La Gritona

You can see La Gritona from my home.

Sandra Cisneros wrote about it. It’s a lot uglier than she thinks — it’s full of trash and sludge and oil and spit and piss and shit. Un infierno.

That is what I live in: hell. It’s a miserable kind of place, the kind of place you escape from, never look back, write horror stories about. But that’s my home and remains my home, I’m writing to you not from a place of wisdom of past of escape but within el infierno — consumida.

But don’t misunderstand me. This is no home. This is a shithole, this place I live in, this place I never escaped from. Yo no soy Cleófilas, I am what she would have become if she had stayed…

I was married at the age of seventeen. I actually finished high school, sort of. I got a certificate that says I have some education. That’s more than my mother had because my father never let her out of his sight once he met her.

He met me dancing. We danced cumbia. I was repulsed by his stomach; it pressed against me when he pulled me close and I felt repelled by both our bodies yet he continued to pull me forward until I found his face above mine and then touching, his mouth open like he was trying to swallow me whole. He smelled like cigarettes and mezcal.

We were married shortly after, he having a job and being twelve years my senior it was a good match according to my father. He was kind enough to me at first. He liked to fuck me in the mornings, I would wake up with him curled around me and already inside me. I yelled the first time and he gripped my mouth so I would be quiet; after that he always held my mouth when we fucked. He fucked me on top at night, this time his hand around my throat. Sometimes his eyes bore into mine but I always looked away and he would laugh.

And then I had Daniel. Like his father, we gave him a name for prosperity. I never called him Daniel, though. Always Luz, which his father kept telling me is a girl’s name and would slap me for making him un maricón but I insisted, only quiet when his father was gone and we were alone, Luz, Luz, Luz, mi amor.

Daniel was somehow so intelligent, despite being born from my husband and myself. He got perfect grades in school, but he would still play with his friends as if he weren’t concerned, he could just do his algebra, sums that I couldn’t even imagine myself.

I couldn’t have another kid. At first, I got lucky. And then I did it on purpose, once Daniel was four and I returned home from the store and Daniel had a black eye and his father told me he had fallen but I knew that was a lie because I had the same mark from yesterday’s burnt desayuno. And things only got worse.

So when I started missing my period a few months later, I stopped eating. I would give in sometimes and make myself puke. I made my body un infierno so that she would not have to enter this one. She came out of me two months later, without ever showing; he never knew.

And then Daniel was ten and his grades were still perfect and he was my love and my hope. I didn’t know what it meant to love until I knew him. I loved him, mi Lucito, mi cielito, mi mundo.

And then he came home one day and he was mad drunk, scary as he usually is. But I didn’t know it, I would have calmed him down, I would have let him fuck me however he wanted, to the point at which I bled and cried I would have let him do anything to me so that he wouldn’t find Daniel but I had stepped outside, I was hanging up the wash, I was looking at La Gritona, the serene sludge, and I heard a sound and I heard Daniel screaming. I could feel my heart break when I found him, his eye gone his face bleeding the pipe in his hand.

It took Daniel for me to finally tell him what he was pendejo puto de mierda…

I am what she would have been if she had stayed. I am with mi cielito here below, enterrada, enterrados, muertos. I live in el infierno, el infierno de La Gritona below her gurgling stream, a whisper to a scream to encompassing me, every minute day year década; por cuánto tiempo hemos estado aquí?