Ainhoa lives a protected life within the walls of her grandmother’s house in the neighborhood of Esmeraldas in Ecuador. Surrounded by a gaggle of aunts who love and teach her, Ainhoa narrates moments that evoke the powerful presence of music and dance in her daily life while also confronting familial violence over the course of Carnaval season. Seen through Ainhoa’s innocent eyes, the difficult themes that have defined the South American country’s recent history, including economic hardship, migration, and upheaval, are but one side of an enormous cultural richness steeped in the joy, music, and vibrancy of this singular community of women.
Following the contours of Carnaval, and sublimely translated by Madeleine Arenivar, Yuliana Ortiz Ruano’s sensorial and viscerally alive novel brims with poetry and exuberance, as well as the pain of an existence lived in the forgotten corners of the world. Carnaval Fever is the introduction of an important new voice in Latin American letters, available in English for the first time.
***
Leave it all on the floor
Ñaño Jota died, he kick off, my Papi Manuel told me when he came to pick me up from school and take me to the wake. I was nervous all day, could feel the delirium sprouting from the mouth of my stomach up to my tongue, a mass of slime creeping up and down, heralding something heavy. Heavy like the voice of the rag-and-bone men who come up to the neighborhood sometimes, yelling through their hoarse loudspeakers: annnyyyy oollll’ iroooon, annyyy scrap metal, raaag aaan’ boooone!
Heavy, like my Mami Nela saying that when Ñaña Marilú died, she started up like she’d had a bucket of cold water thrown in her mug. That’s how death shows up, mijita. Something similar was happening in my young body, a mass coming up announcing something that couldn’t be scraped off the tongue and turned into words.
Papi Manuel parked his old Ford close to the curb where I always sit to wait for him. From a long way off I could hear the sound of that beast getting closer, an erratic rumble against a background of Lavoe at full volume. For Papi Manuel, the rumble of that machine, heralding its own death, wasn’t enough; he had to dampen the roar of that noise with the honeyed voice of Héctor Lavoe, who shared his name, gasping loudly out of the beat-up speaker like a death rattle.
My papi was loaded. He always likes his whiskeys, but this time he was loaded like people only get at a wake. Yeah, that’s it, Ñaño Jota died, the mass said to me, and it started rising now like a stone rolling uphill along the bones of my chest. My papi had on a black collared shirt with shiny white buttons, black pants held up with a belt, white canvas sneakers with a brown patch, like shit, on the top near the laces. The older girls who were standing around said, look at that daddy, he so fine. That made me mad and I went over so they wouldn’t mess with him. Mami Nela was right when she said the girls these days come out hot from the factory.
Mijita, your Ñaño Jota… mijita, your Ñañito Jota kick off. Even now, his voice rising up from the depths of his throat, hoarse from the drink, this papi can’t give the news without a stupid little giggle. Like the giggle of La Lupe in that song he puts on sometimes on Sunday nights, the song that says this fever isn’t new. It started a long time ago. And then she laughs out of nowhere, like a crazy person. My Papi Manuel also laughs out of nowhere, just like his idols, always just when he shouldn’t. What’re you laughing for, what’s the matter with you? I pressed myself against his shirt, gagging on a thick cry, and inhaled the heavy funk of drink, tobacco, and perfume of this papi.
I felt him sob gently behind his brown glasses, and I lifted my head to see tears rolling down his face into his mustache. Papi Manuel’s head looks like an upside-down lightbulb, but with a long-haired Afro full of nice, tight curls. Mami Checho doesn’t like Papi Manuel’s hair, but I think it’s pretty.
My Papi Manuel is a skinny guy, so skinny that sometimes you can see the bones poking out under his throat. But he’s strong, strong enough to lift the gas tanks for cooking and to punch out the thieves who tried to make off with the truck that one time. My Mami Checho doesn’t like the truck either, she’s always telling him to sell that old rattle already, that it’s a disgrace. But my papi adores that truck, he says to her, Mi reina, you can’t fight love.
Like almost everybody in this house, Papi Manuel is known for his good smell. The women in my house all smell so good and are so neat that sometimes I look at myself in the mirror over my Mami Nela’s dresser and I ask myself if I’m really a woman. I stink, a lot. My Mami Checho, since she birthed me, she always sends me back to wash again even when I’ve just come out of the shower. Scrubs my underarms in a desperate rage, sometimes her and my Papi Manuel together.
The two of them scrubbing away at my underarms so much that after the bath they throb, and even then they start to stink again. Ay and this girl, why she still smell like a pig? She sick or she just don’t know how to wash? They blame themselves for the funk of my body as they scrub me in the cold shower and sometimes I cry. Not because it hurts but from the shame, because Mami Nela always says that women don’t smell bad like that and what’s the matter with the girl?
