An aberrant hurricane arrived on Tuesday morning. Rain swelled and burst from the sky, forcing bright-beaked birds to seek refuge in car mufflers, underneath bromeliad umbrellas, or inside crowded chicken coops. No one in Costa Rica knew exactly when morning had actually begun, because roosters, distracted by the storm or by the bright-beaked invaders, forgot to crow. Vendors tried and failed to open their stands. Beggars filled their empty cups with clinking hail. Politicians stayed secure in the warmth of their canopy beds.
The old women who once danced for rain had indeed been right (as always). But who could remember the last time a hurricane had fluttered its heavy body this far south? It was, until this moment, a highly improbable, physically unlikely scenario (climatically impossible, depending on whom one asked). This was usually thanks to the Coriolis effect, which had saved Costa Rica season after season. Put simply: hurricanes didn’t form this close to the equator. Earthquakes? Absolutely. Volcanic eruptions? Like clockwork. But today, to everyone’s surprise and groaning dismay, one hurricane had broken all meteorological rules and decided to run amok.
Weathermen said that the rebel storm (still nameless) ricocheted like a pinball off every island in the Caribbean. After narrowly missing Panamá, it landed on the shores of Costa Rica. It dipped its toes in the warm Atlantic waters to gain momentum, and began enveloping the land, as giddy as a tourist on an all-expenses-paid vacation.
For hours, the nervous meteorologists on competing channels had been contradicting one another about the duration of the storm. On Canal 6, Eduardo Ganoza, afraid of losing viewers, said it would last just another forty-five minutes, then clear skies and brilliant sunshine for the rest of the week. On Canal 7, the anchor Jorge Gamboa slurred and took shameless gulps from a silver flask. The tempest, he said, would hover over Costa Rica for a hundred years and drown the isthmus, separating North and South America once and for all. He then exploded into a tirade about the president’s corruption and melting Greenlandic icebergs.
In Barrio Ávila, the ruins of La Guaria Railroad became a violent river of rainwater. From the current emerged a cartel of cane toads, gray and bulbous as the clouds. They hopped out of the river as triumphantly as the first organisms to haul themselves out of the sea and made their way beneath the rickety doors of concrete houses. Once inside, they deflated their bodies and scrounged for any unfortunate bugs that might have sought the same sanctuary.
On a windowsill in Cristina’s living room, La Lora Lorca, her elderly macaw, squawked his life story into the studio laughter of rain. He had been doing it since the tempest began. An expert storyteller, La Lora Lorca matched every syllable of his memoir to the drumbeat of the storm, yelping at lightning flashes, stretching his golden wings when the wind brought its own replies from the south. Thunderclaps ruffled his crown’s blue feathers. Mist brought new life to his beak. But like clumsy leaf-cutter ants on the roads, his anecdotes fell into the gutters and washed far away, parallel to La Guaria Railroad’s track.
The crazed parrot’s noise saturated Cristina’s house. She had barely slept; she spent the night pacing the house, cleaning nooks and crannies, clipping flowers to place in vases. The nurse’s words still thick in her head. Cancer, I bet, the nurse said. “She bet,” huffed Cristina.
Cristina didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know if she should even tell Teresa, as it was just a nosy nurse’s idiotic guess. But Cristina believed it—Teresa’s birthday was just a few days away, and she would be sixty. Amarga had died at sixty. Cristina believed in life’s cruel parallels. The numerology alone was enough to give credit to the nurse’s conjecture.
Desiderio shuffled into the kitchen to drink the coffee Cristina had set out on the table. He didn’t speak. Neither to her nor the bird; nor did he grumble as old men do when they awake to rain. He hadn’t spoken in ten years, so nothing out of the ordinary. Hadn’t uttered a word after Carmen jumped, and they’d sent their dear, sweet Juan Julián away.
Cristina wanted to ask Desiderio’s advice about Teresa, wanted to beg him to hold her, to say anything. But he chugged his coffee and left, marched back upstairs to his studio, his daily refuge from her.
Cristina’s home was by far the most beautiful in Barrio Ávila. A fine example of Spanish architecture (excluding its outer walls of pink plaster), decorated with Cristina’s many paintings, Moorish arches and columns, blue tiles imported from Morocco. Her taste came from her artistic background; she was celebrated as a genius in art school, and even had a chance to complete a degree in the United States. But without a second thought, Cristina declined the offer because she had met Desiderio, whose sculpting talents would become internationally renowned. All this time, Cristina clung to the memory of Desiderio sculpting her in the likes of Venus.
“He molded my hips out of marble, you know. It’s been so long since he’s loved me like that,” she would say aloud, half expecting the house to break its silence. Waiting for it to say, Yes, I know. It’s been so long.
When Carmen jumped, Juan Julián disappeared for weeks. They finally found him wandering the Borbón Market naked. Juggling fruit and haggling prices with American tourists. He answered the officers and the subsequent doctors in jumbled words that no one could consider language. Father Silvino arrived shortly afterward and offered to care for him at La Iglesia. Cristina was grossly unequipped to look after Juan Julián, and his illness was deemed too deranged for the government hospitals, so Cristina let him go.
After that, Desiderio smashed every sculpture he had ever made into dust. In his studio, every replica and paperweight succumbed to his hammer and fists. He even tried to destroy his most famous statue, a victorious Juan Santamaría that stood in front of the congress building that he’d modeled after Juan Julián. Desiderio became a lunatic, roaring and digging a paring knife into the joints of Costa Rica’s national hero. With a rusty chisel, he attempted to hack off the arm holding the fabled torch. It took four officers to subdue him.
