“When do you leave for the airport.”
“Not for an hour, Dad.”
The mixture of fear and anxiety in Dad’s voice is like a cloud of electric needles thrown out into the atmosphere. His emotions make it difficult for me to think. Why does he have to control everyone? Has he no generosity?
“One last sip of your protein drink,” urges Frieda.
“Your mother must rest.”
Indeed, my dear, there will be ample time to rest when I die.
“Dad, please let me talk to Mom alone.”
Aaron glares at Rosa, on fire with rage.
There is an enormous blockage in my throat. As in my dreams, as in my childhood, my muscles are paralyzed. They are all three looking at me, waiting for me. I am in a desert. I cannot move or speak.
Rosa strokes my face.
Gathering my strength as if I’m lifting an enormous weight, I say, “Aaron, do let us be alone for a while. Could you pick up some bath oil for me at the drugstore? Frieda can go home for the evening.”
He doesn’t move. Just stares at both of us.
“Dad please!”
“Please, Aaron!”
“Frieda must stay,” he says.
“I’ll go into the living room,” volunteers Frieda. “I can do some mending.”
Furious, he leaves. I hear him carefully lock the dead bolt of the apartment door. Faint sounds come from the television in the living room, where I hope Frieda is resting her tired feet on a bolster.
Alone at last with Rosa I gaze off to avoid the intensity of her eyes.
“What did you want to tell me?” Her face is flushed. The room is overheated, as city apartments tend to be. Steam hisses from the radiator.
Rosa’s touch is warm as she strokes my fingers.
I’m so tired now I can barely keep my eyes open, although this is the chance we’ve been waiting for.
“I’m sorry about Antonio.”
Her throat tightens. She seems on the verge of tears, my daughter.
“What is love?” Rosa muses, much as she did long ago.
Then she adds after a moment, “Mom, I understand you better now that I’ve been raising Isabel. When I make terrible mistakes, I understand how you must have felt. I understand about needing something you didn’t get from anyone else.”
Stoic Isabel. Sweet Isabel. Sticks me subtly now with verbal needles, as Eleanor does. She learned from her Grandma. The point is finer and doesn’t go as deep, but the pattern was imprinted on the child at an impressionable age. Disparage Rosa. She’s a fool. Even though I adore my Mommy, Grandma thinks she’s a fool. And I love Grandma, too, even when I defend Mommy against her attacks. Grandma disparages her.
“No, Mommy is wonderful,” Isabel cries. But the child remembers, and the woman Isabel wounds me in the style she learned from her Grandma.
“He called me the other day. Aaron forbade me to speak to him ever again. He could be diabolic.”
Rosa stiffens. “Dad is the one who’s diabolic. More than Antonio. Only he hides it better.”
“Forgive me,” I murmur. “He cast a spell over me. You must forgive and forget, my dear.”
“That takes time.”
I see from her face that she only partly understands. Perhaps after I’m dead and years pass, she will understand more. Can one communicate from beyond the grave?
“Can you forgive me, too, Mother? I treated you so badly.”
“The fault was on both sides, my dear.”
We are both silent for a while.
“Life is so difficult now,” I murmur. “It used to be much simpler when men and women didn’t make love until they were married. Often men will not commit themselves. I fear for Isabel.”
“I’m sure she’ll be all right,” snaps Rosa. “I’ve raised her as a liberated person! To be assertive. She’s not ever going to be a victim!” Her eyes blaze with anger.
“I don’t know, my dear …” I wish I could quench my fears about Isabel’s future.
“We have only a little time left,” Rosa says, glancing at her watch. “Isabel will be fine,” she says, bristling.
Rosa, I want you to stay. Oh, I wish I hadn’t spoken about Isabel and my fear.
Rosa is too protective a mother even to listen to these thoughts. I want you so badly, Rosa, to be with me when I die. But I cannot say this. It echoes inside me. I fear you’re fleeing now because you can’t bear to be around me, and you’re upset with what I said about Isabel. If only I could swallow my words!
When you’re with me, you say you lose your identity. Can’t you sacrifice it for a little while?
If only you could cancel your plane, your life on the West Coast. If only we could work things out. I need to work things out with Jesse, too. Only with Howard do I feel at peace.
