The Tribe by Álvarez Carlos Manuel;Wynne Frank;Bery Rahul;

Author:Álvarez, Carlos Manuel;Wynne, Frank;Bery, Rahul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

BROKEN DOLL

Her heart isn’t yet hanging by a thread.

But it soon will be. It’s the night of 10 May 2015 and in her house in Regla, on the outskirts of Havana, Cándida López receives a call from her daughter Mayara Alvite in Quito, wishing her a happy Mother’s Day. Cándida recalls a bright, loving conversation, dampened only by the anguish of physical distance. Her daughter seems sparkier and more upbeat than she has been recently.

The fact that her daughter seems more like herself again is reason enough for Cándida to recover a bit of the calm she’s barely felt at all since October 2014, when Mayara sold her dead father’s house in San Miguel del Padrón and decided to emigrate to Ecuador to try her luck with her girlfriend Waday, a forty-year-old, half-Chinese woman Cándida has always detested because she is very controlling towards her daughter, only twenty-three.

From the night of the phone call on, Mayara, despondent and in an unfamiliar place, becomes progressively glummer until, on the morning of 12 May, Cándida receives another phone call from her daughter’s number. It is a dam which the events come bursting through.

‘When I woke up that day I hadn’t felt like having breakfast,’ she says. ‘I didn’t even want to get out of bed. I had a tight feeling in my chest. I didn’t know what was happening to me.’

Cándida, petrified, deep in the tunnel where they tell her over and over again that, yesterday night, from a beam in a closet, with a luggage strap,

your

daughter,

Mayara

h

a

n

g

e

d

herself.

—

Her blood pressure goes through the roof. Everything Cándida does from now on – her relentless crusade for the return of her daughter’s body, the brief moments in which she tries to think about anything else – she will do with her nerves pulverized, sunk deep into a cancerous struggle that will manifest in different ways, with one horrific constant: the feeling of having nothing to lean on, nothing to look forward to.

Forty-five minutes after the conversation with Cándida, Waday – whom everyone calls La China – calls again and talks to Cándida’s sister-in-law. She needs five thousand dollars, she says disdainfully, and power of attorney, authorizing her to deal with the process of getting the body repatriated.

On her way back from the polyclinic, still unsettled and clinging to the ever fainter possibility that this is some cruel trick, Cándida decides she’s not going to send any money to La China, firstly because she doesn’t have any, and secondly because under no circumstances will she give one penny, and far less a power of attorney, to that harpy.

And then Cándida gets another idea.

‘La China murdered my daughter,’ she says. ‘My daughter was full of life. A mother can’t be wrong. More than anything, my daughter loved and respected life.’

And a while later:

‘If they bring her, I’m going to dress her up real nice. If they don’t let me dress her, I’ll kiss her, I’ll touch her. I want to do it all.’

And so, during that first

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