The Affairs of the Falcóns

by Melissa Rivero

  It was her attempt at a remedy for the restlessness of the past month. She’d wake at the same hour, between two and three in the morning, make herself a cup of chamomile tea that occasionally did the trick, and head back to bed before 4 A.M. She often woke as Lucho crawled into bed, lying on the edge of the mattress, his back to her and Pedro. “Sleep,” he’d whisper, and sometimes, she did, straight until it was time for her to rise for the day.

  Other times, they simply lay next to each other, whispering. She’d ask if he ate something, and he’d say yes. She assumed he ate in the car, though she never knew for sure. He’d tell her if the night was good or slow, ask if Victoria finished her homework or if Pedro was holding his pencil the right way when he wrote out his name. He always lay on his right side, his back to her. Sometimes, she got close enough to wrap her arm around his waist, and sometimes, he held her hand, bringing it to his lips and kissing it almost imperceptibly. It was a welcome contrast to the many nights he had spent on the couch, watching television or re-reading the same newspapers, quiet and distant, back when work had been difficult to find. Now, he fell asleep quickly; his snoring would begin almost instantly. She’d lay there, smelling the remnants of his cologne, the oil that had started to accumulate in his hair, the leather from the car, and him—the very underside of his skin—underneath it all. She knew his smell as if it were her own. It was singular, like Pedro’s candied sweat and Victoria’s milky breath.

  She could recall Don Beto’s smell now with the same precision. The coffee and tobacco, the rum and his sour stomach, all a jumble. The smell was permanent and decipherable, separate from any other she knew. She didn’t regret sleeping with him that day, but as much as she tried to set it aside, it kept coming back. It was so easy to get the money she needed. Have sex with him every once in a while and he’d likely give her whatever she asked for. Money for the car, the rent, the kids’ school tuition. They could move out of Valeria’s. They could stay in New York and silence any notion to the contrary. No going back to Peru or worrying about car bombs or anyone in uniform. No need to prove just how far she’d gotten from that orphaned provincial girl. She could go back to Regina’s, see if now there was room for her in its kitchen. She could keep her family intact.

  Was she wrong, then, to do what she did?

  She set a kettle on the stove, and as she waited for the water to fizzle, she leafed through her address book. She’d bought the vinyl-covered book at a discount store just before she moved in to Lexar Tower. It was one of many she’d gone through since moving to New York. She seldom added a person’s phone number or address. Instead, she used the book to jot down her grocery lists, her to-dos for the week, whatever errands Mama had asked her to run. These were all listed in the front of the book, at the beginning of the alphabet. She had considered using the book to journal. Her sleepless nights brought all she wanted to avoid thinking about during the day. But there were simply some things she couldn’t bear to see on the page. The reflection might be too much for her to bear. So she didn’t write any of it down—not her day or her thoughts, nothing about the father who’d never come back, or the mother she knew, with certainty, never would. Not even her recipes.

  Her dream, however, was always in the book, scribbled in its back pages under the letter Z. On the nights it woke her, she’d sit at the table with her cup of tea, writing down what she remembered to try to make sense out of it. The humidity on her skin, the hum of the leaves, the mumbling water. She listed whatever she could jog from her memory:

  río

  alas

  árboles

  monos

  bufeos

  And to that list, she added:

  cayendo

  She stared at the new word. Falling. In her dream, she had wings, but couldn’t get them to work. She was falling, crashing through lean trees that reminded her of her father’s arms, and into the river that smelled so clearly like the one that cut Santa Clara in two. She used to bathe in that water as a child. She expected to see her mother in her dream, sitting on the riverbank, like she did in real life, but she never saw her.

  Then there were the monkeys and the river dolphins. Those things, she recalled with a shiver, were going to consume her.

  The kettle shook, and though she ran to turn off the stove, she couldn’t beat the whistle. Most nights, she tried to make as little noise as possible. There were few moments in her day in which she could enjoy silence and the idleness of time. Tonight, however, time slowed too much, and it quickly filled with too much contemplation.