What if I were to insist on staying until she dies? But her voice sets all my nerves on edge. Although I know I’ll never see her again, I’m starting to feel crazy around her.
And I must get back to my new job. To Isabel, who’s staying with a friend.
Poor woman. She loves me. She did the best she could.
Mom, I want our last moments together to be good. If I stay, I’m afraid I’ll crack and start screaming at you.
“Would you like a foot massage?”
“Yes,” I say. “That would be very nice, my dear.”
She has never done this before.
Rosa takes hold of one foot at a time underneath the blankets at the end of the bed, and she massages and kneads. I wonder where she learned this. I feel currents flowing from her blood through my body, soft as velvet. I sink and start to doze off.
The apartment door opens. I hear Aaron’s restless footsteps. He talks in a low tone to Frieda in the kitchen, then comes into the bedroom and addresses Rosa.
“Your taxi will be here soon. I’ll go down in the elevator with you.”
Rosa brushes against the silk of my bed jacket. The pain in my bowels flares. So much is still unresolved between us. “Mother, don’t cry.” Her lips brush my cheek. She clasps me in her arms. The tears in her eyes are like the first drops of the melting of a glacier.
I close my eyes because I can’t bear to watch her leave the room.
Was all this written in the stars before our births?
There is something I must understand before I die. I almost do, but it eludes me. It is almost within reach, like an orgasm almost grasped, but then the waves recede.
Will there be an end to this loneliness? Or will I merely lose consciousness? “To sleep, perchance to dream, ah there’s the rub.”
My presences murmur of light and of much more love than I have known on earth.
Antonio, will you join me one day?
Mother, Father, Frank, will I join you?
I am skating … gliding … flying with Antonio and Frank.
Perhaps all three of us will be reborn as brothers and sisters in a troupe of circus acrobats. Perhaps Rosa and I will be lovers or intimate friends.
Rosa, if only I could tell you my stories. Perhaps you could write them down. You are the worker. Can you sense them? Can I convey them somehow without words?
There’s so much I wanted to say. I want to tell you about my brothers, about my early life which was wonderful, rich, both sad and happy … so much I haven’t said, so much for which I lack the words, so many rich perceptions, thoughts, feelings. Now it’s too late. Rosa, perhaps you’ll write for me. You will write differently than me. You will not write my book. No one can. It’s too late now.
Childhood memories flood me. The smell of grass in summer. Jewelweed. Magic Japanese gardens which unfold from bits of paper in a glass bowl filled with water. Mountains in Switzerland. My first party dress of dark blue velvet edged with lace.
There is something I must complete. Many things like fine threads pulling at me before I die.
Memories of childhood. Yellow flowers. My brothers. The jewel weed.
There’s so much I want to say to you,
Rosa.
I wish your life could have been easier. I wish I could have nurtured all my children more. I wish something in me had been completed through writing or love or perhaps communion with God. Our relationship was a constant thorn in my spirit. For many years I ignored your pain and mine, hardened myself against you.
I make a grocery list and a guest list for a party I fear I’m too weak to give.
Olives, cream cheese, black caviar, shad roe, Brennan’s water wafers, cocktail napkins, Cutty Sark, Amontillado, soda water, lemons, Brie, radishes, and Prosciutto … all foods I cannot swallow.
I’ll invite Heinrich if he’s well enough to come. Erica, too, of course. I want Melanie, the nice couple downstairs, and Margaret … a dozen others … If only I could think of their names. My pen wavers. This small effort has exhausted me.
Soon I will melt into my dreams.
“Sleep,” murmurs Frieda. “I gave you two Darvons. You go to sleep now.”
Frank, with his disarming grin. Mother in her dark dress with spangles. Father smiles and tips his hat to me from an ethereal Chevrolet convertible, bright yellow. Day by day they’re drawing me into the light. Very soon now I’ll join them.
“Play some Mozart chamber music,” I say to Aaron.
He turns on the stereo. The music, so beautiful, soothes me. Mozart understood about life and death. It’s all there in the clarity of the melody. Shaded lights give the rose colored walls and satin drapes a beautiful glow. Aaron puts his arms around me. His breath blows on my neck.
Afterword
This story exists in a terrain between fact and fiction, love and rage. It is a kaddish, or lament, a final ritual of passage for my mother, Maxine Cronbach. It covers a span of nearly 70 years, during which the culture has drastically changed. Nevertheless, the world in which she grew up continues to resonate.
