Free Chango's Fire by Ernesto Quinonez Page B

NY. After they got married, my father’s company sent him there. My parents weren’t native to smalltown customs. As soon as they arrived driving foreign cars and not American-made ones, the town suspected them of being communist. During the Cold War, my mother was labeled a lesbian when she protested the Arms Race. What did that have to do with her sexual preference? My father laughed at it. My mother worked as a librarian and fought tooth and nail for books that the library had banned. Yet through all of this they won the town over and in the end, decades later, they now consider themselves from Wisconsin. But not me, I longed for their past at Cornell and so I counted the days till my departure.
    I don’t plan on changing anything in Spanish Harlem, but like my parents I will be myself. Yes, New York City can be so materialistic and superficial. Breast implants and bleached hair have become armor women wear to prevent themselves from actually feeling anything. I don’t want that NYC. I want to live in a place where people actually eat real food they made for themselves, stuff that doesn’t come out of a box or get delivered in Styrofoam.
    The longer I live here, Julio, the more I begin to understand the depth of complexity of what I have previously romanticized.
    But I’m beginning to make sense of it. My sense, Julio, not yours. It is my way of dealing with it all. I used to see an old woman selling homemade soup from a shopping cart in the street and thought she knew the meaning of life. I’d buy soup from her, thinking it was special soup, made by wise, age-old hands. Magical soup, like something out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. How stupid of me. It’s really simple, she’s poor. I’ve been told I’m better at expressing myself on paper than I am in speech, and so I just wanted to let you know these things.
    Helen
    As soon as I finish reading Helen’s letter, I think of her hands. The letter is handwritten in black, bold lettering that was as graceful as Papelito’s movements. I can picture her hands skating over a white sheet of paper, doing all sorts of circles and swirls. Helen’s letter is beautiful. I have never received a letter like this one, ever. I don’t want to fold it. I think of taking the letter with me everywhere and rereading it at every possible chance, in subways and at bus stops. During coffee breaks at work and during class, especially when the subject is dull and mechanic. I think I will discover new things about her. New things in me, too. But if I take the letter with me, it might get ruined and I don’t want that to happen.
    So I iron it by placing it flat inside a book. It’s all I can think of doing to protect it. I’m an amateur in these things. After putting her letter away, I feel bad I said those things to her the other night. And I wish I could express myself the way she does. I feel both terror and joy that she explained herself with a letter and feel I should do something. I don’t know what. So, I feel even dumber but I will do what many do when they are in situations like this one. I’ll go see Papelito. Since I have to pay my mortgage anyway, he’ll never know my true reasons for being there.
    P apelito’s botanica, San Lazaro y las Siete Vueltas, sparkles with glorious light. Even the life-sized tortured plaster saints look alive, like plants that instinctively sway toward the sun. It is a botanica so clean and saintly, you feel you have to whisper once inside.
    And it is always full of women. The place weeps femininity. Women walk in and out of Papelito’s botanica as if it was a beauty parlor. They adore Papelito, because he’d let women in on Yoruba secrets. He makes them love potions for their men, or spells for women they hate.
    Papelito is wearing a blue-and-white dress, the colors of the Orisha, the black god that had chosen him, and Yemaya, the goddess of the sea. I enter with