Vida by Patricia Engel Read Free Book Online Page A

every chance I had. She gave him a hundred bucks to buy herself a spot in the aparto/hostel for a couple of weeks, and when we’d all be hanging in the living room, the guys strumming Soda Stereo songs on their guitars, Valeria would dance along like it was her only currency. Diego, like all the other guys, watched her tiny thighs jiggling and the way she was always picking the spandex out of her crack.
    There was another one. Roberta the Chilena whose father owned a shoe store in Hialeah and who fell in love with Diego one night at Automatic Slims. I wasn’t around, because I was on a real date with some Peruvian UM med-school fool, son of a family friend, and if I didn’t go out with him I’d hear about it for a year from my mom. Roberta offered to marry Diego on the spot because she had her papers already. And Diego was considering it, which made me nuts. She said he’d have to work in the shoe store with the family though, and Diego wasn’t sold on that last detail. We were at the nude beach one cloudy afternoon when he was thinking it over out loud. I was topless and Diego was completely on display, which, looking back, should have been awkward for us, but it wasn’t.
    I asked him if he was going to go through with it, trying not to sound jealous.
    “I’d rather marry you,” he said, and I think he meant it as a joke but it didn’t come out sounding that way. Still, I laughed and he laughed, too.
    “I’m serious,” he said after a minute or two. “If it came down to it, would you marry me so I can get my papers?”
    I shook my head. “I’d only marry for love.”
    “Easy to say when you’re not illegal.”
    Diego didn’t believe in love. He read a lot of socialist lit and Osho, and he said love was an imagined condition of the weak. Elsa entertained his debates on the subject while I just turned my eyes to the sky. He said he’d never felt anything in his life that resembled the popular notion of love. Not for anyone except maybe his parents. I took this as a challenge. And when I got him alone one night, sleeping in my bed after another drunken barbecue, I poked him awake with my finger and said, “Diego, I’m going to break your heart one day.”
    He turned his big eyes on me and said, “I hope you do.”
    I wish I could say my life changed after that summer but it didn’t. I went back to New York and got another shit job in a gallery, this time uptown. Diego and I would talk on the phone a few times a week. He gave up handing out flyers andgot a busboy job at one of the big clubs. He came up to the city to see me for a few days and I took him all over: Central Park, Chinatown, the Met, and the Museum of Natural History. He’d never seen a dinosaur and said the bones along with the skyscraper skeleton of New York City made him feel insignificant, like he could just disappear and nobody would notice.
    Diego’s mom was dying of cancer and he wanted badly to go home and see her but his parents insisted he stay here, that there was nothing left for him in Argentina. No jobs, no opportunity, and if he ever left the United States, he would not be able to come back. We were sitting in my living room, rain pouring outside, turning the city into a giant puddle. He was eating choripán, the only thing he ever ate, and I was drinking a coffee from Abdul the Tanzanian’s place downstairs.
    “You’re my best friend, Sabina.”
    “I am?”
    He nodded, sausage filling his cheek.
    I’d go back to Miami when I could, see Diego who was now dealing pot although he didn’t want to admit it. He had to, though, when I asked him where he got the money to buy not one but two motorcycles, in addition to an Isuzu Trooper and kite surfing gear. He was rolling in the dough now, sending loads back to his parents, spending some, and saving therest in a white tube sock in the back of his closet, which he said I should rescue if he ever got arrested.
    “How will I know if you’ve been arrested?” I asked him and he