NATASHA IS MY GIRLFRIEND. SOMETIMES I love her. Sometimes I don’t think of her at all. When I met her she had a broken leg. I was visiting my friend Abel, who sells mobile phone minutes and lives down the hall from her in a building behind the Capitolio. I heard her crying, calling for anyone. I thought it was an old woman who’d fallen, but when I pushed the door open I saw a girl, maybe twenty-five, standing like an ibis on one leg, leaning on a metal crutch, her other leg bent and floating in a plaster cast. The stray crutch lay meters from her reach across the broken tile floor.
She looked angry even though I was there to help her. I stepped into her apartment, saw she was alone, picked up the crutch, and handed it to her. She slipped it under her arm and thanked me. I asked her how she got around. Her place was on the fifth floor, and there was no elevator.
“I’ve been up here for two months.”
“Alone?”
“My mother lives here, but she works during the day.”
I asked her name, and she told me Natasha, embarrassed the way we of our generation are to have Russian names.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “My name is Vladimir.
When I returned a week later to buy more minutes for my phone from Abel, I knocked on Natasha’s door and it cracked open. Later she admitted there was no lock and no money to buy one, so at night she and her mother pushed a dresser in front of it. She was sitting on a sofa with mahogany legs, upholstered in a ripping flesh-colored silk, bulges of cushion tissue and bone frame exposed. Her casted calf was propped on a pillow mound atop the glass coffee table. She sat surrounded by books and said she only ever got up to go use the bathroom and to make herself something to eat.
“Don’t you get lonely up here, Natasha?”
She shrugged.
“How did you break your leg?”
“It was stupid. Un mal paso. I was dancing with a bad dancer. He made me slip.”
I was standing so she had to look up at me, trying to decide if she should let herself smile.
“I’ll come and see you again,” I told her.
She said nothing, but I could see in her eyes that she liked the idea. And so I kept coming, every time I needed a new phone card, and sometimes in between, and Natasha would invite me to sit on the sofa beside her and would offer only a few sentences. I could see she was depressed in that dark apartment, subject to the shadows of the Capitolio and the noise of its endless restoration, drills and hammers on stone, with not even a television to keep her company because theirs had burned out years ago and there was no money and no man to take it to be fixed.
I asked Abel what he knew about her. He’s a writer like me. We met at the university where we both studied journalism. Abel writes small pieces for Granma and for an anonymous underground newspaper that gets published on USB sticks and passed around Havana once a month. He also sells black market phone cards. He says I need a side negocio. I don’t even have a government job. This is why I never have money.
“If I get a job, I won’t have time to write my novels,” I say.
“What novels, Vladi? You haven’t written even one.”
Abel said Natasha had an older sister who died from an infection and a father who left for Santo Domingo and was never heard from again. Her mother works as a cashier at the Carlos Tercero shopping center. He said Natasha reads a lot of books, though she didn’t study in the university, and until she broke her leg she had worked as a niñera taking care of the children of a military family in Cubanacán.
“What about the guy she was dancing with when she broke her leg? Was he her boyfriend?”
“¿De qué hablas, Vladi? She wasn’t dancing. Nata never goes out with anyone. She broke it when she fell down the stairs. A neighbor found her on the landing between the second and third floor.”
Natasha didn’t have anyone to take her to have her cast removed, so I offered. We left her crutches at home, and I carried her down the stairs all the way to Dragones for the botero lines. We found a shared taxi going down Zanja in the direction of the clinic and sat together in the back of that green Ford, our legs pressed together as other passengers climbed in beside us. It was somewhere around La Rampa that I decided I wanted to kiss her. We passed Coppelia, and she looked out the window, past me, licking her lips, saying when she could walk on her own she’d go there for her first ice cream of the summer. I kissed her mouth. The woman on Natasha’s other side looked away. The driver watched us from the mirror. Natasha’s lips were still, but she didn’t pull away. I kissed her many more times, and when I paused she stared at me, but we were quiet until we arrived at our stop, and again I carried her, from the road and into the clinic.
When the doctor liberated her leg from the plaster, it was pale and thin compared to her other calf, which was golden and muscular. Natasha was embarrassed. The doctor made her practice walking. She was uncertain and wobbled and held my arm tight. The doctor said she had to be careful. Her ankle would be delicate for some time. She should not walk on Havana’s cobblestones and uneven roads alone, he said.
“You take care of her,” he told me as we left that day.
