I am happy without toxic people in my life, Part II

Family portrait, circa 1986. 

I am happy without toxic people in my life, Part II

“Toxic people attach themselves like cinder blocks tied to your ankles, and then invite you for a swim in their poisoned waters.”  ― John Mark Green

It’s been nearly six months since I last saw my toxic half-sister, Victoria Pineros, as she made a hilariously melodramatic exit from the waiting area outside Judge Bernard Shapiro’s chambers in a Miami-Dade County courthouse building. I watched her turn her back to me and stalk off, trailed by her attorney and a retinue of supporters that included her cousin Juan Manuel and his wife Barbara.

I suppose I should have felt some regret, some sense of loss at the thought that we were parting not as friendly siblings who had lost a parent but as bitter enemies. I also suspect that she sees herself as the aggrieved party who was “robbed” of her rightful inheritance by her selfish, scheming younger half-brother. And I have no doubt, no doubt at all, that she waged a campaign of distortion and disinformation about me when she went to Colombia last fall to visit our cousins and other relatives.

After all, Vicky has employed such underhanded tactics ever since she was a little girl – even before I was born, in fact. Incredibly, our mother – the very woman that Vicky professes to have loved and cherished – was the first (and most frequent) target.

A case in point: After my mom left Vicky’s father – he was an alcoholic with an abusive personality – and her marriage was annulled by the Catholic Church, she refused to move back to my grandparents’ house in Bogota, Colombia. Mom was an intelligent woman with an independent streak, and the last thing she wanted was to live under her parents’ roof and follow their highly conservative rules. Back in the 1950s, good Colombian society girls had to follow strict codes of behavior, and though Mom was certainly no libertine, she wasn’t going to lock herself up in a wing of her parents’ huge house and become a stodgy spinster.

Instead, she found a nice two-room apartment – in Chapinero, I think it was – in a building owned by two ladies that she described as “blue-blooded matriarchs of the old Santa Fe de Bogota line.” I never saw the apartment with my own eyes, mind you, but if it was anything like my grandparents’ last apartment, it was probably roomy enough for Mom and Vicky to live comfortably. I know that it had to be affordable enough for a young Avianca flight attendant to pay the rent – without help from her mom and dad.

Vicky was only a little girl – younger than six, if I recall correctly – but she already showed signs of being Machiavellian even then. She loved getting attention. She loved getting away with doing things she knew that were wrong. And she apparently liked to damage her mother’s reputation, no matter what the consequences were.

My mom, as I said earlier, was working as a flight attendant in Avianca, Colombia’s national airline. As a result, she was gone a lot – she flew on the New York to Paris transatlantic route several times a month. But Mom’s salary was decent, so she was able to hire a live-in maid to take care of both Vicky and the apartment. So even if she was a working single mom at a time and place when “good society girls” didn’t do that sort of thing, she wasn’t a bad, neglectful parent.   

Now, it was customary at the time – and still is now, in some circles – for people of the upper social classes to have the Colombian equivalent of “high tea” during the early evening hours. In many homes, the beverage of choice was English-style tea, but in others it was Colombian-style hot chocolate. Bogota, is located in the Andes Mountains – at an altitude of 8,660 feet above sea level – so it’s often chilly there. Bogotans call this meal “onces.”

Of course, Mom’s landladies – spinster sisters, at that – always had lavish onces meals around four in the afternoon, with huge spreads that included hot chocolate, pan de yucas (cheese bread made with cassava flour), cookies, biscuits, and a wide array of pastries. They were also kindhearted ladies who took a liking to Vicky. They liked Mom as well because she was polite, never brought men over to the apartment on dates, and was an all-around good person.

Naturally, when Mom was in town between flight assignments, the landladies would invite her and Vicky to have onces in their elegantly appointed main apartment. Those occasions must have been memorable enough for a young adult, so I can only imagine how awesome they must have been for my then-small half-sister.

