_____________
IT WAS ISABELITA, Pepe's old girlfriend, who took care of everything. Because Pepe had no family left on the island, and because Maria had threatened she’d leave him if he showed up at the morgue and made a scene or otherwise interfered in the arrangements, Elio stayed put and waited for the funeral. When the day came, Maria had something for him to wear.
“It needs some letting out of the hems and a little starch,” Maria said, holding up a blue and white sailor suit like a peace offering.
Elio looked up gloomily from his morning coffee, then back down. “Don’t tell me—it was Benito’s,” he said into the cup. Benito, Fina’s late husband, had been a persnickety old man and a religious zealot who spent his evenings pacing his living room murmuring prayers and counting rosary beads with clammy hands. Elio wanted nothing to do with his suit.
Maria’s eyes widened. “How did you know that? It’s nice—I think it’s worth a go. It’ll do you some good to get out of those ratty shorts for once.”
“The hell I’m going to put on Benito’s old getup—” Elio said.
“What did Benito ever do to you?” Maria took the pantleg close to her mouth and bit on a loose, grayish thread. She pulled with her teeth, and the piece of thread slid out from the fabric. “See, it’s easy,” she said through clenched teeth. “We’ll just iron out the hemline and it’s done.”
Hot air pooled around Elio’s temples. He’d had it up the wazoo with hand-me-down suits and people’s old shoes. Hard to believe it, yes—but he still had some dignity. “I’m putting my foot down. I’m not wearing that old man’s suit—that’s that.”
“You’re putting your foot down, really? Please, that’s all we need now, for you to decide to put your foot down. Someone’s died, damn it. This is what you have to wear, Elio Perez. And that’s that,” she said, her eyes tearing up. She slumped her body on a chair and sobbed. The suit martyred like a national hero on her lap. They remained silent for a few seconds, tensely looking each other in the eye.
“Don’t cry, please. Okay, look—okay,” he said, soaking up the coffee with the frayed end of a rag. “I’ll wear the goddamn suit, if it matters so much.” Elio started sweating profusely, as if a water pipe had busted inside him. Beads of sweat slid down his face, neck, and back. “I’ll put it on,” he said again. “Just don’t cry, please.” It never occurred to him that Maria’s tears might have had nothing to do with the suit.
“Where are my hairpins?” she said between sobs, running anxious fingers through her hair as if feeling for nits.
“Look in your bra.” He laughed, hoping to lighten the moment enough to stop her from crying.
“They’re not there,” she said. She stood up, put the suit down on the chair, and walked to the bathroom.
“You don’t need hairpins—you look fine with your hair down.”
“Don’t tell me what I need, Elio—I know damn well what I need,” she shouted back from the bathroom. Her voice already hoarse from crying.
He looked at her, but didn’t respond. Instead, he patted his damp, shaved face with the dry end of the rag and lifted his arms to air-dry his armpits. Not even today could he get a break, he thought. Then he reached into his shorts pocket for the little bag with diazepam.
Maria gazed at her face in the small mirror above the bathroom sink. She didn’t like what she saw.
She grabbed a wet hairpin from a soap dish and dried it with a small rag. Then, she gathered a few gray strands toward the hot heft of her head, leaving some wisps to fall limply around cheekbones. She liked that—more youthful. For once she wished to hear somebody say Maria, you’re so beautiful. Life was hard for her now. Maria had been so smart once she could have been anything—anything at all. “I want to be something great,” she’d told her grandmother once. Her grandmother had shrugged. “Women don’t need to be great,” she’d said. “They just need to be. Stay put. Silence is a virtue, and so is patience.”
Her grandmother was a woman who shut her eyes at night and disappeared. A woman who made do. “That’s what being a woman is about,” Maria could hear her saying. “Being a woman is about sacrifice, about living for your husband, and your children, and your grandchildren. It’s about putting yourself last, so that everything and everyone around you can grow.” Maria had stopped listening then—her grandmother was so often wrong. The face in the mirror, wrinkled and withered, looked so much like her grandmother who had been gone for years. Maria knew it was inevitable that, with each passing day, they’d look more and more alike. Yup, that was her grandmother.
