Swift as Desire

by Laura Esquivel

  And that’s how he lived until he had completed a cycle of fifty-two days. The number fifty-two was, of course, significant to the Aztecs, because the sum of its digits yields seven. Seven times seven fits inside a year, so to them fifty-two represented a complete cycle of life.

  The fifty-two days that Júbilo spent drinking represented a phase he had to go through to realize he didn’t really want to die. He came to this conclusion one day when his brother-in-law Juan came looking for him. Júbilo could no longer stand up. When he saw Juan, he clung to his hand and said, “Help me, compadre!” Juan took him to the hospital, where Júbilo began his recuperation.

  We’re talking about a slow and painful convalescence that included learning how to live again. The first thing Júbilo had to face was the withdrawal from alcohol, then regaining movement in his legs and arms, and finally the proper functioning of his whole body. But the most difficult thing without a doubt was trying to win back his family. When he left the hospital, Lucha was already seven months pregnant. She had gotten herself a new job at the National Lottery, in addition to her original job at the Telegraph Office. Because don Pedro was dead, she had not found it necessary to hand in her resignation after all. She was more beautiful than ever, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with Júbilo. She was pleased enough that he had recovered, she had even been the one who told her brother Juan where to find Júbilo, because she had heard it from a neighbor. She had followed his recovery with great interest from a distance, but that’s how she wanted to keep him, far away from her and her children.

  Júbilo had to make an enormous effort to get back on his feet, to find work again, and to convince his wife he was going to fight to preserve his marriage any way he could. Lucha’s parents played an important role at this stage. Although they had once tried to dissuade their daughter from marrying Júbilo, they now did everything they could to convince her she should forgive him and allow him to return home, because they loved him like a son. They had had years to see what a wonderful man he was, and his mother-in-law had become his best ally. She never tired of defending him, and she didn’t stop praising him until she managed to soften Lucha’s heart and convince her daughter to meet with the man who was still her husband. They had never finalized the divorce, because the law prohibited it while Lucha was pregnant.

  Júbilo arrived at the house looking very presentable. His in-laws had taken Raúl home with them so Lucha and Júbilo could speak openly without interruption. As soon as they saw each other, their bodies felt the urge to run toward each other and embrace, but their minds restrained them. Júbilo was thin, but he reminded Lucha of the boy she had first seen when she was thirteen. Lucha was more voluptuous than ever. Her enormous belly drove Júbilo crazy with desire. After talking and crying for a long time, Júbilo asked her to show him her stomach. Lucha lifted her maternity dress so Júbilo could admire her ripeness, and they ended up in bed, holding each other tightly.

  A heavy rain fell from the sky and filled the room with the smell of damp earth. Lying there holding Lucha and listening to the rain, Júbilo distinctly felt his soul return to his body. The rain was a reminder that he had been dead, that months before, his spirit had migrated to a higher sphere, and that it had now returned to occupy its rightful place back on Earth. The rain represented the resurrection of water, droplets that had evaporated from the earth to take on a new form in heaven, and then return to Earth once more. The sound of the rain falling and the thought of the child in Lucha’s womb were for Júbilo the best song of life ever. It became clear to him that he was being given a second chance to live, and he knew he couldn’t waste it.

  The love Lucha and he shared had generated a new existence, palpable inside this belly on the verge of bearing fruit. And the beating heart of that being was the best reason for remaining like this, in a close embrace, for the greater part of the afternoon, until they were interrupted by the onset of premature labor. Soon a seventh-month newborn arrived into the world like a gift from heaven.

  Júbilo called her Lluvia and swore he would never, ever be separated from her, no matter what. He wanted to be all ears to keep her safe, and he was ready to give her all the love he had inside him. He was eager to show his appreciation of each extra day of life he had been given. And so he did. Júbilo remained living under the same roof as Lucha until Lluvia got married.

  Those years weren’t all sweetness and light. Lucha and Júbilo were never able to completely patch up their marriage. Don Pedro had left behind him a great shadow that loomed over everything, from their house to the office. Júbilo got his job back at the Telegraph Office, but it wasn’t the same anymore. Something bad had happened there, and Lucha had kept it a secret.

  “WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL me this before? Why did you keep it to yourself for so long?”

  The sound of the telegraph transmitter’s ceaseless tapping filled the room. Júbilo moved his fingers swiftly, but he received no answer. His blindness prevented him from realizing that it had grown dark and that Lucha couldn’t read the computer screen anymore to see what he was “saying.”

  Then Lucha stood up from her chair and ran to the bedroom door. Opening it, she shouted at the top of her voice:

  “Ambar! Please come here!”

  Lluvia came running, alarmed by her mother’s shouts and thinking that her father’s condition had taken a turn for the worse, but when she entered the room she saw what the emergency was, and immediately set about rectifying the situation.

  “What is your father saying?”

  “He says…it was his duty to take care of you and to fill your life with laughter, and he couldn’t do it…he asks you to forgive him for having failed you. His only aim was to love you. He understands he didn’t always know how, but you have always been, and will always be, the person he has loved most.”

