by Ana Menéndez
“The announcement.” Raúl put his fork down. “They’re getting married.”
Matilde shut the cookbook and got up from the table. She walked to the sink and began washing the pot she had used to boil milk for the coffee. Strips of browned milk floated in the water and Matilde found it revolting.
“Your lunch is in the refrigerator,” she said.
Raúl got up from the table and walked to where Matilde stood. He put a hand on her shoulder. He opened his mouth to say something. He patted her shoulder instead, and turned and picked up his lunch.
At night, alone in the big house in Havana, Matilde cried for her skinny baby. What if he died without ever meeting his father? She stopped eating. The shelves in the stores were never more than half full now and the women said it had something to do with the yanquis. Matilde started shopping with Anselmo. Maybe someone would see how skinny he was and take pity on her. Near the cathedral, finally, Matilde found an old grocer from Galicia. Matilde called him Señor and tried to mean it.
“Señora,” he said and took her hand. It was the first time she had felt a man’s touch in more than a year. His hands were swollen and rough and they startled Matilde. She caught her breath and he pulled away.
“Pardon me,” he said and winked.
“My husband,” she began. “My son, I mean. He is so skinny.”
She returned to the store twice a month and the old Gallego always slipped her an extra bit of ham, gave her fourteen eggs for a dozen. The store smelled of rancid lard and old coffee, but its shelves bent under stacks of chorizo, pounds and pounds of flour. Matilde never dared ask how he managed. Instead she let him take her hand and smiled when he brought it to his lips. She felt his gaze on her until she walked out the door and heard it slam behind her.
Matilde stood by the sink and pulled on the blinds. Sunlight filled the kitchen. Cloudless sky. But there, in the back, along the fence. More yellow. Ruining the lawn that Matilde had come to count on, that had soothed her.
That yellow, now. Why? Bananas. Definitely bananas, Matilde thought. The single one she had spotted days ago was joined now by a fresh cluster that pulled them all to the ground. Or maybe the yellow grain of rice had merely been the first to ripen. Maybe the others were there all along, blending into the green.
What was she going to do with pounds and pounds of bananas when she had a dinner to plan? Surely, more bananas were waiting their turn. They would ripen, then rot. Then more bananas. Ay, Raúl! Raúl and his impulses. All her old feelings came back to her. How could he, how could he?
Anselmo was a year old when Matilde finally arrived with him in Miami. Carrying him, she walked slowly along a carpeted walkway that slanted downward. Where it ended, hundreds of people crowded behind a barricade hung with a banner that said BIENVENIDOS A MIAMI. People carried signs with names on them. Some just stood. Raúl was in the back, next to the doors. But Matilde didn’t shout out. When he turned, he looked first to Anselmo.
They walked toward one another and finally Raúl hugged her, patting her back as someone would comfort the sick. Anselmo began to cry.
“Your papi,” Matilde said. “Aren’t you glad to see your papi?”
All around them, couples embraced. A man picked up a woman and swung her around while she screamed and laughed and pulled her skirt down all at once. When he set her down, she swung her shoulder bag at him and Matilde thought they would never stop laughing.
Raúl took Anselmo from her arms. “Papi’s precious, precious,” Raúl said and kissed his son. “Papi’s so happy to see you.”
Matilde watched Raúl. He looked tanned and strong, and Matilde imagined he’d grown several inches in America. He met her gaze, then looked away.
“We have to hurry,” he said. “Traffic. You wouldn’t believe it.” Then he added, “I’m so glad you’re here,” and he kissed her.
Stuffed rolled pork roast. Six garlic cloves, peeled. One teaspoon dry leaf oregano. One tablespoon salt. One bay leaf, crushed. One tablespoon paprika. One and a half cups sour orange juice. One boneless pork loin, about ten pounds. Two carrots, peeled and grated. One-half pound—Matilde closed the book. Pork wouldn’t do.
“You don’t have much time left,” Raúl said when he walked in the kitchen and found her staring at the refrigerator, the closed book in her lap.
Matilde said nothing.
