Olga Dies Dreaming

In 2017, Prieto remembers his first drive. After bailing out his father from Rikers Prison, he spotted a Kaposi sarcoma lesion on his father’s neck. Knowing that it was a sign of fatal illness, Prieto drove around, finding peace in the act.

In college in Buffalo, Prieto was inspired by a class on environmental justice. When he transferred to NYU to be close to his family when his father was sick, Prieto lobbied against the building of a waste-processing plant in Sunset Park and succeeded. Then, he went to law school before running for City Council.

As a politician, Prieto has earned the nickname “Pollyanna” for his ostensible naiveté about the fact that many of his colleagues were engaged in corruption. However, Prieto has used his silence about their actions to get votes for his initiatives. During his second term, Prieto was invited to a dinner given by the Selbys, a wealthy real estate family. They showed him pictures of him having sex with a man in his apartment and explained that he was now being blackmailed: If he didn’t vote the way they wanted, they would release the photos. Soon, he voted to approve a measure to allow the Selbys to redevelop a series of warehouses, despite knowing that no good would come of it.

To suppress rumors of his homosexuality, Prieto married a woman from his neighborhood, though the marriage was not enough. On occasion, he voted as the Selbys wished, though he also pushed through measures good for his community. Even now that Prieto is in Congress, the Selbys continue to push him to vote in their interests.

Tonight, the Selbys tell Prieto that they want to block the PROMESA oversight hearing he’d asked for. He knows this isn’t a good sign and is afraid of what they want from him this time.

On a weekend free from work and weddings, Olga meditates on her choice to live in Manhattan. In Brooklyn, she sees people heading to Sunset Park, the warehouse-turned-mall, and wonders why Prieto voted for its development. She picks up a buttered roll and coffee, feeling at home in her neighborhood. Just before she arrives at her grandmother’s old house, where Prieto and his daughter now live, Matteo calls, explaining that Sylvia—the owner of the social club they’d been to—had found her tip too generous and demanded that Mateo return it. Olga gets out of the conversation by saying that she sees her niece Lourdes.

Olga’s cousin Mabel has given Lourdes the task of making bows to put on champagne bottles. These, along with glasses, will serve as a wedding favors for Mabel’s upcoming wedding. Olga is put in charge of decorating the gift boxes, becoming a cog in the family machine working on the wedding.

Olga’s Tía Lola, an accountant, provided for Prieto, Olga’s abuela when she was alive, and Olga herself. Her aunt never married, and so there were rumors that she was a lesbian. Olga doesn’t believe it: Abuelita has been dead for 12 years and her aunt doesn’t seem like the type who would want to live in the closet. Olga has strong suspicions that Prieto is gay, but they don’t discuss his private life. Still, she remembers seeing him notice shirtless men at the pool and finding men’s muscle magazines under his bed as a child. She does not care who he sleeps with, but is aware “that a description of the perfect Latino man did not include the word ‘gay’” (112).

Prieto arrives, and the family excitedly centers their attention on him. Later, Olga mentions to Prieto the appearance of two bars on Fifth Avenue, an area where there traditionally haven’t been any. This isn’t Prieto’s area, but Olga pushes, wondering why the opportunity to open bars in a Puerto Rican neighborhood did not go to Puerto Ricans. Changing the subject, Prieto invites Olga to a fundraiser in the Hamptons, but it’s the same weekend as the summer party she’s agreed to go to with Dick. She wonders if she can use Prieto’s fundraiser as a way of getting away from Dick, so she agrees.

Every time she visits home, Olga goes into her brother’s closet, which houses her grandmother’s altar. This time, though, Olga borrows a rosary and goes to the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, telling her family that she is going to the store. She sits in her grandmother’s pew. Olga’s parents disapproved of religion, believing it a tool of oppression, but it is something Olga shares with her grandmother. She began going to services with her grandmother when Abuelita couldn’t get childcare. Abuelita called it a “good kind of secret” (118). Olga enjoyed church. After her mother left for good, Olga bought a statue of Jesus, over whom she said novenas for her mother’s safety.

When Abuelita enrolled Olga in catechism classes at Olga’s request, Olga’s father found out and, enraged, pulled his daughter out. However, after he died of AIDS four years later, his baptismal certificate helped Olga convince a nun that he deserved a proper funeral, at a time when no other funeral parlors would take him because of the disease.

Abuelita was Olga’s most constant parental figure. She died when Olga was 27, and Blanca did not come to the funeral. Even though she had never before received communion, Olga was the first one to do so at her grandmother’s funeral mass. Yet, she still felt lonely.

Usually, mass helps Olga feel close to her grandmother, but today at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, she prays, “Dear God, please let me know what it is to feel loved again” (123).

In DC, Prieto reads a newspaper article by Reggie King calling him a coward for cancelling the PROMESA hearing. He is enraged but hopes Olga will talk to Reggie at the upcoming fundraiser since they have some romantic history.

Then, someone yells in the outer office, and his chief of staff retrieves a package of worms sent for Prieto. They don’t know what it means, but Prieto does. The worms are from his mother, who has not spoken to him since he had voted in favor of PROMESA. He sends the boxes to the FBI. Early in his career, he accessed his mother’s file; the FBI watched her while she was in the Young Lords and in the Los Macheteros, a militant Puerto Rico independence organization. The leader of Los Macheteros was assassinated in 2005, near the same time as the death of Abuelita, and Prieto felt disgusted at the thought of Blanca grieving for someone other than her own mother.

Prieto meets an FBI agent he knows over drinks; the agent has traced the package to Karen Price. Prieto remembers Karen as a friend of his mother’s, but he keeps this information to himself. There are no direct links between his mother and Karen, but the FBI suspects that they know one another.

In New York, Prieto goes to see Karen, though he disguises himself in case the FBI is watching. She doesn’t let him in, but tells him that his mother has nothing else to say to him and doesn’t want to hear from him.