by Beth Kephart
But it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t your fault, either. It was a dog.
But that’s Estela—so afraid of losing. You should have seen her the other day when you walked off—big, old Estela in her big, old shoes. She was calling, pleading. Miguel was in the field with the bulls, his jeep driving off in the other direction, and she was out there, waving her arms, not caring what the bulls thought or did. Nobody can stop Estela.
I feel my face go red, the tears returning. Limón spreads her wings and hops to my wrist. I’m sorry, I say, about the dog. And about Estela. About all of this, really. I’m sorry.
Look, he says. Don’t be. He puts his arm around me, pulls me close. Then he leans back on his bed, watches me closely. Do you want to know what I do, he asks, when I go to the forest?
Wait for birds?
Yes. Wait for birds. But also I lie out there planning the future.
You can’t plan the future, I want to tell him, but I don’t, because he’s still talking, telling me about his father, his longest story, I realize, ever.
One of the best bullfighters of Spain, he is saying.
Yes.
And he was wealthy.
Yes.
And his money—it was all left to me. Miguel managed it when I was younger, and then last year, my eighteenth birthday, the money became mine. Miguel took me to the bank, we signed the papers. He took me to lunch, asked me what’s next, and I said that I was still thinking about it. I thought about it for a year. I went out there, to the forest, lay down, watched the birds. Tried to hear what they might tell me.
And what did they tell you?
That I was free to choose.
And what did you choose?
I chose to stay here. Not here, here. Not in this room, like this. But in a house at the edge of the forest.
There’s no house at the edge of the forest, Esteban.
No. Not right now there isn’t. But I’ll be building one. I’ve bought the land from Miguel. Land for the house. Land for horses.
Horses?
I’ll breed them, he says. I’ll train them. They make me happy.
God, Esteban.
What?
I don’t know—just. Well. I don’t know. I didn’t know all that about you.
Miguel’s the only one who knows so far. I’m going to wait for Luis to leave before I tell Estela. One thing at a time for her. Big hearts like hers break huge.
I nod. I know, I say.
Hey, he says. What’s happening? He touches his hand to the point of my chin and lifts my eyes to his.
I don’t know, I say, and Esteban doesn’t try to force it. He doesn’t try to make me do anything at all. Doesn’t insist. Leans back, stays close.
Luis came to me in the night, I say.
“¿Sí?”
He gave me a package for Estela.
What is it?
I don’t know. I mean, it’s hers, and it’s sealed. I take it from my pocket, show it to Esteban, turn it over so that he can see that it’s just an envelope, old and pretty grimy. No address on it. No stamps.
Don’t make her wait, Esteban says. She should have it.
Right. I stand up to go, but I don’t move. Limón hops to the other hand. She hardly weighs a thing, but she’s all there. Just like a soul, I think. Just like a baby.
Are you okay? Esteban asks me.
Not really.
But you will be.
That’s what everyone says, Esteban, but how do you know? How can you know? Nothing’s okay, and it can’t be.
Because I’ve been watching you, he says. He steps toward me and touches my lips. Come back later, he says. If you want.
THIRTY-FOUR
I pass Arcadio in Miguel’s library, reading some book. I pass Joselita, coming out of the bathroom. I find Angelita in the room of bulls, working an ancient feather duster. I find Estela in the kitchen, turning the spigot in her old black dress and draggy violet apron, which is tied up in a lopsided knot. “Almejas en salsa verde,” she says, before I can say anything. “Depending on parsley,” she says, “to make the dish green.” She’s cooking garlic and onion in a wide, oiled pan, tossing the parsley in and, after that, a tablespoon of flour. “Gives it strength,” she says. And almost smiles.
“How are you?” she asks now. “Have you slept?”
“A little.” I look a wreck, and I know it. She doesn’t pretend that I don’t. Estela doesn’t pretend about anything. She turns back to the stove and keeps cooking, gives me time to climb back into my own head.
