Longing

by Espinosa, Maria

  Often she went to her job in the morning with circles of fatigue under her eyes, her skin dry from exhaustion, barely able to focus until she had drunk several cups of black coffee at work. She was not performing as well as she should at the Department of Employment. Often her grooming and her manner of dressing were haphazard. Her supervisor spoke to her about this.

  At night she would sit at the desk in the living room, the bright light casting black rings in the air, causing objects to double, so great was her fatigue. It seemed that there was an enormous mass of something alive and powerful just beyond her reach, and the only way to tap this was to keep on writing each night, no matter how clumsy her efforts.

  Poems, stories, plays floated tantalizingly in her mind, barely in focus for an instant, out of reach whenever she groped for the words with which to form them.

  However, she believed that if she stopped writing, she would close herself off entirely to this dimension and would never be able to open it up again. This gave her a sense of desperation about time. She became fanatic about getting things done efficiently. She had to vacuum, dust, do the laundry, the shopping, mend clothes, bathe Isabel, get to her writing.

  When Antonio talked, his voice shot bolts of tension through her. She barely heard him. His words came out in a rush. She was only partially conscious of exactly what article he was writing or what he was saying to her.

  “I don’t have enough time,” she kept repeating.

  In April the Van Damm was sold to an entrepreneur who wanted to transport it to Santa Cruz. Antonio was laid off. He could not draw unemployment, because he had always been paid in cash, “under the table.”

  “I work for the Department of Employment. . . . I wish I could find you a job,” said Rosa. “But I can’t. It’s so frustrating. I work with young people exclusively. I don’t even hear about job openings for anyone over the age of twenty-two.”

  He consented to let her buy him a suede jacket, a new pair of trousers, a sweater, and some shirts, but he was outraged at her suggestion that he improve his English.

  He had attempted a class for the foreign-born at night school but dropped out after a week. “My mind is too quick. They are peasants. Those others come from the fields of Mexico. They are illiterates.”

  He waved his hands in a gesture of contempt. “I have no trouble communicating with people . . . I communicate better than most . . . I read English . . . look at my library . . .” He pointed to books in the shelves by Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, his Spanish Bible, a collection of French poets, Kierkegaard, Knut Hamsun, Proust, and a stack of South American treatises on sociology and psychology.

  “But your accent. You could find some better work to do than cooking. You could find something professional, if only your grammar and accent were better.”

  “You despise cooks? Do you know what it takes to be a superior chef? Do you know? Tell me, do you know what a Cordon Bleu chef is paid, and the respect he commands? You’re an idiot!”

  Isabel, who was lying on the rug, fingered its fringes. He began to tickle her all over until she laughed and cried with excitement. “She will be sensual,” he said. “Far more sensual than you are, Petite. You can’t stand it when you’re tickled. You find it painful because you’re so inhibited.”

  Isabel had clambered into Rosa’s lap. Rosa let the child’s soft, warm bulk soothe her hurt feelings. “Perhaps,” she said.

  Tension increased.

  They made love less often.

  He went to three private employment agencies, where he was offered job opportunities as a cook, a dishwasher, a night watchman, a guard, and a janitor.

  Tension.

  Rosa felt the tension whenever he was in the house. It was unbearable. Sometimes she found herself yelling at him to mop the floor, help carry out the laundry to the car, unpack the groceries. Was that shrill voice hers? It seemed entirely separate from her will, and it horrified her.

  At such times he was passive, and his passivity enraged her even more. It was dangerous. After a week or ten days of letting things apparently slide by, he would come home at night, drag her out of the bed when she was asleep, and berate her for hours.

  After a while she learned to mute her expressions of joy, of anger, because her emotions perturbed him. She tried as hard as she could to keep that shrill voice from coming out of her throat. She became afraid of contradicting him, unless it was early in the day before he had drunk enough to be dangerous, irrational, closed to all reason.

