Loving Che (10 page)

But death. A Dios. Silence. That is a different forever.

For all his lusting after a beautiful death, for all his talk of not knowing what land would claim his bones, he clung, in the last moments, to the sweet air of the valley. Fear is one of the few experiences that make you value life, he had said to me. A fine phrase in the swelling chorus of youth. But what of the last hour? Coming out of the ditch, he hesitated. His hair was matted. He was hungry. Without his medicine, his breath came to him in hot spurts, his body surrendering ahead of him. But he hesitated. The beauty of this life yet held him—the bird that passed overhead, the sky and its clouds, the slope of the valley and the trees that clung to the side of the hills and, yes, even the animals that tore at one another beneath the boughs, the violent bleedings: the sorrows and joys. All that night, the radio going, the same news repeated over and over, not even the solace of a bulletin, the announcers grown bored by early morning. And still I sat and still I sat. And the next afternoon and the next, the news was the same.

Oh my Captain, my sweet Ernesto. And where the bed of flowers? Where the red banners? Gone away into silence, never to taste excellent morning again. Gone
away to memory's tomb. Down, down, down into the dumb corridor of the saints.

Oh, but in the beginning how wide the sky had seemed, how infinite the horizon where we thought to rest our eyes for a season.

In the beginning …

Good Friday. The Passion winding through the Chinese neighborhood, the people lining the streets to watch, the pious women throwing themselves on the procession; Christ king, Christ savior. The crowd moving below the window as one. The cathedral bells sounding the noon death.

I was in my studio, my hands covered in blues and greens. The painting of Miami Beach rested against a wall, the man still sightless, the woman's fingers still pressing the flesh of his arm. I have read what you write about art, I said as I tried to fill the canvas, and I can see that you're not an artist. Instead of being insulted, he laughed. I'm not an economist, either.

I smiled. Art is not the things you say, I continued, now serious. It's not in service of this or that. Art is the unutterable, the self made of clay. I talked in this way for a while, with a gravity I no longer have, and he stood listening, silent, watching me. Art does not answer or listen, I said. It doesn't care for you; it doesn't want to comfort you, is responsible to no one; its being is all desire, all covetousness.

Ernesto came to me. Would you paint, then, he asked, without the promise that someone would see what you painted?

I thought about this for a moment. Yes, I said finally. I would paint for the painting itself.

He watched me and then laughed. No you wouldn't, he said. No more than anyone labors for the darkness. Your painting doesn't exist until someone sees it. Like the taste of the orange that resides not in the orange or on the tongue but in the coming together of the two.

With a rag, he wiped the paint from my hands, slowly, thoroughly. When he was done, he brought my hand, warm and red from the friction of the cloth, to his lips. He kissed my hand, and then pulled me to his chest.

Even after all these years, I remember everything with a supernatural precision, with a certainty that is not given to actual life.

He rubs my hands until they are clean and red and then he draws me to him and hugs me in long silence. We come apart and he kisses me, opening up new landscapes with his tongue. Eyes closed, I travel through a green tunnel, tumbling out into open country. The blinds are drawn, the air is hot and moist. He kisses me again and lets his hand slide down my back.

He whispers to me, Sometimes a love seems both familiar and utterly new. He undresses me slowly and sits me down on a chair. He kneels and puts his mouth to me, letting his tongue roam, softly at first, until I too can taste a new country. When he finally enters me, I think of nothing, not the stars or the budding flowers or the sun that beats down upon the earth as we make love.

Never before and not since have my thoughts marched so closely in step with the sensations of my body; I saw that the past and the future were written in smoke. And afterward, felt only the immense sadness of the world settling down into its old contours again.

We lay together and slept away the afternoon. I awoke to his breathing. My back was to him and he held me very close in his sleep. After a while I knew by the change in his breath that he had woken also. We didn't speak. No other sensation but his hands on my body, over my shoulders, my neck, over my breasts, around my hips. He felt down into my warmth and then placed himself inside of me and I arched my back to him, closing my eyes to the touch that tore thousands of tiny fissures within me. I understood then how someone might ruin her whole life for love, throw away family and ambitions, put her very soul at risk, for this glimpse of the eternal that life has tricked us with.

He wakes with a tremor from a little sleep.

I just spoke to an angel, he says. A magnificent angel drawn up in gold garments. Her hair flowed over her shoulders and still I recognized her by this curve here. He runs his finger over my hipbone. The angel said that I must kiss every mole on your body and then I would be forgiven.

He begins at my ear. I am laughing, sleepy. That tickles. Him kissing, moving, like water over my skin. The opening up that is like a surrender. And then the force that takes my breath. Everything falling away, the sky peeling back from the sun.

You are forgiven, I say.

Even for the sins to come?

Even those.

Later, he lies with his eyes closed.

In Peru, he says, the mountains are very cold, even in summer. But the Indians walk everywhere without shoes, their callused feet white and thick as boots. From a distance they look like great herds of llamas, moving quietly, slowly over the ridges.

When the Indians reach the top of a mountain, they deposit all their sorrows in a stone and turn that stone over to Mother Earth. The sorrows accumulate until they form a great pyramid. The Spaniards tried to do away with this superstition, but despite their best efforts the sorrows went on accumulating.

So? I whisper.

So, he says, the monks adapted themselves to the inevitable. With time, all across the mountaintops of Peru, little pyramids of stones rose into the thin air, each pile of sorrows marked by a small Christian cross.

I sit on a bench in the plaza. The peanut seller watches me. I wait. After a long hour, he walks toward me, and I look away. Some peanuts, madam? Something familiar in the voice. I turn to him, take a coin from my purse. The peanut seller tips his hat and hands me a white paper cone of peanuts. Thank you. At your service, he says, but he does not leave. Yes? The man you wait for, he says, he was here this morning. I stand, angry. You have me mistaken for someone else, sir, I am not waiting for a man.

