Between her sorting, packing, tossing and the constant cleaning and cooking, the Sosas became almost invisible. Whenever she saw Valeria in the apartment, they spoke only to exchange gruff greetings. In the evenings, they each disappeared almost completely into their respective bedrooms. Occasionally, Ana heard Valeria pass in the hallway as she headed to the kitchen or to check on Michael.
Rubén was just as evasive. She greeted him in the mornings, before she took off to work and he with the children, but otherwise said nothing more to him. There was no small talk, no jokes like there once had been. He often returned home just as she was getting the children ready for bed. Her talk with Valeria was enough to justify her distance, and she assumed it was enough to justify his. Better this way, she thought.
Despite Betty’s help, Ana’s only regret in all this was that she had asked her for it in the first place. There was always the possibility that, after a few too many drinks or even if she was drunk on love or guilt, Betty might say something. Ana wondered if she herself might one day talk about it. Not now, but in five, ten, twenty years. Would she always wonder what would’ve happened if she’d flushed the pills down the toilet; if there had been another way? Would it even matter?
But no one made it more difficult for her to close this chapter than Lucho. Her sleep was still restless, and she’d wake in the middle of the night to seek comfort in her chamomile tea and her address book. She never did write the word blood on her list. Eventually, she’d go back to bed, just as Lucho came through the front door. She’d always turn her back to him, shut her eyes, and pretend to sleep.
Then one night, he opened the door, and caught her as she turned.
“¿Estás despierta?” he asked.
Without turning around, she said, “You make a lot of noise.” She moved closer to Pedro, his breathing thick and gluey. The pillow beneath his head was soaked in sweat. She blew air onto his face, then flipped him over as his breath galloped. She settled her head back down on her pillow, hoping Lucho might let her slip into sleep.
Instead, he whispered, “I’m going to eat. Will you join me?” He didn’t wait for her answer. The door creaked as he closed it behind him. She lingered in bed, her son’s breathing quiet now, the orange light from a lamppost seeping between the blinds. She wondered what it might be like to leave it all behind. If she went for a walk now, down those empty streets, could she disappear? Would anyone notice? Would he?
She walked into the kitchen, the cold of the hardwood floors brushing against the soles of her slippers. At first, she thought the children or the Sosas were turning down the heat in the unit; it never seemed to be cool enough for any of the men, young or grown. But it was the cooler nights that managed to leech into the wood. She held her maroon sweater closer, and squinted, her eyes adjusting to the light as she sat beside her husband at the table.
The microwave purred. “¿Tienes hambre?” he asked, as if it were the middle of the afternoon instead of nearly dawn. His yellow button-down shirt, its creases still visible along the length of the sleeves, hung on a chair. His tank top, faded with mostly minuscule holes, made her feel that much colder.
She yawned.
“Were you really trying to sleep?” he asked, and his choice of words made her curious. She really did wish she could shut her eyes, escape, even if it was to that dream and the hunger of its forest. But like all things, that was only the partial truth. Did he know that she’d been lying all along?
He didn’t wait for a reply. “I wanted to talk about the furniture,” he said, popping the microwave door open. He adjusted his grip on the steaming bowl of sopa de sémola she’d prepared and set aside for him the night before.
“We’ve got the beds,” she said, “the dresser and the TV. We need a table and couch.”
“We can get folding chairs for now,” he said. He unbuckled his pants, blew on a spoonful of soup. “But yes, we’ll need a table and a couch. Did you talk to George about working more hours?”
“I did,” she said. “He’s got a new girl now. This Nicaraguan. He said he’d let me know.” More hours, she thought. He wanted her to work more hours. As if that soup he was slurping had appeared magically. As if it hadn’t taken her hours to make with two children pawing at her side. She’d already spent hours hunched over the sewing machine, her fingers stiffening, her lower back flaring up, just to buy the meat between his teeth. There were only so many hours in a day, so many pieces of fabric that her eyes and hands were capable of sewing together. “Did you talk to Gil?” she asked.
He blew into the hot soup. “He said no.”
The spoon clanked against the bowl. Once, at a dinner they had at his mother’s, when Ana was already well into the last months of her pregnancy with Victoria, Doña Filomena served her that very same soup. It was thick, creamy, too heavy for her taste, but one that Doña Filomena prepared in the cooler months because her sons, she claimed, liked it from the moment they were in her womb. Ana prepared it every winter they’d been in New York, even though she’d feared that it might make him homesick. He never did thank her for making it.
“January’s been slow,” he went on. “Everyone was going here and there for the holidays. Now winter’s turned everyone into hermits.”
“I’ve noticed,” she said, although she wondered how much of the slowdown was the weather and how much was of his own doing. She recalled one particular early morning conversation, when she was still between sleep and wakefulness. He told her how he sometimes got bored in the car. When he did, he’d park by a bodega near the base, go inside to chat with the cashier and whoever else happened to be gathered beneath the overhead television, and talk about baseball or pretend to follow Mexican soccer, things he had no interest in, just to pass the time as he waited for his next ride. She wondered how many calls he had missed during his bodega breaks. But she was not inclined to argue with him, out of both exhaustion and relief that he was finally working. He was making some money, so there wasn’t a need to say anything at all.
