Longing

by Espinosa, Maria

  “Phew,” said Tanya. “How do you ever stand it?”

  “Have a glass of wine,” said Antonio, unwinding his muffler, rubbing his cold red hands together. “It wipes out the sense of smell if you drink enough of it. . .. Rosa, open a window so we don’t suffocate.”

  “How often do you wash diapers?” asked Tanya.

  “Every few nights,” said Rosa.

  Tanya was still wrapped in her black fur because it was chilly inside the apartment. They had covered the baby in the front room with heavy layers of blankets as well as a warm sleeping outfit.

  Tanya’s cheekbones were high, her face angular. Her fair hair gleamed beneath the dim light of the electric lamp. Her violet eyes were limpid, softening the harshness of her bones. Beneath the half-opened fur she wore a lavender wool jumper and a white angora sweater.

  Tanya kissed Rosa softly on the lips. A little stunned, Rosa allowed the kiss to continue, allowed Tanya’s tongue to part her lips and slip through her teeth. She smelled of a delicate fragrance. As Tanya’s arms reached around her, Rosa grabbed Antonio’s hand for an instant before letting herself be enveloped by Tanya’s warmth, the fur soft against her.

  “Why don’t you get undressed,” said Antonio. “And go to bed. I am tired. So tired. . . .” He yawned.

  “You’ll sleep with us?” asked Tanya with a slight coldness in her voice.

  “Yes, of course,” said Rosa.

  “I won’t interfere,” he said.

  Self-conscious, Rosa undressed in front of them, hastily slipping on a pale blue summer nightgown and her old blue bathrobe.

  “Do you have a robe I can wear?” asked Tanya.

  Rosa looked through the shelf in their closet where she kept underwear and nightgowns. “Here,” she said, handing Tanya a white cotton lace gown. From the closet, she took a matching peignoir.

  Tanya shivered as she undressed, heaped her clothes on a chair, and slipped the gown over her, then fastened the peignoir. Her breasts were small, her hips slender, her shoulders unusually broad. She had a long torso, long slender thighs. Her skin was very white.

  “You could be a fashion model,” said Rosa.

  “I do model sometimes,” said Tanya. She wrapped her fur coat over her peignoir. “But modeling bores me. And men are such pigs. I hate men. Nothing against you, Antonio. I rather like you. You’re a sport. You’re not like the others. I can’t bear to make love with a man. I can’t bear their touch.”

  Antonio twirled the nearly empty wine bottle and poured himself another glass. “Did Rosa ever tell you how she was expelled from college? How she was in a mental institution? She was expelled because she modeled for porno photos.”

  Rosa flushed. “Don’t talk about that, please, Antonio. Don’t tell my secrets. No one knows about that.”

  Antonio put his arm around her. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Petite.” He drew her against him. “It is the others who were foutues. Fucked up, as you say in English, because they are such puritans.”

  “I was in love with a musician at that time,” Rosa said. “He lived in New York, and the college I went to was in Connecticut. I saw him on weekends. He was married. I could not understand how he was drawn to me—I could not understand it at all—I thought no one in the world, certainly not a musician who composed music that was so beautiful—could be in love with me, or take any interest in me at all. The fact that he was married and I couldn’t see him often—the whole affair—created a terrible anguish in me. I felt unreal. No one else seemed real. Then that phony college. Those girls with all their pretensions—I wanted to say fuck you, up your ass to that whole world—I wanted to be real.

  “Then the afternoon of the photos I got scared. Something felt wrong. I wanted to cop out. But I couldn’t just not show up, or call the boy—the student who’d arranged it—and say I’d changed my mind. Part of me was paralyzed. Part of my mind. Something so obvious, so simple a six-year-old could think of, never occurred to me. As if part of my mind were frozen and couldn’t think at all. . . . Still is frozen, still doesn’t function. . . . This strange passivity. I couldn’t say ‘no.’ I couldn’t change my mind. I couldn’t just not show up. I could not call and say I had the flu. Can you understand? It was crazy.”

  Antonio said nothing.

  Tanya nodded.

  “So I got expelled,” she continued.

  “And for that,” said Antonio, “her parents put her into a mental institution.”