  She didn’t mind, then, when Rubén appeared in the kitchen. Squinting, his hair tousled, he looked as if he’d risen from a deep sleep. His voice, however, was full and alert as always. “I can’t sleep either,” he declared. He stood at the doorway, waiting for an invitation to enter. She gestured for him to sit, then closed the address book and slipped it in her pocket. “I don’t want to disturb you,” he said as he sat down. “I know this is probably the only time you get for yourself.”

  “I was just getting organized for tomorrow,” she said, adding a smile to ease his worry. “Besides, this is your kitchen.”

  He chuckled. “You’ve put it to much better use than me or Valeria. It might as well be yours.” She set down a mug with a teabag in front of him. He dipped it in and out of the water. “What’s got you up tonight?”

  “Oh, same as always,” she said. “Bad dream. Work. Money.”

  “You’ll always worry about that,” he said. “You can be a millionaire and still worry about money.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “but it does make things a lot easier.”

  “That’s true,” he acknowledged. “It’s better to worry about having too much than not enough.”

  “My father would agree with that,” she said.

  “Then he understood how important it is to work.”

  “He worked too much. Week after week he’d work in the jungle. He’d get so dark from the sun, it was like all the blood just ran up to his pores and stayed there. And for what? The basics. Food and our house and that was it. Not that the house was much. Wooden slabs and a metal roof. If we needed a door, we hung a blanket. That kind of house.”

  Suddenly, she was back there, her feet bringing up the afternoon dust as she walked on its floor, the wood panels that made up the walls long and uneven. The sun poked through newly punched holes, eyes made from the gunshots she heard in the middle of the night, when her mother would hold her so tight, Ana thought she might disappear into her.

  “I’m sure he did what he thought was best,” he said. “That’s what we all try to do.”

  “Yes, he thought he needed to be out there making money. Like all men. I used to hate seeing him leave. It was worse for my mother. I was a kid, you know. Something else she had to feed and protect. She didn’t always have the patience for it.” She instinctively rubbed a scar on her thigh. She could still feel the stick coming at her, how she tried to swat it away with her delicate fingers, only for it to strike her wrist as well as her leg.

  “It couldn’t have been easy for her,” said Rubén, “may she rest in peace. Alone with a daughter.”

  “It wasn’t,” she said. “She did what she could. It got worse when the kids started coming around. I say kids because they looked young to me. Teenagers. That’s what tipped her off. They’d come around asking if we were ready for a revolution. Then my father disappeared. Then my uncle. She knew they weren’t coming back.”

  That realization didn’t hit Ana until later; even now, a part of her didn’t quite accept that her father was not going to emerge one day from that jungle. She never could bring herself to mourn him.

  “Then she died,” she continued, “and Tía Ofelia came to get me.” Her mother’s death was a fact. She’d seen the body; she’d buried it. There was nothing more she could say about it, except that she promised herself to never squander the opportunity it gave her to start over. “I got to leave all that, and you know, I thought I could make
it all disappear in Lima.”

  “No, Anita,” he said, shaking his head. “That never happens. It’s one of the biggest lies you could ever tell yourself. The idea that you can go somewhere and make something disappear. You can’t. The ghosts will always follow you.”

  “But at least you’ve been able to make yourself into something here,” she said. “I couldn’t in Lima and I never would. My mother-in-law made that very clear.”

  Rubén chuckled. “I’m sure she did. If there’s one thing Filomena loves, its making sure people know their place in the world.”

  “She loves a good last name too,” she joked. “And money. You don’t have a good last name either, Rubén, but at least you had the money. I have nothing! I remember when I told her that I didn’t get my father’s last name until I was in grammar school. I was always my mother’s daughter. I was Ríos. You should’ve seen the look on Filomena’s face.” She shushed Rubén as his body shook with laughter. “It’s funny now, but I didn’t think it was so funny then.”

