by MB Caschetta
Wait until he heard about Tita.
Through dinner Ricardo cried quietly, refusing to eat from Tita’s tender breast. His cries grew louder when the tias praised the presentation of an elaborate cake made with Tita’s final eggs. The frosting said Feliz Cumpleaños.
“Don’t cry, hermano,” his sisters said in one voice. “Papi will buy you another chicken.”
Ricardo didn’t eat the lunch his mother made the next day in case she’d poisoned it: bread and cheese, a slice of birthday cake. He wanted the sweet taste of frosting on his tongue, but he couldn’t forget what he’d seen the day before: his mother chasing Tita around the mango tree, her fingers snapping Tita’s neck with a casual twist, Tita’s limp body being carried to the kitchen for plucking. Ricardo shuddered. He’d heard stories of brother turning on brother, neighbor turning in neighbor, husband betraying wife. He thought the worst of everyone now, even himself.
“Niño,” his mother said in the morning when he pushed away his café y pan, “kiss your mami goodbye.” She was on her way downtown, where she worked as a clerk in a government office. Holding him close, she smelled so sweetly of perfume and lotion that he almost forgot his grudge.
At the door, she faced him. “Do you think I would let my darlings starve? We’ll get another Tita for you, mi amor. You’ll see.” She lowered her voice, eyes twinkling. “Your father will march into Castro’s henhouse and get you the best Communist chicken in the world.”
Ricardo did not smile.
He did not bring up the pink-orange claw his mother had left next to his bed for him to find that morning, though he had it in his pocket. He did not even speak when she walked back across the room and stood by his chair to brush back his hair with her cool hand.
“I am sorry, Ricardito.”
On his way to school, Ricardo searched under every fence post and tree stump to find the perfect place to bury his dangerous lunch. He ripped it into pieces, even the cake, and covered it with leaves, checking over his shoulder for spies.
He planned to get Hector to wrestle him when he got to the school. In La Revoluciøn, two boys were chosen to play Castro and Castro’s brother, fighting for power over Cuba. Hector was not the best-looking choice. He had thick lips and a strange glow in his eyes that made him seem slow, but he was always willing to wrestle as the weaker brother, and he never seemed to mind when Ricardo pressed him to the mat, lips against neck, thigh in his groin.
The tour bus was leaving Barcelona at six a.m., and the American woman still wasn’t on it. Late as usual, she’d had a bad habit of delaying their departures by at least fifteen minutes; Ricardo found it amusing. After blowing out the electricity in the parador this morning, she’d sent the maids scurrying out of their beds.
The very old man who ran the small hotel handed out candles from a sack, but before he’d limped back around with matches, the sun had risen. Ricardo put on a robe and stood in the doorway as the olive-skinned maids huddled elbow to elbow under a chipped archway crying “Auxilio!” as if the Spanish Empire were coming to an end, their nightgowns thin in the gray light of morning. Ricardo wondered if these were the old man’s granddaughters and tried to call one over, but she blushed and turned away.
Ricardo had spent an entire summer in Europe already, a graduation gift from his father. He was used to the August heat, the idle chitchat of strangers whose faces ran together with paintings and photographs in a familiar blur. Spain was his last country—Barcelona the final stop, with several daylong junkets by bus to Valencia, Toledo, Sevilla, Madrid. Their very names held a kind of magic for him, as if somehow they formed a map of possibility, the final destinations of summer, his last chance.
The tour guide, a relentlessly cheerful European named Mercedes, looked at her watch. Like all the other tour guides of the summer, Mercedes had fleshy arms and a pungent smell of sweat mingling with her cologne.
“Buenas dias!” She nodded toward an empty seat, calling attention to American bad manners. “Shall we start the guide, even if we can’t start the tour?” She began to reveal their day: Tejera Park, Los Burgos, and the Museo de Navarra.
