Chapter 68
Once I’ve fully awakened from my dream, I put the kettle on.
I wrap myself tightly in a sweater. The apartment is drafty, the day colorless, brutally cold.
I drink my tea. I check my phone. There’s a text from Henry from the night before: Do you know where my copy of The Great Gatsby is?
At his high school, the teachers speak of toxic masculinity and white privilege.
He and his friends tease one another about their baseness and irrelevance, mocking that version of maleness that our current president exemplifies.
With his girlfriend, he is deferential in a way that reminds me of his younger self, habitually acceding to his sister, Right, Ida? Like this?
Then, too, I think of him asking María to make him papas fritas; how she doted on him, beaming when he galloped away on his imaginary horse.
?Muy guapo, Senor Haynree! ?Eres un vaquero!
All the townspeople gifting him sweets, holding him on their laps, the handsome boy, the prize.
When he was speaking Spanish with his friends, I couldn’t tell them apart, young princes in the courtyard of their kingdom.
On our final day in San Miguel, I had walked into town, descending the steep hill alone, wandering pointlessly through the throngs in the covered market.
Nothing to buy for María, no meal she would be preparing.
Still, I bought a few things that caught my eye, as if by this act I could reenter the dream: another housewife going about her shopping, happy.
I bought dish soap; a piece of marzipan candy wrapped in cellophane; an avocado, not quite ripe.
“Para hoy o para manana,” Enrique’s father asked, the customary question, and I told him it was for tomorrow.
Ordinarily I would have asked after Enrique: Was he well?
Somehow, in the span of a few days, it had come to seem inappropriate; too intimate a question to put to an old man whose name I didn’t know, with whom I’d enacted a fantasy of belonging.
Before ascending the Cuesta for the last time, I stopped in to see José Luis.
Only to say hello; I’d not told him we were leaving.
With him, for a few minutes, I almost succeeded in pretending it was a normal morning, my son and daughter in school, my maid waiting to prepare the day’s big meal.
“Muy bien,” I answered when he asked how I was. “Y tú, ?cómo estás?”
“Vivo,” he kidded, alive. As our laughter died, he pulled a serious face. “You’ve heard about the American banks?” he asked, referring to the mortgage crisis that had just begun to unfold.
I shrugged—what did it matter? I no longer lived there.
“We have a saying: When the US gets a cold, Mexico gets the flu.” He smiled equably, reminding me of what Louise had said, that Mexicans understand justice doesn’t exist. “Ah well. The world will always be in turmoil. When you have God…” He let the sentiment hang unfinished.
Not wanting to leave quite yet, at the doorway, I inquired after his wife; had he read to her today? Oh, yes, he said, como siempre; he only wished he could be certain that she heard.
“Why? Is there something wrong with the phone?”
“No, because of her impairment.”
He had used the word discapacidad, and at my questioning look, he clarified:
“Sí, Es-sal-lee, está en coma.” He sighed. There were people who eventually came out of them, who had reported hearing their loved ones speaking to them. Still, he confessed, sometimes it was difficult to believe.
For moments, I was speechless, terrified I would commit the sin of beginning to cry.
“And what about you, Es-sal-lee? You are happy here, you and your husband?”
“Sí, estamos muy contentos.”
“You don’t miss your home?”
I have none, I started to say, then caught myself, and told him that San Miguel was my home. “El hogar de mi alma,” I elaborated, the Spanish permitting or else excusing the mawkishness of the phrase, the home of my soul.
Since leaving, the years have only burnished that sentiment, sharpened my longing, although I rarely talk about it.
Not to Henry. Certainly not to Ida, who will be eighteen in two months, who has one of those haircuts that are popular among a certain kind of person with a point to make: asymmetrical, shaved on one side of her head.
Because she is preparing to strike out on her own, or as a way to express her displeasure with this country and the extent to which she feels ill at ease here, perhaps in her own body, she has occasionally begun to speak of San Miguel.
When she does, I fall silent, lost, overcome.
I allow my questions to refocus on her. I indulge myself in wondering whether, when she and Louise greeted one another in the school courtyard with uncanny familiarity, they had somehow already met.
Or was it that they shared a less tangible connection?
A dark current of love already flowing between them, linking them even still?
Sometimes, when Ida adopts a certain angle of her chin or set of her mouth, it can be like seeing a ghost.
This weekend, it’s my turn to have the children, in my apartment that used to be the upstairs of a single-family house.
Tom kept the bungalow that I’d once thought cramped and faintly depressing—unworthy of our dazzling lives, the enviable love we’d authored out of nothing—and that now seems handsome and spacious.
Soon after Tom drops the children, Henry tells me he’s meeting friends, glancing shyly at me, hoping it’s okay, I won’t be hurt?
No, of course not, I tell him. Go! Have fun!
I make dinner for Ida and me, the pasta she likes.
I offer her a glass of wine, and she declines.
She is uninterested in losing control, still contained, intensely private.
One waits in her company for the rare moments when she gives a bit of herself away, unexpectedly breaking into a pitch-perfect imitation of a character from television, moving her body to comic effect.
Then it’s like a dazzling jewel dropped onto the table.
After we eat, Ida wants to watch a movie.
We stream an Almodóvar film she’s heard of, about women in comas seemingly lost to the world, and the men who reach them or abandon them in their isolation.
In the end, one of them, a toreador gored by a bull, dies; the other, a dancer, awakens by bearing a child.
