Longing

by Espinosa, Maria

  Isabel was now screaming at the top of her lungs to Jorge’s dismay. He wanted to soothe her. Antonio held him off. “You’re stronger than us,” he murmured to the baby, picking her up again and speaking with tenderness. “I love you so much, Isabel. Because of you, your mother and I will stay together. Because you need us to be together.”

  He crooned:

  Mi amor

  Mi amor

  Tes ojos si azules

  Si bonitas

  Mi amor

  Rosa rinsed out fragments of glass from the wet rag. She found iodine and a box of bandages. Then she took off the diaper around her ankle, bandaged herself, and set the bloodied diaper to soak in a pot of cold water.

  The baby fell asleep.

  The three Chileans talked excitedly in Spanish. She had picked up enough of the language to get a sense of what they were saying.

  Jorge’s voice, a trifle hoarse, sounded unsure.

  Francisco was worried about the wartlike growth on his cheek, which he kept touching. It had appeared mysteriously three months ago. Antonio urged him to go to a clinic, but Francisco had no confidence in clinics. He had once been treated badly at one. He wanted to see a private specialist.

  “We have money. We can help.” Antonio repeated several times.

  Rosa felt confused and somewhat outraged. Why on earth couldn’t Francisco go to a public hospital? She and Antonio had so little for themselves, barely enough for their own food and rent. Antonio would argue that his friends ought to be paid for all they had done. Certainly she was thankful they were there, because Antonio seemed so close to breaking down. Francisco and Jorge transformed his moods with their humor, their lightheartedness, their enthusiasm. They took an interest in the details of Isabel’s care, in cooking, decorating, even in Rosa’s clothing and coiffure.

  Francisco stood by her in front of the mirror in the baby’s room and showed her how—with barrettes arranged just so—he indicated the area just behind her ears—she might change her entire appearance. Worried, he then examined the strawberry-colored growth on his left cheek in the mirror. She pitied him and felt concerned. Antonio was right. They must help him, since he had no confidence in clinics.

  The men decided what to cook for the main meal. Francisco forgot his concern over the growth and became exuberant. He insisted on frivolités.

  “What are they?” she asked.

  The men burst out laughing.

  It was nearly one o’clock, and she’d had nothing to eat all day. She munched hungrily on bread, dry cheese, and an apple, while the others finished off a liter of burgundy.

  Then she and Jorge walked out into the cold to the Rue Saint Antoine to buy meat, vegetables, a baguette, and more wine. His face was ruddy in the open air. His black hair was flecked with grey. Antonio told her that Jorge came from a poor Chilean family and worked as a proof editor in Santiago until Francisco took him under his protection ten years ago.

  There was something about the way Jorge held her arm, something about his touch which made her believe that had circumstances been different, she and Jorge might have lived together contentedly.

  At three o’clock they sat down to eat. Frivolités, Francisco explained at last, were sheep’s testicles. The three men laughed uproariously.

  She was revolted but too hungry not to eat.

  Afterwards the men set off on their daily rounds of cafés in the hope of making connections that might be profitable, in search of society, cheer, diversion.

  She dried the dishes. At last she was alone. She had all afternoon to write, but panic stirred up inside her. She was far too tense to write anything except her diary, which she did in a large, uneven hand. Be calm, she kept telling herself. Be relaxed. Use common sense. The words whirled in huge letters like magic posters, bearing no connection at all to her anxiety.

  “They did a biopsy. Francisco’s growth is cancerous. He’ll need an operation immediately,” Antonio said.

  It was five a.m. He had just come home and awakened her from a fitful sleep.

  “Where were you? With Judith?”

  “I’ve been to the moon and back.”

  He laughed in that drunken way which always frightened her. Then he collapsed on the floor, pulling the quilt off the bed to cover himself.

  She got out of bed and sat down on the floor next to him, covering herself too with the quilt. “That’s terrible,” she said.