  “I was shattered,” said Rosa. “As though I’d been smashed into a thousand pieces. I was so humiliated. But I had too much pride to admit I was ashamed. I felt like I was at the bottom of a chasm and I was all alone. There was no one to talk to about it—not even Xavier, the musician. I was too ashamed. . . . Xavier, and I used to talk in bed about everything under the sun . . . music, philosophy . . . sex . . . but I couldn’t tell him about this. In fact I couldn’t tell him much about myself at all. I kept lying, inventing stories. I was afraid to tell him the truth.”

  Antonio looked at her in a way that made her uneasy. “I love you, Antonio!” Rosa cried. “I was never connected to Xavier as I am to you,” she added, intensity giving a sharp, anguished edge to her voice. She clutched his arm. “You’re the father of our child. . . . And I tell you everything.”

  He broke away from her and went into the other room. They could hear the baby whimper as he picked her up.

  Tanya reached out and stroked Rosa’s arm. Rosa had grown rigid. She seemed as if she were about to speak, but no words came out. Her face was drained of color.

  “Isabel needs to be changed,” said Antonio loudly.

  Rosa changed her. Antonio then took the baby into his arms and whirled her around the living room in time to the Tchaikovsky concerto he had put on the stereo. He held her so close it seemed almost as if he would suffocate her. “Preciosa,” he crooned. At that instant a tremendous love for the infant surged up in him. Let Rosa play out her neurotic cravings. This tiny creature contained the potential of all he and Rosa might have been. She was not yet beaten down. “Preciosa,” he crooned. He loosened his grip, looked at the soft downy head. “Quien es mi preciosa?”

  Rosa handed him a bottle she had warmed, and Isabel began to suckle at it greedily. “A baby only cries,” he said to Tanya, “if it is cold or wet or hungry or needs something.”

  “Babies only cry for attention,” said Tanya.

  Rosa had lit a cigarette. She gazed at the splotches of putty on the wall. Antonio never had gotten around to painting. She could do it herself if she only had unbroken time. But something was always coming up. Isabel’s food, her diapers. Antonio was always creating a crisis. Never an unbroken stretch of time. As she squinted, the putty splotches formed the shape of a woman.

  “Your father is a sculptor,” said Tanya, “and you modeled for porno photos.”

  “Yes,” said Rosa, growing excited by the theme. “Obscenity in that bare, wintry New England town, where everything was covered over and had been for generations . . . what was obscene seemed to be true. Truth should not be covered up. What was really wrong was the way everything was covered up. . . . That to me was rotten. . . . The college was like an extension of my own family. . . . There too everything was hidden, concealed, covered up.”

  The baby burped, regurgitated a little liquid on Antonio’s sweater. He handed her to Rosa and wiped himself off with his handkerchief. Isabel’s warmth comforted Rosa. “I want to write about what’s real. I’m sick of people covering everything up. That’s what drove me into that damned institution. Everyone was covering up my whole life. Don’t you see?” She seemed to be imploring Antonio.

  “Puritans!” he said with furious contempt.

  Rosa shuddered.

  “I would never have done that,” said Tanya. She sipped her wine.

  Rosa stubbed out her cigarette. She took Isabel, who was asleep now in her arms, back to the crib and covered her with blankets. “Isabel,” she sighed. Such a sweet, soft, fragile t
hing. So easy to fracture the skull, injure the child for life. Frightening to have charge of this tiny person. God, let the baby be safe. Let me be a good mother. God protect the baby now, she prayed. Everything seemed so precarious. As if they were on the edge of an earthquake. Antonio had described what it was like in Santiago when everything shook, even the tall buildings. Livestock and human bodies were flung into depthless chasms that had been created instantaneously, and they were never seen again.

  She sat down at the dining table and slipped her arm around Antonio’s shoulder. “Don’t you see, Antonio? Don’t you see, Tanya,” she repeated. “I want to write about what is real. . . . I had a beautiful body . . . I wanted people to see it. . . . I valued only my body. . . . No one had ever valued anything else. . . . I was a nothing. . . . I didn’t know who I was. I still don’t. Oh, I’m not making any sense at all.” She bit her lips, stared again at the patches on the wall that looked like breasts.

