Ancient, Ancient

by Kiini Ibura Salaam

  WaLiLa is so deep into the conversation she barely notices the new pitch the voices around her have engaged. A different tune is being expressed, and the woman’s motions change immediately. WaLiLa slows down her conversation. The woman opens her mouth, lets out a series of shrieks, and falls to the ground. The drumming lowers to a whisper. The chanting drops to a low rumble. Three people gather around the fallen woman. They clear the charged air around her with palm fronds. An old man stops singing long enough to bark some blessings over the woman’s body and shower her with rum sprayed from the fountain of his lips. The three lift her to her feet. Once on her feet, the woman opens her eyes. They shine like dark moons beneath the rim of her white head-wrap. When her eyes make direct contact with WaLiLa’s, the woman’s identity pops into WaLiLa’s vision center.

  ◊ Elisa Eguitez, 51, 5′4″, 201, Cuban ◊

  Then the woman’s eyes flutter closed. The dark moons are strong, decides WaLiLa. This woman will be my host.

  2.

  After the ceremony, Elisa walks directly to WaLiLa and asks her if she has a place to stay.

  “You can stay with me, m’ija. What I’m offerin ain’t too special. I only have a small place, and I share it with my two sons, but…”

  WaLiLa doesn’t question how Elisa knows she needs lodging. It has been some time since she last spoke this tongue and wants to observe more before she starts stretching sounds through her lips.

  In silence, WaLiLa follows Elisa’s heavy, swaying flesh across a grassy field. Elisa stops at tree and leans over a rusty orange bicycle. She stuffs a bag full of mango and banana into a straw basket rigged to the front of the bike. Behind the seat, attached to the top of the back fender, is a plank of wood. Elisa motions for WaLiLa to sit. WaLiLa hikes up the cloth she had hastily wrapped around her body and sits. If Elisa notices WaLiLa’s shoeless feet, she says nothing. Nor does she comment on the flowers stuck to the soles of WaLiLa’s feet. With a grunt Elisa pushes the bike pedals into forward motion. After a couple of slow, strained pedal rotations, the bike takes flight. WaLiLa’s body jerks back. She spreads her arms and closes her eyes as the cool breeze rushes past her face.

  During the bike ride, Elisa neither asks questions nor offers information. In the absence of chatter, a cotton-soft stillness envelops the bicycle. WaLiLa’s message-center is overcome with surprise. Serenity rarely visits in the presence of human beings. WaLiLa welcomes it as it reminds her of the deep peace of floating in a cocoon surrounded by the dark matter of space.

  The quiet embrace of silence is abruptly broken when Elisa skids to a sudden stop. WaLiLa feels the imbalance instantly and slides to her feet. A thick crowd blocks the sidewalk and the street. Elisa pushes through the crowd with repeated permiso’s. WaLiLa follows. When they finally reach the front of the crowd, Elisa gasps. Her hands spread in shock; the bicycle tilts, then clatters to the ground.

  “Changó!” Elisa whispers.

  “What is?” asks WaLiLa as she feels her skin bend under sharp jabs of burning air. A ferocious being of concentrated heat leaps through the small courtyard in front of them. Its multiple fingers of light dance in the windows and on the roofs of the courtyard’s houses. The crowd is frozen in awe as fear spirals through the air.

  “Changó!” Elisa yells a second time. The terror in her voice shoots over the crowd and bounces against eardrums that had been formed in her womb. Her children rest their buckets of water on the ground and turn to scan the crowd for their mother. When they see Elisa, they run across the courtyard, dodging neighbors, and grab a tight hold of her.

  “I’m sorry, Mamá, the fire cannot be stopped.”

  So this is the great being’s full fury, WaLiLa thinks as she instinctively backs away from the fire. She fixes her vision on the houses again. She watches as the little structures weakly bow and yield before the fire’s will. I have seen tales of your destructive powers, she quickly motions to the fire before returning her focus to the humans next to her. As the boys speak to their mother in soothing tones, WaLiLa examines them.

  ◊ Modesto Alonzo, 24, 6′1″, 160, Cuban ◊

  ◊ Pedro Alonzo, 38, 5′7″, 135, Cuban ◊

  As Pedro’s slight body fills WaLiLa’s vision-center, the Assignment signal blinks immediately. It is the elder, WaLiLa thinks, who must provide the nectar. She crosses her arms and studies his mannerisms as he attempts to quiet his mother’s mumbling. WaLiLa can’t discern if Elisa is mumbling curses or prayers. She looks back to the fiery courtyard, watching as the fire, perhaps bored with toying with human emotions, burns down to a simmer, then finally extinguishes itself.

