Hungry Woman in Paris (33 page)

“So how often do these thoughts come to you?” the psychiatrist asked.

“I’ve had them ever since I can remember. When I eat, especially something creamy and sweet, they tend to go away… temporarily,”
I admitted.

“So you’ve had this chemical imbalance since birth?” he asked.

“A chemical imbalance? That’s what it is?” I asked. He told me that wanting to die was not normal, not even when you’ve lost
hope of ever getting justice for women, the poor, immigrants, the exploited, and oppressed. Not even when you’ve lost your
cousin and best friend.

“It definitely sounds like depression with some hyperactivity,” he said, writing down a prescription. At the end of the session
he said he was confident the medication would make all those depressing thoughts fade away. I would be the first person in
my family to take antidepressants. Before that, generations of women in my family had eaten their way out of their depression.

Two weeks later, after taking the medication, I found that the world was finally not miserable. I could see how people could
live in the suburbs with their SUVs and their 2.5 kids in a house with a white picket fence. I felt numb. I’ve no doubt this
was someone else’s version of happiness, but I just felt numb and apathetic. Why should I let other people’s misery get in
the way of my happiness? was my mantra. Even Armando’s mother didn’t annoy me. When she found out through the grapevine that
I was on medication she wanted Armando to break off the engagement, claiming she was concerned that her future grandchildren
were going to end up retarded. Armando told her to stay out of his personal life and said that if his kids ended up retarded
he would love them just as much.

One morning I cooked my mother a diabetic-friendly breakfast and she praised me for being such a good daughter and a good
cook.

“Why don’t you open up a Mexican restaurant?” she suggested. “Maybe I could do tortillas for you by hand. I don’t need my
eyesight to make tortillas,” she said proudly. I dismissed her idea and told her I wouldn’t be opening a restaurant anytime
soon, but if I ever did I would take her up on her offer. My mother told me to come close to her and to stick out my hand.
She put a gold bracelet in my hand and closed it for me to indicate it was a gift for me.

“I wanted to give you this at your wedding, but here, it’s yours. I’m proud of you,” she said. I was so touched I wanted to
cry, but the antidepressant wouldn’t let me. I remembered Altair offering me her gold bracelet after I helped her escape,
and I just had to sit down. My mother rolled herself to my side and then I surprised myself. Despite the antidepressant, tears
were still capable of escaping out of me. It felt good to cry, even if it was only three tears.

“Don’t you like it?” my mother asked, confused.

“Yes. I love it. Thank you, Mama,” I said.

A month before the wedding I saw flyers on the street announcing an immigrant march to protest the building of the wall between
the United States and Mexico, and also against a bill to criminalize anyone aiding undocumented immigrants. I kept one with
me and told my mother about the march. She was so outraged by the wall.

“Que pendejos. Don’t they know they need us?” she muttered.

I had been so preoccupied with the wedding I hadn’t contacted any of my old friends to ask them about the march. I was waiting
to decide what to do about my writing career. I knew I was a writer and that’s why I was put on earth. Writing chooses you;
you don’t choose it. Whether I wanted to make my living off my writing was another thing. I was so numb, happy, whatever you
want to call it… “nuppy”… let’s call it that… that I couldn’t imagine putting myself through the stress of
being mistreated or meeting impossible deadlines and, frankly, who needs an adrenaline rush when you’re taking anti-depressants?
For someone like me who was used to being miserable, I was having a hard time recognizing myself. I didn’t crave sugar anymore
or food or sex… Yeah, that was the big drawback. I couldn’t come anymore. Armando worked tirelessly to satisfy me but
I just lay in bed like a happy idiot, unattached to a result. I stopped making sarcastic remarks about mediocre people getting
ahead or all the things I would observe not being right in the world. I could finally understand how a president who’d never
gone to war himself could send thousands of soldiers to their deaths, or an immigrant turned governor could praise the works
of vigilantes abusing other immigrants as they crossed the desert without documents. Everything was great now; but that was
the problem. Life had no edge and I had no opinions of my own.

Armando had agreed that I would get to decide the kind of menu I wanted for the reception, but I didn’t even care about that
anymore. Whatever he wanted was fine by me. He would forsake all others, including his mother, for me. He was even going to
let my mother move in with us once we got a big house with a guesthouse in the back.

The day of the appointment with the caterer I could not find my antidepressant pills. Had I run out of them or had someone
hidden them? As I searched for them, my mother told me to come over to her bed.

“Don’t do it,” she whispered.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Don’t marry him if you don’t want to. I know everyone says you’re happy now, but I don’t see your light anymore,” my mother
confided, trying to outline where she used to see the light around me.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I know you want to marry him so you can take care of me. I can tell you feel guilty about not calling me and then… making
me blind—”

“I didn’t make you blind!” I interrupted her.

“I know, I’m joking… I can see this is a sacrifice for you. Don’t go sacrificing yourself for me. Look where it gets
you.”

“No, that’s not true,” I said and dismissed her. I continued looking for the pills.

“Ten!” she said in Spanish and threw them at me. I grabbed them and went to the bathroom to take one. I saw my unhappy face
in the mirror, knowing that in a second I would return to being a happy idiot. I stared at the pill and thought about all
the hard work some wonderful person had put into capturing happiness in a pill, and here I was debating the value of this
pill in my life. I thought about all those poets and great artists who were depressed who could have been spared their misery
or could have avoided suicide if this pill had been around hundreds of years of ago… Yeah, but then we would not have
been able to see their beautiful paintings, or heard of their beautiful poetry.