“I did speak to Valeria,” he said. “She can watch the kids if you end up doing overtime.”
He had picked up on the tension between them, and when he asked Ana if something had happened, she said it was just Valeria being Valeria. He didn’t press her; he was never one to entertain confrontations, much less ones with his family. Besides, Valeria, it seemed, could do no wrong in Lucho’s eyes. If he expected Ana to be the workhorse, then the least he could do was ask his cousin for the favors.
“I’ll talk to George again,” she said. “Is that it? Did you just get me out of bed to tell me to work more?”
“That’s not why. We’re moving, Ana.”
“This isn’t about the move,” she replied. “It’s about money. I know we need it. You don’t have to pull me out of bed to remind me.”
“We need more than we make,” he said. He let out a long exhale, turning a bright red. He put his face into his palms as he tried to compose himself. “Everything costs money here. Money costs money. No matter how much we work, every penny we make goes right out to someone or something else. La luz, el gas, el teléfono. Mamá—”
“And your mother,” she mumbled.
“I don’t complain when you send money to your aunt,” he countered. “And she’s got her own children who can take care of her.”
“So does yours,” she said. “You’re not her only child. Your mother’s got Carlos too. That money you send her should stay here, with us.”
“Are you telling me I can’t even send my own mother money? Money that I break my—”
“No,” she interrupted. “It’s money that I break my back making. These last few months? That money’s come from me.”
She couldn’t silence the pounding in her chest. He never stopped sending his mother her mensualidad, even though he’d lost his job, even though they no longer had a place of their own. He sent her the same amount of money every month, no matter how much Ana scrambled to pay the bills. She never asked him to stop
. This was, after all, his mother, and in one way or another, that money was tied to her house, the house Ana had given as collateral. A house that didn’t really belong to her or to Lucho. Though she’d never admit it, Ana hoped that the money might, in some way, atone for the rift she’d caused among the Falcóns.
He pushed his bowl away, slouching into the chair. He rubbed the back of his neck with his left hand and laid the fingers of his right one on the edge of the table. A band of skin lighter than the rest of his hand encircled his ring finger. He’d worn a wedding ring when they were in Peru, on his right hand, as was the custom. It was a slim gold band that eventually grew tight. He stopped wearing it in New York altogether, afraid he might lose it between taking it off for the meat-packing plant and home, or that someone might actually steal it. He told her to take hers off for the same reasons. The rings were one of the first things they pawned when he lost his job.
She put her hand on the table. “I miss how things used to be,” she whispered. “Not Peru. I don’t miss it at all. But between us.”
She wondered if that’s what was missing. If Peru might somehow bring back what seemed lost between them. The possibility of returning was never as ominous to him as it was to her. No ghosts clung to him; no mother’s death, no father’s disappearance. There were too many things she could not unsee. Unlike her, he had things to return to. People paid attention to him there. Every preconceived notion was in his favor, even how it was that their marriage came to be. It was always her seduction, a trick on her part. But Peru was also where their relationship had begun, and the luster of New York hadn’t rubbed off on their marriage.
“Things will never be like that again,” he said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because a lot has changed. We’ve changed. We have kids now. They’re like roots. They plant you down and force you to grow up. It’s funny how much you take for granted when you only have to worry about yourself.”
“When you could do anything and everything seems possible?” she said. “You wanted to write, remember? All those poems you had scribbled in your notebook.”
He smiled. “I started re-reading that notebook. The one you gave me.” She feigned surprise. “I go back and read it sometimes. I had some good memories from back then.” He smiled. “I remember when I asked you what you wanted to be. You didn’t say teacher or nurse or anything else I expected. You wanted to open a cebichería.”
“I’d still like to,” she said.
He laughed. “Ana, you make one kind of cebiche.”
“But that’s all you need,” she said. “If we were in Peru, I’d open it in Miraflores. Serve all those rich Japanese and American businessmen.”
“Even Fujimori?”
She shrugged. “A customer is a customer.” She chuckled at how ludicrous it seemed now, to have that kind of goal in Lima with nothing and no one—no background, no apprenticeship, no money—for it to even be a possibility. “I had some money set aside for it,” she confessed. “I’d take a little out of my paycheck every week. Not much, but just enough so that I felt like maybe it might happen one day.”
He grinned. “I remember you wanted to call it ‘Ají.’”
“‘¡Ají!’ Because a good cebiche has to be spicy.”
“Except you want everything to be spicy.” He grinned. “I still don’t know how you haven’t burned a hole through your stomach.”
“Remember when we had dinner once in El Centro? I poured all that ají over my Lomo Saltado, and you said—”
“‘Just go ahead and drink the thing.’” He let out a soft laugh. “I thought you were going to get sick. I knew I was. That smell! There had to be at least three or four different types of peppers in that thing.”
