The crow swooped the child up in her arms.
Careful. Don’t let him see you’re scared, Rosa thought.
She bathed Isabel, wrapped her in a huge terry towel, rubbed her dry, put on her warm pajamas.
Isabel wandered into the living room and turned on the television set. Abruptly, Antonio got up and turned it off. “Quiet!” he yelled.
“Daddy,” she wailed. “I want to see it!’
He sat down again, as if suppressing a force nearly ready to explode, and stared at her with a curious, frightening detachment.
Rosa observed this. Fear clenched her stomach into a black knot. She went into Isabel’s room and looked at the bed, the toys neatly arranged, the white muslin curtains, half-closed, through which she could see the grassy slope of the hill beneath them. The room was dim, half in darkness.
A force, almost something she could touch, thick and yellow, surrounded her as it had just before Isabel’s birth. At that instant Rosa knew she must run away with the child or something terrible would happen. Quickly she stuffed some of Isabel’s clothes into a huge straw bag she used to take things to and from the sitter’s.
She would call her friend Bernice from the office when she reached a phone booth and ask if they could stay a few days. Otherwise she would find a motel.
She came into the living room, carrying the straw bag.
Antonio sat very still, his beer in one hand, staring straight ahead. Isabel was playing quietly with a doll.
“Antonio, I forgot to buy milk. I’ll be back in a few minutes—Isabel can go with me. Come on, Isabel, take your doll.”
Although she was trembling in all her limbs, she moved calmly. Yellow light surrounded her and Isabel, who held her hand. Time moved slowly.
Go, said the voice.
Antonio watched them pull out of the carport.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“No,” said Rosa. “I can’t go back. I’m not ever going back to you.” The floor beneath her seemed to sway. In her hand the phone receiver trembled and nearly fell. Bernice’s small son began to scream, while Bernice’s older girl shouted something in her clear high voice about the laundry to the younger girl from the top of the stairs.
Through the basement window Rosa could see a huge expanse of field that extended like a bowl until it ended in trees and houses that met the sky. She was in Brisbane, in the middle of nowhere. No toilet paper, children’s screams, and she had fainting spells.
This morning when she reached up into Bernice’s cupboard for a plate she fell flat on her back and blanked out until she felt Bernice’s large hand on her shoulder and heard Isabel crying, “Mama, Mama” over and over again, smoothing her mother’s hair with her tiny hands, as time and time again she had smoothed Isabel’s hair. Bernice had looked down in concern, a powerful dark woman with three children whom she raised alone.
“You’ll regret what you’re saying,” Antonio told her over the phone. His voice was so jarring that it hurt her ear. She held the receiver away from her.
“I made you what you are. I made you from a nothing into a somebody. When I met you, no one would look at you. You were névrosée. You were fucked up. Now you are so beautiful. Men and women chase after you. You can go to bed with anyone you want. Seventeen lovers. Fifteen men and two women, you once told me. Seventeen lovers since we separated three and a half years ago. . . .” His voice grew sardonic. “She has seventeen lovers and the man in the moon and a good job and she is beautiful and she writes poetry . . . I created you and Isabel . . . and she is a beautiful child that no one in your family of miserable Jews ever saw the likes of . . . I created you, Rosa. You will never find another man like me who will put up with all your merde, all your sensitivity, all your strangeness. . . . You will never find another Antonio.”
She swallowed.
“You will regret this,” he said. Then he hung up. Trembling, she replaced the receiver. She vowed to herself that she would never go back to him again. There was a big hole. Emptiness that had been full.
She held back her sobs until she ran out of the basement door into the driveway where her car was. She could scream inside the Chrysler as soon as she slammed the door and drove it down the nearly empty street.
She screamed as she rolled in the grass. She howled and screamed at the top of her lungs into the field and into the huge sky.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Antonio drove his Volvo onto Highway 101 going towards Santa Rosa at two a.m. after the bars closed. He had drunk far too much, as usual. So many times he had stopped drinking only to start again. It was an unusually clear night. The stars seemed extraordinarily large and bright. The moon was full. It was a night like those he had experienced in the south of Chile, where habitation was sparse, where the skies were not yet polluted with gaseous wastes, not yet blocked by skyscrapers and factory smokestacks. He drove unsteadily. Someone honked and zoomed past him on the left. There were few cars on the highway at this time of night.
It was chilly. His hands and feet were cold. He thought of Alma Iñez’ hands with their red lacquered nails, her soft skin, her voice, her laughter which was melodious and rich and full of love. He drove on and on. The yellow line in the middle was sometimes broken, sometimes double. On and on. In Santa Rosa he would drop in on his old friend Harry, who had recently moved there, despite the lateness of the hour. He would see if Harry were by any chance up. Harry kept late hours.
Rosa was not coming back. The baby would grow up without him. Rosa was smug with her limited success, her security, her parents’ money—she was their daughter. No matter how she treated them, she would not estrange them permanently because she was raising their grandchild. Rosa had never known poverty and suffering as he knew it. Rosa did not know what is was to have the guts taken out of you, twisted up, then stuffed back inside.
