Far north of San José, and even farther from the house in Barrio Ávila, rested Liberia, once known as the White City for its blanched dirt roads and adobe houses, and its residents who staved off heat with ivory linen. Guanacaste trees provided shade from the sun and, now, necessary cover from the cannonade of rain. In a sun-bleached adobe house on the outskirts of Liberia lived the Three Marías. The second morning of the storm promised to disturb their day with memories.
María Asunta, the youngest of the triplets, punted rotten mangoes through the rain into the yard next door (the neighbor now six months dead). She tired herself out much sooner than expected—kicking had become increasingly difficult because of the rising water melting the dirt beneath her feet. It created a thick soup seasoned with the mushy orange fruit.
A three-meter-tall cinder block wall dividing the two properties protected the colossal mango tree that hung its head over Asunta and her sisters’ yard. Daily it discarded swollen fruit onto Asunta’s flower beds, crushing dainty begonias. Squashing ripe chayotes. Filling their outdoor washroom with an acrid smell and thousands of gnats. If, at sixty-two, Asunta could scale the wall, she would bring the tree down herself with a butcher knife. But this morning (because of the barometric pressure on her joints) she had only the strength to propel a few mangoes into the adjacent yard.
Punt—into a flimsy branch, knocking even more mangoes onto the poinsettias.
Punt—whirling past the head of a frightened yigüirro bird.
Punt—a sharp, frustrated pain erupted in her kicking leg.
The game’s first quarter ended lukewarmly. Four-all.
Defeated, soaking wet, Asunta hobbled through the muddy mango broth, muttering curses so scandalous that rafting fire ants blushed. Inside, she wasted no time in changing her dress. Her sisters had brewed their morning coffee. Maybe caffeine would give her enough strength for the second quarter in the afternoon.
On the living room sofa, María Visita and María Conchita competed to guess the letters on the new episode of Wheel of Fortune (not yet dubbed in Spanish). Despite knowing only ten words in English between them, they yelled out answers to the puzzles anyway. By the time the show ended, they were tied. Zero to zero. It was a morning of frustrated contests.
“Tomorrow’s a new day,” they croaked to each other.
“I was close—I almost had the last one,” Visita said, pursing her lips.
“In your dreams. You’re closer to a heart attack than you are to getting one of them right,” Conchita said, trying to get a rise out of her older sister.
“¿That so? Well, when I do die, I’m going to haunt you good,” Visita said, as serious as the aforementioned infarction.
“¡You’re already as pale as a ghost!” Conchita said after a long, pensive pause. “¿You sure you’re not already dead?”
“¿Will you both please shut up?” Asunta huffed as she walked in. “¿Did you two finish all the coffee?”
“We waited for you. It’s on the stove,” Visita said.
“¿How many did you get into the yard this time?” Conchita asked.
“Four … and a half,” Asunta said. Her lazy eye glared at a Coca-Cola commercial.
“You’re fighting a losing battle against that tree, Asunta,” Conchita said.
“Girl, go get her a mug. She looks like she’s about to die from exhaustion,” Visita said before she paused. “¡I bet she’ll turn into a ghost before either of us do! ¡Then she’ll finally be white!”
The triplets, named after the Marian dogmas—Visita (Visitación), Conchita (Concepción), and Asunta (Asunción)—wobbled into the kitchen and sat at the creaky dinette table to prepare their coffees. Both Conchita and Asunta joked that their older sister drank leche con café, seeing as how Visita added only a thimble of coffee into a steaming mug of milk. Conchita, on the other hand, took hers in perfect balance: equal parts coffee, milk, and pure sugarcane, which she let sit for a few minutes to cool. Asunta, on the third hand, would only drink her coffee black, with crackling ice cubes that clinked against her cup when she laughed. The triplets still prepared their coffees the same way their mother had when they were girls: each coffee made to match the skin of the appropriate María. Born three minutes and three shades apart.
The triplets sat quietly for a while, trapped in their own heads. Yesterday’s call from Cristina reverberated in the house. After the call, they didn’t console one another. Instead, they spent the night in separate rooms, hiding their thoughts from each other.
