“Not here. In the city, at the studio.”
“What studio?”
“The sculptor’s. His name’s Cardona. You know him?”
“No. But I can’t go to the city.”
“Not today. Tomorrow, the day after. Can you do it?”
Again, he tries to meet eyes with her. Their eyes understand each other.
“Yes.”
They agree. On a certain bus, the following day…
“Talk to me about the sculpture. I might need to make an excuse.”
He talks in front of Suspiros, in front of Colorada, and they don’t understand a word:
“It’s a little country boy, like the one who washes the streets with a pail. Just imagine, a sculpture wearing espadrilles. Can you imagine how it pains me? The attitude, you know? Shrunken, soft, beaten down, hungry! That’s right, he’s forgotten to eat, he’s stranded. It’s a shame!”
He’s gotten worked up again. He raises his right arm, which trembles with rage.
Amaya squints her eyes and shakes her head softly.
Romano thinks it’s sorrow, for the boy from the country. He lowers his arm and falls silent.
The three women return to the house, climbing the cobblestone paths, then descending over furrowed trails of hard-packed soil and dusty ones that give way beneath their feet.
Can you imagine how it pains me? Amaya remembers the man saying. But she is pained, too, pained in a different way, by that strong, inordinate man who wants to make money off white mice and viper venom; cruel with the fox he didn’t strangle, compassionate with the poor derelicts whose dolorous image the sculptor’s fingers bring to life.
Suddenly she feels tired, very tired. Tomorrow…She wants to convince herself that no, it’s not tomorrow that wearies her, it’s today, the day she’s just been through, she thinks, the kind of day that consumes you, because you live through so much, and all at once…
They always tramp around a bit. But not today. Colorada has somewhere to go. She takes Cataldo’s hand and leads him into a vineyard, they jump a gorge and pass over a broad, fallow field full of weeds with hot clumps of earth that burn their feet. They follow this path through the lowlands to the veterinarian’s house. They climb up the low brick wall.
“Here it is.”
“Yeah.” For Cataldo, it is clearly not a revelation.
“Have you been here?”
“Yeah. The big guy was carrying a basket and something was shrieking. I came over on the other road – it’s easier that way – and waited to find out what it was. Two monkeys. They’re there.” Cataldo speaks calmly, looking down on the yard littered with cages. Colorada watches him. She follows his explanation and then inquires, prudently, with affectionate respect:
“Did you invite me to come and I forgot about it?”
“No.” Cataldo doesn’t take his eyes off the interior. “I never told you. It’s sad. Animals that don’t eat each other don’t need to be in cages.”
“Ah…”
“Could you handle being caged up?”
“No. You’d let me out.”
“Yeah. I’d let you out.”
Silence, and a new meditation from the girl.
“Vipers don’t eat each other. Should we let them out?”
“They scare me.”
“Me too.”
They look for something to do. It takes them time to figure out what.
Now it’s Cataldo who proposes:
“The fox.”
“He bites. I saw it.”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s got a little mouth. He won’t bite much. And he’s not poisonous.”
“Amaya told him to let it go. The man promised.”
“He didn’t let him go.”
“No.”
“The mice.”
“OK. What if the dog catches us?”
“I know what to do.”
He clambers down armed with a long stick. The dog runs from one end of the wire to the other, but only her barking reaches him. Cataldo lifts the wire latch and pushes it until it flips over. The door opens and the white mice run out and scatter. In an instant, they’ve vanished through the holes riddling the wall. Only one stays behind, ignorant of its opportunities, running swiftly over the mesh of the cage. Cataldo hits it with the stick and the creature, more frightened than before, darts off and discovers the way out.
“Help me.”
Colorada gives him a hand and Cataldo climbs over the wall.
When the sun goes down, they are sitting on the ground at the end of a vine row, eating grapes.
“I’m hungry. They go better with bread.”
“You want to look for some?”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Fine.”
