Dulzura
by Melissa Martínez-Raga
Illustrations by Olivia Brunning
They fell asleep on Ventana Del Mar in each other’s arms before their gaze even crossed across the Mexican bar. It was finally summer and Soraya’s first time out since Semana Santa. She had successfully completed perhaps the hardest finals season thus far in her college career—damn junior years. Her last assignment, for her Literary Education class, went something like this:
How will the world look after a eugenics revolution? Eduardo Urzaiz’s Eugenia offers a glimpse into a 2218 Mexico in which what are considered ideal humans are used to breed the nation’s future generations, like crossing over the best plants to produce the best fruits. Since the government takes care of bringing up children, relationships seem like a polyamorous paradise of familial attachments. However, it is precisely defining the complex feelings of love, barely contained by the eroding breakwater of government policy, that causes individuals to hurt each other in the name of the state. If there is no monogamy or children to commit to, justifying and normalizing acts of selfishness is like walking out in the middle of a dinner party and no one being able to ask them why or get even slightly offended. With this problem normalized, we can imagine what undercurrents of jealousy and resentment it led to.
Olivia Brunning for Fools Magazine
That night, however, she was set on having fun and not giving a single fuck. She was even, God forbid, wearing all cropped everything, which was puta enough to garner a delighted side-eye from Doña Lola from the opposite balcony. After finishing a blunt and jamming to Bad Bunny, Soraya and her roommate Jen ubered to San Juan. At Tijuana’s queue with her ID between her fingers, Soraya was already swaying her shoulders when she noticed—standing by the bouncers in the coolest of poses, right hip jutting out with a hand in her front pocket and the other’s long red nails balancing a cold Medalla—the most gorgeous woman she had ever seen. Standing out from the dozens of bodies crowding the way inside, she was calmly finishing her drink before being able to enter, the glass bottle coming up at quick intervals and her elegant neck stretching as she released satisfying ahs every time. Her roommate Jen was telling her about an encounter with a rat as she was walking back home from work the day before when they reached the entrance and Soraya approached her wonder.
Olivia Brunning for Fools Magazine
“I don’t know about you but I am feeling this music tonight.”
“I like how you’re thinking.” A flashing smile. “I’m Ale.”
So they danced all night—Ale and Soraya—Soraya and Ale—and they met the next day and the one after that.
Not counting the drunken stumble into Ventana Del Mar that followed Tijuana’s that evening, Soraya now remembered their first official beach date on Memorial Day weekend, special unlike any other. After joking about formally asking her out, gentlemanly Ale seriously called her landline and did just that. As Soraya went to answer the call (Jen had shouted her name from the kitchen), the ring booming through the entire apartment, she had to pause and chuckle, distracted by the grey bullet running across the living room. These days, it’s difficult for Venus to comfort Soraya; Ale loved that queenly cat; both of her dulzuras blended into one heart-wrenching mental picture of them playing together.
But that date in Escambrón had been momentary utopia: as the sun crept below the blurry horizon in a hazy blend of deep purple, pink, and orange hues and shone its faint glow on the dancing palm trees, Soraya, finally ripping her eyes away from an obliviously beautiful Ale and falling in tune with the sublime surroundings, which she suddenly noticed had changed so much in the minutes or maybe hours they had been there, turned up the soft music just a little louder so it was carried up and away by the warm tropical breeze with the earthy smoke and the couple’s harmonious laughter, up through hundreds of golden coconuts clacking together between dozens of fronds and trunks swinging to and fro. Becoming another thing altogether, alive and pulsing, to define the soundtrack of San Juan Sunset—a symphony created by the breathing nature around them, the constancy of crashing waves and frothy shores, and the wispy grains of sand she could feel (but didn’t care) chafing against her legs and neck—the melody had then slipped through their closeness to engulf their extremities with prickly goosebumps and their skeletons with migrant chills—the good kind, ones that settled a comforting calm she had discovered only in those moments with Ale.
Olivia Brunning for Fools Magazine
Their story would be incomplete if she didn’t honor their dips in Ale’s community pool. Not only did they have enlightening late-night conversations; here was also when Ale shared her writing. This was one of the pieces Soraya most treasured:
I saw the color blue when I first spotted the land. It looked like an oil painting of earth and water clashing together in an embrace.
Home, home, home. The voice in your head chanted. Home, it’s home, home.
And then the houses solidified into view, hundreds of them, all blue, tarps flapping in the wind and shining against the afternoon sun.
They went on for long minutes, all the way until San Juan, where the first tall buildings appeared, bastions of progress still standing.
They say the island will never recover. That our people are different now, not quite the same.
Months later I find myself believing that. I’m only here for a quarter of the year so my eyes only confirm the transformation I feel in my heart.I have months of distraction with college, with New York.
I’ve traveled all around the world—Greece, Mozambique, Chile, Philippines—with the classes I’m taught and the literature I can afford.
But everything I read makes me think of home. We are unique, but we are not alone.
The colorful, fun Mardi Gras is what I knew about Louisiana before I learned about thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
That death toll was tripled with Hurricane María.
The voodoo and jazz did not explain the teachers fired by charter schools, and the millions laundered by FEMA superiors.
Secretary of Education Julia Keleher closed 300 public schools in Puerto Rico and stole millions in addition to her buddies at FEMA.
Three hundred schools. This meant ~40,000 students lacked transportation for the new school year. Keleher’s arrest was disappointing.
The joyful funerals and lonely blues were but a sketch of the homelessness and hopelessness of post-hurricane Louisiana.
Puerto Rico’s femicide rates and opioid crisis have another story to tell.
The POTUS has made it clear we are not a priority. We removed ex-Governor Rosselló for making him and his buddies his priority.