Natasha held my arm like a security bar, and I watched her every step in and out of the taxi back to the Capitolio. When we came to her building, she walked on her own to the corner in front of the Teatro Campoamor where some men were stealing sheet metal from the barricades.
“Let’s go in,” she said, and I followed her, because I was just meeting this Natasha of enthusiasm and with wildness in her eyes.
We walked past the street thieves, the walls of garbage, and into the theater through a gap that had been ripped through the wooden door blocks. Everyone knew a famous eccentric squatted on the theater’s upper floors. From Abel’s apartment you could see the guy’s laundry hanging from string across what used to be theater balconies. Natasha led me in, and we were at the base of the old theater’s concrete horseshoe, overgrown with plants, even trees, and I thought of my grandmother’s old stories about the place, where she’d come to hear her first zarzuela when Havana was still grand and beautiful, before its shredding and abandonment and exodus.
Here, the balconies were lined with pigeons, and the orchestra seats, long looted, were occupied by a clan of bony cats. Natasha, still holding me for support, slipped both her arms around me, pressed her chest against mine, and kissed me. We were there so long I managed to lift up her shirt and slide my hands under her skirt and into her panties, but then we heard voices from somewhere in the theater and Natasha lost her balance, so I helped her cover up and took her home.
I have another girlfriend name Lily. She lives with her daughter in the apartment her husband left them in three years ago, in the building next to mine just off Línea in Vedado. I live with my parents. They didn’t see the point of having more than one child. They didn’t have the room for a bigger family. They sleep in the one bedroom in our apartment. I sleep on a mattress in a corner of the living room that my mother also uses to give therapeutic massages to private clients though she was educated in Moscow to be a physicist. My father is a cardiologist. He’s hoping to get sent on a doctor exchange to Angola or Brazil so he can defect and get us out of here.
Lily doesn’t care for books. She thinks it’s funny that I want to write them. She wants to fuck almost all the time, even if her daughter is in the next room, and even if her daughter walks in halfway through because she’s hungry, Lily doesn’t want to stop. She got sterilized, so she says she’s making up for all her condom years. She’s thirty-five. I’m twenty-seven. Lily’s face is hard from sun and smoking Hollywoods, and her hair is thin and limp like thread. Her body is lumpy; her stomach, a rumpled pillowcase. Somehow she’s still beautiful. Sometimes even more beautiful than Natasha, who is lean and pointy, sharp shoulders, elbows, and hips, a smooth face as if carved of clay. Sometimes when I’m with Lily, I miss Natasha desperately. Other times I get a feeling of revenge. I speak to her in my mind as I lick Lily’s body and say, You see, Nata, you don’t own me after all.
I am with Lily when Natasha thinks I am writing. This is why she doesn’t call or come looking for me. She wants me to be productive. I don’t even have to convince her to give me the time and space. She read some pages I wrote a long time ago even though I said they were new. She thinks I’m talented. She believes I can be a great writer. I told her the novel I am writing is about love and mystery and the agony of existence. In my mind, my book is all these things, but the truth is I haven’t written more than a few sentences. Natasha says it will be the greatest novel ever written. She says they will publish it everywhere and I will be invited around the world to talk about it and be given medals and honors and will meet important people who will think me brilliant. I have already told her I love her, so I know she thinks she will be coming with me on all these journeys.
Natasha has no money for books, but she is friends with all the dealers at the Plaza de Armas who let her borrow their used copies for a week or two, and then she returns them with a smile and a pastry or a candy or even just a kiss on the cheek. They like Natasha because she will sit for hours with them in the shade of the plaza and talk about Barnet or Padura and tell them the man she loves is also a great writer and one day soon his novel will be the most sought-after title on the island.
Here in La Habana Vieja, with her newly borrowed books tucked into her bag, Natasha is tough, confident of her steps, no longer afraid she will twist her ankle. When a shirtless boy of ten or eleven approaches her slowly, eyeing her, then, just as they pass each other on the sidewalk, the boy reaches behind her and slaps her ass with an open palm, Natasha is quicker than he anticipates, grabbing his wrist before he can run off, holding him in place as he kicks and tries to flee. But Natasha slaps him with her free hand, demands to know where his mother is, and vows not to release her grip until the little cochino takes Natasha to his mami and confesses his crime. Here, Natasha doesn’t need me.
