On that April night in 1968, Teresa was afraid she’d sweat right through her dress. She set out her father’s navy blue suit on the bed for José María. Cristina would be over soon. Tonight’s play was Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca, and the audience would surely be dressed as elegantly as possible. Any Iberian occasion pressured the Costa Rican upper class to show off, to prove they were worthy of their bloodlines (pure or not), and José María would have to look his best. But he hadn’t returned, and Teresa drank glass after glass of guaro with ice that stung her teeth but cooled her chest. She craned her head to the ceiling fan and counted the revolutions of the blades.
Her father used to do that in his office at the American Fruit Company when Teresa was a girl—when he awaited couriers or inspiration to word memos, he counted whatever multiple thing he could find: birds outside the window, clicks of a pen in his hand, Teresa’s blinks as she sat at his desk. Now Teresa tallied the seconds on her gold wristwatch, totaled the budding wrinkles around her eyes in the mirror, estimated the number of parakeets outside her window. They squeaked like toys on the sill. Soon they would retire to the leafy refuge of palm trees, make love among the dead fronds, and fall blissfully asleep.
Carmen exploded into Teresa’s room, outstretching her tiny arms, ready for clamping. She grabbed both of Teresa’s shins and began wiping her tears on Teresa’s stockings.
“¿What’s wrong?” Teresa asked.
“Mamá,” Carmen said into the fabric. “I heard Lyra talking in her head. She called me annoying and said there was no way I was her sister.”
“My love, of course you’re her sister.” Teresa smiled. “And you’re my daughter. No doubt. But you have to stop with these silly ideas. You can’t go around saying you can hear what’s in our minds. You know your father doesn’t like it.”
Carmen hugged Teresa’s shins tighter.
“Don’t worry, my love. I believe you. Now you have to let go. Your tears are going to dry, and you’re going to stick to my legs. ¿Then you know what? You’ll have to go to that boring old play with me.”
Carmen lifted her face from Teresa’s shins and wiped her eyes. Such a beautiful little girl, Teresa thought. “You’re beautiful, too, Mamá,” Carmen said.
Teresa left Lyra and Carmen with Amarga, who greeted Cristina at the door with rare kindness and shooed the girls back into the house. Teresa felt something odd in herself, an impulse to reach out to hug her mother. But Amarga frowned, so Teresa merely waved goodbye and turned to follow Cristina and Desiderio to the National Theater.
The sunset painted the newly paved roads orange. And after just fifteen minutes of walking, all Teresa could feel was regret for having worn heels. Sweat cooled her underarms but made them sticky. Her discomfort summoned a cloud of dust that threatened to further ruin her outfit. Cristina began nagging Desiderio to button his shirt, and gossiped about every woman who waved hello. To drown her out, Desiderio cawed scores of poems by García Lorca.
“The doomed poet,” he coughed between recitations. “But a genius. A genius.”
They arrived at the National Theater and lingered in the center of the lobby to enjoy the cool air. Desiderio said he had always loved this building, most of all the mural on the ceiling done with such mastery: a scene of nineteenth-century traders with bananas and satchels of coffee on their backs, trudging through a crowd of donkeys and handsome men, making their way to the docks, where giant ships of wood and cloth rested on the sea. Through the doorways leading to the stage, guitarists tuned their instruments, and dancers stomped their feet in preparation for the performance. Desiderio walked to the vendor to buy champagne and cigarettes. Teresa and Cristina went to the powder room.
From behind the stall, Cristina asked after José María, while Teresa dabbed her armpits with a damp towel. Yes, Cristina was her best friend, but she had an overwhelming nosiness that was both expected and blindsiding. And even worse, Cristina’s prying was charismatic. She had an arsenal of empathetic pouts and encouraging smiles honed to get even the most tight-lipped to divulge their entire life story.
“Today is the harvest,” Teresa said to the mirror. She didn’t know if she was trying to convince Cristina or persuade her own reflection.
