The Weight of the Heart

by Susana Aikin

  “Where’s Julia?” I ask.

  Julia walks in from the pool. “Sorry, I couldn’t stand the smell in the kitchen.” She sits down and glares at Delia. “You know Anna and I don’t eat meat, don’t you?”

  “That’s a pity,” Delia says. “The Orishas want everyone to participate in the banquet when they’re performing a ceremony.”

  “The Orishas?” I snort, incredulous, thinking it’s all a joke. Julia gives me a don’t-you-dare kick under the table.

  “Yes, the Orishas,” Delia says, unfazed. “What, you thought that I was just cooking by the altar for convenience? Cooking and partaking of food is done for our saints, the Orishas. And Orishas like lamb chops.” She makes the sign of the cross and closes her eyes in silent prayer for a moment, then breaks the loaf of bread and offers Constantine a piece. She pours wine into their glasses and they start to eat. Julia and I look on warily.

  I’ve never liked lamb. For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt nauseated by its smell. Father used to like roast lamb with mint sauce served for Sunday lunch, and that became a recipe Nanny mastered to such an extent it even got her a compliment or two. But the most disgusting lamb dish I saw Father eat didn’t happen in our dining room, but on the road, on a trip we took one summer to a beach town on the southern coast. We were driving through the arid, central plain of La Mancha, the very turf of Don Quixote’s ramblings, a flat extension of yellowed sunburned fields, and stopped for lunch in a restaurant along the road. It was a medieval-style den, with dark brick walls hung with old ceramics, stuffed bulls’ heads and strings of garlic. We sat around a table, my sisters and I squeamish at the greasy, rancid smells that wafted out of the kitchen. Then Father ordered one of their menu specials: baked sheep’s head. Baked sheep’s head! We all gagged, wondering at our father’s sanity. Where had all his gastronomical scruples gone? After all the criticizing, all the deprecating tirades against Spanish food, he now decided to try a dish from the deep Castilian past? After a while, the waiter, an older, dried-up man with a green-hued face, emerged from the kitchen with the sheep’s head on a platter, and set it on the table in front of Father. I covered my eyes with my hands and only allowed myself to peep out of the slits between my fingers. I could see the head still had the eyes on, though glazed over horribly after the baking. I thought I was going to throw up. Both Marion and Julia looked sickened too. But Father ignored our reactions, and just turned the platter around, looking at the head from all angles. Then he proceeded to pull it apart with his bare hands, chewing delicately on the scarce pieces of cooked tissue embedded along the sad skull, while my sisters and I exchanged revolted glances in silence.

  I’m afraid I’ll never be able to erase this scene from my brain as long as I live. Its memory regurgitates every time I smell cooked lamb. Maybe Julia’s vegetarianism comes from the same traumatic source. However, it didn’t affect Marion in the same way. I look at my older sister now as she watches Delia and Constantine like a hawk, her sandwich untouched on her plate.

  “You sure you don’t want any, Marion?” Delia says. “You said before you weren’t a vegetarian.”

  “I’m not.”

  “So, here.” Delia serves her a pile of chops and pours wine into her glass.

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to drink while the limpieza was going on,” Marion says.

  “I also thought you’d given up drink altogether,” I add.

  “Don’t you worry about any of that now,” Delia says, her black eyes lengthening into long slits. “All of this is done for the Orishas,” she adds, and I see her thin crimson lips open into a smile that trembles with deep, suppressed laughter. But Marion doesn’t appear to notice anything at all; she’s fixed on the feast before her, delight all over her face.

  None of this surprises me. Marion is one of those persons too involved with the serious stuff of life to give any thought to jokes or facetious behavior. She can be mellowed into situations because she never reads between the lines. She lacks the guile to think or act strategically. She tends to approach situations squarely. In that way she had been like Fernando. They dealt with life as the matador deals with the bull. Head-on.

  * * *

  When Marion realized that Father was intent on breaking up her relationship with Fernando, she made a clear-cut decision. She would marry him as soon as possible. So she brought him one day to the house and requested that Father see them privately in his studio.

