading for most of the day. My mind turned to the Padillas. I wondered if they had all gone away for the weekend with the rest of the neighborhood. I reflected on the possibility that Consuelita had perhaps stayed home alone as I had, and I decided to give her a call. Their maid informed me that she and her father had left to their beach house and only “Doña Cati” was home.

“Why wouldn’t she have gone with them?” I thought, “Maybe she’d rather be alone, like me.”

I was always fond of Doña Cati. Above all, I found her strikingly handsome. She had a slender waist, straight stature, and the gait of a goddess. Under the veil of her jet black hair she hid a pair of bright green eyes, two gems of jade accentuated by her bronze skin. Her attire was always alluring but never seductive or provoking. She was inclined to wear golden jewelry along with various dark green dresses, and when she did, Cati seemed to perfectly fit my vision of Cleopatra. But beyond her physical attributes, what I most admired about her was her honesty. On the nights when I attended her soirées, I would observe how she would gracefully excuse herself from conversations only to walk outside and stare into the darkness as I had often done, seemingly oblivious to the gossip which her unusual behavior would inspire. I once asked her why she was outside and she candidly responded “For the same reason you are,” briefly placing her hand on my head before she went indoors.

By five in the afternoon, the sun which had been young in the lake water was dilatorily reaching the end of its course, aging gracefully and finally dying as it set behind the silhouetted hill of San Ramón which resembled a black gravestone. Over the city, the angelic full moon grew brighter as if the heavens were preparing for the arrival of a dead saint. The lurid lights of Managua were beginning to glimmer. In the obscured cityscape, there was no longer a red or orange glow upon the lake in absence of the sun, and the great Momotombo slid into the dark night, less like a volcano than a kitten. Meanwhile the spinal cord of the Masayan highway lit up throughout the horizontal city like a tunnel in a pin-ball machine. Casino lights flowered downtown, and countless taxis turned their yellow caps bright.

Finding me still on the rocking chair, Esperanza inquired to see if I needed anything else before she left for the festival. “At six they light the candles for the Saint, and they take it down from the church to the main avenue where the celebration begins. Then they go all the way downtown…” she explained, “but, I’ll be back at nine. My fiesta nights are always short-lived. I won’t go beyond the eucalyptus trees. Don’t you worry about a thing. Adiós amorcito,” she gave me a kiss, “Remember to pray before you go to bed. Goodnight.”

By the “Saint,” Esperanza was referring to a golden idol commonly known for its power to bring about miracles. The gilded effigy had been sculpted to represent the actual Saint Ramón, a martyr whom no one remembers. It was kept in the Church of San Ramón yearlong until this date, where it would go on a pilgrimage throughout the city. To be fair, the festivities must have been a great deal of fun. From my open window I could smell roasting chicken breasts, carne asada, tamales, pork rinds, quesillo, yucca salad and various other Nicaraguan delicacies which roused my appetite, but to no avail. Due to a certain restriction imposed on me by social class—a prohibition I had only vaguely grasped in my early adolescence, but a restriction I nevertheless reckoned unbreakable—I was confined to my house while hundreds of people celebrated outside my very window. The only one who shared my feelings of incarceration that night could have been Cati, who was likely listening to the same musical instruments, the same crackling fireworks, breathing in the same enticing aromas as I was, neither of us feeling welcome to participate.  

My day, which had begun so peacefully, so full of silence and solitude, gradually slipped into a somber night, and, even as waves of elation were passing just meters outside my home, and firecrackers were lighting up the dark sky, I decided the day held no more adventures for me, and confined myself to my bedroom, while Ezperanza’s night had just begun. Later that evening, after I had fallen asleep hungry and dejected, I would learn the details of her fiesta night.   

At exactly eight fifty that evening, Esperanza was passing by Cati Padilla’s mansion, making her way through the gleeful crowd in order to get to our house, and at precisely eight fifty-two she heard the shot which, had it not been for the corpse she distinctively saw falling through trees of her garden, would have been mistaken for faulty pyrotechnics.

What was deviant in the heart of Cati was something more violent than jealousy, shame or loneliness. Inside of her soul she must have long nourished an agonizing, ineffable thing: a pernicious plant which she continued to water until discovering the fruits it bore were poisonous. Within her, she unconsciously nurtured a most fatal ideal, that of passionate, torturous, exclusive love. An esurient passion which is seldom satisfied, born into one’s soul, not by their lover’s kisses, but by an infectious ideal implanted in them by the faulty interpretations of certain books—a supposition of the way love “is supposed to be”—of the way a kiss should feel. It is like a cancer, this form of love, it feeds on melancholy, it fuels itself with anger and resentment, and yet it lay dormant at the source of Cati’s being since her youth. Once roused, if this avaricious parasite cannot be consistently assuaged, the vessel infected must perish.

Cati, on that fateful Saturday night, in a fever of sobs, painfully ascertained that whatever it was that she had unwittingly internally fostered all these years would end her life less mercifully than an external force. Unable to find the means of expression required to explain to others that the only existing remedy for her malady was compassionate euthanasia, she felt impelled to die alone, discovering no alternative. Her primary regret was not the fact of leaving her daughter motherless—for that, she felt, was already beyond her control—but it was her failure to summon the strength to organize her thoughts that most distressed her moments before her death. Her last desire was to verbalize the indescribable thing within that was consuming her. She desired nothing more than to rant about it, yet, Cati, could not understand her love, much less interpret and express it.

Cati’s final wish was to be granted the ability to shout apprehensible speech from her rooftop, but had she been capable of translating the pre-formulated phrases in her head—phrases constructed in a tongue alien to the mind but all too familiar to the soul—she would have cried out a rampant succession of nonsensical paradoxes. She would have cried out that her love was like fire and ice, that her love was birth and death, that her lover meant nothing in comparison to her love.

She would have liked to tell others, in utter disregard for the absurdity of her statements: “The love inside of me is beyond myself, beyond you and your friends, beyond your philosophy, beyond your social wisdom and games. It exceeds all faiths and times. It is not dramatic; it is not fiction or something to try to understand with interest; it is not romantic or novel-worthy; it should not be envied nor avoided; it is neither contagious nor joyous. It is nothing more than it is!”

She would have wanted, above all else, to explicate the poetic nature of her love to all of San Ramón, and yet abstain from praising it. Cati would have shouted that hers was a love which exists only to remind people that such a love still subsists—that hers was the type of love that puts a barrel under your chin as you embrace the rifle, crying out in desperation, not on account of despair but due to an overwhelming, piercing gratitude for the gift which was allotted to you, allowing you to embody the ideal form of love, endowed with both Romeo and Juliet inside your soul, permitting you to experience all of life in a kiss only to learn how quickly those lips cease to make the same sound, feel as soft, and touch you as they once did!

Yet Cati had lacked the capacity to articulate a single word that night, succeeding only in shrieking, babbling, and weeping shamelessly, emitting frantic cries—those which had provoked my nightmares on that previous Monday night, before I had shut my window.