The Weight of the Heart

by Susana Aikin

  In September I went to visit Nanny. I had only driven north to see her a few times since she left the house some three years ago. I found her bedridden, horribly emaciated and aged. As soon as I entered the room, I rushed to embrace her, and then sat at the foot of the bed and wept. I told her the whole story.

  “Mi pobre niña, my poor girl,” she said. “This is what happens when you put two young people in the same space. When I was a girl, families with sons never hired pretty servants if they wanted to avoid trouble. I remember my sister cutting my eyebrows before I interviewed at your mother’s house, and even then . . .” She paused midsentence while her chest heaved. “There’s nothing for it, girls and boys always find each other.”

  “But, Nanny, this is different.”

  “There’s nothing new under the sun, niña.” She patted my knee with her cold, bony hand. “But don’t worry, time cures everything.” She closed her eyes, exhausted. She was dying.

  Time didn’t cure my grief; the only thing time did was teach me to encapsulate it. I dug my heels into the company, working day and night with feverish intent. I was the first one in the office in the morning and the last one to leave at night. I followed my father into offices, business lunches, exhibition fairs, quarries and construction sites like a general marching into battle. I sat for hours with accountants and lawyers. I learned by heart the specs and technical details of all construction and recycling machinery, mining equipment, tower cranes, dumpers, pumps, concrete molders, scaffolding, mast climbing platforms, and any other piece of useful articulated metal that came my way. I impressed people when I stood up in meetings and recited information on equipment in two languages to back up Father’s business and marketing plans. I became some sort of a phenomenon in the industry, a living database of information that fascinated clients and manufacturers alike. I walked into construction sites wearing a hard hat with the same ease with which I swept into lavish drawing rooms or corporate parties dressed to the nines. I flirted my way around in this male-rooted landscape, exercising the same manipulative seduction on the humblest worker as on the most stuck-up millionaire CEO. And Father sported me proudly among throngs of tough, shrewd businessmen with poker faces and thin, cynical smiles. We became known as an invincible team. The handsome, ruthless Mr. Hurt, and his beautiful, brilliant daughter. No government contract escaped us, no private enterprise commission resisted our snare. It was like we were king and queen of the industry for those years. Everyone was in awe.

  In my downtime I locked myself inside the house. I sat by the fireplace in the library and wolfed down lines of books. Novels, history, poetry, architecture, science, anything I found on the shelves I read compulsively to the point of indigestion. On occasion I would date men, even go out with one for a few months, but nobody captured my attention for long, no one felt worth getting involved with. Sometimes, exhausted and full of ennui after a long day, I would lounge in the old leather armchair facing the fire and watch the flames devour the wood, transforming and reshaping the pile into battlefields, towering infernos, mysterious cities and barren, incandescent landscapes. Then Marcus’s eyes and lips would float above the glowing cinders, pulling the old wound out of the recesses of my heart, and I would go to bed aching with failure and wretchedness.

  * * *

  A whiff of smoke hits my nostrils and travels down my throat. Something is burning close by. My first reaction is to go down to the study, where Delia and Constantine are still locked in.

  CHAPTER 15

  I put my ear to the door and hear the handbell.

  Delia is humming another strange song: “Eleguá, Santo bonito / Eleguá, Caballo negro / Caballo negro, bandera colorá / Ay Mayumbao, Ay Mayumbao.” (Eleguá, beautiful saint / Eleguá, black horse / Black horse, red banner / Oh, Mayumbao, Oh, Mayumbao.) Meanwhile, Constantine is sweeping, swooshing the coconut around the wooden floor. The smell of burned sage is lingering around the door; they’re probably parading the smoldering bowl around. But the whiff I got earlier is different, like a smell of burning fabric or old paper.

