Loving Che (8 page)

At the front. Does he see me?

The air of freedom is in fact the air of clandestinity, he says. But no matter: It adds an interesting touch of mystery.

The woman I once was is walking down Obispo.

I've gone to do my shopping. Look, I'm wearing the green dress, the one with the full skirt and the big white flowers. My dark hair turns in the wind. A man whistles, of course; I am used to this. It is why I wear the dress and let my hair hang loose, though I pretend not to see the faces that turn to me. But really, I don't know any other kind of life. Assume that all women feel this. The attention has already burrowed its way into my sense of the world. I've known fear and disappointment, but still I cannot imagine indifference.

It is early, most of the city still asleep. I like to walk the streets when they are quiet. Sometimes when the cobblestones glisten with dew and the first breezes stir in circles around the sun, I think that yes, there is a place for me, the way there is a place for the birds that alight every morning on the first banyan in the square. There is a place for Teresa de la Landre.

I begin to walk to my studio and then hesitate. In this moment, a man selling peanuts begins to cross the street; a boy carrying five loaves of bread reaches out to steady the uppermost one. And at the corner, a jeep idles. The window in the back lowers. He is inside, motioning to me.

A kiss. The first parting of flesh. Everything that comes later is sweet elaboration. The first kiss is more intimate than the naked bed; its small perimeter already contains the first submission and the final betrayal.

The more I write, the more I remember, as if the words moving across the page were a wind blowing away the dust of years.

There were many sleepless nights when I lay in bed absolving myself ahead of my sins, arranging my memories so they might assist in the deception. I remembered the night I had returned from visiting my cousins at their farm. Calixto had waited for me with a vase of roses and told me how lost he'd been. Later that night, while he slept, I walked down to the kitchen for a glass of water and noticed, just fleetingly, that someone had moved our wedding album from where it always stood atop a writing desk in the hall. The next morning I found it hidden on a low shelf and moved it back. A year later, when I had returned from another trip east, I noticed after a party, as I was arranging flowers on the desk, that the wedding album had been hidden again. I didn't think anything then. It is very difficult to perceive one's life as it is. It is only in retrospect that we come to understand what our mind knew all along, not from a mystical understanding of the universe, but from the slow accumulation of fact that the waking self doesn't have the heart to accept.

Or it could be that I was merely knitting the thread that led back into my justifications and forward into my falling. Calixto seemed to me in those times parched, removed, as if he had discovered a way to subsist on words alone. When I moved to kiss him, I felt a seizing up, as if he resented my hunger. But it could be that this is the way that I began to remove myself from him. I wonder now if people don't make up their reasons for deception after the fact. And that what truly leads us into the arms of another lies beyond our comprehension.

The buildings on the malecón face the sea with boarded windows. The grass is dead from the heat, the flowers are dead. The only color comes from the red paint on the whorehouse door, the pale, weathered blue of a window frame, the pink of morning beginning in Oriente. The heat seeps in everywhere like sickness, like an ordering force occupying hidden courtyards, decreeing sleep, slow movements. Heat inside the dried-out stems of a crocus, in the powdering space between the sidewalks, inside the green leaves already going pale from suffering.

I imagine it all first: My skin is hot glitter in the sun and I long to peel it off, layer by layer. Ernesto follows me home to where my husband is just now getting up to go to work. He watches Calixto kiss my silent body. I wake and turn, and he is waiting. I am raw, burned; I am in the time of life when to feel is the purest truth. No words, but the slip of his tongue like an island of madmen. Adrift, searching.

I begin, even at that moment, to remember everything. I embalm the memory while it yet breathes. I forget everything else, that Ernesto is newly married and that my Calixto is kind. Strange thoughts torment me. I feel the doorknob before it reaches my hand. I hear the sobs of a
mother in Holguin. I smell the Antarctic sea, salt ice and sharp. I know everything before it happens. And still I turn to him. Let him press his body against mine.

Already I knew him from long ago, had stood many years with him watching the moon set and rise again. His lips full and moist where palm trees grew and the peasant women came to be filled. In the long night that followed, the stars spun and his voice sang from the mouth of a shallow stream.

Together, we climb the stairs to my studio. Everything is new to me again. I notice for the first time the smell of cooking, the sound of shouting behind closed doors, the crowds in the street. The stairs we climb curve and turn, curve and turn. We walk through several narrow passageways and into a hallway that turns again onto a single door. The room is small and dark; its three windows looking out over a central courtyard; it is my studio, but now it's as if I were seeing it for the first time. Pushed against the wall are paintings I don't recognize.

I sweat in my flowered dress. In that small room, his smell overtakes me again: mountains and dirt and unwashed skin and heat.

I think back to the night I saw him first, the party in my house when I wore the dress of blue satin. Not love or lust—a thirst for him that I might die. And how I tried to be good and polite. To sit with my legs crossed. To laugh and be bright, to swallow my desire like bile in the throat. Thinking always that I must hold the balance of my world steady in my hands. Must not stumble.

And now in the small room, I at last take hold of the shifting, embracing it, tenderly first and then clutching into my fall.

His chest is narrow and racked from his illness. He whispers in my ear. Sweet sweet savagery. Time dismantles in our hands. I sleep and wake to his mouth. And then the sharp breath of knowing. He has entered my life to stay, burrowed deep into my lungs so that every gasp will bring me back to today: the pale desert settling its eternity into the far grooves of the earth, without end or design.

Later, I wake beside him. He sleeps and I watch: His lashes spill over the white skin of his face and I think of beauty that time doesn't alter, of marble statues that are always cool to the touch, carvings that come to life at night. His month, his mouth, is parted over his straight teeth and the thin hairs from his rebel's beard curl over his lips. Those lips defiant even in sleep.

