The weight of T.’s suitcase strains her arms, and the handle is slippery from her sweat. The trip from the mountain village to the capital city had taken longer than expected because her cousin’s van broke down. T. had nothing to do while she waited for him to fix it but sit with her legs dangling over a cliff, staring down into the crystal blue waters below. The sun shone hard on the waves, making them look like sharp points that would shatter her into a million pieces if she were stupid enough to jump from the cliff.
“Let me take that,” someone — one of the many cousins that live in this apartment — says, and the suitcase disappears.
The walls are crumbling. There are unlit candles on the windowsills because sometimes the electricity dies with a sparking hiss. There are pails full of water in the bathroom and the kitchen because sometimes the taps dry out. And sometimes it is so deathly hot outside that a family with too many kids becomes pieces of clay in a human kiln.
You have it so easy. You get to live in a peaceful village in the mountains in a roomy house, not a tomb that erodes every time a hot wind blows in from the desert. That’s the look that T. gets from her city cousins every time she visits. She hates visiting them, but at least this one will be short. She’s only staying until Sunday when her plane takes off for Paris. Then, she hopes, she’ll never return to this fly-infested, piss-rivered, crumbling-into-the-sea mausoleum of a town ever again.
“Hungry?” asks M., T.’s cousin. M. is fake-blonde and tan with jade-green eyes. She’s wearing a bright pink shirt that’s snug across her breasts, and in big black letters, it says in English “EAT FISH,” with an arrow pointing down to her exposed belly button. M. doesn’t know what the shirt means because she doesn’t know any English. She speaks the language of the mountain people, just like T., and an argot-laced version of the fundamentalists’ language -- the nation’s “official” language --, but she can barely say three words in French though she’s studied all her life. T. doesn’t understand why M. doesn’t try a little harder to get her education if she’s so desperate to leave the city.
Just above her belly button, M. has a small white scar, from where she pierced herself with a sewing needle. She’d seen pictures of American and European girls in French fashion magazines with jewels through their navels and decided she would do the same. She took an earring with a big blue zirconia and shoved it through the hole she’d made. She wore it proudly until two fundamentalists in dingy white robes held her against a wall while a third ripped out the ring. She ran home, clutching her hands to her abdomen, pressing her fingers into the wet, bleeding wound. She called T. a few days after it happened, complaining that the skin around the wound was hot and oozing thick yellow pus. M.’s mother’s home remedy wasn’t working. T.’s mother sent money to buy cream at the pharmacy.
“Not really,” T. says, though actually, she’s famished. She’s seen the cold chicken couscous that’s been picked over by M.’s siblings drying out in a bowl that no one bothered to cover. She stares at the black flies dancing on the semolina pearls.
“Sure you are,” says M., leading T. by the elbow. They leave the apartment and walk down the dim, narrow stone stairway. Once outside, the sun bakes their faces with its late-August glare. T. follows M. through the rundown streets into a small café with blue walls and a radio blasting Mountain pop songs.
The interior of the café is cool and T. immediately feels relief from the heat. They take a seat at one of the tables in the back, under a ceiling fan, next to a framed photo of J.B., a star of modern Mountain music. A young man—23 or so, T. guesses—comes to their table. A shock of black hair falls across his forehead between his liquid brown eyes. He flashes a dazzling smile at M. who orders cold chicken sandwiches with onions and pepper sauce, plus a couple of glasses of sweetened coffee over ice.
“This is my cousin,” M. says, draping her arm around T.’s shoulder. “T., this is R..” R. leans over to kiss M., and T. notices the smell of French cologne, the kind her older brother wears.
“Your order will be right up,” R. says, beaming another smile in M.’s direction.
“How do you know him?” T. asks.
“Isn’t he great?” M. says. “I love his eyes. And his hair.”
T. presses her lips together to hide a smile. For some reason, this reminds her of the stories her grandmother told her of the wealthy Frenchmen who would pay beautiful North African boys to become their secret consorts.
