The Living Infinite, page 22
He opened a small white door, and what lay beyond made Tomás catch his breath. Arched windows covered an entire wall. The floor was composed of thousands of colorful tiles, gleaming in the sunlight. Bright white walls begged for art, but they were blank, save for a cross dangling over every doorway. A woman emerged from the kitchen, and with her came a wave of scents—garlic and onion and cumin. Then children came running toward Martín, pushing into wicker rocking chairs and banging into low glass tables.
“¡Papá!” they cried, and he gathered them to him and kissed their cheeks. In his indulgences, this was the life Tomás had imagined for himself, back when Juana was still alive—to be a man surrounded by children who loved him, to have a beautiful wife, to live in a place that was so full of sun that he would have to squint in order to see. The scene made his heart ache.
“My wife,” Martín said, and she was beside Tomás in an instant, offering her cheek for a kiss, then doing the same with Amalia. The woman gestured a good deal. Her dark hair, nearly black, was so thick that it had escaped the pins that held it back in places. She was very tall, taller than Martín. Her voice cut and carried, and Tomás imagined she was likely a good singer. This woman, named Teresa, was all superlatives, and she was enthralling.
“Martín told me about your surprise visit,” Teresa said. Tomás couldn’t tell from her expression if he’d told her more than that old friends of Gisela’s had arrived from Spain. She pointed to a rooftop courtyard. “Would you like to see it? We have the best views in Havana.”
They followed her out, and the children trailed behind them. A pair of blue jays hopped from one branch to another. Buildings rolled out like hills in the distance, brightly painted like jewelers’ boxes. Beyond that, the sea glimmered like a mirage in the heat.
But Teresa was pulling their gaze away from beauty in the distance, directing them to the garden she had grown. “Mango,” Teresa said, pointing to a potted tree. “In flower, too. You see them? This one here is avocado. She won’t flower until later this summer. Guava over there. Let’s see, that’s fruta bomba. Guanabana in the corner. Limes you recognize, yes? I have to give the trees away when they get too big. I wish we had a plot of land of our own,” Teresa said.
Tomás took in deep breaths of the sweet air. Teresa, sensing perhaps her own distant future, picked up the baby, who was fat and happy and dimpled all over. His hair was curly and his skin browner than that of his siblings, so that he looked as if he’d spent all of his short life in the blazing sun. Teresa placed him in Amalia’s arms and said, “Manolito, this is Señora Aragón.”
“Can you say ‘Ama,’” Amalia said to the baby, and touched his nose with her own. “He looks like Gisela, this one. Beautiful boy,” she cooed, bouncing and humming a tune Tomás did not know.
Martín, who had been watching in silence, grew serious at the mention of his mother, and turned back to the apartment. Tomás followed, and they left the women in the garden.
“It’s been hard here, my whole life. Very hard,” Martín said when they were inside.
What Tomás thought he meant was the arrangement of his life, thrust out of Spain by his own father.
“Our father was a good man,” Tomás began to say in Rubén’s defense, though why he was defending him was unclear to him. If Rubén had known that Martín lived, would he have sent him away like this? It seemed unbelievable that he would. Rubén, who had always loved Tomás with an affection that was nearly maternal in its tenderness, would choose one child over another? Tomás couldn’t make sense of it.
“Does it matter? Both my parents are dead, and death, being so final, is not concerned with a person’s goodness. Am I a good man? That’s more important to me. Besides, my life was not hard or easy because of my father. It was hard because this colony has been at war my entire life, and war is tiresome and sad, and because my mother was quiet and let her sorrow eat her up.”
What might they have been like together? Tomás wondered. Perhaps Martín would have been the philosopher, Tomás the dreamer, making lists, creating universes built on his brother’s philosophy. Together, they might have remade the world.
“We’ve interrupted your peace,” Tomás said. “I am sorry.”
“So you thought I was dead,” Martín said.
“I did. So did my mother.”
Martín’s eyes were reddening and growing wet. “And who spread that lie?”