  There had been nothing humorous at all about Doña Filomena Falcón. When Ana first met her, it was for lunch at her gated house on Avenida Las Almendras. The floors were made of polished wood. The light from a chandelier drenched the living room in meringue, and on the edge of a velvet couch sat Doña Filomena. Her face showed the Galician blood that Carlos claimed she was so proud of, with her skin as translucent as powder and her hair as black as the charcoal tablets Ana burned on her altar. A widow’s peak peered from her forehead like a third eye. She was older than Ana expected. Her skin hung around her mouth and eyes; her nose arched like a beak. Yet her cheeks were curved and soft like a bird’s chest. Her eyelashes stood tall and black above vivid disks of sand. Her hair curled into her head like tiny fists. A whisper of pink lipstick touched her wound mouth.

  For a long time, she observed her guest, speaking only to her son. When she finally addressed Ana, it was to ask if she aspired to do anything else besides greeting visitors from behind a desk.

  Carlos laughed uncomfortably.

  Yes, Ana had muttered, though she dared not tell Doña Filomena or even Carlos about her dream of owning a restaurant, afraid they’d find it silly. Instead, she explained that she was going to school at night to study computers.

  Doña Filomena did not know what that meant, and so she asked Ana about her father and mother. What did they do? Who is the aunt she’s living with?

  My father’s aunt, she replied, as a young, heavy-set teenager served them tea and cookies. That Ana had too much color, too much accent, and was too obvious of a social climber became evident when she saw that muchacha, a girl Doña Filomena said was from a small town only a few miles south of Santa Clara. Her skin was lighter than Ana’s, the result of both a sporadic limeño sun and long days spent inside Doña Filomena’s house. Ana could hear the singsong tail end of her words, an accent which took effort for Ana herself to mask. She diverted her eyes as soon as she saw the girl. But Doña Filomena wondered aloud if they might be cousins, since they grew up so close to each other and were almost as dark as her floors. She said this with a chuckle, and Ana scalded her tongue with her tea to avoid a retort.

  A year after Carlos brought her home, Lucho told his mother Ana was expecting his child, and that he was going to marry her. Doña Filomena slapped him; she would never accept that garbage. She was una cualquiera, a nobody who slept through her sons and would’ve slept with her husband too, if he’d been alive, and when Ana heard this from the kitchen, she ran from the house, unable to hear the rest.

  “Now there’s someone who will never accept me,” she said. “To Doña Filo, I’m just a poor cholita who somehow managed to get a job as a receptionist. That’s as far as I was going to get in life, unless I found an idiot to marry me. I couldn’t snag one son so I got pregnant just to make sure the other one couldn’t get away.”

  “That’s not how it is,” said Rubén. “I see the way you look at Lucho.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Well, that’s not what she saw. It’s not what your wife sees. They all see what they want to see. Once they make up their minds, there’s no changing it.”

  “Exactly,” he said, shifting in his seat and leaning on the table. “And that’s why I think it’s time Michael met his sister.”

  “Ah,” she said. “You’re back on that again. No wonder you can’t sleep.”

  “It’s like you say, Anita. It won’t make a difference to Valeria. She’s going to think the worst no matter what. But it’d change everything for Michael and Nora.”

  “Nora?” she repeated. “That’s good. Naming the girl after your mother.” She imagined Valeria batting away tears, her lashes clumping like burned oil, at the sound of his mother’s name on another woman’s child. “Honestly, Rubén, I don’t know how you’re still walking.”

  “Trust me, if Valeria ever did anything to me, you’d never find out,” he snickered. “She can lose control sometimes. She just doesn’t ever let anyone see it. Anyone but me, that is.”

  She let out a defeated breath. “To be honest, I doubt she’ll ever leave you. She hasn’t so far, and like you said, she’s proud.”

  He sucked his teeth and mumbled something beneath his breath. She had little sympathy for the man. The affair, the lies, the disconnect between the children—he caused it all. And even though he was hurting so many, he still managed to sit there, in his large kitchen inside his own home, a man with money, an attractive wife, and a healthy child, and lament the circumstances of his life. Were she not living under his roof, Ana would’ve told him how he had no right to feel sorry for himself. How she hoped that his wife might one day get the nerve to leave him and take his precious auto body shop with her; that his children might never love him enough to mourn his absence; that his lover wouldn’t waste her years waiting for a divorce he most certainly promised but would never go through.