And I’m still there smelling like rotten onions and cat piss in the middle of the bustle of the gaggle of women who live in my Mami Nela’s house—who isn’t my mami who gave birth to me but my grandma, a word that she hates.
*
My Papi Manuel hoisted me up into the truck to take me to the house where they were holding the wake for Ñaño Jota. I buried myself in the red leather seat, the only thing in this car my papi had spent any money on. But instead of giving the truck back its dignity, as he claimed, it gave it the look of a cheap whorehouse, ready for the putas to dance. I’d never seen a whorehouse in my life, but that’s what my Mami Nela hollered when she saw Papi Manuel coming back from the shop, shouting with joy over his souped-up truck.
My Ñaño Jota was beautiful. His black skin shone as if he polished it every day before leaving the house, he had big white teeth like slices of coconut, and he had a different tone of voice for everybody, especially for the women. He always dressed in white and for that my Mami Nela asked him if he was a pimp or what. But he never cared much what she thought.
Every Saturday morning, while I was waiting to go out to play, I would watch Ñaño Jota come out of the bathroom into the backyard of Mami Nela’s house with a white towel tied around his hips. Before he went to get dressed, he would take his white canvas sneakers, drench them with water, and sprinkle on soap or detergent, whatever was left there on the laundry sink where the ñañas washed the clothes. He would spread that all over the sneakers and then scrape at them with an old toothbrush; a swish-swish as he hummed some song by Vicente Fernández, waggling his eyebrows at me. When he could see his face in them, he would leave them on the bathroom roof to dry while he went to get dressed. T-shirt printed with flowers, usually red, black, or tiger stripes, white high-waisted pants with pleats emphasizing his package and his ass, and a white belt to hold in the skin of his stomach. Then he would scrape over the tight curls on his head with a tiny little comb like the ones you use to find lice, and go out through the back of the house, through the secret exit, slipping through the fence like a black panther.
I’d never seen a panther in real life either, but that was what I thought when I saw him swing himself through, sucking in his voluptuous body to slip through the barbed wire without a sound. From the branch of the guava tree I would watch, blinded by the whiteness of his sneakers and his pants, spotless. And although I’d have sworn he brushed against the wire, nothing scratched Ñaño Jota, nothing could touch him.
When I was three years old, Ñaño Jota—who wasn’t my brother either but the brother of my Mami Checho—told me that it was time I learned to dance. He took me with his rough, black hands to the center of the dance floor: the parlor, on any other day, but today with the furniture arranged so that there was space for the whole family. For all the dancers. That year, like every year, Carnaval started in December. Because Carnaval isn’t only February and the days it says on the calendar, but any party that goes all night long. And in Esmeraldas, where the pounding heat never lets up for a second, a nice spray or bucket of water hit you and you might even give thanks.
So, mija
Like this: forward, backward, mijita, and your
waist,
yes, and the hips,
See . . . what’s wrong, you shy?
Nuh-uh, don’t be shy, mija,
one and two
and like this
and to the side
and over here
and two.
From the big radio sounded the voices of Los Van Van singing “Aquí el que baila gana.”
*
My Ñaño Jota said that dancing is just listening with your hips, mija, nothing more, your feet just move by themselves, look.
It’s not rocket science, mija: let’s go
and two and two
and two and like that.
Yes,
to the front, mija,
don’t be shy, shyness don’t get you nowhere.
And move that waist, mija, like this,
more, like I do it.
Look, mija, no,
like this and
to the back
and to the front
and eh eh eh eh
eeeehhhhso.
*
One day before Carnaval, the ñañas—who aren’t really my sisters but the sisters of my Mami Checho, but how awful the word tía, and anyway they are young and not a bunch of old harpies—did my hair like a cluster of spiders. They made me my Carnaval braids sitting around on the wooden chairs from the dining set while I sat in the middle on the wooden floor. I watched the dogs pass by, and the hours, I started to get sleepy, and they still kept on braiding. They doused our hair with water and hair oil, untangled the whole thing before starting to braid, and once they started the ’do they wouldn’t stop for the end of the world.
My Mami Checho doesn’t like them to put colorful balls on the ends of the braids because it looks tacky. Mija, you’re not gonna go around looking like those trashy girls from up the hill in the Guacharaca. Instead they just tied them up with little black elastics, so the braids wouldn’t unwind. Since my hair is so long and thick, sometimes I would fall asleep while they kept braiding. They would always start with a little tuft from the bottom of my head, divide it into three strands, and twist it up. All this with breaks for hot cocoa and bread, pineapple juice and water to refresh us, laughing and praising my hair until just after dawn they finished the braiding on the very top of my head.
Mija, there’s nothing like a woman with good hair, I swear. When you grow up you gon’ make a clean sweep. If you ever decide to cut your hair, mija, you give it to me to make an extension. Your hair would look pretty straightened, too, but when you’re bigger, cuz that chemical burns the scalp and you little still.
