The Living Infinite, page 17
“I will always love Papá, and honor his memory. What’s past is past,” Tomás said, and his mother burst into fresh tears, and she cleaned her cheeks with the inside of her housedress.
Now Tomás feared leaving his mother behind. How lonely her life had been. How solitary in its grief. He was moved again to ask her to join him on the trip to Cuba and Chicago. Amalia went to bed without answering him, and Tomás stayed up late in the night thinking it over. He would sell the horses for her passage. Take some money he had been saving to replace the bookshop’s back door, which had warped and splintered last winter.
In the morning, Amalia woke her son with an answer in the form of a question. “But what will I say to Gisela if we find her?” she asked.
Tomás had no answer, and Amalia thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said, in response to herself. “I have so much to say. You don’t understand what women can mean to one another. I haven’t spoken to another woman since Gisela left.”
“You talk to women all the time,” Tomás said, rubbing sleep from his eyes, thinking of the neighbor, who had come over during Amalia’s story to apologize because her dog had trampled the geraniums again.
“No conversations of the heart, I mean. I haven’t had a soul to talk to in twenty years,” Amalia said. Tomás found he had no ready response. What can she possibly have to say to Gisela that she cannot say to me? he wondered.
Later that night, back at his apartment, his mind returned to his mother’s assertion that women talked to one another in a way that men did not understand. He considered Eulalia, baring her soul, page by page. Who was her story for exactly? Perhaps there was something in the book that had spoken to Eliza Jane in a way that was not possible for Pedro, or for Tomás. Perhaps Eulalia’s book was, after all, a conversation of the heart.
It bothered Tomás to think so, to imagine that Eulalia had not meant to speak to him through her book, that he was merely the vessel through which the book would enter the world.
6
Tomás and Amalia left Burgos on a cool, damp morning. It was a three-hour train ride from Burgos to Santander, where their ship, the Triunfo, was docked.
On the train, they shared their compartment with a quiet family. It was tight, and Tomás’s knees were up near his chest. The family introduced themselves to Tomás, then gestured at his mother, who had fallen asleep soundly.
“Your mother?” the wife asked. “Que Dios la bendiga,” she said, and Tomás wondered if there was something about his mother’s sleep that suggested she needed a blessing, or if it was just something the woman liked to say. The husband wore a long beard, quite unfashionably, and he was silent as death after their initial introduction, latching his gaze onto the floorboards and keeping it there. But the daughter, who was not much older than thirteen, gave Tomás a tight smile, sat down with so much force that her skirt ballooned a bit around her, and produced a notebook out of her skirt pocket. This she opened to reveal clean, white pages. Tomás could smell the newness of the pages and thought with a pang of his bookshop.
After rattling her pencils about, the girl proceeded to sketch a portrait of Tomás, without his permission. He felt unsettled as he watched his face slowly appearing on her paper—his hair parted far to the right, curls appearing at his temples. She captured his eyes, which were set deep in his face, satisfactorily. She managed to see that his irises did not quite fit the wells of his eyes, and that a sliver of white was always visible beneath them. It was a feature that Juana had loved. She had called them her “hypnotist eyes,” and he would playfully cross his eyes at her whenever she said it. The girl set his ears just right, his strong, angular jaw, and even dotted in his stubble. She looked up once or twice to study him, and Tomás winked at her, which made her blush.
When she was done, she flipped her notebook over to show Tomás.
“Your daughter is very talented, sir,” Tomás said to the husband before really looking at him. Like Amalia, he had dozed off, his jumble of a beard serving as a kind of cushion for his chin to rest on. Tomás looked to the wife, but she said nothing. Instead, she reached over and slowly closed her daughter’s notebook, then patted her knee. But the girl had slipped her thumb between the pages, stopping her mother. Carefully, as if she were handling a delicate thing, she tore the page out of her book and handed it to Tomás. The paper quivered in the air between them for a moment.
