She seemed to hear a male voice telling her to look up through the window at a laurel branch that waved against the blue sky. Why did she not hear her own voice? She seemed to be waiting for a man to determine her mood, waiting for a man to tell her what emotions and thoughts she could have. Why did she need a man’s voice? Why could she not be her own authority? Give herself pleasure.
Isabel squatted on her haunches in the back yard and played with a wooden puzzle which had huge pieces of bright red, yellow, green, and blue. Rosa joined her. She felt as if they were both naked on a vast plain. Each word and each gesture of hers affected the child’s identity that was so rapidly forming. The child held up a red triangle, waved it in the air, and said, “Mama . . . this . . . this . . .”
Rosa guided Isabel’s hand to the lower left hand corner where the red piece went. Isabel smiled with pleasure and grabbed a green rectangle. “Mama . . . this . . . this . . .”
Words, thoughts, feelings, huge swirling masses to be transcribed on paper, were rising up inside Rosa.
“See if you can find where it goes,” said Rosa. She glanced at her wristwatch. “I’ll look at what you’ve done in twenty minutes. Okay?”
She would bring her note pad and pen outside. If she were to play with Isabel when she wanted to write, her resentment would seep through to the child and injure her. On the other hand, she could not neglect Isabel. In the years to come she would need to balance her needs against Isabel’s.
Towards evening when she looked through the living room window she saw Antonio walk up the porch steps. The sky was red with the glow of the setting sun.
She went to the door and opened it. He was wearing his baggy clothes and a golfer’s cap that someone had discarded. Instantly it was apparent somehow that he loved her and that she loved him. How simple it all was. She kissed his stubbled face. Her body filled with dazzling radiance. “You need a shave.”
“I have no time.”
“I love you.” She looked at him with great calm and clarity. He seemed to change physically before her eyes. A little dirt seemed to rub off him. He stood a little straighter; something clouded in his eyes dissipated. Anger seemed to be replaced by love shooting out beneath. He and she were connected by currents so powerful that they could not break. She floated on a wave of bliss.
“Would you like some lentil soup?” Fortunately, she had the foresight to cook it before she took the LSD.
“Drugs make you look very beautiful,” he said.
He could see at once that she had taken drugs. She could never hide anything from him.
“I took LSD last night.”
“Oh.” His eyes narrowed. His voice was harsh. He disapproved of drugs.
“It’s almost over now,” she said. “I’ve been coming down . . . I realize how much I love you.” She looked into his face. Words scraped against the walls of her throat. “Would you move back in with me?”
“Hmmm,” he said.
As they were eating the soup, he said, “The baby needs me. She needs us to be a family.”
Rosa sat very still, holding her bowl of soup. Her hands trembled as she put the bowl down.
She watched clouds of anxiety about money, small gusts of greed, black currents of anger and jealousy dissipate in him as her gaze burned through.
That night she fell into a heavy sleep, sprawled against him in the double bed in the room she shared with the child. All three of them were a whole. This was the way it was meant to be. Harmony, balance had been restored. If only she could see things with this calm, this clarity, when the LSD wore completely off.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The next day he brought over his clothes in a battered suitcase. In order to give the child privacy they moved Rosa’s bed into the living room. He unpacked his frayed shirts from Paris, unmatched socks, desert boots that needed reheeling, his old suit from Paris and the lightweight one he had bought in New York, as well as a few Parisian ties, vestiges of grander days. She fingered a tie of dark red and blue patterned silk, recalling that he wore it the first time they ever met. He had given the plaid bathrobe she once gave him for Christmas to Ruth.
For a few days she remained somewhat under the effect of the LSD. But her body and mind were undergoing changes. She felt jittery. If only she could retain the state of mind she had experienced under LSD.
When they made love, underneath the sensation of pleasure, the thought flashed, “I’m not supposed to enjoy it.”
So that was the secret of their miserable sex life. She’d locked herself up, and so had he.
