Hi Lucia, Just wanted to give you a heads up, I’m sending a package for Essy to your city address. We were back in NYC last week. Stefan brought Rafael, so I played tour guide. Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, Central Park, the museums, all of it! We even went to a hardcore punk show at an art space on Rivington Street, which ended up being mortifying for Rafi, dad and stepmom in tow (equally mortifying for us—well, he is into that kind of music and too young for CBGB’s!). But you know the one thing he actually did like? Chinatown. Kosher vegetarian mock-meat dim sum! Only in New York!
Anyway, we were in the East Village, even stopped into Yonah’s store. It looks different now, but Chaka and Noemie were there. They have three boys now! And I found this sundress for Essy at one of those cute new boutiques. Couldn’t resist. I do miss New York. “Querencia,” is that the word? Or “saudade?”
Are you all right? Please take care of yourself. Your health is very important! :-) Jie
Hardcore punk show? CBGB’s? Jie? She finds herself irritated by this message, something in it forced, desperate. The sight of Yonah’s name irks her, too, weighs her down, like a lump of meat sitting undigested in her belly. She cannot indulge in a trip down memory lane right now.
She bangs out a reply:
Dear Jie, I’ll watch for the package. Thanks. I’m fine. L.
Hi LuluBird, How’s your crazy commute? Sorry can’t really write, have papers to grade and kids have been waking up 2x every night. Natey screams his head off even if I bring him into my mind. Ha ha, did I just say mind?? I meant bed. Miss you crazy eights. When you coming for a visit? Nipa.
Hi Nipa, I’ve actually rented a room in the city now, on top of a café where all the expats hang out. It’s like part action, part cave.
She taps her fingers distractedly on the table.
Miss you. Hard to believe it’s been almost a year and a half. Can that be right? Feels like forever but also no time at all. L.
• • •
She is neither this nor that. Here nor there.
Here, she socializes with teenagers half her age. In the campo, it’s his. His land, his house, his family. If he is in a generous mood, he might say it’s theirs. But nothing is really hers. Even their casita is marked, with Mami’s flowery ruffle curtains, with the perfume of another girl. Only this small room in Cuenca, where she has deliberately selected solid blue sheets and a dark green bedspread, can she call her own, and on the wall above the bed she has started to decorate, taped up photos and pictures snipped from magazines, all the most beautiful things: a glass flower, a mountain vista, hazy fog over London, a pair of Venezuelan waterfalls. In the density of the city, she feels alone. In the open space of the campo, she feels constricted, the eyes of his family ever upon her.
There is always another party, another birthday, another quince, another engagement, another celebration of another saint. And the music louder, the men drunker, the women nosier: What’s this, I hear, about Lucia living in Cuenca? Cuenca? But isn’t Lucia standing over there by the Jell-O? She lives in Cuenca? No, no, she travels to Cuenca. By bus. For work. For work? She works for some gringo newspaper. In Cuenca? For this a woman travels alone? Cuenca, it could be Mars.
She is not resentful by nature. She dances bachata with the tíos, sits politely with the women, doles out cake and Jell-O to the neighbors. She is not resentful by nature. But about Manny, this is where she starts to fray.
• • •
At night, when she feels his eyes upon her as she brushes her teeth and rinses and spits and thinks back to their conversations about the business they once said they would start together, the house they said they would build, and in the mornings when she is gardening and glimpses the exterior of their casita which he and Essy have taken on as a project, painstakingly painting a white rabbit on one side, clouds, a blue sky, and in the afternoons when he is watching futbol with his cousins or talking futbol with his cousins or playing futbol with his cousins, and in the evenings when he is watching telenovelas in the kitchen, she finds herself wondering: How is it he finds time for such things but never has the time to build an outhouse, and meanwhile, she still must shit in the woods?
She has asked, repeatedly, and then she stopped asking, and then she started asking again, and always the same answer, over the course of the year. I’ll get to it. About this particular detail, the outhouse, is where she starts to fray.
One evening she storms outside, grabs a shovel from the garden, starts throwing dirt. She can dig. She need not wait for a man. If he will not do it, she will do it herself.
He comes after her.
“Are you all right?” he says.
“I’m fine,” she says. “I’m working. See?”
He narrows his eyes. “Lucia,” he says. Slow and steady as pavement. “You need to take care of yourself.”
Jie’s words. Always Jie. Like a shadow.
“Shut up,” she says sharply.
“We don’t have the same kinds of hospitals here. You get sick here, I don’t know how to help you. You get sick here, you stay loco for the rest of your life.”
Her blood, electric. She throws down her shovel. Bites her lip, walks away.
