Fractures

Alexandra Clemente Perez

I’ve been told I’m a lot like my grandmother.

My sister and I were celebrities by association whenever we visited her office at la Clínica El Ávila in the 2000s. Las nietas de la Doctora Pérez Alfonzo. People would talk to us about our abuela with palpable admiration. She had helped them, treated them, given them an opportunity. Many also included side commentary about her no-nonsense character. Tiene su carácter, they would tell us, even as children. They sucked on their teeth as they told us about the times la Doctora drew a line: when she rejected a patient for arriving late, or asked another to leave after they showed up with an additional family member, trying to get a two-for-one visit.

I wonder if any of them noticed her teeth were different colors.

Lola, Dolores, Lolita. She stood as mighty as the Ávila Mountain we could see behind our shared backyard. She never let a single hair go gray. She left a wake of perfume behind her—the perfect combination of soft talcum and tangy Boucheron Pour Femme. She always wore stockings to her office, driving there in her emerald Mercedes sedan, wearing a custom-fitted blazer, carrying her Louis Vuitton briefcase. She felt as unmovable to me as el Ávila, a source of power that always was and always would be.

Lola, Dolores, Lolita. Who wouldn’t want to be like her?

The Dolores I saw move through the world carried a hard enamel exterior. I appreciate it now as a strategy for survival in a cutting environment as much as a mythmaking mechanism in a land of opportunity. To rise up, to have her own office at La Clínica, to own her own Mercedes, to gain the respect of all who met her, she needed to appear unmovable. No one could see Dolores crack.

But I saw how Lolita painted and perfumed over her pain. I remember her coming home after dark, slamming her beloved car’s door, and sighing out the pressure of the day. She’d release herself from her tight clothes, change into her nighty, and sit on her recliner to watch her Spanish game shows. Some nights, after dinner with my parents, I would join her there and learn from the facts on Saber y Ganar.

Her brokenness exposed itself in these intimate settings, whenever she opened her mouth and asked me why I didn’t visit her more often. I understood her pain to be the result of a fracture. She carried an ache from a time before the myth of la Doctora Pérez Alfonzo. Here in her inner chambers, she let her eyes droop and her lips curl downward. I acknowledged this crack, but I knew I couldn’t heal it. Her pleas were a weight I could not carry, but I knew I had to take it. Pain is a mitochondrial inheritance. Like the genetic material of those cellular organelles, it is passed down by our matriarchal line.

Her broken tooth was a portal to a past Dolores spent her life separating from. But these stories can’t be suffocated under any amount of doctor drag or direct communication. Like water breaking through rock, memory breaks through everything.

¿Abuela Lola tiene un diente roto? I remember asking mi mami when I still had all my baby teeth. A question I learned from her peeling eyeballs was a question I shouldn’t be asking. But my indiscreet childish self asked abuela Lola anyway. She stopped and looked at me, her side-eye peering through her gold-rimmed glasses and painted auburn bob.

She never told me the full story, just the basic facts: she broke her tooth when she was a child a day the circus was in town.

A collage of abuela Lola through the ages sits on my mantle in my San Francisco apartment. Doctora Pérez Alfonzo, Lola, Dolores, Lolita. Sometimes when she comes to me in my dreams, she’s that young and precocious girl transitioning to her adult teeth a little too soon. Her two braids frame her round face and hold her serious scowl.

One night that braided girl visited me, we spelunked through the canyon of her broken tooth, and ended up in the circus.

The Lolita of my dreams was that girl.

That girl tumbled through the crowds. Her sepia braids bounced behind her with every skip. She was there with her family: mami, papi, and some of her many siblings—people I vaguely recognize, now long dead. That girl was eating a candied apple, sweet to her taste but acid for her teeth. She needed that energy so she could do everything she wanted to do that day.

That girl’s mouth opened with every performance. Her round face, just like papi’s, would elongate with every gasp: her jaw stretching south and her eyebrows stretching north. She saw the biggest cats she’d ever seen, stomping around their cages with their giant paws. There were families performing tricks and feats that defied gravity. Traversing trapezes like birds flying through canopies. She looked so happy, bathed in that awe.

That girl was everyone’s baby even if she was named after an old lady, her abuela. She was young enough to be under the watchful eyes of her older sister but old enough to be able to run away from her. She was defined by her determination, even at that age.

The family needed to go home; there was work to be done. But today, that was not enough of an excuse. That girl wanted more. So, she ran. She ran away from the watchful eyes of her older sister, who had just turned around to answer mami. That girl’s sister was never one to behave like a boy, so one of her brothers ran after her.

I tried to catch her, but she ran straight through me. This wasn’t my story to change.

That girl smiled as she swerved through the people of Caracas. Still holding on to her half-eaten candied apple.

A rope across the path was the culprit. Her right foot catching brought her and the tent it was holding up, down. That girl pivoted on the axis of her caught appendage. Her candied apple shot out like a projectile, hitting a woman in her upper arm and tainting her beautiful white dress with scarlet. She screamed, knowing that nothing good waited on the other side of this accident.

