Sirena Selena: A Novel

By Mayra Santos-Febres

From the author of Urban Oracles comes Mayra Santos-Febres's Sirena Selena: somewhere between "The Blue Angel" and "Kiss of the Spider Woman" rises the legend of Sirena Selena, the diva-siren of the Caribbean whose boleros seduce and torment whoever dares listen.

Discovered by Martha Divine in the backstreets of San Juan, picking over garbage, drugged out of his mind and singing boleros that transfix the listener, a fifteen year old hustler is transformed into Sirena Selena, a diva whose uncanny beauty and irrisistable voice will be their ticket to fame and fortune. Auditioning for one of the luxury hotels in the Dominican Republic, Selena casts her spell over Hugo Graubel, one of the hotel's rich investors. Graubel is a powerful man in the Republic, married with children. Silena, determined to escape the poverty and abuse s/he suffered as a child, engages Graubel in a long seduction in this mordant, intensely lyrical tragi-comedy - part masque, part cabaret - about identity (class, race, gender) and "the hunger and desire to be other things."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781429980289

Book preview

1

Cáscara de coco, contento de jirimilla azul, por los dioses dí, azucarada Selena . . . Coconut shell, melancholy and restless, from the gods you came, sweet Selena, succulent siren of the glistening beaches; confess, beneath the spotlight, lunática. You know the desires unleashed by urban nights. You are the memory of distant orgasms reduced to recording sessions. You and your seven soulless braids like a selenita bird, like a radiant bird with your insolent magnetism. You are who you are, Sirena Selena . . . and you emerge from your paper moon to sing the old songs of Lucy Favery, Sylvia Rexach, la Lupe, sybarite, dressed and adored by those who worship your face. . . .

2

In the airplane, sitting next to la Martha, who is a real lady, a veteran of thousands of footlights: El Cotorrito, Bocaccio’s, Bachelors. She once did shows at La Escuelita on Thirty-ninth Street in New York City. She even had a devoted husband who set her up in an apartment in El Condado. "Just like you now, niña, as you begin your zenith. I was his decent little wife when he came to Puerto Rico from Honduras. He was a businessman, my husband. And since I have a businesswoman’s blood, I learned from him how to keep books and sneaked as much as I could to set up my own little business. Don’t think that I was going to end up broke and alone when that businessman grew tired of it. Me, in the street again? Never, never, never. I went through too many police raids to get these implants and the hormones that make me so fabulous. Sorry, nena. I’ve gotten used to the good life."

Martha, toda una señora, her guide, her mama. The one she never had, the person who pulled her from the street and put her in the Blue Danube to sing. She was tall and peroxide-blond, with a portentous pair of silicon breasts and incredibly smooth skin in the cleft of her bosom. She was tanned and long-legged; her nails were always painted garnet red, like a drop of coagulated blood on the tip of each of her fingers and toes. Not a single hair showed to betray her. Only her height and her voice and her very feminine mannerisms, too feminine, studiously feminine. Her teeth were perfect, no nicotine stains, though she smoked incessantly. Maybe that explained her grainy voice, as if millions of sand particles had lodged in her throat, in her long, well-moisturized neck, already a little wrinkled, but still elegant, stretching up in a proud curve to her permed hair and down to a back that was a little too wide, but nevertheless still appeared to be the delicate back of a woman of a certain age who had already lived many lives.

Vampiress in your novel, the great tyrant . . . : la Sirena was practicing on the plane as they flew toward the Dominican Republic. They were traveling on business, he and Martha. It’s his first time flying in an airplane, his first puddle jump. The second will be to New York, he imagines. To try his luck there as who he really is.

Before he met Martha, Sirena hadn’t always been a wanderer. La Selena had once had a roof overhead, but when his grandmother died from cleaning too many rich people’s houses, there was no one left to take care of him. Uncles: dead or emigrated overseas. A mother: whereabouts unknown. Social Services wanted to send him to an orphanage. But for la Sirena there wasn’t much difference between an orphanage and hell. He knew he would be abused by the stronger boys; they’d hit him, rape him, then leave him bleeding and half dead on the dirty floor of some storeroom. So Selena preferred to make the street his home. First with Valentina. And later with Martha, his new mama.

