Shopping.

A new biblical genesis of my life began when I arrived in the United States twenty years ago. On the first day, I set foot on land at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport and got an immigration permit for six months. On the second, I valued the world in a different, summery light, when I first woke up at the Garcia’s house and heard the children playing merrily and carelessly in the pool. On the third, I began to look unsuccessfully for a dream apartment in Manhattan and realized that only people with a lot of money or a big salary in dollars could afford living there. On the fourth day, I found the perfect place in Queens, a dwelling that the universe had intended for me from the beginning and, on the fifth, there was an internal flood caused by the rupture of the toilet that reminded me of the power of water and its messages. On the sixth, I had to endure the barking of the scandalous little dog of the owner of the house every time I went up to use her bathroom; on the seventh day I got some furniture to stop sleeping on the floor.

Three nights passed and when normalcy returned after the flood in our apartment, we finally went shopping. Billy picked us up in a car bigger than his Wrangler and took us to Roosevelt Avenue, an area where Hispanics buy things at cheaper prices. The place did not look like part of New York City, and was an extension of San Victorino, a crowded, unsafe, dirty, and feverish shopping area in downtown Bogotá before the Antonio Nariño’s galleries were demolished to remodel the sector. The Roosevelt Avenue area of Jackson Heights had small shops everywhere and lots of typical food restaurants decorated with simplicity that offered dishes from South and Central American countries at prices of the United States.

My friend and I had dressed up as if we had to go to work in an office, which was not an appropriate way to visit the folkloric Latin Quarter. While we walked looking so refined, most people stared at us with a mixture of surprise, admiration, and disdain for the way we dressed. Being tall and attractive we were easily noted and  looked ridiculous in contrast with the women who walked the avenue. They were mostly hard workers, simple and short, who did not have much time to groom themselves, nor did they have jobs that required elegant dressing. Many smiled at as because they realized that we were Latinas who had just arrived in New York and had never walked on Roosevelt Avenue. While we toured the sector, Liliana and I carried our purses very tightly thinking that at any time someone was going to steal them because we felt like walking through unsafe streets since the area of Jackson Heights gave us a sense of danger. It took us several visits to this urban area with a flavor of Latin America to verify that most of the pedestrians were good and harmless people and that, unless we were not lucky or walked late at night looking for trouble, they were never going to hurt us. Latinos who come to the United States, except for criminals, like to respect the laws because they understand how wonderful it is to live in a country where rules are obeyed and where you forget the fear of being assaulted or losing your life by confronting thieves.

We began to enter and leave the stores without buying anything terrified by the prices of the furniture. After four hours, Billy desperately asked us for two «cuaras» the way many Latinos pronounce the name of a twenty-five-cent coin and disappeared among the people. After fifteen minutes he came back and announced to us that he had called a friend who had given him the address of a business that sold used spring-boxes and mattresses. Used mattresses? This was worse than sleeping on the floor! What if they had lice and smelled bad? Until that time, I thought that only the poor or the beggars were able to sleep on mattresses where other unknown humans had slept or died. With hesitancy and repugnancy, we headed to the store under the impatient and recriminating gaze of our resourceful friend who had gone through many difficult circumstances for many years before moving into the luxurious house his mother bought in Long Island. He knew perfectly well that no one has ever died for sleeping in a used bed.

When we arrived at the place Billy told us calmly but emphatically: «Now you have to buy something, no more twaddle». Liliana and I felt reprimanded and entered the warehouse upset. A salesman who was mumbling English met us and asked us how he could help us. We told him that we needed some beds that were not very expensive to which he replied, in Spanish, that he had many possibilities at low price. We followed him along a huge cellar until he stopped and said, «This is the cheapest thing I have». He gave us a funny look and smiled sarcastically probably thinking about the reason why two distinguished women who spoke English were buying used mattresses. With the help of our friend Billy, we carefully inspected the merchandise and found nothing that disgusted us. I do not know the process used to improve the appearance of used mattresses, but they looked like new, and the price was economical and within the reach of our budget. The regulations in New York allow old mattresses to be sold if they are cleaned or disinfected before sale and if the customer knows, by seeing the red or yellow tag, that the goods have been used by another person or contain recycled material. It would have been impossible to get a better bargain in the entire Queens borough and we decided to buy, to the satisfaction of the mocking salesman, our single beds for seventy dollars each including the box-spring. Before leaving the neighborhood we went into a strange store with very weird people to buy a television. An old guy with a beard brought us a small twenty inch TV that had no remote, but looked very modern and not  used at all. I immediately thought we were in a shop where burglars sold their stolen goods and wanted to leave the place. However, the guy asked for an unbelievable amount and we put our scruples aside and bought a new television for just fifty dollars.

To save us the cost of delivery, Billy placed the precious cargo on the roof of his car and held it together with strong ropes passed through the open windows from one side to the other to prevent our beds from falling off on the way back to the apartment. I sat with the television in the back seat. On the route, Billy stopped in a warehouse owned by some friends of his from India where we got totally new things at half price: the lining for the mattresses, the sheets, the covers for the pillows and the bedspreads in soft blue and yellow tones. How wonderful! I would no longer have to sleep on the floor, although after three nights I was getting used to fantasizing while sleeping on the cold, hard tiles of my new home.

Some people believe joy is to find something that you are pleased with and, without a doubt, when I went to Roosevelt Avenue to do shopping, I finished the evening full of hormones of happiness because I overcame my prejudices and acquired a new dimension of consciousness that allowed me to appreciate deeply the emotions that the poor feel when they manage to buy what they need.

Furnishing the apartment turned into a new lesson of empathy and humility. Life gave me the chance to continue dreaming on a cheap and very comfortable mattress that had no lice and no pestilence while listening to the news coming out of a television stolen from someone I never knew.