Small Damages (8 page)

TWENTY-THREE

Outside the sky has grown stormy in one distant corner. The sun still shines on everything else. “I know a place,” she tells me. “Not far.” Through narrowness to broadness, up a wide plateau of stairs, she walks and I walk with her. She opens the door. She waits.

It takes time to adjust to the darkness—to find the stained-glass windows high above the smoke stain of incense and wax. “Eighty chapels,” she says, “in this one cathedral.” When she steps ahead on the marble floor, her heels strike bright, hard echoes. When I breathe, it’s the smell of oranges and crisp.

The nave is giant, endless, stoned in. The pews are worn and settled. Everything is carved into a million dimensions—it’s hanging, it’s suspended, it’s on a pedestal looking down. Adair slides into a pew, and I join her. Two pews ahead, three women veiled in black kneel side-by-side, hands against hands in prayer. Near to them, across the aisle, a Japanese man is tripodding his camera, and in between the legs of the tripod, a kid races a toy car across the tiles.

“It’s my favorite place,” Adair says, “in all of Spain.” I think of Miguel and the Necropolis. I think of vanishing. I look past Adair to the stones that hold the space away from itself. I watch the candles burning and the Christs—Christ after Christ. A thousand of them. Tourists slide up and down the aisles. The women pray. Someone sings, and someone else measures the length of the song’s travels, and into the song beats the snap of the camera.

“What did Miguel tell you about me?” I ask her.

“That you’re smart, and a little pissed off.” She smiles. “I’d be pissed off too,” she says. “To be honest.” She reaches for her purse—huge, cranberry colored—and takes out a little book of pictures. “This was me at seventeen,” she says, showing me an image of a girl sitting cross-legged on a suitcase. Her chin is in her fist. Her mouth is small, determined. “I keep it,” she says, “so I remember.”

“Remember what?”

“Hard times become easier times. Doors open.”

“You look pretty much the same,” I tell her. “Now as then.”

“God in His heaven, I hope not,” she says.

She waits for me to say whatever I’ll say next, watches me like I could disappear again and not come back out, just rude her out, like I was doing.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” I say.

“Life’s funny,” she says. “Strange, I mean.” She corrects herself. “All I knew when I was leaving England was that I was leaving England. All I knew when I got here was that I didn’t belong. I fought until I did belong. Until I got through school. Until I met Javier.”

“How?”

“What?”

“Did you meet him?”

She goes along with this, me interviewing her, me asking all the questions; it keeps us talking. “At a party. Someone introduced us. I thought he was old, and I walked away. The next day he called me. Turns out I liked him. Turns out I liked his mother too, and his brothers, liked the way I became part of their family. Funny,” she says, “because I never really thought I’d have another chance at family. It’s what I mean, you see? Life’s like that. You lose and you get and you take it. Brilliant.”

“My father died,” I say. “My father was my family.”

“I know,” she says. “Miguel told me.” She slips her hand over mine, and it rests there, cool, pale, but it doesn’t fix this, and it can’t.

“He was the greatest, you know? The super greatest. He took photographs—like, for his job. That’s what he did. When almost everybody else told him he should be doing something different. My mother, especially, thought he should be doing something different. He was like that, my dad. He knew what matters.”

“And don’t you?”

“Don’t I what?”

“Take photographs? Didn’t Miguel tell me?”

“Film. I like to make films. Dumb stuff for TV class. Little movies starring my friends.”

“Hollywood,” she says.

“Not really. Documentaries. Real life. True stuff.”

“Are you doing it here? Making film, I mean?”

“I don’t even have my camcorder.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because my mother packed. And because I didn’t come to Spain like some tourist. She must have said that a thousand times. I came to Spain because nobody is ever supposed to know that something like this has happened. I came to Spain because you’re here. You and Javier. My mother, you know: she makes decisions. My mother is very important.”

She smiles. “Like my mother, then.”

“Maybe.”

“Not all mothers are like that,” she says, and I realize that this is her résumé, the thing she offers, all I have to know—she won’t be like my mother. Along the stone wall, the candles burn. Christ looks down, amazed and disappointed.

“This will all be over,” Adair says. “And you will have survived it. You’ll be surprised. You’ll see.”

“I’m not seeing,” I say, remembering, suddenly, Angelita’s pouch, her fix for broken eyes.