  Antonio kissed her hard on the lips. “Who loves you?”

  “You do.”

  Tanya, lighting a cigarette, said, “I was in a mental hospital too. Just outside Paris. I was released a few weeks before you two met me on the Rue Saint Antoine. But I’d met Antonio before that.”

  “How long were you there?” asked Rosa.

  “Three months.”

  “Why?”

  “Problems with my family. My mother found me making love to a girl. I was seventeen then.”

  “How unfair,” said Rosa.

  “Whoever said life is fair?” asked Antonio angrily. “You two girls make love. Enjoy each other. Don’t let me stop you.” He was nearly in tears. “Don’t let other people destroy you.”

  They left the candles on when they went to bed. Rosa thought one of the candles seemed to be the soul of Marguerite, the girl upstairs who had died under mysterious circumstances. Some of the old ladies in the building said she did not kill herself at all but had been a victim. They said the murderer placed a revolver by her hand in such a way as to suggest suicide. The candle which was Marguerite burned with a dull flame. Rosa explored Tanya’s soft, bony body. Antonio’s leg was pinned beneath Rosa’s ankle. She experienced a surge of nausea, then a surge of pleasure as Tanya caressed her breasts and her hard nipples, as Tanya’s fingers slid inside her moist crevice. Tanya’s soft scented flesh.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Eleanor lingered in Paris, inventing reasons to stay. The baby needed her, Rosa needed her. She did not want to leave this place where she was both miserable and in a state of joyous excitation wrought by the atmosphere, the people, the life on the streets, and most of all by Antonio, who eclipsed Heinrich’s hold over her. She did not want to return to their dreary suburban town on Long Island where Aaron immersed himself in his studio. But finally she could stay no longer. Aaron telephoned and then sent a telegram demanding that she come home.

  Antonio gave a party for her the day before she left. He invited Khalil, Roland, Françoise, and all his other friends. He hoped that in some way through the party he could obtain work—painting an apartment, taking photographic portraits, perhaps even working on Khalil’s movie. Khalil had not entirely dropped him. A scene had even been filmed in their apartment for which Khalil paid him two hundred francs.

  Eleanor was vague about her ability to help Antonio set up a photographic business. She would have to speak to her own mother and to Aaron’s parents—but couldn’t he earn a living as a journalist, since he had written such an interesting novel?

  “Freelance articles pay only a few sous,” he said. “If I can get a job . . . Françoise knows the editor-in-chief of Paris Soir . . . if I can get permanent work as an editor. . . .”

  Eleanor nodded. “I certainly hope so.”

  Antonio wanted to show them all he was a man of substance with a wife and child to provide for, even a mother-in-law, whereas before he had been a wayfarer. When the urgency of his economic needs became clear, perhaps people would help him.

  Eleanor was singing a German folksong she had learned long ago as a child from a German governess. She stood in the center of the main room in a red dress. As she sang, somewhat off key, with a slightly mocking air, the severity of her face with its high cheekbones stood out:

  Wenn ich mein Schatz

  Nicht rufen kann

  Dann muss man winken

  Ja—ja winken

  Dann muss man winken

  In the background a blues saxophone played on the stereo. “She’s marvelous,” said Jorge to Francisco. Antonio had met these two men by accident near Saint Severin only a few days ago.

  “She looks like Marlene Dietrich,” said Francisco. “Only she has more character.”

  “What a woman!”

  Francisco began to dance. He opened his arms wide as he invited Eleanor to dance with him in time to the blues and she did, her voice trailing off as the blues rhythm filled her body in the movements of the dance.

  Francisco and Jorge seemed like exotic tropical birds to Rosa. They talked with great vivacity and gesticulated with their hands. Jorge was twenty-nine and had the long lashes and velvety dark eyes of a debutante. His voice, a trifle hoarse, sounded unsure. Francisco was forty, tall, and handsome. His white hair was streaked with peroxide. There was a rough-hewn look about him. His eyes flashed. He looked quite distinguished as he danced with her mother.

  Rosa was flushed with heat from the stove. She ladled Antonio’s Chinese soup into black lacquer bowls. He had cooked a clear broth in which were bits of shredded carrots, Chinese noodles, water chestnuts, and greens.