“Matilde?”
“Bananas,” she said finally.
“Bananas?”
“In the yard. The trees you planted, remember?”
Raúl looked at her, then turned back to the closed blinds. He looked at her again and walked to the sink. He lifted the blinds.
The lawn that had once been a smooth monochrome of green was now speckled a gaudy yellow. The first cluster Matilde saw had been joined by five others, all pulling the trees forward in a sharp arc toward the ground. Yellow seemed to drip from the waxy leaves like new paint. Already, the first cluster had begun to mottle. Soon it would start to smell.
“What in the—?”
“The trees you planted, remember?”
Raúl walked to the window and put one hand on his collar. He turned back to Matilde. “Bananas?”
Matilde looked at her husband. Thirty-seven years of marriage, she thought. She hadn’t noticed him age all at once, that was true. But every few years she would really look at him. There was the year she had noticed his first silver hairs. The year she had suddenly realized he was going bald. Now she stared at him. The way his shirt stretched tight over his round belly, the soft folds of gooseflesh that covered his collar, gave her a sudden and unexpected thrill.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You ruined my beautiful green yard,” Matilde said.
Raúl had rented a house in West Miami. Two bedrooms, one bath, a porch that embraced three sides.
“This is beautiful,” Matilde said, thinking of the curving, fragrant streets of Havana, the home by the park.
“Máximo found me a job in his restaurant,” he said. “I’m making almost a dollar an hour. And tips.”
“I’m so happy,” Matilde said. “I’m so happy to be here.”
Matilde spent her mornings walking the length of the street, pushing Anselmo in his stroller. At first the street had frightened Matilde. Monstrously wide. The idea that anyone could jump out from one of the anonymous trees. But soon the trees became old friends with names and stories of their own. As they walked, Matilde pointed out Ofelia the oak and Matacumbre the magnolia and Anselmo clapped and kicked in his stroller with each familiar name. How he needs me, Matilde thought. If I left him here in his stroller he would be completely helpless without me. I am everything.
But sometimes, when they passed the green house next door, the woman who lived there stepped outside and waved. Matilde would wave back.
“¿Cómo le va?”
“Bien, bien, gracias.”
Matilde could feel the woman watching her as she walked away. And she’d be wrenched from her dreams again. With each day, her happiness with Anselmo and the trees seemed more like a gauze that wrapped around her heart to keep it from spilling out. One day when Anselmo cried and refused to eat the baby food that came in little jars, Matilde felt finally a great fatigue from which she thought she’d never recover.
She wanted to ask Raúl if he too felt his life tilting, everything sliding away from him. She wanted to ask him if he remembered how she used to read to him from a red book of poems. But Raúl left the house at 7 each morning now and often didn’t come home until 9. On Friday and Saturday nights, she didn’t hear his key in the lock until after midnight. He slid into bed next to her and let out a sigh. Sometimes he let his hand roam the curve of her hip, but those nights were rare and Matilde recalled their nights in Havana and felt the distance well in her chest.
Matilde spent so many hours looking at the yard through the kitchen window that walking through it now, she had the strange sensation of entering a photograph. Up close the banana tr
ees looked almost human. Taller than she imagined from her spot by the kitchen sink.
She brought the cleaver down on the first browning cluster. The tree recoiled. Matilde brought it down again. She was sweating. She’d barely scratched the bough. She held the cluster in her left hand and sawed back and forth, back and forth.
When the cluster finally began to come loose, Matilde yanked and tore out the rest. Immediately the cluster fell from her hand and Matilde almost fell with it, taking her breath in quick hot bursts. She rested a while, then tried to pick up the cluster, but it was too heavy. Matilde decided instead to drag it across the yard and into the garbage can. She was opening the lid to the can when she realized the garbage truck wouldn’t come for two days. Damn them all! Why could nothing go right? Matilde hoisted the bananas into the can, her arms trembling. She brought the lid down on them with a crash.