Today was more or less the same. A knot writhed in Visita’s belly. Her stomach grew knuckles, readied a strike. She excused herself from the table without a word. Three eyes watched her leave. One eye still watched her mug of steamed milk. A rage overtook Asunta, and she hurled the three half-finished coffees into the sink. Then she whisked herself outside, fuming and ready to start the second quarter against the mango tree. Alone in the kitchen, Conchita sank into the chair and stared at the zinc ceiling. The tightness between her ribs softened. She wondered how Teresa was after all these years. Was age as cruel to songbirds as it was to the girls who loved them?
AS GIRLS, THE Three Marías had been as famous in Liberia for their beauty as they were for their bickering. They spent hours at the mirror and at one another’s throats. Applying rouge. Curling eyelashes. Practicing jabs. Three pageant queens whose talent portion was street fighting.
At primary school, they were harassed by boys who hadn’t yet read the intricate manual of Courting. Who hadn’t yet used their fathers’ smelly pomade or picked flowers with thorns. Who didn’t know that Love and War are separate (sometimes). Rocks and marbles were hurled, hair in ponytails was pulled, but the taunting was the worst of it by far.
Las Tres Marías
Y los tres corazones
La que está en el centro
No lleva calzones
For years, the triplets cursed their mother’s lack of foresight. How could she have named all three of them María? It was asking for children’s creative cruelty. They were almost sure the Mother of God herself had never faced these types of perversions. That rhyme followed the Three Marías everywhere, like a cloud raining frogs.
The Three Marías, the boys would ribbit.
And the three beating hearts, others joined in, crossing their chests. Then all together, with the precision of a Broadway chorus, they shouted the last two lines, pulling down their pants and sticking out their tongues. ¡Whoever’s in the middle isn’t wearing panties!
Soon, the saying spread throughout the country, a biblical plague that for many years haunted trios of young girls whose mothers may or may not have named them all María.
To the jeering, however, the Three Marías adapted quickly and efficiently. Well, more or less. At night, between spitting out toothpaste and swatting mosquitoes as they lay awake, they discussed war strategies: evasive maneuvers, shortcuts, comebacks, tattling, state-of-the-art camouflage techniques. But each new day brought more failed battle plans, and ultimately the short-lived alliance of the Three Marías buckled. Like tired, forlorn generals fighting against the unforeseen of Love and War, they schemed individually. A trio of hostile Virgin Marys. Three minutes and three shades apart.
Visita (convinced that ignoring them was the best policy) tried to lead her sisters by example. Upon any resemblance of a rhyme curling around street corners, she would stand completely and unnaturally erect, marching straight home. A duchess with more important matters to attend to. Worried that their song was going unheard, the boys hurled pieces of smashed brick, rainbow candies, or shards of dull glass at her back as she quickened her pace. It wasn’t an absolute victory, but a victory nonetheless.
Conchita handled it shyly and gracefully, excusing herself with awkward smiles of even teeth. To her misfortune and to the tepid envy of her sisters, she was said to be the most beautiful of the three. So, those boys, whose acne formed bright red constellations on their cheeks, sang the rhyme to the rhythm of a short, rude bolero. As if—had they been given a choice in the matter—out of her, the other two Marías, and the three beating hearts, she was the one they wanted caught in the middle. Panty-less. The way God had first seen Mary in all her glory.
It was during this era that Asunta became renowned as the most violent of the Marías. Boys were careful not to breathe the rhyme in her proximity, for fear of witnessing the flash of one blue eye (that would laze in due time) before the horrendous pain of a broken nose knocked them to the dirt. Even after they were beaten by their fathers for soiling their perfectly good pants, they refused to admit it was a girl who had sent them home, wet with tears and piss.
The rhyme slowly disappeared upon the arrival of the fourth María. It was the year the rains pierced the sanctity of the dry season. The year the Three Marías checked their panties and found blood. The girl came from the capital with her mother. And she hummed a song of an uncaged bird. Her skin brown like a yigüirro’s feathers, her smile irresistible. Teresa’s song set the Three Marías free from each other, if only for the summers she was there in Liberia.
