Longing

by Espinosa, Maria

  He looked stricken. He came over to Rosa, took off her poncho and her sweater, and unbuttoned her blouse. He fondled her breasts, undid the zipper of her jeans, and made love to her right there, standing her against the wall. His fluid mingled with Clyde’s dried semen.

  Afterwards he said, “I find you more attractive now that you are who you are. I never condemned a woman for her sexuality.”

  For the next few days he made love to her a great deal. He had never made love to her so much before. After that, all of a sudden he did not touch her but acted frighteningly passive.

  A few nights later she was asleep when he roused her. “Get up. We have company,” he said. She put on her robe and went out into the living room. A young man sat on the couch, his black hair slicked down by pomade, dressed in tight levis, boots, a heavy dark sweater. Antonio introduced him and said he was Cuban. He offered them each a beer. Rosa refused; the Cuban took a bottle between his knees.

  Antonio made her sit down between them. She was wedged in so tightly that her thighs and rib cage brushed against each.

  “I’m so tired. I’ve got to get some sleep,” she said. She stood up, but Antonio pushed her back down again between them, even more tightly. “Stay awhile. Antonio knows things in his bones. Antonio knows what he is doing.” The timbre of his voice set her nerves on edge.

  Antonio and the Cuban talked in Spanish with bursts of risqué laughter.

  “Ella te gusta?” Antonio asked the Cuban. “Ella te gusta?” The words had a salacious flavor as he spoke them.

  “I’m exhausted.”

  Again she stood up and made her way towards the bedroom, but with frightening abruptness, Antonio grabbed her and wrenched her down upon his lap. He played with the flannel material of her robe, then thrust his hand inside, exposing her left breast. “Do you like?” he said to the Cuban. Horrified, Rosa tried to free herself, to cover herself up, but he pushed her hands away. “Touch,” he said to the Cuban, who seemed apprehensive. “No tienes miedo.”

  Rosa shrieked. Antonio clapped her own hand over her mouth, covered with his own. “Touch,” he repeated. “Take her. My wife is yours to enjoy. I want she know a man who is not cobarde. Is she is fucking an American idiot cobarde.”

  She tried to scream, but her mouth was clamped shut. The baby started crying. Isabel sensed what was happening. Isabel should not be subjected to this.

  The Cuban put one fearful hand on her breast. His hand was sweaty. (Thank God she was on the pill. At least she would not become pregnant.)

  The two men half dragged her and half carried her to the bed. Isabel was crying louder. Antonio’s hand was clamped over Rosa’s mouth. With the other hand he tore off her robe and pulled the nightgown over her head. She tried with all her strength to rise up against the Cuban, but he was astraddle her. He had shoved his pants down to his ankles. She tried again and again to rise, but he pushed her head back against the wall so hard that she grew dizzy and nearly lost consciousness. She was aware of Antonio’s strange detached stare as he watched them from the threshold. Both lights in the room were turned on. She was dimly aware he had his camera around his neck and up in front of his face.

  She didn’t care anymore. Rage over what Antonio had done to her mother, over what her mother had allowed to happen, over everything Antonio had done to her mingled with her struggle to free herself of the Cuban. It was useless. She gave out a huge sob and bit into his shoulder. He lurched with pain. Then she allowed herself to become conscious of pleasure. The air was so cold. The Cuban’s body was hot. The pleasurable sensation of his thrusting inside her. The reassuring fleshiness of this body against her, the pressure against her swollen breasts. She looked into the Cuban’s face. He was panting. His eyes were as dark as her own.

  She was a whore like her mother.

  “Sexual intercourse is like shaking hands,” her mother had once remarked. Then why resist so hard? Sex was something casual. Why get beaten up? Tears streamed down her face. His eyes were as dark as her own. His hair was as dark as hers. He was the same species (unlike Antonio, pale, hairless). Something inside her was opened up, and she began to respond. A demon of revenge possessed her. To get back at Antonio for what he was doing to her now because he was enraged over Clyde. To get back at him for what he had done with her mother. To get back at him for all the nights she had lain awake wanting him. Let the bastard watch from the threshold. Let him take pictures, damn him.

