A gentle murmur came down the line and then the shout of “They’re giving out machines!” unzipped the precarious order the police had been trying to impose for hours. A stampede of creatures in skirts, hair rollers, heels, and housedresses came down Máximo Gómez Avenue, dumping babies into strangers’ arms, pulling off shoes, swearing, and giggling as they made their way toward the truck from which they were unloading the president’s glorious SINGER machines.

Infected with the euphoria, Argenis and Etelvina had run and pushed their way up to within a few meters from the truck’s open mouth, where three men drenched in sweat lowered machines toward the whirlpool of arms, toward the agitated, ferocious heads of an agglomeration of bodies that pushed to occupy the same space. With a few strides and his six-foot height, Papi would have snatched the Singer from the hands of these men, Argenis thought, just before a fist in his stomach knocked the wind out of him. The pain didn’t last long, anaesthetized as he was by rage. He elbowed his way through the crowd, crying, until he managed to get close to his mother again, her hair now falling out of her neat bun and her arms covered in scratches. She was alone and it didn’t matter if they saw her, her friends, her ex-comrades – they were all a bunch of shit-eaters.

She wanted that machine to make a few extra pesos, to save for her children’s college education, to shove it in José Alfredo’s face and say, “Even Balaguer does more for this household than you. You shit, you freeloader, you thief; parasite, scoundrel, jerk.” Argenis raised his delicate hands so they could pass him one, but the constant motion of the whirlpool dumped him on his ass next to his mother at the edge of the riot. Etelvina stood up once more to throw herself, eyes closed, into the vortex, but a hand on her shoulder stopped her, the hand of an elegant mulatto offering her water in a little plastic cup. Asking no questions – he had seen it all – the man led them to the front end of the truck, which was cordoned off by black-helmeted police and a metal barricade. Argenis was sure that what had saved them was the fact that his mother was white; white and pretty. A woman with dyed orange hair motioned for them to pass. The woman was wearing a red T-shirt with the party logo on it. It read, LO QUE DIGA BALAGUER, “Whatever Balaguer Says,” in letters deformed by her obesity. “Are you for Balaguer?” she asked Etelvina, passing her a form on which she was supposed to write down her name, identification number, and address. Argenis saw how Etelvina’s hands were trembling as she signed the paper resting on her new machine and how her writing, always so neat and straight, came out as ugly as one of her second-grade students’ on that piece of paper.

That day’s human blender had disheveled her insides. It was almost twenty years ago and Argenis was sure that the Etelvina of today, the one that wouldn’t take shit from anyone, had been born in that line. The experience had also solidified a link they had always had, one his mother didn’t share with anyone else. He really loved her, and now that he saw her aging before his eyes, even as she sipped her coffee as noisily as ever, that love hurt him a little. Before they said their farewells, while she was writing down Ernesto’s work address on one of the Post-its Niurka had piled up next to the telephone, Argenis understood that some of his talent for drawing came from the capital letters with which his mother decorated the beginnings of her sentences and proper nouns.