It is a bright spring Saturday: April 11, 1970. The famous Argentine singer Sandro is about to become the first Latin American to perform at Madison Square Garden, and Gloria will be one of the lucky attendees at what will be a legendary concert. At just twenty years old, the young woman walks through the electric streets of New York City full of hope and possibility. The disturbing images she recently encountered at her job at a photographic laboratory, the trauma of a father who was murdered when she was a child, and even the long-term prospects of her relationship with Tigre, her irascible boyfriend, are problems for another day. This day should be perfect and should last forever. Which it will, in surprising and unexpected ways.

Five decades later, Gloria’s son reflects on his mother’s life and realizes that their formative years—imprinted as they are by sojourns in New York at exactly the same age—are a bridge between generations that draws the pair closer through a shared sense of longing and potential.

A novel of mothers and sons spanning New York City, Colombia, and Miami, Gloria is a sophisticated and daring excavation of a woman’s life that asks us to consider how the choices we make in our youth reverberate throughout our possible futures.

She has never smoked and may never light up a cigarette, but today, which I decide to imagine bright and bustling, she should, she should take advantage of her boyfriend being late to slowly inhale the smoke, aware of how her lipstick is leaving a mark on the filter, the nervous pressure of her lips giving it a slightly oval shape. Inside that silvery blue cloud of smoke, the wait is less agonizing, more bearable, as they say of certain afflictions, because that’s what it is, a disquiet she discovered upon waking that morning, earlier than usual, when the light slipped softly in through her room’s window and she couldn’t yet hear animals knocking over bottles on that street corner in Queens. When she first opened her eyes, she’d even felt hopeful, reentering the  world without fear. It usually takes her a little while to come  to terms with what it is to be alive and awake, a few minutes to tentatively break the waters of sleep, but today is different, because today is a day that should last forever—that is, if Tigre ever bothers to show up. The feeling of disquiet, far from receding, became a stabbing pain in her chest that, as the  hours passed, under the spray of the shower, eating the one piece of toast she had for breakfast, calling Tigre to arrange where to meet, swelled into an irrepressible stormy sea, rising furiously through her whole body. So now the best thing she can do is smoke. Yet let’s suppose—because that’s also what this is about, supposing. We suppose, then, that Tigre doesn’t like smelling nicotine in the folds of her polka-dot blouse, in her chestnut hair, in her eyelashes, curled with the aid of a device purchased the previous week, after her shift at the photo lab. And to dispel the issue, she had made a deal with him. Yes, a deal, knowing that he would never hold up his end. Fine, I’ll quit smoking if you start showing up on time, she said. A laugh in response, a laugh like an empty can of crackers rolling down a long staircase. That laugh and showing up late and a volatile temperament and wide-collared shirts are the defining characteristics of Tigre, a nickname he earned in  a legendary fight, he told her as they walked through Manhattan on one of their first dates. In fact, that’s how he’d introduced himself months before. Nice to meet you, Tigre, he said, smiling and confident in a parking ramp, in a vague imitation of those young fighter pilots she saw as a girl on the screen of a damp-walled movie theater in the small city  where she was born. And as he did so, as he said the nickname that’d become a permanent stand-in for his real name, Tigre reached out his large, white, hairy-fingered hand to take her  slender, white, long-fingered hand. A minute later, they were in the van that would take them to Niagara Falls. But that was last year, at the end of autumn, and now we’re in a diner in the middle of the spring of 1970, at 4:25 p.m., and he’s nowhere to be seen. From one moment to the next, she feels disgusted by the smoke, by the smell, like how sometimes, bored of a beach or a mountain, she turns her back on it without any regret. I suggest she leave the cigarette half smoked. She does so. She stubs it out slowly, firmly, sitting at a table beside the window, watching people pass by outside, a table where she’s been waiting for Tigre for an hour, maybe less. La Ma-llor-qui-na, she reads, separating the syllables, on the side of the hexagonal ashtray, before saying to herself, how strange, he’s never been this late. Almost an hour now, maybe more. The seed of disquiet, discovered in the center of her chest when she got up that morning, has grown into a tangled mess of tachycardia and burning palm trees. And it’s not helping  to have an old man leering at her from the opposite corner of the establishment. Dominican? Puerto Rican? Cuban? It must be the red miniskirt, but how could she not wear it, it fits so well and she’d been saving it for weeks, months, for that day, for today.  