Nervous, and with my braids all sweaty, I took my first salsa steps to the joy of my Papi Manuel and the alarm of my Mami Checho. The whole neighborhood partied all night. I still couldn’t party all night, but I heard the beat from my room. And as the hours passed, from the hills the music rose up even louder. The song of the moment was “La suegra voladora,” by Sayayín, a hard Colombian champeta that brayed out through the neighborhood, and two songs by Grupo Saboreo: “La arrechera” and “La vamo a tumbar.” When that chorus of “La vamo a tumbar” started up, the people went crazy and it was jumping and jumping on the wooden floorboards. Leave it all on the floor.
Whenever I heard those lyrics I was possessed by La Lupe’s giggle, because I had never heard anything so ridiculous as that song. How could that singer be happy they were gonna tear his house down? The house he worked so hard to build, like it says in the lyrics. The song starts with a sound like birds squawking but my Papi Manuel explained to me, laughing, that they were Colombian gaitas and not animals, and then the voice comes in singing about that house, built with hard work and a floor of guayacán. But then the gaitas come back and that booming voice yells, surely and firmly, getting right into your backbone, that today they gon’ tear that house down.
And the people would go into some kind of trance, jumping around, the walls vibrating, that house was gonna get torn down to the beat of Grupo Saboreo, no matter what. I would sit on the couch and imagine the floorboards collapsing, the frames with pictures of Mama Doma and the knickknacks falling on top of everyone, still continuing their feverish dance under the rubble of that big house, of cement and wood, with twelve bedrooms, a big front porch full of plants, and a backyard dense with mango, guava, and chirimoya trees. I imagined the party going on under the rubble, sliding through the passageway, beyond the porch, and destroying the cistern, the only cistern in the neighborhood, built by my Papi Chelo—who’s not my papi who made me but the papi who made my Mami Checho—and supplying the whole neighborhood with water.
The one who liked that song the most was Ñaña Catucha—who isn’t my ñaña either but the ñaña of my Mami Nela. Ñaña Catucha loves to party. To dance that song she would kick off her sandals and her thick, black feet would sweep over the wooden boards polished with creosote, shining like the color of her skin. And how the ñañerío jumped, the gaggle of women. Their skirts swung around, and their manes of hair, while the men were all falling off the couches from laughing so hard.
After those days of Carnaval when I learned to really dance, to make my bony little body sweat like a wild horse, nobody could stop me. I danced in the bath, to salsa or that song by Sayayín, “La suegra voladora,” that song that my Mami Checho hated. My Papi Manuel had taught me to capture the music from the radio on a cassette tape so I could hear it any time I wanted, but whenever I put that cassette on my mami would say, For crying out loud, turn that shit off, that it made all the hairs on her arms stand on end. And I couldn’t understand why she didn’t like it or even giggle about it a little.
I adored that slow voice slinking out of the speaker and the bom bom, bom bom bom bom, bom bom of the track that my Papi Manuel grumbled the Black Colombians had stolen from the Jamaicans. I liked to see everyone strutting the champeta across the floor. It made me laugh. I loved to see Noris and the other girls who cleaned the house throwing themselves on top of one another, chorusing ya le cogí el maní, le cogí el maní ní, ya le cogí el maní, le cogí el maní.
Ñaño Jota also loved to see me learn songs by memory: Mija, you have a good ear, let’s hear it, sing something, come over here and sing for me a little. And I would unfurl my shrill little voice to imitate Sayayín, riding on that little flying cloud, just like the song says.
*
When no one was watching me, I danced through breakfast; I got out of bed in the morning already moving my feet and hips.
Later, when many months had passed and Ñaño Jota suddenly thinned down as if something invisible were sucking his blood, his cheeks covered with grayish patches, and his eyes sunk in like two lakes filmed with oil spills, I understood that dancing was also his way of making himself well. A forgetting in which the body sweats so much it’s no longer rickety, bedridden, and scrawny. Sweats so much it sweats the sickness out, for a little bit at least, that’s why he had to dance so much and every weekend. And even more on Sundays, to stick the health in the body all week and keep the sickness out.
All the women in the neighborhood just died for him. They always came looking for him, even once he was married and had kids.
Women came from Pimampiro, from Santa Rosa, Vuelta Larga, and even from Quito. Women from Limones and Tumaco. Fat women wearing tight dresses, their eyebrows shaved off and in the empty space of the destroyed brow, a shaky line drawn with a brown or black pencil. Skinny women with big teeth and big-assed women with long braids who did my hair and brought me presents. Who danced as well as he did in the Carnaval parties, when his wife would go back to her sisters’ neighborhood.