The American woman finally arrived, offering a quick apology, and took the empty seat next to Ricardo. The other tourists, mostly Germans in tube socks, sent up a cheer as the bus sputtered forward. The American woman watched out the window, silent, and sad somehow; Ricardo was slightly put off by her fragile appearance. Reedy, almost. It reminded him of an article he’d read about birds and their small, hollow bones.
“Blow-drying my hair,” she said. “I forgot to plug in the adapter and almost burned the place down.”
The young man seated next to her was barely eighteen, Violet guessed. He looked a bit like the figure in an El Greco painting they would likely see in Toledo—Saint Martin and the Beggar—long, gaunt body, close-cropped hair. Young enough to be my son. Something about his soft pink lips and clear eyes made him seem foreign, though she couldn’t discern an accent in his impeccable Castilian—better than hers, and she had taught Spanish for sixteen years at Montclair Community College. Canadian, she decided, pressing at her skirt as it billowed in the heat.
She had been touring Europe since May.
The young man stopped writing in a notebook to scratch his chin with the pencil. A slight beard had grown in overnight, rugged. She studied his green eyes—the color of ivy—and the curve of his neck under the thin shirt, tucked into the same tan corduroys as yesterday. Leather sandals, a shoulder bag in his lap.
Not American, anyway.
Looking out at the Catalonian countryside, Violet thought how Edward would have loved to see the old gypsies hanging their wash over the stone wall at the edge of the city. He would have made up a line of poetry about how they looked like old crows, so worn in their black widow dresses. But Edward was not in Barcelona; he was home in New Jersey, making decisions about their life.
Violet’s sister tried not to gloat. “Imagine,” Judith said, “Your Edward, a mere human after all! He’s practically searching for his mother.”
“Aren’t we all?” said Violet.
Still, the thought yielded a terrifying sensation, more like strangulation than sorrow. She found a recurrent difficulty filling her lungs with air had become socially embarrassing. Once, she nearly fainted in the faculty lounge.
“Panic attacks,” Judith said, offering the name of a shrink, who insisted on downplaying the dramatics and yet still using words that packed a wallop.
Anger, the shrink said, fear.
The tour group split up in Pamplona after they’d tackled the major sights. The bus driver pointed the Germans to the center of town, staying behind and flipping through a magazine while Mercedes napped.
Ricardo wandered aimlessly into the warm afternoon.
He found the American woman lunching at an outdoor café.
“Last month, in Romania,” he said with his best grammar, “I caused the blackout of an entire village with my electric razor.”
She squinted the sun out of her eyes, motioning for him to sit in an empty wrought-iron chair at her table.
“How did you know I spoke Spanish?” she said.
Ricardo pointed south toward Barcelona: “I heard you speaking to the old man back at the hotel.”
“Your Castilian is perfect. Where are you from?”
“Cuba.” He shook her hand: “Ricardo.”
“Violet,” she said. “Havana?”
“Cien Fuegos, but I live in New York now.”
She looked surprised.
“My mother was Cuban,” Ricardo said. “After she died, my father got us out.”
“I teach Cuba as an example of Spanish colonization, failed political vision, and cultural despair,” Violet said. “Perhaps that’s insensitive of me.”
“It’s okay,” Ricardo said. “My sisters still live there. They think it’s wonderful. Patty is going to medical school, and Libby raises chickens. My mother named them after a Party slogan: Patria y Libertad.”
“We always sent them American money in the mail. There’s a trick to it: You lay the bills flat between the pages of a poetry book to fool the officials. Or so we hoped. When my mother died and my father took me out, they were put under surveillance. We used to get letters with some of the words blacked out.”
“It’s like letting go of everything when your mother dies.” Her voice was mournful. “My mother died right before this trip.”
“I was very young,” Ricardo said. “My mother died in a bus accident. My tias say she was carrying a bomb in her purse meant for El Caballero, but my father says that’s nonsense.”
“What do you think?”
Ricardo shrugged. “She could have been working for Castro or working against him. I don’t know.”
Violet’s hair curled in the heat as if it might lift off her head.
“Are you traveling alone?”
