Memory Mambo

by Achy Obejas

  Caridad is the first to notice. She turns her head, fast, and Pauli follows her gaze down to Jimmy’s face. Ali is holding him by the collar as if he were a rabid dog.

  “Juani…” he says again.

  It takes Ali an instant to realize something’s happening but by the time he looks down at his captured prey, all other eyes are on me, including Tía Celia’s.

  “Juani…” Jimmy says. “Tell them…tell them what really happened…”

  His voice is so low, such a whisper, I’m not sure anybody hears it—I’m not sure I hear it—I’m not sure I didn’t just imagine him, his lips cracked, words trickling out. I’m thinking, Maybe it’s all in my head, in my head. I close my eyes and open them again but there’s Jimmy: “Juani, please…” he pleads.

  I close my eyes again, hard like a bank vault, but when I open them again—and this time it’s all swirling water and salt—Jimmy’s eyes are red too—everything’s red—he’s crawling toward me until Ali yanks him back.

  “Juani…tell them what really happened…god, please…help me…” He’s breathing hard now, his fingers curling under his palms.

  Ali makes Jimmy heel, paying no notice to his pathetic requests. But Pauli and Caridad are both staring at me, their faces twisted, pained and horrified. I turn toward Tía Celia but she’s not paying attention to me anymore. She’s checking Rosa instead, gripping her arm and shoulder as if she were putting whatever bones might have been dislocated back in place.

  I look at Jimmy. “C’mon…” he says. “Please…tell them what happened…” He’s begging me, his mouth melting into the most awful grimace.

  But what really happened? What really happened?

  “Juani?” It’s Pauli and she’s so frightened, so vulnerable and raw. Her hand pushes her hair away from her face. She bites her lip. She starts to lean down to me—slowly, very slowly, everything’s very, very slow—and she reaches a trembling hand over to Ali for balance. It’s such a natural gesture, I have to force myself to remember there’s no relationship between them, no love, no connection except for one moment, that impossible moment that produced Rosa.

  “Juani, what happened?” Pauli asks, both hands now resting on my legs, soothing me, holding me. Caridad stands next to her as if she were holding her breath.

  I don’t know why but I look over at Jimmy again. And what I see now is so different. There, through his blood-spattered face, his swollen mouth and engorged eyes, there’s a smirk emerging.

  “Yeah, Juani, tell them,” he says, leaning back on his heels. “Tell them what happened.” He nods, as if he were giving me permission.

  “I…” I start to speak but I stumble. Caridad nervously hands me a tissue from her coat pocket and I wipe my mouth and nose. I start again but I can’t—there’s too much inside me. I feel my face dissolving, my shoulders shaking. I’m crying.

  “Juani, it’s okay,” Pauli whispers. “Just tell us…”

  But Jimmy’s impatient. “You stupid bitch…” he says, gritting what’s left of his dog-teeth. “You stupid bitch…” His eyes are inflamed.

  I feel everybody turn to him. He’s still on all fours, still at Ali’s mercy, but his rage is building, his muscles pumping.

  “What the…?” It’s Pauli.

  I don’t realize at first that I’m crawling backwards, inching away from Jimmy, totally terrified. Pauli grabs my legs.

  “It’s okay, Juani, it’s okay,” she says.

  Then Jimmy detonates. “I helped you, you stupid bitch, I helped you!” he shouts in my direction. He lunges toward me, his face demonic, but Ali throws himself around his neck and Pauli hurls her body between us.

  I don’t know where my energy comes from but when Jimmy’s huge hands reach over to me—he wants to kill me, I know—I jump up and kick him in the face. There’s a thud and a squish. Caridad gasps and drops down to help him, as if she were Mary Magdalene and he were on the way to a crucifixion. But Jimmy’s a bull, a herd of buffaloes: In his effort to get to me, he grabs Caridad by the hair and throws her down to the floor. She screams and flails. Jimmy grunts and tries to crawl over her. Ali and Pauli hang off him like puppets and I feel his breath and his fury. But I’m faster—I’m faster than him, faster than all of them.

