by Ana Menéndez
“I had no idea they would grow out of control like that,” he said.
Matilde was quiet.
“They’ll be here any minute,” he said again. “We’ll have to order out or something. Matilde?”
All these years, what had she been waiting for? Oh Raúl. She looked at her husband and when he looked away she felt the years peel back.
“There was an old photograph from our wedding,” Matilde began. She stopped, unsure of what to say next, unsure if she should say anything at all. “I don’t know if you remember it.”
Raúl squinted his eyes. “Our wedding! What in God’s name?”
“Maybe you don’t remember it,” she continued. “It’s quite possible you never saw it.”
She waited to catch his expression. Yes, she would tell it.
“You were standing under a chandelier,” she said. “I remember it was a chandelier because the photographer caught one comer of it. Do you remember the old chandeliers at El Nacional? You were standing under one of them, the band in the background. You liked the band. You picked them yourself.”
“I did not pick them,” Raúl said. “Your father picked them. The singer was a friend of his.”
“This is my favorite photograph,” Matilde continued, “because in it, for all time, is Adriana Monterrey leaning over you, her black hair spilling across your shoulder like a Spanish shawl.”
Raúl frowned and wrapped his arms around his stomach.
“Do you remember Adriana, Raúl? Oh, she was very beautiful. You must remember her. In this photograph, she was kissing you on the cheek. Of course, in friendship. But the camera caught the stars in your eyes. I’ve never seen you as happy since. That smile!”
Matilde let out a long laugh. “Oh, I fell in love with that smile again, Raúl.”
She took a deep breath.
Raúl looked to the window. After a moment he turned.
“Matilde.” He put his hands in his pockets and began again, as if he’d changed his mind about something. Finally he sighed. “I haven’t thought about her in years. She died, you know. Still in Cuba.” He stopped. “Ah, well.”
Matilde ran her finger along the edge of her coffee cup. She was grateful for the way he held his hands, like a package, small and round in his lap. But suddenly he stood, shaking himself as she’d seen him do to scare away creeping slumber.
“Really, Matilde. What does it matter now,” he said. “I don’t know why you should be upset about a photograph when it meant nothing.”
He turned to her, a face she had never seen.
“Is that what this is all about?” he said. “Some silly photograph?”
Matilde took a deep breath. Where was the center? What did Adriana matter now? Raúl’s women, the late nights, the vacant phone calls? She looked at her husband, so round and soft. She remembered thinking, on their wedding day, that one day she would understand him. Child dreams. We live alone in our own core, flitting over the surface now and then, pretending. Like Meegan, who would never know if Anselmo would be hers alone in his thoughts, in that world that was made up of memories and old desires.
“Everything was going away from me again,” Matilde finally said.
The night was coming in through the window and the kitchen had gone gray. Matilde stood. She began a slow walk around the kitchen, her hands clasped behind her back.
“All these years …” Raúl said to her back.
Matilde stopped at a pie and dipped her fingers into the cream. Then she brushed away a crumb from a blanket of banana icing. She settled finally on the prettiest banana cream pie, one with perfect meringue roses, petals lightly tipped in brown. She cradled the pie in her hands.
“Isn’t this beautiful?” she said.
“What are we going to do with all this stuff? They’ll be here any minute.”
Matilde lay the pie in front of Raúl and placed a fork down next to it. Then she stood back.
Raúl looked from the pie to Matilde.
“What?” He stopped and cocked his head. Then they both turned. A low car engine sounded in the distance. Matilde felt her heart in her ears. She waited for the play of soft tires on the driveway.
From the side window, the headlights suddenly swung into the kitchen, casting shadows that raced across the counters, over the pies and pots, before finally settling on Raúl.
“It’s them!” he said. The lights caught him in the face and he stood with the fork in his hand, not blinking. When the lights clicked off and the kitchen fell away into shadow again, Matilde’s heart slowed. She heard the low murmur and then the laughter of the lovers approaching the front door.
Before they could ring the bell, Matilde turned to Raúl.