“I don’t even know why he works there,” Cristina said, exiting the stall and fanning herself with both hands. “¿Why would he work for gringos who snatch away his holidays?”
“You know him, he wants to provide.”
“¿Provide what, Teresita? ¿You’re all fine, aren’t you? ¿How much did your father leave you and your mother?”
Teresa wanted to confess that Tácito hadn’t left enough for them to survive even the decade after he disappeared. For years Amarga had begged distant family for money; and while her grandmother was still alive, they’d subsisted on her income from séances, visions, and potions.
It was José María’s willingness to hack bananas that had saved them from financial ruin. Amarga had never worked a day in her life, and Teresa had taken on small jobs to keep them afloat: flower arrangements for socialites, garment repair, poem writing for bachelors. Amarga, for her part, pushed Teresa in front of any rich man she could find. And when Teresa fell for and married José María, Amarga raged that Teresa had condemned them to the life of the working class.
“Yes, Tina, we’re fine. But you know men.”
“Maybe,” Cristina sighed. “I suppose some men want to provide as the earth does. They think their hands can grow a life for their family. You know what, I like that. It’s noble. But Desi has never done real work—you can’t consider art as work. A job is grueling, unenjoyable. But that man hugs his marble like he does me. He loves his work because it isn’t work at all.”
Whenever Cristina spoke of Desiderio’s artistic attraction to her, Teresa detected overcompensation. An artist’s eyes wander. Men like him treated women as malleable as metal, or as easily dimpled as clay. And recently Desiderio had begun eyeing Teresa that way, which both excited and nauseated her. It was unfair, his gaze. Teresa had no indication that Cristina noticed, but José María, who issued vehement warnings between ground teeth, had noticed immediately. A man’s insecurity is his guiding instinct.
Teresa felt Desiderio’s eyes on her when she and Cristina reentered the lobby. It had taken only a single glass of champagne for him to completely disregard his wife. He outstretched his right arm like a folded wing for Teresa to reluctantly clutch.
They had been true friends before this flirting habit. Desiderio normally made her laugh, and feel comfortable and listened to. When he was up in his studio, Teresa would visit him, sitting quietly on the periphery of the room while he sculpted. Teresa didn’t mind the hollow ringing of almost-perfected bronze or the dust from expensive stone. Teresa felt that artists tapped into something divine, something worth obsessing over. And to have a sculptor as a friend, as talented as he was, and as funny and charming as he was, honored her. Teresa fawned over Desiderio’s art, and perhaps she had, without meaning to, fawned over him.
Cristina led them to their row, and let Desiderio sit on the other side of Teresa. He leaned in to ask about José María, while Cristina ran to gossip with a woman across the aisle.
“¿Why doesn’t he accompany you anymore, Santa Teresa?” Desiderio always referred to her as a saint.
Saints are just devils who cut off their tails.
Before, Teresa had found being called a saint sweet, but now it became a moniker for Desiderio to defile.
“I don’t need a chaperone,” Teresa said. Men were all the same: an unaccompanied woman was fair game; virgin, unprotected land to be surveyed, negotiated, and claimed. Finders keepers.
“Yes, I suppose you’re right.”
“Cristina seems to be having a good time,” Teresa said. The mention of a man’s wife was as good as a cold shower.
“Yes, she loves this play,” Desiderio said. “You’re in for it now—she recites the lines a little too loud. It’s distracting, to say the least.”
Teresa crossed her arms, gripped each hand around a biceps as armor, her gold bangles chain mail against Desiderio’s flirting. Teresa would have loved to come here alone with Cristina, to watch her best friend’s favorite play alongside her. Cristina’s recitations would have been her only annoyance. But Desiderio wouldn’t leave Teresa’s side, and he was speaking to her with an obvious, vulturine interest. She crossed her legs, folded her arms, turned her head, tried her best to shrink small enough that Desiderio couldn’t see her anymore. Still he wouldn’t stop.