Back in the kitchen, Matilde couldn’t stop thinking about the bananas. What had she solved, really? More bananas were growing. And the ones in the can would rot and the entire yard would smell like a plantation when that woman came with Anselmo. She stood at the sink and opened the blinds. More bananas. More bananas than before. Was that possible? Matilde eased the blinds down and walked back out to the garbage can.
She dragged the cluster through the front door and into the kitchen. She propped the bananas next to the potato bin and opened her cookbook.
Matilde had been in Miami for three months when the phone rang one night at 10. Raúl was still at the restaurant. Anselmo lay sleeping in his crib. “Oigo,” Matilde said into the receiver.
There was a moment of silence, but Matilde did not repeat herself. Then a click, and the tinny sound of an abandoned line.
Matilde stayed in bed the next day, getting up but once to feed Anselmo when she could no longer bear his screaming. Her waking dreams mingled with her sleeping dreams and Matilde floated between all the worlds she had known. She would turn and wake in Havana and even the bougainvillea was where she had left it.
She lay in bed and watched darkness overtake the details in the room until all she could make out was the outline of the blinds against the streetlights. She heard Raúl walk in. She turned to the far side of the bed and prepared to listen to his breathing all night.
In the morning, Matilde turned and saw that Raúl was already gone. She got up and rushed to Anselmo’s crib. She hugged him until she felt him relax in her arms. Cradling her son to her breast, Matilde knew she must make Raúl’s secrets her own, snatch them from him before they flowered into repentance. They would always be something she had.
Matilde peeled the first banana. She squeezed a few drops of lemon juice onto its bare flesh and dumped it in the pot. Then she peeled the next. She peeled fifty-six bananas in the first cluster and then started on the second. She looked around the kitchen. The banana clusters lined the far wall and went out into the living room. Outside, more bananas. She had a dinner to plan. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the bananas. They were everywhere. Disordered, growing. All these years she’d patted her life back into place. Now she felt that familiar falling away, the old panic of not understanding. She wanted her peace back, her dishes lined up end to end, the yard green and fresh.
She crushed the first bunch right in the pot with a soup spoon. She poured in a gallon of cream. A pound of sugar. She lit the gas and watched the pot bubble. She mixed a box of cornstarch into a paste with some water. She poured it in. A bag of cinnamon sticks. A jar of nutmeg. She stirred in slow, languid circles and hoped her thoughts would take the same shape.
Matilde didn’t hear Raúl come home. She didn’t see him stand in the doorway to the kitchen and watch, in silence, before turning away. She brushed away a wet strand of hair and blotted her forehead with the kitchen rag and moved on.
A layer of vanilla wafers, a layer of pudding, a layer of vanilla wafers.
She measured out the flour. She peeled more bananas and mashed them in her own hands before throwing them in the bowl. The milk, the sugar. She didn’t bother measuring now. She looked for the wooden spoon and finally settled on the metal spatula.
Matilde worked into the night. When dawn came, one cluster remained, propped against the wall like someone waiting patiently for an office to open. She opened the blinds, letting the rose light stream into the kitchen. She felt energized. More yellow, out there in the green. But less. Less than before at least.
“Are you okay?”
Raúl stepped inside the kitchen. A banana trifle sat on the counter next to four loaves of banana bread, two deep bowls of banana pudding, a plate of banana cookies. He opened the refrigerator. A milk gallon full of banana shake sat flanked by two banana cakes, each covered with thin and perfect rounds of caramelized banana slices.
“Is all of this for the dinner?”
“I don’t know yet,” Matilde said. “I still have a few things to do.”
“They’re coming tomorrow night.”
“Yes, of course.”
Raúl began to say something. “Look, about the trees—“
“I’ll see you tonight,” Matilde said and handed him his lunch box. Inside, she had packed three baloney sandwiches with cream cheese, two fresh banana muffins, and a thermos of cream of chicken soup. He’ll like the muffins best, she thought.
“Eat well,” she said.
After the phone call and the long night of Raúl’s breathing, Matilde had walked through the kitchen as if possessed. She wanted to bite into ripe fruit. She wanted to knead bread. She wanted to beat and whirl and watch dough ooze through her fingers.
