“Raul asked what you might like to study.”
Chapter 9
Liliana
“The program was just reinstated.” The guide seemed to be trying to keep her voice low. “But they just gave us a new wing of the Communications building. Here, we can take the elevator.”
The four of them, the guide, Liliana, Nita and her father all squeezed into the small brown elevator. It smelled like dog shampoo and Liliana tried to hold her breath. The steel cables grinded to a halt and the doors slid open. Students wearing t-shirts that read in big block letters, la voz, the voice, were sliding paint rollers over the walls, pinning up posters, and carrying boxes. They sidestepped their way through paint cans and power tools and turned down a narrow hallway.
There were students in small classrooms huddled around computers and professors with long hair and hanging beards, their wrinkled shirts un-tucked, leaning against dry erase boards. The hallway opened into a giant computer lab with floor to ceiling windows allowing the sun to cover everything in a yellow dust of light. There were a few students working, the only sound escaping from their cubicles the drum of their fingers bouncing off the keys.
“This is the newsroom. We just got everything settled in here.”
The guide stepped over to some of the covered windows and threw back the blinds. Liliana followed her and stepped right up to the glass. She looked down over the campus—at the red benches lining the concrete walkways, the first leaves of fall gold and sputtering along the ground, and at the horde of backpacks shuffling from one doorway to the next beneath a graying canopy of rosewood trees.
“You can see the entire campus from up here,” Liliana said to her father.
“That’s why it’s the perfect spot for a newsroom. You can see everything from up here.” The guide led them back into the hall and they winded their way back through the students who were working.
It was already past noon and Liliana could sense Nita starting to fidget behind her, her father as well, whose hand was subconsciously hovering over his growling stomach. Even the guide had seemed to sense that they were a little behind schedule but Liliana hadn’t noticed. She was taking in every inch of the place, storing the colors and the faces in her memory to sift through later because the truth was she couldn’t stop thinking about her mother and about Trini and about the man lying dead in the road.
“The main dining area is in the student activities center. That’s where we’ll have lunch.”
The guide’s voice cut in and Liliana suddenly realized they were outside. Wide concrete paths spread over the campus like dark veins. It was quiet. Even the hordes of students rushing to their next class seemed to be moving in slow motion, making their way in silence. Even though it was almost fall the cold seemed to have come early and a chill wind set the leaves and Liliana shivering as they made their way inside the center. On their way in they passed a large cement wall, awkward and daunting as it stuck out in the room, the harsh sulfur smell still lingering as if it had just been put up yesterday.
While the rest of her group was busy eating Liliana made her way to the coffee area. She saw one of the students from the Communications building stirring some creamer into her cup—she was wearing one of those shirts that said la voz.
“Didn’t I see you earlier?” the girl said, eyes still on her stirring.
“Yeah, I’m taking a tour.”
“Where are you from?”
“California, well, I mean here.”
“I was about to say, you don’t look American.”
“We moved there when I was a kid,” Liliana said.
“Oh, an expat.” The girl smirked. “How old were you?”
“Just four.”
The girl looked up at Liliana through narrowed eyes and then back down at her coffee. “You thinking of doing journalism?” she asked.
“Thinking about it, yeah.”
“Don’t tell me that’s why you came back here, to go to school.”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Good, because the journalism program here, it’s…” She paused and bit the tip of her thumbnail. “It’s still recovering. But we just moved into that new building. It’s smaller but it’s better than nothing I guess.”
“Where were you all before?”
The girl looked up, shook her head slightly, and then looked back down. “In a basement in the flatlands.”
“What?”
The girl narrowed her eyes and then stepped closer to Liliana. “You don’t know what it was like do you?”
Liliana shook her head. “We left before…”
“Figures,” she huffed.
Liliana looked down at her coffee.
“Sorry. Listen, the journalism students, we’ve got sort of a project we’re working on and if you want to get involved, we could really use the help.”
“Oh.” Liliana was struck by the girl’s big blue eyes, glistening, pleading. “Sure,” she said.
“Good. Really, we can use as much help as we can get. Give me your hand.”
Liliana held it out. The girl pulled a red pen from her back pocket, bit off the cap, and started writing down a series of numbers.
“Just…” She paused and lowered her voice. “Don’t mention it to anyone, not here anyway.” When she was finished she traced back over the ink before lightly blowing it dry. “Now it won’t smudge,” she said.
“What is it?”
“My phone number. Call me tomorrow and I’ll give you the directions. By the way my name’s Jordan but you can call me Jo.”
The girl grabbed her coffee, heading for the door and Liliana’s eyes trailed after her until she could no longer make out the letters on her shirt. She noticed her father on the other side of the dining hall staring at her, and Nita too, fidgeting again. She snapped a lid on her cup and went back to the table.
They ended the tour in the center of the campus next to a giant fountain, water rushing down from a pair of clasped marble hands. There was something almost sacred about it and it looked more like it belonged in a church than in the middle of a University campus. When the guide left, the three of them decided to sit and rest their feet. They had been walking all morning and Nita, most of all, was exhausted almost to the point of tears. They sat there, quiet for a long time, just watching the students file by, each one disappearing into a different newly renovated building.
