Longing

by Espinosa, Maria

  Rosa heard herself speaking on and on, telling her mother about Clyde, about the Cuban, about Antonio’s violence and his threats, about her fears for his sanity, even about Tanya.

  Eleanor’s eyes so icy grey (like Antonio’s) seemed to recede into the distance and to be pulling some substance out of her daughter. Eleanor seemed to be absorbing her daughter’s substance as her daughter talked, and Rosa felt as though some power, some identity were being taken away from her, but she felt powerless to stop talking—the words poured out like marbles—she felt almost as if she were fusing into her mother, as though this fusion left no sympathy to spare for the strange uncouth creature called Rosa who was talking so feverishly. All her sympathy flowed into her mother. She must get everything out—her mother must know—because her mother already sensed—perhaps if her mother knew, honest communication between the two of them could begin. Perhaps something that was wrong between the two of them would change.

  Eleanor’s cigarette burned to ash. She did not notice when it crumbled to the floor. The room whirled. Everything blurred. Eleanor felt hot and then prickly cold. “I did not want to hurt you,” she said to Rosa.

  Eleanor felt she was in a pit of sulphur and brimstone, unbearably hot and then icy cold. She poured herself more Drambuie, enjoying the burning sensation in her throat. She wanted to cry out, “Love me, love me Rosa, in spite of what I have done.” She cringed inside. She wanted to curl up like a baby, like Isabel, and escape Rosa’s angry eyes, to spare Rosa the violence that Eleanor had both suffered and inflicted. She wanted to embrace her daughter, kiss away the wounds, fix the hurt. Poor child. I have hurt you so much. I didn’t mean to, she wanted to sob. Let me love you. Let me make amends.

  But she felt her own face glaze over. She could not force herself to move over to her daughter and put her arms around Rosa’s hunched shoulders. She felt caught in a vise. Nothing could be spoken. The words stuck inchoate, formless, aching in her throat.

  Rosa gripped her empty glass. “Tell me,” she repeated, “How could you have done what you did with Antonio? You said he forced you. But I don’t understand. Why didn’t you push him away? Why did you speak to him afterwards? Why didn’t you tell me what had happened? WHY DID YOU LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN? Did you want it?”

  Tears slid down her mother’s face, but her eyes remained cold, glacial. “You’re a child,” said Eleanor. “There is much that you don’t understand.”

  Rosa was frightened. Antonio’s words, Your mother despises you, ran through her mind. Her mother seemed immeasurably sad, as if nothing Rosa ever did could atone for the suffering that she, Rosa, had caused her mother. She repressed a desire to choke her mother as she had tried to choke Ruth, repressed an urge to choke her until her mother’s face turned red and she was forced to speak up as she truly was, forced to struggle, to reveal herself.

  She sensed, too, that her mother needed her love, and she steeled herself against this need. She felt cruel. But she said more softly, “I appreciate your flying out to help me.”

  “Your father must never know.”

  “I won’t say anything to him, Mother.”

  “It is so complicated . . . oh . . .” said Eleanor, as if gazing into trillions of passageways within her own brain. “An accident the first time. I was too tired to resist. In Plainville . . . I don’t know . . . he seemed out of his mind . . . I wanted to calm him . . . I wanted to help you. . . . In Paris, I sensed that if I resisted, he might leave you, that if I were not on good terms with him, you and the baby would suffer. . . . I regret . . .” Her words became inaudible as her voice trailed off.

  Eleanor sank deeper within herself. She thought of Antonio’s laughter. And where is the problem, Madame? he might ask, as if the problem could be found in a corner of the room, like a piece of kindling wood. If the problem were not tangible, then it was pure fabrication. He reduced things to utter simplicity, when he himself was not overwhelmed with his emotions. It was the mixture of clarity and of torment within him that Eleanor found so compelling. She felt for him a terrifying compassion. The feel of his hands along her naked skin. The way his soft hair fell over his eyes. The first time in Paris, it was in truth a violation. She had indeed been too tired and too disoriented to fight. The second time in Plainville? Her brain grew confused. Certainly it was not what she had wished or planned.