CONCHITA LEFT THE kitchen and slipped out the front door, walked east three hundred meters, turned south at the corner where the dilapidated fortress of the Salamandra Ballroom stood, and continued downhill to the old river. She had to escape the tension in the house. Visita had locked herself in her room. Asunta was punting mangoes out back. For months now, Conchita had considered asking the municipality to wrench the mango tree from the ground, but on days like these, when the electric blue of Asunta’s lazy eye flared like a flame, Conchita thought it best if she had an outlet for her frustrations.
Despite the hurricane, the old river—or what was left of it—dribbled languidly like urine from a man with cirrhosis. A pitiful incarnate of its former self, fed by scattered puddles of silt and cadmium, snaking through a bed embedded with prehistoric rocks, red cans, and bottles filled with the carcasses of silver fish, their still-bulging eyes and gills not listed as ingredients on the labels.
Conchita stood beneath a guanacaste tree to wait for it. For the sensation that she called nothingness to find her in the rain. When the nothingness finally came, it embraced her. It drowned out her sisters’ snide remarks, her heart’s feeble beating, the numerous nostalgic echoes. Conchita listened to its glorious drumbeat—a savage, affectionate white noise—and she felt as if the rain had washed every thought from her head. But a yigüirro bird began to sing. Whistling with a schoolgirl’s joy. Conchita caught a glimpse of it as it flew away. It was Teresa.
THE DAY THEY first met Teresa, Visita had slapped Conchita for having pointed out the differing sizes of her breasts. Conchita shot down the road toward the river but was stopped by a precipitous downpour that turned the gravel silty and cooled her cheek’s throbbing. She hurried to the shade of a guanacaste tree, and there, for the first time, nothingness found her. Conchita closed her eyes and bit her lip. Everything inside and beyond her was smothered. But the silence was broken by a yigüirro’s song. It yanked her from the cool arms of her solitude. She looked up to the tree branches but saw no singing bird. In a frenzy, she sprinted into the rain, intent on stoning the creature for having broken her peace. She followed the song to the gate of a newly constructed house. Its walls painted indigo, with bird-of-paradise flowers throwing their heads over the fence. Still frantic, Conchita darted her head, looking for the yigüirro.
“¡Loca! ¡Hey, loca!” heard Conchita. She hadn’t expected a human’s voice. It came from the patio swing. Conchita held her purse over her head to see clearly. Waving from the swing was a girl, maybe the same age as she was, shouting for her to come closer.
“You’re crazy for running in the rain. ¿Are you a maniac?” the girl said, then continued whistling.
“¿That was you?” Conchita said, wringing her hair.
“It’s a pretty song, ¿right? My grandmother taught it to me.”
Conchita, confused, then fascinated, interrogated the girl. “¿Your name?”
“Teresa María.”
“¿A María?” Conchita said excitedly. “You make four.”
“¿Four Marías?”
“That’s right,” Conchita said.
From then on, Teresa donned her new title as the fourth María and tagged along wherever the triplets went. To the Salamandra Ballroom, where they danced by moonlight; to the only ice cream shop in all of Guanacaste; to Coco Beach, Tamarindo Beach, and Hermosa’s pearl-white sands. Teresa taught them to dance bolero, tried on the Three Marías’ bras, and even envied their tussles. Their hair-pulling, name-calling, fat-pinching, all-out cursing matches and unavoidable fistfights. Teresa loved the Three Marías, and the Three Marías loved her back. But Conchita loved her most of all. Almost as much as she did her sisters.
One night on a rainy beach, she and Teresa swung together in a bright hammock. Teresa’s feet by Conchita’s head and Conchita’s by Teresa’s, still gossiping about the cute boys they had met at the Salamandra two nights before. Asunta lay drunk and snoring in the sand, Visita enveloped in a cocoon of mosquito netting. They asked each other about their fathers, how special and stern they had been. How kind Amarga seemed, how unkind she actually was. When they were too tired to ask any more, Conchita stared listlessly into the lantern light, watching moths burn up in the kerosene flame. The rain rustled palm fronds and fell heavily on the zinc roof.