“She was here,” Liliana’s father said.
“Who?” Nita said frowning.
Manuel took a hand and placed it on Nita’s head. “You’re mother,” he said staring off to where the sidewalk disappeared beneath a cluster of trees.
“She went to school here?” Liliana said.
Her father nodded. “For a little while,” he said, “before they closed them down.”
“What did she study?”
Manuel’s shoulders began to tense and he suddenly stood, as if he were physically recoiling from the question. “She was…always changing her mind,” he finally said.
Nita widened her eyes at Liliana from behind their father’s back. It was rare that their father shared anything about their mother and pushing him for more always killed the conversation. Asking about their mother had always made him uncomfortable and Liliana, too, seemed to be an expert at that. It was an impulse she had refused to indulge almost her entire life—asking questions about her, about the seemingly one-dimensional character who only existed in the infancy of their memories. But with her mother’s words still subduing all other thought, just the mention of her had elicited a reflex she couldn’t control. As much as she wanted to press him for more she knew it would only too quickly terminate the normalcy of the moment, of all three of them being there together, which wasn’t going to be happening that often with their father taking over their uncle’s business. So instead she stayed silent, her lips only working to quickly mouth a ‘sorry’ to Nita who just rolled her eyes.
Chapter 10
Diego
The paint fel
l away willingly as Diego slid the blade over the window frame. He had already stripped all of the columns bare and his forearms burned as he worked his way to the front of the house. His father had chosen to start on the opposite side, in the back of the house where he could be sheltered by the shade. He had been drinking and the sun always gave him headaches. Even Ana had been scraping the fading paint alongside them for a few hours before her soap operas had come on.
Diego had started to hum to himself, a melody buzzing between his teeth he thought he had forgotten. It was a song his parents had written, meant to be their new finale song and one they had only performed a handful of times before his mother left. It was a deep and sorrowful thing, every note trapped in the low-end. A cante jondo, the Gypsies called it, every Tocaor had one. But it was less of a song and more of a haunting—something dark and phantasmal with a sound more powerful than if all of the hearts on earth spontaneously began to beat at once. And it felt odd to be thinking of it there, to be humming it while preparing a house for fresh paint because that song and the man who dared sing it belonged at the edge of the world, at the end of everything.
Suddenly the front door swung open and the girl rushed out, clutching something to her chest. She barely stopped to look at Diego, turning her face to him for just a second before skipping down the porch steps.
Ana’s voice called after her. “Stop right there,” she yelled. “You’re working for your dinner tonight.” She reached the screen door and pushed it open. “Come on,” she said, “help the boy with scraping.”
The girl just stood there, slowly trying to hide the notebook behind her back.
“Well don’t just stand there. You don’t want him thinking you’re slow, do you?”
“Yeah, sorry,” the girl said as she knelt down next to the toolbox.
Ana disappeared inside and the screen door slammed shut. The girl stared at the notebook for a while, balancing it on her knees, before finally sliding it between the box and the wall. She picked up a hand scraper and moved to the opposite window.
“You’ve done a lot,” she said, looking over the adjacent wall.
Her Spanish fell with a flatness as if she were having to sift through sand for each word but as her shoulders began to relax, and her jaw began to slacken a bit, the words began to spill out with more resolve.
“It already looks better,” she added.
Diego nodded and wiped his brow with the hem of his shirt. The girl let the tool hang by her side as her eyes moved from the bare walls and columns of the house passed the vineyard and the trees surrounding it, passed the beach and the waves. She stood there like that until the sound of Diego’s steady scraping infiltrated her daze. She looked at him.
“We haven’t met,” she said, something like surprise in her voice.
“I’m Diego.”
The sun crept up over the trees as she leaned against one of the clean columns and used a hand to shade her eyes.
“Liliana,” she said.
“Liliana,” he repeated, the l’s, rolling and savory on his tongue.
She finally moved back to the wall and began freeing the wooden house from the fading paint. They worked in a slow rhythm, Liliana stopping every now and then to sit on the porch steps or just to stare down at the vineyard. It was quiet, except for the gulls out fishing, and as if in response to the silence, Liliana took a step toward Diego.
“What was that song?” she said.
“What song?”
“The one you were humming.”
More than an hour had gone by since Diego had been alone save for his memories of his mother. Had she been wondering about it all that time? He shook his head.
“Oh, yeah. I don’t know.”
“It was pretty,” she said.
He smiled and quickly bent down to reach for a paintbrush before she could see. He handed it to her.
“This side’s ready,” he said. “If you’re tired of scraping, we can trade.”
“Thanks,” she said stepping past him, “for doing all of this. I can’t remember what the house used to look like. I wish I could have seen it. Did you? I mean, have you been here a long time?”
“I never saw it either. I didn’t come ‘til I was fourteen.”
“Did you like it here?” she said, a sad quake in her voice. “Do you?”
