* * *
You’re wearing a bronze tulle skirt all spattered with gold sequins, a little dance tutu drooping and stinking of smoke from the salon fire. The sound of it rustling into a heap on the floor. When you’ve gone to the toilet, I touch the fabric, the little gold sequins. Where did you get a skirt like that, I wonder.
* * *
But when I ask, you just put your face in your hands and howl. I have to hug you and say, —Ya, ya, ya, don’t cry, Martita, please don’t cry.
* * *
I’m waiting for something to happen. Something always happens in Paris. Paris, with its chandeliers and palaces. Paris, of champagne and moon. I’m waiting for something bigger than my life. A letter from the Côte d’Azur.
* * *
All my life I’ve been waiting.
* * *
In Chicago it’s winter, too, and it’s cold like here. My father is coming home from work with tacks stuck to the bottom of his shoes and tufts of cotton lint all over his sweater and in his hair. There’s a hole in his pocket from his hammer. There’s a sofa with its stuffing undone sitting on wooden horses, and scraps of fabric on the floor. There’s a floral chintz taped to the window to keep out the eyes of people who pass.
* * *
My father is sweeping up scraps and sofa stuffings and the long cardboard strips with staples. The staple gun and the air gun dangling from curly coils overhead. My father is hand-sewing a cushion with a long curved needle, or he is working a sewing machine. Or his mouth is full of tacks and his little hammer is saying tac, tac, tac.
* * *
When I was a girl, I was always left speechless whenever my father put a handful of tacks in his mouth, as if he was a sword-swallower or a fire-eater. I’d put a tack in my mouth when he wasn’t looking and then spit it out. Tac, tac, tac says his hammer. My father hums or mutters my mother’s name over and over, like a man drowning.
* * *
If you run your finger across the globe, on the same latitude as Chicago or near—Paris, where I’m staying with Martita and her canoe bed. We’re taking sponge baths in front of a butane heater that gives me a headache. It’s so cold we have to set the purple plastic tub right in front of the heater, shiver when we wash, walk down to the end of the hall to refill or empty our bucket, water stains on the dusty wood floor. Back and forth.
* * *
It’s raining a cold rain today. Martita and I with our hair wrapped in towels, painting our toes. Marta tells me about a man named Angelo she was in love with in Buenos Aires. How when you make love with someone, it’s never the same as with anyone else, is it? How every time you make love with someone it’s always completely different, right?
* * *
And I say, —Martita, I’ve never made love.
* * *
—Never? Not once?
* * *
The rain on the skylight making soft little sounds, and the towel warm around my hair, and my toes being painted red.
* * *
—Ay, Puffina, it’s what religion is supposed to be. Like when the sun shines through the church window’s prettiest colored glass and you know God isn’t inside that building, he’s inside you.
* * *
It’s that moment when you go to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa for the first time. You know how surprised you are to discover she’s so…tiny…surrounded by all those people crowding around to meet her. But she’s not looking at them, she’s looking toward the doorway, because she’s been expecting you. And when her eyes meet yours, it’s that instant, that smile she gives because she’s glad to see it’s you. You’re the one she’s been waiting for, and you’re glad, too.
* * *
It’s like the day those ambulance drivers lifted me when I was hit by a car as a kid. Don’t laugh, Puffina. It’s like that, I swear. Gently, gently, as if I was all made of glass. That’s how they picked me up. Oh, please. It was beautiful to be held like that. As if all the sad and happy things that ever happened to me, everything ugly and sweet and ordinary and marvelous, all swirled into one.
* * *
And he knew all my secrets and my sadnesses. My heart lit up inside his and his inside mine like el Sagrado Corazón. I’m not talking about orgasm, Puffina. I mean something greater. The you-you dissolving, a lozenge on the tongue. So it isn’t you and he or that and this anymore. It’s all the things you ever knew and all the things you didn’t, and no words for any of it, and no need for words anyway.
* * *
And it’s as if your body isn’t an anchor or an iron bell anymore, it’s only your spirit, wide as a sky, as if a thousand sparrows opened their wings inside your heart, and oh, it’s lovely, lovely, Puffina. As if you’ll never feel alone again.
* * *
It makes me sick to count my money, to look and see how little is left. I try not to think about it. Every day I have less and less, the money dribbling out like in the French public phones where you drop the coins in the machine and watch them all drop-click through the plastic chutes like a waterfall. The phone swallows and swallows, it wants more and more francs. But I don’t want to go home. I’ve come from so far away because Paris is the city of dreams. Not yet, not yet, not yet.