While he lived on the ferry he had begun writing again. He kept the loose pages of a long article in Spanish as well as the manuscript of Vanidades perversos d’un pasajero in cardboard boxes on top of her desk.
At four in the afternoon he would go to work, before she got home from work with the child, and he would return about midnight, except for Sunday and Monday nights when he was off.
Antonio.
Heaviness.
Security.
Antonio is here. Everything is going to be all right. Isabel will be all right. Nothing bad can happen to us now.
For weeks after the LSD wore off she was in a state of nervous fatigue. His presence filled her with tension and dread, although she told herself this was irrational. With LSD everything had been so clear. The illumination was fading. She didn’t like sleeping in the living room. The place was too small. His clothes, his belongings, his cigarette ashes cluttered up the rooms.
She found herself unable to sleep before he got home from work because she was afraid of him. Why? This was not rational. True, he had done terrible things in the past, but he had been sorely provoked.
One day he brought home a real wedding ring for her of thick gold as well as jade earrings. “Now that the final divorce will soon come through,” he said. They laughed. “Marriage destroys romance for me.”
At night he would come in bedraggled, worn out, his face lined with cares. He was weighing her down, oppressing her spirit until she could no longer bear it.
Things were not going well at work, and she was fearful of losing her secretarial job.
Ten days after he moved in, the old Buick broke down completely. He had no money to help her buy another car. She had to call her mother and ask for money, and to do so made her feel sick in the pit of her stomach. Until her mother’s check came she hitchhiked with Isabel to the babysitter’s and to work.
When the money came, she bought a second hand Chrysler.
Isabel no longer seemed to fit in at Joanna and Les’s house. When Joanna was busy, she would put the children in front of the television set, and Rosa did not approve. There was an excellent Montessori nursery school in the City. Isabel ought to go there. Rosa could take her there on her way to work, although it would be a difficult extra twenty miles of driving.
Children, wrote Maria Montessori, were like growing plants that reached out for the sun. At certain times they had sensitivities, aptitudes for learning that could never be recaptured. A child’s greatest joy was in learning to work. Isabel must acquire the discipline that she, Rosa, had never experienced as a child. Every day that Isabel continued to pass at Joanna’s house seemed a day lost that could never be regained. Joanna and Les were solid, earthy folk, but now Isabel needed more.
Several weeks passed.
It was three in the morning. Antonio wasn’t home yet. She shivered in her nightgown when she got up to go to the bathroom. Then she heard the door slam and heard his heavy steps.
When she got back to the living room, he was standing absolutely motionless, and he stared at her in a way that filled her with dread, reminding her as it did of the past.
He grasped her hand. His touch sent electric shocks through her. She wrenched herself away.
“Something is wrong,” he said. “We must talk.”
“You’ve been drinking.”
“No.”
She could smell the beer on his breath.
“I’ve got to get some sleep! I’ve got to get to work in the morning. If I lose my job, there’s no money.”
“Petit oiseau.” He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her down beneath him on the bed, sliding her nightgown up around her waist.
She moaned when he came inside her. His body sent peculiar electricity jolting through her, aroused unpleasant sensations. “Hold me harder, heavier,” she said.
Later sperm ran down her legs. She felt unsatisfied. Not supposed to enjoy kept running through her brain. She told herself he had the wrong color hair, the wrong build, the wrong skin. But she knew that all these were lies she was telling herself, subterfuges so that she would not enjoy.
She wanted to scream. Tears streamed into her pillow. She was overcome by the most acute pity for him.
In the morning she did not hear the alarm. Evidently she had forgotten to set it. When she woke up, it was eight thirty, and she was supposed to be at work by this time. She was soaked in sweat. Although it was warm, summery weather, she telephoned the office to say she had the flu. Antonio was snoring. When she tried to stand up, she wavered; she was dizzy; she tumbled to the floor.
