Loving Che (11 page)

I sit back, a little tired, but also filled with longing, my heart beating fast, in the old way. I am still for a while, only the movement of my chest rising and falling. And then I take the stick of charcoal to my hand, pressing into the flesh of my palm. When I've darkened my hand, I move around my wrists and up the inside of my arm, casting myself in pale shadow. It's like the old days when I could trace a pen to paper for hours. I move the charcoal into my armpits, and my skin shivers beneath its tracks. I close my eyes, nothing but the soft dusting of coal, wandering gray. The hand of God painting my skin, tracing riverbeds in some ancient map. And now I am far away from myself, and the only thing connecting me to my body is this dusty string, this story forming beneath my fingertips.

Daughter of my heart: You must remember that all our walking is a stepping into the other. We enter rooms and canvases, we look into one another's eyes, we open packages, we travel into other lands. We laugh and taste with wide-open mouths and our hands seek to touch and hold.

So it was with Ernesto and me when we opened the door to the small room at the top of the stairs so we might enter different lives. My going again and again to him, wanting to be lost in his body, thinking that this next time it would finally happen. To feel him in my hands as one might touch one's own self in a lost afternoon. To explore, to conquer. To take hold of a lover, to live inside another's silence.

Oh my child, these secrets locked tight so long. Soon I will lie at the end of a long hallway where you will no longer be able to reach me. And I think now that you might be a child again and suckle my breasts, hold them in your tiny hands. That you might fold time and reenter me, light the dark corners of your memory, back to the place where you began.

Trimming my roses one morning, I recoil at the sound of the stem breaking. I sit with my head in my hands. A bullfrog calls to me across the grass and in the old ceiba a bird wakes. The tiptoeing of a beetle echoes with a giant's step. Beneath my feet, the ants churn up the ground and the sound of earth tumbling on earth blots out every other sound in the world.

At the studio, the portrait of the man and the woman sits where it has for many months. I know that I will never finish it. And for a brief moment, as if illuminated by a flash, I see the future waiting for me. I know that I will give birth to a girl and that I will send her away. I know that I will wait in vain for my lover to return, will wait even after he is dead. That my whole life will be this waiting, pure and hopeful, and the days and years will stretch no longer than the moment it takes a cloud to cross the night.

I'm in my studio the day El Encanto burns. I hear the explosion and run down into the street. Already the crowds are gathering, running past me, bumping me. The sound of fire engines. Screaming. I walk quickly. On Galiano, I stop. Ahead of me, El Encanto is burning, ugly, smoke-ash, smell of plastic. And the sound of glass breaking and breaking, up and down the front of the building, pop, pop, pop as the fire engulfs everything: the dresses from Paris, the gold jewelry, the transistor radios, the glass display cases, the white columns, the front windows. The front windows, with their pale mannequins. I come close enough so that I can feel the heat on my face. The flames take the mannequins, crawling up their stiff limbs like a caress, setting their hair aflame, and they stand, unfeeling, in the same old pose until they start to melt, the smile still on their painted lips. … The building is destroyed, and the only casualty is a worker named Faith, who had gone back inside to retrieve some paperwork.

I'm not going to lie to you, sweet Teresa, he says. My vocation is to roam the highways and waterways of the world forever, always curious, investigating everything, sniffing into nooks and crannies, but always detached, not putting down roots anywhere, not staying long enough to discover what lies beneath.

Summer again, but the sky blue, Havana without rain for weeks. The heat pushing against the glass, no hope of release anywhere.

I prop myself up on my elbow. His eyes are closed. I run my hand over his forehead, pushing the hair off his face, run my hand over his brow and down along the corner of his eyes and the side of his cheeks and still he doesn't open his eyes. I run my finger across his mouth and bite back the desire to touch my lips to his. Down his mouth and through his beard, down to his throat, resting my hand there to feel the trembling of his breath.

He doesn't move. When we were still in the Sierra, he says without opening his eyes, we had a soldier named Eutimio Guerra. It shows you the little value in names. Because of war this man had not even a middle name. He was a coward and a traitor. When we found him out there was only one course of action.

Ernesto opens his eyes. Eutimio was down on his knees. He asked quietly to be shot. He retained some dignity, out in the open, under the sun, on his knees. There was no pleading or crying or any of the shows that make what needs to be done any more displeasing.

Ernesto pauses and turns to me. No one knows this, he says. It began to rain, the darkest deluge, all the sky gone black—the trees, the grass, our hands. The situation was … uncomfortable. No one wanted to do it. Eutimio had been a brother to us. There was nothing I could do. I had to end the problem myself, do you understand, Teresa? Myself, because no one else would do it. Quick as a breath. I shot him once, before he could blink, the .32 into the right side of his brain.

Ernesto is quiet. The rain falls in the courtyard. He leans toward me and whispers. Exit orifice in the right temporal. Orifice in the temporal, Che, the old doctor, whispers.

He gasped and then was dead. Do you think I liked that? Do you think I liked it? and he says this softly, all the anger gone out of him. So softly that it is like a question to himself.

When Eutimio was dead, Ernesto says after a long while, I began to take his belongings. His watch had been tied by a chain to his belt. I couldn't take it off, and I struggled with it. This was many hours after his death. And yet, Eutimio Guerra grabbed my hand. Yank it off, boy, said the dead man to me, what does it matter. …

But this is what I've never understood, Ernesto says. He was already dead.