  Upstairs, the door to Marion’s room is ajar. I push it open and a cloud of smoke hits my face. After a few seconds, I make out Marion at the far end. She is standing close to the open window, and on top of the desk by her side stands an oversized ceramic bowl where flames dance surrounded by thick smoke. Marion is throwing papers and small objects into it. Letters, postcards, bullring memorabilia. She has brought down the collection of posters and pictures plastered on the walls for so many years. They lie piled upon each other on the bed, and on top of it all the black Andalusian wide-brimmed hat she used to wear when going out with Fernando.

  “What are you doing?”

  Marion’s eyes are intent on the flames. “I’m getting rid of all this clutter. Useless memories.”

  “If you want to burn stuff, why don’t you do it in the fireplace?” The smoke makes me cough.

  “The library and living room are off-limits now, don’t you know? Until they finish the limpieza.” She turns to me with feverish eyes, and I know she might go haywire any moment. “And why would you give a damn where I burn this?”

  “Look what you’re doing to the room!”

  Swirls of smoke reach upward, blackening the ceiling above the bowl.

  “The house is gone anyhow.” Marion returns to her pyre. “And this is my room, so get the hell out!”

  “If anything catches fire, we have no water to put it out with!” I’m beginning to feel frantic, but Marion doesn’t pay any attention, she just keeps feeding the bonfire.

  I look around for a blanket or any other piece of thick fabric, as the only other plausible means to put out a fire with. But the room just stares back at me, threadbare and desolate. The once bright delicate flowers scattered over the blue-green wallpaper are now faded. The long curtains, torn to shreds. The rosewood sleigh bed has no bedding, an old dusty sheet just covers the mattress. I take a step toward the wardrobe, but Marion rushes ahead of me and grabs the door handle. “Don’t you dare!”

  I freeze while she opens the wardrobe and yanks out a black-and-red piece of fabric. She takes it to the pyre, and I recognize the mantón de Manila, the embroidered shawl with long tassels Fernando had gifted her the day before the party. She throws it into the bowl, but it is too large to fit in completely and most of it dangles down to the floor. It catches fire quickly, producing thick coils of smoke together with the smell of toasted naphthalene. The flames travel down to the tassels.

  “Are you nuts? You’re going to start a fire!”

  “Get out of my room!” she says, picking up the loose ends of the shawl with her bare hands and folding them over the bowl.

  I rush downstairs, reach the study and knock hard on the door. “Delia, please, I need you.” There is a moment of silence.

  “You know, you can’t really disturb us when we’re doing the work.” Constantine is whispering through the door. He looks at me with his strabismic eye through the slit between the panels.

  “It’s an emergency,” I say, stepping back from the image of his skewed eye.

  He sighs as if my request was a heavy load to consider. But Delia says from the far end of the room, “It’s fine, Constant, we’re done here.”

  “True, but you know I like to pick up my things in order—”

  “Open the door,” Delia commands.

  The door opens and Delia walks out of the darkness, leaning on her staff.

  “Make me some coffee, dear. As strong as you possibly can,” she says as she trudges past me.

  “The thing is . . .”

  “I know what the thing is. Just get the coffee.”

  I turn toward the kitchen while she starts on the stairs, one step at a time, heaving herself up while holding the banister with her free hand, until Constantine comes to her aid.

  “The order of the elements has been reversed,” I hear her muttering under her breath. “I was expecting earth to follow, not fire.”

  “Won’t t
hat quicken results?” Constantine asks in a hushed tone. I can’t believe I can hear their whispered conversation as if I were in between them, although I’m more than twenty feet away.

  “It could. But now we need to watch out.” They reach the top of the stairs and turn to Marion’s room.

  My mind is reeling for reasons I don’t quite grasp, as if my brain were fogged and spinning away from rational thought. I reach the kitchen that reeks of burned paraffin from the zillions of candles that are nearly all out by now. I realize that the coffeepot is still full with cold coffee, so I pour it into a large mug and put it in the microwave. I am burning to go upstairs and find out what’s going on. I stir more than plenty of sugar into the coffee and make for Marion’s room.

  Julia joins me outside the door. “What’s going on?”

  “I think Marion is going into one of her fits.”

  “Oh shit.”