“Come on,” Adair says. “Let me show you something.”

TWENTY-FOUR

The particle of sky that was the threat of storm has become half of the sky, at least, and now when we walk, Adair walks beside me, slows down, for the sake of the baby and me. “My second favorite view of Seville,” she says, “is from there.” She points up, toward the cathedral’s bell tower. “The Giralda,” she says, and my eye travels the Moorish crisscross, past the keyhole windows.

There’s a line, but it’s not long. Adair pays, and now, again, she’s slightly ahead on the slope of the ramp that ascends the tower. A ramp and tight turns, all the way up. Every now and then, she stops to show me the view through a keyhole window. Tourists pass. Schoolkids. A couple of lovers. She kicks off her shoes and walks barefoot. Tells me how a sultan once rode the tower ramp on the back of a horse—a sultan. Tells me how the bells in the chambers called the Moors of Spain to prayer and how the Moors threatened to burn the tower down if the Christians made it their own, but the Christians won. King Alfonso won. The Christians trumped the tower. “Balconies,” Adair says. “Filigrees. We’re such an elaborate breed, we Europeans.”

Her shoes hang from the hook of her fingers; she’s out of breath and doesn’t stop. “Thirty-four ramps,” she says. “Or something like that,” but now, all of a sudden, it levels out, it stops ascending, and we’re outside, high above Seville, above the moss thick on the buttress stone and the diamonds etched into the plaza below and the flower boxes and the rooftop hammocks and the copper and the copper green.

“Santa Cruz,” Adair says, pointing to the twisting of streets. “Alcázar,” she points to the nearby palace. “The Juderia arch.” I can see some of it, not all. I feel strange and high and dizzy, carbonated on the inside of my skin. I walk beside Adair on the tower platform, catching my breath, waiting for the kids from the school to step out of the way, for the lovers to take their pictures, for a kid with bright red hair to stop messing with her camera. Adair’s hair is blowing like the leaves on willows. “Plaza de Toros de la Maestranza,” she finally says, and there, in the distance, is the bullring, lying half in sun and half silvered over by clouds, its slender, continuous arches making a perfect oblong. It looks up, unblinking, from the ground.

“They call it the cathedral,” Adair says. “It’s a Spanish thing. I guess.” She rolls her eyes, like she’s about to tell me more, let me in on the gossip of Spain, as if things are all right now between us; we’ve hit the wall, we’ve gone around it, we’ve made good use of our afternoon. We’re in this together. Adair and me. Adair and you. It is the deal we’ve made.

“Is it true?” I ask.

“What?”

“About Esteban’s father dying there?”

I feel her studying me—my too-long nose, my too-thin lips, my eyes which are my father’s eyes, the thing I like about me, the thing I hope you’ll have—my eyes, my father’s eyes, our way of seeing. “A tragedy,” Adair says now. “One of Miguel’s bulls, didn’t they tell you? I wasn’t here then, of course. I heard the story. Everybody here has heard the story.”

A Los Nietos bull,
I think, and now I think of Esteban, in the dark, in the tree house, looking for his parents in the stars. I see the bullring, far in the distance. The open eye inside the crowd of twisted streets. The pan of sand opening up to the sky. Everyone has heard. Everyone knows. There are no secrets. You won’t have blond hair. Your eyes will not be violet. You lose and you get and you take it. Esteban was orphaned by a Los Nietos bull. I am not orphaning you: I am not. Isn’t this different?

“What’s the matter with you?” Ellie asked me one day, in late April. We’d gone to the track, to watch Tim at a meet. Andrea was down at the sidelines yelling him on—
Don’t let him scare you, don’t you give up, twenty yards, Timmy, twenty yards, what’s twenty yards, keep going
—while Ellie and I were high in the stands. I’d grabbed her hand when the pistol went off, and then Tim was running, and Andrea was screaming, and I was crying. “Hey,” Ellie said. “It’s just a track meet. He’ll win,” but I said that wasn’t it, and I couldn’t stop crying, and she held me.

“You can tell me,” she said, but no way I could. The story was locked up, the world’s biggest secret. There was a deal. I was going away and coming back, and no one would ever know why. No one except my mother and Kevin and the people of Spain, but Spain wasn’t home, Spain wasn’t real. “I’m going to Spain,” I had told the rest of them, “for an adventure.”