She took little Anselmo in her arms and whispered, “Mami’s back, Mami’s back.”
That morning, she boiled red apples and whirled them in the blender. She mashed carrots and blended them with Cream of Wheat. Every day she thought of a new combination: puree of roast beef with orange juice, mashed potatoes blended with peas, peach and mango soups, chicken and cream of rice. Anselmo grew fatter and fatter and every day Matilde forgot a little more. She dreamed instead of mashed guanabana, chirimoyas ripened on the tree, mangoes like summer sunlight, all the flesh gone soft and sweet.
Matilde held the coffee can above the burner until the sugar melted into a deep brown. She poured the condensed milk over the bananas in the blender. One by one, she broke in five eggs. With the blades running, she chopped in a block of cream cheese. She poured the mixture into the coffee can and then started another. When she had four, she set them all in the roasting pan with hot water.
Yes, Anselmo used to love her flan. He had that girlfriend in high school who made him miserable and on Saturday nights, Matilde waited up for him with a creamy piece of flan. They sat under the light, Matilde so proud. Anselmo was more handsome than either of his parents. Tall with sandy hair that lightened to blond the summer he was a lifeguard. Oh how the girls called. And Anselmo would laugh and say he was looking for the girl who could make a perfect flan like his mom.
Matilde peeled another three dozen bananas. She made the crust with lard and rolled out enough for six pies. Bananas, evaporated milk, more eggs. She beat three quarts of cream. She dipped her finger in the mix. Then she licked the blender and the beaters and the bowls and spoons. She lowered a soup spoon in the cake batter by the window and sipped it like a fine wine.
For lunch she ate the scraps of lardy dough. She worked through the afternoon. Bananas. Nutmeg. Cinnamon. Cream. Sugar. Bananas. Honey. Matilde worked the loose strands of her hair back into her bun. Sweat soaked her blouse. When she had peeled the last banana and cooled the last pie, after she had turned off the oven and unplugged the drain, Matilde boiled a pot of milk and sat down at the kitchen table to rest. The wind called through the house as before and she whispered back to it, “SÍ, Anselmo.”
Matilde drank her cup of coffee and milk slowly. Soon the glow outside would begin to fade and she would have to turn on the kitchen lights. But she had time. She sat and slowly sipped. The beaters and the bowls and the blender and the rows
and rows of gleaming pots and pans were piled into a tower on the drain rack. The floor was swept. And outside, her lawn spread from the window in a deliciously pure and flowing monochrome of green.
Matilde sat like this for a while until she heard Raúl’s car. Then the key in the lock. She sat sipping her third cup of coffee and milk.
The door opened. He walked into the kitchen. Every inch of counter space was occupied. Banana pies and banana cobblers. Banana grunts with globs of cornmeal biscuits. Bananas Foster. Banana flans.
Sticky bars topped with peanut butter. Banana-almond cookies. Chiffon cakes. Jelly rolls oozing thick banana cream.
Where the plates once sat in cabinets behind glass doors, piles of banana brownies rose like miniature bricks. Banana puddings. Muffins in banana syrup. Rum and banana balls. Chocolate-covered bananas. Coffee cake, streusel, bread pudding. Muffins and creams and round little tarts of puff pastry holding quivering centers of yellow.
Raúl stared. And after a moment finally spoke.
“Why?”
Matilde looked up from her mug and motioned with her head out the open window.
Raúl walked to the sink and looked out.
“Well,” he said, and when he turned around, Matilde settled on his stomach, round and jiggly like a bowl of pudding. “What’s this about?”
Matilde shrugged. “I read once that bananas are the perfect fruit,” she said. “They grow anywhere, you know.”
Raúl pushed the chair back from the table to sit across from her. “Is this a joke? Have you lost your mind?” he said. “They’ll be here any minute. We can’t just feed them dessert.”
Matilde took a sip of her coffee and milk, looking steadily at Raúl. Raúl stood and walked to the far end of the kitchen. Then he sat down again.