Longing

by Espinosa, Maria

  “We’ll see. Perhaps in a few weeks. We’ll see,” said Khalil. He gave a senseless laugh as he went over to Jack, who was beckoning him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  While Antonio was with Khalil, Eleanor and Rosa took Isabel on an outing. They bundled her into a heavy woolen outfit and wrapped her in a thick blanket.

  Dressed in coats, hats, scarves, and gloves, they put her in the carriage which was kept in an alcove at the foot of the stairs.

  Rosa pushed the carriage over the cobblestoned courtyard. They passed the garbage cans heaped with the white porcelain chunks they’d carried down. At the sight of the dismantled toilet, they instantly recalled all they had gone through last night, and they both began laughing. They laughed loud and long, while at the same time they each felt pain. The cold air sent color into their cheeks. Rosa felt close to her mother. We can be good friends, she thought.

  “Antonio is difficult“ said Eleanor.

  “He was so furious.”

  They took turns pushing the carriage towards the Place des Vosges, where there was a park.

  “He is so difficult . . .” Eleanor repeated, her words trailing off as though there were more she meant to say. “How will he earn a living? He asked if we could help him set up a photography studio. Perhaps I could speak to Mother or to Aaron’s parents, if they are willing to help. . . .”

  “He’s talking to Khalil today. Maybe he’ll get some work.”

  “I hope so,” said Eleanor in a doubtful voice. “Has he heard anything from Chile yet about his article on the Kennedy assassination?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Ah, things are difficult,” she repeated with a sigh. “He wrote what seems such an interesting novel . . . from what little Spanish I understand. . . .”

  They walked on in silence. The cold wind blew against them.

  “Oh . . . do you see that little church set back on the corner? How lovely it is. Fourteenth century, I think. I looked through a guidebook which describes your quartier. Ah yes . . . Saint Geneviève.”

  “Yes, it is lovely.”

  “I hope we can visit Chartres,” said Eleanor. “Many years ago I stayed there overnight at a little inn which was perfectly charming. Of course the Cathedral itself is remarkable.”

  The subject of how Antonio would earn a living was relegated, as it always was in their talks, to a limbo of uncertainty.

  They reached the Place des Vosges. Several small children in heavy winter clothing played on the grass in front of an equestrian statue of Louis XIV. One child climbed astride the horse. The air was full of their noisy shouts, while their fashionably dressed mothers watched.

  “Mother,” said Rosa. “He comes home so late at night, and I get anxious. What can I do?”

  “You could go out yourself.”

  “But a babysitter’s expensive.”

  “You’re quite right . . . and you don’t have much money. . . . When Aaron and I were first married he used to spend every evening working in his studio. I practically never saw him. So I began going out with other men to concerts and plays . . . I did not like spending all that time alone. It wasn’t long before Aaron changed his habits,” she said. “Perhaps I prevented him from working at his sculpture as much as he wished. Yet I did not actually prevent him.”

  “I don’t want to make Antonio jealous. I don’t want to play idiotic games.”

  “Very well. It seems whatever I say angers you,” said her mother, losing her lightness of a moment ago. She seemed offended and angry.

  They watched the children.

  “You can’t catch me!” yelled one. The others clambered after him. He crawled underneath a bench beneath the feet of a young woman in a brown coat who was rocking a baby carriage, until finally he was caught and wrestled to the ground.

  “Assez! Assez!” cried his mother. She dragged him away from the others. He appeared to be about four years old. He was rosy and radiant with joy, although he screamed in protest at her actions.

  “I wish we were happy,” said Rosa. “I wish we had a better sex life,” she said, treading on dangerous ground, hoping against hope for something from her mother that would help. “We rarely make love. Oh, we do more than we used to when I was so pregnant,” she added quickly, as her mother started to speak. “At the end of my pregnancy I couldn’t have made love. But then I wanted him to caress me. What can I do?” she asked as if she were flinging down a gauntlet, declaring war against all that was unsaid and that she sensed.