  3.

  The day after the fire, Elisa, Modesto, Pedro, and WaLiLa stand in front of Elisa’s fire-buckled front door. A smoky scent hovers in the morning air. With worried fingers, WaLiLa twists the hem of the dress Elisa’s sister-in-law loaned her. Smoke is a bad omen.

  Quietly, as if arming herself for battle, Elisa clutches the colorful beads that hang from her neck and begins to pray. Surrounded by the soft light of dawn, she begs for protection and salvation. She asks Obatalá, the ancient, for his wisdom. Observing Elisa’s prayer, WaLiLa sees a world of difference between the tightly-clenched body next to her and the whirling image in white who introduced her to this island. If there is ever a time for bodyspeak, for exalting arms and passionate wrists, WaLiLa thinks, this is the time.

  Elisa’s plum-black lips move mechanically, pushing out prayers without passion. The gravity of her plea is communicated by the tremble of her lower lip. After the prayer, she inhales deeply and lumbers to the door. When she twists the doorknob, the door refuses to budge. Leaning her shoulder against the crumpled piece of wood her front door has become, she uses her heft to force it open.

  The first things to greet her when she crosses the threshold are concrete shards, they crackle underfoot and grind into the floor. She sinks to her knees. Her body tenses as she realizes it is the fifteen-year-old concrete head of Elegua, the watcher, shattered before her. Elisa draws in her breath sharply and wonders if Elegua’s destruction was the result of the fire or the cause of it. She drops a small prayer of apology like a rainshower from the dark clouds of her lips.

  Elisa stands and leads her sons into the house. WaLiLa watches as the blackness of the house swallows their bodies. She does not enter. The sun batiks patterns of heat on her bare neck as it rises in the sky. The scent of dew resting on thick flower petals slowly drips across her face. Her being-center leaps. You have not fueled since your arrival, her message-center notes.

  WaLiLa curses herself for allowing the ceremony to distract her from collecting flowers. When her fuel banks are empty, she will no longer be able to transform human air into a breathable substance. One of the ancestors’ admonitions rushes into her consciousness like a clap of thunder. WaLiLa, she imagines them motioning, you never follow the rules. Upon arrival to Earth, the first order of business is fuel-collecting. But most times motion is not married to my arrival. I come alone, in quiet night. This time I plunged into a dark sea. A dark sea not empty, but full of beings. And they gathered tightly around me. And I swam with them. She pushes her fingers against her lips and wonders how she could have forgotten.

  Her message-center announces that she has five hours of fuel remaining. She slumps into a body sigh. She must separate from Elisa and her sons, locate fuel, and return once she is rejuvenated. WaLiLa approaches the threshold and peers into the dark house. Inside, nothing is left standing. Each of Elisa’s possessions has betrayed her, turned their backs on her ownership, willfully destroying form and usefulness to welcome fire’s full embrace.

  Surrounded by the ravages of her life, an uneasiness settles in Elisa’s bones. She turns her back on the wreckage and clasps her fat hands on top of her head. She walks down the hall and sees the silhouette of WaLiLa’s body swaying in the doorway. She smiles bitterly at the irony of a house guest and no home. She steps to the doorway and stops when her body is a few breaths away from WaLiLa’s. The t
wo bodies mirror each other. With the sunlight radiating behind her, WaLiLa stares into Elisa’s eyes. With the shadows of the house swirling behind her, Elisa gazes back.

  “Have you ever had a fire?” Elisa asks WaLiLa.

  WaLiLa shakes her head no. Hot fingers of light do not exist on her planet. Here on Earth she has been fascinated by the little fires that heat human fuel and light dark spaces, but they are nothing like the fire she experienced last night. Smoke, too, is a stranger to her systems. A toxic intruder, it creeps into the being-center and fans out through the body, triggering malfunctions of thought and action.

  “I can’t…” Elisa starts to speak. She looks up at the sky with a wrinkled brow, then fixes her glance on WaLiLa. “I can’t continue. Would you go in and see if there’s anything salvageable in there?”