Lily doesn’t have to work because her husband sends money from Tampa. He works for a moving company and is saving to bring Lily and her daughter over or maybe just enough to come back and live better. Sometimes she gives me a bit of fula, and I use it to take Natasha out. We go to Coppelia, wait on line for whatever disgusting flavor they have that day. Sometimes we go to a movie at the Yara or to Casa de la Música and Natasha presses close against me in the crowd as we watch a band perform. Then I take her home, and while her mother sleeps, Natasha sneaks me into her room. She always pretends she’s making a great sacrifice by taking me to bed, like she’s an angel and I’m a devil, not like she’s enjoying it, though she doesn’t hide her faces or conceal her moans. But she makes me work for it every time. Not like Lily, who never wears underwear, who doesn’t have to be convinced of anything.
“When are you going to let me read your book?” Natasha asks every now and then when we are in bed together. It’s enough to make me want to get up and leave.
“You know I’m a perfectionist. I don’t want anyone to see it until it’s ready.”
Her friend, who works at a papelería, stole some notebooks for me because Natasha asked her to. I don’t have a computer. Not even a typewriter. I had one, but the ink ribbon ran out and I can’t find replacements anywhere. I write in notebooks. Natasha thinks I have dozens full of my writing, but it’s more like three or four. In my mind I see stories I want to write, I hear the sentences, see each phrase come together like pearls on a string, but when it comes time to write them, they evaporate, and I’m left in the four corners of my room, my mother working on some bare body under a towel; or I’m in Lily’s apartment, her daughter talking to one of the dolls her father sent from Florida; Lily, cooking a meal, humming some old tune, smelling of me under her clothes. If I were a better writer, a real writer, I would know how to make Natasha or Lily my muse. But I can’t even do that.
Natasha’s mother is small and fat in the way of most mothers around here. My own mother has stayed thin by kneading people’s bodies all day, and my father hates this because he says people think he can’t afford to feed her, which is mostly true. He earns too little. It’s mamá’s job that lets us eat beyond the Libreta de Abastecimiento, buy imported food at the markets, African fish and Chinese chicken. Natasha’s mother is shaped like a frijol, with curly hair dyed tomato red, a woman who looks like a meal.
She tells Natasha not to read so much. She tells her that instead of babysitting, she should work on seducing one of the husbands who employ her so that she can blackmail him into sending her away to Miami or Madrid. Natasha can’t help confessing these things to me. In the beginning, I could hardly get her to speak, but now I can’t keep her quiet. She wants me to know all her secrets. I hush her with kisses, try to silence her with caresses, opening her legs, letting her feel me, but she wants to talk, every time. I tell her I love her, but that sometimes only fills her with suspicion.
“How can you love me when there’s still so much you don’t know about me?”
“We don’t need to know everything about each other, Nata. I love the you I know.”
This is the wrong thing to say.
“What do you mean there are things we don’t know about each other?”
Nata thinks herself too intellectual to be jealous, so I know she won’t allow herself to ask me about other women since I’ve given her no evidence.
“We have our whole lives to discover each other,” I say. “But we only have an hour until your mother gets home from work.”
Natasha’s mother thinks I’m too poor for her daughter. But she likes that I come off as ambitious. Writers and artists and musicians can do well for themselves in this country if they make a name abroad. That’s what Natasha tells her mother. I’m going to be famous, and Nata is going to be my pillar and raise our children. Just as soon as I finish my novel we will get married, she tells her mother. That line came from me.
Once, my mother said, “I don’t think I approve of you having two girlfriends like you do.”
“Why not?”
“Infidelity is an antiquated model, Vladi. One shouldn’t be so greedy. Just pick one.”
“I wouldn’t know which one to pick.”
“That’s easy. Pick the one without a husband.”
Later that night, as my mother soaked her tired body in the bath and my father washed the evening’s dishes, I asked him if he’d always been faithful to my mother in their thirty years of marriage.
He looked at me as if I’d done something terrible of which I should be very ashamed.
“Never ask a man a question like that.”
But later he came around to my corner as I lay on my mattress staring at the ceiling, my notebook beside me, turned to a blank page, and stood over me.
“The answer is yes.”
He paused, looked around the room and back at me. “Do you believe me?”
“I will if you want me to.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Okay, viejo. I believe you.”
It has been years, but they say the end of the Capitolio restoration is in sight, the national assembly will soon be able to move in, and the Cuban government has decided to buy up the properties of those living around it for the purpose of creating more government office space. This is what the officials said when they came to see Natasha and her mother about being relocated. The compensation would be generous, they said. Fifty thousand dollars generous. I couldn’t believe it. Until last year, one couldn’t even buy or sell their own house, and now the government is playing real estate games? But Abel’s family got the same offer, and the other families in the building too.