The poems at the beginning of different sections are my mother’s and marked with the initials she used, “MSC.” When she died, following her request I gathered her writings, some of which had been published in high school or college periodicals, some of which were typed, and some of which were merely scribbled out in pencil on bis of paper or the backs of envelopes, barely legible.
I was moved by the vulnerability, the shifts, the gradual stripping away of illusions in her life. But there was anger inside her that she never faced, even at the end. She and I never did resolve our differences. This story is an attempt to do so. Jean Cocteau wrote something to the effect that each reader reads into a work what lies in his or her own consciousness. I leave the story for you, the reader, to interpret, and hope it may touch a chord of understanding.
– María Espinosa
About the Author
Born Paula Cronbach in 1939 to a family of German Jews with hidden Sephardic origins, María Espinosa’s mother’s family lived in Spain until the 18th century. They concealed their Jewish identity until the family finally made their way to Brussels, where they could openly practice their religion. From there they moved to Eastern Europe, and finally to the United States.
Espinosa grew up in Long Island, the child of a sculptor father and a poet mother. She attended Harvard and Columbia Universities and received a MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She met and married her first husband, Chilean writer Mario Espinosa Wellmann while living in Paris. In 1978 she married Walter Selig, who had fled Nazi Germany as a child to grow up on an Israeli kibbutz.
Espinosa has taught at New College of California and City College of San Franciso. She is the author of three prior novels, Longing (Arte Público Press, 1995) and Dark Plums (Arte Público Press, 1995), and Incognito: The Journey of a Secret Jew (Wings Press, 2002), Longing received the American Book Award in 1996, and has been translated into Greek. Espinosa is also the author of two books of poetry, Night Music and Love Feelings. She translated George Sand’s novel, Lélia, which was published by the Indiana University Press.
Espinosa’s poetry, articles, translations, and short fiction have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals, including Anthologies of Underground Poetry, edited by Herman Berlandt, In other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States, edited by Roberta Fernández, and George Sand’s Ma Vie, edited by Thelma Jurgrau. An interesting midnight interview with the Israeli writer, Amos Oz, appeared in Three Penny Review.
For more complete biographical information, go to:
www.wingspress.com or www.mariaespinosa.com
WINGS PRESS
Colophon
This first edition of Dying Unfinished, by María Espinosa, has been printed on 70 pound paper containing fifty percent recycled fiber. Titles have been set in Papyrus type, the text is in Adobe Caslon type. All Wings Press books are designed and produced by Bryce Milligan.
Wings Press was founded in 1975 by Joanie Whitebird and Joseph F. Lomax, both deceased, as “an informal association of artists and cultural mythologists dedicated to the preservation of the literature of the nation of Texas.” The publisher/editor since 1995, Bryce Milligan is honored to carry on and expand that mission to include the finest in American writing, without commercial considerations clouding the choice to publish or not to publish. Wings Press attempts to produce multicultural books, chapbooks, CDs, DVDs and broadsides that, we hope, enlighten the human spirit and enliven the mind. We at Wings know well that writing is a transformational art form capable of changing the world, primarily by allowing us to glimpse something of each other’s souls. Good writing is innovative, insightful, and interesting. But most of all it is honest.
Wings Press
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Wings Press titles are distributed by the Independent Publishers Group
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Critical Praise for María Espinosa’s Dying Unfinished
Some years ago when María Espinosa was still my student, she presented me with a novel, entitled Longing, she had written about her eccentric husband from Chile, Antonio, in the book. The narrative was so alive and convincing, it sounded more like a slice of life, a document. A number of other novels followed, until the present one, Dying Unfinished, which takes up the main characters of Longing, who are now seen from a distance of many years. The first novel was a brave act of defiance because it involved her family. Now most have disappeared, and the present novel is a memorial, a work of devotion towards mother, father, husband, daughter, brothers, and related lovers and friends. It is a tableau of complicated relations in which the mother is the central figure, and Rosa the daughter, still plays the role of observer, narrator, and actor in the story. Once more Espinosa shows her skill in bringing to life and literature her story, in a very unusual family novel. This time it’s not scandal, but the dual points of view of mother and daughter that make it live. My advice to readers is to read them both, to complete this dual tableau which makes fascinating open-ended reading.
