The Weight of the Heart

by Susana Aikin

  “Delia?” I insist. “Talk to me.”

  She turns to face me with an exhausted expression of indifference. She looks old now, Delia, her eyelids are heavy over her glazed eyes. Why am I harassing her? The thought crosses my mind that this is not the Delia I’ve known all these past hours, this is a hag-and-bones version of herself, a bunch of old clothes discarded from her true, vibrant soul.

  “This is not a good time for this. It’s late for Delia, she’s had a long day,” Constantine says from the other end of the kitchen. “Besides, we’re only an hour away from curfew at the nursing home.” Then he adds in a loud voice, as if speaking to a deaf elderly person, “We need to get moving, Delia.”

  Marion and I sit at the table, now a wasteland of hardened spattered wax from the consumed candles, squashed cigar butts, and empty liquor bottles, all covered by a layer of mauve ash from the burned incense sticks. Constantine is still clearing selective elements from this altar’s aftermath scene, such as postcards of saints, plastic statuettes, cowrie shells, and colored beads, together with the coconut-shell halves that held them. Marion sits by my side and pulls at my hair with the old musty towel she insists on drying me with.

  “Come on, Delia, it’s not fair,” I insist. “You made me go through the whole thing without any warning. Give me some explanation, tell me anything.”

  “Was it that terrible?” Marion asks. “May I ask what happened when you collapsed in the garden?” She is unfolding a bunch of old, faded pieces of clothing from a pile, trying to figure out what would be the least ugly apparel I could trade my filthy, wet T-shirt and shorts for. “I’m dying to know what happened to you,” Marion insists. “Can’t you talk about it?”

  “I’m not clear anymore,” I say. “It’s faded away. I remember not being able to breathe and then falling into a strange place, somewhere around the house, and Mother pulling me out.”

  “Like a rebirth!” Marion says.

  “Mother? What did she look like?” Julia asks, coming down the stairs.

  “She looked very pale, with pitch-black hair. Her eyes were huge gray pools of water. She looked into the distance.”

  “Did she say anything?” Julia sits down. Her face brightens up, expectant.

  “No, she just sang this little song.” I stop for an instant to retrieve the lyrics and the tune: “Luna, lunera, cascabelera, toma un ochavo para canela. Moon, moon, sleigh bell moon, take a farthing for cinnamon.”

  “She always used to sing us that song! Remember?” Julia says, and she and Marion exchange smiling glances.

  “I don’t remember her singing at all,” I say.

  “Poor Anna, you never spent much time with her, did you?” Marion says.

  We all sit in silence for a moment while I mull over Marion’s words. In truth, I mostly remember Nanny as my primary caretaker growing up—I spent lots of time in this kitchen and following her around the house as she did chores. Mother was always bedridden, exhausted, or feverish. When I was taken into her room for a visit, she would caress my face and hands, whisper sweet nothings. My little Anna. My teensy flower. My bright star. She had little energy for anything else, never mind singing. Most of the time she was out of breath and would begin to cough if she talked for too long. Now those whisperings echo again inside my head. My little Anna. My teensy flower. My bright star.

  Across from me, Constantine packs things tightly into the compartments of his rucksack and inside multiple plastic bags. Cleanup time is when he’s at the height of his perfectionism, apparently. He puts aside the bucket and mop they’ve been using on the floors, as well as the straw hearth broom he’s been sweeping and swishing the coconut with, in every room in the house.

  “You can’t reuse any of these. You have to use brand-new ones each time,” he says. “So I’ll take them with me and dispose of them safely.” The thought crosses my mind that they were never brand-new items to begin with, but I let it go.

  A few moments ago, I saw him sweeping up the coconut with the straw broom, into a brown paper bag with utmost care. Now he seals the bag, pressing its outer edges into a neat cuff, and puts it in my hands. “Burn this when you make a fire. And make sure you don’t open the bag.” Then he motions toward Delia and whispers in a conspiratorial tone, “We need to let her be. After jobs like these she needs to check out for a few hours. I’ve got to get her out of here as soon as possible.”

