AINHOA PALACIOS

The two stories are an expansion of “Emilio Alarcon Loved Pancakes” (ISSUE 09)

On Emilio Alarcon

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Sophia Alarcon. The first I saw him; I was in a nightclub outside just outside LA. Now, don’t go thinking I was one for nightclubs because I wasn’t. All that drinking made me so ill, for days I would retch and clutch to ground beneath, what with all the swaying and tipping it would do. Back then, I had no idea about the hypoglycemia. If only I would’ve known. 

Anyway, what year was it? Nineteen…let me think. I was twenty-two, cute little thing too. So, it must’ve been right around 1973 when I saw Emilio right in the middle of the dance floor. Swinging and twirling and moving those hips every which way. Dead smack in the middle of the crowd who had, of course, made some room for him at the center because let me tell you, there was not a single soul who didn’t like watching that man. And he lived for that. 

White Levis, white converse, a flower print shirt unbuttoned all the way down to mid chest. I’ll never forget that outfit. Oh honey, the women loved him. But in fact, now that I mention it, I didn’t go home with him that night. My friend, Tonya, did. And I went home with his friend Ricky. Ricky was also a handsome fella—a bit taller, a bit lighter than Emilio. But Ricky ended up being more of a friend. But the next time the four of us met? Thank god our Lord Jesus Christ is a forgiving one because we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. I’m telling you, the world, my world, burst into flames that night and never quite returned. 

But before we got together, Emilio flew back to New York. That’s where he was from. Where he’d been dancing and acting since he was 18 and newly arrived to America. I love to picture a starry-eyed Emilio. New York was where his ex, Liliana, also was. I found out later he went back to ask her if she wanted to try again with him. When she sent him packing, he came back to me. Don’t ask me why he was like that, I never understood it, but before every new woman, that man ran back to his most recent ex and made sure they didn’t want to try again. You should see how many times he called me asking to try again. And every time, I told him the same thing. I’ll only end up leaving you again. 

Anyway, once he was back and we were as committed as we were going to be, we moved to Hollywood. Hollywood! Just like the movie stars. Now, I’m from California, but not the California everyone likes to think about. I grew up in the country. I’m talking thrift shopping for our clothes, clothes which stayed in our family for years whether they fit us or not. I knew nothing about that glamorous movie star life, but Emilio always fit right in. That golden skin of his and those thick black curls, everyone went a bit nutty for him. Kooky, really. 

But you know? As head-over-heels as I was, I wasn’t one for marriage. I didn’t need it. But boy did Emilio beg and beg. It wasn’t until little Mariella was born that I caved. You should see our wedding photos. My hair was so teased, I should’ve been marrying a pick, not Emilio. And he had these curly bangs and hair to his shoulders. That haircut everybody is getting these days, Emilio was one of the first.  

The day after we got married, we headed straight to the social security office, and I became Sophia Alarcon.

Mariella Alarcon. He never missed our Sunday mornings. No matter how late he’d been out the night before, daddy was always fresh squeezing orange juice and mixing pancake batter in the kitchen by 8. By the time I opened my eyes, I could hear him singing— despierta, mi bien, despierta, mira que ya amanecio. 

I liked to pretend I was a tiger and he the deer, and so I’d tiptoe from my bedroom, past the restroom and my mother’s room, but just as I was getting ready to spring on his back, he’d turn around, let out a growl, and chase me around the house. Once I was mounted on his back, secured on like a 5-year-old backpack, I never came down. He carried me the entire way to the park, my face pressed up real close to his as I whispered into his ear, said silly things and not so silly things. I needed daddy to know everything.  

Once I told him about the boy who’d called me una cara de mocos and he got real serious. Said he’d go have a word with the boy come Monday. I’m not sure he ever did, but it didn’t matter. In my dreams, he did. 

