The Kissing Bug Read online

  I was five years old, and my mother had stuffed me into a coat so heavy and snowball-resistant that my arms could move only up and down. The mittens on my hands were as puffy as pillows. But I was enjoying having the back seat to myself. My sister, Liliana, had stayed home with someone. She was still new, only four months old, and I did not quite understand that she was a permanent addition to our family. The world had always been as it was at that moment in the car: the rag doll and the jack-in-the-box and me.

  I was the only one thrilled about the drive. I loved airports. I loved the balloons people brought for those who arrived and the flowers too. I loved running around the grown-ups, squeezing between their bodies. I loved how people hollered the names of sisters and cousins, and how they cried and hugged. Every arrival was a premio, a prize someone deserved.

  My mother hated the airport.

  Two years earlier, on our way back from Colombia, agents at JFK had opened our bags. The men picked through my mother’s panties and socks. They tasted the arequipe and the hard candies too. Later, she complained to her sister: “¡Hasta los pañales!” Even the diapers were suspect.

  At the airport that night, my mother worried that the immigration men would not let Tía Dora through, and so while I ran around the waiting area, Mami stood with my father and all the women and men, everyone in winter coats and heavy scarves, and monitored the doors and tried not to think of the worst. She watched sisters and abuelas and couples arrive, but no Tía Dora. Maybe they had detained her. Maybe she’d gotten sick during the flight. Maybe they had simply refused her entry.

  The crowd thinned. My father grew irritable. Where was she? He still had to drive us all back home, and it was the middle of December and the roads just awful.

  The doors opened again. Tía Dora took a tentative step out, and the corners of my mother’s lips collapsed. Her sister’s face had thinned. How much weight had she lost? Already, she looked like a young woman about to die.

  …

  In the back seat of the car, Tía and I studied each other. I did not have my mother’s worry. I did not know that grown women could become sick and die. If anyone had asked, I would have said my auntie looked like all the grown women I knew except she was flaca. Also, someone in Colombia had stuffed her into a ruana and coat. I sensed a kindred spirit. An auntie who did not get to dress herself. An auntie who was coming to live in our apartment in Union City, New Jersey.

  …

  In Colombia, Tía Dora had her mother, three sisters, and several cuñadas. In Jersey, she had my mother and Tía Rosa who my father eventually nicknamed Radio Auntie since this auntie talked all the time. Radio Auntie had a bundle of hair that looked like black cotton on top of her head. She was the oldest auntie in Jersey, the one who had no children of her own but whom Tía Dora had once called Mamá.

  Over the next six months, Radio Auntie ushered Tía Dora onto buses and subways. She and my mother fed her papas rellenas. They learned that Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan had specific days and times when any patient would be seen, regardless of whether the person could pay. They shuttled Tía Dora across the Hudson River to the hospital. They helped her get in and out of the hospital gown and met with Dr. Alfred M. Markowitz. The surgeon had strong eyebrows and thinning silver hair carefully groomed away from his face. He looked crisp and alert in his suit underneath his white coat, the kind of man that made you think of a clean piece of paper.

  The doctors in Colombia had not suspected the kissing bug disease but Dr. Markowitz did. In an article in the New York Times, years after his death, he was celebrated as an old-school physician-teacher who quizzed his residents, on the spot, about obscure medical conditions. This may explain how Dr. Markowitz diagnosed Tía Dora with the disease, because only in a few number of cases does the parasite attack the gastrointestinal system, making it so that the large intestine begins to lose its shape. Food starts to collect in the colon. The person’s belly begins to swell. A man can, as Tía Dora did, appear pregnant. Without intervention, toxins can seep from the intestines and kill the person.

  Dr. Markowitz explained that Tía Dora would need several abdominal surgeries. My mother, anxious and worried, asked how much it would cost. In Colombia, if you didn’t have health insurance, you had to save your earnings before a doctor would perform a procedure. “We’ll have to raise the money,” Mami said quickly, imagining the expense, and she thought about asking a local Spanish radio station to make the announcement that our family needed many thousands of dollars to save my auntie’s life.

  “Don’t worry about the cost,” the doctor said.