  He had a pattern. In the morning, sober, he was reasonable. Often he had the look of a studious and earnest man, a priest. He would begin drinking an hour or so after he woke up—beer after beer, with stronger liquor if it were available. Half drunk he would go off to job interviews, often arriving terrribly late. As the night wore on, he became more and more irrational. He wept over trifles. He would be inordinately touched by the least act of kindness. On the other hand, he became vindictive over the smallest imagined slight. He was obsessed with whatever ideas were running through his head. Over and over again he would repeat himself, pounding his listeners into a pulp.

  On several drunken evenings he called her parents.

  However, six weeks after he had been laid off from the Van Damn, despite his drinking, he was hired as a cook for $3.65 an hour at a Holiday Inn thirty miles away, just outside the San Francisco Airport.

  “At last I can join the union and get my teeth fixed,” he said. “The union will pay 70 percent of the cost. Isn’t that better than your ‘professional’ jobs with no benefits?”

  He had hoped for two artificial teeth to fill the gap in his mouth. However, his remainng teeth had given him increasing pain. When he did see a dentist, he learned they all needed to be pulled out because the gums had receded too far to hold fillings, and he had too many cavities, too much decay.

  They were all extracted.

  For three days after the surgery he lay in bed with ice cubes against his gums, taking pills and bourbon to dull the pain. Most of the time he slept. When he was conscious, he would look through the back window of the bedroom at the upward slope of a hill so steep he could barely see the sky at all. He saw tree trunks, bushes, and wild oat grass. Household noises reverberated against his jaw when Rosa and the child were at home. The wooden crucifix Rosa had given him long ago in Paris hung on the wall. Marriage to Rosa was his crucifixion—what a choice of a gift!

  He was isolated with Rosa, who saw only the barest outlines of who he was. She did not perceive the depth of his suffering, his need for tenderness, his need to be loved.

  Ulcers in the lower left-hand side of the stomach. He had been cooking clams and crabs, bouillabaisse, seaweed soups, meat stews, quantities of corn, artichokes, and other fresh vegetables, which he would leave in huge pots on the stove for Rosa and Isabel. But all this good food, which reminded him of his childhood on the Chilean coast, had not helped him. He looked at his toothless face, opened his mouth and grinned. His dentures were soaking in a glass on the sink. Malevolent ghosts grinned back at him from the bathroom mirror. His skin looked grey. He pulled out the skin of his cheeks. The texture was flaccid. He was grotesque.

  Rosa’s hairbrush on the ledge above the sink was full of loose hairs. Isabel’s red sneakers lay on the bathroom floor along with her white socks, screwed up into balls.

  The phone rang.

  It was someone calling for the Purple Heart Association.

  Antonio hung up, furious. The pain in his stomach gnawed more insistently. He boiled water for tea and ate a bite from a slice of bread. He could hardly hold down the food. It nauseated him, rising in waves, and he swallowed it back to keep from vomiting.

  Idiote Rosa. She had her father’s arrogance, her father’s selfishness. She could not see how much he, Antonio, needed tenderness and love. Why did she never, for instance, lay his head in her lap and stroke his hair, as she did with Isabel? Massage him gently? LISTEN? She was so impatient that she missed the marr
ow of life.

  Yet she had grown beautiful, competent while retaining an appearance of frailty.

  Driving along in the Volvo on Highway 101. The wind blew against the car, swaying it even though it was a heavy car. The cigarette in his mouth glowed.

  He turned onto Bridgeway, in the direction of Pete’s Place. The bar would be nearly empty at this hour. Others left to go home to their wives, girlfriends, male lovers, roommates, or to empty rooms where wind rattled windows, murmuring lonely chants.

  Soledad.

  Desierto.

  Desierto.

  The white line undulated in a rhumba rhythm. A solitary figure made its way along the road, barely visible in the dark. Easy—so easy—to swerve slightly to the right, crumple the figure, leave it lifeless, its poncho spread over it.

  This was Rosa’s country, not his. Here she spoke the language, made the connections she needed to get jobs, baby sitters, nursery schools.

  Isolation.

  Letters to Chile were not answered. It had been six months since he heard from any of his brothers or sisters. He wrote to Chilean editors—but either the letters never arrived, or the editor failed to answer.