“Fifty thousand dollars is more than a person can earn in a lifetime in this country,” Abel says. “Where do you suppose the government is getting all that money?”
“Who knows? Will you take the offer?”
“We don’t have a choice. When the government says you go, you go.”
Nobody has figured out Abel is the one who wrote the article for the USB newspaper telling everyone the American prisoner was being held in the back of a green house in Marianao next to Ciudad Libertad, right where Batista himself fled Cuba forever. He got that info from a neighbor who befriended one of the guards, who said they were treating the old guy pretty good because he would be the ticket to get the Five Heroes back to the island, and that’s exactly how it happened. Abel scooped everyone.
Natasha’s mother cries at the thought of leaving her home. We leave her to her tears and walk down to the Campoamor, where we still like to go to be alone though we’re not really alone because of the pigeons and cats and people who hide away in its mezzanine corners even while blocks of concrete fall off the walls and ceilings.
We sit together near what used to be the stage, where great performers once sang, where elaborate sets were built and intricate costumes were worn. Natasha’s leg has grown supple, and her ankles are almost identical in girth when I measure them with my fingers.
Here in the Campoamor she is again that girl of the ripped sofa, who looks at me as if I pulled her out of darkness. Not the hard-edged girl I see walking on the street when she thinks she’s alone and doesn’t know I’m watching.
Here in the Campoamor I love only her.
She starts another one of her confessions. How her mother used to scold her for not going out enough, saying she’d never meet a nice man that way, would never get married, and would die alone in that apartment by the theater. Her mother said she had to get out into the world; the man of her dreams wouldn’t just show up and knock at her door.
“And look what happened,” Natasha says, “Mamá was wrong.”
I kiss her. But Natasha has more to say.
“Vladi, what if I didn’t have a broken leg the day we met? What if I were paralyzed? Would you still have wanted to get to know me?”
“Of course.”
“But what if I couldn’t move my body an inch and I couldn’t touch you or kiss you or make love to you and I couldn’t feel anything? Would you still have fallen for me?”
“Nata…”
“Tell me the truth, Vladi. I won’t be mad.”
“How can I separate your body from your mind and your heart when I love it all?”
Of course she is unhappy with this answer. She doesn’t say so, but her brows drop and she stares at the ground.
“You read too many books, Nata. You’re always thinking the worst things.”
“Maybe you don’t read enough. That’s why you’re always complaining you’re blocked.”
“I read plenty,” I lie. “If I’m blocked it’s because I’m stuck on this maldito island.”
“You would leave me if you had the chance. I know it.”
Again, a look of sorrow that makes me want to splash her face with a bucket of water.
“You’re the one about to be fifty thousand dollars richer. Maybe you’re about to leave me.”
I don’t really believe this, but when Natasha starts the game of punishing me for no reason, I can’t help but play along.
She smiles, feeling confident once again.
I wonder if it’s because she’s young that she behaves this way. I wonder if ten years from now, she’ll grow into a woman more like Lily.
When we go back to Natasha’s place, her mother has calmed, sitting on the sofa. “Come, children,” she says when she sees us enter. “Sit with me.”
Natasha goes to her side, and I sit on a chair across from the two of them. Natasha’s mother sighs and tells us she has come to a decision.
“We will accept their money and move when they ask us to,” she says. “I will buy another apartment. Smaller. Perhaps further up in the hills, in Nuevo Vedado or La Víbora. I won’t spend more than fifteen thousand on it. I have a plan for the rest.”
“What plan, Mamá?”
“Ten thousand will get an instant visa to the United States,” Natasha’s mother says. “Twenty thousand will buy two.”
“We’re leaving?” Natasha asks her mother.
She shakes her head and points to Natasha and me.
“No. You and Vladi are.”
It used to be that ten thousand dollars would buy you a spot on a powerboat shuttling across the Florida Straits in the middle of the night. Now ten thousand will cover a visa’s full bribe to completion at the US Interests Section. No lines, no endless delays of two or three years and nonsensical denials; instant approval and processing of paperwork. A ticket off this rock called Cuba into the sky and the new unknown.
I explain this to my parents, who watch me over their dinner of pork stew. I already ate at Lily’s. That she feeds me is the main reason my parents don’t give me much grief about seeing her. But tonight I only speak of Natasha and how her mother has offered me a way out of this country on the condition that I marry her daughter. It’s not enough for Nata to have a marido, even if I promise to be forever faithful. She says her daughter deserves an esposo, bound by law and paper.