  The women in my family did not know how hospitals took care of patients who did not have insurance. They did not know about Medicaid. They did not know the phrase indigent patients. They believed the doctor himself would pay for the surgeries. They insisted our family had been blessed.

  …

  In New Jersey, my mother and Radio Auntie and Tía Dora made audio recordings for my grandmother in Colombia. Tía told her mother about the doctor and the nurses and the hospital but didn’t mention an interpreter. She had studied English and apparently understood more than she could speak. Or maybe no one needs an interpreter when a priest comes to offer last rites.

  “I got scared,” she whispered into the cassette recording, describing the day of her first surgery, but she did not lose faith, she assured her mother. Then, Dr. Markowitz came to her room. “He spoke to me in such a sensitive way. All in English.”

  He wanted to be clear with her. “I am asking for luck for you and for me,” he said. “If I make a mistake in any way, I ask for forgiveness.”

  She assured him that he possessed all her forgiveness, all her gratitude.

  So many doctors filled the operating room that Tía Dora lost count of them. Some were residents. One a cardiologist. Another an anesthesiologist. And then she was asleep and the men busy slicing open her belly.

  When she woke from the first surgery, Tía spoke in English. She meant to say that she wanted to see Dr. Markowitz, but “Por favor, quiero ver el Dr. Markowitz!” collapsed in the translation, and she cried, “Please I like Dr. Markowitz!” She cried it repeatedly until he appeared and clasped her hands.

  THE APPLE

  Tía Dora spent a month hospitalized at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Her birthday that July fell on a Sunday. “I told them I wanted to go to church.” Her cardiologist had to sign off on the venture, though she was traveling no farther than the hospital chapel by way of a wheelchair.

  The doctors monitored her closely. When her fever spiked, Tía explained that ice would bring it down quickly. “We have to find the cause,” one of the doctors said. If they discovered it, however, Tía did not record it for her mother. Neither did she mention a parasite or a kissing bug. Instead, she narrated her body, how after the first surgery she looked down and saw the horrifying scar across her lower abdomen. “I almost fainted.” She turned to Dr. Markowitz, who was probably very proud of the precision of his surgical work, and said, “Please, doctor. It’s ugly. It’s terrible.”

  The surgeon smiled kindly and promised that he would make it better with the next surgery.

  One day, still in the hospital, Tía Dora began to cry and could not stop. A nurse rang Dr. Markowitz. Tía Dora told him, “I want to see . . .” and she had a long list of women, all of whom were in Colombia. Her mother, her aunties, her sisters. Yes, Radio Auntie came to visit her, but she worked for long stretches of hours as a home health aide, and my mother lived all the way over in Jersey with two young girls.

  The son of Jewish immigrants, Dr. Markowitz apparently knew as much about the need for the mother tongue as he did about neglected diseases and the gastrointestinal system. “It’s normal,” Dr. Markowitz told Tía about her longing for home. But she could not leave, not yet. He penned a note to the Colombian embassy in New York City, explaining that she needed to stay in the United States for further medical care, including one or two more surgeri
es.

  He made no mention of Tía Dora’s immigration status. Perhaps he didn’t ask. Perhaps he didn’t care. Perhaps he didn’t want to know that Tía Dora had overstayed her tourist visa, that she was, as we say in Spanish, sin papeles, undocumented.

  …

  When Tía Dora returned home to us between surgeries, I belted out the nursery rhymes I was learning at Holy Family Roman Catholic School. I sang to her about farmers taking wives and a rat taking the cheese. Everyone in the nursery rhyme was grabbing what did not belong to them, even the nurse, and then one afternoon the hospital arranged for a nurse to visit Tía in our living room.

  Our home was a first-floor apartment in Union City. The neighborhood reminded Tía of Quiroga, her neighborhood in Bogotá. “At times I forget that I’m sick,” she told her mother in a recording. The women in our building spoke Spanish and dropped by with rice dishes and wanted to know how Tía Dora felt and told her she looked good. Everyone agreed on this: she looked good. She looked better than when she had arrived from Colombia.