He had never thought about it, about the vineyard being a place that made him happy, about it really being his home rather than just the place where he worked. He always thought more about the things that made him unhappy—his father being a drunk, his mother being a whore, his father’s ban on Flamenco, the war and all it had taken from him and from his people. But looking at Liliana, at this girl who was a stranger, and the way the sun had strewn freckles up the bridge of her nose, the way her irises seemed to flux when she smiled, and the way she filled that bare graying wall, end to end with light, he said, “Yeah, I do like it here.”
Chapter 11
Liliana
It was almost dark by the time Ana called Liliana in for dinner. She was so hungry she couldn’t think, but she didn’t savor it, nor did she stick around for seconds. Her day had been full of interviews and University tours and flecks of dried paint stuck beneath her fingernails—the firsts glints of her future. Though as much as she tried, she just couldn’t make herself long for it the way she did the past, the way she did her mother’s past.
When she was finally alone in her room, in her mother’s old room, she ran a hot bath and let the steam float out through the open window above the sink, mingling with the cool air blowing in off the ocean and draping a chill over her bare skin. She stepped into the tub, letting the water level rise slowly up her legs and to her waist before she finally let herself sink all the way in—save for her hands, still dry, and holding open her mother’s journal as she read.
Trini leaned against the window and was talking about going to beauty school. I was lying on my bed trying to convince her to go to the disco. She stood up. I’m serious, she said, you’re going to University and where am I going. I laughed, to the disco. I managed to convince her to come with me. Besides she owes me.
He was there at the club. He saw me come in and he watched me walk to the bar. Trini spotted Adrian sitting and talking to the bartender. She ran in his direction, placed a hand on his shoulder, and climbed into his lap. There was a small alcove, dark, with only one table. I sat down and Ben came around the corner. He kissed me on the cheek and I thought of Trini and Adrian, kissing, out in the open, free. What’s with the face, he asked. Tired of sneaking around, I said. He reminded me that it was my decision and I just nodded. He took my face in both hands. They were warm and smelled like citrus. Come to dinner, he said. I bit my lip and asked with who. He said his parents. He wanted me to meet them; he wanted them to meet me.
I shook my head and said I didn’t know. I’ll pick you up after class tomorrow night. I nodded. We talked some more, kissed some more; pretended we were the real thing. Ben walked away first. I counted to fifteen and then followed. I stepped into the light and at the edge of the dance floor Manuel and his brother Raul were watching me. When Manuel saw me he just looked down, then turned on his heel and walked across the room. But Raul kept his eyes fixed on me, burning. He rubbed his hands together, pursed his lips, and then waved a chiding finger at me. I scowled back at him and met Trini at the bar.
The next night Ben picked me up after a late class. His parents lived in a nice part of town in a modern house with large windows. The lights were on when we pulled up and his father was opening the door before we even got out of the car. He was a small man with a small salt and pepper beard. His eyes were squinting behind large black bifocals and he was smiling. Ben’s mother was even smaller. Her limbs and hair were wispy and frail but she had large eyes that stretched from one side of her face to the other. Binyamin, they breathed in unison. Binyamin. I had always known he was Jewish. It had always been and would always be a problem in our relationship. My parents were Catho
lic, devout Catholics and they would never allow it. And I still lived in their house. I had to live by their rules. But just because I could never marry a Jew doesn’t mean I can’t be in love with one.
We ate with Ben, thankfully, being the focus of conversation. But when the table was cleared Ben’s father turned to me and asked me how I was liking University. I told him I loved it. Ben chimed in, telling them we met in a News Writing class. He left out the part about him being the Teacher’s Assistant. Ben’s father placed his forearms on the table. You’re a journalist too, he said. I nodded. A journalist, he said again, brave, brave like Binyamin. Brave like you, Ben whispered. Were you a journalist, I asked. Ben’s father closed his eyes for a moment and then smiled. I was, he said, writing all the way up until that moment we were picked up. Ben’s mother stood up and cleared the plates. A moment later I could hear as she dropped the glass into the steel sink.
Ben stood from his chair and grabbed my sweater. His parents followed us to the door. In the car I asked Ben about what his father had said, about being picked up. He stared straight ahead. Finally I saw him start to open his mouth in the corner of my eye. The Nazis, he said, they were picked up by the Nazis. I lost my train of thought and I felt all of the air leave my lungs. Your parents were in a concentration camp, I asked, they lived through the holocaust? Ben nodded. He clutched my hand and rested it on his knee. They met in the camp, he said, they saw each other from a distance, they never spoke a word to each other, but when they were freed, they were freed together. And just like that, I asked. Just like that, he said and nodded.
Ben dropped me off back at the University and I waited in his car for the bus to take me home. He had crawled into the passenger seat with me. His hand was sliding up my back and my mouth was on his throat. He’s right, he said between breaths. Who, I asked. My father, he’s right, about us being brave, he said, something’s happening. Something, what do you mean, I said. He told me to come out tomorrow night, that he’d be waiting, that we’d talk then. The bus rounded the corner and I pulled my sweater back on before grabbing my bag. Then Ben walked me to the stop, the warm pull of his lips still lingering against my forehead as I drew away.
The Things They Didn't Bury Page 4