  She clung tighter. Her thighs gripped the Cuban. She found herself thrusting against him. She felt their rhythms adjust to each other. His hands grew gentler as they stroked her. His tongue sought hers inside their fused mouths. Finally the tension inside her exploded, and she felt sated with a dull satisfied heaviness she had not known even with Clyde, a sense of some animal passion fully exhausted.

  As the Cuban dressed, she noticed that he was trembling. She still felt connected to him. She noticed his shiny pointed boots. It flashed through her mind that these were the boots of a man who was lonely and unsure. Something about his face, his manner was lonely and unsure.

  Only later did the horror of what she had done sweep through her.

  The next night Antonio said, “I can sell the pictures I took, or I can send them to your parents.”

  “What?” Rosa gasped.

  “I want you to get over your Puritan hangups.”

  She felt dizzy and faint. She still had recurring nightmares about her expulsion from college because of the photos.

  “Sell them. Hang them on a telephone pole on Bridgeway. Send them to my grandmother for Christmas. I don’t care,” she said.

  “You enjoyed it,” he said. “I’ll bring the Cuban back.”

  “No you won’t.”

  “Why not? He’s not a cobarde, like your idiot American lover.”

  “I’ll have you put in jail. I’ll call the police.”

  “Before you get a chance to, I’ll beat you so badly you’ll be in the hospital for six months!” He grabbed her arms.

  She screamed out and with strength she did not know she possessed, wrenched herself free from his grip, still screaming. Isabel woke up and began crying, as if in sympathy.

  “Be quiet! You’re disturbing the little one.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I’m what?”

  She ran from him. He kicked her at the base of her spine as she rushed through the door into the bedroom. His camera sat on the bureau. She slammed it against the floor, and then picked it up and threw it down once more. The case shattered, exposing the film. She stomped on the pieces as hard as she could. A fragment of glass from the lens winked at her from the floor.

  She felt eerie, unstable, as if she were walking on the rim of something sharp and curved like a knife blade.

  She stooped to pick up a piece of jagged black plastic. She would gouge Antonio with it, gouge into his vital parts until the blood streamed out, gouge herself to pieces, cut them both off from the past.

  “Get out!” Antonio shouted. “Idiote! Get out and take Isabel before I kill you both! Vermin! Idiote!”

  “Antonio. . . .”

  He hit her just beneath her left eye.

  “Put some warm clothes on the baby. Pack her things. Take the damn car and get out.”

  It was one in the morning. At this hour, after all he had drunk during the day, he was capable of anything.

  In a state of terror she grabbed diapers, formula, bottles, and threw them into a large straw bag. Then she wrapped Isabel into a blanket and ran out with her, holding the car keys.

  After they left, Antonio sat down on the floor against the front door and sobbed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Mother, come to California. I need you,” Rosa pleaded over the telephone. “I’m alone with Isabel in a hotel in Sausalito.”

  Cold air sent shivers through Eleanor, raised goose bumps on her bare arms. The luminous clock showed one a.m. Aaron stirred on his side of the bed.

  Her daughter’s voice
was harsh and yet plaintively weak. It warded off Eleanor’s tenuous wave lengths of affection.

  God forgive her. If only she could love her daughter in the right way. A vision flashed in her mind of Rosa with her hair streaming out like seaweed as she flowed past in a white gown with the baby clutched to her bosom.

  “Whatever has happened, my dear?”

  Rosa stared at the hotel wall in front of her. “Mother, he’s crazy, and I’m going crazy. He threatened to kill me and the baby. Isabel has an ear infection. I need you.”

  “She must see a doctor. Do you need money?” Eleanor asked wearily.

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve already given you so much money,” said Eleanor. “We give and give. You take from us. When will you take responsibility?”

  Aaron, waking, sat up and rubbed his eyes. “What is it?”

  “Let me handle it, Aaron.”