Her face broke her fall. Eyes closed, mouth open. She was the epicenter of a small earthquake, stopping everyone in their tracks. Her sense of taste was the first to come back. Her saccharine saliva mixed with the musty dirt. But there was another tone in her palate: a tang of iron that announced itself with a sharp pain. That girl climbed that pain like a rope, straightening herself up. Then, she began to wail.

Her brother found her a blubbering mess. This was when I caught up to her. A concerned crowd gathered. One of the attendants of the nearby fallen tent gave her water. He was concerned about the amount of blood pouring out of that small girl.

The water rendered the damage apparent. Blood was gushing out of what remained of the girl’s front tooth. It had barely made its debut in the world and already it had been cut to size. No one could find the other piece of it among the mineral detritus. But finding it was not a priority. She needed a dentist. Some concerned citizen gave them a shawl and wrapped it around the girl’s mouth like a bandana. Too big to be carried by her brother, she limped back to her family.

¿Lolita qué te pasó? said her mami as she wrapped her youngest in her arms. That girl melted into her mami’s embrace. Her mami’s voice was as warm as the blood dripping down her neck, as sweet as the sugar of that soiled candied apple. I smile, realizing mi mami’s soothing voice is her mitochondrial inheritance. I yearn to become small and disintegrate into her shoulders.

Lolita’s life was not done fracturing. Her papi died soon after. Her mami, a homemaker, became a widow. Papi’s company, the one that bore their last name, became a massive success. One that would outlive us all. But that success never became our inheritance. The widow and her orphans had no recourse. They had to focus their limited resources elsewhere. Our family was written out of history and fortune.

I never knew what abuela Lola felt when she looked at that yellow box with her last name printed at the bottom. But I know she gritted her teeth the rest of her life.

No one would ever bury Lolita like that again.

Dolores would only consent to being buried when she died. Getting stuck under rubble before my time felt like an inevitability to me. Especially when you live in a country like Venezuela, constantly on the verge of collapse.

Caracas challenged Lolita’s assertion and validated my fears.

The Caracas earthquake of 1967 was so strong it destroyed the seismographs in the Cagigal Observatory. Mass was being celebrated in the Catedral when all the windows shattered. The building shook with such violence that the cathedral cross fell off the white colonial facade. The metal structure left white indentations on the asphalt, silhouetting its crossings like the outline of a dead body.

Mi mami said Lola was at a party when it happened. Makes sense. It happened on a Saturday night. And it was the ’60s, la Doctora was in her social prime.

When I experienced my first temblor at sixteen, I blacked out and found myself outside at 3 a.m. Cold, clammy, and shaking. I was studying for a physics exam. I didn’t even think to wake up the rest of my family. It seemed unimaginable that the ground, the thing we drilled into to set foundations, had fractured without warning.

Every earthquake catches Caracas by surprise. This sort of thing doesn’t happen here, we tell ourselves. But every hundred or so years, we are humbled. Geology reminds us that we are not exceptional. Every hundred or so years, temblors metabolize the Catedral and Caracas entombs the gathered faithful inside her.

And yet, whenever nature is done castigating us, we caraqueños chide creation for its disobedience. Simón Bolívar declared after the 1812 7.7 Caracas earthquake that, “If Nature is against us, we shall fight Nature and make it obey.”

But mi mami still had all her baby teeth that Saturday night. She is not el Libertador. She never fought against colonial Spain. She has never broken a bone. But her life has fractured.

The house that la Doctora built has a battle-tested foundation. If I sit quietly, placing my feet directly on its cold, scarlet, brick floor, it shares its biggest battle with me. That night of the Caracas earthquake, that Saturday, July 29, in 1967.

The clock strikes 8 p.m.

Things are falling from the ceiling. Dolores is not home and mi mami is a child. Mi mami’s helplessness is palpable, like the cracks creeping through the walls. That girl is screaming through her tears. Her abuela is holding her close, hoping to absorb some of the shock. Everyone misses Lolita. ¿Dónde está mi mami? I can hear that girl cry out. That girl does not want to join the entombed faithful underneath Caracas. Mi mami, her abuela, and the house all knew la Doctora wouldn’t let that happen.

After a lifetime of witnessing my family try to mend their cracks in private, I decided to take the opposite approach. Their healing strategy made for disassociated living. It created a separation I did not have the metabolism to maintain. Instead, I’d wear my fractures proudly, like the jewelry I inherited from Lolita.

I acquired my own asymmetry right before I left Caracas for central Massachusetts in the late 2000s: a place deemed safe because it was not under authoritarian rule and was not known for earthquakes.

There were many icebreakers to be had during my freshmen orientation. We’d all be standing in a circle on the quad in the middle of this city I didn’t know. We’d be divided by dorms or some other random variable. On those muggy summer afternoons on foreign soil we’d pass the ball and share a fun fact, hoping to make a connection, maybe even a friend.

