Page 9 of The Night We Became Strangers

Valeria

“ V enga, mijita, ” Tío Bolívar said, as I entered the living room, where he sat with his newspaper and his cigarettes. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”

This was the first time we had been alone since he’d picked me up from the train station a week ago.

Their house was always hectic, with my older cousins coming in and out with their spouses and children, Joselito stepping on rugs and hardwood floors with muddy shoes, my aunt relentlessly cleaning or preparing something to eat for her unannounced guests.

It seemed like she, Graciela, and the maid were always doing dishes.

I myself had helped them in the kitchen a few times.

I sat on a settee speckled with embroidered rosebuds and stared at him. Maybe Graciela had already mentioned my unpleasant encounter with Matías’s mother.

“Do you remember the Recalde family?” he said.

How could I forget? It had only been a week.

“Yes.” I rested my chin on my knuckles.

“What did you think of Félix?”

The redhead? I hadn’t given him a second thought. “Nothing.”

He sighed, leaning forward, and set his cigarette on an ashtray strategically placed on an end table by his sofa chair. A scent of ashes emanated from his suit.

“The Recaldes are important people,” he said. “They own two of the biggest radio stations in the country.” He had already started with his nervous shakes, but it was too early for a drink. “Listen, mijita , La Voz never fully recovered from”—he cleared his throat—“the tragedy.”

They kept calling it “the tragedy” and talked about it as if it had been an accident of nature, not a deliberate act.

“We lost advertisers and, more importantly, the trust of the people. The Recaldes have an upstanding reputation in the community. If we, hmm—if we associate with them, it could be very beneficial to our station. We could buy modern equipment, hire actors to renew radionovela transmissions, acquire better scripts, bring in big bands for our evening shows.”

“And how would we associate with them?”

He pulled out another cigarette from a box he always carried in his shirt’s front pocket. He didn’t answer until he’d taken the first drag of smoke.

“Félix is a good boy, but so shy. The Recaldes have been trying to find him a wife for some time. I think he’d make a great husband for you.”

“For me?” I said, incredulously. What was this, the Middle Ages?

He nodded.

I stood up, afraid that anything I said would come out in the form of a scream. With time and punishment, I had learned to control the anger that lived inside of me.

He stood after me. “Wait, Valerita, think about it.”

Valeria .

“Where are you going to find a better husband? These people are decent, well-respected, and they have a luxurious home in La Mariscal, a new residential neighborhood north of us. You will loveit.”

“Tío, I told you last week I want to work, I don’t want to get married. Not yet. Certainly not to a man I met for two hours and don’t even know what his voice sounds like.”

He set his hand on my forearm in an appeasing gesture, circles of smoke between us.

“Look, you don’t have to answer right now. Take some time to think about it. Talk it over with Graciela, and then we can speak again. There’s no hurry.”

I wanted to ask him why he didn’t tell his own daughter to marry Félix, but I decided not to say anything else.

Getting into a fight with my uncle wasn’t a good idea.

I was staying at his house, after all, and had no other place to live.

As far as I knew, he’d sold my parents’ old house, and the money had been used to restore the radio station and to pay for my education and upkeep.

Fighting tears of frustration, I turned around and headed for the stairs.

When I opened the bedroom door, Graciela immediately shut down a thick folder, as if I’d caught her reading—what? Something forbidden? She tried to hide it among other books in the bookshelf’s bottom row, but I’d already seen it, and I intended to check its contents as soon as I got a chance.

“You won’t believe what your dad just told me.”

She dodged my gaze, flipping imaginary dirt from her skirt.

“Oh, no,” I said.

“What?”

“You already knew, didn’t you?”

She opened her dresser’s top drawer and removed a leather-bound album. “Come here, I want to show you something.”

I sat next to her. She opened the first page. It was a photo album filled with black-and-white postcards inserted in tiny corner frames, all from different cities: Valparaíso, Mar del Plata, Río de Janeiro, Maracaibo, Veracruz.

“Where did you get these?”

Graciela pressed her lips together, as if trying to fight a smile. “My fiancé works for a fishing fleet in Manta and travels all over the world transporting tuna. He sends me postcards from every location.” She was openly smiling now.

“I didn’t know you had a fiancé. When are you getting married?”

“I don’t know. Oscar is trying to save enough money to buy us a house.”

“Are you going to move to the coast?”

“Probably. Although he has family here, too. That’s how we met.”

“How long have you been engaged?”

She kept turning pages. “Since I was eighteen.”

Based on my calculations, that was three years ago. “When did you see him last?”

She shut the album. “I think you should accept Félix. He’s a good man. I’ve known him since he was a young boy. He’s not arrogant like his parents at all . You should take advantage of this opportunity, Vale. They don’t come often for girls like us.”

“ Girls like us? ”

“Girls followed by tragedy.”