Now they were going together to the Dominican Republic on business. Martha had taught him how to save money. And where to go for really cheap wigs and makeup. Martha had made him get rid of the cocaine habit that was wrecking his nasal passages, making them bleed. "Loca, that’s not where a young lady is supposed to have her first period, she said, and gave him an alternative to hustling men in European cars. She cleaned him up and helped him find the sweetness in his voice again. You sing like the angels in heaven," Martha had told him excitedly one day, the day Selena was collecting soda cans around the Blue Danube and, without realizing it, softly singing one of his grandmother’s favorite boleros. He sang it with his whole voice, as if he were going to die when he finished, he sang it to feel his misery—like a wounded dog, a purebred, but one with leprosy, dying beneath a dismantled car.

Las dragas, the drag queens, listening to the bolero just stood there with their mouths hanging open. They were working the street, negotiating with clients, when suddenly they heard a sorrowful murmur, a heartbreaking agony that invaded their flesh and kept them from being sufficiently alert to negotiate prices for their couplings, or for quickies with husbands escaping their homes. They couldn’t do anything except remember what made them cry, and their false lashes began to come unglued from their eyelids. They spun around on their high heels and loosened their wigs to hear better. Then, in a daze, they called for their manager, Miss Martha Divine, to come hear this street hustler with the voice of a holy angel.

It was Lizzy Starr, shouting at the top of her lungs, who got Martha’s attention. She stood closest to the door of the Blue Danube, that little bar of derailed travestis, where the splendiferous Martha Divine reigned as sole proprietor. Lizzy merely swung open the door, stuck her head inside for a second, and shrieked,Martha, hurry, come see this! Martha emerged quickly from the Danube, preparing herself for the worst. She thought she was going to have to fight with some policeman looking for a bigger take who was beating up her girls, or clubbing some client. But that’s not what it was. As soon as the door closed behind Martha, she heard a subtle melody that held the entire street in suspended animation. Martha’s gaze sought out the origin of the voice. And found it. It was coming from the throat of a young boy who, drugged way beyond unconsciousness, was singing as he collected empty cans. Martha just stood there, like all the other dragas, like all the clientes, stunned, like all the people driving cars along the street. When she recovered, her businesswoman’s blood started pumping through her veins. She walked over to the boy and invited him into the bar for a Coca-Cola. She ordered him some food, took him to her apartment, and before long helped him kick his habit and taught him how to dress like a bolero singer. Little by little she helped to transform him into who he really was. And now she was personally taking him to the Dominican Republic, because la Selena had never flown in an airplane before. They were going on business, to see if they could sell his show to a hotel. They both had the blood of businesswomen running through their veins.

Young Selena was nervous, perhaps because of the emotional impact of her first trip, or the hope of a new life through this plan of performing in another country, even though it was just a neighboring island. She had already done her little show at Crasholetta. She had already sung privately for the most glamorous locas in the city’s gay scene. But she was still too young to be able to get a contract in the tourist hotels. "Even if you lie about your age, they can’t hire you, mi amor. Federal laws prohibit child labor. Didn’t you know that? So, instead, said her new mother,we’ll go to the Dominican Republic, where they don’t care about such things." And now, thanks to the federal laws, Sirena Selena was about to become the diva of the Caribbean. She would awaken the yearnings of a whole new public with her songs. Her show would make her the brightest star in any four-star hotel. She would have a dresser and lights and wardrobes made of the finest fabrics. She would finally be able to display the full glory of her voice. Oh. Her voice, please don’t let it fail now, Virgen Santa, don’t let it change, let it stay just as it is, sweet and crystalline. The girls she worked with at the Danube never tired of telling her how a trickle of tarnished melancholy flows from the center of her chest, but it was always fresh, as old and as fresh as the perennial pain of love on the face of the earth. So many people had told her so many things about her voice. Your voice smells like honey. Your mouth is a piece of fruit, an admirer once murmured into her ear as he tried to kiss her. She had just finished singing and was exhausted from being onstage, so she let herself be kissed. She allowed the man to wiggle his eager tongue past her exhausted lips, caressing them to see if he could loosen her up a bit. She let his tongue explore her mouth, sip the dense saliva of a night of cabaret. But in the middle of the kiss, Sirena noticed that the other mouth was seeking something more than is normally sought in a kiss. That mouth wanted to swallow a melody. That kiss was trying to devour her voice.

