Soledad: A Novel - Softcover

Cruz, Angie

 
9780743212021: Soledad: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0743212029 ISBN 13: 9780743212021
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Award-winning author Angie Cruz takes readers on a journey as one young woman must confront not only her own past of growing up in Washington Heights, but also her mother's.

At eighteen, Soledad couldn't get away fast enough from her contentious family with their endless tragedies and petty fights. Two years later, she's an art student at Cooper Union with a gallery job and a hip East Village walk-up. But when Tía Gorda calls with the news that Soledad's mother has lapsed into an emotional coma, she insists that Soledad's return is the only cure. Fighting the memories of open hydrants, leering men, and slick-skinned teen girls with raunchy mouths and snapping gum, Soledad moves home to West 164th Street. As she tries to tame her cousin Flaca's raucous behavior and to resist falling for Richie—a soulful, intense man from the neighborhood—she also faces the greatest challenge of her life: confronting the ghosts from her mother's past and salvaging their damaged relationship.

Evocative and wise, Soledad is a wondrous story of culture and chaos, family and integrity, myth and mysticism, from a Latina literary light.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Angie Cruz was born and raised in the Washington Heights section of New York City. She is a graduate of SUNY Binghamton and received her MFA from New York University. Her fiction and activist work have earned her the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award, and the Bronx Writers' Center Van Lier Literary Fellowship. She is the author of Soledad?, Dominicana?, and Let It Rain Coffee. She currently resides in New York City. Visit the author at AngieCruz.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

It's always like that: just when I think I don't give a shit about what my family thinks, they find a way to drag me back home.

A few weeks ago I receive this urgent phone call from my aunt Gorda.

You have to come home, Soledad, your mother is not doing so good.

Gorda expects a fight from me. She tells people that I was born con la pata caliente, feet burning to be anywhere but here. I say, it's more like those Travel and Leisure magazines my mother borrowed from the offices she cleaned that did it. When most kids wanted to go to Disney World, I begged to go to Venice so I could ride one of those gondolas. Even my earliest pastel drawings were of pagodas, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and Machu Picchu.

In some ways the travel and leisure fantasy continues because without trying I led my family to believe that I left 164th Street to live in the school dorms, which I kind of described to be more like high-rises, with a view of the East River and really great showers. For two years, they've had no idea. Every time I step inside my East Village walk-up on the corner of 6th and A, I feel guilty. Everything about it, the smell of piss, the halls as wide as my hips, the lightbulb in the lobby that flashes on and off like a cheap disco light, reminds me of my deception. But if they knew the truth (and how much I am paying for it), they'd declare me insane and send my uncle Victor to tie me up on the hood of his Camaro and bring me back home, kicking and screaming.

So although I dread it, I switch from the L train to the A and head uptown. I've learned not to make eye contact on the train. I try to avoid looking at the old lady who is an emaciated version of my grandmother, Doña Sosa, without teeth. Like my grandmother, the old lady wears heavy pressed powder three shades lighter than her skin tone. Just looking at her makeup gives me allergies. I squeeze my bags between my legs, slip the silver necklace with a dangling peace sign inside my dress and double-wrap the strap of my knapsack around my hand. Out of all the things to wear uptown, I wear a tie-dye cotton skirt and strappy sandals. I should've at least worn sneakers. For a minute I delude myself into thinking that my family is sitting around my grandmother's kitchen eagerly awaiting my arrival. When the A train screeches its way up to 59th Street, I feel the little hairs on the back of my neck jump up like antennas. The tourists, the white folks, the kind of people who are too scared to go uptown, get off the train, leaving me behind. Once the train takes off from 59th Street there's no stopping it. Next stop is Harlem and then Spanish Harlem and then finally Washington Heights.

When I first moved downtown and people where I work asked me where I was from, I used to say the Upper West Side, vaguely.