She lifts her right arm that, bored, she’d left dangling under the table, and looks at her watch again. Her mother gave it to her a week before she boarded the plane to the United States. It’s one of the few things she brought with her. She’s placed a strange faith in it, a certainty common for others but not for her. A faith that her mother really does love her, despite the fact that everything she does demonstrates the opposite. The first and worst was having sent her when she was seven years old to the capital to attend a boarding school full of varicose nuns. The last, not having come to El Dorado Airport to see her off. Let’s see: 4:32 p.m. She would insult him if she could, the problem was that, with Tigre, the insults never came, it was as if she’d stashed them in a box and when she opened it to use them, they weren’t there. Just an empty box, smelling of wood shavings and dust, a dead insect inside, a ladybug devoid of color, a box like the ones in the ironing room of her family’s enormous home in Bogotá. She’s ready  to remember it, to go down the stairs, sensing the ghost in her belly, the house is haunted, to glimpse her reflection out of the corner of her eye in the quartz crystal mirror hanging in the  living room, to pass through the dining room with eight place settings, to enter the kitchen, to walk across it and out onto the patio to greet the toucan that her mother’s friend brought them from the Amazon, but before she can, she’s seized by that very particular fear that’s overcome her every so often since she’s been in New York. Because so far, it’s only happened to her in New York, never in Missouri, where she spent a few months she’d considered unforgettable but no longer were, not after confronting the resounding roar of the city. The only city. The thing is, she’s come to believe that, suddenly, without warning, she’ll forget something simple, fundamental, at moments such as this, reading the hands on her watch in La Mallorquina diner, waiting for Tigre, who’s nowhere to be seen, fucking hell. Or frying an egg. Her name. Things like that. Last week she even felt like she was going to wake up someday having forgotten how to play ping-pong. She’s been thinking about it and is sure that in another time, in another place, that fear would’ve wrecked her. It would’ve paralyzed her, prevented her from even pulling up her stockings in the morning. There, on those electric streets where even the rumble of parading taxis and the howls of the people excited her, never, not a chance. If the sacrifice for being here  is to forget everything and learn it all over again, I’m ready to accept it. She’s surprised by how calmly she says it. She didn’t know you could have a feeling like this for a city, that you could long for it the way she’s begun to long for New York, though it might also be because her mother isn’t there and not just because of the musical rattle of the subway platforms, the magazines in that new language she already finds herself thinking in once or twice a day, the shop windows that change weekly, the way life should change, the men and their newfound beauty, her stable Friday paycheck, and her new addiction—pizza. What a strange food, so simple yet so perfect. She’d never seen anything like it in Bogotá.  She’d eaten hamburgers at Crem Helado de la Treinta y Dos with her sisters, sure; never pizza. She tried it on her landlady’s recommendation and now it’s all she eats. Cheese, with a sprinkle of oregano, and that’s it. They already know her at John’s, on the corner of Grand Avenue and Haspel Street.  They see her come in and before she sits down at the bar, they  have a slice served up on a piece of wax paper. Being young in  that city, making connections with people, smiling at them,  having them smile at her, hating them, having them hate her. Let’s see: 4:39 p.m., 4:40! The hands seem to have begun to accelerate. She calculates. She goes over the subway stops to  Madison Square Garden. She’s already memorized all of the F Line stops down to Midtown. In a taxi, not a chance, at that time of day, they would never get there on time and it would end up costing a lot. Tigre had twenty minutes to show up or they wouldn’t get in. Not one minute more. And if they didn’t get in, she would find those lost insults. Or invent some new ones if she had to. New insults invented for Tigre and Tigre alone.  

“Hey, shouldn’t you be in line already?” 

The voice startles her, a voice she hears almost every day.  In general, it’s a voice that helps her relax, makes her feel safe, a lighthouse in a stormy sea, but she wasn’t prepared to hear it in that diner and at such close proximity. Amparo has the bad  habit of close talking. Luckily, she doesn’t have bad breath. When had she come in? If she hadn’t asked for the day off, the  two of them would’ve left the lab together and walked to the salon where her friend worked a five-to-nine shift. Two jobs, three if you counted the people she saw at home on Sundays.  Amparo’s mother is bedridden, which was why she couldn’t go to the concert. They live alone, opposing mirrors replicating each other infinitely, in an apartment near LaGuardia,  full of tables covered with embroidered tablecloths, smelling of cheap powders and desiccated drool, where she visited them two weeks ago and they drank hot chocolate as if they were living in a mountain town in Colombia and had just come home from mass. La Sola, that’s Carlota’s nickname for Amparo. Ehhh, hanging out with la Sola again? Carlota called her la Sola until one day, in the middle of Roosevelt Avenue, she asked her to, please, stop. Hearing the nickname, she couldn’t help but think of a white tapeworm—una  solitaria—like the one that had emerged from the rectum of one of her boarding-school classmates in the middle of the  night. The daughter of Our Dear President, the mother superior repeated annoyingly every time she referred to that fragile and ugly girl, all bones, a heron-girl from a llanera song. She remembers how she accompanied the sobbing girl to the bathroom so she could finish passing the worm without the embarrassment of the nuns and everyone else finding out. In the end, the worm escaped the toilet and wound up stranded on the cold tiles, writhing in the moonlight. That’s the kind  of memory she has of the boarding school her mother sent her to. Intestinal parasites and an inexplicable fear of the Colombian flag. If she passes by a really big one, she’s overwhelmed by the feeling that it’s going to wrap around her and swallow her whole.  