For a second, as quick and blinding as the flash from a camera, Teresa wondered if Cristina was testing them. If she’d left them alone on purpose. As if Cristina were betting Desiderio would finally succumb to his nature, and Teresa would relinquish the pact all women make to each other when they become friends.
AT THE START of the third act, the young man who played the role of the Moon stepped onto the stage. The Woodcutters’ chanting faded along with the violins. Blue light washed over the theater. The Moon stood naked, his skin painted silvery white. He began his monologue. Sweat escaped his pores, even through the carefully applied acrylic paint. His body shone brilliantly in a blue light that reflected off the gloss on his penis. He was as naked as a celestial body, his monologue stark and vulnerable. He begged the Rivals in the story to open their chests so that he might crawl in for warmth.
The Moon shivered as he begged for blood onstage. His hands together in a gnarled cup. The theater was so cold. His body was shaved and painted. His penis shrank as chills tightened his muscles. He begged for the warmth of another’s chest, for the foamy tissue of a beating heart.
La dulce sangre.
The Moon paused, as if distracted by something in the darkness of the audience. A blank stare overtook his face, his eyes like empty craters. Teresa felt the young man looking directly at her, the ancient oceans of his eyes transfixed, hypnotized by her own. And those ancient oceans of his eyes summoned streams of water in hers. They activated a deep fear within Teresa, an unrelenting instinct to run.
An angered voice hissed from offstage, and one of the Woodcutters poked the Moon’s back with his axe. Snapped out of Teresa’s stare, the Moon continued his monologue.
High above the theater, in the emptiness of sky, the moon repeated her understudy’s lines, setting each plea lovingly ablaze. But her insides weren’t cold. They burned.
Soon her body would turn as red as a heart and the blood that beats inside.
“¿WHAT DID YOU think of the performance, Teresita?” Cristina asked as the trio made their way back to Barrio Ávila, hoping to end the sticky silence. A subtle breeze ran its breath over the leaves of low-lying bushes and their ankles. An evil static clung to the roads and to the trees. “I thought the Moon kid was a little off, ¿don’t you think, Desi?”
A finger of smoke from Cristina’s cigarette tickled Teresa’s nose, and she sneezed. “I couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “The Moon seemed so savage, it broke my heart.”
“García Lorca does that to you,” Cristina said. “What a man he must have been…” She paused to straighten the seams in her stockings. “The poor thing. Such a genius. A sad, sad genius. ¿Right, Desi?”
Desiderio had been sulking ever since Teresa whisked past him in the theater lobby. He broke his silence. “¿What the Hell kind of heat is this?” he said.
“Hell is right. Not even Dante could have imagined this,” Cristina said.
“¿Which circle of Hell do you think would be this hot?” Teresa mused.
“We are all pure of heart,” Desiderio interrupted. “Although, it’s true that God seems to be preheating the earth, but I’m sure He’s planning to cook other sinners.”
They took a deep breath at the railroad crossing; the dirt road and the track that marked the center of their lives in Barrio Ávila. Teresa’s house lay right across the railway, perpendicular to Cristina and Desiderio’s front door. Cristina’s household’s pink shell shone in the moonlight. It had served as a gaudy beacon as they trudged through the dust and heat.
“Buenas noches, Teresita,” Cristina sighed as she kissed her on both cheeks.
She couldn’t make the short trip across the railbed to drop Teresa at her door. A pulsing blister swelled her pinkie toe to twice its size, and she said she would pop it with a sewing needle as soon as she stepped into the foyer.
“Desi,” Cristina purred. “¿Will you walk our Teresita?”
“Of course I will,” Desiderio said. “Let’s go, Santa Teresa. We don’t want you getting lost along the way.”
Cristina winked at Teresa. “And my mother said I didn’t marry a gentleman.”