  “Unless they operate immediately he’s going to die,” Antonio said in a loud voice, enunciating each word clearly, angrily. “But they won’t operate without money. They’re butchers. Murderers. They ought to rot in hell. Surgeons with safe deposit boxes for hearts, unnumbered Swiss accounts. He needs five thousand francs.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Petite, you can wire your parents for the money. Now. Tell them it’s urgent. An emergency. You’ll send a letter to explain later.”

  “I can’t do that. They’ll think it’s very strange.”

  Antonio leapt up from the floor and shouted, “You don’t realize how lucky we are to have friends like Jorge and Francisco! Do you appreciate them? Do you want Francisco to die?” He bent down and snarled into her ear, “There were times I thought of killing you, the baby, and myself. They prevented me. Do you understand, Rosa? Do you understand?”

  He shook her shoulders. “Francisco needs your help now, Rosa.” His voice was loud, terrifying, and sounded disconnected from him, as if it were a record repeating over and over. His rage was too intense for the words he was speaking, but she could feel it underneath the words, underneath the voice which he had tightened until he sounded mechanical.

  “Antonio, there’s only six thousand dollars left of everything I inherited.”

  “It’s not your money. It’s our money. I married you, didn’t I? Get dressed. We’re going to wire your parents.”

  “Why should we be the ones? Francisco’s family is wealthy. Why can’t he wire them?”

  He slapped her face. She bent her head down into her lap.

  “While your money gathers interest he can die!” Antonio shouted. “You are rotten! You and your family are miserable Jewish misers! You’re too attached to material things. Your parents are rich!”

  “They aren’t rich. They have to ask their own parents for help. I have my pride. I don’t like asking.”

  He spit on the floor to show his contempt for her reasoning.

  The next day they sent the wire. Jorge and Francisco took the money as soon as it came and went to Switzerland. Two weeks later Antonio and Rosa received a letter from them. Francisco had been operated on at a Swiss clinic and was recovering nicely. Jorge had found a job as a waiter. They would stay in Switzerland for a while, because there they could each find work. There was no mention of repaying the money.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Antonio thought of a new novel he would write. It would be about people he had known in Paris, and he would write it as a series of vignettes. He wandered around the apartment thinking about it. He would call it Vanidades perversos d’un pasajero.

  He told Rosa about it. He stopped looking for work, no longer called his friends, and settled down with pen, paper, and typewriter. Rosa moved very quietly inside the apartment so as not to disturb him. She tried to keep Isabel contented and took the infant for long walks in her carriage. Rosa was excited—at last he was exercising his talent.

  Antonio seemed a changed person. He stopped drinking. He stopped going to cafés, except for the Sully Morland at the corner of their street, where he would take Rosa in the evening when he’d finished writing, and there he would sip a cup of chamomile tea or a glass of mineral water.

  Sometimes he awakened at two or three in the morning and would start writing again. He made love to Rosa almost every night. Their lovemaking was better than it ever had been. He looked studious, at times exalted.

  We’re living out a normal marriage now, thought Rosa, a real marriage.

  “Vanidades is far more sophisticate
d than my first novel,” he said. “Manuel was romantic. I’ve grown cynical.”

  “I loved Manuel,” she said. “I could understand the sense of it, even though I didn’t know each word. It is poetic.”

  “You should study Spanish.”

  “Do you think we might go to Chile to live?”

  “Who knows?”

  “How did you write your first novel?”

  “I was not working as a reporter then, but in a bookstore. I had regular hours. That is very important. I lived alone in a little third-floor apartment in Santiago with a view of the Cordillera, snow-rimmed. Alma Iñez was my only visitor. I wrote after work from eight until eleven every night for three years, and during that time I lived very simply—I ate mostly beans and rice—meat is expensive in Chile. I didn’t drink alcohol. I was more tranquil then.” He sighed.

  “If only you could work that way now.”