It’s a complicated movie, full of deceit and violation, loss and longing, beauty and ugliness, and we sit afterward talking about it.
A rambling conversation, in which I mention that there once was a yearly running of the bulls in San Miguel, before our time; Louise had claimed she’d seen it.
“Can you imagine bulls charging through Centro?” I laugh.
Ida doesn’t respond beyond a long, unreadable silence in which I reproach myself: I’ve spoken too freely; I shouldn’t have mentioned Louise; I’ve scared her away. I am about to give up, to clear away our plates, when she says:
“I dream about it sometimes.”
I am so afraid of making her retreat again that I don’t even nod.
“I miss it. The way it smelled, and how you could hear the roosters in the morning. And how free it was compared to here, riding around without seat belts. Remember when we rode to school in the back of that girl’s pickup truck?
” She laughs, narrowing her eyes over the memory in that familiar way she has had since girlhood. “I loved it there.”
I exult, She loved it! It wasn’t all for nothing!
I wait, motionless, hoping greedily for more, that the trick will work again.
This time, no. The silence between us expands.
But it has become companionable; I sense we are both remembering tendrils of the same dream.
The smell of roasting corn and lavender soap.
The field beyond Louise’s house. The serenity of María’s face when she called us to the table, everything drenched in sunlight.
After a little while, Ida announces that she’s tired.
She withdraws to her bedroom. I stand in the hallway outside her closed door, wanting sharply to tuck her in as I did when she was still mine—or when her smallness could support that illusion, and I could hug and kiss her, pull the covers up over her shoulders, fill my lungs with her scent.
Once I’ve cleaned the kitchen, I bundle up and go out into the frigid winter night.
I pull the collar of my coat up, my eyes blurred from the stinging wind, the snow chirping beneath my feet.
It’s something Tom told me when I followed him here: When it is truly cold, the snow doesn’t crunch underfoot; it squeaks.
Other things I’ve observed to myself, in the years without him.
That by November, the sun remains low to the horizon, the daylight like weak tea.
That on winter’s coldest days, the air is odorless, pure, baptismal, the snow turning over and over itself like a white dog licking its wounds.
Occasionally these observations find their way into my writing, though less and less.
It’s no longer what interests me: the poetically observed detail, the beautiful turn of phrase.
Those luminous moments that can distract and lie.
Before I go back inside, I light a cigarette.
I smoke, shifting from foot to foot in a vain effort to stay warm.
When I fling the butt into the snow, I scold myself that I’m being a bad citizen, littering, even though I’ve never wholeheartedly believed in the endeavor of belonging.
And then, for a moment, something of the old irreverence that even the ruin I set in motion did not destroy flares back, and I laugh, Fuck it.
Inside, I pour another glass of wine. I write, without self-censure, without thought or preamble, as once, for a brief time, I had made love to my husband.
I don’t stop to reread. I don’t refill my glass.
After many hours, when I’ve finally spent myself, I climb into bed.
I read restlessly, page after page. When I turn out the light, to my surprise, I fall asleep quickly, entering a version of the same dream I’d had the night before.
It is San Miguel, of course. The street where La Conexión is located, and on the corner, the old woman sits atop her wooden stool selling bunches of roses for ten pesos that she wraps in newspaper.
I first catch sight of her from a distance: her slightly lurching gait, her cane clutched in her hand, her head erect and chin slightly lifted as she shuffles from the sidewalk through the narrow doorway.
In the cramped room, she gives the numbers briskly, número ciento ochenta y nueve, letra A, in that accent that is so difficult to place, that could be German or Italian.
When the girl hands the package across the counter, she says nothing.
Her eyes only widen before she turns to leave.
But in the entryway, she pauses. For the first time since she’s been collecting the mail for the young couple who are gone on vacation, she steps into the adjoining café.
I know these things as one does in dreams, though I don’t yet know who I am, or that I am everyone, the cripple, the absent wife, the girl who fetched the package, and the people passing busily along the street.
In the café, she sits at a table beside an open window.
It’s late morning, and the café—a tourist place mostly—is empty but for her.
Unwitnessed, then, she unties the string, undoes the thick brown paper wrapping.
As it’s revealed, a look suffuses her face.
Impatiently she gestures to the waiter: A cappuccino!
When the boy arrives with her coffee, she instructs him to set it on the adjacent table, away from the art.
“Aquí,” she commands, gazing onto the framed picture that’s resting in her lap.
There’s a glint of tears on her cheeks. She touches back her short hair, smoothing the skin beneath her eyes, like a legendary actress before her final curtain call.
And when, a little later, she rises to leave, she no longer needs her cane; she doesn’t even need her legs. She simply drifts, out along the cobbled street, through the sunlight, head aloft above broad shoulders, the package tucked under her arm.
“?Qué color, senora?” asks the wrinkled rose seller when she stops there.
“Orange.”
The campesina, who seems as small as a child perched on her rustic wooden stool, gathers up the roses dripping from the plastic bin. “A lovely color,” she observes, wrapping them carefully in newsprint.
“Yes.”
“Delicate, like the color of sunsets.”
Her bracelet flashes as she reaches to accept them, her perfect white teeth when she says,
They’re for my daughter. My daughter loves this color. Her father used it in a painting of her once. He made it the color of her little limbs. She was only a thought then, a whim. Mia. She wasn’t even born—