Lifting her shirt, she scooped out one breast from her bra, then the other. They were long, sad, and unimportant, she thought. An enlarged pink areola topped each one like a kippah. Each small nipple a reminder that she’d never breastfed. If at the very least her breasts had kept their shape—even they reminded her of her grandmother’s. Five years ago, she’d found her first gray pubic hair: a milestone, younger, more evolved women would have told her. Well, she refused to let it be, and yanked it—and sure enough, bent on vengeance, it multiplied.
She shoved her breasts back into the bra cups and pulled down her shirt. Maybe it made her younger that she still cared about her breasts all that much. Her eyes gazed again at those other eyes in the mirror. They were blue, too. She laughed. Well, there’s that at least, she thought. She felt a motionless heaviness inside of her that held her in place. She didn’t want to attend Pepe’s funeral. But she would be there, and when the time came to throw a handful of earth onto his grave, he would be dead, and it wouldn’t matter what she looked like.
Looking a long while at a face that was and was not her, for a few seconds, she succumbed to her earlier dream. The most destructive of all dreams: life beyond the island. Chicago.
It was a dream fed by frustration, disillusion, and discontent. A dream she’d first glimpsed in the pages of a Sears fall catalogue, and that, even then, she regarded as the greatest of all dreams—equating it with virtue, and intelligence, and physical beauty. There, en ese norte de todos los nortes, the eyes and lips wrapped themselves around kinder words; and bodies leaned and hooked and probed into each other, making love at odd hours; and machines did what only men could do here, with calloused hands and by force. There, death was death, not exile, not forgetting. There, she’d heard, there was snow, as white and cold and pure as anything she’d ever seen or felt. There, drowning was something that happened in the movies. If she could only discover the secret of there, she could harness it here. Trap it in a glass jar, like a firefly.
To hell with it all, she thought, fixing her hair up like she’d seen in that same fall catalogue so many years before. As far as updos went, that was one of her favorites. A part on the side, with hairpins holding up the whole deal. She looked just like herself. Well, almost just like. She opened the faucet and splashed her face with water. She felt calmer now, refreshed, which was truly an accomplishment, given Pepe’s death along with the island’s current circumstances. All of a sudden, people who already had nothing had even less. No gas, no electricity, no water, no soap, no clothes, no food, no nothing. Perhaps all one could do now was look in the mirror and know that there was someone still there to look back. And that had to be something.
An afternoon thunderstorm erupted on the way to the funeral house. To Elio it was fitting—a sign of defeat on Pepe’s part, he concluded. If Pepe could have had it his way, the sun would have been at its highest on the day of the funeral. Right above Bauta like a reading lamp—except he wouldn’t have been reading. He would have been screwing the living lights out of Celia.
They huddled under one small umbrella—two consecutive broken rods—so that heavy raindrops pelting the canopy plunged from the droopy edge and cascaded onto Elio’s forearm like a waterfall, drenching Benito’s already mangy suit. The rain whooshed, pushed, and gushed over everything with torrential force. Elio looked to Maria’s shoes, a pair of old moccasins with missing tips. Exposed to the elements, her toes huddled together into an irregular triangular shape, stuck out, and touched the wet pavement whenever she pressed on. She pushed Elio right and left when there were puddles ahead. He could see them, he just didn’t care to avoid them. What’s more, it made him feel light and at ease in a queer way whenever his shoe plunged into one, splattering Maria’s legs.
Even though Maria had kept her promise and let the hems out, the pants came up to Elio’s bony ankles. With no socks to speak of, his bare feet squished inside his shoes. He was starting to feel woozy, and everything seemed to slow down. Blinking through a curtain of rain in front of him that now fell ever so slowly, he handed Maria the umbrella and reached out a hand. It all came to a standstill.
“Are you okay?” Maria asked, steadying the umbrella.
