8. Pomelo #3
Later that night, the man’s car dropped him by a children’s clothing store, unable to make its way down the narrow alley illuminated by the red lights of the district.
He walked quickly, wishing to be done with this errand.
He glanced up at the numbers on the doorways and, in his distraction, nearly tripped over a loose cobblestone, his whole foot falling into a murky puddle, further souring his mood.
At the doorway, Gloria greeted him, all smiles, draping herself on him.
Brushing her dimpled brown cheek against his graying five-o’clock shadow.
Raking her fingertips through his thick, black hair.
And his annoyance and frustration with her and the situation were overtaken by his insatiable thirst. She led him into the bedroom.
Afterward, while he was lying there, resting his eyes, he heard Gloria walk out of the room and emerge a few minutes later, the weight of her sinking the edge of the bed. Even with his eyes closed, he knew she had the girl with him. He refused to open them, to play this game.
Why? For her to point out the almond-shaped eyes they shared?
The similarity in their wide grins (which he never showed when the girl was before him).
For Gloria to ask, sadder and sadder each time, the dimple transformed to a sad pockmark on her face, why the girl couldn’t be claimed as his own.
To have a chance at the life his Pilar had.
To be the one to stay and care for him as he aged.
In these moments, the man felt pity for her.
She really didn’t see the difference. He could tell.
The difference between a woman like Marlen—who despite all her flaws had such polished beauty and an established family and a world-class education—and poor Gloria, who he knew through little fault of her own had been born the fatherless daughter of some kind of charlatan witch and mainly worked private dance clubs for cash like the one where he met her.
No, he would keep his eyes shut until she understood his intention.
When he made his way to leave, into the hallway of the apartment thick with the scent of cooking and incense and his recent sex, Gloria’s mother stood there, waiting for him, the dimly lit kitchen transforming her to silhouette.
“In the end,” she called out to him, “you die alone.”
Outside, a strange fog had descended upon the river valley, quickly thickening, so much so that were it not for the glow of the lights in the glass house, the man’s driver would not have been able to find their way home.
And with the fog also descended upon the city a peculiar sadness.
Young women cried over memories they had not yet lived, young men wept for lost lovers whom they hadn’t yet met.
And the elders? The elders of the city were stricken with a sense of regret for choices not made, for roads not traveled, opportunities not pursued so severe, they were left noxious in the wake of their regret.
In the glass house Alma wept in the kitchen as she prepared breakfast. Marlen’s tears fell into the juicer as she wrenched the grapefruit for her husband.
Pilar suddenly could only remember the words to the most melancholy songs and found herself unable to stop singing them.
And the man? In the morning, when the man stumbled his way through the courtyard in the fog to pluck his grapefruit, his body was overtaken with a physical pain.
The recollection of every hurt he had ever inflicted upon others flashed before him.
By the time he made his way into the kitchen and handed the grapefruit to Marlen, his body was shaking with sobs.
After three days of this, a storm descended on the river valley, cutting through the fog.
There was a loud crack of thunder, and it seemed, almost immediately, that the sky opened up.
It came down in sheets, bouncing off the normally hard, dry earth.
The sound woke Pilar up in the night, and she watched the rain filling up the courtyard with fascination.
She had never seen anything to rival it.
Each drop seemed heavier than water, larger than she’d known a raindrop could be, each falling perfectly straight down from heaven.
Over the sound of the rain, she did not hear the door to her parents’ room slide open.
So focused on the raindrops themselves, attempting to locate one and track its descent to the ground, she did not notice her mother crossing into the courtyard.
Not until she lost count and looked past the drops to the grapefruit tree.
Her mother wore her long white nightgown, the one Pilar thought made her look like an angel.
A thin, voluminous cotton confection, now stuck to her thin body, soaked wet from the rain.
Her auburn hair hung down; limp, wet ringlets plastered to her shoulders.
The sight of her filled Pilar with a strange anxiety.
The little girl slid open her own glass door and called out to her mother, but the downpour drowned her voice.
Pilar wanted to go to her, but her feet were stones.
She could only watch as her mother lay down at the foot of the tree and melted away in the rain.
In the morning, the sun was bright and shining again.
The storm had washed away the fog and with it the grip of sadness the fog had brought.
The man found himself humming when he woke up, not even minding that his wife had left the door to the courtyard open.
Today, he did not want juice. Today he wanted to sink his strong teeth into the thick rind, hear the ripping sound as he tore it away from fruit.
To feel the bright burst of citrus as he punctured its thin, papery walls and felt the meat of the juice sac with his tongue.
With great care, he chose the grapefruit that seemed the most ripe, the most robust, the most comely and plucked it down ceremoniously.
For a moment, he felt the weight, particularly heavy, in his large hands.
Luscious with juice, he thought as he gazed down upon it.
He took the fruit into his open mouth, biting down and releasing a howl so raw, the entire staff came running into the courtyard to see about this injured beast. There, the man stood, mouth bloodied, hovering over the abandoned grapefruit and the scattered remnants of his perfect, beautifully white cracked teeth on the ground.
The tree never stopped bearing fruit, but the man never touched it again.
After the fog, when everyone’s melancholy had lifted, Pilar had found herself only able to remember the sad songs.
After her mother washed away in the rain, nothing left behind—not even the threads of the white nightgown—she found herself, in fact, unable to make sounds unless she sang them.
Try as she might to tell her father what she had witnessed of her mother’s demise, words were unable to come out of her mouth.
For her father’s part, when his wife did not rush to comfort him after the grapefruit stole his teeth, he knew something was wrong, but absent her being ill—and she was nowhere to be found—he could imagine no other cause for her disappearance but infidelity.
He raged. Gardeners and housekeepers were dispatched in informal search parties around the city.
He had Victor interrogate every man who worked for him—at the offices, in the back alleys, at the house—and finding no one who could possibly be his wife’s lover, he concluded it must be Victor and had his other men pummel him before throwing him out into the street.
With her mother melted away from her and the house turned upside down by her father’s antics, Pilar found herself increasingly frustrated.
They had to dig up the tree! Her mother had melted into the tree and the only possible way to find her was to look beneath it.
Unable to make the words come from her mouth and unaware of any songs that precisely suited the situation, Pilar decided to write down exactly what she had seen, explaining how the only way to save her mother was to destroy the tree, whose grapefruits were clearly no longer any good.
She wrote down what she saw and ran to her father at his breakfast table with urgency, but he simply tore her note to pieces, renouncing whatever sorcery had possessed his daughter to make up such stories in the first place.
He was less generous when, days later, he found her on her hands and knees, school uniform filthy with earth, knee-deep in a hole she had dug at the foot of his grapefruit tree.
She shrieked and cried as he yanked her by a frayed braid, pulling her away from the hole where she knew her mother was.
He beat her until her nose bled and her arms were reddened with welts where his hands had been.
Later, when Alma cleaned her face of dirt and tearstains, Pilar sang herself to sleep.
Vuelvo a ti, madrecita
A llorar en tus brazos
Y a curar si es posible
Mi alma ya echa pedazos
II.
Over the following years, as Pilar evolved from girl to teenager, her mother’s worst fears for her daughter appeared to manifest. The man, whose anger grew in conjunction with his daughter’s beauty, was at first certain his wife, once settled in her new life with this other man, would return and take his Pilar away.
Then, as that possibility diminished, his daughter began to appear less as a girl and more as a woman.
He grew increasingly certain that, if given the chance, a young man would steal her away.