CHEVIVE
a short story by Miguel Coletti
translated by David Brendan O’Meara
Athena was the name of the goddess of the Templo Faro who stole my teenage heart and mind. She’d show up at our rowdy house every day after school, together with my sister, her inseparable pal. Maybe Athena had no one waiting for her, anyway she’d eat lunch with us and then do her homework, filling her notebooks with her unique handwriting, violent yet somehow perfect. That’s how we got to know each other: among spoons and forks and the smell of soup and cheap pens spilling ink on her fingers, until the afternoon ended and she’d go back to her own barrio, walking alone.
My sister was best friends with this gorgeous dark-skinned girl, the one who upended my life the moment she walked in. Her presence hit me hard: her beauty, her bubbling biting jokes, everything she said: a way of talking completely free of fake politeness.
Athena had introduced my sister to her neighbor Doña Hilda Castro, the most discreet and successful dressmaker in Callao. Doña Hilda was Athena’s patron saint and protector, a true artist of the needle and thread, a single mother and a self-sacrificing fighter who always left a door or window open for Athena in the dangerous Pasaje Perla, a street that had two ways out: one to the sea and the other to a professional soccer field that smelled hopelessly of fish.
My sister was planning her graduation party, eager for her big moment to arrive. Instead of dropping a fortune in some fashionable department store, she decided to give Doña Hilda the job of creating her beautiful gown.
My sister sat down in front of the leathery old seamstress, a real hardened grindstone, as the old-timers would say, and she told us a story about the time Che Guevara was hiding in Callao and married to a local woman:
Ernestito looked like Jesucristo, he was a gringo, but a good guy, a guy who dared to play soccer the way it’s played here, rough football in the barrio of the rough sea, Callao football, with no fear of getting blasted off your feet.
The gringo was the husband of a lady who lived in a small room here on the side (and Doña Hilda pointed to a path in the alley that led to a closed door), he’d come to see her in the afternoons and in those visits he got to know the people of the barrio and he was so nice that all the girls around here fell in love with him and the children too and he made a career as a doctor here in the pasaje, and as a footballer too, that guy could give it as well as he could take it, hard kicks out there on the open field. He’d put up with the jokes of the smart-asses of the barrio as if they were innocent kids, and when the battle was over, he’d pick up the ball and call a meeting in the center of the field and give a little speech and plant two kisses on everyone’s cheeks.
Athena always looked so beautiful, with her lacey Afro and her immense hoop earrings hanging from her pink lobes, which I wanted to lap up madly until they were dry, the golden metallic circles shining in cross-eyed view like the real thing, like a lost bullet. I was turned on by her beauty, horny just to look at her, but also afraid. I began to walk through life in a daze, at first I’d be tense, then I’d see a light, some familiar place, my own footprints showing the way out and I’d feel better, but even more in love, with the surprising perfume of this dark-skinned girl carrying me away from the reality of Callao.
Athena was her name, but she wasn’t the goddess of Olympus, she was the goddess of the dangerous neighborhood of Templo Faro, the lighthouse church in the heart of Callao, that legendary mast from which brave dockworkers used to throw themselves, diving to the asphalt, back when the Chilean navy did their customs blockade.
The temple was the home of a lighthouse tower that reached up to the clouds and let you glimpse on the horizon a celestial island, where the sun was hiding, or a squadron of pirate ships ready to plunder the port.
Athena had a warrior ass, a guerrilla ass that I couldn’t stop thinking about, it drove me crazy, it was a beautiful ass, an ass with a beret, a mathematical ass that I dared not contradict lest it stop talking to me, an ass that was my oxygen, my food, my admiration and that I respected for being gallon-sized, avenue-wide, an ass of the barrio, of a corner that smelled of affection and of a home where it surely made the father of a family happy, an ass that opened the doors of Callao for me because it made me someone just to be near it, a port-town ass wearing a gleaming medallion, an ass that made me grow as a human being, always a winner, an ass that was serious and possible, an ass that wore boots.
Like that time I watched her walk along the rough stone streets, her hips taking over the world, tracing their contours within so many lascivious gazes that guys could see even the shadow of her panty liner; she would dance salsa and the watching eyes would move to the sound, like pelicans rolling fish in their beaks, licking their chops, like snivelling boobies emboldened just by watching her pass by. She would see me and approach me with those big eyes that she would open wide when it suited her and she’d laugh at my embarrassment, with her light teeth and her look of truth in the midst of so much scum, and then during a silent kiss that lasted several minutes she said goodbye to me in the middle of a party swirling with stew, dense smoke and beer, where you had to use a bathroom that had some guy in charge, where people lined up to enter and piss in groups, in gangs, where they were probably waiting to mug me, but she took me by the arm and led me to a side door, the music bursting out like an indecent wind, and then, sincere, sad and weary, she sent me on my way.
Athena, you stole my reason and took it to every crooked corner, to every dirty little bus window where your name would appear drawn by my humid finger, to the birds and bats of the air, to the spicy gossip of the barrio, to the buzz of our conversation left behind on the beach, to the talking heads on TV who would lead off each morning’s list of crimes with your name, to all the dreams of lead and blood from which I could never wake up, to every distant space where I received your messages of waiting, waiting for Athena.
And so I clung to this obsession that sidetracked my life for the rest of my adolescence.
Translator’s note: according to The Motorcycle Diaries, Ernesto Guevara (known at the time as “Ernestito” and later as “el Che”) spent three weeks in Lima, Peru in April and May of 1952. Although he had not quite finished his medical degree, he spent much of his journey through Latin America providing medical services to the poor. In Callao people say that he returned in the 70s, on the run, and married a local woman.
The original of this story, in Spanish, can be found in the blog of Pedro Granados.
Miguel Coletti grew up in the port city of Callao and currently lives in the neighboring metropolis of Lima. His work includes La casa de cartón (The Cardboard House), Los cachorros (The Pups), Los inocentes (The Innocents), and Prepucio carmesí (The Scarlet Foreskin).