“Please eat,” she said. “I made it just for you.”
Why We Left
You sit on the floor sorting nickels and dimes into straight little piles when I walk in. You look up and let one nickel drop. The pile collapses sideways, as if reacting to bad news. You straighten it. I close the door behind me, watch that it doesn’t slam. You bend your head and go on sorting, making meaningful metal villages out of your odd change.
It is November in a city neither of us like. The house is never warm and our bodies are wrong for the weather. It is snowing and I still carry a summer memory of hyacinth and rain, Miami dressed for a storm. Here, the cold creeps in unawares until we shiver from the inside. The landlord can do nothing. We stuff socks under the doors. We leave the oven open.
One night, the snow falls hard. It piles on one side of the house like a hand pushing against the foundation. I say the house is listing. You say that is preposterous. I say the move was your idea.
Do you remember how you quoted Yeats on our first date and sent me away with a handshake? I read Yeats all that night and into the next day. I unhooked the phone. I didn’t sleep for a week. My brown hair fell out and fine red strands grew in its place. I looked like a sister of yours. My dark skin sank into itself, leaving freckles where it entered the bone. The phone rang as soon as I plugged it in. It was you. I was saying the center cannot hold. You asked me to marry you.
I make lists. Ocean Drive in the morning. The drive west at the end of the day. The color of rain. The breezes that wait for the storm. The green sliver of palm blades cutting open the sky.
I leave them in your drawers. I roll them into your socks. I hear Miami breathing when I shake out the wash.
The less you say, the more I write: elephant grass, manatee swamps, that restaurant on Eighth Street afloat in mirrors like the sea.
When I was younger and looking for sorrows, I used to lie awake, jealous of your old lovers. You told me once you didn’t love any of them. And instead of bringing me comfort, the knowledge gripped my throat with winter fingers. So I made up names to love them by. American ones. Brenda. Monica. Christine. Names that could have been mine. Alessandra. Maria. Continental ones like you: Olivia. Portia. I watched you caress Simone by the Seine. The icy breath coming off the water, wrapping you both. You walked crouched against the wind in your thin jackets and tried to disregard the weather. The water flowed black, matching you step for step. The bare trees silhouetted against that dark blue sky. Constellations sinking dizzy behind the solid branches. You walked all night until the world went white along the distant edges and you put your hand flat against the hollow of her back and you bent down and kissed her and were happy.
But all that was before, when sorrow was something I went searching for.
One December night, I come home late, my face wet with melted snow. I tell you I’ve found a forest where hibiscus bloom from the slender limbs of birches. I say the snow shrinks from them as if they were on fire. I say I found the incandescent grove outside of town, all heat and color. I’d been lost, on an unfamiliar route, and I had stopped to watch the sky, already darkening to that northern shade of blue that is like night slowly remembering itself. I stopped, unable to go on. I could not go on. And there by the side of the road the birches grew, thin needle
s that threaded the stars, pink hibiscus clinging to them in the cold.
It was not so long ago. We lived in a warm house full of insects. You said we mustn’t kill them. And more insects came, our home a sanctuary. They crawled into the night, left their sticky footprints on the walls. They had families in the heat. Our house full of insect children. They rained down on us from the pink chandelier in the bedroom and left us giggling in smaller and smaller voices until dawn came and we found ourselves spent, wrapped in each other’s sweat.
By February your piles of change reach the ceiling, metal columns that keep the roof from caving in. You count in your sleep. You put pennies in your breakfast cereal. We walk through the icy house wrapped in our separate blankets. You stop eating and count dimes by firelight. I say I’ve been living for the last two months in a forest of flaming trees. I tell you how the ground in the forest is covered with wet green leaves and slender twigs as if it were late summer, and the air is fat with the song of cicadas.
In a clearing, apart from the others, grows a tree whose blue leaves cover it to the ground like a shroud. Each time the wind blows, it shivers and drops one leaf to the ground. At night, when all the other trees are quiet and the wind is quiet, the fallen leaves glow blue like the hottest part of a flame.
