A Cup of Water Under My Bed (19 page)

Do you open the door to every other country with internal conflicts?

It’s true that Colombians are not the only ones in need of asylum. It is every group from practically every country where the United States and Europe have at some point staked a claim on land. From the perspective of here, which is to say from the perspective of the United States, of this skinny editor, of people who have power, Colombia is not as devastated as Rwanda or even as El Salvador was in the eighties. Colombians are suffering, yes, but not as much.

There is a hierarchy of pain, and it is no longer confined to the pages of my college textbooks about political theory. It is here in Mr. Flaco. Pain in and of itself is not enough. It matters how many are dead, how many wounded, over what period of time, how much public outrage there is in the West. The pain has to be significant in relationship to those in power. By contrast, we (my family and the men at the bus stop and me) are free to make demands, to share outrage, to know solidarity.

Realizing this does not depress me. I consider it a discovery, because it feels that way, like I have entered the collective mind of white people with political power everywhere and managed to see one of the strange rituals by which they reproduce. This, I can only imagine, is how Darwin must have felt.

Because it’s the beginning of summer, NPR has an obligatory story about the high number of girls who are going to tanning salons. I listen to this while lying in bed next to my girlfriend, who frequents these salons, and with my idea for getting Colombians political asylum stalled, I suggest writing on the evils of the fake tan.

Mr. Flaco loves it. White men can always be counted on to agree that girls do crazy things in the name of beauty and that they need to be chastised. Who better than to scold teenage girls than a young woman herself?

I put these thoughts aside and sit at my computer monitor in my office on the tenth floor writing the best opinion piece I can muster. Although the topic is one that slightly depresses me (I could be writing about the impact of the civil war in Colombia!), I nevertheless find myself humming and tapping away at the keyboard, having the experience that comes whenever I write: a rush of joy through my body. I feel energized, happy, strong, even.

At the end of the day, I get on the elevator exhausted, my face slightly flushed. I am living a life I could never have imagined, even if it is about suntans.

At the
Times
, people spend their days writing and then get paid every two weeks. It happens even if you disagree with Mr. Flaco or if you write a bad piece that needs tons of editing. You still get paid.

So, convinced that this life can’t be mine, I insist on taking my intern paycheck to the bank every two weeks and cashing it. Each time the black teller hands me the stack of hundred dollar bills, I feel that I am real and that this is really happening to me.

It is a lesson I learned from my mother.

On Fridays, if she had been paid at the factory, Tía Chuchi would take my sister and me to meet my mother at the bank, where she would be waiting on line with a check, that precious slip of paper in her hand. She would take the money from the bank teller in one swift move, as if someone was going to steal it from her, and then she would move over to the side and count the bills, slipping them into a small envelope the way she would place a pillow in a pillowcase. Those dollars were freedom. We could afford an evening meal at McDonald’s and
pasteles
, too.

Several times a month, people visit the editorial board. Sometimes they are invited; sometimes they have lobbied to meet with the writers. Sometimes it’s people’s chance to talk about their issues; sometimes it’s the board members who have asked to hear someone’s perspective.

Cookies and coffee are served, and we show up with notepads and pens. If it is an extremely important person, like the head of the FBI or a superstar academic who wrote a new book about the economy, lunch is served.

It is during one of these visits that I find myself meeting Mr. Alvaro Uribe.

For months now, my mother’s kitchen has been plagued with his name. Colombians in Jersey and Queens and Florida were able to vote for him in the presidential election, and my aunties have been anxious. Will Mr. Uribe be able to do anything, however small, to end the civil war that’s held Colombia hostage since the sixties? The answer, of course, is no. It takes a movement, not a lone man, but people being people and aunties being aunties, they fantasize about being rescued.

Mr. Uribe comes from a wealthy family and he’s promising to be Colombia’s Rudy Giuliani. He is vowing law and order in a country known for drug cartels, magical realism, and the kidnapping of gringos. His own father was killed by the so-called rebel groups who are now drug trafficking, and Mr. Uribe is rumored to have ties to the paramilitaries, the privately funded armies who massacre civilians.

But in the editorial conference room on the tenth floor, Mr. Uribe hardly looks like someone privy to murders. He could be one of my uncles, a short man stuffed into a suit and not permitted, for the moment, to drink whiskey or curse in front of company. He proclaims that the coffee is not very good and then he makes a little speech about his Giuliani-style plan and takes questions. It dawns on me that he is here, because he has to be, like when my mother and tías would force me to leave the books in my bedroom and meet their friends for coffee.

“Many Colombians in the States are hoping for temporary protection status,” I say. “Will you take up that issue?”

His lips curve into a small sneer. “They voted for me, so I have to ask for it.”

Later in the day, it occurs to me that for the first time I met someone who may be responsible for the murders of many people, and I asked him a polite question.

It is a custom in Latino families like mine that you live at home until you marry. Even if you go away for college, which I didn’t, you still come home when you graduate.

I have already broken this rule once, going to live with a boyfriend at nineteen. But the moment the relationship soured, about a year later, I returned home. Now at twenty-seven, I am ready to leave. This time permanently. I just have to deliver the news.

In the kitchen, my parents and Tía Chuchi are watching the
noticias
. It is evening and everyone is done with dinner. My father is drinking his beer. The window shades are drawn, but the voices of children playing in yards and on the streets below come up in bursts of firecrackers.

“I’m going to live in the city,” I announce.

Everyone turns their head toward me. No one speaks. Then my father looks back at the television, and my mother and auntie do the same. I wait for some questions but they don’t come. Not then. They arrive the next day and the day after: Is it a safe place? Are you sure? You’ll be closer to work, yes, but . . .

They want to argue with me, but they can’t. I have married the best man I could possibly find—the
New York Times
—and we all know it.

