by Lucia Berlin
Señor Errazuriz and Jane accompanied the old couple on the far, far climb to the top of the plaza. Giglio had killed Genovés with one perfect thrust. He was awarded two ears and a tail. The brave bull was being dragged triumphantly around the place to cries of “¡Toro! ¡Toro!” People spilled onto the narrow steps, many drunk, all ecstatic. The alguacil was walking across the sand to Giglio, carrying the ears and the tail.
Jane walked behind the Yamatos. Señor Errazuriz and a guard led the way to the blare of trumpets, deafening shouts of “Torero, torero.” Roses and carnations and hats flew through the air, darkening the sky.
LUNA NUEVA
The sun set with a hiss as the wave hit the beach. The woman continued up the checkered black and gold tiles of the malecón to the cliffs on the hill. Other people resumed walking too, once the sun had set, like spectators leaving a play. It isn’t just the beauty of the tropical sunset, she thought, the importance of it. In Oakland the sun set into the Pacific each evening and it was the end of another day. When you travel you step back from your own days, from the fragmented imperfect linearity of your time. As when reading a novel, the events and people become allegorical and eternal. The boy whistles on a wall in Mexico. Tess leans her head against a cow. They will keep doing that forever; the sun will just keep on falling into the sea.
She walked onto a platform above the cliffs. The magenta sky reflected iridescent in the water. Below the cliffs a vast swimming pool had been built of stones into the jagged rock. Waves shattered against the far walls and spilled into the pool, scattering crabs. A few boys swam in the deeper water, but most people waded or sat on the mossy rocks.
The woman climbed down the rocks to the water. She took off the shift covering her bathing suit and sat on the slippery wall with the others. They watched as the sky faded and a new orange moon appeared in the mauve sky. ¡La luna! people cried. ¡Luna nueva! The evening grew dark and the orange moon turned to gold. The foam cascading into the pool was a sharp metallic white; the clothes of the bathers flowed eerie white as if under a strobe light.
Most of the bathers in the silver pool were fully clothed. Many of them had come from the mountains or ranchos far away; their baskets lay in piles on the rocks.
And they couldn’t swim, so it was nice to lie suspended in the pool, for the waves to rock them and swirl them back and forth. When the breakers covered the wall it didn’t seem that they were in a pool at all, but in their own calm eddy in the middle of the ocean.
Streetlights came on above them against the palms on the malecón. The lights glowed like amber lanterns on their intricate wrought-iron poles. The water in the pool reflected the lights over and over, first whole, then into dazzling fragments, then whole again like full moons under the tiny moon in the sky.
The woman dove into the water. The air was cool, the water warm and salty. Crabs raced over her feet, the stones underfoot were velvety and jagged. She remembered only then being in that pool many years ago, before her children could swim. A sharp memory of her husband’s eyes looking at her across the pool. He held one of their sons as she swam with the other in her arms. No pain accompanied the sweetness of this recollection. No loss or regret or foretaste of death. Gabriel’s eyes. Her sons’ laughter, echoing from the cliffs into the water.
The bathers’ voices ricocheted too, from the stone. Ah! they cried, as at fireworks, when the young boys dove into the water. They swayed in their white clothes. It was festive, with the clothes swirling, as if they were waltzing at a ball. Beneath them, the sea made delicate traceries on the sand. A young couple knelt in the water. They didn’t touch, but were so in love it seemed to the woman that tiny darts and arrows shot out into the water from them, like fireflies or phosphorescent fish. They wore white clothes, but seemed naked against the dark sky. Their clothes clung to their black bodies, to his strong shoulders and loins, her breasts and belly. When the waves flowed in and ebbed out, her long hair floated up and covered them in tendrils of black fog and then subsided black and inky into the water.