  “Oh dear,” sighed Eleanor, “I’m sorry to hear that.” She must know.

  She wanted this strange creature, her daughter, to love her. And yet she herself had destroyed the basis of trust. But I couldn’t help it. It was as if I were in a nightmare and had lost the power of exercising my will. His touch against an emptiness that would absorb me. Before him there was Heinrich, and there were also others.

  Eleanor stiffened. To her daughter she seemed remote, her eyes unfocused, as if she did not want to be reached at all. Her high cheekbones gave her an illusion of youth. She seemed beautiful but very sad.

  “Sex is so simple,” said Eleanor, gazing off at the trees behind the statue. “Yet people make it so complicated.”

  “Exactly what he says!” cried Rosa. “Only he says he has no interest. That he needs to be seduced.”

  “He is so complicated,” said Eleanor, sighing again. (He had nearly raped her the night she arrived, and she had been too much of a lady to cry out.) “Really, I don’t understand it. I only pray for you. I know that he truly cares about you. Perhaps if you pretend to be less interested, he will grow more so,” she added. “Men are so contrary.”

  Rosa’s stomach churned. She watched the small children leave in a procession, accompanied by their mothers. Then she looked at Eleanor’s profile. “Is there anything between you two?” she asked. “Between you and Antonio?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know . . . anything physical.”

  Eleanor’s eyes clouded. “Why no, of course not.” She felt physically ill. She could not bear to look at Rosa’s face. She had always thought—indeed as Antonio did—that sex was simple. Her affair with Heinrich in New York had begun when she felt she could endure no more, that something in her—a quality Aaron could not sense or respond to—was dying.

  She and Heinrich had been attracted to each other ever since they first met, but nothing happened until after Jesse had polio and she worked with Jesse every day for more than a year. Each day it was anguish to look at his poor withered arm and shoulder. Three times a week she would take him to the Nassau County Physical Therapy Center, a grim stucco building. She endured countless hours there waiting, watching the children with their twisted limbs, their pathetic faces. All her energy was poured into Jesse’s recovery, while something was choking her to death, screaming inside her, dying inside her.

  Aaron, too, had his affairs. She and Aaron did not ask each other questions that might be painful to answer. For years she had allowed him freedom, and she thought their marriage was all the better for it. Now she had earned the right to take hers.

  Heinrich nurtured her and kept alive that part of her which was dying, the part Aaron that could not respond to.

  She remembered the first time they made love. Heinrich was working then as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum. On impulse, one day while she was shopping in the City she decided to visit him. It was near closing time. He invited her out for dinner. They talked in a candlelit Viennese restaurant where a violinist played absurdly sentimental music. They had laughed at the music, then saw that each was on the verge of tears. He shared her passion for Medieval French poetry. He listened to her in such a way that new facets of her personality emerged. At last she was with a human being with whom she could create herself.

  Afterwards they went to a hotel. She could still remember the dark blue blanket and the feel of him naked against her that first time, as well as the electricity that coursed between them. Over
six feet tall, he was much heavier than Aaron, and he moved with gentleness as well as passion. His rhythm was so different from Aaron’s. They made love for a long time, and she felt as if she were opening up like a flower. All the tension she had felt for so long was dissolved. She experienced an enormous relaxation.

  Since that evening twelve years ago, their relationship had intensified. But she had made love with other men, too, impelled by yearnings she did not understand. She did not want to belong to anyone. She wanted to be free, even if it were a secret freedom.

  Why was it then that she sometimes wept after one of her trysts, as she walked through the Manhattan streets at dusk, where she was blessedly anonymous, far from their Long Island suburb? At times such a sadness seized her. What could satisfy her? What was she searching for in those shadowy male bodies with whom she had copulated so casually?

  “You have a lot of influence over Antonio,” said Rosa. “He can talk to you in a way he can’t talk to me. I’m glad he has someone to talk to, because otherwise he would go crazy, I think. I wish he could talk to me. He does. He talks endlessly. But he feels you understand him better. He says you listen better.”