My mother and Tía Chuchi go with me to buy spoons and forks, a Brita water filter, and curtains with a flower pattern. They help me set up the apartment, an illegal studio on the Upper East Side that’s about the size of the bedroom I shared with my sister. When they leave, I am left with myself in a way that feels new. I am on my own for the first time in my life.
My very own place
. I have the sensation of having escaped a burning building. I have a job. A good job. And my own illegal sublet. I am paying my rent and groceries and not doing it by working at a factory or cleaning toilets.

The New York Times building has windows like a cathedral’s: tall, large, indulgent with how much sunlight they permit indoors. I walk up to the fourteenth floor one afternoon and stare out a closed window, mesmerized that Manhattan can actually be reduced to a miniature city, that the millions of feet and voices cannot be seen or heard from here but are nevertheless in perpetual motion.

I love the quiet here, the space to contemplate how quickly perspective can be changed, to wonder how a man like Uribe, who loses his father, makes peace with grief or doesn’t, to think about what a man on the editorial board said to me: “I bet no one else has written for this editorial page whose parents didn’t speak English.”

In a few weeks’ time it will be the first anniversary of September 11 and with it will come the rush of memory, of women and men who—hundreds of feet above the city—stepped into the sky that morning to escape the heat and the twisting metal and the violence of not choosing their last moments.

But before the anniversary, about two weeks before, a white man from the
Times
, a business editor, will look out a window like this one. He will be up one more flight of stairs and maybe he will wonder about the sky and the city and perspective. Or maybe not. The pain by then will be squeezing at him too much. He will prop open the window, place his face to the city air, and step into the sky.

Mr. Flaco is curious to hear what I might want to write about a new report showing that boys are being left behind in education. Nervous, I stumble through my pitch about how it’s not all boys. It is black boys and teenagers. “Racism,” I begin, “has, you know, shaped the expectations the kids have of themselves and that teachers have of them.”

“What’s going to be your recommendation?” he asks, a smile dancing at his lips. “Tell teachers to raise their self-esteem?”

I stare at the carpet. He continues. “What’s remarkable is that when you look across socioeconomic levels, black boys consistently do badly in school. It doesn’t matter if they’re living in Westchester or Harlem.”

The air around me grows thin, choking.

“By comparison,” he says, “Chinese kids do well in school even when they just got here yesterday.” He chuckles. “It’s like it’s genetic.”

I glance at him to make sure he is really here in the room with me, that he has actually said those words. I don’t expect to see the familiar face of the skinny man I have known for two months. Surely his words have distorted his forehead and his eyelids and his nostrils. But no such thing has happened. He is still the same man with the
flaco
face and a high-up job at an important institution. A Mr. Uribe. He grins at me, like we’re best friends.

In Times Square, the taxis blare, the trucks screech, the tourists squeal and position themselves for photos. It’s August and the air is thick with humidity and the grease of hotdogs being sold by street vendors. The tourists point their cameras at each other and then up at the billboards. They have come from all parts of the country and the world to be here under these towering ads and bright lights, and as I watch them I begin to consider that maybe I don’t want to be here.

It’s not because of Mr. Flaco the Racist. Or Mr. Uribe the Killer. I don’t know what it is. The streets vibrate with too many people, and the billboards tower over us with white faces, white teeth, white summer cotton, and I find that I don’t have the words. As much as I want to leave, I can’t.

This is my big opportunity, the moment I have been preparing for my whole life. People like me, from the community I come from, we don’t just get to work at the
New York Times
. Rosa Parks sat down, Martin Luther King Jr. stood up, and my parents paid for Catholic high school so I could be here. Whatever I do, I can’t say no. I have to say yes, yes, and yes again.

When Gail asks if I want to pursue this journalism business, I say yes, and I find myself with a year-long internship on the third floor reporting for the metro desk.

Newsrooms are set up like mazes.

It is an endless series of desks and television screens, and everywhere you turn is another white man. You are meant to be the intern who gets lost and can’t find the elevators, or at least I am. Looking out across the third floor, I see only receding hairlines, white foreheads, and bushy eyebrows. Somewhere in that I am supposed to find an editor with a name like Bob or Jennifer. Locating my new desk—amid the clacking of keyboards and droning of television news—becomes my accomplishment that first week.

It doesn’t take long, though, to see that I am missing a crucial asset: a talent for talking to white men.

I have a good deal of experience with white women. I learned their mannerisms right alongside lessons in English, algebra, and chemistry. If I count my entire schooling starting with kindergarten, that is nineteen years of studying white women. It is easy, then, to now make small talk with them. I nod sympathetically about children, inquire about their favorite movies, commiserate about the morning commute.

But white men are different.

After two weeks in the newsroom, I see that talking to white men boils down to a crude combination of cracking jokes about children and the morning commute, referring to sports teams and events at random, and imparting snide comments about this book or that article. It is especially impressive if you can comment on something buried deep in a news story, since everyone knows that no one actually reads the story to the end. Talking to white men, then, has a pattern, a set of rules, but try as I might, I can’t learn them. My mind blanks when they joke with me. I find myself nodding and looking the other way, hoping they will leave me alone.

What’s worse is that I have absolutely no instinct for reporting. None.

“Here’s the news release,” an editor tells me. “I need copy by three.”

I nod, sit at my computer, and look at the paper. Something about a food-borne illness. I stare at the words and wonder what I’m supposed to do.

Writing an opinion, even a stiff editorial, comes easily to me. My mind immediately reaches for questions, important points, people to interview. But reporting produces in me a condition akin to stage fright. My body freezes, my mind stares at a blank white wall. Even though I’m doing exactly what I would do in the editorial department, here in the newsroom, without the option of forming an opinion, I have to remind myself of what to do: make calls, ask questions, quote, summarize, send to editor, wait.