* * *
Martita, I like how you say “Beaubourg.”
* * *
I know how to say it now, too. —Meet at the Centre Pompidou at Beaubourg—. One of us always on time, and the other two always late. We walk around and buy bags of pommes frites, our hands cold, the little paper bags greasy and warm, or a sticky crêpe from a street vendor. We look in shop windows at the things we can’t afford.
* * *
In Chicago, my family is making tamales for Christmas. They’re soaking corn husks in tubs of water to soften them. There’s the scent of pork meat steaming in my mother’s pressure cooker. My mother has the whole family assembled in a production line that requires all hands on deck, aunts and uncles and cousins and kids, some at the table spreading dough on the corn husks with spoons, some adding the fillings, the sweet and the salty, then tying them with strips of corn husks as if they were Christmas presents.
* * *
My family is gossiping as they work, I imagine. They’re having a good laugh about me, I bet. My ma is telling a story with me holding a flute of champagne in one hand and a pen in the other. She imagines I’m looking out at Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower, though I can’t even afford the second-floor observation tower.
* * *
Me in the city of dreams.
* * *
Only my father keeps his thoughts to himself, his mouth shut.
* * *
On Christmas Eve, no one invites us to dinner. Marta and Paola and I meet at Beaubourg with a paper bag of walnuts, a demi-kilo of tangerines, a bar of Swiss chocolate. We look in the bright windows. An Indian shop full of gauzy fringed scarves, leather strings of brass bells, patchouli incense, wicker baskets, rattan chairs. A woman selling roasted chestnuts. Open-air stalls with great downy geese hung by their feet, flaccid necks, pheasants with all of their plumage. Waxy wheels of cheeses as creamy as calla lilies. Chocolates wrapped in gold foil. Blood oranges from Spain, green bananas and mangoes from Senegal, avocados from Israel, Greek pistachios. Feathery tulips the color of flamingos on thick green stems. Shops with silk camisoles and scented drawer paper, soaps that smell of carnations, little bunches of lavender tied with ribbon, a peach parasol lampshade, a white iron bed with an antique comforter, and the linen all cutwork and edged with Battenburg lace, and Marilyn Monroe alarm clocks.
* * *
—Look, look, Martita!
* * *
You bury your head on my shoulder and say, —Please, can’t we go now? I’m so cold.
* * *
I move out of the Black Hole and move in with Paola for the holidays, while her employers are away in Sardinia. Marta moves out of the
Black Hole, too, with a job in Saint-Cloud as an au pair. A long ride to the end of the métro line, then another train, and then a bus. We go on a Saturday afternoon, me and Paola, Marta leading the way.
* * *
The Eiffel Tower tiny and far away from the kitchen window where Marta minces carrots, broccoli, peas into an ugly green mush for the baby’s daily soup. The baby is a little Korean kewpie with hair like fur, a fat honey drop who just learned to hold her head up. I take a picture of Marta and the baby on the balcony, Marta kissing and kissing the baby, and the baby just letting her.
* * *
Paola’s apartment is at 7 rue des Innocents, métro stop Châtelet. On Sunday we walk along the Boulevard St. Germain, because Paola has promised to take me to Les Deux Magots. The last time, I had just bought a new black-and-yellow-speckled composition book with a matching speckled fountain pen, the paper the good kind, with fine lines when you hold it up to the light, like the labels on wine bottles. But I never make it inside the café, even though I imagine myself sitting at a table by the window, ordering a café au lait, and writing in my new composition book with my new pen.
* * *
I’ve walked past Les Deux Magots with other notebooks, other pens, but I never go in. I’m afraid of the waiters. I’m afraid of the customers seated at the windows staring at me.
* * *
But Paola doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. She pushes me through the front door and shoves me in a chair, orders for both of us. We watch the French watch us with bored faces, their cigarettes and dogs. They don’t like us here.
* * *
Paola tells me the story of how she came to Paris hoping to become a model. She shouldn’t have had a problem, long-limbed as a thoroughbred and pretty.
* * *
—But the photographers treat you like their whore. And they say I photograph fat, that I should take pills, that my nose is ugly, and like that.
* * *
She lights a Gauloises, flicks her platinum mane, and, without knowing it, looks like a photo by Brassaï. Back home, her uncle, who eats his dinner lying on a couch like a caesar, says she’s una pazza, wasting money on nonsense like a new nose when the one she had before was splendido, like his.