  “Often you are impatient, my dear,” said Eleanor, glad to find something she could get a grip on. Antonio had something intangible that satisfied her.

  “I must be like father, he says.”

  Eleanor did not respond.

  “He hates father, you know.”

  “What is to be done about that?” asked Eleanor in a voice so calm that Rosa burst out, “Don’t you hate it that he hates father?”

  That strangely calm response of her mother’s. There was something lacking in the middle. Some gap. Something was rotten. All wrong.

  “It’s very sad.” Antonio is jealous of Aaron because of me, Eleanor thought. She pictured Aaron with his dark hair, his restless energy. When he was working he would forget her entirely. Nothing else existed for him but the brass or clay or steel. How she admired and envied this absorption in his work. But even when he was not sculpting, Aaron’s mind always was preoccupied to some degree with what he was working on.

  “If Antonio and I split, I’ll never speak to you again,” Rosa heard herself say, to her own amazement. “Because you control him.” She had not planned to say that. It made no sense.

  “I have no control over him,” said her mother, angry now. “You misjudge me.” Antonio and Heinrich. In some ways they were alike. Antonio, too, nurtured that invisible part of her. He was more violent, even more intense.

  “All those jokes between you. I don’t like the way you and Antonio talk to each other.”

  “You are so distrustful, my dear,” said her mother. She sounded weary. She was hardly aware of what she was saying, only that she must defend herself.

  Rosa wanted to scream out at the top of her lungs, shake her mother, shake her and shake her and shake her. Choke her to death. Choke her until the truth came out of her. She swallowed back rage and trembled uncontrollably. She could no longer trust herself to speak. Why did she expose herself in this way? Why talk to her mother at all?

  The sun lowered in the sky.

  She concentrated on a cloud that slowly crossed the pale globe. Soon it would be Christmas. They planned to celebrate very simply, with one gift for each person. She and Antonio would cook a dinner.

  “Games,” said Rosa. “I’m sick of games.”

  “You want everything to be so direct.”

  “Yes . . . I’m not always direct though,” said Rosa. “I wanted the baby so much and, then I got frightened. She wasn’t an accident, though,” Rosa said, looking at her mother, who had half turned away. Her mother had a severe aspect at that moment.

  “Even though we weren’t married I wanted a baby, and I prayed to conceive. Then after I did conceive I took quinine because I was scared. Nothing happened except that my ears started ringing. That lasted two days, and I was only conscious for short times. Mostly I slept. I slept it off.”

  Her mother’s silence seemed to be sucking out more from her.

  “Then . . . this was absurd, Mother,” she went on. “I got this crazy job as a dancer in Hamburg.” She thought of the small stage, blindingly lit, the sensation of walking out there as if she were somebody else—not herself at all—and to the strains of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, divesting herself of most of the tawdry red costume with sequins that she had been given.

  Overweight men with egg-shaped faces. The dancers were told to drink, to keep the customers drinking between sets. “I kept looking in Paris for an office job, but the only thing I could get was a job as a striptease dancer.” She laughed. Swans on the lake. Swans on the lake there in Hamburg, and another dancer, a girl who looked rather like Marguerite, staggering on the path beside her, barely able to walk, dark circles under her eyes. “I love to dance. But I didn’t want it to be that way. It seemed like an adventure. Antonio told me to go. At least it was a job. I thought, after the baby is born I won’t be free any more. Not the way I am now. So I went to Hamburg and danced in a club so stuffy with smoke I could hardly breathe. The other dancers were all on drugs.”

  “Oh my . . .”

  “I lasted there about a week. I knew if I kept on I’d lose the baby. . . . The pregnancy didn’t show yet.

  “So I packed my suitcase and left before they’d even paid me anything. I’d signed a two-month contract, and I was scared they’d see me leave. I bought a third-class ticket. On the way back I started to bleed. I panicked. I walked through the train until I came to a first-class compartment where there were berths. Then I lay down on the first one I came to. Some German doctors came in. They laughed. They thought it was hilarious to find me there. I told them I was having a miscarriage. They let me rest until we reached the Gare de Lyon. Then I made one of them find me a taxi. They wouldn’t have even thought of it otherwise . . . what pigs! . . . But my hair was unwashed, and I looked like hell. . . .

