Vanina Orezzoli
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FEB 2009 Inroads Mentorship winner, The Loft Literary Center, Minneapolis.
SEP 2010 "Custard Apple," an essay, featured on DivineCaroline.com
DEC 2009 "Proof," The Dos Passos Review.
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FROM The Dos Passos Review
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Excerpt no.1
"Martina went every weekday evening to the Museo Cubano de las Ciencias to see the Archilochus colubris. She always arrived an hour before the keeper locked the gates, while the clerks were gossiping with the mops in their hands and the puddles of astringent floor wax drying around them, and then, when it was time, she would hurry down El Prado, arriving at my door with her wrinkled cheeks still deflating in bursts a breath scented with the metallic dirt of street coffee.
She had been cleaning for me for nine years, so ours had become a ritual. As the sun reached the key-shaped mountain-top of the Sierra, I would go down to unlock the door and while I headed back to dress, she would slip inside. The youngest neighbors thought she was my aging mother, come to keep house for a lazy daughter; the others understood that in the hours I was not managing distribution of the Diario Granma, the newspaper of the Communist Party, I was a whore who could afford someone to keep the windows clean and to wash the smell of man from my linens."
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Excerpt no.2
"Cuba is a love story with what could have been. As the Revolution aged, she lost her smile, and her teeth and nails became dull, almost yellow. I am faithful to her because after all of these years I know no other way and because every now and then we experience a moment of that old hope, a moment where the breeze doesn’t bring me the acid smell of urine but the perfume she wore in those youthful days.
These are my thoughts as I leave the beach, walking quickly against the dark brown seawall. Fidel’s police could pass by at any time, and the penalty for this–for just being with los balseros–is five years, but I will not be detained. Los vecinos know me, and everyone knows about Sarita and the raft. If a military vehicle were to come up these streets, the doors of these old homes would quietly unlatch. These pieces of battered cardboard hanging in the windows that read ‘unidos luchamos, unidos vencemos’ would slide away to uncover a safe passage.
Ours is a country where one man’s motorcycle means a hitched ride for every lucky stranger at a stoplight, where Osvaldo and I can live in the remnants of a grand Havana estate despite our family’s humble beginnings and the color of our skin. These are the triumphs of my Revolution.
I pass the Medical Building and the radio station and the massive stone blocks of the Museo Cubano de las Ciencias, where they found Martina's thumb several years ago. Before anyone had noticed the blood spilling from her, she had straggled over to the clerk's station. “Sometimes you cut a piece of yourself off and feel yourself getting bigger," she had told them, resting wearily against the desk. They had thought she was crazy, and maybe she was, but her words plague me now."
"Truly a lovely haunting read."
Mary Carroll-Hackett, Editor, The Dos Passos Review
FROM The Fruitie,
my blog of fruit-related essays
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Custard Apple: aphrodisiac FAIL
"The custard apple is a fruit borne from a small tree that grows in the mountain valleys of the Andes. Having traveled there last winter, I understand what a feat it is to survive against the thin wind that lashes down from the snowy peaks. Holding the strange, almost cactus-like fruit in my hand, I am reminded of the extreme beauty and stubborn nature of the Peruvian highlands. It is a landscape out of The Sound of Music with none of the twirling and singing.
My husband can attest to that. It was on our trip from Arequipa to Colca Canyon that he nearly died. We had flown in earlier that day and--without waiting for our bodies to acclimate--had begun the journey further up. Up, up to 16,000 feet.
With the humor that comes from something safely behind us, we laugh thinking of the dogged, wet sound he made on that tour bus. It wasn’t quite a cough, it was the sputtering of his lung tissue filling up with fluid.
Instead of spending that night making love in the gorgeous lodge, I spooned broth into his mouth and watched a nurse give him oxygen. Instead of watching for condors the next day, we spent it sitting by the edge of the thermal pools, head spinning, complexion white-yellow.
White-yellow as the inside of a custard apple. Or chirimoya, as we say in Spanish. It’s a pre-Incan word and an aphrodisiac as old as that, supposedly."
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Passion Fruit
"Twenty-five dollars worth of passion fruit and they're the size of golf balls. But the flowery aroma that rises to my nostrils as I pull at the stringy yellow flesh with a serrated spoon is... well, it's lightweight cotton shirts, and the slats of a wooden chaise, and the downy hair of Mark's arm as he reaches for a sweating glass of beer in Cuba. These particular passion fruit, I've learned, are from New Zealand.
They're very wrinkled, but this just means they've lost some of their extra moisture and their sugar content should be high. It's not. I feel the bitterness in the corner of my jaw, and then the flavor spreads–-tart strawberries, oranges wedges floating in Sangria-–that's the taste.
When I've finished one, when I've carved it out like a Halloween pumpkin, I crumple its skin in my fist and I just breathe."
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I'm an emerging writer and first-generation American living a very typical, happily trivial first-generation American life in the Midwest. I make money creating ads for coffee companies and bicycles, and write in my second language whenever I'm not.
My day job earned me a ticket to the Emmy Awards once and my work has been passed around by Jimmy Fallon and Pee Wee Herman, who I can't seem to stop name-dropping. My fiction has been shared at The Target Performance Hall, The Loft Literary Center and has been published. I've co-written and co-directed a documentary. But still, my parents just wish I'd become a lawyer.
I live with the poet I married and our two children in a house that is painted orange. And when it's cold – which is often here – I fire up the skillet to make my mother's arroz tapado.
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