“Sign it, please,” Tomás said, and the girl quickly took the page back and put her initials in the right-hand corner. Then the girl tucked her pencil into a pocket in her coat and stared out the window for the remainder of the trip. Later, Tomás placed the page inside Eulalia’s manuscript, so as not to crease it.
They arrived at the docks in Santander on a gloomy April afternoon. The Triunfo seemed to hover over the water, as long and white as a cloud. Behind it, the María Cristina, another ship, was being loaded for an upcoming voyage. Onboard of the latter, Tomás knew, was the infanta. Her trip to the Caribbean and the United States had been in all the newspapers, and now, crowds had surged upon the docks in the hopes of seeing her go. The ships’ tall masts and their dangling ropes resembled giant knitting needles from afar, tangled up in yarn. Horse-drawn carriages toted passengers and their luggage. The horses snorted and pounded their hooves, and one nearly trampled Tomás, who was not paying attention. Off in the distance, the hills of Santander rose in gray mist. The lamps within the ship were already lit, and they glowed brightly enough to be seen through a few portholes.
Amalia struck up a conversation with an elderly man, who was helping her with her bag.
“We’ll be stopping in Cuba, which is where I plan to stay. My family is there. Are you both going on to America?” he asked.
Tomás nodded.
“Well, Cuba should be interesting,” he said to Amalia. As their tickets were punched, he added, “Perhaps we’ll get to witness a war.”
“I should hope not,” Amalia said.
Onboard, they watched Santander disappear on the horizon as the ship pulled away. As darkness fell, lanterns brightened the windows of the homes set on the hills, and the light trembled on the water. “Que lindo,” Amalia said again and again, and Tomás wondered what it was she saw in those delicate lights that struck her so. Hadn’t she lived in a palace? Hadn’t her eyes rested upon strings of diamonds lacing a queen’s chest? Tomás thought that if he had seen such things, there would be no light impressive enough to make him sigh in such a way.
Later, the sea roiled as if it has been unchained from some giant anchor, and Tomás and his mother spent an unpleasant night inside their cabin, wide-awake, and talking in whispers about the state of their nausea.
Most days, Tomás and Amalia rose before dawn to sit on the deck and watch the sun come up. In those quiet moments, she told him about life in the Palacio, the details she had left out before. She traced the patterns of Sor Patrocinio’s injuries on the palms of his hands. She described Isabel’s lovers, and, specifically, a man named Tenorio, who climbed the spiral staircase into the queen’s quarters at night.
“They all seem so sad,” Tomás said.
“The Bourbons? Yes. Some say they are cursed,” Amalia added.
“Eulalia once mentioned that you were unhappy, too. With Papá, I mean.” Tomás spoke quietly, softly. The dark of their cabin and the rocking of the ship put him in mind of his childhood, when his mother held him at night. Boyish secrets would tumble out of his mouth, and she would listen, commenting only so often.
“Some days were very hard. Very sad. This is true,” Amalia said. She reached out to hold her son’s hand. “We sacrificed so much to secure your future. Even our happiness. I know you understand, hijo,” she said.
Tomás did understand. Some days, he would think of Juana and find he could not breathe or think, and he knew in those moments that he would spare every ounce of happiness in his life to see her again.
They began to see lines on the horizon after the sixth day at sea. Amalia befriended the old man who first spoke with them as they boarded. His name was Grimaldo, and his family awaited him in Cuba. It was Grimaldo who pointed out the islands as they passed them by. “The Virgin Islands, and there, that bright spot is San Juan, Puerto Rico. Soon we will see my Cuba,” Grimaldo said, a hand over his heart.
Amalia looked up at her new friend and blinked slowly in his direction.
In another life, Tomás could imagine them together, how this Grimaldo might have been his father instead. So many “might haves.” Tomás felt unchained, like the sea, and spoke without thinking, “Your Cuba? You are a Spaniard, señor. These days, it’s best not to forget that.”