  I push myself off—I feel my legs extend like a hurdler, my hips leading, my head back—and I’m out of there, out of that furnace of all their passions and tempers, out of that sucking spiral to hell, out of their circle of darkness and fire. As I run, run out to Milwaukee Avenue, I feel fresh, clean snow on my face.

  I don’t know how long I’m walking. It’s gray and black out. It’s the middle of the night. The street lights are fuzzy, like faraway suns. The snow is unspoiled, twinkling like in the movies. I’m coatless but I’m not cold. All the stores along Milwaukee Avenue are closed, their burglar bars drawn. There’s no one at the bus stops. There’s a jazzy piano playing somewhere, people laughing and drinking. Traffic is slow, only an occasional taxi pulls up to a late-night bar here and there to take the moneyed revelers home; they’re from other neighborhoods, here for the cheap thrills.

  I pass a homeless man covered in canvas bags—bags for rice and barley and wheat. He is black and big and even the hat he wears is made of this burlap, this scratchy stitch. He is sitting on the floor in the vestibule of a closed store. The windows display religious figures—Christ on the cross, angels, various virgins. There are Saint Christophers, Santa Bárbaras, products of our imaginations, all of them. The man is quietly eating a banana. When he finishes he puts the peel in a plastic bag he has dangling from his waist by a rope. Everything smells of urine.

  I lean against one of the windows and my stomach wrenches. What comes out of me is green and red and white and drops from my mouth like lava, steaming on the sidewalk. I’m sweating, even in the cold. My torn sleeve flaps up and I wipe my mouth with it. I stink.

  I raise my eyes and realize I’m no longer in front of that religious goods store or before that big homeless man but somewhere else entirely. The windows are brightly lit. There’s a blurry rainbow shadow, my reflection on the pane. Inside, the overhead lights are on. When I put my hand to the glass, I can feel vibrations: fax machines, computers, telephones. They’re not on but there’s a hum, a steady hum. I try to focus, to read the signs on the windows and doors. The letters are rather big and I have to step back a bit to decipher them: Migdalia Colón For Congress.

  I can hardly believe it. I cup my hands to contain the glare and look inside. There, alone at the main desk, her head bent, her shoulders leaning intently into her paperwork, is Gina. Migdalia Colón is her new Rudy Canto, the new hope for the neighborhood, her new ride through the belly of the beast. And Gina, workaholic that she is, is here now, in the wee hours, still putting together tomorrow’s schedule, still writing the speech that needs to be delivered first thing in the morning, still editing the new brochure, still doing whatever needs to be done for the cause.

  I take great comfort in seeing her here: I interpret it to mean there’s nobody else yet, nobody else to rub her feet while she writes, nobody else to work the tightness out of her muscles from a long hard day, nobody else to lie next to in bed while reading the latest poll figures. There’s nobody for her to go home to; my heart aches from this knowledge.

  Gina doesn’t see me at first, doesn’t register me at all. She’s scribbling and twirling her hair absent-mindedly (a habit I recognize as meaning there’s a deadline of some sort approaching). I tap on the glass but she doesn’t hear me. I tap a bit harder. She looks up sleepily, doesn’t recognize me (and I think, What must I look like that Gina, who has touched every inch of my face and body, cannot tell who I am now?) and goes back to her writing. I tap again and she looks up once more. She squints and waves absent-mindedly, then re-focuses on her work. I move over to the door and turn the knob but it’s locked so I rattle it a bit. Gina looks up yet again, squinting so hard her face is all scrunched up. Then she gets up, grabs a dry donut from what’s left at the fo
od table in the campaign office, and comes toward the door.

  I realize immediately what’s happened. And I know that if she sees my face before she opens the door to hand me that donut, that lock will remain shut, and I’ll be left out here in the cold. So the closer she steps to the door, the farther back I move, out of the light and into the dark. I turn my body a bit so that my face is obscured.

  The lock clicks, the door creaks open and I hear Gina’s voice, at first far away, inside, behind the door as she’s opening it, and then outside, inches from me, leaning into me with her eyes narrowed from effort, her nostrils flaring as if sniffing for clues. “My god, don’t you have a coat?” she asks, half in, half out of the office. She still doesn’t know who I am.

