It's Not Love, It's Just Paris Read Free

or local bookstore anyway. They were sexy books. Books about Europe and elsewhere, people living uncharted lives—the kind of people we both wanted to be after high school. Then, Ajax said, we’d really start living. But the box of books was returned to me, so I took it to his apartment hoping to leave it with his mother, but she had moved, and when I asked down at the liquor store, nobody knew where she’d gone.
    Maybe it was the rotated yellowing teeth, the hollow cheeks, stork-thin arms, or the way Loic held his cigarette between his middle and ring finger, but my memories of Ajax built an instant bridge of familiarity between us. Maybe it was his eyes, pale and beckoning. Maybe it’s just that lonely attracts lonely.
    Loic was the kind of guy who’d drive down Avenue Foch in his Mini and pick up a young hooker only to give her free money and offer to help her find a decent job somewhere. He really did that, about once a week, but I was the only one who knew, because I’ve always been the sort of person people find it easy to tell their secrets to. The truth is I’m very quiet out loud, shy like an escargot, saving my chatter for the privacy of my own mind, and I’m only talky like this when I’m still trying to understand what things mean to me.
    I took the cigarette Loic offered me that afternoon thinking it was a good way to christen this new life. Loic didn’t say much, not even when I broke into a coughing fit after my first drag. He looked over his sharp shoulder and, through his smoky smile, as if he could read my weariness and fears, said, “Don’t worry, Lita. You’re going to be very happy here. I promise.”
    My father says you can’t go anywhere without leaving something behind. It sounds better in Spanish—less simple, although my father is a simple man. He’s a tycoon now but he was illiterate until he was nineteen and says poverty can’t be covered by a new suit, which also sounds much better in Spanish, but you get the picture.
    My mother, as I said, was found in the jungle. She could be Brazilian or Peruvian just as easily as Colombian since most national lines drawn through the rainforest are only observed by maps. She might be mestiza or pure Indian, though we don’t know her tribe—Bora, Yagua, or Ticuna—it’s hard to say, since being dropped in the city was her first displacement. She’s got thick black hair strong enough to strangle someone, which I inherited along with her straight brows and long eyes that stretch to my ears. Alligator eyes are what my brothers call them, because they got our father’s eyes, small and round like coffee beans, and his condor nose. My older brother, Santi, would say that unless you hang with Lévi-Strauss, chances are we don’t look like anyone you know. We’re sand colored, tall and lean with angular butts. My father says it’s from generations of hunger and malnutrition that came before us, but that can’t be verified, because, like my mother, Papi was also abandoned. When he was six or seven his father packed him with a bundle of arepas and left him alone in a Bogotá park. It was sunset before he realized his father wasn’t coming back for him. He went to the safest place he could think of to wait out the night, a church, and spent the next five years sleeping on its steps among the derelicts and street kids until he observed a man who came for daily Mass and, figuring the guy must be halfway decent, one day followed him home. Papi doesn’t like to get into details,but sleeping on the church steps was pretty dangerous and he got all the propositions you’d imagine a twelve-year-old homeless boy would get.
    The man my father followed turned out to be an ironworker, and he agreed to let Papi work for him in exchange for food and a place to sleep. Eight years later, the man, Santiago, sent Papi to repair the fence around a convent on the city periphery. That’s where he met my mother—an eighteen-year-old nun in training. It sounds kind