“I made clams with green sauce on Luis’s first birthday party at Los Nietos,” she says now. “An ancient recipe, passed on by a woman from Jerez.”
“Estela, listen.”
“¿Sí?”
“There’s something for you.”
She cranks her head around to see me, lets the parsley do its thing. “What do you mean? You’ve been crying because you have something for me?”
“From Luis. Something he wants you to have.” I pull the envelope out of my skirt, then slip it back inside the pocket. I watch Estela try to understand what I just said, and then I see me reflected in the bottom of a pan that hangs, with all the other pans, from her ceiling. My bangs fall to my ears. My ponytail is longer. My skin is darker, and I don’t wear mascara. I’m not the person I was.
“Luis gave you that?” she says, her voice halting.
“He did. Last night. Said it was for you.”
“I don’t think I want to see it,” she says.
“You have to, Estela. It’s for you.”
“Okay,” she says, after a long time passes. “Okay. We’ll talk out by the groves.”
“The groves?”
“The olives.”
“Way out there?”
“Look around you,” she says. “What do you see?”
“The Gypsies?”
“Right,” she says. “And I need private.”
I leave my shoes hanging by the olive grove’s gate and walk barefoot through dust that is like beach sand at my feet. The hem of my sundress goes from rust to taupe; it falls away from me, out and away from the hard wide ledge of you.
Beside me Estela is tossing out seeds from a bag that she pulled from one of her massive apron pockets. The black birds with the oily heads have found her. The heat rides every wrinkle on her face. Her brown is a brown map of worry. She turns behind us, to see if anyone’s there. She finally decides that we’re alone.
“Luis,” she asks me now. “What did he give you?” She tosses the last seeds to the shade beneath the trees, and a flock comes in like a thundercloud.
“The envelope is sealed,” I say, slipping it out of my pocket, giving it to her. “I don’t know what it is.”
“And he said nothing?”
“He said to give it to you.”
“In the night?”
“He came to the tree house to find me.”
She turns the envelope over in her hands. “Sí.” She turns it over like it’s a flamenco dress, still wrapped in yellow tissue, too dangerous to open.
“I could leave, Estela, if you want me to. If you want to open it alone, I can go back.”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sí. I want you here. Look, I brought you grapes.”
“Grapes?”
“So the baby won’t go hungry.”
She looks at me with fear in her eyes. Confusion, something like hope. She finds a tree, squats to the ground, and settles her back against the trunk. From the second pocket in her apron she pulls a clump of grapes and begins to peel them, one by one. Each time she’s done, the grape is for me.
“Don’t you want one?” I ask her.
“You take care of your baby,” she says. A hazy swarm of gnats storms up. She moves them away with the back of her hand—a cook’s hand, I think—stained and quick and facile.
“Gracias, Estela,” I say.
She leaves the envelope at her side, unopened, and it won’
t be opened, I realize now, until she finishes peeling the grapes and watching me eat them. Finally, the little tree of fruit is empty, and she drags her fingers down her apron to dry them. She breathes in and out, getting ready. Lifting Luis’s envelope to her knees, she slips a finger through the seam. Out falls a single photograph. Black and white and cracked, and stuck on three sides with those black, triangular ears that old people use in old albums.
“Santa Maria, madre de Dios,” she says, and before she says anything else, her face becomes a river of tears—water in the gullies and the alleys. Triana in flood, I think.
“What is it, Estela?”
“It’s everything.”
She closes her eyes and leans her head against the tree. I hear the holler of a faraway stork. I glance at Estela’s lap, at the photograph, and see two people—young and beautiful and in love. The girl is maybe the age I am now—thick, short hair about her face, her teeth in the right places, white and firm. The boy’s hair is charcoal colored and thick, his cheeks are chiseled and wide; the rest of him is slender. A jacket, more white than black in the photograph, is slung across one shoulder, while the other arm is held low about the waist of the girl, whose dress is striped, whose sleeves are tight to the elbow. Her dress comes together at the neck with a string that is tied in a familiar lopsided fashion.