  Marion overhears him. “I’ll call a cab then.” She dials on her phone.

  Constantine blushes. “We’ll also need to get paid.”

  “Of course! I’ll get my purse. Please remind us how much we owe you,” Marion says.

  Constantine looks even more flustered. His crazy eye roams around the floor while he seems to be doing some complex mental arithmetic.

  Julia reaches for her backpack and extracts a wad of bills from a side pocket. “I got it!”

  “Go ahead, we’ll pay you back later,” Marion says.

  “No, no, let me pay for this. I think I owe it to everyone after having been the best of my bitchy self for most of the day.” Julia approaches Constantine. “Delia said two fifty for the job, plus a hundred for you, plus fifty for the cab. And here’s an extra fifty for you. Okay?”

  Constantine’s face goes dark crimson as his hesitant hands receive the bills.

  “Okay?” Julia repeats.

  “It’s just that . . .” We all hang on his words. “It’s just that I spent an extra 2.50 euros on the coconut, plus 1.60 coming and going on the subway to the Mercado de la Cebada, the only market in the old Madrid where you can get it at this time of year. Then there was the broom. It has to be made of old-fashioned broomcorn, you know, and they’re hard to come by these days.”

  “All right, all right, here’s an extra fifty for your troubles,” Julia says.

  “Well, the broom was twelve euros and . . .”

  “Take another twenty and let’s call it a day,” Julia says, about to explode from exasperation.

  Constantine looks unhappily at the money that Julia thrusts in his hand. He’s about to open his mouth again when Marion says, “Here’s another fifty from me.” And then, intuiting Constantine’s unyielding technique, she points to the door. “Oh, I think the cab’s at the gate!”

  Constantine sighs before he gets his backpack, the mop and bucket, plus the broom and a bunch of plastic bags from the counter and heads out the door. Marion and I help Delia up from her chair and walk her slowly out of the kitchen and up the ramp that leads to the garden gate. She drags her feet and holds her large brown handbag tight against her chest. When we reach the cab, the driver opens the door, and she stands for a moment before getting inside.

  “So nice to have seen you girls again,” she says with a vague smile. “You all look so pretty.”

  I embrace her large, puffy body. It sags in my arms. I search for that smell of quince jelly and treacle that has soothed me throughout the day, but instead I only find the musty, sour smell of old flesh. “Thank you for coming out, Delia. Can I call you tomorrow? Can I come see you? I have so many questions.”

  “Yes, dear, call me. I think there is a public phone at the home.” She gets into the car with immense difficulty. We stand by the gate until they drive off.

  * * *

  When I enter the library, Julia is already making a fire. She has piled up a whole load of dry pine cones over a mound of balled-up old newspapers and is applying a long matchstick to it all. Multicolored flames sputter around the paper and then start crackling as they reach the cones. Marion sits on the edge of the sofa opposite the fireplace.

  “The old trickster!” Julia says, as she builds a tepee-like structure of thin logs around the burning cones. “They’re a good team, those two, they know how to bounce off each other to squeeze clients. They always put on the same little skit at the end.”

  “C’mon, Julia! You’re not telling me that’s your real opinion of them, after you pushed to bring them in, had them make a mess of the house and nearly
drove us all insane,” Marion says. “You’re just mad at Delia for some other reason.”

  “It is my true opinion of them. But they always trick me into thinking they’re for real when they want the job. Then I slowly wake up as the thing progresses and, by the end, I just pay them as much as I can to get rid of them.”

  Marion laughs as if she were listening to utter nonsense. “You’re crazy!”

  “It’s true, Marion. I’m sorry I brought all this on. I’ll clean and fix up the house and contact the real estate agent again as compensation.”

  “At least it has brought the three of us back together,” Marion says.

  I sit on the leather chair by the fire. I rest the coconut, wrapped in the brown paper bag, on my lap.

  “You’re the one who’s the trickster,” I say to Julia. “First you bring on the trick and then you trick us into disbelieving it, right?” Julia laughs, and I continue on my rampage. “You’re full of shit, Julia! I’ll never trust you again. And now, no matter what you say, I shall proceed to follow to the letter the original instructions for the burning of this artifact.”