  When I opened the front door to let them in, I sensed an air of melancholy in Fernando. He had been gored again at the beginning of the season; the bull’s horn had carved a nasty, deep wound into his thigh. He was back in the ring again, although he hadn’t recovered all the weight he lost in the hospital, nor his good spirits. His mood had grown somber. We all thought this had to do more with Father than with the bullring, since Fernando had been signed for a year-long tour for the best corridas in Central and Latin America, where he would make a fortune. Father had refused to give Marion permission to travel down to Cordoba to meet his mother, and that had been a blow to his pride.

  When they closed the door of Father’s studio, I couldn’t help lingering around. I wanted to listen in, not just out of curiosity, but out of anxiety for them. I was full of trepidation; I was awed that Marion had mustered the courage for this confrontation.

  The door to the studio was a beautifully carved, heavy, double paneled piece, but it had never closed to perfection. Another one of those shoddy jobs of sloppy national carpenters, Father had described it so many times; but that served my spying purpose for the moment. I heard Marion and Fernando sit in the chairs opposite Father at the desk.

  A silence followed.

  Then Marion’s voice, “We’re here to tell you—”

  But Fernando interrupted her. “No, please, Marion, let me.” And after a beat, in a voice sober and rehearsed, he said, “Mister James, I would like to ask for your daughter’s hand.”

  Through the chinks I could just barely see Father, his eyes on the desk and his hands with fingers intertwined at his chest.

  “I am now signed for two years and I have enough savings to buy a good house, the deed of which will be entirely in Marion’s name. While I live, I swear, she will want nothing.”

  A minute of uncomfortable silence passed. Then Father lifted his eyes, like two daggers of ice. “And what if you don’t live?” he asked slowly. “Have you thought of that possibility? I mean, you’ve been gored twice in the last year, why are you so sure you won’t die tomorrow? How can I give my daughter in marriage to a man who could be six foot under any day?”

  Marion jumped from her seat and the chair screeched on the floor. “Father! How can you say that!” It was the high-pitched voice that always preceded her bursting into sobs.

  “It’s all right, Marion.” Fernando interrupted her again in a level voice, taking her hand and gently lowering her back into her chair. “Mister James, it’s true there is a risk, although many matadors get gored and live to old age. In a few years I hope to make enough money to retire; then I shall look for another business. But I love your daughter, and all I can offer her is what I have now.”

  Father suddenly burst into a growling rasp of laughter. A chill crept up my spine. I thought of pulling away from the chink and leaving the scene altogether. But then I heard the thundering voice. “Why do you think I’m laughing? I’m laughing because all this sounds like a joke. Why would I give my beautiful, sophisticated, well-educated daughter to a man who is likely to give her a miserable life in dirty, dusty bullrings, with the daily anticipation of gorings and the chance of becoming a widow any day? Just tell me, why would I do that?”

  There was a moment of frozen silence. Then Marion’s chair screeched again as she stood up.

  “Father, I am twenty-four years old and you can’t tell me what to do. We thought we would be respectful, that’s all. Fernando, let’s go.” She turned and marched toward the door, while Fernando followed slowly after her. I was going to run
away from the door, but just then Marion burst it open and I stepped aside to let her pass. Fernando walked behind her and turned to close the door carefully. Then he stood facing me for a beat in the dimness of the hall.

  “Why don’t you say something to him? Why don’t you tell him to go to hell?” I asked, deafened by the beating of my indignant heart.

  He gave me a long, silent look. “I never had a father,” he said after a moment and turned away, leaving the house after Marion.

  That night, as I walked into the bathroom, I found Marion crying.

  “What are you going to do, Marion?” I asked.

  “I’m going to marry him,” she said, wiping the tears from her bloodshot eyes in the mirror. “We already put in the papers.” Then she sat down at the edge of the bathtub, rewrapping her robe around her bosom. “I wanted to elope, run away with him, but he said no, it’s not in his code of honor. But I don’t know if I’ll be able to wait. I don’t think I can be in the same house with this monster. I hate him. I can’t believe the things he said today.” She burst into sobs again.