The next day she is back in the city again, and in the evening she does not go for pollo con fritas and colas with the interns though they beg her to join. She returns to her small bed in her small room, looks up through her dramatic French doors, to the night sky too cloudy for stars. She is hot. Itchy. Fresh mosquito bites have risen on her ankles, she digs in her nails with little relief. Heavy trucks roar by, axles shake her bones, smells of grease and salt mixed with cigar smoke roil her belly. It is so overwhelming she wants to shut the French doors. But then she’d be locked in a cave. So she lies next to her window, allowing the diesel fumes of the city buses to assault her nose, clog and contaminate her lungs. She coughs. Reaches between her legs, fingers deft, brings herself to orgasm. Still, she feels unsatisfied, strangely aroused, so again and again, and then lulled to sleep by the raspy sounds of German and tireless American twang: “Well, in America, we ___ .” When she wakes, she feels something inside her like a venom, a flare in her chest, a burning sensation just beneath her skin. The serpents. A thought flickers. She extinguishes it. When she slows her breath to listen, the air is quiet. It is only her.
But back in the campo, new frictions, even as Manny finally builds the outhouse (which he and Essy paint a bright purple). There’s the volume of the television. Muddy boots. A rake left in the garden that gets stolen overnight. And then money—how much they should contribute for all the meals they now take at Mami’s when Lucia is away. He accuses her of neglect, missing his second cousin’s quince. He says she doesn’t appreciate his family, his mother. She is shocked. She loves Mami. She has always tried to be polite.
“You don’t even cook anymore,” he says.
“What?”
It’s true. Because he never wants to eat her food. All those Sunday soups and stews she finds three days later, sitting untouched on the stovetop. It’s a woman’s humiliation.
“You could help Mami with the cooking,” he says, coldly. “At least when you’re around.”
Her face grows hot. She feels stupid, ashamed.
One night, she dreams she is a clog, a tangle of lint and dirt and hair jammed in the curve of a drainpipe. One night, she dreams she is a black and tan puppy, lost in a bullring, begging for directions to the East Village.
I must do something.
She, Lucia Bok, is a doer of things. Like Ma.
• • •
It comes to her through a series of coincidences. Signs, you could say.
One night she is lying in her small bed in her small room, staring up at the night sky. From the café tables below, bits and tangles of conversation drift and rise. A shaman cleansed my soul. Have you tried it?
The next day it happens at the office. One of the interns asks if she knows anything about the plant medicine retreats in the jungle. The ones run by shamans. No, but she overheard some tourists talking. Why do you ask? she says. I thought it might make a good article, he says, so earnest.
It happens the third time at the farmacia, when she stops in to buy vitamins. Ana Maria smiles, they exchange pleasantries—cómo está?—and she mentions nothing of the itch under her skin or the burn in her chest, but today, quietly, respectfully, Ana Maria asks if, not to intrude or anything, but only as a suggestion, a matter of curiosity, if she is interested, she would like to visit a curandero.
No, not a shaman, not the ones in the jungle. A curandero. A traditional medicine man, a healer. Here in Cuenca. She could refer her to such a person.
Three coincidences. This adds up to a sign. She feels grateful, blessed, calm once more, as the recipient of the universe’s guidance.
• • •
The consultorio is located on a quiet side street in an inconspicuous, unmarked house. In the waiting room, a shrine to the Virgin Mary, a glass case displaying foreign perfumes (Jōvan, Lancôme, Chanel), another with packages of vitamins and other Western medicines. The curandero must be close to her in age, but the skin of his face is loose, jowly, his nose and chin protrude with a shine. A witch. No, a gnome. But wearing a crown of red feathers and a white button-down shirt with decorative stitching, a bit pirate-like, stained with sweat at the armpits. Yet there is something about this man she instinctively trusts, some spark of kindness. He greets her in his office.
“I am Don Gonzalo. What brings you here?” he asks.
He asks many questions. About her habits and routines, her sleep and meals and bowel movements, her dreams and daily stresses. He observes her carefully—her eyes, her neck, her hands, her feet, as if he knows it is too easy to lie with words.
“Debilidad,” he says. A general weakness due to spiritual intrusions. He will perform a ritual cleansing, a limpieza.
She sits on a low stool, close to the floor. He fetches a large sprig of dried herbs, bound together like a feather duster. She closes her eyes, hears the rustle of leaves, the flurry of air as he fans and beats it over her head while emitting high-pitched chirps. He spits into his hands. Touches her hair. Then he passes two eggs over her body and chants. To expel the malevolent spirits from her body, he later explains. He lights a tall candle. Rings a bell, inhales a puff of cigarette, blows the smoke into her mouth. Then he swigs from a bottle of spirits. One minute she smells the alcohol, the next she feels a spray on her face. For a moment she hovers outside herself, envisions the scene through her daughter’s eyes. Mama, why is that man dusting you? He wraps her head with a towel. Swigs. Blows flame. Like a dragon, Mama! Her eyes clench shut instinctively. Heat roars up her back. But there is no fear. No doubt. Only faith.