In January I notice you stop counting. A copper flank of Lincolns is caught mid-march around the tan leather couch. Washingtons stare dumbly from the glass coffee table. You look up when I walk in. I shake the snow out of my hat and ask why you’ve stopped counting. You hold your arms out and ask me where I’ve been.
I say I’ve been walking in the forest where blue leaves glow and hibiscus cling to the limbs of birches. In the forest there is a tree with thick roots that come up through the earth and a thick short trunk. It is the kind of tree that stays close to the ground so that it isn’t buffeted by strong winds. But from its base, like stepchildren, grow green branches in every direction, wild with leaves of every color. When they fall, the sun shines through them and they become white as air. It is almost as if they disappear in the light. I tell you they remind me of old letters, lost thoughts. I say each pale leaf must be heavy as a book.
You look at me for a long time. And then you pick a dime from the top of a pile and put it in your pocket. I say don’t do that. You say you have to and pull me close. I put my head on your chest and feel it rise and fall. When I look up, silver reflects in your eyes like rain.
I say, Do you remember why we left?
It was May. You had come in late from work, you’d just made partner, wanted to save everything for him. I was sitting alone in the living room, the room dark, the flowers you’d sent collecting light from the street. I looked up, my face in the shadows. You didn’t say anything. Did you already know? You knelt beside me. I told you how I used to go looking for sorrow, how I wanted to find reasons to be sad. And now. And now. Even the flowers pulled away from me as if they were ashamed of yesterday’s innocence. The light from the street blinked slowly. We sat in the dark. Your hand was warm and alive in mine and when you took it away, I began to scream as if I were alone in a valley, lost, with night coming on. Your fault, I screamed. If you weren’t working all the time. If I weren’t so lonely.
I watched you walk out and the way your head hung low made me close my eyes with shame. I heard your car start through the open door. I stood and walked and after a moment I found myself outside the room we had painted that winter. I thought I would tear at the walls until my fingers bled. I imagined the walls covered in our blood. Instead I stood outside and talked to him about us. Things you would never really tell a son, about lost nights with your head in my arms, your breath still in my hair; about the way your fingers curled in sleep like a baby’s.
I waited for him to respond.
But it was May in that tropical home, walls alive with insects. I sat outside the door and all that came back was their buzzing.
I come in from the snow. My arms ache and my fingers are blue beneath my nails.
I tell you how today I stood in the forest beneath an ancient palm and she told me things she’d never said. How at night, when all the other trees are asleep, she sweats long tears from her leaves. How her old roots are numb where they grip the stone and how she longs to lift them out, lie down in the wet leaves of the forest. I stood next to the palm and felt my feet sink into the earth, afraid to move and rustle the palm’s brittle blades. I stood for a long time, listening to her sing an old song of hers. When the afternoon flared just before sunset, she told me of a tree that grows straight and slender, with two branches that lift up from the trunk like two grateful arms.
“She stands taller than the rest,” the palm said, “and everyone hates her because her uppermost leaves are green with happiness.”
And then she went on singing, long tears falling like notes.
You grab my hands tight. Your hands are warm. You shake me.
Flowers don’t bloom in winter. They don’t resemble old books. Palms do not sweat long tears. They cannot, even in the deepest sadness, pull themselves out of the earth.
I say, Why did we leave? What was the reason we left? I beg you to come to the forest with me. Just to see. The forest doesn’t exist, you say. You let go my hands. There is no such thing.
I say the pain in me was like windows breaking. I say we wrote all our dreams in glass.
You say, We lost a baby. That is why we left. Our baby is gone. You say it as if it were something that you read in a book. As if you could never believe that the leaves that fall in the forest glow blue at night, that hibiscus can grow in the snow, that palm trees remember. You pretend you don’t know that our baby lived within me. When I felt him turn, it was like that first touch in the dark, like a single caress you remember for years.