“What happened to…you know…the last one?” T. asks as M. takes a bite of her sandwich, remembering the short, round-eyed boy with dark fuzz on his upper lip.
M. wipes away a fleck of pepper sauce from her lip. “Oh, him…that was a long time ago. I broke up with him when I met a guy who had his own car. A convertible. He drove me all the way up and down the coast. If you know what I mean.”
“Oh,” T. says, taking a bit of her sandwich. She knows what M. means, but doesn’t want to hear more about it. She savors the crispness of the onions and the fire of the pepper sauce as it burns her tongue. She doesn’t bother to ask what happened to the guy with the convertible, but she imagines M. in a speeding car with her white-blond hair whipping behind her like a flag of surrender. T. imagines that the car is canary yellow, but she doesn’t know why.
T. lifts her glass and notices that a small amount of caramel-colored coffee is trapped under the ice cubes on the bottom of her glass. She swirls the ice cubes around and tilts her head back to drain the glass. R. sidles up to the table, turns a chair backward, and straddles it, folding his forearms across the back of the chair.
“So, T., how come I haven’t seen you in here before?”
“Oh, that’s because she doesn’t live here in the city,” M. says. “She lives in the mountains..”
“Oh yeah? I was born there. I miss the mountains. I’d give anything to get out of here, you know? Anywhere but here.”
“T.’s going to Paris,” says M., without taking her eyes off R.
“Really?” R. asks, turning to T.
“Yeah, she’s going to study at the Paris Conservatory of Music, isn’t that right, T.?”
T. nods, but before she can say anything, M. says, “But don’t ask her to sing anything. She’s always singing these fancy arias in Italian and German, and you won’t be able to understand a word! Anyway,” M. says, clamping her hand on R.’s thigh, “You should come out with us tonight.”
“Where are you going?” He asks, looking at T.
“White Hot Club,” M. says, “We’ll probably show up there around nine o’clock.”
“Nine o’clock? Maybe I can make it then. I have to watch my sister’s kids tonight. She has to work.”
“Can’t she leave them with your mother?” M. asks, swirling her fingertip in her drink. She cocks her head to one side, reminding T. of the gray-winged birds that sometimes perch on the windowsills of her home in the mountains. R. shrugs.
“Oh, please come. It’s a special occasion,” M. says.
“It is?” R. runs his fingers through his thick, wavy black hair.
“Sure it is,” M. says and leans over to whisper something into R.’s ear. R. turns away, but T. can tell he’s smiling. M. laughs.
After they leave the café, M. and T. go to the market to buy bread for M.’s family. M. pays 50 coins for four French baguettes and two round semolina loaves. She argues with the vendor about the price of butter that’s got flies all over it. The vendor is a follower of the old religion; a fundamentalist. He narrows his eyes at M.’s stripe of bare belly. T. notices him staring at M.’s scar.
“How can you charge so much for that? You’re giving it to the flies for free,” she says in the fundamentalist language.
“Don’t you know that means it’s high quality?”
“It’s as high quality as your cock is long,” she hisses in the language of the mountain people, and T. squeezes her lips shut to suppress a smile. Switching back to the fundamentalist language, she says, “I’ll pay 10 coins for that.” T. doesn’t understand why M. insists on buying this fly-infested butter when she can get something better from another vendor. The vendor takes M.’s money but doesn’t hesitate to tell her that she’s a whore for not drowning herself in yards of fabric as the fundamentalist girls do.
“You too,” the vendor says to T., “cover your nakedness, or burn in hell.”
“Get fucked in your ass,” T. spits in the language of the mountain people, and the girls walk away, laughing.
As they walk towards the other end of the market, M. stops by a rack of clothes. She reaches in between the knockoff leather jackets and finds a short denim skirt trimmed in aqua-blue sequins. At a table covered in lacy thongs, M. picks up a triangle of chartreuse fabric edged with brown lace and hides it in the folds of the skirt. She pays the vendor 150 coins. T. says nothing as M. grins at her. The price for the thong is only 20 coins. M. could pay for it. T. sighs and stares up at the sky.