  “Whatever.” Julia sits back on a low stool by the sofa, her face stretched into a big grin. “We just paid a shitload of money, and if you want to play it till the end, hey!”

  “As for the shitload of money,” Marion says, “at least it’s rendered some excellent and immediate results, whereas all my years of therapy . . .”

  Julia laughs. “I’m glad you’re also satisfied.”

  I want to glare at her, but a part of me is amused. I’m relieved at the lighthearted mood we’re all sharing at this moment. And, of course, I know my sister Julia’s side as joker, as con artist. She was always able to swindle Marion and me into believing all kinds of crazy things just to get the best of us. The old, annoying equivocator. She’s just playing us now. Or is she?

  I place the coconut on top of the wood pile with care, and sit back to watch the brown paper darken around the edges and flare up, revealing the ropey, striated surface of the coconut husks. The flames snap and crinkle as they circle around it in long tongues. The room is soon infused with a smell of burned coconut.

  “This turns out to be a real gift, since we don’t have a lot of wood.” Marion smiles, staring into the fire. “But we do have wine. Two fine bottles of Marqués de Riscal I bought today.”

  “And some leftover Cuban rum from the lavish table of the Orishas!” Julia sniggers. “If you give me your car keys, I’ll fetch it all.” She prances out of the room.

  “You never really know with Julia, do you?” Marion muses into the fire.

  “You also think Delia is a fake?”

  “It’s difficult to make a judgment on someone like Delia. Let’s just say it’s been a very interesting day. I’m actually very impressed. I certainly got to clean out my closet.” Then she adds in a whisper, “I suspect this might be something Alina has demanded of Julia before their upcoming reunion. I don’t know. Those two.”

  Marion watches the flames for another moment, and then turns toward me with a crumpled piece of faded purple cloth she’s picked up by her side on the sofa. “Look what I found for you!”

  “Where on earth did you find this relic?” I say, unfolding what turns out to be a one-piece outfit of shirt with shorts, the sort of romper we used to wear around the house as teenagers on summer days. “Oh my God, it must be over twenty years since I’ve seen this!”

  “Go on, wear it!” Marion says. “You have to change out of that filthy T-shirt and the wet shorts. And it’s such a great color for you.”

  “I don’t think it’ll fit.”

  “Of course it will. You haven’t put on as much as one pound all these years. I don’t know how you do it.”

  In a few quick movements I pull my T-shirt and bra over my head and step out of my shorts. I stand stripped down to my panties by the fireside, where its blazing glow soon warms up my skin. I look at the one-piece, trying to remember how to slip it on.

  Marion stares at me in amazement. “Look at you! What a gorgeous body! Your boobs haven’t moved an inch! And that waist!”

  Julia walks in with a tray full of wineglasses and bottles. “Ooh! Striptease time! Wait a minute! I want to try that too!” She puts down the tray, peels off her clothes, and yanks the romper off my hands. I take a lunge toward her and we spar, each pulling frantically at the piece of clothing.

  “Julia, stop! You’re going to rip it!” I say, annoyed.

  We used to be like this a long while ago, three girls in a room, mostly in Marion’s room, trying on clothes and accessories, playing around, confiding secrets, wisecracking about boys and dates, while whole wardrobes of fine clothes in beautiful colors flew from one end of the room to another, and makeup, scarves, hats, and all sorts of shoes lay strewn over the bed and across the floor. Friday and Saturday nights were many times like that, as we got ready to go to parties or hang out with friends. “What shall we wear tonight?” was the triggering question, and soon we would all be cavorting around closets and drawers. Most of the time, Julia and I would be naked, or stripped down to our underwear, unashamed, while Marion, always more chaste, coy about her older—then more beautiful—body, wore one of her kimonos or a bathrobe in ladylike fashion. Those were days before Marion fell in love with Fernando, before Julia met Alina and before I even knew Marcus existed. The days of innocence and sisterhood.

