“Se oye al jíbaro llorando, otro más que se marchó”
I liked Bad Bunny’s new album. Not so much the reggaeton– no, I’m too old for that now–but the message resonates well within my heart. The Puerto Rican artist has won himself a global audience singing about the fate of his own island. Economic stagnation. Emigration. Separation. More people are on the move than ever.
Since when was a good life far away from home?
Tonight – another night that I can’t find a house, a bed, a stove, a plate of hot food – here I am, in the cheapest hostel the city could find, thanking God for having the decency not to make me sleep on the streets. I keep thinking back to the dog walkers who wanted to call the police on me. I just needed a hotspot. Why? Why treat me as the danger when I am the one facing those dangerous streets?
I arrive at the hostel gate. A line of Moroccan men, young and old, are sitting on the stairs with cigarettes between their fingers and nothing written on their faces. Their eyes are heavy and their hair is messy. I ask what they are waiting for. They look lonely and lost.
“Nothing.” A man cracks. The question amuses him. I realize what he means, and start chuckling too. For men like us who don’t know when the next meal is coming, there is indeed nothing to wait for.
I walk into the hostel. I try to negotiate the price, but the receptionist only stares at me with a blank face and tilts his long, thick beard slightly towards the door.
“There are other hostels.” His lips are not moving; his beard is. His eyes are impatiently looking for something, anything that is more entertaining than me. I have already lost the bargain.
The bearded man takes forever to register my passport into the system. It was 2 a.m. and freezing, the city is asleep all around me. A high pitch jolts into my head taking over the Bad Bunny song I was humming. I squeeze my empty wallet. Where will the wings of the invisible angels take me after tonight?
The receptionist ‘professionally’ takes his time – a punishment for seeking help in the cold of the night. Deciding to have mercy, he leads me upstairs, down the straight corridor, to the last room, and opens the door to a room filled with a pungent and confusing smell. I can’t place it.. Obscuring the room was a thick, impenetrable mixture of sweet white vanilla and salty black broth, one that simultaneously pulls me in with its charm of elegance and reminds me of the garbage gradually rotting behind it somewhere. One of beauty and pain; of dream and illusion; of chasing and losing.
The bearded grump turns on the light. I see human figures sleeping behind closed curtains. Now I know where the smell is coming from. It’s the result of a futile effort to spray air freshener in a crowded room, engrossed in the stench of sweaty feet and their tattered shoes.
All of a sudden, the reception guy halts in front of a man who, knowingly or not, took the wrong bunk of the bed. He whips the curtain open and shouts to him in a volume inappropriate for a sleeping room:
“What is your bed number?”
I want to close my ears. The drowsy man wakes up and screams in protest. A few frowning faces appear from the curtains, eyes squinting because of the piercing white light. My eyes meet theirs. I quickly lower my head in shame. This room is full of other immigrants like myself, and I’ve disturbed their sleep, perhaps the only good thing they can count on after a long day of exhausting labor.
I hurry to turn off the light as soon as the reception guy leaves. I climb into the upper bunk, tip-toeing up the ladder while holding my breath. The metal bed creaks in an uncollaborative humor. When everything quiets down, I am finally lying flat, face up, staring at the dull grey paint of the ceiling fifty centimeters above my head. I am breathing normally again. Yes, a bed to call my own for a few hours, a thin layer of fabrics isolating me from the dangers and struggles I’ll have to dive into tomorrow morning. I think I’ll miss the check-out time, but that’s a problem for later.
A child is born with a passport. Then she is expected to build a life in this place over the coming thirty or forty years. I was so naïve when I finally got my maroon passport with golden scripts on the cover and thought that I had achieved the impossible, ten years of legal residency in this country. Today, I realized, the day I received my passport, I was already too late: when I was reborn here as a citizen, I was already 25 years old, with a face that people always expect to speak a foreign language, with an accent that will always sound not native enough. Who is there to afford me thirty, forty years to build a life here now?
And a house? An education? Two loving parents?
My mother that I left behind. Who needs me to be here, to be so far away from her. I can’t erase the image of her, before I left, alone in the kitchen kneeling between glasses and jars, uneasily clenching her teeth as she filled and sealed Tupperware one by one with food she believed would last till my arrival. They did. The cookies and nuts are still warm in my stomach right now, providing the only comfort in this long, cold night.
Since when is a good life one far away from mom?
My thoughts are taken over by sleepiness after I lose count of time. My feet join the competition of whose smell is the worst, my shoes are already lined up. My snores will soon compete with the older brothers, whose minds are now wandering in another dimension, one that only closed eyes can see. In my head, Bad Bunny is singing again:
“No quería irse pa’ Orlando, pero el corrupto lo echó…”