Somebody comes up through the rows. The two dimwits stop speaking or moving, knowing they’re intruders. They wait, hoping to pass unnoticed.
The farmhand is going back to the house, hoe on his shoulder. He sees them and ignores them. With what little you get for grapes, is what he thinks.
In the hand holding the hoe he has a kerchief, with knots like little ears on either end. He remembers it and turns back. When he’s reached the two dimwits, who look up at him from below, still chewing their pink berries, he drops the hoe, undoes the kerchief, and takes out two crusts of bread. He offers them in his hand, a single hand coarse from working the soil:
“Here. They’re better with bread.”
Cataldo takes the crusts and passes one to Colorada. He starts to eat the bread and grapes and looks askance at the farmhand, asking himself why he won’t leave, since he’s not kicking them out.
The man wipes the sweat from his neck with his kerchief, slips it into his pocket, picks up his hoe, and goes on his way.
Later they lie back in the scrub between the vines and Colorada looks for fennel, to chew on the succulent seeds.
Soon she starts to laugh, low, as though to herself, absorbed, absent.
“What’s with you, huh? You going to tell me?”
“I feel a tickle.”
“How? Who’s tickling you? Where?”
“Here,” Colorada says, and lifts up her skirt. “Between my legs.”
She opens her legs and shows her thighs, all the way up. She doesn’t stop smiling, now broadly, now softly, as if waves of itchiness were coursing over her.
Cataldo offers to help:
“You want a hand? Want me to scratch you?”
Colorada agrees and lies down on her back, her skirt pulled up over her belly, her knees spread apart.
Cataldo scratches softly on the inner walls of her thighs, and she wriggles with laughter.
“Hold still, I can’t do it with you like this.”
All at once, the laughter stops. Cataldo scrutinizes the girl’s face. Colorada has rested the back of her hand over her mouth, going hic, hic, with tears running out of her eyes.
“What about now…?”
He doesn’t answer.
He waits.
When she’s calmed down, she asks:
“Didn’t you see you gave me the hiccups?”
“Oh…”
Colorado sits up and goes on scratching herself before pulling down her skirt.
“How’d it happen?”
“What…?”
“The tickling, down there…”
“I remembered the mice.”
“Oh…”
“Don’t make me remember, or else I’ll…” And she starts laughing again.
Cataldo, instead of worrying as he had before, laughs and laughs, he falls to the ground laughing. It passes, for her as well as for him, and both of them are left feeling cheerful.
“We could keep one.”
“One…what?”
“A white mouse.”
“Why?”
“For Suspiros.”
“True. What do we take her now?”
“I don’t have anything. Another toad?”
“The house is already full of toads. Amaya’s hu
sband stepped on one and went crazy. He said a bunch of bad words.”
“That red rock?”
“I don’t like red stuff.”
“What if instead of taking her something, we bring her here?”
“It’s late. The sun’s going down.”
“There’s games you don’t need much light for.”
“Well. Amaya did go to the city.”
“We could hunt bats.”
“With big canes.”
“Suspiros will like knocking the bats down.”
“Yeah, with big canes. She’ll like that.”
The father’s using a flashlight, but he still trips over the furrows and vegetables. He shouts:
“Suspiros…! Suspiros…!”
Tripping, whining, guilty, the servant follows him:
“Ramírez was watering. He saw her.”
The man jumps the barbed wire; the woman slips between the strands. They tread over the produce at two of the farms and skirt the threat of the dogs.
Ramírez collapses early onto his cot; during the week, he’s no friend to the nightlife. His farmhouse has gone dark, save for the embers outside where he grilled dinner.
The mutt keeping watch awakens him before Suspiros’s father calls.
Yes, Ramírez saw her. She passed through his fields with Colorada and Cataldo. She didn’t come back…? How could that be? Colorada neither?
Ramírez buttons up his pants, puts on his shoes, and thus shows them his willingness to help search.
