Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París

Author:Daniel Saldaña París
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2020-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

In the Paideia School, “fairy” was the most offensive thing one boy could call another. I’d had the bad luck of hearing it often, especially in relation to my lack of ability at sports, but I was always very careful not to react with anger: I’d force myself to ignore the insult and, at most, would smile and give my persecutors the finger, which seemed to disconcert them.

Víctor Flores, on the other hand, was an easy target. Fairy, queer, homo: there was no variant of that insult that wasn’t thrown at him at least once a day. And, invariably, Víctor Flores would cry with rage, swipe his aggressor’s schoolbooks to the ground, scream an interminable string of curses, and then, when it was all over, he was the one to be sent to receive his punishment from the principal—a Frenchwoman who had a perpetual smile on her face and was always dressed in red.

The image of Víctor Flores, his face smeared with snot and disfigured by rage, flitted through my mind when I heard the nasal twang of that soldier calling me a fairy. But I didn’t have time to feel hurt by that insult: still riding on the crest of his inappropriate laughter, the adolescent crouched down so that his face was on a level with mine. “So, you a boy or a fairy?” His question frightened me less than the smell of his breath, something like burnt plastic or those weirdly colored liquids my father kept in the garage and every so often poured into the engine of the Tsuru. The teenage soldier looked straight at me, smiled, and I suddenly thought I remembered where I’d heard that laugh before. It was my father’s laugh, the one he gave sometimes when sitting watching TV, and that I’d hear from my bedroom, from my Zero Luminosity Capsule, or while I was organizing the leaves I’d collected during the day.

Mariconchi sensed danger and tried to move me away from the soldier, hiding me behind her back. The soldier straightened up and slapped her lightly, more to sow the seeds of fear than to inflict pain. Mariconchi raised both hands to her face. One of the passengers who had already been checked attempted to intervene, but a second soldier approached with a menacing expression, raising his rifle as if he were going to hit him with it.

The adolescent soldier crouched down again in front of me, breathing his solvent smell in my face. “Let’s see if you’re a girl or a fairy.” I was petrified, and Mariconchi, frozen with impotence, was crying silently without moving a single muscle, like those miraculous Virgins in churches.

The adolescent soldier unwound Mariconchi’s shawl and proceeded to frisk me from the calves upward, as if checking for a weapon. At that moment, there wasn’t a single thought in my head. For the first time, my mind was a blank, like a sheet of paper with absolutely no creases. The second soldier, who stood watching a few

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