  “Antonio had been so upset before I left that he smashed the window in the front room. But he kept telling me to go. What I’m saying is I was terrified of having the baby. And now I want her more than anything else, even more than Antonio. . . .” Her voice broke.

  “And that’s not all, Mother. I fell one night when I was carrying groceries,” said Rosa. “I think that’s why Isabel was born early. I shouldn’t have worn high heels . . .”

  Eleanor said, “My, what a lot you have lived through, my child.” Antonio and Heinrich. Antonio. Would Rosa ever forgive her if she knew about her involvement with Antonio?

  It was growing dark. As they passed Saint Geneviève on their way home, dark clouds were filling the sky.

  “Perhaps it will snow,” said Rosa. “It hasn’t snowed much this winter.”

  Tiny flakes settled on their clothing as they wheeled the baby carriage in through the gate of the courtyard. Flakes covered them with white specks, covered the pavements, the cars, the streetlamps, ledges of buildings, and all the objects around them.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Rosa and Antonio met Tanya on the street one day as they were walking the baby in her carriage. This was the young girl whom Antonio had led into Rosa’s arms and into their bed. It was bitterly cold. Tanya, tall and slender with pale skin, pale blonde hair, and delicate features, swathed in a black fur coat, seemed glad to see them. Impulsively, Rosa asked her to spend the night.

  Antonio urged Tanya to come. In fact, he overcame her hesitations and said that he himself would pick her up at her little room on the Île de la Cité and walk with her to their apartment.

  “Rosa needs you,” he said. “And I think maybe you need her too. You need each other.”

  Rosa was startled. “Why are you doing this?” she asked as they walked on afterwards. She covered the baby more securely in her blanket.

  “I cannot bear it when someone I am close to suffers,” he said. “I sense your needs, even before you yourself are aware of them.”

  Rosa found herself sobbing. “I don’t
know why I want this,” she said. “I want to be normal. But I want to make love with her. Somehow I feel I need to do this so I can be a good mother to the baby. . . . I don’t understand.” She sobbed as they walked on in the cold. He led her into a café for a glass of brandy, comforting her. “You are honnête“ he said. “You are trying to be who you truly are so that your repressions don’t harm the baby.”

  “I don’t understand,” she moaned. She lifted the brandy to her lips. It burned her throat. His arm was around her as he rocked the carriage back and forth. At that moment she loved him more than anything else in the world, more than she ever had. She turned and softly kissed his dry lips. “I love you so much.”

  “For a while,” he said, dismissing this with a shrug. “For a while you will love me.”

  “I will always love you. You have saved me. You understand me. You aren’t like other men. You don’t look down on me and despise me and try to destroy me. Antonio, I love you so much,” she said, breaking down into tears again.

  “Yes,” he said. “Bodies in bed . . . that is flesh . . . sacks of flesh . . . and love is something else again. Even little children love. Perhaps you have heard of a child of five who is broken-hearted when its playmate leaves. Children, too, can die of broken hearts.”

  “Sentimental,” she murmured. “That is sentimental. I hate sentimentality. But I adore you.”

  He downed the rest of her brandy and ordered another.

  Closeness to Tanya would promote closeness to the infant, she believed. Closeness Rosa had never gotten from another woman. She needed that closeness RIGHT NOW in order to mother an infant girl, in order not to shove that infant girl out the window or down a toilet or down a dark airshaft or underneath a freshet of water from the faucet or into the oven to suffocate.

  I need to be loved in order to love at all. Going back in time to pick up dropped stitches, as in knitting.

  Tanya and Antonio arrived about ten that night. Antonio reeked of liquor. Rosa had just finished putting a load of diapers on the stove to boil. The acrid ammonia smell filled the air.