– Nanos Valaoritis, author of Pan Daimonium, My Afterlife Guaranteed; editor of An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry
María Espinosa presents the themes of alienation and incompleteness in alternating sequences between Eleanor, an artistic-minded, assimilated Jew from a wealthy but politically progressive family and her equally artistic daughter, Rosa. Eleanor is constantly torn between her desire for her dream of freedom and the structures that confine and define her to the world. … As with the unnamed hustler in John Rechy’s City of Night, Eleanor seeks her essence in a series of anonymous sexual encounters. Sex, the most primal currency of communication, becomes her nexus to the natural world of desire, dreams, and identity. … Dying Unfinished is more than a fascinating portrait of creative souls alienated in a materialistic world; it is a brilliant discourse in the search for the language of silence and otherness with the human soul.
– Rosa Martha Villarreal, author of The Stillness of Love and Exile, Chronicles of Air and Dreams, and Doctor Magdalena
María Espinosa’s Dying Unfinished is not a novel. It is a long poem of great lyrical beauty, a deftly-wri
tten tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, told in the intimate voices of Eleanor and Rosa, a mother once a daughter and a daughter now also a mother. Their stories resonate in the heart of every daughter who seeks her self-realization as an entity separate from her mother, and of every mother who fiercely protects her autonomy from family demands. Carving an identity from damaged tissue, from scars and wounds left us by the most significant and complex relationship in our lives requires analytical and surgical precision but also compassion and the strength of convictions. To confront memory, that merciless, relentless accountant, who always arrives with the books of rancor, regret and sorrow neatly tucked under her arms, demands an enormous amount of courage. Elusive for Eleanor till the end of her days, these are the lessons of the heart Rosa learns, for it isn’t until the fluid connectedness of mind and spirit is restored and the essence of dreams recovered that forgiveness of self and others is possible. Bravo! Gracias, María.
– Lucha Corpi, author of Eulogy for a Brown Angel and Palabras de Mediadía/Noon Words
Maria Espinosa’s daughter and mother yearn for contact - who among us does not! - and the sensation of being consumed is overwhelming. This novel takes the reader into eerie alleys of the heart with language as beautiful as the gardenia, sometimes delicate, sometimes full-bown, always pervasive and alluring.
– Clive Matson, author of Chalcedony’s First Ten Songs and Let the Crazy Child Write
From KIRKUS Reviews:
A lyrical novel that takes place over three generations and that reminds us of the arduousness, and even desolation, of love relationships-between husband and wife, spouse and lover, mother and daughter. The fury at the center of the narrative is embodied in Eleanor Bernstein, whose relationships with her husband Aaron, her daughter Rosa and her countless lovers-both friends and strangers-are equal sources of elation and agony. Espinosa (Incognito: Journey of a Secret Jew, 2002, etc.) knows how to chronicle amatory ambivalence. Eleanor’s relationship to Aaron, a sculptor with an artistic temperament and numerous casual lovers, is emotionally tempestuous though sexually unexciting. Because Eleanor had grown up an imaginative child in a world of privilege, she doesn’t accommodate herself easily to the demands of adulthood and motherhood. For a while, the primary relationship in Eleanor’s life is with Heinrich, a family friend who devolves into a lover. Aaron and Eleanor raise Rosa in a hothouse of pretense and intensity, so much so that Rosa has a breakdown in early adulthood and is diagnosed as schizophrenic. After a tenuous recovery, and against the wishes of both her mother and her psychiatrist, Rosa moves to Paris and takes up with the flamboyant and charismatic Antonio. They get married two weeks before the birth of their daughter, and Eleanor voyages to Paris to witness the birth of her grandchild. But when Rosa is in the hospital awaiting delivery, Antonio first rapes his mother-in-law and then begins an affair with her. Antonio expresses his insight into Eleanor’s character by stating the obvious: that her primary mode of communication is through sex. After the turbulence and frenzy of her many sexual encounters, Eleanor ages, her body succumbing to arthritis and eventually cancer. During this time she grows more reflective and is able to reconcile some of the demands of her body with the realities of physical deterioration. A fierce novel that explores the topography of passion and grace.
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