“I don’t know,” he said. Tomás said nothing else, and only watched, horrified, as Martín sat hard on a wooden chair and moaned, his face hidden in his hands. It was a brief thunderstorm, and he quieted almost at once, and soon stared hard at the floor, his toe following the swirl of one of the tiles. “Do not pity me, cast away into the Caribbean, like some Caliban.”
“I thought you said you didn’t read,” Tomás said.
“I went to school. They have schools here.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“I don’t know what you want from me,” he said.
Who am I to bring him the dusk? thought Tomás.
“I came here for a job. I have a delivery to make, you see,” Tomás began, trying to explain himself. “And my mother always remembered Gisela, always loved her, and she hoped to see her again. Instead, we found you. And you have found a brother in me. I want you to know that. I’m a good man, Martín, and I think you are too, and we had nothing to do with this mess our parents made together.”
Outside, Martín’s children squealed and laughed, and Tomás could see them embedding themselves in Amalia’s heart like a spoor. He already guessed what his mother was thinking, that Martín was the vine that bore fruit, and such vines needed tending.
Amalia and Teresa came in from outside, red-cheeked and sweaty. Teresa went off to the kitchen and returned with cold water for everyone. She set a pitcher on the table, and four crystal glasses, and the four of them drank in silence.
“Mi hijo,” Amalia began after a gulp.
“Would you like to see where she is buried?” Martín asked, his voice gravelly.
Amalia nodded, and with a trembling hand, set down her glass.
They weren’t far from the cemetery, and Martín led Amalia and Tomás without speaking much. Teresa had stayed behind with the children, but first had clipped some orange blossoms. She wrapped the stems in a wet towel, and handed the bundle to Amalia. “Gisela was a kind mother-in-law. Do you know, she refused to be my midwife? Even though I begged. Wouldn’t see the babies until they were a week old. Such a mystery,” she said.
By the time they reached the cemetery, the orange blossoms were already wilting and draping over Amalia’s hands like tiny snakes. Once among the graves, they walked slowly past the rows of white tombs, each of them pensive and solemn. The statues of angels and weeping Marías seemed to reflect the sun like a photographer’s flashbulb. Here and there, children played among the graves, alighting atop the big ones and jumping off, their arms wide as if they might slip onto a stream of air and fly away.
At first, Martín missed Gisela’s grave and had to backtrack. It was modest compared to the others. There was no statue, no marble urn, only a simple headstone.
Gisela Castillo de Rusál, the headstone read.
Martín patted the headstone once, twice, then wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. As for Amalia, she put the blossoms on the grave itself, and then, as if Martín and Tomás weren’t there, listening to every word, she began to speak:
“I miss you, dear friend. Thank you for bringing my children into the world. Thank you for grieving with me. Your tears made me feel as if my own were worth shedding. Thank you for the peacock dress, the one I destroyed. I wear it still, in my dreams, where I am still young and full of hope. Thank you for the humming that filled Ruben’s days, for the humming I hear in Tomás’s throat when he is busy and doesn’t think I am listening. Thank you for leaving Spain, for taking that gem that I had stolen and that was later given to me, and making a life for yourself far away from us, so that Rubén might come to me at night and tell me he loved me without distraction.”
Halfway through, Martín began to walk away. Tomás watched him from a distance, saw as he stood among unknown dead, his hands in his pockets, swaying a little. He watched as one of the urchins running about slammed into the back of his legs, and how Martín turned slowly, said a few words, then resumed his position.
“Mamá,” Tomás said, and touched his mother on the shoulder. She wrapped her arm around his waist.
When they returned to Martín, they found him near a large hedge. “Look at these,” he said, “Miniature peppers. They look like small pumpkins. Aji cachucha. Teresa will love these.”
“You sound like your father,” Amalia said to him, and his face grew serious as he handed her a few of the peppers. “I used to watch Rubén planting the wheat. He wasn’t always a farmer, but a carpenter, and so we had good, sturdy furniture in the house. Outside, the plants sometimes died and the crops failed because Rubén was only just learning to be the man he wanted to be. I helped him on occasion, and he would say to me, ‘One only has to believe that these seeds will become plants. There is as much faith in this as there is in anything.’”