My mother will tell you he liked to drink, but that was more of a social thing for him. To drink and to dance and to entertain. He was the life of the party. People loved him for it. I loved him for it. Later on, on those nights we kept the restaurant open late, when my mother was nagging I should be in bed, daddy let me stand on his toes. He let the music move him left and right, traversing the makeshift dance floor, the one I got to wander with him through. 

Orelia Rodriguez. I’m not sure what there is to say about him. A shameless man, maybe. I met him when I was long graduated from university. By then, I should have known better but maybe I was still too young to tell a man from a man-child.  

I was a secretary, and he owned the restaurant I ate at often. At least, I thought he owned it until much later I found out his sister was the owner. Anais. What a vile woman. La madre que los parió. Both of them. The entire Alarcon family. 

Bueno, perdoname. What do you want to know? My memories? Well sweetie, he was a drunk. There isn’t much else than that. The sin verguenza drank until the moon retired and sun took over. By the time I awoke, he was pouring himself a glass of pisco. Pisco. He called it coffee of the gods. Tarado. 

No, he wasn’t aggressive so long as you stayed out the way. Well, most of the time. 

The first week I came home from the hospital with Julia, he went on a bender for three days. “Celebrating.” Vagabundiando, that’s what he was doing. I never knew exactly where he was, but in our small neighborhood where everyone knew everyone, people talked. Some said they’d seen him at his buddy’s Paco’s house, at El Rincon. Everyone followed it with a congratulations. Emilio is a real proud father. They told me he wouldn’t shut up about his new baby girl. And what was her name again?

When he finally came home three days later, el hijo de puta looked like shit. After struggling with the lock for three minutes, he finally stumbled inside and caught me in the kitchen. Came up behind me with sloppy wet kisses to the neck. Mumbling some nonsense, groping, and squeezing what he could. Que asco me daba. 

“Hola mamita. Where’s my baby?” he said. 

“Sleeping.”

He moved towards the bedroom, but I grabbed his wrist. Don’t, I said. She’s just gone down. 

That was the first time he pinned me down on the table. Called me a fucking bitch. Said I would never keep him from his daughter. Maybe that was the moment I decided it was time to leave. 

Julia Alarcon. My own memories are vague. I’m sorry I won’t be much help. 

Mami tells me that he sent us off with a bag of rice and lentejas. She joked that they must have been magical rice and lentils. What does he think? That they’re going to multiply every week? 

What I do remember are his visits. How he promised to make the drive once a month.  How I barely slept the night before, too excited, maybe too afraid I wouldn’t recognize him anymore. I’d imagine that maybe he’d shaven off his mustache, his head, his eyebrows. What if he didn’t recognize me? I’d imagine Mami hugging him, kissing him as if I’d had a single memory of that ever happening. 

Here’s what else I remember, sitting by the front door on the day he didn’t come. The door was cream. A once white so noticeably made off through dirt and grime, prints of whoever had owned that thing before us. I remember the clock hung on the wall and how I couldn’t make sense of it, only that the moving second hand was, in fact, proof time was happening. 

Later, Mami would tell me he probably got caught up at work, but I never remembered Papi working. Where did Papi work? 

I was only four back then and to be truthful, that memory gets muddled with what Mami has had to fill in for me. Muddled with my own leftover dread of cream-colored front doors and clocks ticking on walls.  

Sophia Alarcon. He didn’t always drink, you know. Sure, we had our nightclub days, but that was just the lifestyle. Of course, like I said, I never liked that lifestyle much because of how sick I became. Those damn sugar issues I knew nothing about! If only I would have known back then, I might have been able to get help. I might have been able to handle him better! God knows I also had my issues. I was a spoiled little girl, selfish. So selfish and moody. My god, twenty-year-olds are moody. 

Anyway, you asked when he started drinking right? That was…well, if we got married in ‘79, then it must have been ‘83 when we moved to Peru. That sounds about right. We were helping Anais run the restaurant. Anais was his sister and she was fantastic. She let us take over the joint which was perfect because the second floor had the cutest little apartment. Made it easier when Emilio refused to close and insisted on staying open until the wee hours of the morning. At least then, Mariella could sleep upstairs. 