She tells her story slow. She tells it, and it’s just the two of us here in the olive-grove shade—us and the bugs and the silver-green leaves, and not the black birds with the brown heads. They ate the seeds; they’re gone.
Estela names that year: 1939. She names that city: Triana. She tells me about a basement bar—not like the bar in Madrid, she says, not barrels of wine and calamari on ice, but a bar thick with people hiding from the bad news of the day. Old corrida posters on the wall, she says. The smoke of bad cigars. Short women with big necks talking crazy with their hands and men thumbing a short deck of cards. A little stage, up in front, with a stool, and two long tables that you couldn’t walk between at midnight when everyone was sitting three-deep in. The bar was the thing, then. The only thing they had. The best Estela’s parents could make of the city they’d escaped to after they had escaped from Madrid. Because there was no more surviving Madrid; Franco had made certain of that. Estela and her parents had escaped with their lives, and they’d come to Triana, hoping to live.
“They only knew taverns,” Estela says. “They only knew the food.”
The nights in Triana were blue, Estela says. The milk was thinned to blue. The mussels had a blue attitude and were lazy. The bread was sometimes all there was—bad bread and cheap rojo, cracked from barrels. There were already so many dead, and those who weren’t dead were like nothing people, dead in the eyes, loose around their bones. It was October 1939, and the war had been over since April, but Spain wasn’t the Spain any of them had known, for it now belonged to Franco. It was the church against the people, the anarchists against the nuns, the Civil Guard against civilians, the extremists forcing politics onto farmers and working stiffs. It was dead people hanging from chopo trees. Doctors who weren’t allowed to practice. Teachers selling charcoal in the street. Lawyers sleeping in cemeteries. Priests without churches. Spain was the Moors of Maria Luisa Park, who said they’d been tied to the wings of the German planes.
“Tied to the wings?”
“Imagine.
“There were not enough bars,” Estela says. There was nothing for anyone to do, nowhere to go, it was nothing hoping for nothing. Estela was eighteen, the cook. At night the people came for what they could find, which was wine and poor tapas and flamenco. “Hating Franco,” Estela says, “made us one people.”
I nod. I watch her face, where the tears have settled or been whisked away by the heat.
“The Gypsies,” Estela says now, “they sang there.”
“Joselita?” I ask. “Rafael? Bruno? Arcadio?”
“And Angelita,” Estela says. “Fat even then. Proud as a pig in the mud.”
“You’re not so skinny, Estela.”
“I was once,” she says.
There wasn’t much, all the way around, to put down on the tables, or to pay with. There wasn’t much, but Estela and her parents kept the bar alive, because what else could they do? What were the choices? “You tell me,” Estela says, “what choice we had.” It was a dug-out tavern, she tells me, with one bad door to the outside and one ladder to a space above, and that’s where Estela and her parents lived, in the room above the bar. At night Estela would climb a ladder to bed while her parents waited below for the last sad drunk to go home. And when her parents came up, they would hide the ladder, so that in that room above they were safe.
But it wasn’t. Because one night, Estela woke to the sound of a boot through the tavern’s one door. She woke to bottles exploding. She woke to the pop of a gun, and by the time she reached the ladder that ran to the hole that was their tavern, it was done. There was dawn bleeding through the boot hole in the door, and there was Estela’s father lying in a pool of blood. Her mother, Estela says, was gone—arrested for her wartime crimes against Franco, for making a nighttime place for the men and women who had never been and would never be Franco’s people, who were Reds and Republicans still—you couldn’t change their hearts.
“They took my mother,” Estela says. “They killed my father. They did not think that maybe there was me above, in the shadows, looking down. They made me an orphan. I had no one. I had no one but Luis.”
“Luis?” I ask.
