Longing

by Espinosa, Maria

  “The country is going to hell,” said Harry.

  “Let’s drink to that,” said Rick.

  Harry, leaning backwards, fell onto the floor. Antonio howled with laughter. People in the bar turned around to look at them.

  Did his senses deceive him or was that his old friend Alejandro, the famous Chilean playwright, who sat there in the corner with Juan Figueroa? He had not seen Juan in months—Juan had been avoiding him.

  Rick, Don, and Harry were his only friends here. Tears welled in his eyes. He took another swallow of beer, stood up, and lurched towards Alejandro and Juan. Rage coursed along his nerves, singing a melody in his blood, arousing ideas in his brain.

  “Alejandro,” he said, with a slight bow.

  Alejandro was a tall man with Indian features, high cheekbones, and lank dark hair.

  “What a surprise, Antonio!” said Alejandro, standing up to greet him.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that Alejandro was here?”

  Juan said, “I meant to . . . we’ve been so busy. . . . Sit down and join us.”

  Next to Alejandro sat a delicate dark-haired girl. She was truly delicious. A morsel to devour in one long session of making love.

  “Your name?” asked Antonio, kissing her hand. Her skin was cool, fragrant.

  “Consuelo,” said Alejandro. “My wife.”

  Antonio sat next to Juan. He learned that Alejandro had been living in San Francisco for three months and that one of his plays was being produced by a group in the Mission District.

  Every so often Alejandro’s and Consuelo’s hands would touch on the table. Absently they would fondle each other’s fingers and palms.

  As they continued to talk and drink, the energy running through Antonio rose to an extraordinary intensity. All arthritic and ulcer pains had vanished; all weakness, all fatigue was only a memory. He was composed of fire, air, and something red, heavy.

  In his pocket was a folded letter from the chief editor of a publishing firm in Santiago. The chapters of Vanidades he had sent off several months ago were being rejected.

  This was one of the few publishers who had responded at all to his queries.

  “Alejandro . . .” He pulled the crumpled letter from his pocket. “Listen to this.”

  He read the contents of the letter.

  “The con! The idiot, Alejandro! I tell you, this man is jealous of me. I used to correct his compositions in high school. He doesn’t possess the talent that I do in my smallest finger. . . . He’s jealous. Perhaps you can put in a word for me with your publisher, eh Alejandro?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” said Alejandro, without a grain of sincerity.

  Mierda.

  Beneath the dim Tiffany lights Alejandro’s face looked like a Mayan’s. In truth, the man was a peasant, a politician whose plays were produced and who received grants because of his political and social affiliations rather than because of the merit of his work.

  The molten red heavy substance inside Antonio glowed.

  “You are so pretty,” he said to Consuelo. He stood up and leaned over her. “Would you like to make love?” With the rapidity of a snake’s moving fangs, he thrust his hands into the neckline of Consuelo’s low-cut blouse and felt the softness of her breast.

  Her eyes grew round; she screamed.

  “I’ll be in touch,” said the Frenchman who ran the crêpe kitchen on Bridgeway. “Maybe in a few weeks. I’ll let you know about the job.”

  Antonio walked out.

  Metallic taste.

  Cold.

  February wind.

  Rain against his face.

  He knocked at door after door without success, looking for work.

  Meanwhile his real work—Vanidades—was still not complete. Each day he wrote a few sentences, a few pages, then often tore them up or scratched out what he had written because it was not what he visualized at all.

  “You feel too sorry for yourself,” Rosa said last night.

  He had held up a kitchen knife and bellowed, “Repeat, please repeat. Repeat,” until she ran sobbing into the bedroom.

  Later he held her in his arms in bed. She pulled back fearfully. He smoothed her hair. “Don’t be afraid of me, Petite. Your concern for Isabel is your most redeeming quality. Is that con, that son-of-a-bitch, your father, who has fucked you up.”

  Nearly all their conversations these days ended by his cursing her father, she thought.

  They rarely made love anymore.