That was about the time his brother also started coming around more, and the drinking? I blame it on Jose. 

Jose drank from sunrise to sunset. No, sorry, sunrise and he never stopped. Emilio only began by keeping him company. He liked to say, como lo voy a dejar solo solito mamita? Imagine that. The luck we had was that Emilio functioned well and he never stopped being a hard worker. Even in California, after he quit the acting and dancing and got a regular job, he worked that little tush off. Always provided. 

Truly, he was a nice man—loving, kind. Honest? Not so much but you tended not to care because he could talk you into anything. 

But that alcohol, that was a different story. 

Orelia Rodriguez. When I met him, por supuesto, I thought he was handsome. There was no denying that. I was only 30, and he was 42.  He had quite the years on me.

I always knew about his ex-wife. What was her name? Sofia, I think. Si, una gringa. He told me she’d left him. He told me it was because she missed her gringa home. Because she couldn’t stay in Peru any longer. I believed him. He also told me he had a daughter, Mariella. And that he loved her to bits. I believed that too. 

The girl often called the house phone. She was probably fourteen by then. Always polite when she asked for Emilio—she never called him daddy to me. When she found out I was carrying Julia, she often asked me how I was doing. If I knew if it was a girl or boy yet. She said she hoped it was a girl because then she’d have a sister. A half-sister, she would correct herself immediately and then she’d ask me how to say it in Spanish. Una media hermana, I’d tell her. 

Emilio always spent nearly an hour on the phone with her. What did they talk about? I don’t know. 

It’s hard to remember those brief moments. Brief moments giving me a glimpse, just a sliver of the kind of man Emilio might have once been. The man I wished I’d fallen in love with. 

Mariella Alarcon. I called Peru every Saturday to talk to daddy. His new wife, O…something…I could never get it right. Well, she always picked up. She seemed nice and I always talked to her for a few minutes, asked her how she was doing, how the restaurant was. When she became pregnant, I told her I hoped for a girl. She taught me how to say half-sister in Spanish. 

Did I feel jealous? No, I don’t remember feeling jealous.

Maybe because daddy never made me feel jealous. He always assured me I was his first born. His muñequa. His linda. 

Sophia Alarcon. Do you want to know what Mariella said to Emilio when I finally had to leave for my own sanity? Because I gave her a choice, you know. I looked at my baby of twelve and said, Do you want to stay with your daddy or go back with me? 

She told him, “I can’t stay with you because you drink too much, and you can’t take care of me.” 

I don’t think she remembers that, and I’ve never reminded her of it. Poor baby girl. I always prayed to God she didn’t see the ugliest parts of us. 

I’ve always asked her to go talk to someone though, because my little Mariella, she’s never been good at choosing her men.  Stalkers, drunks, abusers. Her first marriage crumbled so fast she was left with unwrapped wedding gifts. 

Julia Alarcon. He took me rollerblading once. We went to the skate park, the one by the Costa Verde. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if he was drunk then too? 

Sophia Alarcon. I went to Al-Anon one year. Once I understood what the alcohol was doing to us. In those meetings, we sat in a circle listening to each other’s stories about our husbands, our brothers, our fathers. All of them, so much worse than Emilio. 

Here’s what they teach you at Al-Anon. That you can’t control it, and that you can’t cure it. Sure enough, it’s the truest darn thing. Once a person turns from our good lord and savior Jesus Christ, well they are going turn to something else. Alcohol, sex, any number of things! For Emilio, it was alcohol. I know he wanted to change too and bless those three months he did. 

Oh yes, he quit for 90 days. After those 90 days he came up to me and said “Sofi, I have been sober 90 days and you haven’t changed a bit.” 

I just stood there. Wide-mouthed because maybe even then, I knew he spoke some sense.

Orelia Rodriguez. He tried calling me months after I left, asking if I’d like to try again. I sent him packing. I can promise not a single bone in my body ached to go back to that hell with him. 