When the admirer finished kissing her, he looked at her victoriously. Sirena resumed the role of mysterious woman and walked away without a word toward the back room that served as a dressing room for all the dragas at the Danube. Her slight hips swaying, she held the foreign saliva in her mouth, without swallowing it, suspecting sabotage. When she arrived in the dressing room, she rinsed her mouth with water from the faucet and Listerine. Afterward, when she arrived at Martha’s apartment, she gargled with a mixture of rose petals, magnolia petals, and garlic to rid herself of any envious bacteria that might have remained hiding in her mouth.

And that’s how she felt now, wanting to put a handkerchief full of herbs around her neck, drink a shot of brandy with honey, orange blossom water, and cinnamon, swallow a raw egg yolk, pray to San Judas Tadeo. She wanted to protect her voice. It’s a good thing that Sirena knows it. Her voice is the only thing she has that can get her anywhere in life.

In the airplane, Martha didn’t notice her nervousness. She gazed at Sirena, who was seemingly deep in thought, never imagining that she was praying to Santa Clara, or to la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. Martha thought she was going over the words of the boleros she had selected for the audition. It amused her to think that others might see them as a family, her the mother with her fifteen-year-old son, who seemed like, but wasn’t exactly, any other boy; his too-meticulously-cared-for nails, his high arching eyebrows, the slender waist, all indicating something else. And she, who was, but not really, the doting mother, a doña of a certain age who never allowed herself to be conquered by motherhood, someone who had been a young mother, a friendly confidante, and a support to the family. La Martha Divine, a little too tall, a little too strong in the lines along her chin, a little too smooth and round here and there . . . But even so, anyone would think, at a casual glance, that the woman and her son constituted a family going on vacation in the Dominican Republic. She gazed lovingly at her hijito, touched his head, and Selena responded with the usual smile, distant and almost imperceptible, still engrossed in the whisper of words, prayers, and songs that was throbbing in his mind.

3

You, María Piedra de Imán, enchantress and touchstone, who walked with the seven Samaritans and gave them beauty and recognition, bring me luck and fortune, bless your Sirena, so that I can sing, Piedra Imán. You were magnet and compass: you will be my protector, with me always. I ask of you that my voice come out filled with needles, dense, that it enter the breasts of those who listen to me and wring longing and applause from them. I ask for gold as my treasure, silver for my house, and I want you to be the sentinel of my home and my personality as you were the guiding light for the Holy Virgin Mary. You know, Santísima Piedra Imán, that drinking egg whites helps, gargling with seawater and Listerine helps, practicing the recorded exercises of maestro Charles Monigan that Martha bought me from the television and that I put on the videocassette player in her apartment helps; but they don’t assure me of anything. Your protection is what I seek for my assurance. . . .

That is why I entreat you to make my house prosperous and happy and to let your star guide me and illumine my path. Lend me your beneficent magic. I want you to lend me your talisman, I want to have power and dominion to conquer my enemies. I want you to guide me, Piedra Imán, on the opposite path, opposite to when I was working the streets. To be able to sing as if nothing had ever happened, as I did when I was a child and had a home and a family. We were poor, sometimes we had to eat cold Chef Boyardee and bread, night after night, but we were happy. There was no need to succumb to evil, to grow desperate, and to sing just to survive. To pour all the anger into a song. And now, Piedra Imán, I don’t want to sing like that anymore. I want to sing from a new mouth, as if newly born when the lights shine on me. Free of memories.

In return for what you give me, I will give you amber, onyx, coral, so that you will free me from all envy and evil. I will give you pieces of steel so that I will have more than enough of what I need and to assure my path to success. I will give you wheat so that I may triumph over my enemies, incense and myrrh for the gift that the three kings brought to beloved Jesus, and I will give three potencias for the virtue of Piedra Imán: three credos, for the first; seven salves, for the second; and five Padres Nuestros and five Ave Marías for the third, praising the Lord on this holy day and saying Glory to God in the Highest and peace on earth to all men of goodwill, blessed bread of Holy God who satisfies my soul and cleanses my sins.