  A car splashed water from the gutter against his legs, right through his trousers.

  His shoes leaked.

  Cold and damp.

  Cold and damp.

  Like Puerto Montt in winter.

  A car just missed him. He stepped back quickly. Damn fools! Drive like they own the streets.

  DAMN THE BERNSTEINS AND THEIR FUCKING MONEY!

  Rosa possessed all the frailties of a rich girl, but none of the blessings. However, she was full and lush, blooming magnificently, he told himself. She was siphoning off some vital spiritual substance from him.

  The Bernsteins had fucked them up.

  Legs so heavy.

  One foot up.

  One foot down.

  Up.

  Down.

  Cars whizzed past. He no longer cared if they splashed him. Because it was raining so hard, the sidewalks were nearly empty. Water slid off his rubber poncho, soaked his face and hair.

  Mierda. The Frenchman was only playing games with him. “We’ll let you know.” That’s what they all said. “We’ll be in touch.”

  He slid into the booth at one of the few local bars he was still permitted to enter, where they also served food. He ordered a glass of beer and a hamburger. The rain, cold, and wind had revived his appetite, and he was unusually hungry—he seldom felt like eating at all, and he had lost weight. His trousers bunched at the waist, while his belt was tightened to the last notch. Short-sleeved shirts hung like folded wings against his bony arms.

  The hamburger tasted too heavy and too greasy. He could barely swallow it. As he stared through the rain-bleared windows at the restaurant across the street which jutted out on a pier, where long ago he used to work, he thought of the empanadas he occasionally cooked there. Now that was the way to cook hamburger! The patrons had gobbled them up.

  As he gazed across the street, the idea struck him. So he had difficulty working for people? Very well, he would be his own boss!

  He would set up a bakery where he would make those delicious meat pastries, unknown in this country. Then he would distribute them to supermarkets. They could be frozen, or sold fresh at smaller local stores. He would become a millionaire. Then he and Rosa would have leisure to write, to cultivate friendships, to be human beings. They would live in an enormous house with a swimming pool. Isabel would have tutors. They would have a son who might be a genius—for that matter, Isabel, blessed with opportunities, would soar.

  Perhaps Rosa’s parents would lend him the money to start the venture.

  He was so exhilarated that he left his hamburger and beer unfinished and rushed back to the car. He drove to the Big G Supermarket to buy the ingredients.

  At home, he rolled out dough, mixed ground meat with hard-boiled eggs, and he chopped olives. He added raisins, cinnamon, cloves, salt and pepper. Then he ladled some of the mixture onto a flat piece of dough and rolled it up into the shape of a crescent moon. He made thirty-six empanadas and baked them.

  Isabel sat on his lap, swung her legs, and munched an empanada. He wiped the crumbs from her face. She smiled up at him. He had pasted a banana label on her forehead.

  “What do you think, Rosa?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know. Starting a business like that is very risky. Do you know how many small businesses go broke?”

  She got up from the table and paced across their small kitchen. “I’m upset,” she said, “because I got a letter today that Mom and Dad are visiting here in a few weeks. I never invited them. Why the hell do they
have to come out here and mess us up?”

  “Rosa!” he cried. “You are folle! The timing is incredible. Their coming is perfect. . . . I can tell them about my business and ask them for a loan. We’ll be rich. Don’t you understand? I’ll need about $25,000, but they have the money!” He rolled his fingers together, as if he held imaginary bills. “We’ll be rich! Don’t you understand? Then we’ll each be able to write to our heart’s content.”

  “But first we have to start the business,” Rosa said. “That’s a twenty-four hour a day job. I’ve also just learned that if I take a few weekend courses I can get an adult teaching credential. Then I could teach part-time—just twenty hours a week. The schools for adults in San Francisco pay ten dollars an hour. I want to get a teaching job.”