A man wearing a straw hat asked the woman if she would take his babies out into the water. He handed her the smallest one, who was frightened. It slipped up through the woman’s arms like a skittish baboon and climbed onto her head, tearing at her hair, coiling its legs and tail around her neck. She untangled herself from the screaming baby. “Take the other one, the tame one,” the man said, and that child did lie placidly while she swam with it in the water. So quiet she thought it must be asleep, but no, it was humming. Other people sang and hummed in the cool night. The sliver of moon turned white like the foam as more people came down the stairs into the water. After a while the man took the baby from her and left then, with his children.
On the rocks a girl tried to coax her grandmother into the pool. “No! No! I’ll fall!”
“Come in,” the woman said, “I’ll take you swimming all around the pool.”
“You see I broke my leg and I’m afraid I’ll break it again.”
“When did it happen?” the woman asked.
“Ten years ago. It was a terrible time. I couldn’t chop firewood. I couldn’t work in the fields. We had no food.”
“Come in. I’ll be careful of your leg.”
At last the old lady let her lift her down from the rock and into the water. She laughed, clasping her frail arms around the woman’s neck. She was light, like a bag of shells. Her hair smelled of charcoal fires. “¡Qué maravilla!” she whispered into the woman’s throat. Her silver braid wafted out behind them in the water.
She was seventy-eight and had never seen the ocean before. She lived on a rancho near Chalchihuites. She had ridden on the back of a truck to the seaport with her granddaughter.
“My husband died last month.”
“Lo siento.”
She swam with the old lady to the far wall where the cool waves spilled over them.
“God finally took him, finally answered my prayers. Eight years he lay in bed. Eight years he couldn’t talk, couldn’t get up or feed himself. Lay like a baby. I would ache from being tired, my eyes would burn. At last, when I thought he was asleep I would try to steal away. He would whisper my name, a horrid croaking sound. ¡Consuelo! ¡Consuelo! And his skeleton hands, dead lizard hands would claw out to me. It was a terrible, terrible time.”
“Lo siento,” the woman said again.
“Eight years. I could go nowhere. Not even to the corner. ¡Ni hasta la esquina! Every night I prayed to the Virgin to take him, to give me some time, some days without him.”
The woman clasped the old lady and swam out again into the pool, holding the frail body close to her.
“My mother died only six months ago. It was the same for me. A terrible, terrible time. I was tied to her day and night. She didn’t know me and said ugly things to me, year after year, clawing at me.”
Why am I telling this old lady such a lie? she wondered. But it wasn’t such a lie, the bloody grasp.
“They’re gone now,” Consuelo said. “We are liberated.”
The woman laughed; liberated was such an American word. The old lady thought she laughed because she was happy. She hugged the woman tightly and kissed her cheek. She had no teeth so the kiss was soft as mangos.
“The Virgin answered my prayers!” she said. “It pleases God, to see that you and I are free.”
Back and forth the two women flowed in the dark water, the clothes of the bathers swirling around them like a ballet. Near them the young couple kissed, and for a moment there was a sprinkle of stars overhead, then a mist covered them and the moon and dimmed the opal lamplight from the street.
“¡Vamos a comer, abuelita!” the granddaughter called. She shivered, her dress dripping on the stones. A man lifted the old woman from the water, carried her up the winding rocks to the malecón. Mariachis played, far away.
“¡Adiós!” The old woman waved from the parapet.
“¡Adiós!”
The woman waved back. She floated at the far edge
in the silken warm water. The breeze was inexpressibly gentle.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you.
Especially to Katherine Fausset, Emily Bell, and Barbara Adamson.
This book wouldn’t exist without the publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women. Thank you to FSG.
Stephen Emerson, Barry Gifford, and Michael Wolfe, who spearheaded the effort to republish Lucia’s work. Extra thanks and deep appreciation go to Stephen Emerson, whose extraordinary work and care made A Manual for Cleaning Women the great book that it is.
Lydia Davis, for writing the foreword to A Manual for Cleaning Women, the best we’ve ever read.
Jennifer Dunbar Dorn and Gayle Davies.