Outside, the shouts of men returning from their labors. The blinds are blue with light beyond the window. Gunfire sounds, or thunder, and then it is quiet again and I am still, listening to a lost bird insisting at the window. And yet he lies, lies still, his breath easy, almost silent, with none of the gasping I will come to know. His arms are bent beside him, fists clenched. I follow his bare chest to where his ribs sink low to the sides. Small bruises mottle the skin on his stomach like leaf shadows on the valley floor.

I lie close to him, lie still and quiet next to him. In sleep, he moves his arm to embrace me, in sleep he rises again from the dead. Perhaps he dreams of someone else who comes to him in the night. I rest my head on his shoulder, my face in the rise of his chest. I whisper that it
doesn't matter. That nothing matters. I breathe the moist soft of his beard and listen to the blood pumping beneath the rise in his neck.

He opens his eyes and watches me, propped on one elbow.

I move to kiss him, part his lips with my tongue. He murmurs, moves his hand down my spine, down. He pulls me onto his body. I let myself sink onto him. He looks up at me; My love, he murmurs. The light is beginning to fade from a window that now catches our reflection between
its blinds. I am above him, watching him, this man who is not a hero or a photograph; who is only warm, smelling of moss ground, his body before me, freckled and soft, his skin tacky to the touch with dried sweat. He blinks slowly. He grabs my hair with one hand and pulls. Pulls down, gently, his other hand in the small of my back. He lets go and embraces me, brings me down to him so that I can feel his heart beating now against my chest. He turns me onto my side. He caresses my hair now, moving slowly, the motion of his hand a mirror to the motion of his body. Slowly I return to myself. I follow his movements. We watch one another. His breathing changes. He closes his eyes and draws me close, a great catch in his throat like day's dying into night. When he speaks again, it is with a voice that comes from worlds away.

The red in the sky is fading over the city, ebbing away behind the buildings. He says he will be back in two days. If I want to see him. Yes, I want to see him. He doesn't kiss me. He is back in his uniform, a different man now, sitting in the back of a jeep.

And this car, I say, where is it from?

We recovered it from La Cabaña.

Recovered?

Yes, he says, we took it back. You can say stolen if that is what you like. To conquer something we need to take it from someone else, he says. And it's good to say things clearly and not to hide behind concepts that might be misinterpreted.

The house is almost dark when I return. I change my clothes and wash quickly. I close the blinds, leaving the room dark, and settle into bed. A sudden joy takes me. I make an inventory of my body, discover only pleasant memory in the crook of my knees, in the muscles of my arms. And nothing that could be called guilt. Not even a sand's worth in the sloshings of my heart.

The door downstairs opens and then Calixto's voice is calling up to me. I lie very still. Teresa! His voice outside the door and then suddenly he is standing there in the light of the hallway, his face unrecognizable. I close my eyes into a thin crack and bring my hand to my head. Oh, Teresa. He comes to me and takes my hands. Oh, oh, you are so warm. Too warm. He touches his hand to my forehead. I am weak, I say. And maybe at that moment I begin to feel the first flutter of regret.

Calixto moves aside the covers. He holds his arms out to me and I sit up. He raises my nightgown over my head. I sit naked, eyes closed. I let my husband lift me. I feel myself rising from the bed, light, inconsequential. Calixto carries me to the bathroom and sits me on the tufted chair while he runs the water in the tub. I was surprised,
he says, to find the house so dark. It frightened me. He speaks with his back to me, running his hand back and forth beneath the stream of water. I suddenly thought you had gone, that something terrible had happened. He stands and puts his hand to my forehead again. Then he lifts me, his arms beneath my naked legs, supporting my arching back. He lowers me slowly into the water.

He sits in his good gray pants at the edge of the tub and soaps a sponge and begins to bathe his wife. I close my eyes and sink lower into the water. The rough sponge over my forehead, down my face, beneath my neck. The sound of the water being wrung from the sponge. The sound of water displacing. The sponge across my chest, around each breast, down beneath the water. How do you feel? I open my eyes. Sweat has darkened Calixto's hairline a dark blond. His eyes are greener and brighter than I remember. He holds his hand out to me and leads me out of the tub. He wraps me in a towel and brings me back to bed. I whisper, I am new now. A happy weariness comes over my body inch by inch, an exhaustion so complete that it takes hold of me suddenly. Within seconds I am inside a deep black sleep.

Late in the night I wake to the soft flutter of birds' wings. At first I don't know where I am, imagine myself back in
the shabby studio, and I draw my breath. Gradually I return to the bed where I lie, my own white room, the lace curtains over the windows that now let in the moonlight.

The next morning, I butter Calixto's bread slowly and hand it to him. I watch as he dips it into his coffee without even looking, his eyes on the newspaper before him. A toothpaste shortage now, he says and arches his brow. He doesn't say anything more and neither do I. Politics do not interest me.

Calixto puts his paper down and finishes the bread. He kisses me on the cheek. I knew we could cure you, he says and smiles. I sit at the table for a long time after. And then I pick up the breakfast things and take them into the kitchen and wash them one by one, glad for the hot water and the way it stings and reddens my hands back to life.

Once again I can discern the wind that brings rain, the smell of wet earth miles away. And this new awareness, I tell myself, is proof that what I am doing is right, for the world seems so new and lovely now and my place in it assured at last.

Every day I step into a new self. I walk the streets, where the trees whisper secrets and the flowers are so red and full that I wonder why the priests don't denounce them in their sermons. Some days, the clouds hang so low and heavy that I have to turn my face to the ground.