  The children, when they were small, were like hungry birds, wild rose bushes. She had not tended them as she should have. She had not pruned, clipped, cultivated. She had let their spirits grow wild.

  “Mom, I’m scared. I need you to come out.”

  “What has happened?”

  “Oh it’s too long a story to tell over the phone. Can you come? Mom, I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be, my dear. Isabel needs you to be strong.”

  Her mother sounded so calm, so dispassionate. Rosa had hoped her mother would express outrage over what had happened, but none was forthcoming. Eleanor said she would phone her back when she had made plane reservations and that she would fly out the next day.

  “I’m so glad. Thank you,” Rosa said.

  “It’s late,” said Aaron. “Let me talk to her. Why does she call so late?”

  Eleanor gave him the receiver. “Hello,” he said in that urgent way he had.

  Rosa recoiled because the energy in her father’s voice was so like her own. “Antonio’s thrown me out, Dad,” she said. “Isabel is sick.”

  “What?” In contrast to Eleanor, he did sound genuinely outraged, and this comforted her, while at the same time it frightened her so that she did not feel she could tell him all that had happened. She wanted to spare him. Tears choked her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “What can we do to help?”

  Again she backed away from the sound of his voice. She felt as if he were violating the boundaries of her spirit with an intensity that was too much to bear. “I’m okay. I’m at the Sausalito Hotel. Mother’s flying out.”

  “I’m very glad of that,” he said. “Do you realize what time it is here? It’s after one in the morning.”

  “I’m sorry. I had to talk to you. How are you?”

  “I won the International Competition,” he said. “I’ll be flying to Geneva in three weeks to confer with architects there.”

  “That’s wonderful,” she said. Again her throat choked up with sobs.

  “Let me say goodbye to her, Aaron,” she heard her mother say.

  When Rosa woke up the next morning, sun was streaming through the venetian blinds. She felt dizzy, feverish. To have to call on her mother after what had happened! But she had no friends to call on. There was no one else who could help her. She had to think of Isabel. Her father had won the Competition. That thought hummed along with everything else. Her father had won something, had succeeded through hard work and talent and anxiety. She had to think of Isabel. Her father’s rage animated her; her mother’s calm sustained her.

  She had to find a job, a babysitter, pull her life together somehow. She was furious with herself for needing Eleanor to be with her, furious with Eleanor for being so calm. And yet Eleanor’s calmness penetrated her, along with Aaron’s shock and rage. She too could be calm. Before calling her parents she had felt as though she could not even take a step without collapsing. Everything that she feared—the very worst—had happened.

  She determined to live moment to moment. Eleanor’s calmness seeped through her pores. She would not think about the past or the future. She would only think about now. Isabel needed changing. The ammonia smell of wet diapers filled her nostrils. Put ear drops in Isabel’s coral-colored ears. Drop the dirty diaper in the plastic bag, after shaking out the shit into the toilet and rinsing it. Wipe Isabel’s buttocks with a wet cloth. Dust her with talcum powder. Pin the clean diaper and pull the plastic pants over her plump baby legs. Make a doctor’s appointment over the phone for Isabel. Go down to Bridgeway where they could warm the formula in a restaurant and she could buy some food for both of them.

  “We’ll go for a walk,” she crooned. Keep herself calm. Keep her voice soothing. This moment. This moment. No past. No future. If she fell into the chasm of the past or future she would not be able to go on; she would die. Now. Now. This moment. Isabel’s security lay entirely in her. Wear her bright magenta dress because Isabel loved the color, and Isabel thrust her small plump arm towards the dress as though she could embrace its warmth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Eleanor stayed at a hotel in the hills and rented a car while she helped Rosa search for another place to live. Antonio remained in the pink stucco house. He could be seen everywhere in the company of a dark-haired girl named Ruth, who had glowing eyes, bad skin, and a voluptuous, plump figure.

  Rosa suffered over Ruth.

  Eleanor, on the other hand, made friends with her.

  “Don’t worry about Ruth,” said her mother. “Antonio cares far more deeply about you and the baby.”