  Maybe the nurse took a bus to reach our apartment and marched through the streets with her medical bag swinging against her hip. She would have passed the shop where the Cuban women rolled tobacco, the bakeries that sold señoritas—with their perfect layers of vanilla custard—and the discount store where women’s panties filled the wooden bins. Maybe those stores came later. It was 1981. In a few years Union City would have its first Cuban mayor, Robert Menendez, and the newspapers would report what Tía Dora and I could already see: outside of Miami, our town had the most Cubans in the United States.

  Settling into the sofa, Tía Dora and the nurse nodded at each other. My mother sensed that the nurse had questions. Of course she had questions. My mother called for me to stop singing about farmers and to help translate for my auntie.

  “Let’s check your blood pressure,” the nurse said to Tía.

  My auntie rolled up her sleeves. She still wore the escapulario, the Catholic necklace with its two square pieces of cloth that mimick a monk’s garments and are supposed to bring good luck. A hospital nurse had given it to her.

  The nurse unhooked a stethoscope from her bag and asked, “How are you feeling today?”

  “Good,” Tía Dora whispered.

  My auntie looked at me. The nurse followed her eyes.

  I was six and still had short ponytails. No one said, “Your auntie has a disease that could kill her.” No one said, “Your auntie needs you.” They didn’t have to. It was obvious from the way the nurse said, “Tell your aunt . . .” and the way Tía Dora told me, “Dile a la enfermera . . .”

  The nurse inspected the skin where the colostomy bag was attached to Tía’s body and looked for signs of infection. She had questions for me and directions too. No one cared that I was only about to start first grade. I knew both languages or enough. I was my auntie’s ears and her tongue, and when I did not know a word, I stitched the English noun to Spanish verbs, and Tía Dora beamed at me as if I were the smartest girl alive.

  …

  For years after the surgeries, I did not think of Tía Dora as a woman with a serious illness. She was my skinny tía, the tía with scars on her belly, the tía who had several surgeries over the course of a year and then continued to live with my parents, sister, and me. I thought of her as the auntie whose belly hurt her some days, who couldn’t always eat when she wanted, who was, as Mami said, delicada.

  The illness then was a part of Tía like her brown eyelashes. At least that is what I believed. When I turned thirteen, however, one of the older tías, Auntie Biblia, came to live with us and told me the truth.

  …

  It was 1988, and my parents had moved us to our own house a few miles north of Union City. The kitchen looked like a garden. The wallpaper boasted rows of green apples and pears with leafy stems. The refrigerator was a giant potato stuffed into a rincón under the staircase, and the pressure cooker whistled every Saturday before noon: a fat bird sitting high in the trees. One window faced the long driveway in front and the other a quiet alley behind the house. Our house, with its kitchen-garden, was probably the oldest one on our block, but it was ours.

  One Saturday afternoon, the kitchen-garden held nine of us: my parents, three aunties, two auntie husbands, my baby sister, and me. Tía Dora sat at the table. My mother fried patacones. Another auntie poured soda, and one of the auntie husbands stood at the threshold to the kitchen, holding the doorframe, as if he had installed it. The table did not have enough chairs for everyone to sit and eat at the same time so we took turns at the table, and the grown-ups complained in Spanish about the wars in Central America and the price of meat in Union City.

  My mother, her short hair dyed a shade of auburn, leaned against the stove. “What they’re charging for a pound of chuletas is . . .” Her voice trailed. The oil sizzled in the pan. She searched for the right word and found it: “It’s barbaric.”

  Her older sister, María de Jesus, whom a cousin later called La Biblia, the Bible, on account of her long memory, refused to be outdone. “It’s worse at the supermarket on Palisade,” she retorted.

  Radio Auntie added that the price of eggs was worse still. Maybe she eyed her husband. The man could eat a dozen eggs by himself in one sitting.

  The television in the next room blared with news of the dead in El Salvador. My father, who had fought against Fidel Castro’s army in Cuba, sat in the kitchen by the window, listening. He was turning fifty that year but still looked like the lanky soldier I saw once in a photograph from when he was nineteen. He heard about the dead in El Salvador and turned to the auntie husbands and said, “Qué mierda.” The men agreed. Wars were shit.

