DECEMBER 18, 1989
The new house was a pale peach color. It was squat, only one floor, and looked smaller than our other house. But Reina was right about the patio; it was as big as a living room and just as welcoming. We could have parties here, I thought, and I imagined my parents dancing in the balmy night air.
“We’re here,” my father said, resting his hand on my mother’s knee.
“Can I open my eyes?” she asked, and he told her yes.
She did so slowly, as if too much light too quickly would blind her, and then she smiled.
“It’s nice,” she said, but my father was already out of the car. “Do you think so?” she asked me.
“Sure,” I said.
Next door a very attractive woman in a sundress and high heels was shaking out a rug over the railing of her patio.
“Señorita!” Tito called, and introduced himself as her new neighbor.
He was walking closer to the edge of our new property to talk further when Reina hit him on the back of the head with her purse. “Maybe Mariella can give you some tips on how to stay indoors from now on,” Reina said.
Inside, the house was much newer than anything I was used to. Our old furniture, clumped in the center of every room, suddenly looked out of place. The kitchen cabinets had glass faces and the stove was white with six burners. The bedrooms were plain, with small windows covered by iron bars. The bathroom was tiny and lacking a tub. It wouldn’t quite be the same to hear my father singing “Popeye the Sailor Man” in the shower. But it was clean and, as Tía Flor said when she came over later that night, it would just take some getting used to. As he entered each new room, my father looked more and more dismayed, like he had come with real—if resigned—hope, but now wanted nothing more than to turn and run back to our other house. I sat on the kitchen counter and watched everyone make their way through the rooms, walking in and walking back out, like visitors at a museum. I heard my mother say once, “Perhaps we can start a new Velasco history here.” Absently, my father responded, “Perhaps.”
I called Ubi when we had a phone hooked up. He sounded funny when he answered.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My mother’s in the hospital.”
“What happened?”
“It’s called a pulmonary embolism. I looked it up in my book. It means there’s a blood clot in her lung. I tried to call you but the number had been disconnected.”
“We’re at the new house now.” He didn’t say anything at first and I could imagine him nodding on the other end. “Is she okay?” I asked.
“I think so,” he said. “She had surgery. Alma found her on the floor, passed out in the hall, and called an ambulance. When I came home, they were just putting her in.”
“She already had surgery?”
“They had to do it quickly. The clot was blocking her lung artery.”
“I’m sorry” I said. Alma was their maid, a short and stout woman who didn’t talk much but who had been with the family since Ubi’s father left, close to five years ago.
“She’ll be okay,” Ubi said. Then, “Are you scared?” he asked.
“Of what?”
“Everything that’s going on?”
I thought about that for a minute. “I don’t know. I want to see what’s going to happen, I guess.”
“Did you hear about those guys they got at Restaurante Campeon, over by El Dorado?”
“No.”
“The owner was helping Noriega. He was holding a huge stash of weapons. The Americans stormed in and arrested him along with some of his employees. It’s hard to believe. It was a popular place.”
“That was one of Reina and Tito’s favorite restaurants.”
“At least you have your family,” Ubi said. “It will be worse now, watching the news by myself, hearing about all that’s happening. It would be nice to have someone.”
Tito walked by me, sliding a box along the floor with his foot.
“You still have your mother. She’s only in the hospital. She’ll come back to you. And you have Alma. And you have me, you know?”
“Thanks,” he said. “You promise?”
“Promise.”
I gave him our new phone number in case he wanted to call. I told him I’d see him soon, anyway, though, and said that I’d have my mother say a special prayer for his mother because my mother knew all the special prayers for every occasion.
We lay our mattresses on the floor that night and, without sheets, went to bed in our new rooms. Even the insects here sounded different, their calls more shrill, and without anything hung on the walls to hide behind, the small lizards that I was used to seeing dart from picture to picture scampered along the seam where the walls met the ceiling, making their way around the perimeter like it was a racetrack.
I had trouble sleeping. At some point in the middle of the night I walked out to the patio. It was a flat expanse that was raised, level with the front door, and I sat at the edge with my feet dangling to the dirt beneath it. I held my postcard with the words Querida Sofia written at the top in my best handwriting. I sat for a long time, considering what I would say. Finally, I wrote, in small letters so everything would fit:I’m on the patio of my new house, across the city from where I used to live. It’s different, though, like I have moved to another country. You told me one time that you went to Costa Rica. What was it like? There are so many things I want to tell you. Like how I feel different when I’m around you. And how I wanted to kiss you the other day at the pool, after you rubbed chapstick on your lips. And how I think about you all the time and when I sleep, I dream about you. I wanted to tell you in person, but I wasn’t sure how. I’m sorry for the postcard.
Ramón
I hoped it wasn’t too much.
I was reading it over when I heard a shuffling behind me. I turned to see my father, in his white boxer shorts and T-shirt, walk onto the patio. Half of his dark, wavy hair stood straight up.