Two hours and thirty minutes. That’s how long the fight to Paris is.
They walk toward the waterfront. Ahead of them, the ancient palace gleams like a heap of snow, surrounded by a blue nimbus of sky. It’s like Sacre Coeur, but not as beautiful. Two hours and thirty minutes. T. closes her eyes, and she can almost feel the cool, rain-tinted air on her face, can almost smell the crêpes and coffee.
A cluster of fundamentalist girls walks by, dressed all in black, casting castigating glances at M.’s bare midriff and T.’s uncovered, flowing, wavy hair.
“Bitches,” M. hisses under her breath so that only T. can hear.
The club throbs with the voice of a boy singer who can sing four octaves. He sings in the fundamentalists’ language, but they hate him and are forever threatening to put him in jail and if he didn’t have the money to bribe them, they would. The lights glimmer. The sequins on M.’s skirt flare blue neon. M. and T. head to the bar where they each order a glass of red wine -- wine from the mountains. Violet in color and almost sweet. They don’t drink it in Paris. It’s beneath them. T. knows she might never taste the wine again.
A fundamentalist walks by the bar, passing T. and sputtering about how the city is overrun with mountain heathens.
“God loves mountain heathens! That’s why we don’t have to pray as much as you do,” M. shouts in response. The girls clink their glasses. M. glances at her watch. “I hope R. gets here soon,” she says. T. sips her wine and looks away.
By 2:00 am, T. has lost M. in the club. Tipsy, she feels her way out of the bar, onto the damp, narrow streets where midnight-blue sky fills in the gaps between the stone buildings that lean and sag and slouch toward the ground that holds them up. When T. finds M.’s apartment building, she hears ragged breathing and hoarse whispers. She looks behind the stairwell and sees R.’s back. His pants are around his ankles and he’s got his hands in the crevices of M.’s knees. His hips thrust while M. moans, crimping her hands in R.’s hair. M.’s sequined skirt is bunched up around her waist. T. backs away slowly, telling herself that neither of them saw her.
“What time does your plane leave tomorrow?” M. asks as T. finishes washing herself from a bucket that sits in the shower stall. M. is sitting on the floor near a window with warm, yellow morning light spilling over her face.
“It leaves at 10:30.”
M. just nods. T. notices that she’s wearing the same clothes as yesterday. There’s a round stain on the sequined skirt that T. pretends not to notice.
“Is something wrong?” T. asks as she pulls a comb through her hair.
“Oh, it’s just…R. He’s going back to his village in the mountains. He’s been working here to save money so he can get married to a girl he’s got waiting for him up there.”
T. is at a loss for words. M. goes on: “They’ve been engaged for months.”
“M., I’m…sorry.”
“Yeah, well, don’t worry about it. I mean, you get to go to Paris! You get to take long walks by the Seine and hang out in sidewalk cafes and spend hours in the Louvre. You get to bathe in that Parisian light everyone always raves about. I’m really happy for you, you know?” M. squeezes T.’s wrist. “Kiss that sexy brother of yours for me, will you?”
T. nods and tucks a loose strand of honey-colored hair behind M.’s ear.
That night, T. sits on the floor next to one of her cousins. He strums a mandola and T. rehearses O Patria Mia from Aida. The room is full of T.’s cousins, all of who are listening to T.’s voice. The entire apartment is lit by candles that give off a warm, orange glow. It’s like being inside an amber bead. The flames are mirrored in her cousins’ eyes, and the smell of the burning wax makes T. swoon. Tomorrow, Paris, T. thinks to herself. She remembers what R. said yesterday: Anywhere but here. She glances over at M. The fiery glitter in the corner of her eyes is really teardrops. T. watches M. bat them away.
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