“I’m not feeling well.” He closed his eyes for a moment, tuned to the quivering of his eyelids underneath the umbrella. That damn diazepam was playing a number on him. He should have taken one, not two—what the hell was he thinking? One foot before the other, he tightroped his way onward. He thought of the markings on the cave’s wall. There was something to that. It was the realization that, like the markings, life was multiform and multiple and utterly incomprehensible. It wasn’t a fixed point on the horizon, but a scribble we were meant to decipher. A book that took the form, the color, and the tone of the reader. A fish, impossible to grasp, because it’s always, always slipping away. He was glad he never had the chance to tell Pepe about it. What did Pepe know about markings, and fish, and everything else that drove Elio crazy each time he went into that cave to stare at a goddamn wall?
But he, Elio Perez, was made of a different mettle entirely. He, a kind of Cuban Quixote, trudging through a flooded Sierra Morena, with Dulcinea by the hand. Thrusting into the air with his lance. Rocinante and Sancho doggy-paddling up ahead on their way to the Island of Barataria. “Master,” Sancho calling to him somewhere in the horizon. “You kept your promise! I see the island—I see it!”
Elio’s head swooned with Sancho’s every word. “I see it too—yes, I see it,” he mumbled. He pulled Dulcinea closer to him, and thrust his lance forward again. “Do not flee, cowards and vile creatures, for it’s just one knight attacking you!”
“What in God’s name is wrong with you? We’re not there yet,” Maria said, taking hold of the umbrella again. It had tipped forward so far and no longer served its purpose.
Elio felt dizzy, sleepy, and confused. He wished he could put his head down on something. Benito’s suit, now soaking wet, clung to his body. It made him feel heavy and clumsy.
Maria was silent, again—she must have been boycotting the rain, he thought. Because perhaps rain on the day of a funeral was too much to bear. Because rain on the day of a friend’s last day above ground meant much more than on any other day.
They reached the park. Bauta’s bell tower, the same one he’d once climbed to and where he’d once forgotten his Don Quixote, loomed above them. To Elio, it seemed to spin in all directions, like a mad weathercock, or blades on a windmill. He wished the bells were tolling now. If there was a time for tolling, it was today. The park was empty, but Elio imagined people hiding in bushes, behind benches, atop the high branches of trees. There were others, too—he just couldn’t see them. They were there to keep tabs on his whereabouts, to make a record of his every move. They were there to remind him that just as the therapist had predicted, things would get worse for him from that point forward.
They passed the Carretera Central, la de la Rosa, the one that led to El Cayo. A few people watched the rain from their porches. They smoked and talked in low voices, but stopped to watch Elio and Maria drift by. At the corner, the old Bar de Enrique, now the pizzeria, was closed for the day. A wet paper, hanging by a corner on the door, alerted that it would reopen after the funeral.
Daria’s Funeral Home stood between the large wooden gate to the Baya de Gallos and Sira and Francisco’s house. The gate opened to a long passage, and concluded in a large, quadrangular patio that Basilio used for cockfights. How Sira allowed such gruesome battles in her own backyard, Elio couldn’t fathom. She’d been everyone’s preschool teacher, including his. A damn good one. Didn’t make them like that anymore. The only one who’d ever understood him, really. Through a haze, he remembered Francisquito, Carlito, and Ilda, now somewhere in Miami. Everyone gone. Why they didn’t have funerals for them too, he couldn’t understand. He hadn’t seen or heard from them since 1982—as far as he knew, they had also drowned.
Across from the funeral home was Antonio Guerra’s old home. Antonio was gone, too. This time, though, not to Miami, but to a place Elio wasn’t sure existed—much less for suicides. He’d been a music teacher at La Escuela de Berto, and Pepe’s elementary school friend. But because Antonio gave up, and because he didn’t leave a note behind, Pepe, who’d never really been the grudge-holding type, refused to forgive him.
“I need to get my face wet,” Elio finally told Maria, sticking his head out of the umbrella, and letting the raindrops cascade down his cheeks. He wiped his face with a sleeve. It made him feel better.
