Dying Unfinished

by Espinosa, Maria

  They spent the next few days shopping: a bassinet, a baby carriage, tiny pajamas, undershirts, booties, plastic pants, diapers, a bottle warmer. He was surprisingly practical. When she fingered a bamboo crib at Galeries Lafayette, he shook his head. “No, that won’t do at all. It’s too fragile.”

  For Eleanor, their expeditions had an exciting, even erotic quality. (Aaron considered shopping to be purely women’s work.) She bought Antonio a soft cashmere scarf to replace the one he’d given away. They picked out a bathrobe for Rosa.

  At lunch, she talked about her time in Europe as a young girl. While in Paris, her mother arranged for Valentino, who was not yet well known, to make her a dress. “First he draped me in brown paper from which he made a pattern. The dress was beautiful—a dark clinging velvet. It has hung for years in the closet. Since I burned a cigarette hole in it at a party, I haven’t worn it.”

  “It’s a dress for the person you are no more,” he said.

  Suddenly she wanted to cry.

  “Dresses are like the skin of a woman,” she murmured. “Does a five-year old girl’s organdy dress belong to the same person as her widow’s garments?”

  He gave her an inscrutable look.

  Attempting to overcome her mood, she added gaily, “Mother used to buy me handmade muslin underwear, which girls of good family wore at that time—this was before we went to Paris. I used to throw those things out and spend my allowance on filmy lingerie trimmed with lace.”

  He blew out cigarette smoke.

  “You must buy Rosa clothes,” he said. “She needs beautiful clothes.”

  At Le Printemps that afternoon he picked out a black velvet suit, an ivory silk blouse, a blue sweater of merino wool for her to buy Rosa.

  “For Rosa, beautiful, yes?”

  “Yes,” she said weakly.

  He introduced her to his friends—painters, writers, a Moroccan handyman, a filmmaker. They walked and walked along the cold pavements. Eleanor loved Paris. She loved the ancient buildings, the dark flowing Seine, the smells of fresh baked bread. Here she felt a desire to open all her senses and absorb. Despite what she had heard about the rudeness of Parisians, they responded to her with warmth. The concierge would invite her for a cup of tisane in the evening and talk about her life, her lover, who had been killed long ago by the Germans.

  “Mon ami, you need a homosexual affair. It is repression that is the source of all neurosis,” Antonio was saying to a gentleman with a gray beard who was writing amidst a sheaf of papers.

  “You’re insane!” The man glared at him, then gathered up his papers from the table, along with his cup of expresso, and moved off.

  “Quel con!”

  Eleanor smiled. “You’re lucky he didn’t hit you.” She yawned. “It’s past midnight. I’m exhausted. I should be in bed.”

  “How often do you visit Paris, Madame? Is not every day. Come, I will take you to another café.”

  She let herself be led, feeling young once more and in the mood for adventure.

  One day he took her to meet a countess who lived on the Isle de Saint Louis. Her apartment was luxurious, with parquet floors, furniture upholstered in satin, and a view of the Seine. As for the countess, she had the fresh beauty of a peasant girl. When she greeted him with an embrace, he fondled her derrière. “No, Antonio!” But she smiled, even while she protested.

  She served them tea, and afterwards he read her palm. “You will have a child.”

  “Only one?” she looked disappointed.

  “I see one child.”

  “We’ve been trying to conceive.”

  He lightly traced thin lines in the hollow beneath her thumb. “These are lines of frustration. Perhaps your husband needs his sperm count checked. Be discreet.”

  The countess flushed. “Who have you spoken with?”

  “No one. I just propose caution.”

  The countess laughed, breaking the spell. “You’re outrageous!”

  Afterwards he dragged Eleanor from café to café, drinking cafés royales. “The Countess’s uncle is editor at Gallimard. I want her to introduce me.” His voice grew anguished. “I need to obtain decent work. This life—cleaning the stairs of our building, painting apartments for friends—it is no life for a writer.”