They looked at me like I was crazy.

Like I was abandoning them.

Like I had abandoning in me.

Like everything we’d been about meant nothing, absolutely.

“Miguel loves Esteban like a son,” Adair is saying now, and I wonder what else she’s said, what I didn’t hear, what I won’t know now. I wonder if what she is really saying is that you’ll be the child she loves.

I’m coming for you,
I wanted Kevin to say.
I’m coming for you, and I’m sorry.

“I know somebody,” she says, “who makes films like you do. He says it’s a life—full and happy.”

I cannot speak. I shrug.

TWENTY-FIVE

We find Gloria where Miguel left her and Miguel asleep behind her wheel, a newspaper folded into fourths on his lap. The weather’s grown even closer, and a harsher wind has kicked in. Adair apologizes to Miguel for being so late, leans through his open window, gives him a kiss. “I lost all track,” she says, holding her hair back from her face.

“Javier’s back at the house,” Miguel tells her, while I buckle in. He snaps the key in the ignition and turns to check behind him, but Adair runs about on those heels, leans through my window, kisses me too. “Soon,” she says, and now Miguel is driving—out of the city and past the stretch of petrol stink until there are no more fortress walls or ribboned-up sky. A fist of purple grows thick on the horizon.

“So you’ve met Adair,” Miguel says.

I don’t answer.

He drives into the weather. Leaves the half sun in Seville and heads for the heart of the storm. The olive trees are silver. The heads of the sunflowers are stooping. I lean back against the seat and close my eyes and remember Ellie the night of the meet calling late, after Andrea and Tim and Ellie had gone out to Minella’s to celebrate Tim’s win; it’d be his only win that season.

“It isn’t like you,” she said, “to cry like that, and I’m your friend, and I don’t get it: why won’t you tell me?”

“It’s just everything ending,” I said. “Senior year, you know. That’s what it is.”

“But we’re not ending,” she said. “We keep going after this.”

I wanted to tell her everything, but I couldn’t. Telling Ellie was telling Andrea was telling Tim. Nothing that happened to one of us didn’t happen to the others, and being knocked up was happening only to me. I couldn’t tell them because I couldn’t explain it, because if I did and if Kevin found out, it’d be like holding a trial and your friends being judge. Everyone deliberating. Everybody with an opinion. Them on one side and me on the other. There were already lines enough.

“I don’t understand,” I finally say.

“¿Qué?”

“Why Adair married someone so old.”

We go miles and miles before Miguel answers.

“Love,” he says. And that’s all. That’s all he has to say, and miles more go by, and then I ask him if it’s true.

“True what?”

“About Esteban’s father and the bull?”

Miguel turns to me with his one good eye. “There are things we cannot change,” he says.

He leaves me at the arch, drives Gloria around back, and shuts her down; I hear her choking. Except for the cats and the lizards and Arcadio, fast asleep on the weathered-up love seat, the courtyard is a blank, empty place. Where the Gypsies have gone, I could not tell you. They live and breathe and move through the shadows of this house—all the time, they are here, they are present.

Estela’s not in the kitchen. She’s not in the bull room or the bedroom, and the doors to the guest rooms are shut tight, and I don’t care what the rules are here: I need somebody to talk to. I head back toward Esteban’s courtyard and open the door to the outside, where Esteban is currycombing Tierra, moving the brush in half circles, his hat pushed back from his face. The sky is the color of spoons.

So, he says.

She’s a Brit, I say.

And?

I don’t know. I don’t.

He stands and strokes Tierra’s back, says something into her ear. She pulls her lips against her teeth and tosses her head. Now he talks her into picking up one hoof, to putting it down, to standing straight. He comes toward me, lifts my hand in his, slips it onto the bones of Tierra’s nose, straight through her halter. His hand is soft and cool; it’s gentle. I feel something turn inside me.

Wait here, he tells me, disappearing inside the stall and returning with a bag of carrots. She’s hungry, he says. Keep her happy. She works the first carrot like some old harmonica, and Esteban goes back to what he was doing—crouching and scrubbing, talking and settling, the horse quivering with every stroke. When I offer Tierra another carrot, she takes it, the juice running down past her lip.

So you know her? I say, and my voice sounds funny. You know Adair? I mean, do you know her well?