Rosa did not know.
Rosa did not know him at all.
Rosa did not know anything at all.
He thought, as he had many times, of suffocating her until the breath stopped. He had been on the point of suffocating Isabel the night they left.
If Rosa were dead, however, who would take care of Isabel? Despite everything, Rosa was good to the child. She softened with regard to Isabel and lavished on her the love she herself would like to have had.
He had Ricardo, whom he had seen only once in Viña del Mar. Alma Iñez wrote that Ricardo resembled him more and more.
Maybe some day Isabel and Ricardo would meet, fall in love, not know they were half brother and half sister. He smiled at the thought. The line started to grow crooked. He had drunk so much that it was difficult to keep his consciousness one-pointed or to connect his shaking limbs with the directives of his mind. Scenes from the novel about Paris flashed through like lightning, hurting his head. Someday he would finish Vanidades. Someday. He pressed his foot down harder on the gas. He wanted to drive faster, faster, still faster, sweeping past houses and trees.
He did not see the car coming that passed the truck on the hill, coming towards him fast in his lane. Headlights blinded him. He swerved to the right, but it was too late to avoid the collision. He was thrown forward. Metal and glass smashed against him. He had been thrown against the windshield, and fragments of glass were everywhere. His eyes hurt, and he thought that glass was embedded in them. He smelled smoke. Something was burning, but he could not move. He was wedged against the door and against the steering wheel and crumpled up in such a way that he could not move.
Metal was jammed against his legs. His insides felt as if they had been punctured and warm liquid was hemorrhaging. From far off he heard screams from passengers in the other car.
It was hard to breathe. The air didn’t flow in right. Keep breathing through nose, gasping through mouth.
Cold. So cold exposed as he was to the open air. In the darkness he felt as if he were freezing to death.
One of his legs felt twisted at the joint.
He heard the sound of a siren louder and l
ouder. Through his partially open eyes he saw searchlights being cast over the area.
Pain in head, intestines, abdomen, chest, gut, groin, and knee. Breathe. Keep on breathing. Gasp for air. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Blood seeped through his own broken body, seeped into the metal and glass and plastic. The blood was warm, yet he was so cold. So cold. I am dying, he thought.
And then in his mind he heard a woman’s melodious laughter. He felt soft white hands caress him and heard a voice filled with so much tenderness that he melted with it. From a distance he heard a man’s voice which had a resonant depth, and it too was filled with tenderness. All the love and all the tenderness he had ached for during so many years. But he was not worthy of love or tenderness. The blackness inside, horrid, stinking, which no human being could withstand, seeped out of him. It would repel them, drive them off. However, their laughter persisted, as did the feeling of love and tenderness coming from them. The blackness seemed to melt. Once again the man and woman were visible. They had grown closer. The man’s voice resonated with such great tenderness that he could hardly bear it. Inside his head he saw a light that grew brighter and larger and larger, while the woman’s softness of voice and body enveloped him in a substance that was body, sound, and light. The light and warmth grew brighter, even while it was freezing cold; and the pain in his body was going further away.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The boat left a V-shaped wake, and the smell of gasoline mingled with that of the ocean.
Isabel huddled against Rosa. It was cold, and the wind was strong. Grey gunwales. Greyish white sky. Water from a cresting wave sloshed in the bottom of the boat. They were wearing boots and ski jackets.
The houses of Sausalito nestled against the hills, while on the other side of the Bay lay Tiburon and Belvedere.
They were moving towards the Golden Gate Bridge.
A young Portuguese boy of perhaps fifteen manned the boat, his eyes narrowed against the rushing wind. He was related to Joanna.
Ashes fell from her hand like dark snow. Rosa watched them drift over the choppy waves. She grasped another handful from the burlap bag and tossed them over, too.
It could not be.
It could not be that these oily black ashes were his body, his intelligence, his heart, his spirit.
Antonio, where are you?
Antonio seemed to hover near them, an invisible presence, unquiet, electric, as close to them as the gulls that were swooping down to the water.
Perhaps a few ashes would float down the coast to Chile, or they would sink to become part of the ocean bed. They would dissolve in the ocean, evaporate into the sky, and rain down to fertilize the earth.
“Mommy, what are you doing?”
The ashes still smelled of smoke and fire.
“Your father’s dead. These are his ashes. I’m scattering them in the sea, because he loved the sea.”
“Where is Daddy?” Isabel persisted, not understanding.
“He’s dead. His body is dead. But he’s here in the universe. He’s with us.”
Isabel did not understand. How could she? “Dead,” she murmured, disturbed. She watched her mother scatter another handful into the jaws of a breaking wave. Her mother’s hands were ice cold.
Isabel brightened with a memory. “I dreamed about him last night.”
“Did you?”
“He was at the store with me, and we were looking at the king crabs, and he stuck a banana label on my forehead. Mommy, is a dream real? Where is he?”