When the ceremony is over, he presses a small crystal into her hand, a talisman for strength, and prescribes her a tonic, seven drops to be taken in a glass of water twice a day.
As she walks back toward the café, she feels emptied, restored. She marvels at the patterns in the cobblestone sidewalk, admires the large, colorful houses, their stalwart gates. Even the shards of glass on top of the security walls seem to radiate a friendly glint.
She returns to him.
The next time, she asks about his family. He has five children. The youngest, a boy of sixteen, studies the traditional ways. And the others? she asks. The others go their own ways, he says.
The next time, she asks if she may ask him more questions. She works for the gringo newspaper, she explains.
He is a modest, private man. Not exciting for the gringos. The tourists, they want to know about the exotic, the mystical, not what he sees with his eyes.
What does he see with his eyes? she asks.
The bluntness of his answer surprises her.
“You are unhappy,” he says. “You keep things inside. You cannot find peace with all these things trapped inside, like a poison. Like this, you will not find the correct path.”
Trapped? Poison?
She is annoyed, practically offended, by these words she finds both trite and vague. But she presses him. What, then, is the correct path? she asks.
“Ay, Chinita,” he says, smiling. “You are not ready. When you are ready, you will let go, find the ties that bind. Only then can you find the path.”
Ready?
She has moved across an ocean to find the path. The new path. The new air. The new life, untethered to the complications of her past. The life of her own creation.
She returns to her daughter, whose skinny brown arms encircle her neck, who laughs and shouts and screams and cries. Wild and free, Essy is full of joy. She disappears again with the shepherd girls into the campo.
This is happiness.
That afternoon, she and Manny sit together quietly on the stoop outside the casita.
“Where does she go?” she asks.
“She has friends,” he says.
She lets out a sigh.
He echoes it. Spits out a mouthful of watermelon seeds, turns to go inside.
At night, they lie under the mosquito net, Essy asleep between them. She reaches over, puts her hand on his chest. He grunts, turns away.
In the city, she lies in her small bed in her small room, mulling over the curandero’s words. Unhappy. Trapped inside. The ties that bind.
• • •
Ma, what happened to Ba?
Your father died in an accident.
What kind of accident?
A car accident.
But you loved him, you really loved him. Didn’t you, Ma?
I did, Xiao-mei. Once, I did.
• • •
And then she thinks: I don’t love him. I have never loved him. And love is everything. It is as simple as this, and she cannot think why it seemed so complicated before. The ties that bind. There is only one man she has ever loved.
She can hardly remember what it looked like, that shabby apartment in the East Village. Twin mattress on the floor of the living room, security monitors where she watched the store. Why did she leave him in the first place?
Then it comes to her. I gave up love for a baby, traded my soul mate for a child. She is shocked, ashamed that she has put this into words. These words. Bad words. Hurtful, like racial slurs, words that should not be thought at all and certainly never voiced. A mother loves her child unconditionally, without regret. But now encapsulated in words, that tinge of resentment ignites a physical pain, like something in her gut has caught fire. It rises, shoots up to inflame her esophagus, throat, coat her tongue, so she rolls it into a bolus and shoves it back but it lodges in her tonsils and she hacks and hacks until it pops back up and again she must swallow it down. For a few hours she clutches her belly, lies prone in her bed. It gets worse, it gets better, it gets worse. Perhaps it has been weeks, months, years, she has been swallowing it down and her throat, her esophagus, her mouth, even her teeth, now hurt from the effort. The curandero, he is right.
• • •
She yearns to hear his voice. But she doesn’t know where he is. Somewhere in Israel. She has his old cell phone number and sometimes when she’s at the office she dials it discreetly and it rings but then an automated voice clicks on. Sometimes it informs her there are technical issues with the number. Temporarily out of service. Other days it says the mailbox is full. Sometimes it rings and rings. It makes no sense at all.
There must be some way to find him. Of course there is. She has always been resourceful, she can track him down, even if he is in Israel. But if she has to try too hard, perhaps it’s the universe’s way of telling her this isn’t to be. She doesn’t believe in God, but she believes in a natural order, a higher directive, to be gleaned and mulled and acted upon. In this way, she and Manny differ. His desires remain inert, stuck in his heart. There is a word for this, a beautiful word that unfurls from the tongue: velleity. The weakest form of volition. A mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it. This has never been her way. But the time must be right. Needs must be aligned. Perhaps they were misaligned in the past, perhaps that was why their relationship fell apart. This time, she is determined, it will not fail.