When Cristina arrived at the jail to take her husband home, Desiderio was sitting quietly, his eyes fixed on a dark corner of the cell, soaking wet and aphasic. Again, Father Silvino appeared behind her, his cassock yet again an encroaching shadow. He offered the same favor with a smile. Son awaited father in La Iglesia, he said. But Cristina refused to hand Desiderio over. With a mute, she could manage. Cristina wouldn’t be left alone in that lovely house in Barrio Ávila.
Since then, Cristina visited Juan Julián at La Iglesia on Tuesdays, driving her ancient pink Pontiac to the convent, the car’s damaged exhaust pipe shooting black plumes high into the air, reminding those who still remembered of the old train on La Guaria Railroad.
Cristina bribed the nuns with small cakes to better care for her son, and once a month she presented Juan Julián with the sweetest blooms from her rose garden and a new bottle of cologne. Cristina found these were the only two gifts that didn’t knock him into feverish laughter. An uncontrollable roaring that said plainly to her, You idiot woman, do you really think this will make it all better? And as he plucked petals and spritzed a pungent cloud into the room, Cristina relayed things his father might have said, or complained about the parrot and other minor instances and annoyances she was tired of telling the walls. In visiting Juan Julián once a week, Cristina found a solace not dissimilar to visiting a loved one’s grave.
She confessed this all to Teresa one afternoon after a few shots of guaro. “Juan Julián is so good at listening,” she said. “You’d think I did something right as a mother. But, alas, that’s as impossible as time travel, isn’t it.”
Ambling about the mess in her kitchen, Cristina and her scattered mind wandered wherever they could. She flipped through musty cookbooks from the shelves, inspected a rack of lamb in the fridge for spoilage, and darted dead roses at the walls. Then Cristina’s mind did something unfortunate. Cruel. It drifted to Carmen and how she had jumped. Then to the thought of Juan Julián, who’d stepped into Love’s steel trap, marrying Carmen before they were even out of high school. And finally to thoughts of Desiderio, whose silence was all she breathed. The gravity of Cristina’s ego pulled everything that had happened into an orbit around her: those tragedies became no one else’s but hers. It was her daughter-in-law who had disintegrated on the pavement. It was her son who would spend his future in La Iglesia. And it was her husband who had been resurrected a mute.
Three birds with one stone.
And at times, against her will as she smoked long cigarettes on the patio, Cristina couldn’t help but blame Carmen for throwing herself out that hospital window like a stone. But this, too, became just another thought Cristina would transmute into smoke and blow out into the rain.
Between puffs, that intrusive realization found her again:
Teresa was turning sixty.
The same age Amarga had been when she died.
For so many years, Cristina had spent Teresa’s birthdays alone with her in her kitchen, the warmth of a small glowing cupcake the only other guest. Before the night Amarga died and José María disappeared, Teresa’s birthdays had been joyous affairs—dancing, and drinks, and a tight-knit, eccentric ensemble of friends. Every person a character who arrived to Barrio Ávila to celebrate their favorite person in the world. Teresa had once held that title: everyone’s favorite person in the world.
With that memory like a flame and Cristina, the moth, she decided to throw her best friend a party for her sixtieth birthday—perhaps the last party—and convince Teresa to attend. Even if she had to tie her up with rope, sling her over her shoulder, and glue her to the couch. Cristina jumped up from her table, almost knocking over her breakfast. La Lora Lorca yelped and shat on the carpet. Cristina ran to her foyer and uncovered a black book of phone numbers. She would call and convince those who had once attended Teresa’s parties, who’d spent decades of friendship with her.
A party was the perfect send-off, Cristina thought. And best of all, Teresa wouldn’t have any prognosis to bog down her thoughts. Just balloons and streamers, pastries and the catharsis of reunion. Cristina armed herself with the telephone and dialed as many numbers as she could decipher from her own handwriting. Many went to answering machines, while others had been disconnected. Some calls were picked up by relatives who informed Cristina of the friend’s passing. Cristina’s house reverberated with condolences and unanswered pleas, and with La Lora Lorca’s continued autobiography.
After an hour of anxious self-deliberation, Cristina phoned the Three Marías, triplets whom Teresa had known since girlhood. They were once Lyra and Carmen’s godmothers, and had been the ones to care for them when Teresa took off to the United States. María Asunta, the youngest, answered gruffly and hung up before Cristina could extend the invitation. On the second try, María Visita, the eldest, took on a tone with Cristina as though cutting off a telemarketer—“We don’t want any”—and hung up. María Conchita, the middle triplet, answered the third call, and to keep her on the line, Cristina blurted out Teresa’s diagnosis. Conchita was the most emotional of the triplets, and she muffled her cries. Cristina took the opportunity to invite her to the party and explain why she was throwing it, but the line went dead before Cristina could ask if they remembered how to get to Barrio Ávila. Even after all this time, Cristina knew they did.
Out of the goodness of her heart, Cristina decided to phone Father Silvino, and his voice smiled at the invitation. “I appreciate it,” he said. “But I’ll be busy. Oh,” he continued, “Lyra is here.”
“¿Where?” Cristina said.
“At La Iglesia. She’s making her rounds right now.”
Cristina was left speechless. The second time in two days.
“And Gabriel is here, too, Cristina. ¿Are you still coming today?”