  He grew very tired. A deep fatigue that increased day by day, week by week, month by month. Vanidades grew dim in his mind. He was an unreal man leading an unreal life. At the Kaiser Clinic they had told him to stop drinking and to stop smoking completely, but he could not, because then the nervous tension was too great to endure. He was told to follow a bland ulcer diet. They were giving him cortisone shots for arthritic pains in his knees and hips that he had recently developed, but the shots only helped for a short time before the pain would flare up again.

  His body was giving out.

  His spirit was too tired.

  The grease splattered in his face. The heavy smell of fat, hamburger meat, and french fries filled the air in the kitchen. Smoke burned his eyes.

  He picked up his cigarette, which he always kept straight up on one end at the edge of the stove and inhaled. He flipped over half a dozen hamburgers.

  “Hey Antonio—two more orders of fries and three club sandwiches.”

  He separated six strips of bacon and put them on the grill, took six slices of white bread, smeared them with mayonnaise. Then he chopped iceberg lettuce and sliced turkey. He sliced tomatoes.

  Flip the fries. Put the hamburgers on plates. Push the bacon to the center of the broiler. “Six hamburgers ready,” he bellowed to the waitresses. They were garnished with sickly bits of lettuce and tomato. Iceberg lettuce was poisonous; it should be abolished. He was cooking with inferior ingredients—tomatoes that had never seen the sun probably—but he had to follow orders.

  “Honey, I need scrambled eggs and a well-done steak.”

  “One order of pancakes.”

  The waitresses shouted out their orders as they pegged them up on the rotating spindle.

  He grew faint. For this job a person needed to be an eight-armed Hindu deity, a Vishnu—one needed to move with the dexterity of an acrobat.

  The coldness and damp worsened his arthritis. Perhaps he and Rosa should move south to Arizona or New Mexico.

  “Hey Louis,” he shouted to the dishwasher. “Do people get arthritis in Nicaragua?”

  “Rarely,” said Louis.

  The boy had just gotten to work about fifteen minutes ago. He was unloading a steaming rack of plates. Looking up, he smiled. Louis was a healthy boy of nineteen with a nice smile and velvety eyes, a muscular build. It was a relief to speak with him in Spanish. Louis shared an apartment with a cousin in Daly City. He studied English during the mornings, and he wanted to join an uncle’s upholstering business.

  Menial jobs for all Chicanos. Dishwashers, fry cooks, janitors. Muy bien.

  His feet ached from standing, and his heels were worn thin.

  He was tired, bone tired. A finely tuned (but rainsoaked) Stradivarius among cheap tubas, one hundred dollar guitars, and badly made factory violins.

  Raucous voices. Black voices. But the blacks were at least in their bodies, while the whites were not. The blacks had suffered too much in North America not to have compassion.

  Millie said, “Can you cook this steak a little more? The customer wanted it medium.”

  He took out his dentures, as they hurt, and stuck them in his glass of beer. Then he grinned at Millie, a huge black woman with a good nature.

  “My word,” she said. “You do look a sight.”

  Cynthia, who was eighteen, giggled. She was delicate, with skin a walnut hue.

  The colored women who talked and laughed in brassy voices liked him, confided their troubles in him.

  He stuck his dentures back inside his mouth so that he could talk distinctly. “Carnaval,” he said. “Is that I looked like someone in the Brazilian Carnaval.”

  Ignoring the orders on the spindle, ignoring the group of conventioneers who were flooding them with orders from the dining room, he shuffled into a dance, holding the spatula as if it were a vaudeville cane.

  “Brazil . . . is the country to live in . . . is not the prejudice of this fucking country.”

  Ignoring the pain in his knees and the gnawing in the left side of his stomach, he danced, pushing back the white chef’s hat from his forehead which was damp with perspiration, hot with fever, ignoring the flap of his long apron which had come untied, shuffling his feet in time to the Gershwin tune that he heard inside his head.