As you wish, madam.

The next day Ernesto doesn't come to the studio. Or the next. Only the peanut seller watching me as I cross the street to my building. I begin to take a different route. I remember his words, The love lives inside the leaving. I paint and repaint, setting down layers and layers of color that in the end only I will know about. When the painting is done, people will look at it and sense a secret.

Weeks go by, or years. One morning, I am working when the three sharp raps come to the door. Military police—open at once! The voice is harsh, and for a moment I catch my breath. When I throw the door open, it
is Ernesto standing there, laughing. My heart still beating fast from fear, and now longing and relief. I had missed you so. Military police, he whispers. I close the door. Did I scare you, he says? And he kisses my lips and my cheek and grazes his teeth into the soft space between my neck and my ear. Tell me how I scared you.

A storm is thrashing about in the city. I shut the window and after a moment close the curtains. I find my way back to the mattress by touch. His breath the only sound. I move close to him, find his shirt and unbutton it. I follow the length of his leg to his feet and remove his shoes, his socks.

Yes, you scared me, I say.

Good.

I undo his belt, unbutton his pants, pull them down, together with his briefs. I run my hands back up through the hair on his legs, stop where they come together, lean in to take in the smell of him, the smell that is mine now, that means something else entirely, that is full of our secrets together. And I take him in my mouth, the pulse of his desire like words against my tongue. Speak to me this way. I listen for his breath and wait, caressing, waiting, thinking nothing, wanting nothing.

After, I lie beside him in the afternoon dark, listening to the storm, the heavy drops running down the gutters, splashing the courtyard below outside the closed window. The sound of water closes my lids. I sleep. When I wake,
he is by the window. He has parted the curtain enough so that a pale light falls about his head.

He comes to me. I knew when I saw you, he says. I knew about these breasts, these hips. I knew you already. So I wasn't afraid of never having you because I had already tasted your skin.

I close my eyes when he enters me, always I close my eyes, though I try not to. I close my eyes so I may see only this. His coming to me each time for the first time, a door opening into a new country, the sound of footsteps—approaching or departing? I must concentrate. And now, the world tilting away; I am afraid I will cry out for him, tell him everything: how I desire him, how I would like to run away from him and how I must possess him forever. The rain falls in long sheets, and it is like the ringing of bells in the cathedral. When at last I open my eyes, he is looking away, his own eyes rimmed in red, exhaustion in the hollows of his face, like skull shadows coming up through the skin.

Loving Che was like palest sea foam, like wind through the stars.

Savior, murderer, brutal love of my own creation. In the dark, his necklace of bones in my mouth. Entire afternoons passing in the time it took to close a fist or open the slits of our eyes.

I am at the window, looking down over the courtyard. Across the way, a woman sits ironing white shirts at her kitchen table. One by one she takes the shirts out of the starch and lays them out in front of her. Her hand smoothing the fabric is almost a caress. She is speaking something to herself or maybe singing. I lean closer, but her lips are soundless. She moves the iron slowly, now and then stopping to poke the coals with a small stick.

When I turn back to my work, I find Ernesto standing against the wall. He has entered so quietly and now he stands watching me, arms folded across his chest like wings. Take off the necklace, he says, not harshly but without smiling. I hesitate. Why? Because I ask you to. I stand for a moment. Is the door locked? He nods. I take the necklace off. And the blouse, he says. I lift my chin to him. It has never been like this. Always he has taken off my clothes himself, slowly, teasingly, so that I have barely been aware of my own nakedness. Please.

I do as I'm told. I unbutton the blouse. I look back at him but he doesn't speak. I slip the blouse off my shoulders. The skirt, he says. It's a pin-striped skirt I bought a long time ago at El Encanto. I unzip it. And the slip, he says. I let it drop with the skirt. I'm in my underclothes.
It is hot, but the sweat on my skin makes me shiver. He has not moved. He is watching. He nods. I shake my head no. He points to me. Do it.

I reach back to undo my brassiere, the lace one that I wear in the daytime for him. And then, not wanting to show embarrassment, I bend to lower my panties. I roll them down as I go, and the movement of this last layer over my skin introduces me to a new anticipation. I stand bare-breasted and open to this foreigner, like some fetish of a woman, some stone carving from the mountains of his travels.

But he does nothing, only looks. For a long time, he looks. And then he walks slowly to me. Without touching me, he bends and picks up my brassiere, helps me with it. He lifts my leg, one and then the other, and pulls my panties up. He pats my skin, lingers at my waist. And then the blouse—hole by hole, he buttons it. He slides on my slip. He holds my skirt open so I can step into it, my hand at his shoulder for balance.

For hours after he leaves, scarcely aware of my hands, I work, charcoal staining my fingers like smoke.

I trace his face, lightly at first, the way memory returns, indistinct, held together by the barest outlines. And then I dig deeper into the paper, darken shadows, rub light into the places where his forehead protrudes. When I was younger, truth was a flat plane, dimensionless, weightless; and the white paper was more honest than all the false green pastures of paint, a single blade of grass more real for its ignorance of space, its vegetable disregard for eternity.

But now I know that this is also true: that I can conjure his features from dust, blacken the paper with fire-ash, and have him speak to me again, if only in this language of deaf-mutes. I can form his soundless lips to my memory and only I will understand why I have given him half a face, dissipated half his features over the wide world. This much remains of my own possession: this curl in the hair, this eye that turns down in sleep and sadness, this eye that narrows in private joy.