The Empty Shoes

GOSH! WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN? Heaven knows.... A while back, no date I can remember—everything was always so much the same that it was really difficult to distinguish one month from the next. Oh, but January was different. You know, January is the month of the upitos and the bellflowers, but it is also the month when the Three Wise Men pay us a visit.

The grass by the window was tall enough for their horses, and my shoes, a little bashful because they had holes in their tips, were there, waiting, openmouthed and a bit damp with evening dew.

It will soon be midnight.

“They will come after you’re asleep,” my cousin had whispered in a confidential tone. “And they will leave your gifts on top of the shoes.” When I am asleep! But I couldn’t fall asleep, I was hearing the crickets chirping outside, and I thought I heard steps too; but no, it was not them.

To sleep. I had to fall asleep, but how? My shoes were there on the windowsill, waiting.

I have to think about something else so I can fall asleep. Yes, that’s it, I’ll think about something else: “Tomorrow we have to trim the flight feathers and fill the water tank. After that I’ll go by the brook and bring back a basket of honey berries. . . . I should not have brought down that nest that had two naked baby birds with gaping beaks and a look of fear in their eyes. . . .”

I woke up. It was so early that only a few scant rays of light were coming through the window. Almost blindly I walked to the window. How many surprises, I thought, were awaiting me. . . . But no. I touched the moist leather of my shoes: they were empty, completely empty.

Then my mother came and kissed me in silence, caressed my wet eyes with hands tired of washing dishes, nudged me softly to the edge of the bed, and slipped the shoes on my feet. “Come,” she whispered then, “the coffee is ready.” Then I went out and got soaked with dew. I had some flight feathers to trim.

Everything was so beautiful outside. So many bellflowers. So many of them you could walk over them without stepping on the earth, and so many upito flowers covering the ground that you couldn’t see the holes in my shoes anymore.

Havana, 1963