Natasha thinks our getting married is the easiest part of all this. The difficult thing will be to leave her mother here alone.
“It’s not how it used to be,” her mother said. “You will be able to come back and visit as much as you want and still have the opportunities that La Yuma offers.”
“But why don’t you come with us?” Natasha asked her, but her mother insisted she’s too old to start over.
Then she relented a bit and said, “When you and Vladi have children, I will join you over there and help you take care of them.”
For my father, there is no question.
“Go, mijo! What are you waiting for? Another revolution? Go!”
My mother is not so easily convinced. It’s from her that I’ve inherited my skepticism.
“Do you love Natasha?”
“Yes.” Tonight I have no doubts.
“Do you love this country?”
“Yes,” I say, though of this I am not so sure.
Later, I go back to Lily’s and tell her everything. She knows about Natasha. She knows to be discreet. But sometimes in bed I make the mistake of telling Lily I love her and then I regret it even though it’s true, for that moment. I don’t want to make Lily feel bad. She gives me so much when at times it feels as if Natasha only takes from me.
When Lily and I are in bed, it’s as if she cares only for my pleasure.
“Lily,” I tell her, “you are an amazing woman. Your husband is a lucky man.”
“What about your Natasha? Do you fuck her the way you fuck me?”
“She won’t let me.”
But Lily never asks if I love Natasha. Not even tonight.
“You know if you go over there to La Yuma, you will have to work very hard. My husband tells me all the time how much he has to struggle just to survive. Nothing is free. You have to pay for the roof over your head, every ounce of electricity and water you consume. Every time you flush your toilet. You have to pay for the air you breathe.”
“I know what it is to work, Lily.”
“You? You’ve never even had a government job. Do you know what I did before I had my daughter? I cleaned toilets at the Calixto García hospital. Do you know what happens in hospital bathrooms? The worst kind of waste you can imagine. I cleaned it all with my bare hands because most of the time we were short of gloves. Tell me, what work is it that you do?”
“I write.”
“You haven’t written five pages in the year I’ve known you.”
“It takes some writers a year to write a perfect sentence.”
“You can live on your invisible words here, Vladi. Not over there.”
I think of Natasha. She once told me her first memory was of her sister dying. Natasha was three and her sister, Yulia, five. Their parents had taken them to a swimming pool near Marina Hemingway, and within hours Yulia was burning with fever, a raw wound blossoming around a small cut on her elbow. They thought the bacteria would only take her arm, but she died her first night in the hospital. They brought Natasha to say goodbye though she was already gone. She remembers the sight of her sister, hard, purple, and swollen. I told this to Lily once, and it is the only time I’ve seen coldness wash over her face, her voice hollow as she said, “Children die all the time, Vladi. It’s nothing unusual.”
My father had a girlfriend as a teenager, long before he met my mother, the daughter of a once wealthy family from Camagüey who owned property all over the island that was seized by the revolution except for one house on the edge of Miramar that the family was permitted to keep and live in. As it was forbidden to have American dollars, the girl’s father hid the hundreds of thousands of bills he’d accumulated, lining all the paintings with money, stuffing stacks under floorboards, between walls, burying piles beneath rose beds in the garden.
There was so much money that he could not hide it all, and the man was so tormented by his fortune, terrified he would be discovered and imprisoned or executed, that one day he took all the dollars and made a pile of it behind the walls of the backyard, careful so nobody would see, and set it ablaze. There, the family watched as their fortune and inheritance burned, leaving nothing but scorched earth and the smell of smoke and ashes, which cleared with the afternoon rain.
“What is the lesson here?” my father asked his son when he finished the story.
I did not have an answer.
Was the lesson that one should not get attached to money or that one should not trust the government?
Was the lesson that if the man had held on to those dollars long enough, there would have been a time when it could have bought freedom for all of his descendants?
“Tell me the lesson, Papá.” I wanted to know what I was supposed to learn.
“I don’t know, Vladi. You’re a smart boy. I was hoping you could tell me.”
Sometimes in my notebook I write suicide notes. Not because I want to die but because I think it’s an interesting exercise to see what sorts of things I have to say about my life, and also because I want to test myself, to see if I really have to write the last letter of my existence, to whom would I address it: to my parents, to Natasha, or to Lily.