Cleanse my sins, Santísima Piedra Imán; the sins of this faithful believer, the most fragile of all the hustlers on the street, the most screwed-up fifteen-year-old in the whole barrio. And not by uncles, or godparents, or neighbors enamored of an innocent gaze, but by people who came and went and never came again, by grown men who from a distance somehow realized something that I only felt vaguely. They came and opened their car doors already knowing I would get in, I would sit there staring coldly at them, I would let the trembling hand go wherever it went, knowing that what always happened would happen, the swelling, the delicious fear, the urge to cry, the burning saliva, the tear in my eye, the yearning to die right there. They knew I would permit the tons of liquids pouring onto the interior of the car, dampening the rugs, the vinyl seats and even the steering wheel, staining them with their smell. Then came the hardening of their faces, after discovering, but not saying, what they had discovered. They paid me twenty pesos, Piedra Imán, twenty pesos pressed with their own hands into the pocket of my sweaty pants, as if that were the price of my secret, of what was contained within my skin. The price of my sins and of my beauty.

But if I sinned, they were worse sinners, they were my worst enemies. I never saw those men again, Maria Piedra Imán. They disappeared afterward, as if swallowed up by the earth. You, who put them in my path, from my path you will take them, you who gave beauty and recognition to the seven Samaritans, to this child who lies prostrate before your feet, give him the name that you choose, protect his voice so that he may pray to you and ask for your protection. And he will offer you that same voice as his greatest offering if you guide him and illumine his way, Holy Ember, light of my home. This I give to you, Holy Stone.

4

Martha grips her armrest. She feels almost as if she could rip it from its fixture. They are only a few moments from landing. For some mysterious reason, takeoffs and landings always make her nervous. But not flying: hanging there suspended in the sky didn’t make her the least bit uncomfortable. Being up there was like being in a movie, and she thrilled at the idea, requesting service from the thin, elegant stewardesses. Indeed, she remembers occasions when she came across stewards who recognized her from the bars, remembered her cabaret shows, when she imitated Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler, and they would even ask for her autograph. But takeoffs and landings always provoked anxiety in her. And there was no anxiety in this world that didn’t prompt Martha to think about her body.

Oh yes, her body, this disguise that was her body. She trembled just thinking that someone, in the middle of takeoff, might point a finger at her and shout,Look at that. That is not a woman. And they would turn the aircraft around and force her from it, throwing her suitcases to the ground. Her bags would open, suddenly spewing high heels, gauze and tape, depilatory creams, and thousands of other cosmetic items, lending themselves, the bitches, as evidence. The captain himself would deplane to insist that she had no right to enjoy the comfort, the airborne luxury, the dream of traveling to other shores. Not her, she’s an impostor.

But with the money that Martha can make on this trip, she will finally be able to pay for the operation, which will be a very difficult change for her. She doesn’t mind the sacrifices. Having the operation isn’t the same as dressing up—this was something she knew deep within herself. To be able to take off her clothes and see herself, finally, from the waist below the same as from above the waist, with tits and candy. Together. To finally be able to rest in a single body.

The operation would liberate her from her worst fears, cure her subconscious nightmares. That was the diagnosis of a girlfriend who had a degree in psychology, but never practiced. After the operation Miss Martha would feel much relieved. There would be no more dreams in the middle of the night of sleeping naked in a circus tent while everyone paid to look at her, the main attraction, chained to a pink post adorned with Christmas garland. Never again the fear of being kicked off an airplane in the middle of takeoff. Customs agents everywhere would welcome her with courtesy and respect. She would be able at last to rest in a single body and to take care of her girls and this child that the Exterminating Angel himself had sent her. Able finally to finish paying her debts and release the karma for what she did to her husband. But it wasn’t all her fault. As much as she had begged for the money for her operation, he would never give it to her. What else was she supposed to do? What indeed, if wrinkles were already appearing in her voice and the hormones had already reached her soul? What, when she could no longer meet the stares of the neighbors in the apartment building where her husband had sent her to live, and when she no longer had the desire to go to restaurants with him? But by helping this child she was protecting, she would be able to help them both. Then she could finally turn herself into a real lady, have a single body, airplanes, cars, in one body, hotels, husbands, in one single body, and

Reviews for Sirena Selena

[gabbyf-373317 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

For a book about transgender women in Puerto Rico, written by a cisgender author, it was okay. There is better transgender fiction written by transgender authors that does not include the same naïve sensationalism and othering that this book offered. The author missed the mark, and regurgitated many common transgender stereotypes, such as confusing drag queens and transgender women, a misogynistic viewpoint that painted many of the characters as goldiggers, and too much emphasis on physical transitions, for the sake of shocking the audience.