  WaLiLa’s belly shoots arrows of warning through her body while her message-center reminds her that Elisa is her bridge to Pedro. Her message-center also reviews the Human Decency Laws, which dictate that by accepting Elisa’s offer of shelter, she has placed herself in Elisa’s debt. Human codes state that WaLiLa owes Elisa gratitude in the form of courtesy or kindness.

  Against her belly’s urgings, she turns and clears a passageway for Elisa to squeeze out of the narrow door frame. They pass each other as WaLiLa enters the house. As the sunlight recedes, she rotates her shoulders back and forth—each two shoulder movements a small prayer engaged to shake off the doom pressing against her scalp.

  In every room she sees nothing but unrecognizable pieces of black. Then she reaches the back of the house. There she finds the only intact door inside the destroyed home. She turns the doorknob, and the door swings open with surprising ease. Two mice scurry out of the room, racing over her feet and disappearing into the ruins. She opens the door wider, and a bird swoops out. The bird is followed by a river of roaches streaming past WaLiLa’s legs. After the roach exodus is complete, she pauses, waiting for more creatures to flee. When none do, she enters the room.

  The room’s air is cool, and it rolls over her silently. She senses that this is Elisa’s room—not her bedroom, but her prayer room. Above, a low white ceiling hangs solid and certain. The walls are plastered with scraps of paper filled with the markings of human speech. The floor is covered with mounds of objects. Each mound is a strange collection of items organized by a theme unknown to WaLiLa.

  WaLiLa stoops to the ground and looks around. The mound directly in front of her consists of a jar of honey, an orange silk butterfly, a necklace of yellow flowers, old gold coins, and a pile of five oranges. The pile to her right has blue ribbons, three crystal glasses of water, silver rings, a doll in a frilly blue dress, a miniature ship with many sails, and a lace doily. The room bursts with ceramics, keepsakes, fruit, flour, flowers, water, wine, money, metal, nuts, coins, beads, shells, silk.

  She leans back on her haunches as she takes in all the items that surround her. She focuses on a photograph of a smiling, young-looking Elisa holding hands with a beaming, sienna-colored man. Written on the back is “La Habana, 1973.” Next to it, under a crystal glass of water, rests another photograph of the same man. He stands knee-deep in the sea, his left hand resting on the corner of a handmade raft, the right one lifted in a melancholy salute. Written on the back is “Para Miami, May 1985.” Behind the glass of water, a small bundle wrapped in white silk waits. WaLiLa picks it up and hears the soft clink of metal. She gently unwraps it and discovers two plain rings. Inscribed inside the rings is the phrase “Elisa y Gigaldo, para siempre.”

  WaLiLa reties the bundle and puts it back behind the glass of water. She stands and carefully steps to the center of the room. She takes a deep breath, and the unmistakable scent of fuel sinks into her body. Suddenly conscious of the energy pulsating through the items in the room, her hands begin to tremble. Not a flower has been singed, nor a fruit shriveled. She looks around and realizes most of the mounds are adorned with fresh flowers. One petal from each pile, her message-center calculates, will keep you fueled for the remainder of this trip. She tiptoes around the piles, plucking one petal from each altar and shoving them into the pocket of her dress.

  When the collecting is done, WaLiLa listens to the noises in the rest of the house. She hears the muffled sound of things being moved around. Certain of her solitude, she lifts the hem of her dress and tucks it into the dress’s neckline. She presses two rose petals against the center of her torso and closes her eyes as her body accepts the fuel. Her practiced fingers feel nothing amiss. Neither her fingers nor her message-center consider that these petals stubbornly survived the threat of fire only by filling themselves with smoke.

  4.

  WaLiLa sits at a round table nestled under the stairs with a belly full of mango batida and egg sandwich. The table, the stairs, and the apartment belong to Liliana, Elisa’s sister-in-law. On the night of the fire, Liliana guided the dispossessed family to her home. She filled them with hot chocolate, wrapped them in sheets, and insisted that they sleep. Elisa sits at the table across from WaLiLa. She stares vacantly at the wall. Since the fire, Elisa has locked herself into a silent state of mourning. She eats when Liliana places food in front of her. She bathes when Liliana fills a bath bucket for her. She only leaves the house when Liliana insists. Prayer is the only activity Elisa does unasked. The majority of her hours are spent staring into space, entertaining visions her mind creates and thoughts no one else has access to.

  “Buenas!” Elisa’s former neighbor Silvia enters the open doorway ushering in the morning. Her soft, yucca-colored body is thinly covered with sweat. She sits down uninvited and asks for a cup of coffee. She runs one hand through her short curly hair, while she holds up a tattered envelope with the other.