* * *
—My uncle! He cannot wait to say, Paola cannot make a success of life. No, Puffina. I cannot return until I learn true French. Then maybe I can find work as an interpreter or a tour guide, or how do I know?
* * *
The Paola from before the new nose was allowed to come to Paris alone so long as she stayed with her cousin Silvio.
* * *
—Why? Because Silvio is famiglia. Second cousin, but famiglia. And he said I could stay until I could find work, no problem. Then, Mamma mia…I had to get out as soon as I could run, eh? Understand?
* * *
She rolls her eyes and lifts her eyebrows in explanation, and I nod and make-believe I get it. Paola is the same age as me, but I’m a little fool compared to her.
* * *
—But if my uncle knew what kind of barbarian Silvio is, he never would’ve let me go. But he didn’t know, did he? Silvio looks at me, and what does he see? He sees I am an idiot. We sleep in the same bed because there is only one, in one room, and anyway, how is it you don’t trust me, your own cousin?
* * *
He’s so old, what am I supposed to say? One night, one of his girlfriends is in the bed, too, and I’m so afraid, I just pretend to keep sleeping because I’m a stupid girl. The two of them making pig sounds right next to me, as if I like it. I only stay till the morning, until I have in my pocketbook enough francs. Divine where I find them? Ecco! I go.
* * *
Paola likes to tell people she’s from Milano, but that’s not so. She’s from a little town beyond the city named San Vittore, a place that sounds pretty to me.
* * *
—But, no, it’s not that way, Puffi. You cannot walk anywhere without getting shit on your shoes. And in winter, so cold you cannot imagine. I sleep on the couch next to the heater, and even then…A courtyard where the neighbor’s dog, chained to a fence, barks all night. Dirty windows. Dirtiness on my shoes. Rusty mattress springs and bicycles and metal in the yard. Tutto grigio, sempre grigio.
* * *
When you think it’s impossible to live one day more of fog and winter and gray, when you are going mad and are going to suicide, voilà! It’s spring. And there, above all that ugly ugliness, so close you think you could touch them, Puffina—the Alps.
* * *
The Argentines have organized a party for New Year’s Eve. They’ve rented a hall near the Bastille, and we’re all going. Everyone except Marta. But at the last minute she comes, too.
* * *
We pile into a yellow Citroën that belongs to José Antonio’s new girlfriend, a woman with that transparent skin copper-haired women have, wrinkles as fine as silk threads, the kind of face that gets migraines. José Antonio introduces her as a Buenos Aires actress. Her neck very straight and proud while she’s driving, as if she’s a flamenco dancer.
* * *
It’s cold outside. A dry cold. Even the moon is cold and far away. The little hole in my heart is brittle and charred.
* * *
We drive past empty streets, high wooden fences, dark buildings. Strange to be riding in a car. We drive round and round a wide circular intersection.
* * *
—This is where the Bastille stood, José Antonio says.
* * *
—Where?
* * *
—Here.
* * *
But there’s nothing here but a big bald circle. The car going round and round very fast, like a dizzy carousel.
* * *
There isn’t anyone walking down the streets. Everything boarded shut. All at once, the windows of a lamp shop brilliant with chandeliers.
* * *
—Guarda, che bello!—Paola says.
* * *
And for a little while the hole in my heart stops its whistling.
* * *
The yellow Citroën darts this way and that, down an alley and up another, a wild game of blindman’s bluff. We park on the sidewalk same as everyone, push a wooden gate. An unlit courtyard and the sticky scent of meat frying. A crowd pushing to get inside sweeps us through.
* * *
The hall the Argentines have rented is as cold as a gas station, ceilings as high as an airplane hangar’s, and fluorescent lights that make our faces hard. Concrete walls and concrete floors a color that has no name. Putty? Submarine gray? Pea green? As if the war had just ended.
* * *
We line up to buy our tickets, everyone paying their own way except the actress, who pays for José Antonio. Steaks being cooked over an open grill, the cook sweating. Red tickets for wine and green ones for steaks. But it’s so cold out tonight, the stars don’t even blink. Foldout tables. Foldout metal chairs against our thin dresses. We keep our coats and gloves on while we eat. Paper plates and plastic silverware. Wine the same color as the blood running from the steaks.
* * *
They’re playing tango records. Everyone getting up to dance. José Antonio with his actress, Carlitos dragging Paola. The dancers moving in a big counterclockwise circle across the floor, the sweeping sound of their feet—a slight lag, a glide, a jerk, the movements of cogs and wheels inside a clock.
Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo Page 3