“What are you doing out here?” he whispered.
“I couldn’t sleep.” I slid the postcard under my leg.
“What do you have?”
“It’s nothing,” I said.
He sat next to me. I caught a faint whiff of his Aramis cologne as he lowered himself
“It’s poetry,” my father guessed. I knew he was joking.
“No,” I said. “It’s a letter.” I didn’t know why I said it. I should have stopped at “No” and changed the subject, I realized.
“To a girl,” he said and nodded.
I tried to deny it but he cut me off “I sent a letter to your mother once. I was in Chitré for carnaval. Her parents wouldn’t let her go. I was having fun at first but I got tired of dancing with the other girls. The only one I really wanted was her. I had been thinking about her a lot before this. We had gone out a few times. But it wasn’t until then—there was something that felt like it was missing from my life when she wasn’t next to me—that I knew I had to be with her. So I wrote her a letter and told her.”
“Did she write you back?”
He seemed not to hear me.
“Did she write back?” I asked again.
“She showed up at my door. Actually, I was outside already, hosing off our patio, and I saw her coming down the street on her bicycle.”
“She rode a bicycle?”
“In a skirt, too. My mother always thought that was despicable, but I loved that about Mariella.”
It felt strange to hear my father use my mother’s first name, as if he had told this story before, to friends, and had forgotten to whom he was telling it now.
“What did she say when she saw you?”
“Nothing”
“Papi! Come on.”
My father looked at me with his rough face, stubble that he would shave in the morning.
“She said, ‘You’ve ruined me, Francisco. I won’t ever love anyone else.’ We were both ruined by the other, I guess. People and things can do that to you.”
He reached out and cupped his hand against the back of my head. We stared at the street for a few seconds.
“Ubi’s mother is in the hospital,” I said.
He looked at me. “What happened?”
“An embolism, I think he said.”
“That’s usually serious.”
“Ubi said he thought she would be okay.”
“Then I’m sure she will.”
I looked up at the sky, at a perfectly round moon. It looked flat though. Less like a sphere hanging in the air than a hole that had been cut out of the blackness. And what if it was? What if it was a way to see through the sky to a layer behind it, one that was glowing and white?
Then, as if my father knew what I was thinking, he asked, “Do you believe in heaven?”
“Of course,” I said.
“What do you think it’s like?”
“I think there’s a lot of light, even at night. And I think you can float a little, not like the astronauts in the space shuttle when they’re bouncing off walls, but more like when you’re in the ocean and you can spring up and hover for a second before coming back down. I think you can see down to earth whenever you want and that God’s arms keep growing longer and longer every day because He wraps them all the way around heaven and holds everyone at once.”
My father pulled me toward him and pressed his lips to my temple. He held them there, smoothing his other hand over my hair, like I was a child who had been lost and now found. He wouldn’t usually do something like that but I knew he was feeling emotional about the move. I think he felt like he let go of his family by leaving that house. And if he wanted to hold on to me because I was still here and because he could, then I would let him. After a few minutes, he pulled away.
“It’s time to get some sleep, Ramón,” he said.
I followed him back inside and tried again to go to bed.
DECEMBER 19, 1989
In the morning, our house was the scene of an unpacking frenzy. I stuffed some clothes into my dresser drawers and then pulled on my soccer shorts and a T-shirt with a picture of a dancing dog on the front. I still had the money from the limes. I had kept it with me all this time, thinking that my mother would eventually ask for it back but she never did. I slid the coins in my shoe. My postcard to Sofia was on the floor next to my mattress. I picked it up, careful not to glance at anything I had written. I didn’t want to read it again. I wanted to trust it, to send it out and see what would happen even as I hoped that what would happen would be that Sofia wrote me back or called me or pulled me aside at the pool to tell me she felt the same.
I snuck out of the house amid the shriek of tape ripping off boxes and the sound of packing paper being unwound and uncrumpled and pushed aside. If I had told my mother I was going out, she never would have let me. For days now, the newscasters had come on television and told everyone to stock up on groceries and water because the invasion was imminent. Reina went out once and bought a few things and then nothing happened. On the streets people were trying to act as though nothing unusual was going on. They were still trying to conduct the business of everyday life, moving around sandbags and stacks of tires, ignoring the fact that so many stores were closed. And yet, there was an unease that had settled over the city like a filmy layer of dust. The streets were no more dangerous than they had been for the past two months, yet the promise of more danger was palpable. We were still teetering, it seemed. We were so close to falling.
At the post office, I fished the money from my shoe and used it to buy a postcard stamp. The man behind the counter gave me a phone book to look up Sofia’s address. He acted very exasperated at having to do so. Carefully, I wrote Sofia’s name and street in the space on the right side of the postcard and, with a great summoning of fortitude, handed it to the man.
He looked at the address and then looked at me.