“I was supposed to stay with relatives in Avila, but it didn’t work out,” he said. “I couldn’t find my mother’s family.” Their conversation paused. “I’m going to the University of Madrid for graduate school in the fall.”
“To study more Spanish?”
Ricardo shook his head. “Architecture.”
She fingered some postcards, looking at the writing as she waved them back and forth. “They’re for my students.”
He dug around his shoulder bag and found some stamps, offering them up. He pointed at her neat signature. “It’s a lovely name: Violet Fields.”
“I keep meaning to take back my maiden name.” Her face was pink. “You don’t seem like an architect type.” She stared over his shoulder, as if it hurt to look him in the eye.
His father had already paid his tuition at Madrid, Ricardo thought. When Violet insisted on paying for his drink, Ricardo told her a secret.
“What I really want to be,” he said, “is an artist.”
After the bus crash that killed Ricardito’s mother, he grew up quickly. At first his father lay around the house in his underwear, drinking rum from the bottle, which Patty or Libby tried to hide out back in the garden. When Ricardo turned nine, there were secret meetings in the backyard, whispered accusations, neighbors’ disapproving glances.
His father sent him off to bed with a pat on the back and a wink. “Now we’re going to get somewhere, hijo. You’ll see.”
Beware political dissent, the school janitor hissed, cornering him in the hallway. What do you think killed your mother?
“Papi,” the twins warned, “we have Ricardito to think of. We have our future.”
The year Ricardo turned ten, his father woke him out of a sound sleep and carried him to a beat-up car, then to a rickety boat, and finally to what must have been the tiniest airplane in the world. His father carried him up the ladder and belted him in the seat. The whole ride to Miami Ricardo’s ears popped; his head buzzed. His father slept through the thunderstorm that rocked the little plane, but Ricardo threw up twice: once in the well where his legs were and once in his own lap.
There hadn’t been time to pack clothes or even a photograph of his mother or sisters. No toys or shoes, though later his father would present him with a box of things from Cuba. In the pocket of his jacket, Ricardo gripped his only worldly possessions: three Cuban coins, a marble, and Tita’s dried-out chicken claw from his mother. Flying in the tiny airplane, looking down at the lights and the small disappearing island, he didn’t know he would never see his sisters again, or Cien Fuegos, his mother’s home.
Violet watched a deep orange sun sinking behind the red rooftops as the Alta Vista bus slid along under a wide Spanish sky. Turning to Ricardo, she thought she saw tears in his eyes, but as the bus reached the great, embattled entranceway, Ricardo yawned and smiled.
She’d been mistaken. She was alone. “I’m nobody’s mother.”
Ricardo raised his eyebrows, soft pink lips parting as if to speak.
After a belabored effort to park behind the little parador, the bus finally rolled to a stop. Violet handed Ricardo an email printout: Dearest, Please call. We Need to talk. Georgia is ready to get married. Hope you’re having fun! Love, Edward.
*
The Germans filed off, inviting Mercedes for a nightcap at the café across the street. In France and Italy, Violet had learned to appreciate their constant tobacco smiles, their enthusiasm for Europe, which seemed like something to count on.
Ricardo held the email. “Edward?”
“My husband,” Violet said. She had stuffed the notice in her purse the previous day.
“I’m sorry.”
“Funny,” she said. “I felt like crying, all day, and then I thought…”
He tilted his head, waiting for the rest of the sentence. By the look on his face, Violet realized she’d made a mistake.
She motioned to the empty aisle. “I think it’s time to go.”
Six on the dot the next morning, when Violet appeared, the Germans gave her a standing ovation. Violet took a deep bow. This was a three-day excursion to the South—Toledo, Sevilla, and Madrid.
“You’re almost on time!” Mercedes said, as Violet made her way down the bus’s rubber aisle to her usual seat.
“Sleep well?” she asked Ricardo.
The night before he’d spent hours at the outside café across the street. “I’m hung over.”
Violet cleared her throat. “Alcohol!”
“To watch the Germans, you’d have thought it was water.”