  His fingers shook as he lit yet another Caporal. “I have always been poor,” he said. “In Santiago, there were times I could only afford one meal a day. Beans and rice. But for me, money is not important. Sometimes I gave away what I had to friends. Money means nothing to me, but is important for Rosa and the baby.” He inhaled, blew out, stared past her, involved in his thoughts. “You don’t know how difficult the life can be,” he said. “My friend Fernando … you meet him the other night. He is so desperate for money. He go to the butcher to beg for scraps of meat for his dog. But he is the dog. Last week I give him the money I receive at last from Chile for a newspaper article!”

  “You’re too generous.” She felt so tired. His voice kept eating into her.

  “Tell me, Eleanor, would there be opportunity for me in the United States? I can work as a photographer. I can learn new skills.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Life with Rosa and the baby will be too difficult here. She has no idea how to run a household or cook economically or sew. You have not prepared her.”

  “She was never interested.”

  “Is the duty of a mother to prepare her daughter.”

  “It’s all my fault?” Her lips quivered, and tears welled up.

  “Life hurts, Eleanor. You must listen.” His voice rose louder. The café owner behind the counter turned his glance on them. “I am waiting now for months for the job with Paris Soir to come through. If it doesn’t, then we must go to America. May the good God help us.

  “Rosa needs me. I cannot resist when someone needs me so much. But you understand I need your help.” If you want me to stay with Rosa, you must befriend me. He was handing her the obligation of keeping them together. If he abandoned Rosa now, Eleanor would feel responsible. Somehow it was all bound up with the rape.

  At the next table, a young man and a girl with long brown hair were kissing, their mouths like soft mollusks, their bodies glued together. If only Antonio and Rosa shared this kind of happiness.

  But meanwhile, he was with her.

  “I dread going back to Westbury,” she said. “Here I feel freer in my thoughts. It’s as though Aaron and even Heinrich, all the web of familiar things around me at home seemed to constrict me.”

  “With me, you are more free.”

  “Yes,” she murmured.

  He put down his glass of wine and gazed at her, but she looked away. She had stepped out on an invisible ledge.

  The man and girl with the long hair were getting up from their table.

  One day she talked about different houses in which she had lived. “Each place has affected me so strongly. I don’t think it’s the same for a man.”

  They were eating a lunch of lentils and roast lamb in a café near her hotel.

  “For a woman,” he said, “a house is like a womb, while for most men a house is simply a place to sleep, eat, shit, piss, and make love.”

  Her passion for her house was diffuse, she reflected. It was scattered into bits and fragments of the universe, buried in the earth with the seeds of her geraniums and roses. Buried in the timbers of the house. The house was like a second skin. It was part of her and part of Aaron.

  “The house in Ohio where you lived as a child, it was like mine,” he said. “He speared a piece of meat with his fork. “Ten children. Four servants. Our Aunt Luisa never married. She devoted herself to us, and she ran the house while my mother spent hours each day playing the piano.

  “After my father died, each child under law received an inheritance from the estate. Still, we were poor. There were many unpaid bills, and my mother was having a difficult time. I gave her my portion—I was the one child who did. But she treated me the worst! She put me into the cold
est and dampest room in our house. I came down with arthritis. Aunt Luisa took care of me, because my mother had no time. She was too busy with her social life and with the Church—she was a strict Catholic. For two years I could only walk with a cane.” His face hardened. “I was too strong for her to love. She could not dominate me. She could not break me, as she did the others. … When she dies, I will dance on her grave!” he said, his eyes flashing.

  “Always I help others, but I do not help myself. With the right woman, I could be formidable.” His eyes met hers. She glanced away, feeling as stirred up as if she were a young girl.

  Late that night he knocked at the door of Eleanor’s hotel room. His stance was unsteady, and his voice had a fanatic quality which it took on after he drank too much.

  “Eleanor, let me in.”

  She opened the door. She was in a long nightgown, just about to slip into bed. “Get dressed,” he commanded. He seemed in such a volatile, fragile state that she did not dare refuse.

  She went into the bathroom to dress, while he helped himself to the contents of the flask on her bedside table.

  At the Deux Magots, filled with late night customers, he ordered cognac for them both. “I need a woman who is strong,” he said. He paused and sipped from his glass.