  Marion’s cell phone rings inside her small book bag on the sofa. We all freeze.

  Marion fishes the phone out of her bag. “Who can be calling at this hour?”

  But I know exactly who’s calling at this hour, and my heart thumps uncontrollably in my chest.

  “Oh, hello, Marcus! It’s been such a long time.” Marion gives me a significant look, while I scramble to pick up the romper from the floor, and clutch it to my chest as if to shield my nudity from the eyes of a stranger who had just walked in the door. “Yes, here she is.” Marion gives me the phone.

  “Oh God! We’d forgotten about him,” Julia mutters as she slips back into her clothes.

  “Anna, I’m at the gate, but the buzzer doesn’t seem to work,” Marcus says, as soon as I put the receiver to my ear. I want to take a large draft of air into my lungs but my rib cage is fluttering to the tune of my fast-beating heart and won’t allow any further distention. Both my sisters stare at me with sharp, attentive eyes. I take a step away from them, away from the glow around the fireplace, into the darkness at the far corner of the room.

  “Anna?”

  I let his voice sing inside my head, like I’ve done all these years every time we talked business on the phone, the last venue of intimacy we have burrowed ourselves into. In all those conversations about machinery, contracts, and clients, only a few moments had to elapse before the divorce between outer meaning and inside feeling started to happen. Then the talk would split into separate threads. The words, in their practical description of business terms, would sort of precipitate into a lower layer and continue unfolding with a perfect sense of their own, while another form of subtle energy rose above it all, a deep, warm feeling of togetherness, a cloudy space where no words were necessary, where communication just hung on the music of the voice. The voice as a pure, abstract musical tone capable of moving the heart along the whole range of the emotional spectrum. In those moments, I would float around the room, away from my body seated at the desk or sprawled on the bed, and tune my whole being to Marcus’s voice.

  “Are you there? Did I lose you?”

  And now I’m wondering, was this all in my head? Was it just my dream body floating up to his, across material boundaries, beyond satellite dishes and radio waves? Was I delirious when I felt our subtle bodies entwine and curl around each other as we talked?

  “Give me a couple of minutes. I’ll be out there,” I say, and click the phone shut. I walk toward my sisters, toward the glowing brightness that radiates out of the fire. I’m about to enter its circle of light, away from the darkness, the sam
e way I’m about to walk out of the shadows of my dream life and step into the glaring reality that Marcus and I have been avoiding all these years.

  “Don’t you dare go out to him. Ask him to come in the morning. Who does he think he is?” Julia starts.

  “Leave her, Julia. She needs to do this,” Marion says.

  * * *

  The anointment ceremony takes place by the fireside.

  My two sisters help me into the romper. It fits, but it’s absurdly short, above the gash across my thigh. The buttons in the front only come up to the point just between my breasts. I start to complain, and I’m about to decide that I will return to my old clothes when I see the wet, greasy pile on the floor and realize there’s no turning back on this matter.

  “At least it doesn’t give you a wedgie,” Julia says. I know she’s trying to make me laugh. I must look pretty grim at the moment.

  “We need to tidy you up a bit,” Marion says. “Julia, get one of the hand towels and that last bottle of water.” Julia brings a towel and tilts the water bottle over it to wet it. Then she dabs my face with it, and afterwards rubs my hands and legs. Marion takes a comb out of her bag and straightens my matted hair.

  I look at my reflection in the huge gilded mirror that hangs above the fireplace. My features, lit from below by the firelight, are ghostly. Shadowed eye sockets and hollow cheeks, thin lips. My body looks dehydrated and gaunt. A sad princess groomed by her two ladies-in-waiting, who are at their wits’ end to make their lady presentable. I am going out there to meet my knight in armor after a decade of self-imposed house arrest, the variety where the heart is locked up in dungeons of pride and insurmountable obstinacy, while the rest of the body pretends to live in the world. The situation is momentous; physical appearance doesn’t really matter at all. I want to think that only my determination matters. The resolve to free myself from the fixation that has been smothering my soul all these years.