“My daughters are in Cuba,” Grimaldo said. “They are all I have left. Where they are, my home is. My Cuba then. You can keep your Spain.” Grimaldo left them by the railing without saying goodbye, and Amalia scowled at her son. “Look what you’ve done,” she said. But she wasn’t really angry. The open air had been good for her. She had grown used to the rocking waves, and now she couldn’t stop talking about Cuba, about the warm air, how it felt in her lungs, and the dolphins she kept spying off the side of the boat.
When Cuba finally appeared on the horizon, it stretched lazily on and on. It felt like summer, though it was still April. In fact, it felt as if someone had bottled the summer up, allowed it to grow and expand in a confined space, and had just released it. Before they even set foot on the island, Tomás had already had four glasses of water that turned warm before he could take a proper drink.
They tried to find lodging at several inns close to the harbor. Each time, they were turned away, and walked deeper into the city. Tomás carried his mother’s bag and his own, and they seemed to get heavier with each block. The city reminded Tomás of Sevilla, which he had visited once. The buildings were stacked close together, as if a child had imagined the entire place and created it with toy blocks. On balconies and roofs, people lounged about, fanning themselves with pieces of paper, or painted silk fans. Every once in a while they turned down a cobbled street and caught a glimpse of a long, low fortress, the walls of which seemed to circle the city and keep the sea out. Waves crashed against the sea wall every so often, sending glittering sprays down on the people walking along the path beside it. “Que lindo,” was all Amalia would say, even as she stepped over a cat that had seemingly been dead for a few days, never missing a step, her eyes gazing up at the balconies and around buildings.
When they finally found an inn with a vacancy, Tomás booked two rooms for them. “So expensive,” Amalia said, but he waved her off. The money he’d taken out of the bookshop’s bank account, paired with Eliza Jane’s sponsorship, was sufficient, and there would be money enough when Eulalia’s book sold.
“We’ve had a horrible time finding a room,” Tomás told the innkeeper.
He shrugged. His Spanish was different than Tomás’s. His vowels more open, the endings of his words trimmed off like so much fat. He stuttered a little, too. “The city is f-full. A Spanish infanta is coming to Havana. I f-forget her name,” he said.
Amalia began to say something, “Yes, we know. In fact—” But Tomás cut her off. It was best, he thought, not to let on to a stranger that they knew the princess. What if he assumed too much, that, perhaps, their pockets were deeper than they actually were because of the association?
“Do you know when she will arrive?” Tomás asked. He didn’t know. They had lost sight of the María Cristina right away, and according to the newspapers, Eulalia’s itinerary had her stopping in Puerto Rico first.
“Tomorrow,” the innkeeper said. “The whole city has been cleaned up for her visit. To be honest, it used to smell so bad down this street. And now? F-fresh as roses. I wish more of these princesses would come to Cuba.” He handed Tomás the keys to their rooms.
“Mamá,” Tomás called, and found her standing before a picture on the wall.
“Tomás,” she said, breathless. “Look.”
The painting was of three little girls, each with a diadem on her head. They were dark-eyed things, standing in size order. The smallest, on the left, held the end of a diamond leash, and at the end of the leash was a blazing white peacock, a circlet of gems around its neck.
“It’s them, my girls,” Amalia said.
“Mamá, the infantas are not brunettes. They are blond and blue-eyed,” Tomás said, and started to pull her away.
“No, no, it is them. I’ve missed seeing them this way, when they were little, so—” Amalia’s hands fluttered towards the painting.
“Don’t touch it!” a shrill young woman shouted from behind the tall desk. She was a squat girl with a piggish, upturned nose.
Surprised, Amalia gripped her son’s wrist. “Ay,” she cried.
“Let’s go to our rooms,” Tomás urged, and she let him lead the way. “This is a strange country,” he muttered as they climbed the stairs, but Amalia only said, “Que lindo,” again, like a guitar with only one string.