  “Rosa,” he moaned, “I’ve got to do this. I can’t teach, as you can. Don’t you see? There’s no way out for me. I can make $3.65 an hour the rest of my short working life, then break down and go on disability. Or I can take a risk. It’s the only way. That idiot Alejandro . . . Juan . . . all the other rabble! We’ll see how they treat little Antonio then!” He whistled with unnatural cheer as he put the empanadas away in the freezer. Then he sat down in the living room with a can of beer to watch a program on the television set they had just bought.

  The sky cleared. A few stars shone, and soon the moon would rise.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Rosa stood on the porch and talked with the young couple who were their neighbors. “Ken’s niece broke her arm real bad,” said the woman. “She’s only seven. The doctor said he can’t set it until her bones are fully grown, when she’s about fifteen, because the nerves might get damaged if he does it earlier. They’ll have to break it again and set it. The break was right above her elbow.”

  Rosa gave a start.

  Isabel and the couple’s little girl were running across the lawn. They disappeared around the side of the house. “Exactly the same thing happened to me,” said Rosa. “But they told me the bone could never be set.”

  “I’ll get you the name of my niece’s doctor,” said Ken. “Go see him. He’s real good.”

  “Look,” said Rosa. She straightened her arm all the way so it bent backwards at a peculiar angle.

  “My God!” cried the woman. “I had no idea.”

  With his warm fingers the doctor felt the bones in her right arm, felt the lump where a calcium deposit had grown just above the joint.

  “I can break it right here—reset it—so that it will be straight,” he told her. “I don’t understand why it wasn’t done before. It’s a routine operation,” he said, frowning.

  “How long would it take to heal?”

  “You’d be in a cast about six weeks.”

  “Would I be able to drive?”

  “Not with the cast.”

  She thought of Isabel, of getting to work, of the money she would not be earning. She had not been at her job with the Employment Office long enough to claim sick leave.

  “I’d better have the operation later,” she said. “There’s no one to take care of my child if I’m in a cast—no one to drive her.” (She could not depend on Antonio, who was erratic about picking Isabel up at the sitter’s, erratic about getting the child places at all.)

  A routine operation.

  She left the doctor’s office in a daze, drove home nearly unconscious of where she was going. The realization that she could have been a dancer—years before she had a child, before she had to earn a living for herself and Isabel, the realization that her arm could have been straightened when she was fifteen —set up widening eddies of pain. She clenched the steering wheel so hard it seemed as if she would break the thick plastic.

  She did not tell Antonio about her visit to the doctor’s office, because the realization hurt too much.

  Soon, in a year or two, even less, when she could set up care for Isabel, when she could save up some money, she would have the surgery. Her arm would be straight; no longer would she need to camouflage her slightest movements; no longer would she need to conceal part of her body; no longer would she be physically deformed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Eleanor and Antonio met at The Schooner Bar and Grill in Sausalito.

  He seemed bonier to Eleanor. His face had more hollows, more lines. He seemed to have aged many years since she last saw him. More often his face had a hard look. Less frequently did the electric, charming, devil-may-care expression come over him.

  Eleanor and Aaron had been staying at a hotel up in the hills for over a week. Each day she and Antonio met at The Schooner for an hour or so, while she and Aaron divided the rest of their time between Rosa and Antonio together, excursions with Isabel—how delightful to take her to the San Francisco Zoo and out on boat trips, as well as shopping for pretty clothes—and excursions with just the two of them. She and Aaron had rented a car. One day they drove up to the wine country in Sonoma; another day they visited old friends near Redwood City; they climbed Mount Tamalpais.

  She pitied Antonio.

  He wanted them to lend him twenty-five thousand dollars. Were they to do so, were they to obtain the money from her mother and from Aaron’s parents, he would, in all probability, give away every cent of profit.

  It would be a gift thrown to the winds.

  He was a Renaissance aristocrat born into the wrong century. He had no flair at all for the industrial society in which they lived.

  However, she found him more compelling than anyone else she had ever known.

  She longed to reach out and stroke his gaunt face, his fine hair.

