Humiliation. Paulina Flores
from the neighborhood where they lived. The father had lost his job a while ago, but with the girls home on summer vacation, he had no choice now but to take them with him when he went to drop off résumés or attend interviews. Their mother said they couldn’t be left alone. She used the word abandon: “You can’t abandon them in the house.”
At first the father had found it a nuisance. He saw it as his wife taking revenge on him—after all, she could have made more of an effort to find some old neighbor lady with time on her hands who could take care of the girls. Then he decided it wasn’t really such a bad idea. Maybe they would give him an advantage. If people saw him come in with two little girls in tow, maybe they’d take pity on him and give him the job.
“Remember, think about something sad,” he’d say to his daughters before they entered the office buildings.
“Like if Mom and you died?” asked Pía, confused, the first time her father said it. Her eyes grew watery and intense.
The father corrected himself. “No, no. Not that. Not so sad. What I mean is that you can’t go around laughing or playing or cracking jokes while you wait for me. I want you to pretend to be sad. Fake sad, like the actresses on TV . . . and then I’ll take you out for french fries and the three of us will laugh by ourselves.”
Pía smiled in relief, happy at the idea of french fries. But her eyes filled up with tears again when Simona told her: “You know what I think about to get sad? I imagine Mom and Dad are going to break up.”
Simona raised her eyes to look defiantly at the sun. She’d been warned so often not to do that, but now she felt utterly confident, capable of absorbing all the sun’s rays. Because this morning would be different. This morning they would triumph, and all the effort and failure that had come before would be worth it. And she had planned it all. Finally, her help would do some good.
She’d been trying to contribute for a long time. In the afternoons, she sat at the kitchen table next to her father with her own pile of newspapers in front of her, and she went through them looking for any and all job advertisements. She marked them with a fluorescent highlighter, cut them out carefully, and glued them onto a white page. Once the page was covered in pasted ads, she filed it in a folder labeled CLASSIFIED ADS FOR DAD. At the end of the day, she handed the folder to him with all the gravity the situation called for.
She was driven and enthusiastic, but not because she wanted her father to find a job. Nor because she wanted to end her parents’ fights, or the family’s economic straits. Rather, she longed for her father to be again the way he used to be.
At first, when she found out he’d been fired, she couldn’t help but feel satisfied. She didn’t tell a soul, but she was pleased. Finally, she would have fun with her father all day long! Every day! And it was summer vacation, too—it was like a dream. Nothing would get in the way of their games: not work, which left him so tired at night; not her mother, either.
Because her mother seemed like the biggest obstacle. She never let Simona spend time with her father: she took over and dominated every aspect of her life, and her little sister’s life. She made them food, brought them to school, to birthday parties, took them shopping for clothes. When her father came home from work, her mother went on taking charge of everything herself: checking the girls’ homework and their backpacks, drying their hair after their baths, making sure they brushed their teeth well, tucking them in and turning out the light. Simona received a “good night” from her father only when he got up to lock the doors. And then there were Sundays. The day she and her father could finally have fun, her mother would butt in with her scolding. “Don’t bother her, Alejandro,” she said when he lunged at Simona to start a tickle war. “She’s a little girl!” The same thing at lunch, when her father started in with the jokes: “Hey, look over there!” he’d say, and then steal food from her plate. “Let them eat in peace,” her mother said. But Simona didn’t want him to leave her alone, she didn’t want her mother to defend her. She knew they were games, and she liked them. But her mother didn’t understand, and she complained to her girlfriends that it was “like having three kids instead of two,” or that “he always makes me into the bad guy.”
But as it turned out, things only got worse after he lost his job. And then Simona realized that there was an even bigger wall that separated her from her father.
The first day he was home, she got up very early, eager to snuggle up with him in bed. She ran to his room, but when she turned the knob she found it was locked. She knocked a few times, gently, but the door stayed closed until lunchtime. When her father finally appeared he was in a bad mood, and he complained that her mother hadn’t left anything to eat. After making some gluey noodles with half-cooked hot dogs, he told her and Pía that, starting now, they’d have to make the beds and divide up the housework. Then he locked himself in his room again. There were no jokes or tickle wars. Her father came out only to go to the bathroom, his face scruffy and ever less healthy. And everything they did made him mad. Things that had never bothered him before, like when she sang the songs from The Little Mermaid, her favorite movie. Before, they’d always sung those songs together, and they’d recited the dialogue from memory. “Poor Unfortunate Souls” was her favorite, and the one they sang the best.
“Here’s the deal,” her father would say, imitating the malevolent voice of Ursula the witch. “I’ll make you a potion that will turn you into a human for three days. Got that? Three days. Before the sun sets on the third day, you’ve got to get dear old Princey to fall in love with you. That is, he’s got to kiss you. Not just any kiss—the kiss of true love!” Her father just loved that last line, and so did she.
“If I become human,” Simona would reply, playing the innocent and dubious Ariel, “I’ll never be with my father or sisters again.”
“That’s right . . . but . . . you’ll have your man. Life’s full of tough choices, innit?”
Simona was sure that her father loved her, but she could also tell that something was making him feel lonely, and that all the love she could give him didn’t help; quite the opposite, in fact. In some strange and inexplicable way it seemed to weaken him and make him feel more alone. She thought that solitude was related to one of the words her mother had said in their fights, one she’d also looked up in the dictionary: humiliation.
So, when she’d seen the casting call a couple of days earlier, it was as if a miracle had come down from heaven. How had she not realized? How had she not thought of it sooner, when it was so obvious? All that time looking at classified ads for carpenters, bakers, assistants, watchmen, salesmen, drivers, and more watchmen, never realizing how bad those ads must make her father feel.
Now, while she walked, she took the clipping from her pocket and read it one more time:
GREAT OPPORTUNITY: Casting Call. Ad agency seeks women and men of all ages for publicity campaign—prestigious international brand. Tryouts: Monday–Wednesday, Bellavista 0550 . . .
Simona loved TV. She always paid special attention to the commercials, because her sister never understood them and asked her to explain.
There were many reasons her father was destined to triumph in the casting, but two in particular stood out. The first and most obvious: people in commercials were much less handsome than her father. To say less handsome, in fact, was an understatement. It’s just, her father was beautiful! He looked like Luis Miguel, the most beautiful man on the face of the earth. She told everyone: “My dad is like Luis Miguel’s twin.” And he knew it too, and he seemed to like it, because he always sang to her “Será que no me amas,” imitating Luis Miguel’s haughty flirtatiousness as he danced. He turned his face in profile, grabbed his hair, gave a kick and a turn. He moved forward with little jumps, swaying his hips, while Simona did the backup singers’ chorus: “Noche, playa, lluvia, amas.”
And that was the other reason: her father had a flair for performance. At least, that was what her mother always said: “Alejandro missed his calling. He should have studied acting or something, it’s in his nature.” Simona caught the mockery behind the comment. And not only because her mother’s tone implied it was