It’s 9:00 at night. Amaya comes back, her face, neck, hands covered in kisses. They didn’t see the sculpture of the boy, they didn’t go to any artist’s studio. By 8:00, Romano decided to leave her, because he wanted to attend a teachers’ conference.
Amaya still feels that humid pressure, with a slight scent of tobacco, in her mouth, violating her warmly, in a succession of never-ending waves.
Unusually, there’s no light on in the doorway or the courtyard. But there is in the bedrooms, in the dining room, in the kitchen. Open, well-lit rooms, full of furnishings and everyday objects. But now, though she’s never felt this before, Amaya envisions her home like a house suddenly emptied by misfortune.
She stays in the courtyard, afraid to go in, afraid a stranger will leap out from some corner to tell her what’s gone wrong.
She doesn’t imagine tragedy striking anyone in particular, she doesn’t want to assume such a thing. It’s something else, a retreat from her, an exodus, she imagines, as if everyone, even her sweet dimwitted sister, knew what she’d been up to. She feels exposed, denounced, singled out by the silence.
But it’s only for a moment.
Then she thinks of Suspiros. She thinks, apprehensive about doing so, afraid of breaking something with her thoughts, afraid of naming her, because it might bring some evil down upon her.
She lights a lamp on the veranda, spilling clarity onto the tiles in the courtyard, and this action replenishes her strength and allows her to call out, still softly, hearing herself:
“Leonardo…Leonardo…”
And to pass through the bedrooms and open the window that looks out over the back yard, heavy with shadows:
“Colorada…Colorada.”
And to look in the kitchen where no fire is lit for dinner and there’s no point in calling for the servant.
Mute, afraid of lashing out, she runs along the walkway and scans the street from end to end, and when someone comes up and then down on the uneven footpath, she takes cover in the unlit doorway and lets him pass without seeing her. And she stays there, one hand held high, braced on the flaking, whitewashed wall, waiting for whatever there is to wait for.
Then the servant comes, covered in mud up to her knees.
She has to find out if Amaya came back, if Suspiros has returned to her. That’s what the boss wants to know, while he’s out there trampling the fields and poaching half the people from the various houses, who come along to help.
Amaya presses her to tell her where.
And the servant cries:
“I don’t really know right now, Miss. They went that way” – and she stretches her arm out in a cardinal direction, toward no precise place or distance.
Yet the way Amaya shakes her, her merciless rage, hands her back over to the night.
The scornful words rain down on her:
“If they sent you here, woman, it’s because they want you to go back. Idiot, use your head, idiot!”
It gets worse. The woman’s understanding grows cloudier and she can no longer continue. She throws herself to the ground and cries. Amaya rocks her, trying to stand her up, begging her in the end, but it’s pointless.
So Amaya goes alone.
Feeling her way in the shadows, she reaches the edge of the canal. Further down, much further, scant lights like fireflies scrawl straight lines in the air. She understands: the men thinks the same thing, that down there in the water…
She stands there, weak, terribly weakened, but straight and wide-eyed, hearing the water she doesn’t wish to see.
She looks up, moistens her lips, gnawing at them softly, and utters her sacrifice:
“I renounce that man. He will touch me no more. I promise you. But let her be alive. Even if she’s sick, even if she’s wounded, let her live.”
No, Cataldo hasn’t gone back to his family. That’s not unusual: he spends so many nights in the old shack…
His brother, intelligent and strong, to make up for the burden the dimwit represents for the family, stands at the head of the search party.
From afar, he calls his name, as all of them call his name, “Cataldo, Cataldo!” And also with the name Cataldo will know is coming from his brother, his strong brother, his protector: “Blackie, little Blackie, I’m looking for you!”
Cataldo hears and stops lashing at the air with his cane.
The moon reveals to him, walking through the last patch of vines, not his kindhearted brother, but a troupe of people he doesn’t recognize.