  Tía Dora wore a knee-length billowy skirt and a blouse a tad wider than her thin shoulders. Her three sisters complained that she was nothing but huesos. They were round women themselves: moons, globes, oval dresser mirrors. Tía Dora was a candlestick. She had thin fingers, a long nose, brazos delgados. She dyed her hair a light brown and once a shade of blonde that had looked like a yellow flame on her head. She floated through the kitchen-garden, her hair shaped into the voluminous curls popular that season.

  My mother tried to get Tía Dora to eat. Here’s a bowl of soup. A plate of pescado. A baked potato with nothing on it.

  “No, mi vida,” Tía Dora said. “No puedo.”

  “It’s only a little,” my mother insisted.

  Tía shook her head and pressed her palm to her belly. “I can’t,” she murmured and sighed at the baked fish as if it were a man she could never love.

  Later that evening, the house emptied of aunties and auntie husbands. The sun turned into a brassy light at the bedroom window on the second floor. Auntie Biblia perched next to me on the twin bed, the mattress sagging under our weight.

  She looked at me as if I were a book she had already read. In Colombia, Auntie Biblia had taught elementary school children in villages how to read and sweep the dirt floors of their one-room homes. In Jersey, she told me stories about communist rebels who longed to become literate and girls who could never escape the violence of their fathers’ hands.

  In a hushed tone, Auntie Biblia said, “Dora está enferma, pero muy enferma.”

  I leaned in. The way she talked about Tía’s illness sounded strange to me, as if there had been another option. But Tía Dora had always had nurses and doctors, always needed naps and special attention. It was normal.

  “Dora almost died in Colombia—that’s how sick she was,” Auntie Biblia said.

  “What happened to her?”

  “She ate an apple.”

  I didn’t argue. I was thirteen. Like everyone else, I had read the Bible. I knew what happened to women who tasted fruit they were forbidden to touch.

  …

  I pinned Auntie Biblia’s story to the one I knew best—the story of Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden, her subsequent exile and punishment. Or maybe it had nothing to do with that most famous of stories. I had gotten my first p
eriod and I was beginning to understand that every woman is two women, herself and her body. Or maybe, as the child of immigrant women—the daughter, the niece, la sobrina—I was required to have a relationship with fiction. She ate an apple and almost died. Migration and poverty swallowed parts of the story, made it so the stories were half-told, almost perdidos. Once upon a time, Tía Dora ate an apple in Colombia, and that was why she was sick in New Jersey.

  BICHOS

  Auntie Biblia’s stories, akin to praying the rosary, repeated. She moved about our kitchen table with her pomegranate lipstick and her tall tales about Colombia’s beauty pageants and priests who wanted more than limosna, her story about how Tía Dora had almost died, that’s how sick she was.

  I might have been almost fifteen when the kitchen-garden started to feel crowded for my arms and legs, my new height, which at five feet two inches felt quite tall. I could see stains on the wallpaper.

  Thinking about Tía Dora, I asked, “How could eating a fruit almost kill her?”

  “It was contaminated,” Auntie Biblia answered, matter-of-fact.

  “How?”

  “A bicho. The fruit was contaminated by a bicho.”

  …

  Bicho is a Spanish word for insect. It can also mean a man’s penis, and in some parts of Latin America, a little devil.

  It did not surprise me that a bicho tried to kill Tía Dora because my mother waged a furious war in our kitchen-garden against roaches. One time, Mami opened a cupboard, spotted a cockroach, took off her house slipper, and flicked the roach from the cupboard to the kitchen floor, where she smashed it repeatedly with her slippered foot, then scooped it up into a dustpan and hauled it to the trash bin.

  The killing tired my mother. Sweat gathered on her forehead, and her body looked heavier, sadder. Still, she battled.

  By the time I heard about Tía Dora and the bicho, I already knew I was no match for anything that creeped and crawled, whether it was an insect out in the wild or a pest in the kitchen. When I opened the utensil drawer to find a cockroach, its splayed antennae poking out from under a stack of forks as if it were ready to fight me, I slammed the drawer shut and almost threw up.