7
Tomás could not sleep from the heat. He drank glass after glass of water, which sent him to the bathroom downstairs again and again. Sometimes, there was a line for its use, and he waited for nearly twenty minutes at one point for a woman and her daughter to emerge from the toilet. Her eyes were red from crying, and the girl held her mother’s hand tightly. He slapped mosquitos away from his arms and tried not to itch. Such were the disturbances at a Cuban inn in the middle of the night.
In the morning, Tomás and his mother met for breakfast, and it looked as though she hadn’t slept either. Even her hair, usually wound into a small bun at the nape of her neck, was beyond her control, and ringlets had sprung up around her face, giving her a girlish look.
“It’s too hot,” she said, fanning herself. Overnight, streamers had been placed inside the hotel, hung from roof beam to roof beam in happy loops.
The shrill girl from behind the desk the night before was rigging up the last of them, and as she did, she hummed the “Marcha Real,” missing some notes here and there.
“How is that for a welcome?” Tomás asked his mother, who didn’t seem to recognize the Spanish anthem in the girl’s off-tune trilling.
Feeling better with some toast in his belly, Tomás teased the girl, “Te agradezco la música,” exaggerating the “z” for effect.
“It’s not for you,” she said at once. “Neither are these,” she said, gesturing to the decorations. “But should the infanta find her way here, she will know we support her in Havana. It’s the Orientales, out there in Santiago and those backwoods, who are fighting our king.” The girl shoved the last tack into the wall, stood back, admired her work, and disappeared into another room. The streamers were not red and gold, however. Nor were they red, blue, or white. Neither Spain nor Cuba was represented in them. Rather, the streamers were green and orange, and the ends were frayed from multiple uses.
“Eulalia arrives today,” Tomás said to his mother, who was still spreading butter on her toast. It occured to Tomás that she seemed smaller than before somehow. Older, too. Suddenly, he regretted bringing her with him.
He spoke cautiously. “Mamá, we don’t have to look for Gisela. We can go see the princess arrive. Enjoy the sights some. Go on as we have been.” Even as he said these things, he knew the ways she would refute him. He considered how he might escape one night and try to find Gisela on his own, though he didn’t know what he would say to her.
“We should see the infanta arrive, of course,” Amalia said, then sipped her coffee. Sweat pooled under her eyes and on her temples.
“Mamá,” Tomás began, unsure. “You . . . you shouldn’t get your hopes up about finding Gisela. Even if we do, she may not want to see you again. I don’t know what you intend to say to her, but she might call the police if—”
“I’m not going to attack her, if that’s what you think,” Amalia said. Irritation seemed to rise in her, gaslike. She was a hot air balloon. “Besides. How many photography studios could there be here?”
“In all of Cuba?” Tomás asked. “It’s a big island, Mamá,” he said gently.
“I mean only to talk. To see my old friend again.” Amalia laced her fingers tightly. “I miss your father so much, Tomás. You can’t understand how much. And I haven’t had anyone to talk to for so long about him.”
“You have me,” he said.
“A son does not remember his father the way a wife recalls her husband.”
Tomás crossed one leg over the other and looked away. Behind the front desk, the innkeeper was talking to a guest dressed in a military uniform. The little sabers on his epaulets clinked as he spoke.
“Gisela and I remember Rubén in a way you cannot, I’m sure of it.” Amalia opened her mouth to say more, but stopped herself. “Forget this. I have business with Gisela, that is all. You understand that? Business? It’s a man’s word. Business. That’s what she and I have to talk about now.”
Up until that moment, Amalia’s face had been pale, but now it was florid and her cheeks quivered.
“Fine,” Tomás said offended. “Leave it. Today is for greeting Eulalia, fresh from the sea. We will wave our handkerchiefs at her and she will recognize you in the crowd, her blessed nodriza, and she will greet me like a brother.
Amalia looked at her son hard for a second, then softened. “Don’t get your hopes up, hijo,” she said before rising from the table and returning to her room.