“I tossed and turned all night,” she said, “I could hear you all the way across the street, explaining to everyone how I’m not your mother.”
He blushed. “What do Germans know?”
“Well, they’re right,” Violet said. “And without him, I’m a spinster.”
“Edward?”
“I did meet a man in France.”
Ricardo felt his excitement rise. “A man?”
“A wonderful man!”
“At your hotel?”
Violet patted the thin material of her skirt: “No.”
“You went out?”
“To a disco.”
Mercedes began to speak into a microphone. She was wearing a yellow straw hat and seemed in particularly good humor. “Today we are starting our three-day tour, featuring Madrid: city of industry, fashion, and broken hearts.” The bus driver popped in a video of the sites they would see: the Palacio Real, the Plaza Mayor, Puerta del Sol.
“You went to a disco?” Ricardo’s voice floated above the sound of the Germans’ dull drone.
“One night when I couldn’t sleep, I went for a walk and found the most delicious little dance club.” She caught her breath, excited by the memory. “It was so hot that night, Bastille Day, and I stepped inside because I knew it would be nice and cool.”
“Was he French?” The skin on Ricardo’s arms prickled, as if the stifling air might actually burn him.
“He was from San Diego,” she said. “A divorcé.”
“An American,” Ricardo whispered. How many times had he himself dreamed of falling in love with a dark handsome stranger from a dark land? A divorcé from San Diego would do, anyone, as long as it was someone belonging to Ricardo, even if only for the night. Suddenly Ricardo wanted to kiss Violet Fields in a dark smoky disco with throbbing music in his ears while men from every nation looked on, wanting him.
Violet peered through the window at the low-growing trees that slid along the countryside. He followed her gaze, dreaming, seeing that some were gnarled and dense, others shady and expansive, with branches like feathers.
The next few days, Ricardo felt sullen. He thought about writing his father the truth: that he wanted to go to Paris and study with artists. Day after day on the bus, he’d start out listening to Mercedes’ chatter but soon be lost in the hot yellow sun of his own yearning, imagining he was walking and talking with Violet.
As morning developed into sweltering afternoon, the driver h
ummed to himself, nodding as he drove. Cool air blasted from the vents, lulling even Mercedes to sleep; Violet seemed half in a trance. Ricardo said her name.
She turned. He hesitated. “What is it?”
“Did you kiss that man?”
She laughed and patted his leg. “What kind of a question is that?”
He leaned his head on the seat in front of him. “Did you kiss that man from California?”
She lightly swatted him, as if he weren’t serious, then sat back and closed her eyes. “He kissed me, not that it’s any business of yours.”
Ricardo studied the way her hair framed her face, the freckles on her neck. She seemed to grow younger the longer he knew her. “I see.”
“What do you see?” Violet said sharply. “Because frankly I think you’re too young to see anything.” She was glaring. “How old are you, Ricardo?”
“Twenty-five.” It would be true in a few months.
“What does a person actually see at your age?”
The question seemed to startle her, giving him hope. “I see a country,” he leaned over her to look out the window. “A beautiful country.”
At lunch in Segovia, Violet announced to everyone—even the Germans—that she intended to drink all the wine in Spain. Ricardo tried to keep her glass filled, but she sipped slowly. He said, “What about you, Violet?”
She skewered a shrimp. “What about me?”
“That’s just it, isn’t it?” He leaned across the table. “No one knows a thing about you. I mean, I’m going to be an architect; the Germans are always going to be German, and Mercedes, here, is very soon going to be free of us.”
Mercedes laughed, touching his arm.
“So, Violet, what are you going to be?”
“When I grow old?” she teased.
“Whenever.”
“No clue.” She raised her glass. “Except maybe alone.” He barely heard her above the din of the restaurant. The Germans were embroiled in an animated discussion.
“Speak in Spanish,” Mercedes pleaded. She’d been talking all day into the bus microphone as they drove past cathedrals of stone and great ivory crosses carved into cliffside cemeteries, everything yellow in southern Europe in the summer. “Even my brain is dry,” she said.