20

by John Edgar Wideman

  Rosa Santos: Her blood grandparents are all buried home in the islands. Rosa came here as a baby and does not remember her birthplace. She has no brothers or sisters—her birth ruptured her mother's tubes.

  ————

  Because Manuel still said nothing, Xica sometimes cried untranslatable words, things that could not be held or seen, anything that might unfasten the spirits in him:

  Marulho: No single English word describes this roar-sound of waves as they crash on shore, Manuel. I think of the mar in marido filled with barulho, noise: an ocean inside a husband crashing. I watched you pace that night and drive off wildly because you could not stand being without her. She was only having coffee with a friend. She wasn't with another man. Marina can't tell time! She doesn't think!

  Desacato: The purgatory where someone has not yet said good-bye, is playing along with another person's desires, but not out of love.

  Saudade: More than longing. More than yearning. The aching person can declare: Come to me. Although you are so much in me that I carry you around, I'll waste away if fate keeps us apart.

  Marina: You crashed into a tree and lost your mind over her. Stop fussing, Manuel. Rosa and I will lead you to her. The lazy goat Marina.

  At the sound of her name his hand opened.

  ————

  The Portuguese families in Lodi kept canaries. Some also raised parakeets or talking mynas and parrots. The birds gouged their cuttlefish and filled our houses with trilling and cracked seed. We needed their song to match our pulse and high nerves.

  Mamãe wanted to murder the plumber. Mr. Fernandes fiddled with the leaking pipe under our sink until it lay quiet. Mamãe paid him. The next morning she needed him again. Mr. Fernandes returned three times. Finally the drips turned the under-sink cabinet into moss, and one night the pipe blew up. After shutting off the main, my silent mother drove our soaked towels to the plumber's house. She nailed them over some windows so that Fernandes would look right into mildew.

  When she returned home she sang an aria with our birds.

  ————

  Two lines from a fado my father often played:

  Navegar é preciso,

  Viver não é preciso.

  This song of fate has two translations:

  To navigate is precise,

  To live is not precise.

  or:

  To navigate is necessary,

  To live is not necessary.

  A widow in our parish wrote a fado:

  As a child I thought love was for angels,

  But fate says that love is the unbroken horse

  Dragging us behind its sleek smooth haunches

  From the moment we taste it

  To the day we die.

  ————

  Manuel had once loved to comb the great matted snakes out of Marina's long hair. Every day in the sunlit yard he untangled her black knots, fixed a braid, and tucked flowers into her hair. She would lean her head back to kiss him with her upside-down face. They laughed when the kissing ruined the braid and Manuel had to do it over again.

  Xica would bring out a pitcher of water flavored with cut peaches. She knew the most ageless secrets, my Xiquinha: The peach wedges looked like prawns with fibrous legs dangling, the scarlet legs that had clung to the peachstone's rutted face. She could take plain water and change it into an aquarium.

  Xica left me when I still had so much to ask. When she set down the peach water for the lovers quietly, barely looking at them so that nothing would crack the spell, I should have asked the color and shape of the physical particle this love engendered. Maybe it is that blue anchor in the seat of all flames.

  ————

  During the Lodi heat we called knife-fight weather, Xica decided that Manuel wanted to relearn his wife's hair. We led him to her and used his clay fingers to tug her hair into rough skeins. Finally one morning the pulling made her wrench away and jump to her feet. “Stop it!” she screamed. “It's hurting me! It hurts!” She pushed us aside and ran off.

  Manuel's half-closed eyes fluttered. “Marina,” he said: his first full word since the accident.

  Xica and I grabbed him. “Say it again,” we pleaded. “Marina. Say ‘Marina.’ Say anything.”

  He could say nothing else and turned to watch her recede in the distance.

  Marina's flight became the first entry in Xica's Ofensa ledger. Inscribing sins and proposed punishments in a great book was God's job, but once again He was asleep. Xica opened a large black diary and wrote:

  #1. Marina Guimarães Costa, December 10. She abandoned us. Sawdust in her food will slow her. I'll turn her into a tree.