  Antonio cut in on Francisco and her mother. The saxophone sounded louder, as the volume had been turned up.

  Mother was tipsy. Antonio was far from sober. Khalil had sent a pneumatique expressing his regrets. Roland had not shown up. Jean wandered around, pale, self-absorbed, with his camera slung around his neck. Small, dark-haired Judith, whom Antonio had picked up somewhere a few weeks ago, practiced her French with Jorge, Tanya, and Tanya’s friend Lotte, a German music student, who had thoughtful brown eyes and tinted blonde hair.

  Rosa ladled the soup. Mother, Antonio, Jorge, Francisco, Tanya, Lotte, herself. The black surfaces of the bowls were edged in gold. Judith had lots of dollars. Her father manufactured mattresses in Los Angeles.

  A red rose. Three or four nights ago she and Antonio had gone out for dinner with Khalil and his group, but after dinner she and Antonio suddenly found themselves alone. Khalil, Jack, and Lorna, along with the movie crew, had vanished. Antonio and Rosa stood on the corner. Eleanor was dining with an American friend somewhere. Their breath blew out steamily into the cold air. “Merde,” Antonio muttered, kicking at a large black object on the sidewalk, an abandoned galosh.

  “See how handsome he is,” Antonio muttered as a fair-haired Germanic youth emerged from the restaurant.

  “Would you like to make love with him?” she asked. “Have you ever wanted to make love with a man?”

  He slapped her in the face.

  That evening a red rose arrived. “From Khalil perhaps,” murmured Rosa, gazing into the narrow white box which had been left at their doorstep by mysterious hands. Visions of a part written especially for her. She might be called on to revise the script. Crazy dumb visions.

  “Look at the note!” stormed Antonio.

  Antonio had never given her a rose before. Why did he choose that night to do so? And to have it delivered by a special messenger during their absence?

  She clung to him, kissed his cold dry lips, but it was too late, because he had glimpsed her ambitions, how she might trample him underfoot like an old galosh if he impeded her.

  The eye of the peacock. Vanity. Vanity. Feathers with their brilliant iridescent hues of blue and green, silver and gold and purple. The circular hues enclose an eye. The eye of love winks.

  Something so phony. She was phony.

  In that instant she pitied him, loved him, understood him in a way she rarely could, because so often he irritated her into a
frenzy. Then he could be so kind and so aware of her needs that she was overwhelmed continually with shame.

  Eight lacquer bowls edged in gold. She would need more. Unmatched porcelain bowls from the top of the cupboard. Soup for Jean, for faithful Françoise, who was laughing in a corner amidst a group of people. (Her wedding-gift wine glasses had been shattered in the course of marital disputes.) Jacques, the tall handsome carpenter with whom Antonio used to work. Jacques’ wife, a slender woman who wore her hair in a beehive. Léonie, a fragile, quiet girl who studied Greek. Philippe. Anna. Elena, four months pregnant, in a black maternity smock. A young girl in a trench coat with long blonde hair, once Antonio’s mistress, had come with her new lover.

  Ten more bowls of soup. Perhaps other guests, as well, would have arrived by now. She would need to serve in shifts, as there were no more bowls.

  She peered out into the living room.

  Antonio and her mother were dancing very close. Jorge gesticulated as he talked to Tanya and Lotte. Jorge’s hands were as slender as a woman’s. With his even features and black hair, his imploring voice, he seemed a young boy, while Francisco, who towered over him, looked as if he were in drag in a white ruffled shirt, tight pants, with his silver-blond hair.

  “That’s Rosa’s little lesbian friend,” whispered Antonio as he wedged his groin closer against Eleanor while they whirled among the guests. “Tanya.” He pointed her out. Tanya was seated on the floor, her shoes off, huddled in her fur coat, her face half-turned towards Jorge.

  A shock ran through Eleanor. Her insides felt as if they were turning around, or perhaps she was about to be sick. Buried desires of her own, indistinct forms, rose up.

  Antonio felt half erect. She edged away. “Antonio,” she whispered, “please not here . . . whatever do you mean about Rosa?” She hoped Rosa couldn’t see them dancing. The people around them protected them. Vivid colors. A pang of aching, of raw aching over her daughter.