Now she brewed tea mechanically. She imagined herself to be part of a black and white movie that contained a pot of steaming brown tea. She stood in the cold kitchen balancing her weight on the sides of her feet, not wanting to touch the cold tile floor. Warming one hand on the sides of the tea pot, she reached with the other into the pocket of her robe. Marisa’s gift to her was there, the yellow topaz set in silver. The screams of her sister Beatriz out in the yard brought her quickly to the window.
Beatriz and a neighbor girl were coaxing two black kittens to board a makeshift boat floating in a puddle of rain water.
“Beatriz!” Raquel called her sister, “come over here, please!”
Beatriz looked up from her game. “Do I have to?” The two girls looked at each other in distress. “Hold these guys, Rosita, I’ll be right back!” Forcing herself to look serious, Beatriz ran to the kitchen window, where Raquel expected her.
“Beatriz, what are you doing to those poor animals?”
“They wanted to go for a ride,” answered the girl.
“But cats hate the water, silly! Let them go,” said Raquel.
Beatriz offered a dazzling smile, mirroring her sister’s wide mouth, her high cheekbones, her shining black eyes: “That’s why we put them on the boat, Raquel!” She turned swiftly, wasting no time to get back to the kittens. Returning to her pot of tea, Raquel told herself she must be appreciative of the willfulness of the young, her sister and her friends, the boys in the neighborhood, for who else would live through this dictatorship, and flourish in the end?
Presentiment
She broke her fall on the tile floor with both hands, palms outstretched, and took the kicks to the kidneys in silence, lips tightening in panicked determination … checking, painfully lifting hems to apply cool fingertips to bruises, cigarette burns… her lower lip lapping tears, a runny nose and the thinner, saltier, blood … confirming in whisper that the woman next to her was also raped with electrodes (don’t let them know you suspect what they might do, they cut me, the bastards), she spit out the words, a warning to Marisa, offering moist tea bags to soothe the burned skin, while waiting, waiting, knees turned to dough and still waiting.
Marisa shook her hair away from her face, her hand was captured again by Don Jorge, his kind eyes attempting to penetrate her own, murmuring concern. She pressed her face against his chest, pushing the memories, why now? She could postpone the feeling of warmth her employer offered in the large room between the piano and the fireplace. She should close her eyes just like this and detach herself from his touch to be there, in that other place, remember everything over again, and feel nothing, nothing. Or she could open her eyes and be in her bed, absorb herself in the embrace of this kind man who had saved her life, in tracing kiss by kiss the surface of his face, ignore the shock of intimacy as she would ignore the memories of that other place, and follow the feeling of her body being caressed without actually being there.
How did it happen? Did she sit too long by the piano after Raquel left, touching the keys lightly and knowing she had waited only for her to come, the notes reverberating against the vaulted ceiling, crying a little, perhaps, because she was so happy that Raquel knew? Was it when Jorge spoke her name in a question, the precise intonation, that her battered body turned, her face open to him, so glad to be alive. But then came his caress, his gentle kiss, her soft words wanting to end the mistaken preamble.
Released again from her thoughts, Marisa in turn released her hold of time and lay unmoving on her bed. Outside, the newspaper bundles hit the sidewalk, the metal doors rolled up and businesses came alive. In the distance, she thought she heard the purring of Jorge’s gray Chrysler, but that could have been hours ago, when her eyes registered everything that happened to her in black and white, when she lifted her hands to her face again and felt it, wet with tears, and she heard her voice, very steady, sending Don Jorge away. With the comfort of the noise outside her window, and the light streaming in, Marisa slept.
Fate
At the end of August the weather breaks. In the Plaza, magnolias burst open and birds sing in desperation, claiming a branch or the eaves under the round band shelter for themselves. But there is no band. Old people are prohibited from feeding the pigeons because they will interfere with the general’s parade. Children cannot be allowed to run, and dogs are out of the question. Mothers must perch a small tricolored flag on baby carriages. Preparations for September’s festivities, the once raucous celebration of independence, are now carried out with unnatural order and decorum.
Braving the curfew, Marisa huddles in a doorway. She doesn’t know where she is, exactly. The neighborhood is not familiar to her. But this is the bus route that Raquel always took when she left her job at the embassy, it has to be the way. As light fades, the scent of eucalyptus grows stronger, and Marisa tries to take hold of her own steps, to root herself somewhere. Can she ever again trust a body that doesn’t belong to her? She runs another block, deeper into the neighborhood where she sees lights, and vegetable gardens surrounded by cement walls painted pink.
An owl hoots, a human owl, giving the signal that there’s an unknown pedestrian in the neighborhood. Teenaged boys run to peek out of doorways, to slide carefully along the sidewalk from doorway to doorway. Raquel joins the search as she hears the second owl hoot, indicating the stranger is friendly and unarmed. At the corner she sees the boys surrounding Marisa. She knows it’s Marisa, her heart pounds out her name. The boys push the newcomer toward safety, toward any open door, and Raquel reaches for Marisa, taking possession of her body in this embrace, pulling her into the sanctuary of the darkened garden, murmuring thanks and blessings. The boys scatter, laughing nervously. The owl hoots three times.
(1978)
Cuento de Jalohuín
October 28, 1959
“I’ve only got a few days before this hallows eve. The sign to remind me that it’s my turn is that ocher and red sprig of oak that grows before the abandoned barn. It’s got to be, because it’s the only autumnal color I can see from here.
“ If I didn’t know it was October in this new town, the barn all covered with ivy, green climbing vines of all kinds, the rain falling and falling, it would all look like summer. Except for the sprig of oak. I’m sure of it. My sisters and I have taken care to hide our ways, and so our language is subtle. Its signs, almost invisible.
“A chill down my back. I’ve never been the object of presage such as this. I am the one, and I would escape now … no. Perhaps I would have escaped this morning, before the rain let up enough to show me how the colors grows from ocher to gold to red, on the leaves of the single oak branch that stands before the green vines.
“Deep within the hills the church bells toll the new time of day, before it has been decreed for time to save an hour of daylight before winter. And, so, the town will live an hour longer tonight. But here, in our house away from the valley, the sound of the bells barely reaches us. We are foreigners among the locals, though our ancestors have inhabited this continent for centuries. The air feels heavy on this grey afternoon, the wind hurries on the darkness, the candles grow brighter beside the window.
“When the clock strikes five an hour early, then, I’ll go up into the attic to collect the objects of the spell I’m meant to cast. When I open up the cedar chest of my sister’s recollections, and I gather memories in purple petals of dried roses, fading in my hands, little pieces through my fingers, like the promises the young man made to her that