  Suddenly, there was what seemed like an apparition at the door frame. Valeria, in a pink pajama set, her face glistening from a coat of night cream, her hair tied in a loose bun at the crown of her head. “¿Qué hacen despiertos?” she asked.

  Rubén’s face reddened and he hurried off his seat. “I couldn’t sleep,” he explained. “Ana here was kind enough to offer me some tea.”

  Ana stood and picked up his cup from the table, then remembered to ask, “Do you want some? There’s still water—”

  “No, thank you,” replied Valeria curtly.

  “Thank you for the tea, Ana,” he said, then gestured for his wife to go ahead of him. He followed her silently back to their bedroom. No doubt, Valeria didn’t like what she interrupted. Ana knew to keep her distance in the days to come.

  She was grateful, however, for the interruption. There were enough revelations for one night. It was clear to her that Rubén only stayed with Valeria out of obligation. He didn’t love her. He had no remorse for what he’d done, and he wasn’t going to stop seeing the other woman either, no matter how much it hurt those who loved him. He didn’t even see how he’d wronged Valeria or his children. Was he blind? Ana wondered.

  Was she?

  No, she was not like him. She and Lucho were on the verge of getting back on their feet. They had lost their way, but things were taking a turn for the better. He had a job; she had hers. Soon, they’d see the apartment Carla had recommended. He looked at her now the way he once did, and even touched her the way he used to. Kissing her neck behind closed doors, venturing to touch her in front of others. She loved him. What she did, she did for them, not out of lust or greed or opportunity, but out of necessity. None of what they had now—Lucho’s job, their children’s school tuition, the money for a new apartment—none of it was possible if she wasn’t willing to adapt, to understand that sacrifice and silence were necessary for their survival.

  Her stomach moaned. The water in her cup had cooled. She turned the stove back on, reheating the water that remained in the kettle, and once again opened her address book. She wondered if it was the
cod she had for dinner that now unsettled her stomach.

  Fish. There were fish in her dream. Piranhas. That was the wall.

  She looked at the list again and jotted down “dientes.” They had teeth, pointed triangles that gleamed against the moon’s reflection. In her dream, the monkeys and the dolphins chased her toward that wall of piranhas. She kicked and whacked them away as they bit, yet they managed to draw blood.

  It was the blood that made her spine straighten. She flipped through several pages of her address book, back to the letter D. At the top of the second page, she had scribbled “21/10.” October 21. She’d drawn a circle around the date. She then flipped a few pages forward, scanning the top corners for any other circled dates, but there were none.

  Did she forget to write down December? she wondered. Had she missed any other dates?

  She flipped back to C and B and A, and found 13/9, 1/8, 28/6, each encircled. She had written down the first date for every single cycle before October 21, but none after.

  She set down the pen. She jogged her memory for clues. When was the last time she used a maxi pad, took a painkiller, placed a warm compress on her abdomen? Was it in November, before Valeria left for Peru? She had been careful, letting Lucho know when it wasn’t safe to have sex. Even when she ran out of her pills, she’d been careful.

  The kettle rattled, and this time, she turned the knob with such force that it came off the stove. She looked at the date again. October 21. Circled so clearly. Her body had bled then. She’d bled in her dream too.

  Sangre. She could see the word, taste it, but she couldn’t write it down.

  8

  THREE MONTHS AFTER THEY LEFT THEIR LAST BROOKLYN APARTMENT, Ana and Lucho drove Rubén’s station wagon to the southern edge of their old vecindario to see what could be their new home. The building was in a rougher part of the neighborhood, closer to the warehouses and low-lying, boarded-up buildings that lined the outskirts. As they got closer to the address on the torn paper towel Carla had given her, Ana took note of the stores along the main strip: a Salvation Army, a laundromat, a liquor store, a Chinese takeout spot. Sneakers dangled along electric pole wires above them, a contrast to the lights that hung outside Lexar Tower. She counted the corners with crates outside of bodegas—three—and remarked on the number of men standing next to the doors, their faces obscured by dark hoods and their bodies wrapped in heavy coats. “It’s winter,” Lucho pointed out.