Yes, I can finally smile and not carry the weight of the world on my back, but what about the moments when I feel people’s
pain so deeply that it becomes my own, and those moments when I feel people’s joy so beautifully that it too becomes my own?
What about those highs and lows that make me feel alive? But when I take this pill I don’t overeat and I’ve lost twenty pounds,
a little voice shouted back at me. Hmm, that was true; if I stopped taking it I would gain back the twenty pounds and maybe
even gain another twenty and go back to being a human yo-yo… I seriously considered that objection before thinking how
pathetic it would be if my greatest contribution to humanity was losing twenty pounds. I put the pill down and saved it for
later, after I had answered my own questions.

My mother’s nurse arrived and I got ready to go out with Armando. My mother handed me Luna’s letter.

“How come you haven’t read it? It’s been in my drawer all this time and you knew it was there. Why don’t you read it now?”
she challenged me.

I went to the bathroom and locked myself in. I opened the envelope and saw that there were tearstains on the paper and some
of the words were almost illegible. I began to read it.

“Canela, I’m sorry I am not as courageous as you. Adios.”

That’s all it said. Damn, why can’t suicide notes be longer! After my burst of anger I cried, picturing Luna drinking from
the Coke cans, knowing that little by little she was killing herself softly, sweetly.

Armando honked when he arrived at my mother’s house and waited outside for me. I quickly told my mother good-bye as I ran
past her nurse. I got in his Mercedes and we took off; on the radio a disc jockey on a Spanish radio station encouraged everyone
to march and take a stand against HR 4437, the proposed immigration bill. Armando was about to turn off the radio when I told
him to stop the car. He pulled to the side of the road and looked at me with concern.

“I can’t do this,” I said. “I know I love you, but I’m not ready to commit to you or anyone,” I continued courageously, knowing
that I couldn’t sell out. For another woman this would be happiness, but for me it was selling out on my dreams. Sure, I would
have financial security and a nice husband and all the wonderful things in life called the American dream, but this was not
my dream.

Armando looked at me and sadly asked, “Don’t you get lonely?”

“Yeah, I do… but even chocolate, as good as it is… gets boring. There are too many flavors to settle for one,” I
confessed, wondering if he thought I was a heartless bitch for putting it that way.

“All right. Give me back the ring,” he said casually. I gave it back. “So you think I’m boring?” he said sadly and put the
ring away in his pocket without looking at me.

“No, you’re not boring, but I know that you can’t live life through me. You have to go live it for yourself. I have a lot
of living to do still.”

“And you can’t do that with me?” he asked. I thought about it for a long time and knew that the answer was private. I can’t
be monogamous; I don’t want to be some man’s property or responsibility, or have to ask for permission to take on a cause
or a mission in life.

“No,” I answered. I kissed his hand and got out of his car.

“Canela, this is the last time I’ll do this. I will not pursue you again,” he warned me.

“Thank you,” I said and closed the door to his Mercedes.

When I walked into the house my mother could tell by my step that I was sad.

“What happened? What did he tell you?”

“I can’t go through with it.” I started crying.

“So why are you going to cry? You got what you wanted. You should celebrate—you are a free woman again, que no?” my mother
said a bit sarcastically.

“You’re right.” I grabbed her jacket and our purses.

“We’re going for a little walk.” I pushed my mother’s wheelchair out of the house and into history.

“Where are we?” my mother asked in the midst of a sea of humanity made up of over four hundred thousand conscious objectors
clad in Mexican and American flags, millions of cinnamon souls marching throughout the United States for a piece of the American
pie.

“We are among friends,” I answered her and continued to push her wheelchair very slowly, shoulder to shoulder with immigrants
of every color. I heard people shouting all sorts of things, like: “America, you need us. We clean up after you and feed you
and take care of your children, and soon we’ll take care of your parents too.” I swear I even heard someone yell in Spanish,
“Respect and dessert!” Maybe that should be our version of “Bread and Roses.”

“Why are people shouting, ‘Today we march, tomorrow we vote’?” asked my mother.

“Because we’ve had enough,” I proclaimed.

M
onths after I arrived in Los Angeles I got a letter from Altair. She’d gotten my address from Marina and apologized for not
contacting me sooner. She informed me that she had called her bodyguard to turn herself in, but because she had escaped from
him he’d been fired. He had decided to stay in Paris to look for her and they’d found each other. They are both living in
Paris
sans papiers,
trying to start a new life together.

Frenchwomen don’t get fat and Japanese women don’t grow old or get fat… but Latina women do. We get fat and we wrinkle,
but our wrinkles come from laughing and crying. We know how to feel and eat; we know how to love and to come; we know how
to live ourselves to death.

Everything is about food and hunger, whether it is hunger for the body or hunger for the soul. As long as I am alive I will
always be hungry for revolution, for justice and truth, but I am no longer hungry for my soul the way I used to be. I have
plenty of beautiful memories and life-inspiring moments to nourish my soul for many lifetimes… I hope this was delicious.

Allez, allez
(F): Come on, come on

à l’orange
(F, cooking): prepared with an orange sauce

Ama
(S, slang): Mom

Amuse-bouche
(F): a tiny appetizer before the appetizer; literally, amusement to the mouth

Apéritif
(F): a drink before dinner to whet the appetite

¡Apurate!
(S): Hurry up!

Arrondisements
(F): neighborhoods of Paris

Au revoir
(F): Good-bye

Au revoir les euros
(F): Good-bye to the Europeans