Hot Sur by Laura Restrepo Page A

sealed her destiny. The tradition continued with my mother, Bolivia María, and reached me. Not even my sister, who is younger, was saved. The boys were given real names, like everyone else, such as Carlos José, my uncle; Luis Antonio, my other uncle; Aurelito, my aunt Niza’s husband; my cousin Juan de Dios. But all us girls were saddled with geographic names, as if instead of a family we were a map. A whimsical tradition, from people who never traveled, all of them solid country folk, until my mother, Bolivia María, decided to take off. She was the first one to discover the world. The rest of them, forget it. It was so bad that my aunt Libia didn’t even know on what side of the planet the place she was named after was, and you should have seen how enraged she was when she found out that Libya was a Muslim country, and a communist one to boot. They’re lying, they just want to shock me, she said, making the sign of the cross. She was so Catholic she’d rather have been named Fátima, or Belén, or at least Roma, but not the pagan Roma of Nero, but the apostolic Roma of Peter. As you will have noted, Mr. Rose, all of us ended up with the middle name María so that the Virgin would protect us, as they said. A Hispanic thing, I’m telling you, saddling people with this trail of names, all so weird, or the same name repeated for each member of the family, or a combination of both, as was our lot. I know it’s a provincial thing, ridiculous. You don’t have to tell me. But for some reason I’d rather not abandon it, maybe because behind each María with a geographic name there has been a strong woman not to be messed with.
    If you want, call me Francia. Francia María. Although I don’t actually look much like a Francia, a bit too sophisticated for me since I am more at home washing and ironing. Not Paris either, don’t want to be Paris Hilton’s namesake, what a disaster of a girl with a hotel’s name. Maybe something tropical, such as Cuba or Caracas, something that’s not my real name but that resembles it. As far as my little sister, let’s do something else, let’s exempt her from the family tradition because she hates to travel, venturing into the unknown spooks her. She gets a little lost if she has to move, or even switch rooms, or change her place at the table. If you move her bed a few feet one way or the other, she gets pissed off and throws a tantrum. And she was precisely the one who my mother named for the country that was farthest away. Don’t ask me which one because I can’t tell you, but imagine the most mocked and constantly remade of nations. Sometimes I wonder if the name marked her destiny as it had for my grandmother Africa, or if it was in honor of the country that my little sister behaved so strangely. Name her after a flower; she likes them: flowers, stones, trees, anything that’s bound to the earth, anything that remains in its place and doesn’t move or go. Call her Violeta, an aloof and temperamental flower. That’s what she’s like, my little sister, shy but tough. They might seem like opposites, shy and tough, but they’re not. I think the name Violeta will fit her well because it is a sweet name, silent almost, and yet it is only an n away from violenta . And the fact is, my sister Violeta can be violent. She bites. I have her teeth marks in my arm, a scar from one of her bites. My mother, let’s just leave her with Bolivia. I always thought the name fit her well, because Bolivia is a hardy country without any airs, a survivor. And that’s my mother, a survivor. She has passed away, of course. But when she was alive, she dealt with life without breaking down or complaining, until the day she died.
    But let’s see what we have so far, like you used to say in class. My sister, Violeta; my mother, Bolivia; and that leaves me. You can call me  . . . Canadá? No, too cold. No Holanda either, not for me; I don’t know any Dutch people. Siria? Too much trouble, with all