“I’m waiting for Tigre.” 

“Ah, Tigre. You and your Tigrecito…” Amparo says,  still standing. 

There’s a contemptuous, even argumentative, tone when she says his name. When Amparo uses diminutives, and she often does, there’s usually a hint of warmth, but now she’s not so sure. She’s been a little hostile since she told her in the locker room that she was going to see Him in concert.  So silly, she thought in that moment, so silly she repeats to  herself now, gesturing for her to sit. If she hadn’t, Amparo would’ve stood there until she turned gray, she’s one of those women who believe certain formalities help prevent existential collapse. She doesn’t know her that well, maybe that means they’re just work friends, not being able to anticipate her reactions. She thought Amparo would’ve been surprised, the way her sisters were when she called to tell them from one of the phone booths at Jackson Heights subway station. Their jubilation on the other end of the line was infectious and only then did she really comprehend the true dimension of what she was going to experience on Saturday, that is, today, April 11, 1970. Oh, that’s nice, was all Amparo said when she’d told her in the locker room. 

Amparo pulls back the chair she’d indicated and sits down for a chat, while pushing back her long red hair, which gets washed out every summer. Under the lights in the photo lab,  she doesn’t look this haggard, and might easily pass for much younger than her actual age, which is forty. Carlota doesn’t  understand this either, how she’s befriended a woman twice  her age. The thing is that Amparo is as loyal as an echo. 

“Tomorrow, right? At four. Try to think of something he liked and bring it if you can. It could be a food or a drink,” Amparo says. 

The concert had occupied her mind for days and she hadn’t  remembered that tomorrow, Sunday, she was supposed to go to Amparo’s apartment for a formal session. She hadn’t told  anybody what she hoped to do, especially not her mother, when she called her a couple days ago and her mother let slip: seventeen years ago today, your father was… She always  trailed off at that point, unable to utter the most terrible verb  of all. Her friend is a medium and has promised to contact her father. Amparo’s mother had been a witch back in Colombia, but a more powerful witch had waged a war against her, in the countryside and the cities, and she’d been forced  to flee and come live in the United States with her daughter. The battle left her mother debilitated and weakened, but not beaten. Amparo inherited some of her powers, among them the ability to commune with the dead. That’s why she’d gone to drink hot chocolate at Amparo’s apartment. She wanted to hear in detail, away from eavesdropping coworkers, how and when Amparo was going to contact him, her father. Was it  possible for her to miss him even though she was barely three years old when he was buried? Yes, it was possible. Sometimes a future that never took shape weighs more heavily  than any past. 

Amparo stares at the cigarette butts in the ashtray without  judgment and begins humming a song, a kind of olive branch, and all is forgotten, let’s be work friends again. She starts  out quietly and only when the song imposes itself over the  conversations at the other tables does she recognize it. It’s an old one, but it’s one she likes. She starts humming along and then adds the lyrics. Soon they find themselves singing the tango she’d heard walking hand-in-hand with her widowed mother, her jewelry jingling, past one of the little cafés of her childhood, where tie-wearing men drunkenly embraced each other in the full light of day and every so often a bottle of aguardiente slid off the table and crashed to the floor. Now she’s the one leading, imitating the deep voice of Sarita Montiel… Fumando espero al hombre a quien yo quiero, tras  los cristales de alegres ventanales… A tall and slender waiter appears, and they get embarrassed by their spontaneous musical outburst. They fall silent and the remnants of the song disperse in her mind, tatters of burning paper… Mientras fumo mi vida no consume porque flotando el humo me suele adormecer. Amparo orders a café con leche and then reaches out a  hand to softly touch the hem of her red miniskirt. From the expression on the face of the old man in the corner—Haitian? Venezuelan? Colombian like them?—he appears to envy her.  Amparo nods, indicating that she approves of the finish. She tells Amparo about Alexander’s, a department store she discovered last week in Manhattan. We should go together, she says, afraid of going overboard. Her friend smiles without a hint of bitterness and says yes, one of these days, when she has something to spend. I’m poor here, but I wasn’t born poor, let’s keep that clear, Amparo often repeats in the locker room.  From rector of a girl’s school to machine operator. A house of her own in Colombia for her younger siblings and renting an apartment in a run-down building near LaGuardia, where you hear planes land every five minutes and the windows vibrate. She’s a machine operator too, they work side by side, but the word poverty doesn’t even enter her mind. Maybe because it’s all an adventure and New York hasn’t knocked  her down yet. Not yet. For now, there’s just too much litter on the sidewalks. The blackout, the rats’ nests, the burning buildings, and the sex epidemic are far away. And anyway, her mother lives in a mansion with four employees and a ton of Meissen porcelain and she works as a machine operator at the Agfa photo labs, so what does that make her exactly? She doesn’t know. 

