Here’s my story for the holiday blog tour, written with love for all the many different cultures of the world.
Post a comment today or Monday to be entered in a drawing to win a signed copy of my book The Bolero of Andi Rowe, which, incidentally, includes another Christmas story.
The tour continues on Monday with Mayra Calvani. Scroll down for a full schedule of authors blogging our way to Christmas!
A VERY MANJAR CHRISTMAS
Before her son of a bitch son-in-law took off and left her with four kids to raise, after she’d raised four of her own gracias very much, Yolanda Sommer, called “Yiyo” both in Santiago, Chile and in Jackson Heights, Queens, lived with a woman named Marta De Luca. Despite being from Argentina, Marta kept a mostly clean and tastefully decorated apartment on 82nd Street, where Yiyo rented a small room with a twin bed and dresser. It was 1976, just a few years after that fateful one when all went to shit in Chile. Yiyo had slipped out unknowingly, before La Moneda went up in smoke, to follow her maricón brother who had got an engineering job in “America”. As if Los Estados was the only America around. The neighborhood was shitty, full of drugs and all kinds of bad things. But if José could live there, Yiyo Sommer could live there. She was over 50 now but she still had a figure that could turn heads. She figured there were less chances she’d be raped in a neighborhood full of gays.
José had wanted his own place and she couldn’t blame him. The man had lived his entire life with their mother, up until she died and he felt it was finally acceptable for him to leave. But he came to Yiyo’s apartment every week and gave her money. She would make him empanadas de queso and they’d drink Chilean vino rojo he picked up at the liquor store around the corner. José would rave about Pinochet, and what good things he was doing for Chile, for the economy. Her brother, the maricón lover of dictators. When Yiyo didn’t join in on his Pinochet worship, he’d wave her off and call her una communista. Well, so what? There was something about that pompous asshole she didn’t trust.
But what was worse than carrying bags full of groceries past hungry junkies and José swooning over Pinochet like he was his fucking boyfriend every fucking time she saw him, was Marta the Argentine. Not surprisingly, Marta thought very highly of herself. Every morning at 8, she’d put Italian opera on the record player and attempt to sing along. The woman thought she was a first soprano, but Yiyo had heard dying dogs that sounded better. At dinner, she’d talk about how when she was a young woman in Buenos Aires handsome rich men would take her to El Teatro Colon and to gourmet meals in la Recoleta. As if Yiyo wanted to hear this. As if it wouldn’t take more than a little imagination to see this fat, sweaty woman, who couldn’t even fry an egg or do her hair properly, mind you, as once being a sophisticated young beauty. How she ended up in this run-down Queens neighborhood or what became of any of those men, Marta never said. And Yiyo never asked. She just waited until la gorda finished talking and hoped this wasn’t one of those times when she’d go off about her time as una estudiante de los artes bellas.
Such as things were, the apartment was filled with endless battles. Chilean poetry versus Argentine. Chilean soccer versus Argentine. Chilean wine versus Argentine.
And then there were the maté versus manjar mornings. Marta would sit at the kitchen table, sucking out of that stupid gourd with her “bombilla” like some overweight Indian, and Yiyo would sit with her toast and manjar, that sweet, smooth goodness filling her and making her remember Chile and Arica where she grew up in the desert.
Marta would ask for the hundredth time, “What do they call that again? I always forget.”
No shit, Yiyo would think. But she would say, because Marta would complain about her bad language, “It’s called manjar.”
“I thought it was dulce de leche.”
“It’s manjar.”
“But it says right there on the jar—”
“It’s called manjar.”
Was it Yiyo’s fault they couldn’t label things properly here? The jar did say dulce de leche and that it was an Uruguayan product. Who ever heard of Uruguay? And who had ever met a person from Uruguay? Not Yiyo. And did she want to? No gracias. All she knew was that this creamy concoction had the taste and consistency of manjar, the nectar of her life. She would know it anywhere.
It was because of these painful mornings that Yiyo finally began spooning the manjar out of the plastic containers and putting it into a washed out glass mayonnaise jar she kept especially for this purpose. Marta kept asking her stupid questions but at least she couldn’t point her fat finger at the label anymore.
Yiyo would always offer some to Marta to taste, and Marta would pretend to consider, but she would always say no. “It must be very fattening,” she would say, as if she didn’t consume twenty bonbons a day. Then she would offer Yiyo a sip of her maté, and Yiyo would pretend to consider, but she would always say no. “I don’t think it’s polite to share drinks,” she would say, and Marta’s chubby face would redden and she’d tighten her grip on the metal straw.
Probably the one thing that helped Yiyo keep her sanity sharing an apartment the size of three bathtubs with this woman were the Friday nights when she and Marta would “entertain”, as Marta said, a few ladies from the neighborhood. Every Friday night at 8 the women would ring the front doorbell and walk up the three flights of stairs to the tumultuous apartment. There was the Irish viejita Mary, la colombiana Marisol, and la negra Margo….
