The Hurricane

Mar 15, 2019
5 min read

by Hemil Garcia Linares

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil. — Friedrich Nietzsche

“Can we stay here?” asked the child, and Magda, for the first time, did not know what to say. She breathed in deep and finished the last of her cigarette. She looked at the child. His brown eyes awaited an answer. Magda put out the cigarette in the ashtray and sat the child on her lap while cigarette smoke drew arabesques throughout the room. “We can’t stay here. We must move my darling,” she said and kissed him. It was not a lie. They had to move every two months. Magda, already accustomed to the routine, was getting ready to take a bath while Bobby, her child, dealt with his errant lifestyle with the help of a video game he took with him all over Virginia. They had been traveling for almost three years. New faces, always different and terrifying, appeared and disappeared quickly from their lives like the cars on Arlington Boulevard. The large and unfamiliar avenue was home to Latino restaurants, laundry mats, and convenient stores, and sprinkled with South and Central Americans jornaleros who were smoking cigarettes as they waited for some contractor to offer them work, if only for a few hours. The room on the third floor where they lived had a perpetual smell of tobacco that seemed to have always been there; a rancid smell as if the room, the whole building, had been constructed by smokers who purposefully left their cigarette butts inside the fragile plywood walls. “Can I turn on my video game, mommy,” asked Bobby, and Magda gave him a consenting look. “I have to take a bath, sweetie,” she said. She went to the bathroom and left the door ajar. She looked at her thirty years in the mirror, or are they thirty-three, Magda? Does it matter? As she took off her pajamas, her cinnamon-brown skin, still soft, glowed inundating the yellow walls of the room. In her tired face, her vibrant eyes shone brightly. They were of a green tint like the Caribbean Sea, a calm and transparent sea that on occasions could turn wild and unpredictable, like a hurricane, and she knew, although she might not wanted to accept it, that she carried a hurricane within. Magda turned on the water faucet and the warm water bathed her skin. She slid the soap around her arms and back then reached for her breasts. She dallied about and then slowly reached toward her stomach, and her sex. She cleansed her thighs and calves, and finally, she bent down to caress her feet with the soap. I’m exhausted, she thought. She remembered her brother had offered to give her a job in his store, back in Guatemala, and told her not to worry about anything. A little help wouldn’t be bad now, she thought. How different things were from five years ago when she came to the United States with so many dreams. She was working as a waitress at a Mexican restaurant and received very good tips. After a year she met Jose Ramon, a good-looking Mexican employee who swept her off her feet. Like a fool (she thought now) she fell head over heels and became distracted. Let’s go dancing, Magda. Let’s take a trip to the beach, princess. And it was all dancing, trips, and happiness until she became pregnant. When she told him, Jose Ramon seemed happy and they went together to her first prenatal appointment. But the next week, the Earth, Immigration Services, Destiny, God, the Devil or the Chupacabras must have swallowed Jose Ramon because she never saw him again. She had a difficult pregnancy and had no choice but to leave the restaurant, and from then on, her life took a sudden twist. “So now, what are you working in?” her brother asked her once, and she simply answered, “I’m independent. I work in sales.” Now the future couldn’t get any worse, or could it? If she could only return home with money, always the damn money. If she had money she’d tell everyone to go to hell. I should hurry and get ready. And if I listened to my brother? Maybe things would be easier there. But my baby, that’s the problem. Would he get used to living there? He has to practice his Spanish, and the food would be the hardest. Mommy, I don’t like beans, he says, and he won’t eat them, but he can sure down those chicken nuggets without a problem. He’s so adorable with his Nintendo. Why don’t we have a house, Mommy? he asked the other day and he caught me unprepared. We’ll have a beautiful house, I tell him. When? he asked. I told him that someday and changed the conversation and asked if he would like to go to Guatemala and meet his grandparents and he said yes kids are so clever but only if we would have a house there. I said yes and told him that the grandparents’ house is large and that it is ours too and that we will go to the beach and that when we sit on the beach we won’t ever leave and….

She was almost finished bathing when the bell rang. Mommy, the bell is ringing, said Bobby, and Magda rinsed quickly and closed the faucet. She grabbed the first towel she could find and put her hair in a ponytail. She put on a fuchsia robe and stepped out of the bathroom. “Who is it, Mommy?” the child asked without stopping his video game. “I don’t know, sweetie. I’m gonna see,” she answered, walking towards the door. There was a strange man outside. She looked at him as she raised one eyebrow and after making a sign she closed the door. “Bobby, sweetie, go over to Aunt Sandra’s for a bit and I’ll pick you up later. Okay, baby?” she said and disconnected the video game. She put it in a bag along with some cookies that were on the nightstand. The boy left the room with the bag in his hand and knocked on the next door. A messy-haired woman in red shorts and only a bra opened the door, and when she saw Magda, they understood each other without saying a word. As soon as the boy entered the other room, Magda returned to hers. “Come in, darling,” said Magda to the stranger waiting outside, “and close the door.” She barely hinted a metallic smile as she took off her robe and lay down on the bed, naked and lost because she knew that the hurricane she carried within even though she did not like it would come ashore once again to lash against the sheets.

Hemil Garcia Linares (Peru, 1971) earned a BA degree in journalism in his home country and an MA in Spanish and Hispanic Literature from George Mason University. He is a Spanish Instructor at Georgetown University. He has worked at George Washington University, George Mason University, and public schools in Virginia and Washington D.C. He published Tales of the North, Stories from the South (2009, 2017); the novels Sixty Days to Leave the Country (2011) and Achille in the Andes (2015); he was the editor of the anthologies Latin Roots (2012), Exiles (2015), and co-editor of To Belong (2017). He has published his work in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, France, Spain, and Denmark. In 2010 he won first place in the International Latino Book Awards in the fiction category. He has been a finalist in literary contests in Argentina, Spain, Switzerland, and Mexico. He is the founder of the Virginia Hispanic Book Festival and the Spanish Creative Writing Workshop of Virginia.

Editor’s note: This story first appeared in Gival Press