He throws away the cane, grabs Colorada by the arm, and takes cover behind the old storehouse.
But then he remembers, and slides over toward the oven left over from the old house. Gently, he calls out:
“Suspirita…”
Suspiros doesn’t answer. He’s confused. He looks as far as his eyes can see. She’s gone. But she was there, not long before.
When they knocked down the bat flying out the storehouse, awake after sleeping on one of the joists, they told Suspiros about it, then went on chasing those fleeting, airborne shadows. Suspiros didn’t finish it off, Cataldo didn’t know why, and she retreated to where the oven stood, to watch the long canes flailing, wielded like slender stilts, but up high, which always finished with grousing: “I let him go,” “He got away.”
Cataldo didn’t know why Suspiros ran off so quickly. The bat was in the dust, and it was moving, as if preparing to escape, to fly away. But that was all. And the girl got scared by the animal’s silence, having it there, loose, at her feet, unable to escape, suffering without a shriek, without complaint, like people, or dogs run over by cars.
Suspiros isn’t next to the oven, or on the other side of it, either. Cataldo guesses how far the unknown group has come, then flees.
The men stop before the inert night cloaking the storeroom, and don’t even bother to look around.
They’re about to turn back:
“What do we do? They’re nowhere around here.”
“Not a trace.”
Only the father, seeming uncertain, mulls over what next to do. He says, “Suspiros, Suspiros…” And he repeats, as though with so soft and solitary a voice, he won’t discourage himself further: “Suspiros, Suspiros…”
From the oven, from inside it, a leg emerges, but no one notices.
Then, soft and silent, Suspiros climbs out, advancing toward the voice that calls her name.
Amaya imagines the conversation. She polishes it, always in the same direction, since it depends on
her thought and her will.
She will say to him, Do you believe in God?, stiffly, because they’ve always talked that way, and he will say no, because there’s no other way it can be: No. I don’t believe. She will ask him to respect her religious convictions and he will say yes, he can do that, he is capable of respecting the faith of others. That will be the moment to explain to him her pledge, the pledge she will have to keep, because the girl was brought back to her…
Her husband walks past in his frogged pajamas, lost in his own affairs.
Amaya gets up from the chair. Her arms retain the feeling of her weight stretched out halfway across the table.
She turns toward the kitchen. She heats up the milk in the aluminum milk can. Over the flame, which exudes a domestic aroma, she stirs a long time with a spoon. And the vapor warms her up and dampens her hand.
José Luis. He’s still with her, he’s still in her. She didn’t make her pledge for him, but for another man. She doesn’t have to expel him from within her.
The milk whirls on its own, dragging her hand and the spoon along, as if they were weightless.
José, José Luis.
Deprived of its chance to exist, the dialogue dissipates in Amaya’s memory.
He’s not looking for her, as if he expects her to do everything.
She runs into him on the bus. Suspiros, between the two of them, impedes the words that Amaya wouldn’t have agreed to say there, because if she brought it up, it would only be so he would understand…He is restrained, but his consternation shows through, the fact that something, or everything, is eluding him.
Another time, he’s standing by the front door to the pharmacy, arguing, exasperated. He pulls on his shirt collar with his left hand. He’s perspiring.
Amaya says:
“Excuse me.”
He blubbers as he steps aside.
When she comes out, he’s vanished.
She asks her husband:
“So the veterinarian…he never showed back up?”
“Yeah…he buys pomade, brilliantine…Always stuff for his hair.”
Amaya smiles. Different habits now, maybe, different penchants.
She wants to find a loose thread to pull on, to see if he remembers her:
“He never asked after the goat? He didn’t want to see it grown up?”
“Never. Nope.”
With a soft nudge from her right hand, Amaya sets the burnished wheel of the Singer sewing machine in motion. At the same time, she presses the pedal and the hissing sound of the machine drowns out the family once more.
Nest in the Bones Page 8