  I push the door open and we walk in. Delia and Constantine stand around the pyre side by side with Marion. Constantine shakes one of the maracas I have seen earlier on the altar in the kitchen. It makes a rattling cascading sound that repeats itself endlessly into a loop. Delia prays, “Santa Bárbara bendita, Santa Bárbara bendita. Blessed Saint Barbara, Blessed Saint Barbara.” She has a necklace of red and white beads in the hand that holds the staff, now tilted toward the pyre. Now and then, she turns to Marion and says, “Don’t stop, keep feeding the fire! Changó is fire, Changó is thunder, Changó is lightning! If you feed him now, he won’t be hungry later.”

  Marion approaches the fire with a large photograph in which she is standing with Fernando dressed in glittering matador costume, and feeds it to the flames. Her eyes light up with a sort of madness.

  “What the hell?” Julia turns to me. “This is insane. Is she leading her on to burn down the whole place?”

  I look at Julia as she turns her face back toward the scene inside the room and feel surprised at her detachment. I don’t want to say to her, You started all this, why do you complain now? We are well past the moment for reproaches. Instead, I reflect on how strange it is that Julia seems to be all of a sudden totally uninvolved in the process, while Marion and I seem more invested every minute. Right now, I know exactly what Delia is doing. She’s pushing Marion in the direction she thinks she wants to go, knowing that there is nobody like her to do exactly the opposite of what she’s told.

  Julia shakes her head. “This is ridiculous! I think I’m going to split. I don’t see the point anymore.”

  “Hell no, you don’t split! You’re staying until it’s all done, even if it’s to help sweep up the rubble.”

  Julia leans closer and whispers, “I don’t mean leaving for good. I just want to take my pictures home. It’ll only take a couple of hours.”

  “No you don’t! No one leaves until it’s over!”

  “Sorry, but you don’t tell me what to do!”

  We glare at each other for a moment. “If you leave now, I will never trust you again,” I say, and from the corner of my eye I see Delia looking at us with a disapproving eye. Then she shakes her handbell in our direction.

  Meanwhile, Constantine is carefully stomping out a few burning pieces of paper that have fallen on the floor.

  Delia turns to him and coos, “Gentle, be gentle with Changó.” Constantine slows down.

  Marion watches as the photo burns, first opening a brown hole in the middle and then devouring the entire image up to the edges. Soft, flaky sepia cinders float up to the ceiling. Marion turns around and, picking up the black wide-brimmed hat from the bed, places it on the pyre. I think it’s going to flare up, but in fact it seems to stifle the flames underneath. Smoke puffs around the brim and wafts out the window.

  “What else will you burn for Santa Bárbara?” Delia asks Marion, and puts the bead necklace around her neck. “May Changó bless you for bringing on the sacred embers.”

  “That’s all. I’m good for now.” Marion sits on the bed looking haggard, and stares out the window.

  “Ay, Changó, Changó, dios del fuego y la danza. Oh, Changó, Changó, god of fire and dance,” Delia sings and shakes her handbell. Constantine answers with his maraca.

  “All right, let’s have that coffee,” Delia says after a beat, sitting down on the only chair left in the room. “Marion, tell me about this handsome man.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. He’s been dead for so long.”

  Just as I’m going to take the coffee mug over to Delia, I hear a door slam on the opposite side of the corridor. It’s the door to Father’s bedroom, which always bangs when the wind blasts through the hallway from the opposite window. Why is there wind now? Last time I looked out, the thick haze of midday swelter had lifted from the garden, and the afternoon promised to slide into a blushing basin of quiet.

  “Here, I’ll take that cup if you go close it,” Julia says, and takes the mug I’ve been holding in my hand long enough to make the coffee stone cold.