Of course. She’s here all the time, with Javier. Javier and Miguel—they’re in bulls together.

I think she’s young to be a mother.

You’re younger, he says. Aren’t you? He stares at me as he works the brush through the long knot of Tierra’s tail.

But this just—to me this just happened. To her—it’s what she wants.

It wasn’t always.

What?

What she wanted.

What do you mean?

Miguel got a phone call from your mom’s friend, Mari. She said there was a problem with a baby. Miguel knew what to do, who to ask. Adair was always talking about babies. Javier was always letting her go on.

I try to imagine the conversations. I can’t. I say nothing, and Esteban continues.

At first you were going to stay with Adair, but Estela wouldn’t hear of it. “I’ll keep her well,” is what Estela said. Estela insisted. The rest of them said yes.

Estela insisted, I think. Miguel said yes. Adair was always talking about babies.

Here, Esteban says, before I have a chance to ask him questions, before there’s time to sort it out. Help me with this. He takes the bag of carrots and hangs it on a hook outside the stall. Hands me a brush and shows me how to work the thick white yarn of Tierra’s mane. He stands behind me, his hand over mine, his breath in my ear, his skin smelling like leather and hay, and I think about Adair at the shop, in the church, walking thirty-four ramps to show me the view.

Why would Estela do that for someone she hadn’t even met? I turn and ask him. Why would any of you?

Maybe because you’re having a baby.

Obviously I’m having a baby.

Maybe because Estela could imagine the baby, even if she couldn’t imagine you. He shrugs his shoulders, then looks undecided. I don’t really know, he says. I guess you’d have to ask her.

The air is changing, the clouds above us. There’s a low rumble in the far distance, and then a closer crack. Esteban looks up and beyond me, reaches a hand to Tierra’s neck.

Better get her in, he says, working his hand into the halter beside mine. Tierra hates a good storm. We lead the horse back toward the stall—the two of us. We pull her in, close the door behind us. A zipper of lightning rips through, and then another and another—big, yellow chunks that scissor the sky and burn the edges off the clouds.

Steady, Esteban tells Tierra. Steady, girl. She shakes her head and tips back onto her hind legs. Esteban talks her down, strokes her neck, shows me how to calm her.

In the next stall over, Antonio complains. From the tree of twigs in Esteban’s room, the birds call. Beside me Esteban doesn’t move. The sky keeps breaking up into its pieces, and I feel myself breaking too—jagged and not me but still me. Kenzie, the American girl. The bitchy one who has been nothing but trouble since she landed here. As if her problems were the only problems. As if she was doing the rest of them some kind of favor just by being here.

“I suck,” I say in English, and Esteban doesn’t understand, and I don’t mean him to, I don’t mean for anyone to see me as I see myself.

Adair showed me the bullring, I say, after a while.

Esteban doesn’t answer.

From the tower. We saw the bullring from the tower.

The bullring
is
Seville, he says. You see it from everywhere.

Why do they call it the cathedral?

The gates, he says. The entrance gates. They took them from a convent. He doesn’t want to talk about it—makes that clear. Doesn’t want me to ask any more questions.

I’m sorry, I say, about what happened.

He leans against me. That’s his answer. He says nothing, just lets time pass and the rain puddle the courtyard, rinse the tree house, saturate the bulls, who will never find much shelter beneath the spindly arms of the olive trees and who have no clue—no ounce of clue—what is happening to them next. Nothing goes away, Esteban says, after a long time passes. Not the things you remember, and not the things you still want.

The rain falls harder. There are lakes out in the courtyard—sudden silver lakes that keep growing wider, getting deeper.

Estela never let me forget, Esteban says now.

What do you mean?

That my mother loved me. That my father did. She told me every single day. Lunch and dinner.
Your parents loved you, Esteban.
You can’t cook like Estela cooks, he says, unless your heart is huge.

I guess, I say. But the fact is, I know.

I don’t want him to move, don’t want the rain to end, don’t want to lose this edge against me, don’t want another day of sun—no place to hide, no time for shadows. But a patch of sky blue is floating in with the gray, and now a last clap of thunder knocks, but lightning doesn’t follow.

Storm’s gone, Esteban says. The fallen rain slides off the roof. It rises like steam. It grows hazy.

Take me into the forest with you? I ask him. Please?

Maybe, he says, and now I hear Estela calling.