  “In Brazil the people they dance and sing on the streets. If they are poor, okay, still they dance.” He laughed. “And the racism . . . not like this crazy fucking country. There you see such a mezcladura . . . a black girl with the green eyes . . . a man with the white skin and African hair . . . so beautiful they are the mixed up races.

  “Go to Brazil. Ah, but you will love it. Is not the prejudice you find here . . . is not the same. . . .”

  He thought back to when he had gone to Rio on a journalistic assignment. He had been in his twenties. He spent two months there. “The Police . . . you avoid the Policía . . . but in this country, too, the blacks they avoid the Policía.”

  Cynthia’s eyes grew wide. She and Millie took out their orders, trays held high. Once more he turned his attention to the hamburgers, french fries, bacon, pancakes, scrambled eggs, and steak.

  The smoke made his eyes smart. He asked a third waitress to bring him more beer. Ash from his cigarette fell onto the broiler, sputtered in the grease.

  So tired.

  Faint.

  The other night Rosa drove him to the Kaiser Clinic for his stomach pains. (They had not yet heard the lab results.) He did not overlook the way she stared at him in the inspection room, where a doctor took heartbeat, blood pressure, and gave him white plastic cups for urine and stool specimens. He felt old, bloated as he sat on the edge of the high table and Rosa, careworn, a little sad, her hair disheveled, seemed to survey him with a new aloofness. She had been wild, like an unbroken mare, when he took her under his tutelage.

  Hamburgers, bacon, french fries, eggs, steaks, pancakes, wilted vegetable garnishes. (Vainly, he ordered fresh produce each day. It never came.)

  His boss, a slender man with greying hair in a watermelon colored shirt, yelled, “Antonio, do you call this bacon cooked?”

  “I cooked Sir . . . if you like I cook more,” said Antonio.

  His boss flung the nearly raw bacon back onto the broiler. “Hurry it up.”

  “Yes Sir.” Antonio stirred onion soup with a wooden spoon.

  “You could save time if you made that soup from a mix,” said his boss.

  “Is not the same thing. Give the patrónes something honest for their money, yes?”

  The bacon sizzled.

  “You been drinkin’ too much,” said his boss.

  “Is the poor man’s medicine, no?”

  The boss smiled. He had sickly white skin, dark eyes. He was of Italian origin.

  “Is allowed I piss, Sir?” Antonio was swept by a wave of rage. His boss
frowned, turned on his heels, and strode away.

  His boss knew nothing of the physical pain Antonio suffered and would never know. Everything seemed to be sliding. He was about to fall. He gripped the edge of the counter to keep his balance, slid the bacon—partly burned, still partly underdone—back onto the plate.

  “Poor chile, you ain’t feelin’ good,” said Millie. She laid her warm, moist hand on his forehead. “You got a fever . . . oughta go home to bed. Let your wife take care of you. You been lookin’ sick for weeks. Maybe you can file for disability.”

  “Is nothing wrong,” Antonio insisted.

  He drank the rest of the beer. Then he threw the glass into the garbage can so violently that it smashed to bits against the orange pulps, meat bones, shredded bits of vegetables, cellophane, and cardboard wrappers.

  The Department of Employment told him he hadn’t shown up for work three days in a row. Hence he had quit. He told them he had been too sick to phone in, in fact, unconscious.

  In truth, he had hazy memories of his last days at the Holiday Inn. He had come home drunk, fallen asleep on the floor, and awakened to find that Rosa had covered him with blankets. Had he called at work to say he was ill? It seemed he had held the thick black receiver in his hand, greasy with food Isabel had deposited on it with her sticky fingers.

  How cold it was. The sky was filled with heavy clouds, and the wind rattled through the windows in the living room, chilling him through his robe. His fingers were white, bloodless. He lifted the hot cup full of tea to his lips. How good it tasted.

  One a.m. at the Seven Seas.

  Rick, Don, and Harry sat at a table at the Seven Seas with Antonio. They had been drinking all evening. He was filled with a strange, wild energy. Rick, a sculptor, Don, a novelist, and Harry, a carpenter.

  Don said, “In ten years we will have a post-literate culture.”