We packed everything, moved west like in the movies. Even after all these months you still believe that leaving is a form of reverence. That your memory could make of the past something sacred.
On the last night of the winter, I stand naked in the forest, under the ancient palm who knows me by name. She watches as the years fly away from me. She does not speak and the forest is quiet. In the morning, she whispers, Listen, the sound of loss. I stand still, wanting to hear above the silence. A bird calls in the distance. The wind sings a song of insects in the leaves. The palm lets a leaf drop like a tear and says, You hear the forgotten lyrics, the undelivered messages?
And then the sound is all around me, like falling in love again, like children singing. I want to lie in the warm shade of the palm and let her song cover me like the ground of the forest. Listen, she says. She bends her green leaves down to caress me and her song is slow and long. It holds everything I thought I had forgotten and I want to cry out, hold her to my chest. I hear the wind like falling leaves, the song of old days. I hear the colors of Miami, more real than when we lived there, the ocean like a giant trumpet swelling.
I want to close my eyes and listen, sleep inside the palm’s song.
I want to sing with our son, follow his voice to where he lies. His voice, pale as leaves that fall in sunlight.
Instead, past the melody, it is your voice I hear. Soft and distant first and then sharp, insistent. You are shaking me, shouting in my ear: You mustn’t lie down here. It’s not safe. Your fingers are cold and stiff. Wake up, you are saying. Wake up.
I want to put my hand in yours. Whisper that the forest is beautiful in winter. Have you seen the hibiscus? Do you believe me now?
You are picking me up in your arms.
Listen, I say. Why did you stop counting coins at night?
You bring your lips close. You can’t sleep here, you say.
Lie with me in the forest, I say. Just a little while.
You shake me again. Wipe my lips with your hands. In Miami, we lived in a warm house full of insects, you say.
The song grows confused. Did you see the hibiscus? And then I feel your breath, hot and wet in my lungs.
From far away, the sound of insec
ts buzzing. It is so beautiful that I begin to weep in your voice, your breath leaving me in bursts of song.
Wake up, you say.
Shh, I say, and put a finger to your lips. Don’t cry.
Story of a Parrot
Hortencia de la Cruz was an imposing, beautiful woman who, like many women of her generation and temperament, blamed her unlucky circumstances on her husband, a writer whom she thought a failure and a fraud. As a girl she had wanted to be an actress. But her parents—who were members of the Vedado Tennis Club and had to consider how such things were regarded—sent a man to pull her out of the audition line one brilliant Sunday morning and lock her in the house until the silly notion passed. She never forgot that she would have been great but for this indignity and for the rest of her life looked back on it as the tragic heartbreak that true artists must endure. To console herself, she married the first man who told her he loved her. He was neither rich nor educated and for a time they were supported by Hortencia’s parents in a Miramar house full of windows. Almost adequate compensation, Hortencia thought, for all the trouble they had caused her.
Hortencia and Felipe never had children, and after the revolution they settled in Miami along with everyone else she knew. By then, the love-glow of revenge had faded and Felipe’s malnourished frame and rough manners only incensed Hortencia. Her parents’ money evaporated along with the rest of their world and Hortencia and Felipe were forced into a small house in Sweetwater. There they lived in much-reduced circumstances that every day reminded Hortencia of the crooked turns her life had taken.
One day, as her sixtieth birthday approached, a bird flew into the house through a door Hortencia had left open. It was a magnificent bird, done up in green and yellow with a beak shiny and black as a sapodilla seed. The bird flew straight to the living room, where it immediately began to amuse itself by flapping its feathers as it hovered inches from the ceiling. Felipe ran in from the kitchen just as Hortencia leapt from her lounger. Standing together in the living room and staring up, Felipe and Hortencia said at the same time, “Cotorra.” Miami had lately been overrun by wild parrots, descendants of freed pets. Felipe had read about it in the local paper and shown the article to Hortencia, saying it might make a good story. It sat now in a pile of articles behind the drinking glasses, part of the small fraternity of ideas that Felipe promised he’d get to one day.