Oh I really love it up there, they said, no doubt picturing Central Park and hordes of yuppified New Yorkers roller blading on a Sunday afternoon, or restaurants with outdoor seating that serve Italian gelato and crepes. I said it for so long that even I forgot that to most people Washington Heights is not even considered Manhattan. It's more like the Bronx. And because I knew that people associated what they saw on the news with the place I grew up in -- a war zone filled with cop killers, killer cops, crack dealers, gang members and lazy welfare mothers -- I convinced myself that embroidering the truth about my living on the Upper Upper Upper West Side was my way of keeping nasty stereotypes of Washington Heights out of people's minds.

But then I said it in front of my roommate, Caramel. She's a Chicana from Texas running away from the heat. When I told her I was from the Upper West Side, she cringed and looked at me pityingly.

How can you stand it up there? she asked horrified. It's like gringolandia.

I wasn't sure what she meant by that exactly, I just knew it was bad. It felt worse than being called a blanquita back home: a sellout, a wannabe white girl. So to calm her down I told her the truth, I'm from Washington Heights. In a loud Texan accent she boomed: Then say it like it is, mujer.

Washington Heights.

As soon as I arrive at 164th Street I'm attacked. I trip on the uneven sidewalk. The air-conditioners spit at me. The smell of onion and cilantro sting my eyes. I start to sneeze, the humidity is thick, sweat beads drip on the small of my back. Hydrants erupt, splashing cold water over the pavement. I know I should turn back while I still can, before anyone in my family sees me, but when potbellied, sockless men and pubescent homeboys call me mami, as if I'll give them the time of day if they stare at me long enough, I know I must keep moving forward. The last thing I want is to look lost or confused about where I'm going. There are more cops on the streets than fire hydrants. Merengue blares out of car speakers, the Dominican flag drapes in place of curtains on apartment windows, sneakers hang from lampposts, Presidente bottles, pizza boxes and old issues of El Diario burst out of the trash cans on the corner, a side of pernil grills by a building's basement.

The way I'm figuring it, my time in Washington Heights is like a prison sentence. Once I do the time, I won't have the guilt trip anymore about moving out. I'm twenty years old. Twenty years old is old enough to live away from home. Apparently not old enough for my aunt Gorda, who's almost forty and still lives with my grandmother, and Victor, who is about to hit thirty and won't leave my grandmother's pampering ways unless someone marries him and takes her place. But anyways, I promised Gorda I'll give my mother two, maybe three months. If my mother can't get her shit together in that time then that's it. I've already sacrificed a once-in-a-lifetime apprenticeship with a professor in Spain this summer. Finally I was offered the opportunity to travel far away to Europe, where I could taste grilled champiñones and tortillas españolas, leisurely sit at a café during siesta and drink strong espresso in front of an ancient church. Me and Caramel had it all planned. We were supposed to meet up in Barcelona, where her gypsy tía lives and then escape on a train to Paris following James Baldwin's footsteps.

Who's James Baldwin? I asked her.

Oh girl, you have so much to learn, Caramel said in her I'm-five-years-older-than-you-and-know-so-much-more-about-the-world voice.

I tried to tell Gorda that Europe couldn't wait. But she went on this trip about how I've forgotten the importance of familia.

What if you do go to Europe and something happens to your mother? You'll never be able to live with yourself, Soledad. That I know for sure.

And just when I think I'm going to make it home safe a hard splash of water falls from the sky and hits me in the head. Children begin laughing, circling around me. They're welcoming me to hell.

Fuck!

Parts of my skirt cling on to my skin. My sandals turn a deep dark brown. My nipples go erect. I put my hands over them. I drop my bags.

Do you need help?

Leave me alone. Get away from me, please.

This guy wearing a gold rope chain as thick as my wrist holds back a laugh. That makes me hate him instantly.

Chill. It came from the roof. Don't get mad at me. I'm trying to help.

Yeah right.

I give him the hand and look farther down the block toward my grandmother's building. I'm almost there. I know that once I find Gorda I will be fine. I breathe in through my nose out through my mouth. Deep breathing is supposed to help. I learned that from my art teacher, who takes a lot of yoga.

That's some language for a pretty girl.

As if I care about what he thinks. That's the problem with the guys around here. He thinks because he spends his life in the gym and gets dimples when...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0743212029
ISBN 13 
9780743212021
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
AA Utrecht
3584
Niederlande

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