  “I want to complete a collection of stories I began years ago. But I need tranquility and freedom from financial worries. I am not calm enough. I drink to quiet my nerves. I am like a person without a skin.” His fingers trembled as he lit a fresh cigarette.

  “Rosa loves you more than she has ever loved anyone,” said Eleanor.

  “She needs me, but she does not know how to love me. All men are children. I am too much for her. A woman can only love a man whom she can see as a child.”

  “She does need you very much.”

  “And what if you and I ran away together? You are frivole, but you are strong. Together, we might each become formidable.”

  “I wish I could run away with you,” she heard herself whisper.

  Later that night she felt tempted once again to swallow all her Seconals. Thirteen remained inside her leather travel kit.

  To die, ah to die.

  To carry out Heinrich’s threat and drift into eternity.

  She dreamed she was deep inside a cave where a gnarled old man hunched over a fire. He was chuckling to himself. “You do not see,” he said.

  “See what?”

  “If you saw, you would not need to ask.”

  Rosa, forgive me. Who can dictate to the heart?

  What if she had gone off with him? What if she had broken all the taboos, cast herself off from family and friends, and lived with him in Paris or Barcelona?

  “You live in dreams, regrets, and anxieties,” said Antonio. “Like a sleepwalker you let eternity … the now … pass you by.”

  CHAPTER 26

  THE APARTMENT

  On the day that Rosa took the baby home from the hospital, rain was pouring down. She nearly slipped on the wet cobblestones in the courtyard. Pale with fright—the baby’s skull was so fragile—she held Isabel more tightly as she climbed the four flights of stairs behind Antonio, who had gone ahead to unlock the door.

  She put Isabel down on their big bed. She was still sleeping.

  “La bébé is at home now with her mamá and papá,” said Antonio. He put his arm around Rosa. The two of them gazed fondly at the tiny bundle in pink flannel.

  A little later Eleanor arrived with a bag of groceries. Antonio inspected the bottle of wine she had brought. “Ah, Madame, this is Chenin Blanc—very good. But we need a Cabernet with the roast. I go to buy a bottle.”

  He ran out the door, evidently eager to escape.

  Rosa went into the kitchen where a bottle of formula was heating. Eleanor noticed how thin she looked in her grey sweater and skirt—thinner than she remembered. Her shoulders were slightly bent, as if she were cold or fearful. She tested a drop of the liquid on her wrist to see if it was warm enough. “I wanted to nurse her, but I have no more milk.”

  The air felt oppressive. Rosa glanced at her mother. Tears glistened in her eyes, and in that instant Eleanor felt that Rosa knew everything. Nonetheless, she shrugged off the thought and began to wash dishes that were piled in the sink while Rosa fed the baby.

  Eleanor visited every day, bringing groceries, more baby clothes, a worn volume of Baudelaire. She ordered a diaper service. She watched over Isabel when Rosa went out during the day. Their apartment was nearly always cold, littered with clothing drying on a rack in front of the heater. Eleanor bought more blankets for Isabel, who would collapse against her like a soft kitten and give a sigh of contentment in her arms. How darling she was!

  “A baby only cries if she needs something,” said Antonio. He and Rosa would pick Isabel up if she gave the smallest whimper. Once a week, her hair askew, Rosa would bundle the baby into her carriage early in the morning and run along the sidewalks to the clinic for her checkup. Each minor ailment—an attack of gas, a trace of diaper rash—loomed for Rosa like a catastrophe.

  Antonio was out a lot. He said that he was looking for work. Although he was still the building janitor, he needed more income. Photography, painting and odd jobs he obtained through friends had kept him going up to now. Sometimes he brought people home with him. Sleek, flirtatious French girls. Chilean men who smoked and drank his wine and talked loudly over late dinners. At times he stayed out until two or three in the morning. Then Rosa’s nerves would be strung nearly at the breaking point. “Where have you been?” she would ask. “To the moon,” he would reply.

  An editor in Santiago asked Antonio to write about Chilean artists in Paris. “I need to be alone. I need serenity,” he said. Rosa was thrilled, and she tiptoed around the apartment, keeping things as quiet as possible.

  Nonetheless, he was attentive to the baby’s needs.

  “This is how you burp her, Rosa. You never showed her, Madame?”