Martín nodded, as if sealing his father’s words somewhere deep inside. Then they left the cemetery and headed back to Martín’s shop and his home, where they parted ways.
“Do you think we will see him again?” Tomás mused. They had only three days left in Cuba.
Amalia popped a small pepper into her mouth and chewed slowly, the sweetly sour taste making her scrunch up her face.
14
The next morning, Tomás read about Eulalia and the bullfight. “Any news?” his mother asked over breakfast.
“The bull lost. They always lose. Eulalia gave her ring to the torero, and everyone cheered. She’s very generous,” he said.
“Did the torero accept right away? Or did he protest?” she asked.
“Let’s see,” Tomás said, reading further. “It doesn’t say, but we can imagine it, can’t we. The torero did not deliberate for a moment. Then he slipped the ring onto his pinky finger and held it aloft for everyone to see. Antonio’s face was priceless, of course. It looked like someone had slapped him. The torero was very handsome.” Tomás’s own laughter died then, and he seemed pensive. Despite his reservations, the possibility that he might not return to Burgos, that he might accept Eulalia’s offer and see the world at her side, thrilled him.
“Mamá, I have a decision to make.”
“What decision?” she asked, confused at the sudden shift.
Instead of telling her, however, Tomás asked her another question. “What do you think of visiting the old nursery? I could buy you a lace gown, like the ones the women at the Casino Español were wearing.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I am not going to be invited to the palace. And you cannot afford a dress like that on a bookseller’s salary.”
“Mamá, Eulalia wants us to come with her. On her steamship. I will be her secretary and you will be—”
“What?” Amalia asked. Her face had hardened, and looking at her, Tomás felt as if the floor between them had opened up, exposing the lobby below.
“She’s offered me a job. Secretario de Su Alteza.” He went on, trying to convince his mother and himself. “I failed as a writer. The bookshop is in debt, did you know? I’m not the farmer Papá wanted me to be. My fiancee died and I wasn’t allowed at her funeral. Yet, here I am, about to be handed the seal of the house of Orléans.”
“Is that what you want? A wax seal in your pocket?” she asked.
Tomás did not know how to say what was in his heart. That Eulalia thrilled him, and that, at the same time, he feared what she would do to him. That she presented an impossible future made possible. That all his life, he had merely been the milk brother, even after Amalia’s service had ended, and how sometimes in her presence, he felt like more. That when she touched his cheek he had felt the boundaries of his life crumble.
But they both grew quiet, collecting their thoughts, building their silent arguments. “Tenorio wrote poems for me for a long time,” Amalia said at last. “He would send them to our home, bold as he was, and I would read them, then burn them in the fireplace, did you know that?” Tomás shook his head. “I believe he loved me, I’ll have you know. But I was true to your father, even when he wasn’t true to me. Because the queen was jealous, I was dismissed.” Amalia let the words settle between them before going on. “Your father couldn’t read well, you know. But he suspected what the letters were. I never saw Tenorio again, and he seemed to me like a used-up rag. Grieving his wife, used up by the queen, by the government, and left to dry, stiff and awkward and lonely. Keep him in your thoughts, Tomás. Where Tenorio went, you now follow. The life of a secretary is not the life I dreamed of for you, even if it does take you to Chicago and places beyond that.”
Tomás hated hearing his own thoughts and fears echoed this way. He might have resembled Rubén physically, but inside he was all Amalia.
“Don’t you think that the queen listened to him? That he helped her in some way? I could help Eulalia. I could teach her to be more like you,” Tomás said, his voice raw as if he had swallowed too much water. He knew, even as he said it, that it seemed like the worst kind of foolishness, to think that people could change those in charge of them, those who planned the courses of their little lives in lavish rooms and never asked them what the people thought.
“If I couldn’t even change Rubén—” Amalia began.
