Bad Girls: A Novel by Camila Sosa Villada

Author:Camila Sosa Villada
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

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IT’S THE HEAT, the maddening heat. Having spent so many years suffering in hellfire, the obligatory siestas when you’d pretend to have a cool, invisible house with curtains in the windows that keep out the heat of the bush. It was so hot that Mommy was afraid we’d melt in the haze. We took our nap sweating like animals, alone, with no energy for anything. Taking turns to fetch water from a communal spigot; you couldn’t drink the well water any more. It was so hot in the village that everything went bad: the water, the earth, the food, hearts and souls. Heat still makes me angry. Travesti heat was no different. Caked makeup that got sticky, a mask of warm mud blocking up the pores so that our souls wouldn’t slip out every time we were attacked. Our faces turned into a mask, the most beautiful of all masks, travesti features more authentic than our actual ones, conceived for another world, a better world where such masks are possible.

Meanwhile we were Indians in war paint, beasts who stalked the Park at night, on the lookout for the unwary. We were always angry, brutish in our tenderness, unpredictable, crazy, resentful, poisonous. We were forever ready to burn the whole place down: our parents, friends and enemies, the middle classes with their comforts and routines, the posh kids who all looked the same, the patrician cocksuckers who scorned us so, our running masks, the anger painted on our skin protesting a world that looked the other way, that protected itself at the expense of ours, sucking life from us just because it had more money. So we chased our johns, forced into heat, into feeling that there was nothing worse than being a fairy choking on the hot world of men, where all issues are resolved with kicks and punches. Forced into the secret wish to kill them all, to end the world once and for all, to see if that would also sate our anger over the abuse to which we had all been subjected. Perhaps that was why we stole from them. Not much: twenty, fifty pesos slipped out of a wallet, nothing. No families were going to go hungry because of it. It was just a gesture. I’m young and believe I have a right to do this. That the money belongs to me because I’m at a disadvantage in this scene we share, the john and I. Later, at home, they’d notice the loss, missing the money that I’d already spent on one of the small pleasures that illuminate the lives of the poor. At the time, I went to the movies a lot. Sometimes I’d buy a book. Sometimes I had enough for a nightdress. I learned from the other travestis, it was a trick of the trade and inevitable, given the pittance they paid for our bodies and talents. It wasn’t a tip because it was taken without consent. But it was still legitimate, payment to compensate for the unseen violence of every trick we turned.

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