  I walk to Father’s room, and I’m about to secure the door when I figure I should also close the window, and step inside. The window’s old frame looks lopsided and distended; it takes pulling and pushing in hard to lock it down. Another strong gust will break it loose again. I turn around and look at the stripped bed surrounded by white walls. It faces the mountains through the window I just closed, a stark eye staring out into the world with no curtains, no drapes. I am always surprised at the sober atmosphere of his room. This used to be my parents’ bedroom before Mother died, and no doubt very different then to what it is now, possibly a warm, soft haven for the end of each day. But I have no recollection of that time. I have only known this bedroom as it is now, spartan. Funny how of all the lavish, ornate furnishings of other rooms in the house, this one, the master bedroom, is bare, austere to the point of harshness. No one has talked about this room today. How come the study is considered a much more difficult place than his bedroom? One would think that the space in which a person sleeps and dreams, or lies awake tossing and turning all night for years on end, would be far more charged than a place where one just works and conducts business. But no controversy has arisen on the subject of cleansing this bedroom. I guess Delia and Constantine have already whisked through it, swept it and sanitized it with their magical trappings. Without a word.

  The bed is a simple wooden frame. Above it hangs the only picture in the room, a coarse oil painting of a country boy leading a horse in a field. The horse is a bay draught horse with thick white-stockinged legs, and the boy walks barefoot with trousers rolled up to his knees. They walk together into a dim sunset, careless and tired, after a long day of plowing.

  Right now there are no furnishings other than the bed, no bedside table, no small bookcases, not even a chair. Someone must have removed them all. But no one has touched the contents of the wardrobe that runs sideways to the bed. Inside still hang his suits, his ties; on the floor still stand his shoes. I fear to open it and look at these things. The white walls around me create a strange silence, a sense of chill. Father didn’t die on this bed, but somehow, when I look at the bare mattress, I imagine the silhouette of his body lying very still with hands crossed over his chest and head slightly tilted toward the ceiling, like the stone statue of a knight carved over an ancient tomb. Despite his fierce personality, or maybe because of it, some people saw Father as something like a knight.

  I remember when we arrived at the large halls of the mortuary and located the parlor where the wake was being held, how surprised we were to be assailed by a multitude of faces, many of them unfamiliar, who talked about Father’s generosity. How he had given them money during hard times, or visited them while sick, or protected them in the face of bullying landlords and corrupt officials. Some were old employees, others older members of the Madrid British circle, and others just neighbors and distant acquaintances, like a niece of Nanny’s who told us he had sent money for monthly and medical expenses for years until she passed. The small community that gathered around his open casket
knew him as the man who could scream and humiliate, chastise and bully, but also soothe and protect. But we, his daughters, only knew him as a man to be feared and avoided, as a man we chose to punish in the end through purposeful neglect. I remember stepping away from the wake, and pacing the long marbled corridors outside while remorse bit into my guts, overriding my grief. Surely of the three of us, I had been the hardest on him.

  I had been the hardest because I had been the closest. And for the longest time. Not only that. I had been the daughter he most loved. My desertion and my sustained resentment became the cruelest punishment he ever received. Neither of us ever talked about it as we sat in awkward silence on my rare, brief visits to the house years after I had left, and we drank tea looking at the near empty fireplace or at the dimming evening light outside the windows. The man I had been in awe of, the man who had shown me the world, was now reduced to my personal prisoner under house arrest, and I could visit him at will or let him rot for months. On those occasions where I condescended to go, I was cold, dismissive, bored. But the rancid pain for all we had shared during the years we had worked and lived together surrounded us like a fog.

  Back then, there had been a world full of splendor that only he and I inhabited, that not even Marcus had been able to permeate. I remember smiling to him over the table, above wineglasses and conversations of clients or business acquaintances, locking eyes with him in that familiar space only the two of us shared. A space lush with images, witty words, and treasured sounds. I remember tongue-tied moments when we reveled in music as we drove home from a meeting, from the airport, or through beautiful country roads in the French Riviera. Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Haydn’s piano sonatas, Satie’s Gnossiennes. I remember looking for him at cocktail parties, combing crowds until I spotted him, and then admiring him from afar, so handsome in his spotless black tail suit, as he stood with others, sipped champagne, or spoke to older, beautiful women. Not everything was his possession of me. Or his seduction. I was in the game too.