  “Things have changed. I’m married to you now, and there’s Isabel.”

  “With such a talent for writing—talent I wish I had—why should you be painting apartments?”

  He rubbed his fingers together as if he were holding imaginary coins. “Money,” he said. “I earn only a few sous through my journalistic articles. If I sell Vanidades perhaps we’ll become rich. But writing does not come easily to me—I revise so many times—I don’t write haphazardly as you do the very first thought that enters my mind—and yet you are gifted, Petite. I meditate—I structure my ideas before I set pen to paper. Then I must be absolutely tranquil before I begin to write. I must be centered. I need quiet. All the conditions must be correct. I concentrate totally when I write. I’m no good for anything else.”

  He heard Rosa’s soft footsteps behind him. She put one hand on his shoulder and looked down at the sheaf of papers on the dining table where he was working. She looked particularly beautiful at that moment, dark and restless. He was disturbed by the turmoil he sensed inside her, although outwardly she was calm, her hair ebony against her white sweater, with her dark velveteen slacks.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  She took a sip from his half-empty glass of wine. He had begun to drink again. Just a little wine helped relax his nerves.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do know. What is it?” He pulled her down onto his lap.

  “I want to be writing too,” she said after a pause. She sounded full of doubts, as if she questioned her capacity to do so.

  “You must then,” he said. “The baby is asleep. Good. You write two pages now—every day two pages—that’s all you need to do. That’s all Thomas Mann wrote.”

  “It sounds so easy. It’s hard. My thoughts stick. They don’t flow into words,” she said.

  “But you’ve written so much,” he said. “Stacks and stacks of pages. An entire novel.”

  “That was before I met you. Now it’s all different.”

  “You must write, Petite. Now. Take this pen. This paper. Sit down. There’s room at the table for both of us. You write two pages. Just two pages. Write anything at all.”

  She looked at him in silence for a moment. Her enormous eyes filled with tears. “They don’t correlate . . . the inside of me and the words.”

  “That comes with practice,” he said.

  Three weeks went by. He finished most of the third chapter. Then he reread the white pages filled with his handwriting, as well as the typed portion, and he doubted their worth. It seemed a dry, brittle account of what had been joyous moments. How could he succeed in capturing the x-ray vision with which he had seen beneath the young fashion model’s composure when he photographed her for Elle? How capture the process by which he divined her fluttering, precocious desire? She was only fifteen. He had taken her home, undressed her, talked with her for hours, followed the contours of her mind with endless patience. This was the first time she had made love.

  How express his relationships with hundreds of girls and women? Not only did he make love to them, he drew out their most secret joys, fears, longings. How describe the exultation, the loneliness, the excitement of it all, the rare kind of communication he had with these creatures? “No one else has ever been so close to me,” women would say.

  His gifts left him isolated. He had always been alone, as he was now, in a psychic desert with Rosa, who had only the vaguest understanding of who he was. She could not perceive the depth of his suffering, his need for tenderness, his need to be loved, because she was so preoccupied with her own inadequacies, so intent on sheltering her own frail ego.

  “Le charmant,” one woman called him. Each village in France, she said, had “un charmant” who was not subject to ordinary rules, who might seduce the mayor’s wife, who was somewhat of an outsider.

  He looked at his sheaf of papers in disgust, threw them into the cardboard box where he kept the growing manuscript, and decided to give it up for the time being. He despaired over Vanidades. What he wrote fell so far short of what he imagined.

  “Oh but you can’t give it up!” cried Rosa. However, when he read his work aloud, translating it as he read from Spanish into French, it failed to move her in the way he wanted her to be moved.

  “There are too many pressures on me now,” he said. His brow furrowed. He refilled his glass. He had been drinking more wine, she noted with consternation. “We need money, Petite.”

  “But I have enough for us to live on for a while—at least a year. If we have money for Francisco, certainly we have money for you to finish your book.”