  “You like him a lot, Mother. You love him. You weren’t just doing this for my sake.”

  “Oh Rosa . . . there is so much you don’t understand,” her mother repeated once more.

  “I hate you,” muttered Rosa.

  “You are like the snow queen,” said Eleanor in her sad victim’s voice which so infuriated Rosa. “With ice in your heart.” Eleanor felt her old rigidity, her old crossness and fury, the old coldness towards her daughter coming back, covering her pores, her skin. A terrible fear of her daughter with her wild black hair, her dark eyes. Like a changeling. Fruit of her womb. A punishment for a crime that she could not remember having committed. But beneath her coldness, her haughtiness, even her hatred for Rosa—qualities that clung to Eleanor like a fabric clinging to her skin—she hungered for her daughter’s love and understanding. She ached to the point of wanting to die if it were not given to her, because she wanted this more than anything else in the world. If she lacked Rosa’s love, everything else was hollow. (But how could she expect Rosa, under the circumstances, to love her? That was pure madness.)

  “What did you see in Antonio, Mother? Why does he attract you so much? Is it because he’s my man?”

  “Of course not, my darling.”

  Liar, thought Rosa. At the same time she could not help being touched by the sadness which emanated from her mother’s entire body. If she could atone by tossing Antonio to her mother, “Here Mother, have him, he’s yours. For all you’ve suffered. Let him heal that gap inside you, that wound that’s been bleeding all my life. Let him make you whole. Let him make you laugh. Take him. If he heals you, then perhaps I will be healed, too.”

  “Life is so complicated,” said Eleanor. “How much I regret what has happened.”

  Why on earth did she sound so cold, so forbidding? She wanted to hug Rosa, hold her close, murmur how she loved her. But she was afraid. She had always been afraid that Rosa would strike out at her, would leap away if she extended any gestures of affection.

  “What do you see in him, Mother?” Rosa repeated.

  Eleanor’s gaze again grew opaque as she retreated inside herself, trying to think how she could put that bond between her and Antonio into words. How indeed? Rosa was her daughter. Antonio was her son-in-law. However, these boundaries seemed artificial and entirely without meaning. Eleanor believed that under any circumstances she and Antonio would have become friends and lovers, so unique was the bond between them. Antonio was powerful, if dangerous. He breathed life into her. He caused her to unfold. He caused her to become more fully human. If she were guilty with regard to Antonio, then she was guilty for being born at all. Perhaps this was what was meant by “original sin.”

  Rosa drove to a psychiatrist’s office in nearby San Rafael. In the empty waiting room, with its beige drapes and walls, its brown thick carpet, she remembered the mental hospital. She thought of girls and women in white hospital gowns on the ward for the most disturbed. Later she lived in the cottages, where they could wear anything they liked. Green grass in summer. Snow in winter along with sleet and rain. Her therapist, who was an intern, was a thin young man with lank hair who seemed to hug the walls as he walked and who stooped a bit.

  She had felt tainted. Something was intrinsically wrong with her. She was inferior. She was not acceptable. Thin and fat women in the closed wards. Some aimlessly watched television. Others played cards. One masturbated by the windowsill. Another stared into space. Another crooned to herself, and still others stared at a blankness, a richness that only they could see. All of them seemed to have glazed eyes, like mother’s. Like her mother’s.

  But her mother was not
crazy.

  Mother always told her that she loved her.

  She, Rosa, had been crazy then.

  Nothing made sense.

  She remembered a dream she had had a long time ago, when she was eleven. In the dream a mysterious voice ordered her to bicycle to the bottom of a lake, beneath a milky white sky. Passive, curiously obedient, she did so. Then she found herself on grey rocks amidst a grey sea beneath a grey sky and knew she had already died.

  The psychiatrist had the same quiet manner as the intern who had treated her in the hospital. However, this man was fleshier, with a round, Irish face, and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles.

  “Some demon seems to possess me. Like an evil spirit. Sure, I was upset about Ruth. But something outside seemed to be controlling me. I can’t trust myself. I’m frightened. I’m out of control.”