  ————

  When boys started coming to visit me, I saw almost nothing of Xica and her wars. I set the table for my callers and bit my lips hard to make them red and swollen. Milk cartons then had lovely thick wax, and boys would scratch out my name with their fingernails. Tilting the cartons to the light I would read: Rosa Santos loves Cliff. Rosa + Jimmy.

  My father told me to sweat my nerves back inside my skin. One day I had to plant scarecrows through our entire field using tin-can lids. The discs had sharp fluted edges, and I cut myself hammering nail-holes into them. I dragged a full trashbag of them through the tomatoes and fava beans and corn. I tied the lids with twine to stakes. The weakest breeze would lift them, teeth glinting, at the crows. No one in Lodi used straw men anymore. We got our scarecrows from cans.

  I stopped planting my buzz saws because inside the thicket bordering our land I saw Marina, her clothes tossed onto brambles, colt legs splayed, with a man I did not recognize pressed to her back. She was in a sweat and did not see me. With a terrible moan the man dug into Marina so hard he lifted her into the air.

  I ran home, and the cut metal I had seeded stirred after me.

  ————

  Marina played with the saucers of glitter and straight pins. The crushed ice was to make the crackled lace candles, but she kept slipping pinches down her dress. She stuck holly into Manuel's hair and splashed the paraffin so that hard cysts cooled on our worktable. I was stenciling angels and wondering why I had come. Ever since Manny stopped working at the dairy, Xica and Marina had earned money doing needlework and raising chickens, and at Christmastime they sold candles. This was the first year I did not want to help. Manny was so peaceful cutting foil stars that I wanted to slap him. Xica was bossy, and Marina was all mouth. She stood at the refrigerator finishing a whole jar of olives, and then she drank the black-salt juice. She always needed to drain everything to its bedrock and bone.

  Xica went into a rage when she saw Marina eating everything in sight. She hurled paraffin blocks, snowflakes, and sequined bells so hard toward the kitchen that I knew she had guessed the truth. When Marina escaped through a window, Manuel held out his arms and tried to go after her. We had to restrain him, and he fell down into the Christmas debris and twitched with shock. Xica and I rolled him onto a huge, padded tablecloth. We hoisted the ends and rocked him like a child in a hammock to stop his crying. Manuel spoke the last words he would ever say after his accident: Marina. Marina.

  “Be quiet, sweetheart. She's here,” Xica whispered, nodding toward me.

  “I'm here,” I said.

  I doubt we fooled him, but he quieted down. Our arms soon tired and he sagged to the ground, but we kept swaying, ignoring the tearing of our net, until the waves of lulling finally took him. When Manuel was asleep we got on our hands and knees, graying Xica and I, to pick up the trimmings and the stars.

  ————

  Some entries I read in the Ofensa book of Dona Xica Adelinha Costa:

  —#15. Mr. Alfred Kearny, Lodi florist, January 20. Fainting not enough anymore. Knocked over ten wreaths when I fell. Still he would not admit he is after my son's wife. Tomorrow I'll pour honey inside his store, and by nightfall black ants will be eating his flowers.

  —#32. Marina Guimarães Costa, March 2. Twice, three times a day I wash her sheets! She comes h
ome with that sin smell. It will travel down the hall to Manuel's room if I do not scrub and bleach it from her cloth. My hands are turning ghost white.

  —#48. O Nosso Senhor, April 17. Why did You make her the one thing he has not forgotten? Untie this ribbon!

  —#54. Mrs. Lamont, May 1. Spreading gossip. To teach her silence I'll phone her five times today and say nothing when she answers.

  —#56. The Sun, May 5. Too hot. Bug and spider nests in house. Feel poisoned. Hate the Sun.

  ————

  Xica finally packed Marina's bags and threw her out. Mr. Kearny hid her in his guesthouse and told his ragdoll wife it was the only charitable thing to do.

  Father Ribeiro took Xica and Manuel sailing at Lake Tahoe. He meant well. Water calls to us if we avoid it too long, and he thought the Costas needed to answer the water's cry. Water would melt Xica's bile and teach her forgiveness, and it would soothe Manuel's heartbreak. I did not want to go, but Father Ribeiro insisted that I was one of the few friends Xica had left in the entire parish.