  “No, we need money now. I need to earn money. I am too anxious living this way. Besides, the conditions no longer feel right—maybe we should go to the United States—I feel Paris is not good for the baby. She needs a better climate—more fresh air and sunshine—perhaps in California it would be easier for us.”

  “But can you finish your book first?”

  “My ideas need time to jell. I don’t have the inspiration to go on. Rather I have too many ideas, and they are not clear.”

  She felt terribly frustrated at the idea of his stopping. Her own work seemed far less important. The two pages she had been writing each day were amateurish ramblings, while he was a mature artist who had earned a living as a journalist and seemed on the brink of fame and wealth with his second novel.

  “You’re afraid,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Could it be you’re afraid?” she asked very hesitantly in a soft voice.

  He overturned his wine glass and smashed it on the tile floor. The wine spilled from the table onto his thigh before he moved it away. He raised his hand as if to strike her.

  “What did you say? Répétez! Répétez!”

  She rushed out of the apartment, slamming the door behind her, and in the privacy of the hall landing she burst into tears. A Vietnamese couple who lived on the same floor walked up the stairs at this moment and looked at her with curiosity. But thank God they did not ask her what was wrong. They let her be.

  A few days later Antonio and Rosa were walking past the Café Selecte when Antonio glimpsed Lotte inside. He pulled Rosa inside the café and went over to Lotte’s table.

  “Hello,” he greeted her. “You’re Tanya’s friend.”

  “Yes,” she said. Her dark eyes shone with delight and her tinted golden hair gleamed. She was wearing a cashmere brown sweater that set off the rosiness of her skin.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  Antonio ordered cafés royals for all of them. Lotte was munching on a ham sandwich. “I can’t drink in the middle of the day,” she said.

  “Yes you can,” said Antonio. “A drop of cognac won’t hurt. That’s all they put in their cafés royals—a very small drop, the sons of bitches.”

  Lotte laughed.

  Antonio questioned her about her life. She came from Munich and she had been studying singing for a year at the Conservatoire. It was evident as they talked that Lotte was attracted to Antonio. Her eyes lit up whenever she looked at him. She even blushed at times.
>
  Rosa sipped the hot café royal. She shivered. There were goosepimples on her arms. She was wearing a thin blouse under her coat, and it was cold even inside the café.

  Lotte said she lived with another German girl and had not seen Tanya in a while. In response to Antonio’s persistent questions, she said that she only had experience of making love to other girls. “I’d like to make love to a man,” she said, smiling at Antonio, looking him full in the eyes, “but I’m afraid to.”

  After a while she excused herself to go to the WC. Antonio said, “I know she wants to make love with me, and I think she needs to. But she wants your permission first.”

  Rosa could scarcely swallow the coffee and cognac mixture in her mouth. She nodded. A queasy feeling welled up inside her. She was frightened, but she believed she had no choice except to acquiesce, after all that Antonio had been through with Tanya.

  Lotte was more sensitive, more compelling than other women Antonio had shown an interest in. Lotte was the one person—so far in their life together—whom she could imagine replacing her.

  The next day Rosa went out for a long walk between two and five o’clock in the afternoon. When she returned, the baby was asleep in the front room. The door to the main room was shut. She sank down on the cold tiles. She heard Lotte’s soft laughter, Antonio’s deeper echo. A few moments later, dressed in a coat and scarf, Lotte opened the door, an exultant look on her face. When she saw Rosa she bent over in her concern. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Rosa. She felt faint, and a wave of anguish swept through her.

  “You were generous,” Antonio said later. “I value you for that. I love you, Petite.”

  “I only hope it won’t be repeated,” said Rosa.

  “Who knows? Who can predict the future?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Antonio’s article on Kennedy was published in El Mercurio and his article on Chilean expatriates living in Paris in La Nación. While these minor successes gave him brief flashes of joy, they did not dispel the huge dark cloud of fear surrounding him.