My name is Alex, I told these strangers, and my fun fact is my nose is broken.

That way, you’d know I did not wake up that morning to study physics and live through my first earthquake to play games. I did it because my drive to live free is like that of someone buried alive. Some girls in Caracas would’ve used this bulb as an excuse to romanize their noses under a surgeon’s knife. Sifrinas caraqueñas like me did not need an excuse to get a nose job. If Nature is against us, we ask a surgeon to oppose it until it obeys. But I was not like those girls.

I spent my college nights hopping from frat party to frat party. Cosplaying as a powerful, smooth femme fatale. Walking around like a ghost in a snow-framed Worcester night, I could make stable ground shake with the clickity-clack of my four-inch heels. I’d be nursing a red lipstick-stained Natty Ice on one hand and the assumption I was battle-hardened enough that nothing else could break in the other. I’d take that empty hand and caress the calluses over my left nostril.

I knew something then I still know to be true. My callus is not made of bone that can be sanded off. It’s not organic material, it’s memory.

In my mini-skirt, thigh-high boots, and knee-deep in snow, I could conjure the memory of that warm day. I could open my eyes and step into that scene. Regardless of where I stand, like Lolita, I am still that girl.

In my callus, I was that girl who tumbled through swaying high school grads to find her sister. That day, papi came to pick her and her sister up from a pool party in La Lagunita. That girl had coordinated this pickup, sitting in a corner, Smirnoff Ice in one hand and cell phone in the other. They boarded the car with the grace of newborn foals. Papi was here to rush them to the other side of the valley. Mi mami was already there, waiting for the inevitable.

These girls needed to be there when abuela died. Even if they were at least three drinks deep.

The three of them got stuck in classic Caracas traffic. Papi was playing some music, but that was not much of a distraction from the somber atmosphere. After an hour, that girl was bursting, her bladder unused to the high frequency of alcohol-induced fill-and-empty cycles. She begged papi to stop with such slurred fervor he had no choice but to comply. Her sister did not join her cause, but did not stop it either.

The urgent tone from papi was her inspiration to hurry, the alcohol in her system was her impediment, the tiny step in front of a cement wall at that gas station was the culprit of her fall.

Her body landed on the tip of her nose. Her cartilage gave way to concrete. Both her nostrils now pointed right. Warm blood flowed into her mouth, dripping through her teeth and down her chin. As she peeled herself from the wall and came to, the ache of fracture came through. That girl held her broken appendage like she was cradling a baby bird. Her hands, still tingling with the spirit of Smirnoff, were now soaked in scarlet. That rush of alcohol still kept me warm in the foreign, cold nights.

There was no time to waste on this gas station gaffe. Papi made that clear: Alexandra deja la vaina y apúrate. I think of papi’s tone, his terseness and sternness, on that cold Worcester night. Those tones are not uncommon for him, a similarity he shared with la Doctora. But his words were underlined by an anxiety that cracked my heart open. Maybe it was the i in vaina that came out too sharp.

That girl was nothing if not obedient. That girl cracked her nostrils forward on command. As I stroke my nose, I mimic that motion, forcing my beak perpendicular to my face.

That girl collected her blood with newspapers a gas station attendant provided. She lay down in the backseat of her furious father’s car. She covered her nasal bone with an ice pack to coagulate her mess. Her sister sat in silence, frozen in place, trying not to sway.

With the peace of an empty bladder, that girl better perceived the magnitude of the moment. Something else had fractured. The emergency, tacitly understood by everyone, was too devastating to be verbally acknowledged. But the ripples undulated through them. That girl’s pain pulsated with every heartbeat. Papi weaved through cars with unbridled urgency. Her sister barely blinked as they approached La Clínica.

They weren’t fast enough. Abuela Lola was gone.

Mountains aren’t supposed to crumble. Having the matriarch of my lineage transition to ancestry was as unexpected as an earthquake in Caracas. I fainted at the news of her death. I felt the Tacagua-Ávila fault break open and swallow me.

It spit me out on this winter Worcester sidewalk.

My fracture was not an emergency in this world. My nose became a cliff etched from a past tremor. You wouldn’t know where there is now ragged rock, there were once mellow meadows.

I still stroke these overhangs. Staring into my screen, living in a building retrofitted for earthquake safety. My ridges are softer now; my beak’s sharpness sedimented over by time.

But when they find me in the rubble, they will witness my lineages’ cumulative breaking and mending. They broke in Caracas, they’ll say, and spent lifetimes healing those fractures.

Alexandra Clemente Perez (she/her) was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. She is writing an essay collection about her experience migrating from Venezuela to the United States. Organizations like Tin House have supported her work, and her words have appeared in publications like The New York Times. She lives in Northern California. You can find her at aleclemente.com.

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Next Up: Nightwood by Bailey Davis