Slum Virgin by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Author:Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: slum virgin;gabriela cabezón cámara;charco press
Publisher: Charco Press
Published: 2017-10-22T15:58:15+00:00

14. Quity: ‘Long live the Slum Virgin’

Long live the Slum Virgin

may her party never end

there’s always room for another friend

here where there’s so much blow and beer

that it’s coming out of our ears.

She was reflected in the murky water of the pond, looking down with her hands outstretched, always ready to provide refuge. Sometimes, when it rained, the kids tied a plastic tarp to her arms and set up a tent. All children, no matter how poor or criminal, love to play.

Like a slum Narcissus dressed as an Andean god, the Virgin of El Poso watched over the murky pond day and night. And day and night the carp broke the reflection with their whites, oranges and reds. And browns too, from the mud their voracious restlessness stirred up. The people in the slum took care of the Virgin. They put a raincoat on her when it rained, sweaters when it was cold. What would the Holy Mother think of her scarecrow effigy?

For Christmas they twisted lights into her golden rays. I found out later that the rays symbolised virginity. Why rays, Cleo? I asked. Did the sun shine out of the Holy Mother’s private parts or something?

And she wasn’t the only one who watched the pond. The entire shantytown watched it. The usual chaos was exchanged for order as if the years of poverty and precarity, the narrow alleys covered in shit, the strips of sheet metal, the bricks of different sizes and colours, the crooked walls and the frenzied children had all been caused by the lack of a pond. As soon as we’d filled it, everything began to seem like part of a plan, something with meaning and purpose. As if this miserable labyrinth had been part of a grand scheme, poverty began to feel like austerity, an aesthetic choice.

‘The pond’s like a miniature version of the shantytown,’ said Daniel. Cleopatra thought so too and crowned the barrier wall with another Virgin. One rectangle enclosed the other and both were protected by a Holy Mother. The kids played safely between those two mothers. They wanted to pump the water, keep a lookout, feed the fish and organise the harvests. They saw themselves in the mirror of the pond and they stayed, even though they could sense something terrible on the horizon. Because they’d met the fierce hunters who prowled that land and they knew that we too would have nets thrown over us. But they stayed anyway, between the two virgins, ready to fight.

The carp-butchering community had begun to enjoy life, making regular TV appearances when reporters came to cover our aquaculture venture, sleeping with the university girls who came because we were a good case study for their academic papers; the shantytown guys were suddenly heroes. They felt joy. It may not seem like much but there’s little more you could ask for. The saints stayed too. We cemented them to the top of the wall so the Virgin wouldn’t be all alone up there, and

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