  Eleanor was sitting in one of their rickety chairs. “No, I didn’t.”

  “With her brothers?”

  “Rosa was too young,” she said icily.

  Rosa wandered around the room, the baby pressed against her shoulder, gently patting her tiny back to help her burp. Afterwards as she lay asleep in Rosa’s arms, Antonio leaned over and softly stroked Isabel’s face. “Babies are intelligent. They sense everything that is going on. Isabel wants harmony between her father and mother. She is a powerful personage. We need to be harmonious for her sake.”

  The baby’s chest fluttered with light sleeping breaths.

  He drew Rosa close, and despite herself Eleanor felt a twinge of jealousy.

  There was always tension. One afternoon, as Rosa was carrying a pot of freshly brewed tea over to the dining table, she cried out, “You’re sitting too close!” Eleanor and Antonio had been sitting on the edge of the bed, while Antonio read to her from the article he had been writing. Eleanor moved away slightly. In defiance, Antonio moved closer. Rosa hurled the pot of tea. It shattered around his ankles, splattering his pants and forming a puddle on the tile floor. He sprang to his feet and gave her a resounding blow across the face.

  “Stop!” Rosa screamed, sobbing.

  “Don’t, Antonio!” cried Eleanor.

  “Pas d’hysterie.” He turned to Eleanor, and he looked stricken. “I never hit a woman before,” he said. “She needs it, and it hurts me. She needs a man to set boundaries.”

  “Fuck you! Fuck you both!” cried Rosa.

  “Clean up the glass, Petite.”

  Weeping, she did so, on her knees with a brush and dustpan and sponge.

  Afterwards he embraced her tightly. “Who loves you?”

  “Do you?” she asked through her tears. “Do you really?”

  CHAPTER 27

  ELEANOR

  “Mom, I have no more milk in my breasts,” you said, cheeks flushed with rage. Then you looked away. Forlorn. You were so angry and forlorn. I wanted to comfort you, but I didn’t know how. There
was a huge black wall between us that you had erected over the years. Or had I? It was you, Rosa, who built this wall, I told myself, while pushing down my doubts.

  Your features formed a cold barrier, softening only when you cradled the baby in your arms. I wanted to fly out of my body, hug you to my bosom, and weep tears of comfort and balm. But I felt paralyzed.

  Memories flicker through my mind.

  “Don’t move your hands beneath the covers or the bogeyman will get you. Keep your hands by your sides,” said my Irish nursemaid long ago. For her, the very hint of masturbation was a mortal sin.

  “Don’t touch your mother’s dress. You’ll rumple it.” Mother’s navy chiffon dress with tiny silver stars. “Don’t touch.”

  Another memory comes to mind. I was at a college dance.

  “Tell me,” the young man implored. “Do you care for me at all?” My lips felt frozen. When he walked away from me on the moonlit terrace, I could not reach out and pull on his sleeve. “Don’t go.” That was all I needed to say. “Don’t go.” But I could not move or speak. His steps receded against the bricks. The dance music inside the building sent waves of sound through my spine. I could not move.

  Now I could not reach out to comfort you, Rosa.

  CHAPTER 28

  RETURN

  The house felt bereft. She missed Howard and Jesse, who were off at college. There was an ache of wanting something associated painfully and secretly with Antonio.

  Creaking floorboards. The beech tree in the yard was bare of leaves. Its silvery branches swayed in the wind. House an empty shell. Empty shell. The words repeated themselves in her brain.

  Her shoes creaked on the stairs. Paint was wearing off in spots on the black wooden floor. Underneath was vermilion, a residue of the former owners long ago. Smells of cooking. Edith Piaf on the stereo—no—she would play some Mozart for clarity. Lose herself in the music. But then the phone would ring, and Aaron would come in from the studio for dinner.

  Howard and Jesse came home on winter break. Howard moved to the maid’s room in the attic for privacy. In the late afternoon, Eleanor would sometimes bring him a plate of cookies or a cup of hot chocolate, and she would visit with him, sitting on the edge of the bed, folding laundry while he worked on a term paper. As for Jesse, he would play the piano for hours with a furious intensity.