Now, my mom had a live-in maid who made sure Vicky was well-taken care of. Every possible need a little girl could have was taken into account. She had a nice room. She had an army of dolls and a closet full of nice clothes. Vicky also got at least five meals a day (breakfast, morning snack, lunch, onces, and dinner). So…really, there was no justification for what Vicky did in the summer of 1956.

Mom’s landladies, as I noted earlier, were kind but extremely old-fashioned and strict. They didn’t invite unattended children to their apartment – such things were unheard of back then. They probably had a lot of fragile and expensive antiques that they didn’t want Vicky to break. Maybe they simply didn’t want to be held responsible if something happened to her whilst she was there without Mom to watch her.

Vicky, however, was fond of going to the landladies’ apartment for onces. By her own admission, she loved all the delicious pastries and the hot chocolate they served (even though she insists that she has “never liked sweets”). But she hated not being invited when Mom was on flight status.

Now, one of Vicky’s most negative personality traits is that she is willing to do anything – lie, cheat, or steal, even – to get something that she desires. On this occasion, she decided to finagle her way into the landladies’ afternoon onces on a day when Mom was flying across the Atlantic Ocean as part of an Avianca Super Constellation’s crew.

According to Mom, after the maid had given Vicky her usual afterschool snack and went off to take care of some housekeeping duties, my half-sister stealthily made her way out of the apartment, closed the door quietly, and walked up a flight of stairs to the landladies’ place.

She knocked on the door, and when the landladies’ maid – wealthy Bogotans couldn’t function without servants, I guess – opened the door, Vicky went into full thespian mode.

“Oh please, miss,” she cried piteously, “can you please ask the ladies if I can come over and eat something? My mother is gone away and our mean old maid won’t give me any food. I’m hungry.”

Aghast, the maid took Vicky by the hand and led her to her employers. “Excuse the intrusion, my ladies, but this young girl says her mother is not home and that the maid won’t feed her.”

I’m sure that Vicky was not malnourished or mistreated, but her tear-streaked cheeks and her hungry gaze at the onces spread in the dining room convinced the two elderly women that a) Vicky was being denied food, and that b) Mom was a bad mother who left her only child with an uncaring maid.     

My mom a few years before her first marriage.

“Why sure,” one of the ladies said to Vicky. “Eat all you want. We won’t let you starve.”  And seething with anger at the perceived mistreatment of a disabled little girl (Vicky has cerebral palsy), they let the little Machiavelli gorge herself on pan de yucas, chocolate eclairs, lady fingers cookies, and rich hot chocolate, Colombian-style.

As luck would have it, Mom arrived at the apartment a few hours later. It was late and the night sky was dark and bedecked with a multitude of twinkling stars.  By then, Vicky had returned to their apartment and was blissfully in bed, stuffed to the gills with several meals digesting in her belly.  

Usually, the landladies were asleep by the time the Avianca flight from New York arrived in town, but to Mom’s surprise, this time they were waiting out in front of Mom’s apartment. On their age-wrinkled faces were expressions that reflected barely-repressed rage.

“Beatriz, we respectfully request that you move out of our building within the next week. We can’t have a person like you as a tenant anymore.”

My mom, who was tired after the long airplane flight from the States to Colombia, was flabbergasted. “Why? What’s the matter? You’re getting your rent payment on time and I follow all the rules here.”

The landladies stared stonily at my mom. “Yes, you pay your rent and have not broken any of the rules about bringing boys to your apartment. But we can’t abide anyone who leaves her child under the care of a maid who doesn’t feed a child.”

My mom tried to reason with the two women. She even asked her maid to tell them that Vicky was properly looked after, even pampered. But Vicky’s tale of woe had convinced them that she was underfed and neglected.

 As a result, instead of enjoying her time off from flight status (those transatlantic flights often took 24 hours and were physically exhausting), Mom had to spend it packing, looking for a new apartment, and moving – all because Vicky told a lie.