  What I do next, I do quickly: I grab her arms and push back, back into the campaign office, where it’s warm and the lights are shining. She’s off guard and falls backward; she stays up because my arm wraps around her and keeps her from dropping; I smell her hair, her skin, feel her in my arms as if we were dancing a tango and dipping for pleasure.

  She drops the donut somewhere, pulls away, gasps, stumbles, brings her hands to her mouth and starts to shake. “Oh my god,” she exclaims. I close the campaign-office door behind me, lean my back to it. Now we’re face to face, except that she keeps stepping back, away from me.

  “What…what happened to you?” she asks, her dim eyes racing from my head to my toes, surveying the damage. “Juani, you aren’t supposed to come in here…you can’t come in here…”

  She reaches for the telephone but her hands are shaking so badly she can barely hold the receiver.

  “Ay, Gina, who’re you gonna call, huh?” I ask. I realize I must sound like Jimmy, that pig. I don’t move from the door. I don’t want to scare her but mostly I just don’t want to move. I am suddenly so tired. “What will the cops think this time, huh?”

  She blinks, as if she doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but she puts the phone down, clumsily; it rattles on the cradle before settling. “What do you want?” she asks. Her voice is a little firmer now. I can tell she’s trying to get herself together, to come off like she’s not scared, like she’s in complete control.

  I sigh. What do I want? I want to know what happened, I want to know how I could feel so much, and how she could feel so much, and how we could wind up here, with so many fax machines, typewriters and computers humming between and around us like an electric fence.

  “Listen…” she says from across the room, her arms crossed on her chest.

  I notice her nose is a little different, a little crooked, and I realize that, in spite of what Jimmy said, I must have broken it. Or has it always been that way? Could it be that I never noticed before? Could I have missed something that obvious?

  “…You’ve got to go,” Gina says. “I mean, I’m working, you’re not supposed to be here, and I swear, if you get near me, I’ll call the cops—I really don’t care.”

  I close my eyes, I nod. I feel the cold coming in through the slit of the door behind me. “Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m not going to hurt you—”

  She guffaws. I open my eyes. “Uh huh,” she says, trying to be cocky but she’s not convincing. She’s too caught up in her own fears to pull off the attitude she wants.

  “I’m not going to stay, don’t worry,” I say.

  “No, you’re not,” she says, “and I’m not worried about it either.” But she is; I can tell. “What do you want, Juani?” she asks. But this time she’s using my name, and that means something.

  “I want to know what happened,” I say, and I close my eyes again. All I see is darkness.

  “What happened?” she asks, confused. “What do you mean, ‘What happened’?”

  “What happened—between us?”

  I hear Gina tap her foot impatiently, I can imagine her looking away as if she can’t believe I’d ask anything so inane.

  “We were attacked at my house by an unknown assailant,” she says in a monotone. “He was after me because of my community organizing. You scared him away with the leg of a chair. Then you got scared of other possible political violence and I couldn’t promise that it wouldn’t ever happen again, so we stopped seeing each other.”

  I laugh and open my eyes again. “Wow—that’s quite a story,” I say. “I notice it’s got your own little revisions.”

  She stares at me and says nothing.

  This isn’t what I want. “That’s not what I meant—that’s not what I meant by ‘what happened between us’,” I say, finally leaving my post at the door. I step up but she flinches and so I slowly sit on a desk near the door. “I meant between us.”

  “I don’t know what you mean…” she says, not a question, not a statement, but something in between. She’s confused.

  She’s beautiful, that is important to say.

  “Between us,” I say again. “One minute we were in love, the next minute, we weren’t.”

  “What kind of amnesia are you suffering from?” she asks, and she’s angry now. She’s forgotten she’s scared and she’s walked right up to me. “Don’t you remember? You beat the shit out of me.”

  “That’s how you remember it?” I ask, holding my breast with my palm.

  “That,” she says, nodding at my chest with her chin, “was self-defense.” She crosses her arms again, but this time it’s defiance, not a sense of protection, that motivates her.

  “What I mean,” I say, standing right up to her, “is this: How could that happen? How could we do that to each other?”

