Matteo put his hand over hers.
“My mom has been gone for ten years and it’s been the hardest ten years of my life, so yes, that is fucking crazy. I can’t even imagine how hard that was.”
Olga sighed. This topic always made her irritable and defensive. When her mother was first gone, young Olga was despondent for months. One day she overheard two teachers talking about her at school. Poor Olga. How sad. Her father a junkie. Her mother ran off. Poor little girl. The pity dripping from their voices. Being the subject of such sentiment disgusted her, made her feel small. She vowed to fix her face, to don a mask impenetrable to ruth. That instinct—to put the mask on—rose again now. She tried to shrug it off. To try something different this time. To tell the whole truth.
“Yeah. Actually. I don’t talk about this much but yes, it was really fucking hard. Especially at night. In my dreams she would disappear. Vanish right in front of me. And I would wake up crying. But you know. Eventually I bucked up. I mean, I’d get angry and stuff. At her and my dad, for leaving us. But, you know, revolution requires sacrifice, as my parents would say.”
“But,” Matteo interrupted, “you were just a kid. You didn’t choose to join a fucking revolution!”
Olga laughed, a genuine belly laugh now.
“Matteo. You’re a Black man in America. You were drafted into a revolution the day you were born, like it or not.”
Matteo chuckled and raised his glass. “Well, damn.”
“I’m kidding, but I’m not, right? See, my parents raised us, me and my brother, on an ‘all power to the people’ doctrine. ‘Liberation’ was the highest calling. So, what my mother did was, to some degree, noble. Or at least I knew I was supposed to see it that way. And at the end of the day, she didn’t leave us on a street corner. We were with her mother—who I was always closer to, anyway. My father was still alive when she left. And of course, I had my brother. When my dad got sick, he moved home from college and everything. Just to be near me. So, I never felt abandoned, per se. I just started to feel like she was a soldier we’d lost to a war. Which, we kind of did.”
“So.” Matteo proceeded with caution. “Since you brought up your brother, I gotta ask—”
Olga laughed. “Hmm. I hope you’re smart enough not to talk shit about my brother.”
“Nope. Not me. I learned my lesson. But … you’ve got to see why people find him a bit schmaltzy, right? That whole schtick when he was being held ‘political prisoner’ for, like, five minutes, and then got released and was paraded home? And this part I remember from the New York 1 loop like it was yesterday! My man was paraded home, draped in the Puerto Rican flag while sitting in the back of a convertible, like his own one-man Puerto Rican Day parade float. I mean, come on, how is that not political theater?”
“Damn,” Olga said, giggling while she tried to sound serious. “You’re really testing me! First of all, my brother was a legitimate political prisoner. He went down to Vieques with Reverend Al and was arrested protesting military bombings there, okay? Second of all, it was pure coincidence that they placed him in a jail—for thirty fucking days, mind you—that happened to be in his district. Third of all, that was my Tío Richie’s convertible and we can’t help it if he’s flashy. Nor could we have planned that they would have released him on the eve of the actual P.R. parade.”
Her argument fell apart because by now she was laughing too hard. “Okay! I can see how, combined, it may have come across as a little gimmicky.”
Matteo laughed with her. “Was just trying to make a point about how someone not related to him might see things from the outside is all.”
She sighed. “Truth be told, I have no use for politicians. Especially Puerto Rican ones. When I was little, my father would have these little history classes for us. Every Wednesday night—that was his day. We’d learn all the Puerto Rican history and American history nobody was teaching in schools. My takeaway? Politicians were always the sellouts, pushing our people down a river. Sometimes not even for money, just for approval by the Yanqui, as my parents would say.
“Prieto? My brother got all those same lessons and came out believing he could be different.
“My mother thinks what I’m doing is stupid and I’m not sure I disagree. I’m absolutely ‘a slave to the capitalist needs of the White Man.’ Worst of all, I really enjoy money. My brother though? He doesn’t give a shit about any of that. All these City Council guys, these guys in Congress, pocketing this or that kickback so they can buy a house or send their kids to private school? My brother still lives in my grandmother’s house.