“Sí. Luis. He had come every night, to the bar. He’d come for the Gypsies, that’s what the Gypsies said, but really he was coming for me. We knew every rooftop in Triana, Luis and me. We knew where to go to be alone.”
“So you were lovers.”
“We were lovers.” She nods and her head stays low, like it is too heavy to hold high. “I was carrying his baby when he went off, looking for Miguel.”
“Why was he looking for Miguel?”
“Because Juan, Luis’s brother, had died. He’d been executed in Granada. Luis had promised that he’d take care of his son. It took him years to find him. My brother’s son, that’s all Luis told me, the day he left. I will come back to you when he is found.”
“You were carrying his baby.”
“I was.”
“But he didn’t come back?
“It took him twenty-six years to find his nephew. Twenty-six,” Estela says. “Veintiséis.” She counts the number out on her fingers and thumbs. She smooths the wrinkles from her cotton skirt and pulls at the loose hair on her head. Now she takes one wide finger and sweeps it over her thick eyebrows, flattening the bristles down. It is hot out here. A bird is calling. We cannot see the courtyard or the arch or the Gypsies or all Miguel’s doors from where we are sitting, in the olive-grove shade.
“But you were carrying Luis’s baby,” I say, after a while. “A baby is nine months. Twenty-six years is twenty-six years.”
“I never told him, Kenzie. There was no time.” She shakes her head, won’t look at me.
“But you have a child, Estela. With Luis.”
“Phhhaaa. By now my baby would be fifty-six. A woman. A wife, maybe. A grandmother.”
“You don’t know,” I ask, “what she is?”
“I never knew. I left her in a basket, by an infirmary, sí? By the door. The war was over, and I had nothing more for business in Triana. I came back to Madrid and worked the soup lines.”
“Estela, I’m sorry.”
She swats at the air. “Ladling the soup was easy,” she says. “Ladling the soup was not walking the streets. Friends of my mother’s, girls I’d gone to school with—they were stinking the stink of prostitution. Out on Calle de Doña Bárbara de Braganza, I’d see them, hundreds of women in black shawls, sitting on the wrecks of cracked pavement, like seals—you know seals?—on a rock. One million, they said, were dead. Everyone else, almost everybody, was yellow-skinned with sickness.
“I worked the soup lines. I ate
the bread, I spread the bread with olives when I could afford the olives, flavored it with goat cheese; every once in a while, I had anchovies. In the fancy shop windows, Franco’s people put their fancy cakes, their pigs, pigs with their necks sliced open, their glasses of Manzanilla. But every day I got up and worked the kitchen. My specialty: the soup. A few vegetables, a little beef, the broth made thick with rice. Because it was good to be as tired as that, good to be good at something. At night I went home to one room. I kept warm with a fire of pinecones. I sold the few things I had to curio hucksters. I ate on the edge of my bed.
“I had two black dresses, no stockings, one pair of shoes, and every day—every day—I looked for Luis. And the years went by, and they went by. I was old already when Luis found me again.”
“Where?”
“In a department store cafeteria. In Madrid. On a break from my job with a banker.”
“A cafeteria.”
“Miguel needed a cook. Luis introduced us.”
“So?”
“So I was old, and by then Angelita was his lover.”
I shake my head, try to take it all in—all these pieces of a life making a story. Coincidence or bad luck or no luck. Don Quixote. Whatever it was, Estela’s life is all subtractions. It is small damages and heartache.
“He doesn’t love her anymore,” I say.
“Phhhaaa.”
“If he did, he wouldn’t have saved this photo. Wouldn’t have given it to me to give to you.”
“Time is time,” she says. “People get old.”
“But you never told him.”
“How could I tell him?”
“But—”
“Nothing. He had Angelita for a long time. And after Angelita, he had the memory of Angelita. And now, sometimes, he has Angelita again. Sometimes they travel the roads together, and sometimes they act like lovers.”