Paradise Travel

Excerpted fromParadiseTravelby Jorge Franco. Copyright 2001 by Jorge Franco. Translation copyright 2006 by Katherine Silver. Published January 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Icould easily have died that day at dawn after I got lost, not only because death itself stood in my way, but because I craved death with a passion. I remembered and finally understood all the times Reina had said: Let's just kill ourselves, but after saying it so many times, nobody paid much attention anymore. "Let's just kill ourselves," she'd say angrily whenever things didn't go her way. I wasn't worried about only Reina's life but about everybody's, especially mine that I took such good care of, not for any very good reason, maybe just that pessimistic love I always felt for life, a love that lasted until that night when I was the most desperate human being, when for the first time I thought: Better dead than alive and without Reina. But it was my memory of her strange ideas that made me believe I could take one more step, and then another. I knew when I started running that I was starting to lose her, and that in the twinkling of an eye I could also lose myself. While I was running away from the policemen, I pictured her, her angry mouth shouting: Marlon, don't go out! But you also have to figure in my anger, and when I went out that night I never imagined I was going to get lost in the world's biggest, most intricate labyrinth, doomed to having as my last memory that angry expression on Reina's face, her yelling at me like my mother used to when I was little: Marlon Cruz, don't you go out! I yelled back at her and left. We yelled at each other all the exhaustion and silence we had been keeping bottled up inside us ever since we'd decided on this madness of coming to New York to find our future. "New York?" I asked her. "Yes, New York." "Why so far away?" "Because that's where it is," Reina said. It was her idea. As a rule, all the ideas were hers. I had a few of my own, but only Reina's got anywhere, and this one was already well on its way. By the time she told me about it, everything had been decided. She didn't even ask if I agreed. "We're both going," she said. She went on about all the opportunities, the dollars, the chance to earn a good living, live a better life, get away from this shithole. "In this place we haven't done anything, we aren't doing anything, and we aren't ever going to do anything." To finally have a place for the two of us, where we could get ahead in life and even have children, she continued. While she was saying all this, her eyes shone and she looked so sincere I actually believed her; there was so much determination in those eyes, they even scared me. "But it's so far away and we've never been there before," I told her. Reina squeezed my hands and pressed her mouth up against mine. Instead of eyes, I saw two glassy blotches of different colors darting back and forth, as if they were searching for the fear behind my eyes. She started talking in a different tone of voice and even the rhythm of her breathing changed. "We're both going," she repeated. "Or do you want to stay here, like your mother, like your father, like my father, screwed like all of them?" She said this quietly, her lips glued against my face, her body pressed against mine as she breathed warm air out through her nose; she wasn&Franco, Jorge is the author of 'Paradise Travel', published 2006 under ISBN 9780374229771 and ISBN 0374229775.