With the door shut and the indoor lights on, Desiderio offered Teresa his arm. She hesitated for a moment before she loosely clutched his biceps, because her legs felt weak from wearing her heels. It was just ten meters to the track, and another ten to her front door, but Desiderio walked slowly on purpose, wanting to savor Teresa’s touch. In a way, she was thankful of their pace. Her feet ached as they traversed the unpaved ground.
“Santa Teresa,” Desiderio began. “¿Why were you crying in the theater?”
Teresa pretended to trip over a stone so they could stop moving.
“I told you both already.” Teresa turned to him. “It was the boy who played the Moon. His words were so beautiful that I couldn’t help myself.”
“¿I thought saints never lie?” Desiderio said. “You don’t think anyone can, but I can see you blushing,” he said.
“Desiderio—” Teresa’s voice broke. “I don’t know what you mean. It’s really very late, and I want to get home to check on my girls. José María will be waiting up for me.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Cristina is probably already passed out on the couch. I bet if we listen closely, we can hear her snoring.”
Teresa looked down and smirked. Then she turned her attention up to Desiderio again, who made no facial expression. Teresa followed his blank gaze. In the center of the line sat the largest cane toad she had ever seen. It gripped the steel rails with webbed feet, and its inflating body resembled a pile of bubbling tires; its height was that of Teresa’s thighs; its hideous width that of three of the rail’s crossties. The diabolical creature began to croak. At first it purred, a quick hammer to hollow wood, but then the croaking grew until it filled Barrio Ávila with the howl of a locomotive. Teresa cupped her palms around her ears and clenched her teeth; she was sure they’d shatter in her mouth.
Teresa had spotted these toads before, on the banana plantation as a girl. The size of men’s feet, the creatures mated in trenches, stalked roots and dried fronds in the dust. Teresa wouldn’t walk down dirt paths alone. Tácito told her they served their own purpose, like all creatures. They protected the crops, snatched up vermin with their gigantic mouths to swallow whole. Bananas have bodyguards, he joked.
“¿But why the croaking?” Teresa asked him. “¿Why the Devil’s song?”
“It’s a spell. Even Satan needs protection. Even he has things he’d like to ward off.”
In her mind, Teresa grabbed Desiderio’s hand, yanked him away from the toad’s trance. In her mind, they escaped and found refuge in Cristina’s house, barricaded the door, caught their breaths, and laughed. ¡What a sight! they’d say. For years they’d repeat the story, how they fled such a beast.
But neither Teresa nor Desiderio could move a muscle. A noxious stench paralyzed them—from the toxic sacs behind the toad’s eyes spilled syrupy tar, evaporating like gas. It reminded Teresa of spoiled liquor. Of guaro left in a gutter to fester, like vinegar and sulfur. This smell tickled the back of her throat, and she retched. She couldn’t stand it anymore: the sound and smell, the gruesome sight of such an animal.
She looked to Desiderio again, whose eyes were shut. She didn’t notice urine running down his pant leg. In the toad’s mercurial eyes, those gigantic, swirling orbs of black and platinum, Teresa saw something the moonlight illuminated. A murderous glint, like the spark that produces fire or the flash of a blade. But its true origin was not from the cane toad, not even from the moon. What was mirrored in the creature’s eyes was a man, running. A man who had lost himself to his own nature. A man whose tail would break free from its prison and find its way back to him with the help of the moonlight.
TERESA AWOKE ON the porch’s wooden swing. Her wristwatch had stopped at 9:33. A ringing dizzied her, and she hung her head over the porch railing and vomited a translucent white liquid. She did not remember, as Desiderio did, that when the giant toad disappeared, she was left unconscious on the gravel. That he had carried her to her porch and laid her gently on the wooden swing. He fought himself not to kiss her, he’ll say. Her lips were as soft as he had imagined them to be. But Teresa didn’t remember anything.
On the other side of the railroad track, Cristina’s windows were dark. Teresa opened her front door and stumbled to bed. She left the gate and the front door unlocked for whenever José María decided to come home.