The café con leche arrives steaming, without the milk skin having formed. Amparo smiles at the waiter and, to keep him there a few seconds longer, orders a mallorca, the Puerto Rican sweet roll that gave the place its name. She’s always angling for attention and has nice teeth and prominent breasts, but the excess eye makeup, two raccoon stripes, scares off most prospects. She doesn’t dare tell her, knowing that being single for a while has made Amparo sensitive to  such comments. 

“Plain mallorca,” the waiter responds without returning Amparo’s smile. She comes out in support of her friend, offering a safety net in the form of a question, a question that, without being aware of it, will end up triggering a horrible memory that’ll accompany her the rest of the time she spends waiting for Tigre to appear.  

“And Mr. Murray? Is he okay?” 

Mr. Murray is their boss. His son had an accident—if you  can call drinking a bottle of Baygon an accident—and he hadn’t come into work the day before. 

“Yes, he’s okay. They pumped his son’s stomach, and it didn’t lead to anything serious,” Amparo says, taking three little sips of her coffee. Then she leaves it on the table and  doesn’t touch it again. 

“But that doesn’t matter. I almost forgot. Guess what. They came for the pictures. Mr. Murray’s secretary told me,” she  adds, widening her eyes and slapping the table with the palm  of her hand. The spoons and ashtray jump, the coffee almost spills, and she thinks that the shadow of revenge is once again hovering over them, why else would Amparo want to ruin her afternoon by bringing that up now? She hadn’t thought about what had happened for a while and now it would be hard to get it out of her head. 

Amparo suddenly grabs ahold of her wrist and looks at her watch.  

“Ten to five! I have to go. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow at my place. Eat the mallorca, they’re really good here. And have fun at the concert.” 

Amparo stands up, smooths her skirt, gives her a quick  kiss on the cheek, and leaves, waving to her all the way across the restaurant until she’s out the door. She watches her pass in front of the window, smiling, not really understanding why, it’s impossible that four hours of washing strangers’ hair would make her happy. She lets the doubt spread further to avoid thinking about what Amparo had said and asks the waiter to clear the café con leche. She hesitates to take a bite of the powdered-sugar-dusted mallorca. She’s hungry, but not that hungry. If she does, she’ll have to eat the whole thing, and if she doesn’t, it’s possible they’ll serve it to someone else. The worst would be for them to throw it away without anyone having touched it. It’s inescapable. It starts with those words: Guess what? They came for the pictures. They came. That was exactly what she’d said. They came, instead of he came. The man who took the pictures and one of the women? Two  men? Or was it an indistinct they came; a they came that was really a he came? Just one. It’s Tigre’s fault, if he’d shown up sooner, they would be talking about where they were going to meet Carlota or at least fighting about why he was so late.  So, to avoid contemplating the absolute tragedy, the misery, the meaninglessness of her life if they got there and the doors  were closed, she decides to think about what had happened at the Agfa lab. She does so with legs crossed, sitting sideways in her chair, slightly back from the table she’d specifically picked out so she could see when Tigre arrived. She finds herself ready to examine the incident with renewed attention, a cool head, now that she has more time and isn’t being ambushed by those images, walking alone in a park or down the aisles of a supermarket. She hasn’t told Tigre anything about it, of course. The vileness of the whole story hasn’t faded, touching her to later drift away and disappear into the New York sewers. Just the opposite. It’s taken up residence deep inside her, entangling her soul, and she’s terrified that somebody might find it. Or at least that’s what I think.  

Translated by Will Vanderhyden

Excerpted from Gloria. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.

Gloria is available via Counterpoint Press.