We must make ourselves our own priority. Somos más y no tenemos miedo.
Listening to Ale’s prosa corta was an exhilarating reverie. Soraya knew Ale would succeed in anything she put her mind to, and felt fortunate to be her audience while it lasted. Her ability to articulate the bullshit that happens between the two nations she shared loyalty with was beyond Soraya. Admittedly, Soraya was still apprehensive of Puerto Ricans’ extent of critical knowledge, but Ale’s words had given her hope that Boricuas were using their art, their work, to express their indignation. Change is necessary, Ale used to say, and if we act together, we can achieve a future beyond our imagination. Pero, dulzura, Soraya had begged, can we all really join under one fight, stick to one goal? During these dates, Ale seemed to float between two worlds; one infinite and multicolor, the other haunted by dark shadows.
Their handful of sexcapades (Ale loved that term) to her beach apartment—where Soraya found herself now—would be forever branded in her mind. Gabriela, Soraya’s mother, usually lives there, consulting from home. But she always understood Soraya’s need to get away from the city, to breathe and think without the thrum of San Juan’s traffic. Whenever Soraya escaped to Luquillo, Gabriela stayed over at Soraya’s aunt’s place, two floors up, to lend Soraya her living space. Living apart was for the best. Quickly annoyed by questions or judgement or futile conversation, Soraya avoided being completely honest about her occurrences to her mom; plus, she couldn’t fully trust Gabriela to keep her mouth shut. They both knew this was the closest thing to therapy Gabriela could offer Soraya, and Gabriela always needed some of her own in the form of drinking and bonding with her sister.
Olivia Brunning for Fools Magazine
Every time Soraya brought a new person to Luquillo’s boardwalk kiosks, she always insisted—and during her first visit, Ale, enchanted, confirmed—that each stall exuded its own personality: underlit and intimate, bright and homey, or psychedelic and swinging. A sea of silver zinc interrupted by green, orange, and red canopies, each vendor marketed its savory specialty: crooked handwritten cardboard calling out crave-quenching ensalada de carrucho next to sturdy prints inviting anised-baby-plantain escabeche right beside neon serpents buzzing Barrilito-sweet piña colada. Irresistible temptations. They would sample as many as they could.
Looking back to that night of the summer solstice, Soraya remembered two vivid things from the following hazy hours: crazy-cheap stuffed mofongo and 50¢ chichaíto shots, attached to the slogan Summer Is Here, The Poorest Time Of Year! Oh, and she could never erase Ale’s admiration upon hearing, on one kiosk’s old square tele, something along the lines of:
“…it continues to inspire young Black children’s Halloween costumes today. Yes, yes, it might have had one foot in because of the Marvel brand attached to it, but we must give credit where it deserves for the predominantly non-white representation and cultural impact it provided.”
Even though no one in that dingy place was paying attention, Ale was fascinated that these discussions were broadcasted in Puerto Rico. Soraya couldn’t fathom what they contributed before they were hopping to the next enticement.
As Soraya sat in her beach apartment’s balcony on Labor Day weekend, glass of wine in hand, nostalgia twisted her throat for those moments. Nowadays, when Ale called from Iowa to tell her about the writing workshop, she hadn’t always picked up the phone. She didn’t welcome the nausea induced by Ale’s voice—so friendly, and no less distracted. Ale was meeting all sorts of new people. Soraya lied about dating another person, a man. That had been six days ago, their final FaceTime.
Bittersweet was Ale’s birthday on August 9th, the last time Soraya slept over at Ale’s apartment and the Sunday before starting her senior year of college. After Ale dropped the Iowa bomb, as casually as Soraya served dinner, as carelessly as Doña Lola’s gossip; after Soraya had swallowed the guanábana in her throat, smiled easily, and, without the dulzura said, that’s amazing you deserve it; after she had responded to Gabriela’s text saying she was all good thanks for asking just making dinner with Jen; after they had looked at each other and laughed, wined and then dined, licked their fingers and cleaned the dishes, and arranged the kitchen and living room neat as they were for next morning; after they kissed, so tenderly, all through the evening, and Soraya still felt troubled, yearning for a clear answer that kept her up all night as she stared at Ale’s sleeping figure, sweet Ale who did not notice her distress, who did not hesitate to fuck her into oblivion instead; after they’d made no further plans when she left groggily that morning to fulfill her duties in the classroom, how could Soraya possibly articulate that she didn’t want Ale to do the same in Iowa, that she suddenly wasn’t sure how to talk to her about the future, that she didn’t know what she did to deserve Ale’s abandonment, that she didn’t want to feel like this, never signed up to feel anything like this—attachment—because she obviously knew this was unrealistic from the start, too tempting to be real, for themselves and for this island, and there was nothing either of them could do—she understood Ale’s passion for writing, she respected her fearless ambition, she admired her mobility and its necessity for her storytelling, and Ale couldn’t just waste this opportunity, stay and write here (couldn’t she?)—yet Soraya never wanted to end movie & munchies Mondays or Wednesday lavender cake and coffee dates at Caldera, tacos pa’ los patos on Tuesdays or ‘ritas pa’ las chicas on Thursdays, grinding and snogging at La Placita on Fridays or weekends of playa y más na’, so how could she explain that her life was now planned out with Ale in mind—she’d finish college next year, Ale’d move in, both with to-die-for jobs, they’d get the black cat they talked about (Ares), get high and cook dinner every night, wake up to each other’s bodies, travel everywhere together, get married, adopt a kid, grow old in each other’s arms—when it is all just in her head, when even as Ale had studied her eyes, Soraya was not able to say pero te amo dulzura, no te vayas—but I love you honey, don’t leave? Is there anything surer than change?