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IT WAS NOVEMBER, and the downpours of early fall seemed to be behind them. After stopping at the bodega for her ration of milk and loaf of bread, Maria arrived home from work that day to an empty house. Elio was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t sure where he’d gone, or why, or what time he’d be back. That morning he had left for work as usual, but she had noticed that he was fidgety. She tried to ask him about it, but he brushed it off and blamed it on the thirty-year-old mattress. Too thin to let me fall asleep, he said. But she knew there must have been something else. He was quieter than most mornings.
Imagining that Elio would turn up sooner or later, sometime after dinner, Maria walked to Fina’s house in the dark. She knocked, but no one responded. Using the key the old woman had given her days earlier, she let herself in. Fina was nowhere around, but she’d left the lights on and a note on the kitchen counter: Gone to study the Bible in Punta Brava. Maria rolled her eyes, and threw away the note.
She fastened a red scarf to her head and looked around. There was little to do, really. Dust a bit, mop the floor, tidy up the kitchen, starch and iron the old woman’s handkerchiefs and pillowcases, and wipe down picture frames. On most days of chores, Maria tended to Fina’s house with Fina sitting close by talking up a storm. It was as though the old woman only really wanted her companionship and nothing else.
She’d been considerate enough to write her a note, Maria thought. Notes were wonderful when they were full of answers such as “Be back after lunch,” and “Closed until further notice”; or, better yet, like the ones she often found on her table at the telephone company: “No point coming to work tomorrow, we’re all staying home,” or the note about her annoying boss, “Yenisleydis’s a rat.” Fina’s note, she thought, had in it nothing she wanted or needed to know. And because it left her with as many questions as she already had when she walked through the door, she almost wished there had been no note at all.
It was fall but nothing at Fina’s house that night gave away the season. In keeping with weather patterns for that time of year, it was sunny and the temperature was a comfortable 76 degrees; nothing on the island could have warned her that winter was only months away. Sweating, Maria nudged the day’s crumbs on the kitchen table toward a cupped hand. She thought of Chicago. According to her old Sears catalogue, now that was a fall that mattered. Fall was Save on thousands of seasonable needs and more than a thousand price cuts. In the pages of the catalogue, yellow, orange, and red leaves piled up along city and country roads, or blew in the wind. Seasons in Chicago, she was convinced, made a dent in people’s souls—or better yet, mirrored people’s souls.
Here the island of eternal summers, except for the occasional winter chill that often required nothing more than an old sweater, denied any possibility of change. Perhaps this was why life seemed to move slowly, because it wasn’t working itself up to some ultimate transformation. Life on the island moved at the speed of a turtle. A hundred-year-old turtle, she thought, pinching the sagging skin on her neck between her index finger and thumb.
She’d been cleaning Fina’s house for a few months now. She’d grown accustomed to the beautiful bidet, with its silver faucet, the Sevrès porcelain tea sets, the silverware, the terry cotton towels, and the RCA Victor gramophone—with all her records: Benny Moré, and Rolandito La Serie, and Lecuona, and Perez Prado, and Been Crosbee, Luis Armstron, Ella Fitzgeral... And of course Beelee Holeethay. It was all so fabulous, so number-one—how could she not be one hundred percent in love with it? Fina was easy, a good woman at heart. Maria hoped that all her hard work would one day pay off. Perhaps Fina would leave for Coral Gables before the five years ended, and she and Elio would move into her house sooner. Their lives would change then. Falling houses brought people down. Maria had given up on her own house a long time ago.
All she needed to do was to put more shoulder into it, tend to Fina more. If she got really lucky, the old woman would take pity on her. Because deep inside, Maria was afraid Fina had made a promise she wouldn’t be able to keep. Perhaps Maria was being too gullible and shouldn’t rely on an old woman’s promise. If Fina’s family in South Florida ever decided to claim ownership of the house, blood would be thicker than water. And Maria would never get the house. Although Fina was full of good intentions, Maria would be no match for family trauma spanning over thirty years.
A few hours later, Fina returned and Maria went home. When she walked into her own house, she found Elio sitting at the kitchen table, a finger in a bucket petting an oversized red goldfish.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” he asked, taking Maria’s hand and crouching next to the bucket. “Isn’t he perfect?”
“How do you know it’s a he, Elio? Maybe it’s a she and now you’re confusing it.”
“Ay, Maria, you’ll never understand.”
At this point, she didn’t need to understand. She was so used to Elio’s quirks that she no longer found them strange. Although he was becoming quirkier, harder to figure out than when he was younger. Perhaps that’s what men did as they got older—they simply became stranger and stranger, until one day you could no longer recognize them. She needed to concentrate her attention on the issue at hand: getting Fina’s house. But as far as understanding Elio, she needed nothing to do with that.
That night Elio stayed up until dawn, finishing the last chapters of Don Quixote. He’d waited for hours for Maria to fall asleep. When she finally did, he slid out of bed, and tiptoed into the living room. He pulled the book out from beneath a clump of newspapers, and sat down to read. In the bucket, close by, the red goldfish opened and closed his mouth near the water’s surface.
Over the years, Elio had been accused of being everything from dreamer, to coward, to gusano, to crazy, to thief, and so many other things he hadn’t cared to keep track. But no one had ever accused him of loving Maria too much. So, when near dawn he finally reached the hendecasyllabic verses that conclude Don Quixote, Part I, something in him stirred. He felt vindicated. Reaching the first line, he looked down at the fish.
“See,” he whispered, pointing at the page. “It’s all right here, little fellow. But you already knew that, didn’t you?” Elio made sure to read quietly, but he read anyway:
“She, whose full features may be here descried,
High-bosomed, with a bearing of disdain,
Is Dulcinea, she for whom in vain
The great Don Quixote of La Mancha sighed.
For her, Toboso's queen, from side to side
He traversed the grim sierra, the Champaign
Of Aranjuez, and Montiel's famous plain:
On Rocinante oft a weary ride.
Malignant planets, cruel destiny,
Pursued them both, the fair Manchegan dame,
And the unconquered star of chivalry.
Nor youth nor beauty saved her from the claim
Of death; he paid love's bitter penalty,
And left the marble to preserve his name.
“Ha,” he said to the fish, “that Don Quixote knew one thing: love. Love that was always at a distance.” He could follow the game or ignore it, Elio thought, but it wasn’t just a pastime. It was a battle to the death. What a sad bastard. So sad it almost broke Elio’s heart. If Elio didn’t know any better, he would have thought Don Quixote lived on an island, too.