Mi gran dilema was always what I would say to Julia as she grew older. You hear all these things about abandoned daughters. About the issues they’ll grow up with. Daddy issues. Dios mio, I’ve always hated that phrase. I didn’t want her thinking her father didn’t love her. But also, to idolize a man who never loved her? I didn’t want her to be just another one of us, just another foolish woman who believed him just because he professed it in his drunken episodes. His love was un amor de mierda. El hombre was incapable of real love, real love that changes your life, forces you to change yourself. To show up for people in the way they need you. 

Julia used to ask more questions when she was younger. Most frequently, she wanted to know when Emilio and I got married. La verdad is, we never did. We couldn’t. He was always legally married to Sophia. Gave some spiel about the social security office back in California. How he would have to go there to square it away. It didn’t make much sense, but I didn’t know how gringos did things and so I let him have his truth. 

And I did my best to keep mine. When Julia asked about him, my priority was to be honest, not angry. If she’d wanted to reach out to him, I would have found his number. I would have helped her. 

“I’m good. I don’t need a dad,” she always said. 

Sophia Alarcon. We never officially divorced. I tried, a couple times. Calling him, insisting we file, so I could remarry. He brushed me off. Said he didn’t have time to do all the paperwork. But hear this, when I was ready to retire, I visited the social security office and I find out Emilio had withdrawn my benefits. Can you believe that? Don’t ask me how he pulled it off, but there I stood, at the office, the attendant’s face all mushed and confused as to what I was doing there—claiming to be Sophia Alarcon, claiming to be ready to receive my pension without knowing so much of it was gone—cackling like a mad woman. 

My own stupidity came and bit me right in the butt. 

Mariella Alarcon. Daddy was a black belt, did you know? I’m serious. He was a black belt twice over. There are photos of him in that white robe, what do they call them? A gi? He was the broadest man in the photo. Daddy was always taking care of himself. Always lifting weights. 

Sometimes he’d pick me up in one hand and curl me like a dumbbell. I’d burst into giggles; he’d blow raspberries on my stomach, and we’d repeat that routine a thousand times over. I laughed so much I thought my body was going to explode. 

Sophia Alarcon. Part of me is relieved you didn’t know him. Part of me is certain that by your time, you would have never gotten the good bits of Emilio. But at least by talking to me, you can get the true him. The beautiful person he really was under all that muck. 

On Emilio Alarcon’s Final Goodbye

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I could have—should have—let him go on the last night he visited. I should have returned to the wedding planning. To the sewing of pearls on my dress or choosing the decorative cake nobody would eat. And yet, I never could. Emilio Alarcon played on my mind long after his visits ceased. Long after the pancakes and roundabout penitence—interactions that left me incessantly journaling, attempting to tell and retell them in ways that confirmed they hadn’t been dreams or hallucinations. 

* * *

I receive the invitation via email. Nearly a year after his first appearance in my bedroom. The email reads: We decided to postpone the ceremony in the hopes this horrible pandemic subsided. But we feel, it is time to let him rest. We hope you can join us from a distance.  

The zoom room is called “Comemorando Emilio.” It is a minor detail, but I remember the word commemorate comes from the word memory— to remember— and I wonder why it must always lead back to the very action I lack and long for. What can I commemorate about a father who I’ve only met in death?  

The invitation also contains an RSVP link opening to an excel chart with the names of those invited. There is a column to mark attendance— si o no. There is also a column to type one’s condolences.  

Que dios los bendiga. Lamento su perdida. Emilio nos estara cuidando desde el cielo. Emilio will be watching over us from heaven. To that, I laugh uncontrollably. Without meaning to because little does Victor Pancha know Emilio Alarcon is not in heaven but among us wandering from bedroom to bedroom trying to make amends. Maybe, I laugh because I know Emilio Alarcon cared for very little in his life and how can Victor Pancha be so sure, now and in heaven, he will do a better job of taking care of us?