  “Hmmm.” He looked saddened by her confession.

  Quickly, noticing the minute hand move around the clock on his desk, she tried to tell him all that had happened. It came out jerkily, and somehow without sense.

  A breeze blew the ruffled café curtains behind him. His office was paneled in imitation wood, and he charged twenty-five dollars an hour. This rug, too, was brown. She gazed into the colors, the textures of the surroundings as if they could absorb her, absorb the hurt and humiliation that overpowered her. However, she was unable to cry. She spoke in a brittle, thin voice, curiously detached from what she was saying.

  “Why am I the scapegoat? Why aren’t my mother and Antonio here?”

  “You’re here,” he said.

  “I can’t afford to see you every week.”

  “How much can you afford?”

  “I could only afford to come once a month—and not even that right now. I don’t have a job yet.”

  “Come when you can,” he said. He rose, signalling that the hour was over.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Puerto Montt with its grey waters. From a café Antonio watched waves wash against the sand and up against the piers. The waiter brought him another cup of black coffee. He watched fishermen on the beach unfurl their nets and gather sea bass into wooden casks, which would be wheeled away to a huge icehouse. Some would be sold in the open market stalls in the Centro, while some would be shipped by railroad to Santiago, because this kind of fish was caught in greatest quantities in the south, where the ocean was chilled by the Humboldt Current.

  The fishermen laughed and shouted to each other, bodies tanned, faces lined, hardened, virile. Their eyes were of the sea. A mixture of Spanish and Indian with dark skins, dark hair, dark eyes, in rolled-up trousers, barechested or in undershirts, they were apparently unaffected by the coldness of the water.

  Three small boys walked past, dressed in ragged pants and tee shirts, skinny, their hair cropped close.

  The mist was clearing. Sun shone golden through it. Beyond the mist were patches of blue. The coffee was bitter in Antonio’s mouth. He dipped a crust of dry bread into it and then chewed. He had lost weight. He had no appetite.

  Gulls hovered over the nets and every so often a daring one would stoop down for a prey, to be chased off by the fishermen’s shouts and gestures.

  He paid for the coffee and bread and left, walking past fishing piers towards his mother’s house. Half a mile inland loomed buildings in the business center of downtown Puerto Montt. The road was lined with tall and slender evergreens. They swayed silvery green against the lifting mist. He passed a clump of small stores and squat wooden shacks where children played and women walked with bundles of washing to a fountain in the center of a small plaza. Some carried babies wrapped in shawls.

  There were groves of trees and then large wooden houses, many built in the last century, with large gardens and lawns. This was the old section. His mother’s house had been built over a hundred years ago. During his childhood he lived in it with his father, his mother, his brothers and sisters, his maiden aunt Gertrude, and various servants. All the children had long since fled, except for Alfredo, his oldest brother, who was raising his own family here in Puerto Montt. The con. Alfredo could not bear to part from his mother, nor could she bear to part from him. Ah how different in his own case! Pity for himself welled up. If only his father had not died when he, Antonio, was so young.

  At the side of the house chickens pecked at grains of corn. When he opened the front door, he heard his mother playing a Chopin étude on the piano in the living room. He was surprised, because it was only nine in the morning.

  He heard the two maids in the kitchen and a clattering of dishes. The maids, one young and one old, were talking rapidly in Spanish. Upstairs Alfredo’s children moved back and forth, back and forth, their footsteps muffled against the carpets, sharp against the wooden floors. He heard the sounds of a guitar. Merde alors, they were all early risers! He did not know how it was that he himself had woken up so early this morning. Perhaps it was the children or the sound of Alfredo’s electric shaver in the bathroom next to the cubicle where he slept. It was the same cubicle his mother had put him in when he was fifteen, after his father died and she sublet rooms. Cold and damp in winter, hot in summer. The worst bedroom in the house. Even when he was ill with pneumonia, he’d slept there. How he hated its dank walls that smelled of mildew!

  He was the seventh child. Even before his birth there had been omens of ill fortune for him. A civil uprising. Soldiers firing shots outside the house. He turned over in her womb, his mother said. Ever since his birth, he had been unnaturally high strung.