* * *

We lie together, distant thunder closing in on the city. Neither of us speaks now. I rest my head against his back and listen to his breathing. Each breath coming soft and easy. We lie for a long time, me listening. And then a soft whistling on the exhale, like a distant warning bell. His exhalation begins to catch on itself. The muscles on his back tighten and then release. He lies still, and I know he is trying to control the breath. But the whistling grows, each new breath a greater effort until suddenly he sits up and leans forward. He takes my hand and then pushes me away. The muscles below his ribs pull in, the muscles of his face, his stomach. I stand and kneel in front of him. Your medicine, your medicine. He is still. His skin is cold. You are growing blue, I say; your medicine. My heart is beating fast. Your medicine, Ernesto!

I run to his jacket and go through the pockets until I find the syringe. I fill it the way I've watched him. His face so pale. A fallen little bird, thin panicked ribs pressing against his skin. My hands tremble. I hold the needle to his arm, but I can't do it. He looks at me, nothing in his dark eyes that could be called fear, only a confused resignation. I hesitate. His face so pale. And then I plunge the syringe into his skin, looking away as I empty the adrenaline into his blood. His chest quiets its frantic pulling. The whistling through his throat increases and then subsides. He lies back on the mattress. I sit on the floor
and let my breath out slowly. Color returns to his face. He closes his eyes. When he can speak again, he says, My lovely Teresa.

I walk home alone. The afternoon is hot beneath the black clouds. A boy races by on his bicycle and the wind in his wake rustles bits of paper in the street. I walk, trying to calm my heart. Ahead walks a man familiar by the slope of his shoulders. His head is turned down to the ground as he walks, his hands in his pockets. When he turns down to the malecón, I speed up. I cross the street at a run, cars sounding their horns. The man lifts his head to look across the traffic at me and I see that it is no one I know.

Don't you understand, Calixto said to me before he left for Madrid, that the very word revolution is doomed to failure? Round and round and round, forever trapped inside its own semantic fortress, forced to retrace its steps for all eternity.

You were born in the middle of the night and your screams filled me first with awe and then with fear, this new stranger who'd come from me, this new person with her own beating heart.

Someday I would give you a good life. Someday when my lover returned. Someday I would become your mother. I was waiting. I sent you away from this island so that you might be free of its sounds and sweet airs.

I was waiting. How could I have been of help to you? Already, I read him in every move of your hands, smelled him on your sweet baby's breath. When you cried at night, I lay remembering the lost afternoons, how time had wrapped its eternity around us.

The night before my father's flight, I woke before dawn. The house was silent. Not even the sound of the wind through the eaves. I walked to your little mattress and watched you sleep. You were still, facing heaven, your arms outstretched. Your mouth was parted and your chest rose slowly. I kneeled next to you for a long while. I caressed your hair and I bent and kissed your forehead. I kissed your chin, brushing my lashes against your lips.

I kissed you and you opened your eyes, your face a breath from mine. You lay still, quiet, your black eyes looking back at me.

I was waiting, you see.

And then one day you appeared. Beneath my window, singing for me the poem that so many years ago your father had sung for me.

You appeared like a vision. And I could not move from where I stood. The years and the sorrows held me fast.

You and I are past forgiveness or understanding. I took a history from you and you returned carrying his memory in your dark eyes. I have suffered punishments enough. To you I leave these small words, these images stilled with a spirit that belongs to you. I leave you our failures together and also the private triumph of your own life, the beating in your chest of a love that endures.

Farewell.

Farewell but you will be with me.

I sat with Teresa's letters for a long time. I was not so removed from exile chatter that I didn't understand the implications of her story. Miami was not a city for romantic heroes; here, an association with the revolution was something to be hidden, denied, and ultimately forgotten. Any hopeful joy I might have felt at Teresa's words was tempered by the story that contained them. In the confusion I felt at that moment, I was moved to throw the entire contents of the package away and I may have actually stood with that intention. Instead, after a moment, I carefully restacked Teresa's letters and photographs. Barely aware of what I was doing, I packed them back in their box. I sealed the edges of the package with masking tape and then I found a length of twine and wrapped it tight. I pushed the box into a closet, setting it on the highest shelf.

Some days later, I drove to my old neighborhood. I had not returned since my grandfather's death and was surprised at how little the streets had changed, how familiar the houses seemed. There was the same porch and steps leading up to the front door and the window that I used to look out from, imagining the world that lay beyond, the people I would meet, the woman I would become. It was late afternoon, but the street was deserted. I parked across from the house. The driveway was empty and the blinds had been pulled down shut. Someone had planted red geraniums under the windowsills and the lawn was trim and green. I waited there, looking at the house for a long time, waiting for someone to enter or leave. I dozed for a while
in the heat. When I awoke it was getting on toward evening. I sat up in the car and caught, in the distance, the figure of a small boy walking slowly up the sidewalk toward me. He was dressed quite formally for the heat, in long shorts and a white shirt whose short, wide sleeves only emphasized the thinness of his arms. The purpose with which he walked—leaning slightly forward from the waist—made me think that he was small for his age, for he looked to be no more than about five, but even with the distance I could make out the furrow in his brow. His black hair kept falling into his face as he walked and now and then he swept it away angrily with one hand. I watched him, barely able to move. As he approached the house, he slowed. He stopped at the sidewalk in front of the house. He turned and looked at me. I sat very still. A minute passed, maybe two. Then he took his gaze away and started walking again, past the house, up the street and I followed him with my eyes. When his tiny figure turned in the distance and vanished, I rolled up my window and drove away from the house.