  “M’ija, this arrived for you yesterday afternoon. Papo brought it. His cousin had a visitor from Spain who carried it in his suitcase.” Silvia places the envelope onto Elisa’s lap with ritualistic flair and breaks into a self-mocking laugh. “Que triste! How sad it is that the mail travels more than we do.”

  As Silvia presses her lips to the rim of the coffee cup, Elisa opens the letter. Silvia launches into an extended lament of exhaustion. Her bicycle is broken, she had to borrow her son’s, it is so hard to use a bicycle for transportation, maybe not for the children because they never had a vehicle, but wow, how she misses the old family car, and oh, what a hard life.

  “What is it, m’ija?” Silvia interrupts her tirade to ask of Elisa’s contorted face.

  Elisa looks up from the letter.

  “My mother-in-law, she’s ill, she needs me in Spain.”

  Liliana grabs the letter from Elisa and peers at her mother’s shaky scrawls. By the time she reaches the end of the letter, she is crying.

  “She didn’t want us to know,” Liliana says to no one in particular.

  Elisa stands and rests her arm around Liliana’s shoulder. A departure from Cuba’s arms is the last thing Elisa desires, but she’s the only one who can go. Liliana couldn’t get out of the country in a million years. Nor could any of Liliana’s brothers and sisters. Elisa, with her income and status, is the only one who can fly to her mother-in-law’s aid.

  “Aiiii, mi niña,” Silvia complains, “if we were in any other country! Your poor mother may die before you get a ticket in this maldito country.”

  Elisa shushes Silvia with a few clucks of her tongue.

  “Don’t you worry, Lili. I’ll go get Mami, and I’ll bring her home.”

  “Of course, of course,” Silvia coos. “I’ll help too. I have a cousin in the visa department. We’ll get the papers you need.”

  “I appreciate it, vieja,” Liliana sighs. “I’ll go to Señor Alberto and Señora Franco to get the money Papi left with them. It’ll take me two days. You think your cousin can help us then?”

  “Sí, I’ll go talk to him now,” Silvia says.

  “I’m coming with you,” Elisa says and goes upstairs to collect her purse. Before she leaves, she wakes her sons and tells them what has ha
ppened.

  “Liliana’s going to the country to get money from our relatives. I’ll be too busy running after visa papers to look after our guest. Watch over her, m’ijos. Make sure she has everything she needs. And…” Elisa adds to the list of commands, “ask no questions of her.”

  5.

  The minute Elisa, Silvia, and Liliana walk out of the door, WaLiLa feels relentless questions whirling around her. These questions do not pass through the brothers’ lips. Fulfilling their mother’s request, they maintain a painful silence. Throughout the days, questions drop from their suspicious glances and take root in the air, like seeds in fertile soil. Left unasked, the questions blossom and grow. As afternoons pass, the questions learn to walk. They wander around the house following WaLiLa with their eyes. Soon, they sit across from her at the table peering at her as she eats. Eventually, WaLiLa bursts out with answers.

  “I live from a town small near to Toronto under Canada. I travel and study. I collect information of people, places, things. I watch and listen, then I bring stories to people mine. People mine do not much travel, and they want to know what world is. Your mother is nice to take me. After fire, I tell her I go other place, but she say I stay here. If I am problem, I go.”

  “No!” growls Pedro, “Unless my mother says otherwise, you will go nowhere. As long as you are in Cuba, you stay in this house. Understand?”

  WaLiLa shakes her head in agreement, keeping an eye on the questions. They still sit across from her, but they are shrinking. Now their eyes barely reach the rim of the table top.

  “There is much to study here,” says Modesto. “We have a long and rich history, why don’t you take a tour?”

  WaLiLa’s message-center processes this question as a challenge rather than a suggestion. She feels a tightening in her torso. The nuance of accusation she hears in his voice discomforts her. Is this what it feels like, she wonders, to be hunted? She slowly winds her arms around her belly. The smoke from the fuel she liberated from Elisa’s prayer room has saturated her being-center and clouded her judgment. With her hunter’s acumen weakened, she has not even attempted to find the source of the pain. She has one intention: to connect Pedro to the ancestors. To do this, she must reach his eyes. She turns her face toward him and says, “Tell about history long and rich. I feel pain, many pain here.”