At Curtis Brown: Katherine Fausset, Holly Frederick, Sarah Gerton, Olivia D. Simkins, Madeline R. Tavis, and Stuart Waterman.
At FSG: Emily Bell, Stephen Weil, Amber Hoover, Devon Mazzone, Naoise McGee, and Jackson Howard.
Friends (old and new): Keith Abbott, Staci Amend, Karen Auvinen, Fred Buck, Tom Clark, Robert Creeley, Dave Cullen, Steve Dickison, Ed Dorn, Maria Fasce, Joan Frank, Ruth Franklin, Gloria Frym, Marvin Granlund, Anselm Hollo, Elizabeth Geoghegan, Sidney Goldfarb, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Laird Hunt, Chris Jackson, Steve Katz, August Kleinzahler, Erika Krouse, Steven Lavoie, Chip Livingston, Kelly Luce, Jonathan Mack, Elizabeth McCracken, Peter Michelson, Dave Mulholland, Jim Nisbet, Ulrike Ostermeyer, Kellie Paluck, Mimi Pond, Joe Safdie, Jenny Shank, Lyndsy Spence, Oscar van Gelderen, David Yoo, and Paula Younger.
The publishers of the previous books: Michael Myers and Holbrook Teter (Zephyrus Image), Eileen and Bob Callahan (Turtle Island), Michael Wolfe (Tombouctou), Alastair Johnston (Poltroon), and John Martin and David Godine (Black Sparrow).
The family: Buddy, Mark, David, Dan, C. J., Nicolas, Truman, Cody, Molly, Monica, Andrea, Patricio, Jill, Jonathan, Josie, Pao, Nacé, Barbara, Paul, Race, and Jill Magruder Gatwood. Much love.
—Jeff Berlin
ALSO BY LUCIA BERLIN
Welcome Home
A Manual for Cleaning Women
Where I Live Now
So Long
Homesick
Safe & Sound
Phantom Pain
Legacy
Angels Laundromat
A Manual for Cleaning Ladies
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lucia Berlin (1936–2004) worked brilliantly but sporadically throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Her stories are inspired by her early childhood in various western mining towns; her glamorous teenage years in Santiago, Chile; three failed marriages; a long-term problem with alcoholism; her years spent in Berkeley, New Mexico, and Mexico City; and the various jobs she later held to support her writing and her four sons. Sober and writing steadily by the 1990s, she took a visiting writer’s post at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1994 and was soon promoted to associate professor. In 2001, in failing health, she moved to Southern California to be near her sons. She died in 2004 in Marina del Rey. Her first posthumous collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, was named one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2015. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Foreword: The Story Is the Thing, by Mark Berlin
The Musical Vanity Boxes
Sometimes in Summer
Andado: A Gothic Romance
Dust to Dust
Itinerary
Lead Street, Albuquerque
Noël. Texas. 1956
The Adobe House with a Tin Roof
A Foggy Day
Cherry Blossom Time
Evening in Paradise
La Barca de la Ilusión
My Life Is an Open Book
The Wives
Noël, 1974
The Pony Bar, Oakland
Daughters
Rainy Day
Our Brother’s Keeper
Lost in the Louvre
Sombra
Luna Nueva
Acknowledgments
Also by Lucia Berlin
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 1981, 1984, 1985, 1988, 1991, 1990, 1993, 1997, 1998, 1999 by Lucia Berlin
Copyright © 2018 by the Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin LP
All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
Most of these stories previously appeared in the collections Angels Laundromat (Turtle Island, 1981), Phantom Pain (Tombouctou, 1984), Safe & Sound (Poltroon, 1988), Homesick (Black Sparrow Press, 1991), So Long (Black Sparrow Press, 1993), and Where I Live Now (Black Sparrow Press, 1999). The foreword, “The Story Is the Thing,” previously appeared in the journal Square One, no. 3 (Spring 2005).
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71831-2
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