My red high heels or Conversation with my sister

There were so many beautiful words when I was little. As I grew up I killed them. Now that I'm all grown up I mourn them. Like the word anapecation they used to say in all english speaking radio stations. You and I looked for it in the dictionary and couldn't find it. "This is a station anapecation ". We finally thought that Ana Pecation was a very beautiful, smart woman, with lots of friends. She had all these people saying her name whenever they wanted to please her.

We agreed that her name was beautiful enough to say every few hours. You always named your dolls Ana the same day the kings brought them. You woke up before I did and named your yearly doll Ana Pecation Sosa, or Ana Pecation Delgado. I never was able to do that because I never woke up before you did on the sixth of January. We were in high school by the time I found out that Ana Pecation was not a person or even a thing. It isn't anything that matters. I- dentification, identification leaves nothing to desire in your soul, it is a tasteless matter people live with.

The same thing happened with our dream shoes. They were red and shiny high stiletto heels with beautiful arches. They could be a kiss if you looked at them both from behind at just the right angle, lined up like a mouth. They also reminded us of bright red fresh chilis ready to dry for future enchilada sauces. Our aunt Chonita looked great in them. She had the nicest legs in the barrio and was a daring woman. Every woman on the block was proud of her because she had no man around to tell her "Don't wear those red shoes, they make your legs look too nice", or "Take off that lipstick, it's too bright", or "Don't cut your hair, you have to wear it long, like decent women do, like virgins." Chonita teased her hair and wore her high heels and her red lipstick and kicked her crazy veteran husband out, all in the same day, while she got her six girls' pony tails ready for school with the juice of a whole five lemons she'd bought the day before for twenty border centavos.

We dreamt her shoes many times. I had better dreams than you. One time I dreamt a ceiling full of red stiletto heels. They all had magnets in the soles so I could arrange them any old way I wanted to in the metal ceiling while I dreamt of walking the world in them. Your dreams were more effective: you dreamt a man attacked you and that you had poked his eyes out with the heels, remember? You really wanted a pair of red heels in the morning and convinced mom that those heels were better than army knives or guns for self defense.

We both agreed that their best use was for dancing rancheras and twirling around and around at true Tex-Mex rythms. My mom preferred to dance "El Mambo del Taconazo" with Pérez Prado as her music man, and my aunt Delfina hopped up and down in them to "Crema Batida". Remember how I twirled you the day we borrowed aunt Chonita's red heels? Remember that cheap hi-fi with the wobbly legs? Mom still enjoys playing records on it.

Now hardly anyone wears red heels, they've drowned them in nightmares. The beautiful red color that appears on our panties once a month is now a color for painting women's oppression and prostitution. It is as if the prostitution flag were red and the expectations of all women were low and flat. I mourn the words of memories and fun. I know many women kill red secretly to please their friends and their correct puritan men dressed in black who don't oppress them. Red is a word that exists in the third world, awaiting for the first world to erase it from the first world, then the second world, and finally the third world canvas, awaiting in the mexican barrios in rural America.