  Thoughts and fears pressed in on her. They clung with tentacle-like arms, indistinct, dark animals changing their shape when she tried to see them clearly.

  Perhaps they should give him the money anyway. He was trapped. Living with Rosa had aged him. Her daughter was such a child. It was demeaning for Antonio to have to continue to work as a dishwasher and fry cook for pennies, with no exit in sight except the mirage of published works and of fame.

  “It is always a pleasure to be with you, Eleanor,” said Antonio.

  As usual, they spoke in French. Eleanor glowed. She dismissed thoughts of money, of the future. “Chin, chin,” she said, raising her glass, clinking it against his.

  “You seem sad,” he said. “Is Aaron boring you?”

  “Not at all. It’s romantic to go off with him alone. . . .” Her words trailed off. She was anchored to Aaron, but she loved Antonio. She loved every fiber of Antonio, although they had not made love in a long time and probably never would again the rest of their lives. What linked them was something deeper than sexuality.

  “If only we had met,” she mused, “under other circumstances.”

  “When I was twenty and you were thirty-two—if only you had never married.”

  “Or if we were in other bodies.” She laughed. “I could never quite believe in reincarnation . . .” Her thoughts wandered through the bar, meandered cloudily around the people at surrounding tables, out into the mists rising over the Bay.

  “I need you,” he said.

  “But it’s quite impossible.”

  The words they exchanged were banal. Yet the currents that connected them, she thought, had a terrifying strength, and broke through the taboo created by their social relationship as if this taboo were merely a web of gossamer threads. She and Antonio were mysteriously linked in a way that she did not understand at all.

  Don, Rick, and Harry came in and sat down at their table with a great deal of noise and laughter. Antonio spied a woman who owned an art gallery. Just as she was about to sit down at the bar, he shouted out to her to come and join them. “You must see Rick’s work,” he said to her. She was a young, vibrant woman. Short blonde curls framed her face. She wore overalls and a man’s long-sleeved white undershirt. “Marina,” he said, “you must go see Rick’s sculpture. We go now to your house, Rick, to show Marina. Yes?” He rose, scraping the legs of his chair against the floor. “Eleanor, you
come with us?”

  “No,” she said regretfully. “I really must get back to Aaron. He’s waiting at the hotel.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Rosa sat with her parents in their hotel room high above the Bay. They sipped Cutty Sark and water with a twist of lemon and munched at Brie and Camembert on crackers.

  The room’s flowered wallpaper seemed grotesque to Rosa. Cracker caught in her throat; she swallowed it down with the Scotch.

  Her mother wore a soft rust-colored silk dress with long sleeves. Her hair was greying. She seemed very distant, and she seemed to be grieving over something—as always, thought Rosa.

  Aaron fidgeted with an unlit cigarette. He seemed terribly ill at ease—as always, she thought. Always there was something just underneath the surface of people’s words and actions which must be avoided. There was something that terrified him. He—unlike her mother—did not seem to have aged at all. He wore a brown tweed jacket, a dark green turtleneck sweater, and grey flannel trousers.

  Propped up against the mirror on top of a bureau were photographs of Aaron’s work in Geneva. This was the piece he had been commissioned to do after winning the International Competition. The sculpture was a soaring bronze work about forty feet high. Two winglike forms joined a trunk which curved in a long arc.

  “What do you think of Antonio’s plan to start an empanada business?” asked Aaron.

  Rosa said, “He’ll blow the money. Whatever you give him, he’ll blow.”

  “Do you think so?” asked Aaron. “I don’t like the man—but I don’t want to be unfair.”

  Waves of bitterness lapped against Rosa. She was betraying her own husband.

  “Eleanor and I will need to give some thought to his plan,” said Aaron. He downed the rest of his Scotch. It was as if she had not spoken at all, as if her counsel did not count at all, Rosa thought, somewhat shocked.

  “Has he been able to find a publisher for his book?” asked her father.

  She shook her head. “His novel isn’t finished yet.”

  “No?” Aaron seemed surprised.