“It’s going to come right back here,” he said.
“I know.”
“Then you didn’t need a stamp, joven. I could have put it directly in the box.”
“So?” I was anxious enough as it was without learning that I could have saved my money.
He smirked. “Must be an important postcard.” He flipped it to the back.
I flung my hand over it and pinned it to the counter. “Don’t read it.”
“I knew a Sofia once,” he said.
“Please, just send it.”
Someone behind me in line coughed.
The man at the counter looked up. “Whatever you say, joven.” He shrugged and slid the postcard into a slot.
I wandered around for a long time after that. At first because I was annoyed with the man at the post office and then because I was all wound up with nervousness, restlessness, eagerness over the postcard. I didn’t know where I was going. I watched the pavement pass under my feet and grew lost in my thoughts. More than once, I had the urge to run back to the post office and beg the man to find the postcard and pull it out and save me. After a time, the squawk of a huddle of chickens jolted me and when I looked up I saw, about half a block away, the pool. It meant I had walked nearly four kilometers. Sofia was probably there, I thought, though I didn’t feel in the best state to see her. just knowing that my feelings were out there in the world, on a piece of paper, on their way to her, was almost the same as if she already knew. I felt that if I went to the pool she would be able to see right through me, that she would somehow be able to read on my face all the things I had written. But in another way, I longed to see her. I could tell her about our new house and even invite her over. Maybe she would have been in the water just before I arrived and her hair would be wet and pushed back from her face. She cut it herself, she told me once, not for lack of money, but because she couldn’t stand all the primping and preening that went on with Latin American women, always at the beauty parlor, getting their hair bleached until it came out orange when really they wanted to be blond, getting their nails done, having fake eyelashes stuck on. My mother never does any of those things, I had told her.
“She’s one of the enlightened ones,” Sofia had said.
Or probably she would be reading the newspaper, sitting up with her legs in a pretzel, gazing down at the opened paper.
“People who lie on their backs, holding their books up, are not reading,” she had informed me. “It’s impossible. Too much sun. They just want to seem like they’re reading. I hate that.”
I smiled now thinking of her saying such things. I had never known anyone so sure of everything she did.
I kept walking but by the time I got to the pool, I still wasn’t sure whether I would actually go in. Maybe I would just peek in for a minute, to see if she was even there, to watch her for a second if she was. I stood outside the fence, my fingers laced through its metal diamond pattern, and watched the water rippling within its concrete bounds. People sat on towels and chairs, smoking or sleeping. The guy behind the snack stand was delicately building a tepee out of straws. And then I saw them—Sofia and Ubi. Her dark hair was wet, just like I had thought, but she sat in the corner, on the concrete, where two walls of the fence met, and Ubi sat beside her. They both had their legs crossed but they were close enough that their knees touched, and they were talking in a way that seemed undeniably private.
I knew it then.
I knew, watching them interact, that there was something between them. It was plain. And when, a few seconds later, Sofia reached out and held Ubi’s hand, I stayed and watched, somehow unable to move, as if my feet had sunk into sand up to my ankles at the beach when the waves run back out. I stood helplessly, aware of the blood gushing through my veins, and watched them. Finally, when the attendant and the lifeguards weren’t looking, I pulled back the flap in the fence and climbed through. My heart felt huge in my chest, like it was eating everything else inside me. Ubi saw me first and jerked his hand out of Sofia’s. He stood up.
“I can’t believe you,” I whispered when I reached him.
Sofia stood, too.
>
“I was telling her about my mother,” Ubi said.
And for a second I wanted to believe that I was wrong, that the affection 1 had seen between them was only compassion and genuine friendship.
But then Sofia said, “His mother wants to meet me. She can’t believe her son actually has a girlfriend.” She smiled. How innocent she was to have said it. Of course she didn’t know anything about how I felt. To her we were all friends and going out with Ubi was nothing—not a betrayal, not heartbreak.
I stared at her. I thought of the postcard she would receive in a few days. I wanted, for the first time in years, to cry, a heat burning behind my eyes.
“Ramón,” Ubi said imploringly, reaching out to touch my arm.
But I pulled away.
“I have an errand,” I said, barely able to talk without my voice breaking. I could feel the flood rising in me. I walked quickly to the other end of the pool and ducked back through the flap in the fence. I trudged home in a daze, my body heavy as lead, my eyes swollen and wet, and thought of what a fool I’d been.
DECEMBER 20, 1989
Early in the morning, when it was still dark, a loud boom shook the house and woke us. From the patio, where I had been the night before, everything looked different. Flares flew overhead, like firecrackers that wouldn’t burst, and every so often, through the dark, a bluish explosion would illuminate a whole section of the sky. Except for my mother, we were all standing outside. My mother had taken her pillow into the shower stall and chosen to stay there. With all the tile, she said, it was the most fortified part of the house.
Come Together, Fall Apart Page 18