  ————

  We were not far from shore. A young woman ran from the lapping water up the sand, tossing her hair as a man chased her. Even on our boat we could see the sparkling curves of their backs. She squealed while leading him farther from us. When he caught her, they collapsed together into a single tumbling dot on the horizon.

  Manuel stared after them and suddenly threw off his life jacket. Father Ribeiro grabbed for him, but he was already over the edge.

  ————

  Xica Adelinha Costa had tried to escape Portuguese fate by moving halfway across the world, to a dry inland patch, but there she was for the second time in her life on a shoreline wailing over the body of a dead man. Father Ribeiro, dripping and gasping, still giving the corpse the kiss of life, could not console Xica.

  She grabbed a knife from a nearby picnic table and with one upward slice cut open the useless ribbon on her wrist. The ground was already claiming Manuel. Sand, leaves, and gravel coated his wet skin and filled his eyes and ears. Xica held him and tried to brush the debris away with the lament that convulses newborns, body blind and purple, the lament that told me she had already fallen into another world.

  ————

  She wanted air to kill her instead of water. The day after she buried her son, she dressed in a long brocade gown and lay in the sleeping net. My parents fed her broth and told her to stop talking nonsense. “I'll be gone before dinnertime,” she said simply. She closed her eyes and put her will to work.

  Father Ribeiro came by to remind her that Manuel had not actually killed himself—he was a child, and when a child sees what he wants, a flash that speaks to memory, he flings himself toward it. His innocence meant he was in heaven. “So you shouldn't give up heart,” Father said.

  She did give up heart: She gave it to me. God still owed her a wish, and I was the only one who believed she could hold Him to it. My parents and Father Ribeiro were off discussing which doctors to call when Xica opened her eyes long enough to put my hand on her chest. “Rosa,” she said. “My Rosa.”

  Her heart fluttered like a trapped hummingbird. Perhaps she was drawing all her blood toward it, because it beat harder and faster while her calves drained and her hands, face, and neck paled to chalk. Even the star in the cove of her throat dimmed. She was pulling up a winding sheet inside herself.

  “Xiquinha,” I said. I felt the bird fly up against her ribs, trying to break through and splatter on my palm. She was straining her heart upward as far as she could, loud and furious, directly into my hand. As I bent my face closer to hear the wing beat, the raging bird exploded, and then my Xica was gone.

  ————

  After Marina had a miscarriage, Kearny's wife nursed her briefly and then ordered her out of their lives. Suddenly Marina had no more lover and no more baby. She took over Xica's empty house. Soon after Marina returned, I put a conch shell on her porch. No one can resist sealing the cold pink lip against an ear to hear the water echoing. I knew one widow who carried a conch in her purse to clap to her head like a transistor radio whenever she wanted to induce a good sobbing. Marina was such a glutton I knew she would fill herself with tides. She would probably take the shell to bed.

  At the drugstore a week later I bought wax-candy skeletons. Children bite off the skulls, drink the cherry-water inside, and chew the wax until it disappears. I set the skeletons in toy plastic boats around Marina's windows and doors. Before leaving for school that day I heard her bellowing.

  I punctured every inch of her garden hose. It spouted water everywhere like a gunned whale.

  I hesitated after they found Marina aimlessly wandering the highway. Then I heard two women gossiping: She killed her husband, and now she's queen of the house. The next day I uprooted some plants from my father's aquarium, slapped them on an old doll, and left it strangling on Marina's porch.

  One morning when Marina left to sell some chickens, I took the key from behind her mailbox, entered the house, and uncaged her birds. She would return to find them shrieking and pecking the apples on the table. She would never catch them. I hid hardboiled eggs and left a typewritten note: Ten Easter eggs in here. Tear the place up before they rot.