The wind roared louder, joining with the motor to cover the sound of her voice and of Rosa’s sobs. As if the sobbing were contagious, Isabel, too, began to cry, leaning against her mother’s shoulder.
There were only a few ashes left in the burlap bag they had given Rosa at the crematorium. She dumped the rest of them directly into the white-capped waters, as she leaned far over the side of the boat. She wanted to be away from this silent young boy. His presence bothered her.
Some of the ashes floated on the surface of the waves.
“Do you want to turn back now?” asked the boy.
“No. Please go on a little further.”
The girders of the bridge loomed larger. They passed underneath. Then the buildings of San Francisco loomed high to their left, while the steep headlands of Sausalito were to their right, and in front of them was the ocean stretching towards China.
The boat rocked with the motion of the larger ocean waves. Rosa hugged Isabel closer. A huge wave drenched them all with spray.
Gulls circled in the sky.
The smell of the ocean filled their nostrils.
Antonio, where are you?
El Sueño de Manuel, a few clipped articles, a few stories in South American newspapers, the pages of his unfinished novel. His photographs, thousands of them. What should she do with these meager possessions?
Cast-off clothes that his friends gave him. A few shirts and trousers. His old tweed jacket, the thin beige windbreaker, the suede jacket, darkened with use.
She would write to his mother, his aunt, the brothers and sisters he was closest to.
Cold pierced through them.
“I can’t go any further,” said the boy. “It’s getting too rough. I’m not supposed to go past the bridge.”
“Turn back if you have to.”
The boat made a sweeping turn. Rosa looked at the limp burlap bag, then tossed it, too, into the ocean. A gull swooped down and, thinking it was some sort of fish, grasped it in its beak, then let it go.
About the Author
Born Paula Cronbach in 1939 to a family of German Jews with hidden Sephardic origins, María Espinosa’s mother’s family lived in Spain until the 18th century. They concealed their Jewish identity until the family finally made their way to Brussels, where they could openly practice their religion. From there they moved to Eastern Europe, and finally to the United States.
Espinosa grew up in Long Island, the child of a sculptor father and a poet mother. She attended Harvard and Columbia Universities and received a MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She met and married her first husband, Chilean writer Mario Espinosa Wellmann while living in Paris. In 1978 she married Walter Selig, who had fled Nazi Germany as a child to grow up on an Israeli kibbutz.
Espinosa has taught at New College of California, City College of San Franciso and elsewhere. She is the author of the novels Longing (Arte Público, 1995; Wings Press ebook 2011) and Dark Plums (Arte Público, 1995; Wings Press ebook 2011), and Incognito: The Journey of a Secret Jew (Wings Press, 2002; ebook 2011), and Dying Unfinished (Wings Press, 2009; ebook 2011). Longing received the American Book Award in 1996, and has been translated into Greek; Dying Unfinished received the PEN Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence in 2010. Espinosa is also the author of two books of poetry, Night Music and Love Feelings. She translated George Sand’s novel, Lélia, which was published by the Indiana University Press.
Espinosa’s poetry, articles, translations, and short fiction have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals, including Anthologies of Underground Poetry, edited by Herman Berlandt, In other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States, edited by Roberta Fernández, and George Sand’s Ma Vie, edited by Thelma Jurgrau. An interesting midnight interview with the Israeli writer, Amos Oz, appeared in Three Penny Review.
For more complete biographical information, go to:
www.wingspress.com or www.mariaespinosa.com
About the Press
Wings Press was founded in 1975 by Joanie Whitebird and Joseph F. Lomax, both deceased, as “an informal association of artists and cultural mythologists dedicated to the preservation of the literature of the nation of Texas.” Publisher, editor and designer since 1995, Bryce Milligan is honored to carry on and expand that mission to include the finest in American writing—meaning all of the Americas, without commercial considerations clouding the choice to publish or not to publish.
Wings Press produces multicu
ltural books, chapbooks, CDs, DVDs and broadsides that, we hope, enlighten the human spirit and enliven the mind. Everyone ever associated with Wings has been or is a writer, and we know well that writing is a transformational art form capable of changing the world, primarily by allowing us to glimpse something of each other’s souls. Good writing is innovative, insightful, and interesting. But most of all it is honest.
Likewise, Wings Press is committed to treating the planet itself as a partner. Thus the press uses as much recycled material as possible, from the paper on which the books are printed to the boxes in which they are shipped.
As Robert Dana wrote in Against the Grain, “Small press publishing is personal publishing. In essence, it’s a matter of personal vision, personal taste and courage, and personal friendships.” Welcome to our world.
Colophon
This Wings Press edition of Longing, by María Espinosa, is available in all ebook formats, and as a print-on-demand paperback, printed on 55 pound non-acidic EB Natural paper by Edwards Brothers, Inc. of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Titles have been set in Parisian display type, the text in Times New Roman type. All Wings Press books are designed by Bryce Milligan.
On-line catalogue and ordering:
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