  He sat down on a worn couch in the huge cedar-beamed living room which had been built to hold over fifty people. His father’s gilt-framed portrait stared at him from an end table. His father’s eyes were brown and liquid, and he seemed to say, My son, I am here with you. His father had been Mediterranean, warm-blooded, warm-hearted.

  His mother, bent over the piano, turned to glance at him as he came in. She wore a black dress. A golden cross dangled at her neck. Her white-blonde hair was piled upon her head, and she wore thick golden earrings. Her fingers moved swiftly over the keys. The music soothed him, yet there was something cold in the music, something like his mother with her sharp, aristocratic profile. (Everyone said he had his mother’s features.) The last notes of the piece sounded. He remembered this particular melody from his childhood. It revived both painful and joyous emotions.

  “Good morning, Antonio,” said his mother. She rose from the piano. Although her limbs were slender, she had grown thick in the waist.

  She sat down on a worn, plush chair across from him and took her knitting out of a green embroidered velvet bag. She was knitting slippers out of white wool.

  “So you will leave on Thursday,” she said. She expressed no regret. He felt that she might have been talking to anyone, not necessarily her son. Her needles clicked. “It’s just as well. All your newspaper and writer friends are in Santiago. There’s really nothing for you here. . . . How do you like Alfredo’s youngest? Isn’t he precious?”

  “He’s only a few months older than Isabel.”

  She pursed her lips, counted her stitches. “You were never married in a Catholic church, and so the child is illegitimate.”

  “Only in the eyes of fools,” he said. They were again fighting their old battles, when he defied her and protected his younger brothers and sisters from her. (He could do much less for the older ones.) “Legally we were married. Legally she is my child. That will stand in all the law courts in the world, Mama. Legally she is your grandchild.” He used the formal third person in addressing her, as he had been taught to do since childhood as a sign of respect.

  “Ah but I have so many grandchildren,” she sighed. “Francisca has three. Alfredo has six with the youngest . . . Tomás has four . . . Marianne has five . . . Marianne, who was always unstable, has gone mad, they tell me. . . . She cannot abide her youngest daughter and sent her to live with Juan, who has six of his own. . . . Jaime has two . . . and Margarita has nine . . . her husband was killed last year in
a mine explosion . . . such a tragic business.”

  “And you have Isabel.”

  “What a shame that she could not have been the child of a Catholic marriage. All my other children have married within the Church. Only you chose to live with a Jewess. She was pregnant at the time of your civil marriage, I believe. So you’ve left her.”

  “For the time being,” he said. He looked at her in disbelief. “What’s the source of your prejudice? Father had a Jewish grandfather.”

  “He converted.”

  Antonio laughed uproariously, slapping his thighs. She allowed herself a hint of a smile.

  “Tell me,” he repeated, “the source of your prejudice.”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “At least you could write to Isabel’s mother. She always used to pray, you know, in a Catholic church in Paris. She has religious leanings.”

  “Was the child baptized?” asked his mother with a flicker of interest.

  “Mierda. What does that matter?”

  The needles clicked. White wool flashed before his eyes. She lifted her eyes towards the ceiling as though to dismiss the entire subject. She would not forgive him that.

  Later, lured by the sound of the sewing machine, he wandered into the little room off the kitchen where Aunt Gertrude always sewed. Her plump homely face, her precise gestures at the old-fashioned treadle machine moved him.

  He watched her. She was not aware of his presence. Her hair, long since turned white like her sister’s, was cropped short. She wore a print house dress. Like his mother, she was a religious fanatic. Unlike his mother, she had immersed herself in the care of the children and the house. Gertrude slaughtered hogs and poultry, canned vegetables, dried apricots and peaches, healed the children with herbal remedies and poultices. Gertrude saw to it that meals were cooked, the house kept clean, that the servants performed their jobs. When his father was alive, his father and Gertrude would confer about domestic matters while his mother surrounded herself in a cloud of music, books, and the social festivities afforded by this remote provincial city.