  “How can you be so sure?” asked Rosa. They were sitting at a card table in the cottage on Pearl Street Rosa had rented with her mother’s help only two days before. The table was the only piece of furniture except for two mattresses and the crib. There were bare floors. An old-fashioned window with many small panes of glass looked out onto the Bay.

  “I know,” said Eleanor, “I just do know.”

  Several days later Eleanor invited Antonio and Ruth for dinner. “It is best,” she said to Rosa, “that we all be friends.”

  They sat on cushions on the floor. Rosa watched the others eat spaghetti which Eleanor had prepared. They were talking, laughing. How could they do this to her? How could her mother have invited them? The lights were bright; the wooden floors shone, freshly waxed. The window panes gleamed black, as there were no curtains yet.

  She could not eat. A flame seared through her, obliterating everything else. Slowly the realization grew that this could not be endured.

  The others were talking about Paris and about parking meters.

  This could not be endured. Flames seized control of Rosa’s body, burned up all other thoughts and feelings, all inhibitions. She was a mass of pain, flaming. An outside force seemed to propel her across the room towards Ruth. She found herself choking the other woman, her hands around that thick peasant’s neck, screaming, “Get out!”

  Antonio wrenched her away, pushed her down on the floor.

  He and Ruth left.

  “You are overly distraught,” said her mother. A plate had broken. Bits of china and spaghetti in tomato sauce lay on the floor.

  “You must see a psychiatrist. I insist on this,” said Eleanor.

  Rosa, with her mother’s help, cleaned up the dishes. She could not stop her trembling. She must confront her mother about all that she knew.

  “Sit down,” she said. The voice that spoke was not her own. She was far away from her body. She trembled so much; she had never trembled so much. Eleanor did not appear to notice.

  They sipped an after-dinner liqueur that Eleanor had brought. It tasted bitter, but at the same time acridly sweet.

  “Mother,” she said, pausing for words.

  Eleanor sat on a pillow covered with a piece of dark blue and green madras material. She wore a moss green cashmere sweater and matching wool skirt. She seemed sad, as she usually did when Antonio was not there.

  “Mother, you’ve been much too friendly with Antonio. He told me what happened between the two of you in Paris. WHY DID YOU
MAKE LOVE WITH HIM?”

  Her mother swallowed, glanced quickly at her, then away again.

  The baby was asleep in the bedroom.

  “Why did you?”

  “How did you know?” her mother asked quickly.

  “Antonio told me.”

  “I wish he hadn’t.”

  “You wish he hadn’t? I wish it had never happened! I wish you had never laid eyes on him! I wish you had never come to Paris. You’re ruining my life! You’re a monster. I hate you. I wish you were dead!”

  Her mother’s silence made her words seem childish and totally ineffectual, somehow unreal. Her mother’s silence made her, Rosa, seem to be in the wrong.

  “You don’t understand,” her mother finally said, breaking the long silence. “Someday perhaps you will. I love you very much. I don’t want to lose your love. I suffered terribly over what happened, you will never know how I suffered. It was an accident. . . .”

  “An accident?”

  “Yes, I was so tired . . . the night I arrived in Paris . . . he came up to my hotel room . . . I don’t even quite know how it happened . . . I was too tired to resist.”

  “But you’re a grown woman. Why did you invite him up to your room?”

  Again Eleanor sighed. “I never expected him to . . . to practically rape me . . . he overpowered me . . . I could not cry out for help . . . before I could cry out. . . . I didn’t want to cause a disturbance,” she added more softly, as if speaking to herself.

  “But why did you let him make love to you again? Don’t lie to me. I know you care for him. I see your face light up whenever he is around.”

  Silence.

  “Some day perhaps you’ll understand,” said her mother.

  They sat again, without saying anything, and the brightness of the lights, the blackness of the window panes reflecting lights, the air around Rosa all seemed to affect her strangely, and she felt as though she must talk, must tell her mother everything that had happened between her and Antonio, the silence was forcing her to speak, her mother was sucking something out of her own substance, her mother’s silence seemed to force the words to come, almost without Rosa’s volition.