The weight of Antonio’s being was too oppresive. It filled her pores, drowning her. She had to escape.
She rushed down to the corner to buy a San Francisco Chronicle and looked under “Apartments for Rent” in the City. Speaking softly on the phone in the kitchen, so as not to awaken Antonio, she learned that an eighty-dollar-a-month studio on California Street was vacant. She said she would take it. Then she called a moving firm. Feverishly she began stuffing clothes into suitcases that she lugged in from the garage. Then she shoved them into the closet so Antonio wouldn’t see them. She gave Isabel her breakfast, put her inside her crib, then drove as fast as she could into San Francisco to look at the studio, pay her deposit, and get the keys. On her way back she dashed into a supermarket to get cardboard boxes. The movers would be coming in less than three hours.
When she returned, he had left the house. As Rosa walked into the bedroom, Isabel was attempting to climb out of her crib. She had lifted one leg over the top. For weeks Isabel had been trying to climb out by herself; soon she would succeed. Then they would need to watch her even more carefully.
“Mama . . . Mama . . . out . . . out!” cried Isabel, stretching out her arms.
Rosa lifted her up over the edge, feeling the child’s soft, silken hair against her chin. “There you go,” she said. “Carefully . . . up . . . over.” Isabel shrieked with glee, kicking her foot against the knotted tension in her mother’s stomach. Rosa gave her a new puzzle to play with while she packed kitchen dishes, but soon the child grew bored with it and began wandering around, following her, “Play!” cried Rosa. “Go play with the puzzle. Finish it.”
Isabel threw all the pieces of the puzzle up in the air, then laughed with delight as they spattered over the kitchen linoleum. Rosa ignored this and went on packing. She only hoped she could finish before Antonio returned. The movers would be here in forty-five minutes.
As she was stepping off a chair with a stack of plates from the cupboard, she tripped against Isabel and fell to the floor, smashing plates everywhere.
She took the child across her knees and spanked her as hard as she could, so filled with rage that everything else was blotted out of her consciousness. Isabel’s cries grew louder. Rosa shook her as if she were a rag doll, and the thought came into her mind of smashing the child’s head against the floor, smashing it into a pulp.
The whites of Isabel’s eyes rolled; she shrieked and shrieked. Rosa gave her an especially heavy blow across the buttocks, then stopped abruptly, horrified at herself. She could have killed the child. She was so angry she could have killed her.
She let Isabel go and flung her head against her knees, sobbing.
“Qué pase?”
Antonio stood in the doorway.
Isabel was crying at the top of her lungs. He swooped her up from the floor to rescue her from the broken plates.
“What happened?” he repeated in French.
“I can’t stand it here anymore. The place is too small. The movers are coming any moment.”
“You are completely folle.” He rocked Isabel in his arms.
Rosa bit her lips. She hated herself so much at that moment that she wished she could vanish out of her body, annihilate herself. She could have killed the child because she was so angry.
“I’m not fit to be a mother,” she sobbed.
“You’re the only mother she has . . . Look the baby loves you. She’s crying for you. See what you’re doing to her. She needs us both. We’ll look for a larger place. You’re completely folle. I’d have you committed if it weren’t for the baby.”
Rosa got up from the floor, took Isabel from his arms, and clasped the child against her. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Mama’s sorry,” she said, stroking Isabel’s hair, taking the child’s arm in hers and covering it with kisses. Isabel’s sobs subsided. Rosa sang, “Isabel . . . Isabel . . . was playing one day . . . she tripped her mother up . . . Mama spanked her too hard . . . Mama loves you, Isabel.”
Antonio broke into wild laughter. “You’re completely, completely crazy!” he roared.
Rosa flashed back to her LSD vision. If only she could have retained that serene wisdom. Tension ripped through her like lightning bolts. Convulsively she gripped a chair. The vision of Antonio she had experienced under the LSD came back to her at that moment, and she felt it as a reproach.