All week, I check the link every few hours. I do not notice my compulsion until Henry—my fiancé— demands to know what I keep doing on my phone. Huh? I look up with a dazed gaze that makes him squint at me with suspicion in return. “What’s going on? You’ve been out of it this week,” he both questions and accuses me and for a fleeting moment, I consider telling him my father has died. A year ago, really. I consider telling him about the pancake visits, and the way I sometimes find myself longing for his return, and that finally, it is time for his funeral. 

In the end, I say nothing, instead listening to whatever voice is telling me Emilio Alarcon does not deserve to live outside of my mind. 

* * *

The day of the commemoration is a Saturday. Henry is in the living room watching the news cover the same pandemic round and round. Vaccines, masks, the protestors, the reoccurring lockdowns in Shanghai. I tell Henry I am going to take a bath. My heart can no longer bear the same news again and again. 

Closing the bathroom door behind me, I let the faucet fill a tub with cold water I do not intend on using. Instead, I sit on the bathroom floor atop a folded towel and set my laptop on the toilet lid. 

Before clicking join, I ensure my name will not show and, in a panic, I write Henry Whittaker instead. 

Both my camera and my microphone are off when the screen populates with stranger’s lives— small blocks expanding over the entire screen. Most keep their microphones off though their cameras show them sitting at their computer desks, or their kitchens, or their backyards, a setting only distinguishable by the bright rays making their faces unrecognizable. 

The commemoration is at a church, of course. Catholic, wooden, hollow like I remember from my childhood. There is no coffin at the head of the altar but a table with a black urn. Bouquets of white flowers surrounding him. I cannot see the faces of people sat in the front row but from the backs of their scalps, spotted or bear with wisps of white, I can make out their age. Most must be over seventy like Emilio. But it is not the bodies inside the church that tug at my attention, rather, the Alarcon’s on my screen. 

There is Mariella Alarcon, who clutches a tissue in preparation for the tears she is readying to shed. Her nose scrunches and wriggles until finally, the motion makes the first tear fall and her weeping unleashes. She is muted. And then there is Julia Alarcon, who unintentionally allowed the camera to show her curled in bed. Unintentionally is what I assume when I watch her eyes grow wide and her screen go dark within minutes of logging on.   

I know Mariella and Julia are both my half-sisters. Mariella, I recognize as the one who reached out to inform me of Emilio’s death. The one who typed Daddy has died. The one who populated her Facebook page with photos of her and daddy. The one I never responded to. 

There she sat now, sobbing with the same intensity, I imagine, of a year ago. Why was she sobbing? 

* * *

Maybe, somewhere deep down inside me, somewhere beyond reason and logic, my hope is that the zoom call will be the last of Emilio Alarcon. His final goodbye. Our final goodbye. But weeks later, I find myself sending Facebook messages to both Mariella and Julia. 

I type,

Hi. How are you? My name is Esme Alarcon. I think you know of me, but in case you don’t, I am one of Emilio’s daughters. I was hoping, if you were willing and had time, you could tell me a bit about him. 

Mariella is the first to respond. An overwhelming and resounding, yes hermanita. She sends me her number, her schedule, and invites me to call whenever with an eagerness that suggests she’s been waiting for this moment. Julia takes days to respond and though she does not seem nearly as thrilled as Mariella, she is willing. Absolutely, I’ll tell you what I can, she types. I fixate on the words what I can and for a fleeting second, do not feel alone in my own lack of tales.  

I can tell from their Facebook photos and their voices, both women are well over ten years older than me. Mariella has had a family already. A partner who stopped showing in her photos and posts years ago. A child who could be my age. My half-nephew if such a thing existed. I can tell she lives in Florida where she spends her weekends “brunching out with the gals.” Julia remains in Peru. Lives in Lima with a cat named Caramela, and during the week wears scrubs and wakes at 6 a.m. to share inspirational messages on her wall. Un dia a la vez, sin ayer, sin mañanas, solo un dia a la vez. 