  Father had a way of smoothing things over when he had gone too far, like any good Machiavellian seasoned in political strategy. He announced we would have a big party in celebration of a significant contract his company had just signed with a German firm, and said we could invite all the friends we wanted. It would be a magnificently catered event: his new American secretary, Olga Morris, was taking care of that, with delicious food, wine, booze, and even a hired disc jockey. We were taken by surprise. Father had never been a lavish entertainer; he sometimes brought clients for lunch or drinks in the evening, and only allowed us small birthday parties and gatherings. Marion was cautious at first, but when Father said jestingly that she could also bring “her torero, without the bulls, please,” she thought that this was his way to make up for their falling-out.

  We’d never seen Father in such a good mood. The new partnership with the German firm was going to take his business to another level. He’d been working hard for the last twenty years to get to this point, and finally money and contracts were flowing into his company like never before. This moment represented the peak of his self-made enterprise, the realized dream of the young Englishman who’d arrived penniless in a remote, difficult land.

  It was the end of May and we’d just finished our year exams and were ready to decompress. People started trickling in by eight, when it wasn’t yet dark. The evening hung with that eternal twilight of summer solstice days. A haze like pink fingers caressed the garden, extending in soft strokes toward the distant mountains across from the veranda. The guests, a mixed crowd of friends from school and university, and Father’s employees, stood around on the cool, plush lawn with tall cocktail glasses, exchanging social graces and soft laughter. The dress code was casual on our friends’ side, with jeans and T-shirts, skimpy summer dresses, and shorts; and more formal with Father’s employees. Olga Morris, a decadent belle from South Carolina with a lazy drawl, who’d just started working for Father, coordinated the catering by buzzing around between waiters with trays and the disc jockey, a weather-beaten, middle-aged rock-and-roller who blasted Michael Jackson’s Thriller from large speakers at one end of the veranda.

  When the evening dipped into a darker shade of orange and crimson, the swimming pool’s underwater spotlights flashed up, making its oval shape shine with aqua-blue radiance. The crowd groaned, pleasantly surprised, and gathered around, mesmerized by the blue glittering surface. Then out of nowhere came a splash, followed immediately by another, and two figures slithered underwater until first one head and then another popped out on the surface. One was Julia’s. The other was a short-haired girl with large dark eyes and a mocking smile, whom I had never seen before.

  Julia struggled to catch her breath. “Alina!” she shouted, “I can’t believe you pushed me in like this,” but she giggled, splashing water into Alina’s face.

  The crowd laughed; and presently, one, two, three, and four more of our friends jumped into the pool with their clothes on, some even forgetting to take off their shoes. There was more laughter and splashing inside the pool. Someone threw in a ball, and a game of water polo began. Most of the other guests moved slowly back toward the veranda, searching to refill their drinks and settle into easy chairs to continue conversations. Waiters milled around offering tapas on trays and replenishing glasses of wine and cocktails, while guests mellowed into deeper states of tipsy placidity, and Tom Waits’s voice crooned in the night air singing “Missing You.”

  The house stood behind it all like the magnificent backdrop of a delightful operatic moment. I gaped at the beauty of its silhouette against the cobalt sky, the whitewashed façade hung with creeping vines reflecting garden lights, all windows ablaze revealing red rooms with dark bookcases, gorgeous pictures, collections of ancient ceramic plates, vases thick with flowers on beautiful furniture.

  “I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” a voice with a slight German accent said beside me. “I’m Marcus.” I turned around to find a medium-height, muscular man in a cream summer suit; his face clean-shaven, with angular cheekbones and blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses. “I think you might be Anna, James’s youngest daughter. Am I right?”

  “And you are . . . ?” I looked at him suspiciously. There was something I didn’t quite like about him, a keenness, a wolfish quality in the depth of his gaze. Or maybe just the way he looked at my breasts, which were somewhat apparent through my wet blouse that had been splashed over at the pool.

  “Marcus Holsbeiter. I’m with Henningber und Berger, the company that just signed the contract with your father. I just moved to Madrid . . .”