“It wasn’t that spicy.”
“It’d be too spicy for Americans, that’s for sure,” he said. “They can’t take that much heat. And the name wouldn’t work either. They pronounce their ‘j’s like our ‘ll’s.”
“That’s why I’d have a restaurant and not a cebichería,” she said. “We’ll call it ‘La Inmaculada.’ I’d serve only the purest and finest ingredients. As immaculate as the Savior’s mother.” He chuckled and she continued, “Although we could just put phonetics beneath ‘Ají’ so the gringos get it right. I’m sure we can get Valeria to help us with that.”
“I’m sure she would,” he said in all seriousness, although she’d meant it as a joke.
“That’s when I first told you about my restaurant dreams,” she said. “I never even told Carlos that.”
“It’s when I told you about my poems,” he said. “Then my birthday came around and there was that notebook.”
She smiled. “I remember you didn’t want to have dinner in the first place. You thought someone might see us. Like we were doing something wrong. But as soon as we sat down, it didn’t matter. It was . . . liberating.”
“Liberating?” he repeated. “We weren’t really free to do anything, Ana. We didn’t even know what we were doing.”
“I knew what I was doing,” she said, putting her hand over his. “I knew I was with you. I knew I loved you.”
“That cost us something, didn’t it?”
She looked up. His eyes were crestfallen, dimmed by the years. She found those brown eyes alive once, vivacious. They’d melt at the sound of an accordion on the radio, or a string of carefully chosen words in a song or poem, and even, what seemed like a lifetime ago, her own laugh. He was so unlike his brother, who chose his words carefully, who planned and considered the consequences of his actions. Lucho seemed always on the verge of leaping, as if he was prepared to live for the pursuit of a goal instead of the goal itself. Yet convincing him to leave Peru proved to be more difficult than she expected. He had resisted the idea, even though his brother, after those early years in Madrid, seemed content abroad and had no plans to return. But Lucho spoke passionately about La Patria and Apristas and against terrorism. His place was in Lima, ready for whatever change might come.
Pedro’s birth, however, changed his mind, and after the move to New York, the differences between his experience abroad and Carlos’s became more acute. Carlos didn’t have to run or hide, he’d say, or speak another language in a country that did not welcome him. He had only a wife to worry about. There was nothing, really, for Carlos to lose as he chased whatever dream he had. There was no need for him to concede to the circumstances of his life the way Lucho had to, reduced to a ghost in a foreign land.
He couldn’t get past this, and her insistence that they stay seemed only to embitter the life he now led.
“Why can’t you see what we have,” she asked him, “instead of what’s missing?”
“I do see,” he replied. “We made the choices we made, and we have responsibilities now. To ourselves, to the children. I just wonder sometimes . . .” His voice trailed off. Sometimes, he reminisced about the life he left behind. He’d talk about the Sunday afternoons he spent by the beach, eavesdropping on the ocean as it spoke to the rocks below, and the algarrobina ice cream he treated himself to on Sunday afternoons. Whenever he helped Victoria with her homework, he was reminded of the fatherless boy he helped go from mediocre scores of fifteens to a succession of perfect twenties on his math exams. Sometimes, he mentioned a former colleague or classmate, or this genius who just got a position at an American school in Monte Rico, or that imbecile who became principal. She listened, but always with a pang of worry that there was nothing in this life that gave him any joy. He talked about how difficult life was here, but rarely mentioned having any regret, which made her think that perhaps he regretted it all.
It was with trepidation, then, that she asked, “What do you wonder?”
“About our choices,” he said. “I just wish things could be different. I never expected our lives here to be easy, but we’ve spent the last few months living in someone else’s home. Who’s to say we won’t be here again? And the job? Do you think I like being someone’s chauffeur? Driving aro
und in the middle of the night just to pay for the basic things we need? I do it because I’m a father and a husband and that’s what I’m supposed to do. Pay the rent, pay the bills, give my kids a good education. Take care of you.”
“You don’t need to take care of me, Lucho.” Her chest tightened. She had no doubt that, if she needed to, she could do it alone. Here, she could hustle, work as many jobs as she needed to make ends meet, something she couldn’t do in Peru. Even with the children, there was more opportunity to earn a living in a decaying New York than there was in a fractious and lawless Lima. If he ever left her, or if she needed to leave him, she could make a go of it alone. She could make it here without him, even though the idea pained her. She wanted her husband, not someone to save her from the world. She already knew the world too well, better than he did, though she couldn’t tell him this.
“I can take care of myself,” she said. “I can take care of us.”
“I’ve no doubt you can,” he said. “You’re strong. But Victoria and Pedro? They need their father.” He didn’t speak of love, only of duty. Was that what kept them together now? she wondered. Was it just the children, or did he stay with her to save face, like Rubén? Would he stay no matter what she did?
The Affairs of the Falcóns Page 17