  That isn’t what don Júbilo had signaled at all, but he loved hearing his daughter interpret his words in that way. He made a sign of complicity and gave a deep sigh. Finally Lluvia had dared to give voice to what she desired more than anything. Lluvia understood this. And she knew that she hadn’t made it up; she was convinced that she was simply repeating the words she had heard so long ago, while she was waiting in her mother’s womb for the best moment to be born. When Lluvia had interpreted her father’s words she had merely been faithful to the voice that had echoed through the corners of their house for so long without ever daring to make itself heard.

  When Lluvia saw that her mother’s eyes had taken on an unusual shine, she knew her interpretation had been right. She had managed to unearth emotions that had remained buried beneath pride and aloofness for such a long time. Lluvia was about to discover a new side to her mother. At first, she had been surprised by the look of pain on her mother’s face when she first saw how sick Júbilo was. She had never imagined her mother could feel so much on his behalf. And now as her mother’s eyes glistened with love, Lluvia felt as if she had made a discovery much more important than that made by the archaeologist who found Coyolxauhqui. All these years, beneath layer upon layer of coldness, her mother had kept hidden a loving gaze that could melt anyone’s heart! The shine in her eyes came from the deepest recesses of her heart. It was unbelievable that it could have gone unnoticed. Lluvia had assumed that her parents hadn’t communicated at all for a long time, but now she became aware of her error.

  She reflected on how in 1842 Samuel Morse had discovered that cables weren’t necessary for transmitting messages and that wireless telegraph communication was possible, since electric currents traveled just as swiftly without cables as with them. He made that discovery one day when he saw a boat on a river accidentally cutting through an underwater cable: he realized that this didn’t interrupt the message that was in the process of being transmitted.

  Similarly, as Lluvia witnessed the way her mother’s hand rested on her father’s without a word passing between them, it proved to her that inside the resonating matrix that makes up the cosmos, the transmission of ene
rgy occurs on a permanent basis. She wondered whether this invisible and intangible communication had always existed between her parents, and whether she was only just realizing it now that she had discovered she had a wonderful facility for perceiving it.

  Curiously, don Júbilo’s illness, which brought so much suffering with it, was what allowed Lluvia to discover that her parents’ bond had been unbroken since her birth. She would love to have known this when she was younger. What serenity it would have brought her childhood to realize that although communication between her parents seemed to be broken down, in fact energy continued to circulate from one to the other. Even though the lines were down, their love kept traveling as swift as their desire! She only needed to look at her parents’ intertwined hands to understand so many things. Her mother’s rage, her constant frustration at not being able to kiss and embrace her husband as she wanted, the way she directed her anger at her children instead of at him. Her father’s yearning, the way he sought out music and turned it into a substitute for Lucha’s caresses. In a second it all made sense to her. How she would have liked to understand much earlier, but everything happens in its own time and there is no way to speed things up to one’s liking. For example, it took don Júbilo his whole life to rebuild the bridge that had been broken. He finally managed it a mere moment before dying, and he left the world in peace.

  He spent most of his final day in a coma, unable to use his telegraph transmitter. He had waited for Lucha to visit him before he died. Lluvia was convinced that the light in her mother’s eyes would illuminate her father’s way in his travels beyond this world. They said good-bye without speaking, but with much love.

  THERE IS NOTHING LIKE popular wisdom. There are so many sayings that ring so tremendously true, and yet their full meaning isn’t really felt until one experiences them firsthand. I have often repeated the saying “You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” but it wasn’t until my father died that I understood what these words really meant. His absence is immeasurable. There is no way to explain it, to quantify how alone I now feel. The only thing that is clear to me is that I am not the same anymore. I will never again be don Júbilo’s daughter. I will never again feel like a protected child. I will never again know the reassurance that there is a man in this world who will always give me his unconditional support, no matter what.

  It is difficult for me to conceive of a world without my papá. He was always by my side, in good times and bad. When I was sick, my papá was there. When I was upset, my papá was there. During celebrations and holidays, my papá was there. During school vacations, my papá was there. Always smiling, always attentive, always ready to help me, whether it was to take my children to school, to crack walnuts for chiles en nogada, or to accompany me to the flea market at Lagunilla. Whatever it was, from the moment he opened his eyes until he shut them for the last time, my papá was always there for me.

  I know it’s selfish to think this way. The life my papá led in his last months was no life at all. He suffered so much. He hated depending on others. His death was really a blessing, and that it happened the way it did. Surrounded by love, with all the people who loved him so much at his side, in his own bed and not in some cold hospital. The only thing that still pains me is that I didn’t manage to take him to see his beloved K’ak’nab again, the beach at Progreso, where he first learned to swim. We had planned the trip, but he was never well enough to let us make it. At least he was able to say good-bye to the sun. The morning he died, he asked me to put him in front of the open window to greet it one last time. He fell into a coma and that afternoon he died. Following his final instructions, we dressed him in his white linen suit, the one he wore when he danced danzón with my mamá. And then we brought him to the funeral home.