  ————

  Certain delicacies in our cupboards were meant to last forever—the sulfured apricots, the grosgrain-tied bags of sugared almonds, the port with ashy mold around the cork. I stole them for Michael Paganelli, the boy who had come to work on the Bettencourt ranch. I had just started high school, and after classes he would be waiting for me in his pickup. We ate sweets and drank until I was gut-sick and brave enough to taste Michael's salt by licking his neck. I spanned parts of him: From his left nipple to his sternum was one strained hand stretch. My forefinger and thumb measured him nosetip to chin.

  Alone at night I could put him back together. I spread my hand out on my chest and thought: Michael's breastbone is now crushed here. I have captured the size of him. The night breeze lifted my bedclothes as I touched Michael's lengths all over me.

  It was worth lying to my parents. It was worth the stealing. My battle with Marina, and even the faces of my beloved dead neighbors, evaporated under the sheer height and weight of my new love.

  ————

  Sex happens the way a pearl is formed. It begins with a grain or parasitic worm that itches in the soft lining until the entire animal buckles around it. With enough slathering it will relax into a gem.

  The first time I made love was in water. Michael and I dove into the swimming hole outside town. The moon came down to be in the water with us, and in its round ghost center I measured Michael's erection so I would have it again when I was alone: more than my hand's widest stretch. Touch anemones at low tide and watch their tissue shudder and their color deepen. When Michael disappeared in me I cried his name, because this was how I had always thought of love—a jolt of swallowing someone alive. Sometimes we thrashed into deeper water. We submerged below the moon and kicked hard to come up choking on it.

  Love had odd unforeseen glories. I came not from what he was doing but from arching against his rough belly. I would never have guessed that his tongue in my ear could cause rapture, or that not knowing how to ask him to speak my name could trigger such sadness. The sheer force of his coming thrust me from the water, and suspended in the chill, with stabbing pains and my blood on his thigh, I wondered why people are fated to have this torment forever.

  ————

  They said the stench of rotting eggs drove her crazy. The house was a shambles, and here and there a myna chipped at the bright eggs putrefying on the floor. Mrs. Riley came by one day with an embroidery job and found the wild-haired Marina in a place smelling like a dead animal.

  She took Marina to the hospital, where nurses closed her bulging eyes with cool witch hazel. They spoon-fed her purees and kept a night-light by her bed. Mrs. Riley called half of Lodi with daily reports. After a week doctors said that Marina was not sick enough to keep
in the hospital, but she would never fully recover as long as she remained alone.

  ————

  Michael acted as if he didn't know me. He stopped coming by after school, and when I went to the Bettencourt ranch he looked straight through me.

  The next day I returned to the ranch and beat Michael's truck with a plank to chip off half the paint. Rust would set in before he could hammer out all the dents.

  When love no longer recognizes us, we fall into the strangest outbursts and comas. I had restless sex with the first boy who came along at school, and then I collapsed into shock. I lay in my room until Mamãe tried to rub my shoulders and ask me what hurt. “Leave me alone,” I snapped, wrenching away. That is the final curse of dryness: We forget about those closest to us and dwell suspended upon what has been snatched away. We who are robbed should be forgiven everything.

  ————

  We recaged the birds, and I taught the mynas to speak so that the empty house would ring occasionally with throaty words. Marina liked the snapdragons and lilacs I planted for her. Marina: Do you recognize that plant there? It is what we call Our Lady's grass. Dozens of Azoreans smuggled it over here because they could not survive without its penetrating oil, only to discover that it grows wild in the hills.

  I know what my punishment will be. Someday I will have to live a long time alone, long enough to imagine several times that I will never recover. Anytime I think this cannot continue, my sentence will double. This solitude will come after a great love has died, for then I will not be free so much as haunted with dead perfume.

  One day, when mosquito bites covered Marina, I thought of Xica washing bruised Manuel outside in a large metal tub. She would keep the warm water and the soap out of his half-blind eyes, and as she worked, pouring long streams over him, she had such radiance that I knew she had the whole world there in her arms. There was not a trace of anguish as she smiled down at him. When she was done, she would lift the wounded man up into the light. Xica was so splendid before bitterness choked her, so glorious when she bore him aloft.