When I finally work up the courage to call Mariella, she greets me with a high-pitched voice. I begin by explaining who I am though she stops me almost immediately. She knows who I am. She asks me what I would like to know only I do not ask a single question before she launches into long monologues about Emilio Alarcon and the way he’d always wanted daughters. The way he called her muñequa and linda, and the way she kept in touch long after she moved away. 

Julia is more reserved. She only responds to my questions with apologies as if her lack of memories were her failing. I notice she calls Emilio papi though she has more questions than answers about him. I notice, unlike Mariella, what Julia knows about Emilio has been passed down to her by her mother and though I doubt she would ever admit it, she seems to grip those stories like precious heirlooms. But what I notice most in Julia’s memories is Emilio Alarcon does not call her muñequa or linda. He does not call her at all. 

At the end of my call with Mariella, she insists I take her mother’s number. “If anyone knows Emilio, it’s my mother,” she says. “She’s the one who was married to him for twenty years.” I write the number down with the expectation I will lose it. Throw it in the trash soon after the phone call ends, but in writing it, I memorize it. And in memorizing it, I begin chanting it daily until my fingers follow.

Mariella’s mother, Sophia, answers my phone call before I realize what my fingers have done. The woman lives in Arizona and is retired, information she offers with the same enthusiasm as her daughter as if that kind of a zeal was hereditary, a trait only belonging to their branch of Alarcon. She calls me sweetie and honey and begins sending me photos via texts as she retells her own stories of Emilio. She sends me a photo of their wedding day, Emilio in a shag haircut and white bell bottoms. She sends me a photo of all three of them—Sophia, Mariella, and Emilio in front of El Rincon de Anais. Sophia goes on and on about their complicated but resilient love and the hypoglycemia. About Emilio’s shaking hips, and his single attempt to get sober, and still, it isn’t enough. 

Orelia, Julia’s mother, I seek out on my own. Orelia’s stories are direct in a way that makes me wonder if she’s been waiting to tell them for years. Orelia does not have a single nice thing to say about Emilio though she asks me what I remember of him. When I tell her I was fifteen when he stood me up, she scoffs. Calls him a sinverguenza for the fifth time and assures me I’ve missed out on nothing with the same certainty Sophia assured me, he was a beautiful person. 

* * *

I record every conversation without the women knowing. After they end, I replay them and transcribe them into my journals where I re-read his name and attempt to construct a man who has begun to feel mythical. Fascinating even if fictitious, something in the likes of Zeus and his wives and his many children—some sprung out of his very body, out of his mighty and powerful being. 

And every night for weeks, when the lamp on my bedside table goes off and the room grows quiet, I drift to sleep constructing sketches in my mind. Trying, as if it were possible, to physically resemble the paradox of Emilio Alarcon. I give him kind eyes and a sly smirk at eighteen. Wild eyes and a luminous smile at forty. A hardened but pathetic gaze at seventy. Some nights, he holds a beer bottle in his hand and Mariella on his back. Others, he brings flowers to Sophia and violence to Orelia. 

I do this for weeks until I realize my nightly ritual is constructing sketches of a man who is gone. I do this for weeks until I realize—here I am. Here we are—women orating his life. Passing it down like a folktale. Shaping it. Fitting him into boxes and giving him carefully chosen names. Alcoholic, drunk, life of the party, papi. 

I begin wondering if here is where the women of his life would always be bound to? Revolving and floating around our center, our life force. And if not, how does one undo the bonds of their past? Of a history unknown, murky like the very man who brought me forth? 

Until one night, the same voice who kept Emilio Alarcon living within the confines of my mind gave me the answer I was certain had been buried inside me since I was a child. Awaiting me so it could murmur, murmur until it could roar—surrender. 

Surrender to the mystery. To the stories never truly known about the man I met in death because it was the only way of not becoming another woman who gave her life to Emilio Alarcon. 

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