  It was a cloudy afternoon; the sun never made an appearance, but my mother arrived wearing dark glasses. It was obvious she was wearing them to hide her eyes, which were swollen from so much crying. It didn’t surprise me at all. I could identify with her pain. What did surprise me was that she called me by my real name. As we began to walk through the cemetery, my mother took me firmly by the arm and said, “Don’t let go of me, Lluvia.” She seemed so vulnerable and small! I imagined how lonely she must feel to have lost for the second time the man who had been her husband.

  When we returned home from the cemetery, after tearful good-byes with Lolita, don Chucho, Nati, and Aurorita, I closed the door to the room that had been my father’s and didn’t open it again for a week. I couldn’t bear to see his empty bed, his silent radio, his still telegraph, his empty chair, all desolate and abandoned. But after seven days had passed, the need to feel my father’s presence drew me back into his room and made me sit in his chair. The room still held his scent, and the arms of the upholstered chair still retained his warmth, but he was no longer there. I would never again hear his footsteps, the sound of which had always brought me such peace. From the time I was a little girl, as soon as I heard him come home, I would know everything was going to be all right, that any problem would be lessened just by his presence. Now that was all gone. I thought about the overwhelming experience of watching him die, of being at his side the moment he departed. I had thought I was well prepared for facing his death, but I was wrong. One is never prepared. The mysteries of life and death are too powerful. No mind can fully embrace them. It is very difficult to understand what occurs in the third dimension. We only know that the deceased are no longer here, that they have gone and left us alone. Anyone who has seen a lifeless body knows what I am talking about.

  Seeing my father’s stiff body lying on his bed reminded me of the horrible feeling I had experienced one day as a child, when I saw a marionette hanging from a nail, after a puppet show. A few moments earlier I had seen it speak, dance, walk, and suddenly there it was, immobile, empty; it had lost its soul, had stopped being a character and become just a piece of painted wood. The difference between the marionette and my papá was that the puppet could come back to life in the hands of the puppet master, but my father couldn’t. That body would never again speak, move, laugh, walk. That body was dead, and I now had to sort out his possessions.

  I preferred to deal with it right away to avoid prolonging my mourning. I opened his drawers and began to fold his clothes, to organize his records and his books. I set aside his records by Virginia López and Los Panchos for myself. Then I discovered a small box that obviously held his keepsakes. I opened it slowly, out of respect. Inside I found a photograph of my mother when she was about fifteen. An oval picture of me from elementary school. A photo of my children, and one of my brother. A small envelope containing a curl of baby hair and a note in my father’s handwriting that said, “memento of my beloved Ramiro.” A small notebook with notations of significant Mayan dates, and a detailed drawing of a Mayan stela. A guitar pick and a matchbox. When I opened it, I discovered my first tooth, with a note by my father recording the date it had fallen out.

  That day instantly came back to me. My papá had taken me to my bed and helped me put the tooth under my pillow for the mouse to come and take away.

  “What’s going to happen to my tooth, papá?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry, m’hijita, the mouse will come and take it away, but in its place he’ll leave you some money,” he replied.

  “I already know that,” I insisted, “but later, what’s going to happen to my tooth?”

  “Later?”

  “Yes, once the mouse has it.”

  “Oh! Well, he’s going to keep it in a little box with the rest of his most treasured possessions.”

  “No, papi, you don’t understand. I want to know what’s going to happen to my tooth. Is it going to fall apart?”

  “Well…yes, but not for many, many years—it will eventually turn into dust—but don’t worry about that now, you just go to sleep, my Chipi-chipi.”

  MY FATHER WAS RIGHT. The “mouse” kept my tooth with the rest of his most treasured possessions, and although it was sti
ll in good condition, it is going to end up turning into dust, but not for many, many years. Maybe I will never see it. But these thoughts helped me to overcome my pain. I stayed there for a while thinking about the dust. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Everything that lives ends up as dust. We walk amid dust from butterfly wings, flowers, stars, rocks. We breathe the dust of fingernails, hair, lungs, hearts. Each minuscule particle of dust carries with it traces of memories, nights of love. And at that moment, dust stopped being a symbol of accumulated solitude for me, and became just the opposite. Millions and millions of presences of beings that have lived on Earth are in that dust. Floating there are the remains of Quetzalcóatl, Buddha, Gandhi, Christ.

  In that dust were mingled bits of skin my papá had left behind, little pieces of his fingernails, his hair. They were spread over the whole city, over the pueblos he had traveled through with my mother, over my whole house.

  Not only that, but my father lived on in my body, in that of my brother, my children, my nieces and nephews. His legacy, both physical and emotional, was present in all of us. In our minds, in our memories, in the way we lived, laughed, spoke, walked. Pondering on this during the funeral, it allowed me to go over and give my brother a heartfelt hug, something I hadn’t done in many years. And it allowed me to reconcile myself with life.