Even with all the dancing my uncle died young and handsome, although thinner and with those strange patches all over his face and on the roof of his mouth, which I could see because that plague hadn’t taken away any of his height. When his fever didn’t go down no more and he couldn’t get out of bed, I asked my Mami Nela what was wrong with the ñaño, that I had a right to know. But she pretended not to hear me and just kept on with what she was doing.
I was eight years old when he kicked off and I wasn’t very tall yet. That’s why I could see the roof of his mouth all white, like the inside of the young coconuts that Papi Chelo brings from his ranch up on the island that has our name, the Tolita de los Ruano. Papi Chelo is pale, tall, and sinewy; he stands out against the Black flock in this house, even against his daughters, who are not pale but neither are they black, a mixture closer to caramel than to chocolate. But mercy on anyone who tells them they aren’t Black. BLACKITY-BLACK, they shout.
Papi Chelo has a nose like a toucan beak that all us women have inherited, as if it had been traced directly onto our mugs. He would often say, proudly and in his funny accent from the northern islands, closer to Colombia than to Ecuador, that he was the first man of his last name to have made it with a Black. There were always stifled giggles around the dining table after that speech. Papi Chelo is sweet to me, but he didn’t like Ñaño Jota much. Sometimes they yelled at each other and even smacked each other around in the yard. They never let me see but I knew what was going on, I’m not deaf.
All of this was going ’round in my head as we were driving to the wake, my face pressed into the blindingly red leather seats of the old Ford. I remembered Ñaño Jota talking to the girls from the neighborhood in the passageway when they came by, supposedly to get water, but really just to kiss, dance with him, or go down into the cistern together and close the top, as if the cistern were a pool. Sometimes I thought they would come out drowned, but they always came out dripping wet and screeching as if the cistern were the Las Palmas beach.
I started to feel a terrible fear and an endless gratitude, a strange mixture that was eating up my body, like the body of the voice that comes out of kids when they recite the poem “Barrio Caliente is burning, burning is Barrio Caliente.” I was burning up just like when that neighborhood turned to ash, starting at my toenails: the little hairs on my big toe, my socks with the school logo on them, my brown leather shoes, the skin and the long hairs on my shins. My knees boiled and disintegrated. The flames licked up my thighs, my backbone, my coochie, the burning sensation lingering in my hips. I felt the skin covering my muscles melting like chewing gum against the seats, red as the allure of the frigate birds, of that beast driving me along. Crying curled there in the passenger seat window, I imagined Ñaño Jota dancing a diabolical rumba like the flames of Barrio Caliente in the truck bed.
I gave way to a horrible frenzy that only comes on me when my temperature goes up and I start to run through the whole house like a bitch in heat, raving, Mami Nela tells me. It wasn’t my mouth, but the fever, the fever that didn’t start now but a long time ago, that spoke for me. I told my papi to stop the car and put on some salsa, some good salsa for dancing, please.
Be serious, mijita.
AIDS, your Ñaño Jota died from AIDS. Mijita, pordios, you don’t celebrate something like that. And he let out his little giggle, like a drunken rat, which only turned up the heat of my insistence. When my Papi Manuel laughs like that, I know that if I just let loose he’ll do whatever I want. I screamed and begged without stopping for breath, like a guacharaca bird. Finally he gave in.
We parked the truck going up Calle Montúfar, seven blocks from our neighborhood.
The neighborhood of Calle Montúfar is always full of dirty kids running around with no shoes on. On the weekends, like in any Esmeraldeñan neighborhood, the residents bring out their speakers and sit on the curb to sip their whiskey, close the street to play ball dodging the cars, the trucks, and the bus that has already taken more than one little kid. We stopped right next to the corner that takes us to Calle México. My Papi Manuel opened the doors of the truck and took a packet of cigarettes out of the glovebox. I got down in a daze as the cowbell that announces the mythical question of “Aquí el que baila gana” rang out at high volume, asking what’s happening here, eh?
Forward, backward, like this, mijita
move your waist,
and the hips,
one and two like this
and to the side
to the front
and one and two and two.
*
And what had happened here? My Ñaño Jota had been taken by something called AIDS, and I didn’t know what it meant, like almost everything around me. Opaque to my confused little head. I started dancing right there, in my school uniform and with my eyes shut, listening to my Papi Manuel’s nervous giggles as he blew out smoke from his seat on the passenger’s side, watching me with a crazed look on his face.
People came running over to the Ford to the rhythm of the music, applauding all together like seals, stomping their feet like a bunch of dumb clowns, because any stupid shit is a big event in that neighborhood where nothing ever happens, other than a kid smashed up, once in a while, by the number 2 line of the Las Palmas bus.
Translated by Madeleine Arenivar
Copyright © 2025 by Yuliana Ortiz Ruano
Excerpted from Carnaval Fever by Yuliana Ortiz Ruano. Reprinted by permission of Soft Skull Press.