She wished she could get high again on LSD. The book she’d read said that when you came down from the drug, it was hard to shrink the ego back into its former structure. Much too hard.
Isabel grasped her mother’s hair, rubbing Rosa’s face with her tiny, warm, soft hands. What did a two-year-old know of grudges, of forgiveness? Isabel’s dependence scared her. She couldn’t ever blow up like that again.
Just then she saw the moving van outside. Two black men jumped out. She handed Isabel to Antonio and rushed out to tell the men she wasn’t moving after all, and did she owe them money?
“Forget it,” one said gruffly.
“Just give us ten dollars for our trip out,” said the other.
She ran inside for her purse and paid them.
When she came back, Antonio was sweeping up the broken pieces of china. “You’re insane,” he declared. “I ought to send Isabel to your mother.”
“No!” she cried.
Isabel was chewing at the edge of a clean diaper that dangled from her mouth, as she did in times of stress.
Rosa rubbed the bottom of her neck, which still hurt from the fall.
“Come, sit down.” He propped the broom and dust pan against the wall, led her to the kitchen table, offered her a cigarette, lit one himself, poured them each some burgundy, and took Isabel on his lap.
“We’ll find a larger place,” he said.
“Isabel needs to go to a good nursery school,” she said. “That’s one reason I wanted to move. There’s a wonderful one in the City. I can drive her there on my way to work, but it’s hard.”
“You’re loca. There are nursery schools out here.”
“This was a special one . . . a Montessori school . . . and I can’t afford it. Can you help me pay for it?”
He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Petite, I make very little. Enough to buy a few groceries, a few drinks. I’m saving to buy a car of my own. I need one, you know. Besides, I have debts to pay off . . . three hundred dollars of traffic tickets, or they’ll arrest me.”
“Three hundred dollars?”
“Yes. I got a lot of tickets when I was driving Ruth’s car. They are émerdants, these policemen.”
“You never told me that.”
Now she recalled envelopes with clear windows from the San Rafael and San Francisco Municipal Courts that she had given, unopened, to Antonio.
“Petite, your parents are wealthy.” He shifted Isabel so that he had one arm free, and movin
g his chair closer, put his free arm around her. “What’s wrong with asking them to help?”
“I just asked them for money to buy the Chrysler.”
“It’s for La Princesa,” he said, giving the child big wet kisses, making Isabel laugh with pleasure as she tried to wiggle free. “Your parents should want to help.”
“I want to be free of them. I don’t want to ask them for anything.”
“You give money too much importance, Petite. What is money? Nada. Nothing at all.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
They moved to a two-bedroom house a few miles away in Mill Valley. It was surrounded by fields of grass, and it was quiet. Their windows overlooked hills nearly empty of other houses.
Antonio bought a second-hand Volvo.
“Here we will find peace, if the good God is willing,” he said.
He finished a long article about Vietnam and North American racism. In September he received word it would be published in a Chilean quarterly.
Rosa learned of a Montessori nursery school just opening up a few miles away. Isabel went there mornings and continued to go to Joanna’s in the afternoons by means of a complicated car pool arrangement with other mothers.
In the mornings at ten o’clock, hours after Rosa had driven off with Isabel, Antonio would rise, shower, make tea, and sit in front of the living room window in his bathrobe, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and contemplating the hills covered with dry grass as he tried to clear his mind. Something was missing from the new chapters of Vanidades that he had written since leaving Paris. Before he set pen to paper, he wanted every scene, every character, and his point of view to be crystal clear. He could not scribble on endlessly, thoughtlessly as Rosa did.
At four in the afternoon he would leave for his cooking job at the Van Damm.
Rosa envied Antonio his greater amount of free time. She chafed at her new job for the California Department of Employment with its long hours. At seven in the morning she left the house with Isabel, and she did not return until six-thirty in the evening. At night after the dishes were done and Isabel was asleep, she would force herself to write.
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