Just as it had before, the nothingness invited Conchita to sleep. To let it slip into her like a cool knife into soft flesh, and take over her body for a bit. But Teresa began humming. Her song brought Conchita right back; she was aware again of every individual sound and the melody they made together—the inescapability of life.
BY THE AFTERNOON, Asunta was sitting in a pool of her own frustration. With her back to the concrete wall, she tossed off her ruined shoes and inspected her broken glasses. The mango tree and hurricane had laid waste to her garden. It is all unsalvageable, she thought. Not just her plants but her life. She wondered how she had ended up a María. Here, chained to two others who shared her every thought and characteristic, but who were somehow undeniably different from her. An imperfect third half to an already completed whole. Attached, she was convinced, as an afterthought.
The yigüirro she’d startled earlier landed on a floating mango and began picking at the jetsam. One of Asunta’s eyes watched its movements closely. The other noticed Conchita trudge back into the house.
TO SAY ASUNTA had been jealous of Teresa in their teenage years would have been an understatement. The day Conchita brought her home like a prize from a carnival, Asunta marveled, not at her hair, or her dress, or her collarbones, but at her own sisters’ obsession with this girl they had just met, but whom they instantly loved more than they loved her. She felt in that moment that she had become a backup María. A runner-up. The understudy in her own life’s play.
Asunta approached this new sisterhood with mild distrust and a vehement lack of manners, commenting on Teresa’s body or the missing molar visible only when she hung her head back in laughter. Visita and Conchita were used to this passive-aggression, and Teresa accepted it as an unavoidable personality flaw—nothing outside the realm of her own mother’s bitterness—and quietly tolerated it. To Asunta, this was a declaration of cold war. As the Americans panicked over Communism’s influence over the rest of the world, so, too, did Asunta fret over Teresa’s influence over her sisters. Her congeniality, charm, and poise threatened what scant amount of love Asunta could potentially receive, as if love were a finite resource. As if it could be mined, lumbered, traded, or pilfered. Boys flocked to Teresa, and especially to them, Asunta would whisper horrible things: ¿Did you know her own mother hates her? Her breath smells like beans that have been left out in the sun. I heard she hasn’t been a virgin for four years. But those boys, addicted to Teresa’s expensive oils and her stories from the capital, waved Asunta off.
One night at the Salamandra, Asunta watched as Teresa danced with a boy Asunta had been in love with since childhood. The one who originated the Three Marías rhyme and whom she had sent plummeting to the earth on several occasions. She watched them from the bar, a seething kettle, taking shot after shot of guaro. After the dance was over, Asunta clutched the boy’s biceps and led him from the ballroom into a nearby thicket to confess her love to him. But he only wanted to know about Teresa, what kind of boy she wanted. Asunta’s blue eye flared. She leaned closer and reached for his hand. He jerked it away. She grabbed it again. He jerked it away again. Then Asunta reeled her fist back and punched him in his gut. But he punched her back, square in her blue eye, so hard she fell backward onto a bed of aloe plants. Their spikes punctured her neck and shoulders. The boy laughed, saying life comes full circle, or something like that.
Asunta recovered, except for her blue eye that had lazed from the impact of the boy’s fist, a severed nerve that would never heal. From then on, that eye watched a separate world, darting without control. It revealed life’s secrets. The small, horrible details that divulge the truth of it all: a still-twitching mouse overrun by ants, Visita ripping out her own hair, Conchita fawning over Teresa, loving her more than she loved her own sisters. Asunta had no choice but to witness it, to accept the inescapability of it all. But she still fought against it. In a bitter, lifelong cold war.
IN HER ROOM darkened by the storm and by old, pricking thoughts, Visita combed hair over a growing bald spot. A Dior cardigan rested on her shoulders, and saffron cat-eye glasses quivered as they dangled from the loose chain around her neck, the same ones she had worn for over forty years. Visita had once been a librarian, but it was decided she was too loud answering the phone and too rude to library-goers for the job. Fired, but still fond of the uniform.