But Tomás spoke over her. “After we return to Spain, I’ll probably move to Madrid,” he said.
“You’re slipping away from me, not by measures, but in long leaps,” Amalia whispered. “You’ll follow Eulalia around like a lapdog, and when she is done with you, you will come back to Burgos without your bookshop, without anything, not even your dignity. This is not what Rubén and I wanted for you.”
Amalia left before Tomás could say another word. He knew it would be hard, telling her, but he could not have guessed this. He thought darkly of Tenorio, that mysterious man from her past, the man Eulalia thought of as her real father. What a mess these men and women had made, even before Tomás and Eulalia could utter their first words, their first “No,” in rebuke of all of it.
He put his hand in his pocket to retrieve his wallet in order to pay for breakfast, and felt a small piece of paper flutter down to the floor, like a dying butterfly. He took it up and saw his list again. This he carried outside to sit for a bit, right on the step in front of the inn.
Couples walked by hand in hand, fresh from the Malecón, that long, low seawall girding Havana. Their hair was stiff from the salt spray. Some of the couples seemed sure of one thing—that they loved one another, and that this was a jewel in their pockets, one they could not lose. It wasn’t true of all the pairs that walked past him. Just a few. But Tomás could tell. He had had such a precious thing with Juana, hadn’t he? It was in the ease of their walk, the way their hands folded together, or the way they laughed—without fear that they were too loud, showing too many teeth, or embarrassed by their guffawing. He looked at his list again, on paper so soft it felt like a handkerchief.
3) Fall in love.
Tomás tried to imagine walking casually like this with Eulalia, the way he had so often with Juana, saying something so funny that she snorted with laughter. He could not picture it. He tried again, but he was tired, his brain was fuzzy.
Where is my happiness? he wondered. Where is my place? Eulalia and I have this in common. Our miseries can be braided together, can’t they? Together, can’t they make two broken, meandering lives whole?
A church bell tolled the hour somewhere in the distance, and it joined the other noises of the morning, of dogs yapping, and a trumpet blaring, of the sea’s rushing and a woman singing in some bright place.
15
Tomás spent his last days in Cuba at the inn. Eulalia sent another note, which he ignored, the request folded up and stuffed in his pocket. The newspapers detailed the rest of Eulalia’s trip—her visit to the Sagrado Corazón, to greet the Mother Superior there, and the detailed description of the white feathered fan the nuns gave her, mounted on a small conch shell; of the delegations of freed slaves who, also armed with painted fans as gifts, met with Eulalia and told her tales of their enslavement and emancipation; and of the small fracas that occurred when she slipped out into the Plaza without chaperones, how the people held her by the shoulders and shook her, and begged her never to leave Cuba.
The effect of reading the newspaper, with doting stories about Eulalia on the front page and tales of the grisly revolution in the war against Spain in the pages that followed, was much like sleeping after a long boat ride—the disorienting waves of royalistas and independistas persisted in making Tomás feel off balance—and he wavered back and forth on his decision to go with Eulalia.
As for Amalia, she was sullen in the mornings around Tomás, and each day she left early and returned late in the afternoon, with more stories about Martín and his children. Only then was she animated. “The little one is so rough,” she laughed. “Look at this,” she said, pointing at a little cut on her forehead. “He threw a seashell at me. He needs a firmer hand.” Or else she would recount one of Teresa’s meals, the amount of garlic they used on the island, and how the onions made her eyes water, but she loved it. She would talk about Martín, how he resembled Gisela and Rubén, how he was a perfect mixture of the two of them. She told Tomás about what she had learned about Gisela, how her mother was from Barbados, and her father a Spaniard from the Canaries, how they raised her in a place called Pinar del Rio, in the shadow of a huge green mogote, like something out of a fairy tale. “Her parents died in a fire, Tomás. Que horror. Poor Gisela, unmothered and unfathered, just like me,” Amalia would say, and go on and on until Tomás thought that he knew more about Gisela and Martín now than he knew of his own past.