Dear Natasha, You make me fucking crazy. You still hide your body from me when we are naked. You talk and talk and talk. But then you go quiet and I love you more than ever and I want to rip you open like the sofa so I can love every bit of your bones. You are my conscience, and this is why I so often want to escape you.
Dear Lily, I remember when you saw me on the sidewalk and asked me to help bring your shopping bags to your apartment. Within minutes you were sucking me off as if you’d been waiting for me all your life. You make it hard to leave you. On the street we are strangers, but in your home, you know me best.
Dear Mamá y Papá. You raised me not to want what I don’t have. You didn’t give me a sibling because it was impractical, and this is why I hate practical things. In my corner of our home I found solitude and have learned I never want to be alone, but alone is the only way I know how to be.
There are new barricades up around the Campoamor, so until it is dismantled by road scavengers, Natasha and I can’t get in. On my way to see her, I ask one of the construction crew working on the Capitolio what plans there are for the theater, restoration or demolition, but he doesn’t know.
“It’s been rotting for over fifty years,” he says. “For all we know, it will rot for fifty more.”
I stop by Abel’s place. He’s out of phone cards, so he can’t refill my minutes. We sit in his room, where he shows me on his computer the piece he’s working on for this month’s contraband USB press, talking about how the government is displacing people yet again, not to make room for ministries and offices, like they say, but to sell entire buildings to foreign companies for luxury hotels and condominiums.
“You think that’s what’s really happening?” I ask.
“There are always money motives behind the official story,” Abel says.
He’s been telling me for a while about all the foreign investors and enterprises coming to the island, looking to get a claw in before anyone else; technology executives, car manufacturers, even the exiled rum heirs trying to get back in the Cuba-future tournament and compensated for what was taken from them so long ago.
“What is your family going to do with the money?”
“My parents are going to buy a place in Playa. They want to get away from the noise of the city. My sister is going to live with her boyfriend. I might find an apartment of my own around here if I can. What about Natasha and her mother? What will they do?”
“They don’t know yet,” I say, because Natasha’s mother has sworn us to secrecy. She doesn’t want others to get the same idea and ignite a situation where you have to pay a bribe just to pay another bribe.
When I go to her apartment, Natasha is waiting for me, the door wide open. She sits on the sofa, and I sit close to her, ease her horizontal so that we are two long bodies locked together by ankles and elbows.
Her mother has made the appointment for each of us. The first five hundred dollars went to getting us scheduled for the same day with the same employee.
But before that, another appointment. The filing of papers for a civil marriage. Natasha says it’s not a real wedding. It’s just a legal decision.
“So we won’t really be married?”
“We will be, but not in the eyes of God.”
“Since when do you believe in God?”
“Since we decided to get married. A civil wedding is bad luck. We need to have another wedding in a church. We can do it in Miami. With a party and everything.”
“We won’t have any friends to invite. We don’t know anybody over there.”
“Ay, Vladi,” she says, and turns her body over so that we are nose to nose.
When we arrive in Florida, Natasha’s mother’s second cousin, whom she’s never met, will meet us at the airport and let us live in a room he made out of the garage until we get organized and find our own place. Since I’ve known her, I’ve told Natasha I know how to speak a little English. When we get to the United States she will see I’ve been lying.
She says the first thing we will buy when we have enough money is a computer for me so I can transfer all my notebooks to a hard drive and finish my novel. A big American publisher will distribute it. It will tell the truth about everything, she says. I don’t know where she gets these ideas, this certainty.
Before I came here to be with Natasha, I was with Lily. We were naked on her bed, the metal fan in the corner of the room blowing hard over our sweaty bodies.
“If I didn’t have a husband, maybe we could be something, Vladi.”
“Maybe.”
“When it’s time for you to leave, don’t say goodbye.”
“I won’t.”
We took a shower together before I left her, and sometimes I wonder how it is that if Natasha knows me as well as she thinks she does, she can’t sense Lily on me, read on my face that I’ve made love all afternoon the way I read it on hers after we’re together.
Natasha, I think. Who are you? Who am I? Who are we really?
But then it’s as if she feels my distance, and it’s Natasha who begins to strip me, pulling me on top of her, and I ease into her, support my arms on the wooden edges of the torn sofa where I fell in love with her, my eyes fixed on the black orb of the Capitolio cupola blocking the sunset just beyond the window, and next to it, the Campoamor, its clandestine residents and starving animals receding into a pond of gray and blue shadows.