Under the night table’s glass top, photographs of the dead smiled up at her. They observed her battle against aging with quiet condemnation. Visita plucked a gray from her scalp with a pair of tweezers. Two would grow back in its place the next day. “Mala hierba nunca muere,” she said, eyeing a photograph underneath the glass. The one of Teresa holding a six-year-old Carmen, who clutched her mother’s ribs like a frightened koala. Visita had taken that picture of them down by the crystalline river with a brand-new Polacolor camera. The sun shone in their eyes, and they were happy. “Weeds never die,” Visita repeated as she plucked a particularly stubborn gray, leaving a tiny coin of blood.
AFTER AMARGA’S FUNERAL, Teresa fled to the United States and remained there, without contact, for six years. Visita and the other two Marías agreed unanimously to take Lyra and Carmen in when Teresa asked. At the time, Visita sympathized with Teresa. Only a desperate woman could abandon her daughters like that. A woman drowned by grief, beaten down by shame. The day Teresa left, Lyra and Carmen clung to Visita’s hips as Teresa climbed the flimsy metal steps to the plane. Teresa’s thick black sunglasses hid her tears.
The Three Marías slipped into motherhood much more easily than they had sisterhood. To combat the prospect of jeering boys, Conchita coached them in her charming evasive maneuvers, and Asunta taught them haymakers. At night they slipped Lyra and Carmen candy, and kissed them good night on each eye. But Visita was the one who really took charge of raising Lyra and Carmen. Motherhood gave her superhuman energy, an ineluctable sympathy, and an even lower tolerance for bullshit. She was the strictest, but also the most nurturing, and she protected them fiercely from the sons of the boys from her youth. And the two girls took to Visita as if she were Teresa. Carmen told her fantastical stories before bed, wondered why she was thinking what she was thinking, and hugged her the tightest. Lyra spoke to Visita in languages she had learned from books, cuddled closely, and drank a steaming mug of milk with a thimble of coffee in the mornings.
Lyra and Carmen loved the Three Marías, and the Three Marías loved them back. But the Marías’ conjoined motherhood would last only those six years. On Carmen’s fourteenth birthday, there was a knock at the door that disturbed the party. Visita opened it to find Cristina and Desiderio. They entered like two police agents without a warrant, their faces severe, yet saddened by their mission. Visita had known in her heart this day would come.
The Three Marías tried to stop them, blocked doorways, argued against it, but Desiderio packed Carmen’s things, and Cristina Lyra’s. The makeup Conchita had bought them, the rainbow of unopened presents. Teresa had ended her exile and returned to Costa Rica, was waiting for Lyra and Carmen back in Barrio Ávila. Visita interrogated Cristina and Desiderio with shouts: ¿Why hadn’t Teresa come herself? ¿Was she that much of a coward? ¿Had their efforts gone unnoticed and unappreciated? Cristina and Desiderio remained silent as they stowed Lyra and Carmen in the car. Cristina left an envelope with US$4,000 inside. The pink Pontiac sped away, leaving a cruel fang of black smoke. The ice cream cake melted into a light bluish puddle on the kitchen table. The Three Marías collapsed and wondered why the fourth had forsaken them.
NIGHT CAME, AND the triplets still hadn’t broached the topic of Teresa. They signed a psychic pact to save it for the morning. Visita wobbled into the living room, where Conchita pointed a blow-dryer at Asunta’s head like a ray gun. The Three Marías (three minutes and three shades apart) sat together in an acute triangle to watch a rerun of Wheel of Fortune. In shrill, rising voices they yelled out answers to the puzzles (every single one of them wrong). During a commercial break, Asunta’s lazy eye observed the new beige curtains Conchita had sewn. Asunta complimented Conchita on her craft, and Visita readily agreed. Conchita tilted her head back and smiled a weak, lovely smile. Outside, the storm knocked more mangoes onto the flooded garden. They floated like corked bottles at sea, with lost, tender secrets inside.