“Have you been drinking, Elio Perez?” She turned Elio’s face toward her with a wet hand.
“Yes, whiskey—lots of it,” he said with a chuckle.
“This is not the time for jokes, you know that?” She looked straight ahead. “Try to not be yourself when we get there, okay?”
“I’ll do my best.” He slumped his shoulders and pulled down on Benito’s pants. They were so far up his shins now, he might as well have been wearing Bermuda shorts.
By the time they reached the funeral home, Elio’s muscles were twitching, and his breathing was shallow.
The two large entrance doors were closed. Sheltered by the roof’s overhang, Maria closed the umbrella, and shook it. A lot of good it’d done them—they were soaked. Benito’s suit had been through the ringer, and Elio’s shoes spurted out water with each step he took. Maria’s gray skirt clung to her thighs, her beige slip sticking out on one side, like a saggy tongue.
“You’re scaring me,” Maria said. “Let me fix you a little. I think you were right, this suit’s too small for you.” She pulled down on his wet sleeves, and patted down the hair around his bald spot. “I love you, okay?” she said, as if she needed to hear herself say it out loud.
“I know. I’m just not feeling well.”
She pushed on the handle and opened one of the doors. Elio paused to let her go in first, but she pushed a soft elbow into his ribs, and he went in ahead of her. Closing the door behind them, the rain seemed to stop. Cigar smoke and incense in the room turned his stomach. People who’d known Pepe for years packed the room. Elio and Maria looked around for a place to sit. There were a few empty seats in the last row. Excusing themselves, they sidled sideways down the row and into their seats. They ended up staring at the backs of heads and a giant wooden cross hanging on the wall at the end of the aisle, between two small wreaths of white carnations and yellow paper flowers, each with a purple bow at the center. In the middle was Pepe’s open casket, toward which a long ribbon of folks scuffled their way.
“Not even flowers,” Maria said. She set the umbrella beside her and tucked the slip in under her skirt with nervous fingers. She was right, there were very few flowers. Besides the wreaths, there were a few roses in purple plastic vases, but no carnations. “Some,” Elio said.
“They’re probably plastic.”
No sooner had they sat down than Elio started fidgeting in his seat. He didn’t want to be there. He’d been wrong—he didn’t want to see Pepe’s body. Or to be reminded of his mother’s own dead body. To know what Pepe looked like dead, all he had to do was close his eyes and remember his mother, and he didn’t want to do that. Not now, not there, and not with all these people around.
“What’s the matter now?” Maria said.
“I can’t take this kind of thing. I’m leaving.”
“You sit your ass down, Elio Perez. Sit your ass down, or I’ll nail it down to the chair for you.”
Elio stared at Maria. But, instead of saying anything, he stayed put. It was impossible to fight everyone at once, and much less Maria. A cramp tightened his chest, and he felt dizzy again. His hands were clammy and shaky.
“I don’t feel good,” he told her. But she looked straight ahead and listened intently to the service. She had tears in her eyes. Did Maria still have feelings for Pepe? Elio thought, then decided it’d be best to let it go.
After the service, Isabelita came up to them, a mustache of perspiration glistening on her upper lip. Circles of sweat dampening the underarms of her brown shirt—low cut enough that when she leaned over to kiss him, Elio turned his eyes away to avoid seeing into her bra.
“You have to see him,” she said, large silver hoops dangling near her neck. “Dale, c’mon.” Pulling on their hands like a tug-of-war. “He’s so handsome. Mimi went all out with his face—doesn’t look swollen at all, you know.”
“Who talks like that?” Elio whispered into Maria’s ear. She pretended not to hear him, giving up instead to Isabelita’s pull and sitting closer to the edge of her seat, which wouldn’t help her much, Elio thought—she would still be sitting in the back row.
A small crowd gathered around Pepe’s coffin at the end of the room. Everyone crying, hugging, leaning on each other’s shoulders for support. Everyone was there, even the bodeguero. Descarao, Elio thought. Goddamn hypocrites, they turn him in one day, and mourn him the next.