  “I see. Well, I hope you’re already settled in,” I began to say, but then I spotted Marion and Fernando walking into the garden, with Manuel trailing behind, carrying a guitar. I turned to Marcus. “That’s my sister. I’ll be right back.” I hurried over to Marion.

  She looked stunning in a red silk dress that clung to her waist and hips, and fell dramatically along her thighs to just below the knees. Draped over one shoulder she carried a shawl of black silk embroidered with red flowers ending in long tassels, a classical mantón de Manila, which Fernando had given her.

  “It’s scheduled for next Thursday at one o’clock,” she whispered into my ear as I kissed her cheek. “I hope you can come.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I replied.

  Then I saw Father walking toward us with Marcus. “Marcus, I want you to meet my daughter,” he said, looking at Marion, but Marcus turned to me and said, “We were just introducing one another.”

  “I meant Marion, my oldest daughter,” Father said, ignoring me. “She just graduated in architecture a few weeks ago. Marion, this is Marcus, he will be working with us as a partner from the German firm we just signed with.”

  “Nice to meet you, Marcus. Welcome to Madrid,” Marion said quickly, avoiding Father’s gaze.

  “Marcus just arrived from Düsseldorf and I’d very much like to take him out to lunch next Thursday. I’d like you to join us; and afterwards you could show him around the old Madrid, to give him a sense of the place,” Father said.

  Marion blushed deeply and sighed. Then, after a quick reproachful look at Father, she said, “I don’t think I can, Father. I’m getting married on Thursday.” And turning around to Fernando, who was talking with someone else, she pulled at his sleeve. “Fernando, meet Marcus, he just arrived from Germany. Marcus, this is my fiancé, Fernando Rios.”

  The men shook hands. There was a moment of embarrassed confusion in Marcus’s face. Then he said, “Congratulations!” Marion thanked him and, taking Fernando’s arm, moved away to talk to another group. Father stood rigidly. His face was livid.

  I said to Marcus, “Can I get you another drink?”

  I walked quickly toward the catering table.

  Julia, who had changed into dry clothes and combed back her wet hair, caught up with me. “Don’t you think that Olg
a Morris is overdoing it with the booze? I mean, everybody looks drunk.” I looked around, realizing she was right: the party was becoming a landscape of intoxication. People were sprawled on lounge chairs, many sat on the lawn or around the pool, wisecracking and howling with laughter. I scanned the crowd for Father and saw he had been joined by a group of employees who were chattering about some frolic I couldn’t quite make out. Among them were his two mechanical engineers, Montes, a tough, muscular middle-aged man whom we hated for his dirty, sexist jokes; and Lopez, a sly, lanky fellow known for his bullying of other employees. Father’s stare was vacant and fixed in the direction of the house. He paid no attention to the babble. Meanwhile, Olga Morris brought him another tall glass of liquor on the rocks, and stood by his side with her own cocktail, mooning at him from under her drooping eyelids.

  “She’s weird,” Julia said. “She’s been pouring him drinks nonstop, she’s getting him really drunk.”

  “It’ll be good for him to loosen up,” I said, trying to conceal my disquiet. “Anyway, it looks like everyone is having fun.” I wanted to protect Julia from the apprehension that was quickly building up in me. “I’m more worried about the music. If that guy has Lionel Richie and Diana Ross sing “Endless Love” one more time, I’ll just scream!”

  “Yeah, you’d think with his rugged rock-and-roll band looks he’d be playing more upbeat music,” Julia said.

  Across from us, the disc jockey flirted with one of Father’s office girls and seemed to have lost interest in the music. But as I set to walk over toward him, I heard a deep, percussive, almost metallic chord tear through the air. Every head turned. Manuel sat upright with his guitar on one knee; the sweet, dark notes flowing from his fingers over the strings galvanized the air. The guests gathered around, entranced. The disc jockey turned the music down on his end. Manuel’s fingers ran up and down the neck of the guitar; bright, dry notes played out swiftly and then held, as if suspended in the air, picking up again as the rhythm mellowed down, into a haunting, heart-wrenching melody.