  “You tell me,” she says sadly, “you tell me.” She walks away from me, but this time it’s not fear. Her shoulders are slumped, her hands are limp. She throws herself in a chair, exhausted, vanquished. “Tell me. Please.”

  She’s not pleading, but I can tell she longs for explanation as much as I do. My chest hurts but it’s not a physical injury. Does she hurt?

  “I miss you,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “Juani, don’t…” She looks away, out the window to the falling snow.

  But I can’t stop now. “I loved you very much,” I say. “I still love you…”

  She shakes her head again. My own eyes are filled with tears, my face is hot, but I swear I see something falling from her face—a tear too perhaps?

  We are silent for the longest time. We stand there, in the hum of the machines, peering at spider webs in the corners, at paper clips on the floor, at pieces of donut strewn by the door. We say nothing.

  Then the phone rings. To my surprise, Gina answers it. “Migdalia Colón for Congress,” she says in her most professional voice. It’s nearly four o’clock in the morning. There’s no way anybody’s volunteering at this hour.

  “Yeah, I was just leaving,” she says, “don’t worry…no, honest, I’ll be home soon.” There’s a pause. “No, nothing’s wrong…really.” And another one. “Yeah…me too, okay, see you soon.”

  Before she’s hung up the phone, I’m at the door, turning the knob. As soon as I open it, the cold slaps me—it’s as if there’s been a temperature drop of about twenty degrees since I came inside.

  “Juani,” Gina calls out behind me. I don’t want to turn around but I feel her hand on my shoulder, so I obey that yearning my skin has for her touch. “I’m sorry,” she says.

  I don’t want to know who that was, so I don’t ask. I don’t want to know what it means, or when it started, whether it’s a woman or a man, because I can guess most of those answers and none of them really matter anyway. What I want to know is something else entirely.

  I turn to her. I look her right in the eye. She’s looking right back, open and scared, but not of ordinary dangers. “Did you…did you ever love me?” I ask.

  Her eyes widen. “Did I ever love you?” she asks, her mouth like a rose, red and fragile. “I…well…” She struggles, she shifts her weight and puts her hands in her pockets, all without taking her eyes off me. “Yes, of course I loved you…I’m sure I still do.”

&n
bsp; And so, for an instant, I imagine forgiveness—I imagine a waterfall, silver and cold, in a lush garden, a serene Eden. I think, Te quiero verde.

  We hug, we wrap our arms around each other and it’s real. I feel her heart beat next to mine—pounding, really—and I bury my nose in her hair and feel everything from her shoulders to her waist with my open palms.

  “Gina…” I whisper, because I’m not sure I can talk other than in a whisper, “I’m sorry, I…”

  “Me too,” she says, holding me back, sniffling.

  I breathe her in, getting a lungful. “Maybe…I mean, we still love each other…”

  But she reads my mind and doesn’t let me finish. She pulls away and she is stronger than me by far. “No,” she says, shaking her head, “no—we can be sorry but I can’t forget what happened, I can’t—trust is permanently broken for me.”

  “But time,” I beg, struggling to keep my arms around her but losing the battle fast.

  “No,” she says, “no.” And before I realize it, she has me out the door, shivering in the dark. “Good-bye, Juani,” she says, and the door closes, the lights go out at the campaign office, and all the machines go dead.

  CHAPTER 22

  THIS Is ALWAYS MY PROBLEM: These overwhelming feelings, this contained madness; to accept, for example, what just happened with Gina, but without accepting it. What I mean is this: to accept enough, to accept so as to make everyday existence bearable, to be able to run into her at the train station (without either of us hesitating) in front of the entire neighborhood if necessary, and to say hello, to perhaps exchange a few words about whatever campaign she’s working on, to smile, to mean every moment of it. And then to not accept—how could I accept this madness? To accept it, I think, is to lose hope. I don’t mean hope about us, but about me.

  I’m stuck here, in a booth in a coffee shop with a window looking out to Milwaukee Avenue. I’m stuck mostly because I can’t muster enough energy to move. My legs are free. My arms are free. I just can’t seem to lift my butt off the cracked vinyl seat, to lift my hand higher than necessary to bring some coffee to my mouth.