As Elio might have expected, there were lots of women. Some sat in corners smoking in silence, or rummaged for handkerchiefs in their own or other women’s purses, or doubled over with sobs. In fact, there were more women than men—that was certain. Then it suddenly occurred to him that nobody had thought of telling Celia.
“Nobody’s called Celia,” Elio said. “Pepe would have wanted that.”
Maria shrugged. “Not my place to call anybody,” she said.
Elio let it go. Maria might have been right; it wasn’t her place to call. Perhaps a friend of Celia had called already. In any case, Pepe would have wanted somebody to tell her. Elio had called Pepe’s mother in Tampa, which had been hard enough. Not only had the poor woman not seen her son in nearly thirty-five years, now she’d never see him again.
“I did. I called her—her sister gave me her number,” Isabelita said, giving Maria a side glance and lifting her chin to the ceiling. Growing taller momentarily. “We’re too far from the coffin. To get a good look at him, you gotta get closer.”
Maria stood up and Elio followed her. Holding on to Maria’s hand, he felt queasy again. His palm, as cold and clammy as a frog’s back against her warm skin. Isabelita led them through the crowd, pushing, elbowing, and nudging until they were right in front of the coffin.
“Ta-rá!” she said, her arms opened wide in the air like she’d just nailed a difficult landing. “Doesn’t he look fabulous?” She shook Maria’s shoulders. But Maria didn’t respond. She stared at Pepe’s face, her eyes welling up with tears.
From Isabelita’s words alone, Elio concluded that Celia had been the wrong woman to fall in love with.
Women gathered around him, dark eyes lined in black, circling his body like moths around a light bulb. There was pointing at his face. “The makeup artist did a damn good job hiding the pockmarks,” some said. Or, “Take a look at his hair—nice, right?” Isabelita combed it herself.” Others, the older ones, perked up their breasts before coming closer, as if Pepe could appreciate their immeasurable fullness from his coffin. They marveled at the breadth and width of his chest, his large hands, the girth of his thighs. Spellbound by his mouth-watering, jaw-dropping bulge. Isabelita even said that she’d never seen a more beautiful drowned man than Pepe—and God only knew she’d seen many. Elio moved to the side to get out of the way of the women.
“I can’t take this,” Maria said, her hand over her mouth. She sobbed, “I have to go, Elio—I don’t want to see this.” Shoving her way past the crowd, Maria edged back to the entrance, forgetting to take her umbrella. Within seconds, she was gone. She’d disappeared behind the door.
Perhaps Maria had noticed Pepe’s cracked lips underneath the pinkish lip gloss, or the sloppy stitching beneath it, or his fingers stiff as paddleboards against his thighs.
Elio didn’t attempt to register what had just taken place. His eyes followed Maria’s path through the crowd. Isabelita walked after her.
“Oye, compadre, glad you showed up—what’s with the little sailor suit?” someone close by said. Was it Pepe? “You okay, man?” He should sit down. Elio swooned. He couldn’t identify a single voice. He heard a saxophone belt out a familiar whining—Charlie Parker, perhaps? Or something else entirely. Maybe this was what happened when a man approached death, a kind of dizziness. Elio straightened his spine to steady himself and fixed his eyes on Pepe.
“You’re a son of a bitch, you know that,” he said to Pepe’s corpse. “A real son of a bitch. First you go and betray me, then you drown yourself to avoid an apology. You have some balls, Pepe Fernández.”
“Elio,” Isabelita whispered. Her warm breath blooming in his ear. “People can hear you—they’re gonna end up asking you to leave. Pay your respects and go.”
“I can’t stand being in here another minute.” Elio turned away from the coffin. He couldn’t make out her face. There were so many faces around him. He imagined himself in one of those paintings where one face merges into another, then another. All he had to do was squint, and they would all vanish. He felt his vision drifting away.
“So why the hell are you here?” Her breath heated up his ear. He swayed. She tried to steady him by the shoulders, but his legs buckled under him, and he fell on the floor with a thud. On his side, like a capsized blue and white sailing boat.