I am sitting in the Señora’s apartment, consuming rice and beans with Ecuadorian soft cheese and orange juice. Her daughters are busy cleaning some dishes, and I ask if they’ve already eaten.
“They have,” the Señora says in a hushed Spanish. She is sitting in a chair close to mine. She looks over at her daughters, and raises her voice: “Inés, go to Karen’s apartment. Bring her back here. You invite her here, to eat with us.”
Inés immediately drops the towel she’s using to dry the dishes, and slips quietly through the heavy front door. This rouses the dog at the back of the house, who barks as if to show he is still on guard. The Señora yells something at the dog in a Spanish I don’t understand.
As Yolanda places a plate of steaming food in front of the empty chair beside me, her fragrance of a floral vanilla briefly overpowering the scent of the food, the Señora asks me if I’m dating Karen. I say that I am not.
“I wonder at times about Karen,” she says, eyeing the painted figures around her. “Why does she travel so much? Why does she never see her home? Do you wonder this, too?”
“I don’t know,” I say, shrugging my shoulders as I eat.
The Señora looks confused.
When I am nearly finished my lunch, Inés returns with Karen, who finds a seat beside me. Inés returns to her duties and the dog begins barking again.
“Eat,” the Señora says, rising from her seat to address Karen, and indicating the plate of hot food in front of her. “Rice and beans with cheese.”
Karen greets everyone in the room with a nod of her head, thanks the Señora, and begins eating.
The Señora reclaims her seat while maintaining her focus on Karen. “Why do you never see your home and your mother?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” Karen says.
“That is what Jonathan told me also,” the Señora says. “He, too, does not know why.”
“You were all just talking about me?”
I work quickly to finish my lunch, and then I rise to leave.
“Sit down,” Karen says, pulling me back into my seat. Looking at me, she adds: “Did you start all this?”
“I was wondering,” the Señora continues, glancing over at Karen, “if you miss your home.”
Karen continues eating, and Inés places a glass of juice in front of her. Karen picks up the glass, takes a drink and gazes at the Señora.
“There’s nothing for me there,” Karen says. “That’s all. It’s just too sad to think about—my childhood of physical and mental abuse, my parents who fought all the time—so really, I don’t. But despite all that, yes, I still miss it, just as I think anyone misses their home when they move away from it. Even so, I’ll never go back.”
Everyone is silent. The dishes clang together as they are placed in cupboards with no doors. The dog barks one last time, and then becomes quiet.
Karen waits for a moment, and finishes her juice before continuing: “You should ask Jonathan that same question. He has a wife and baby on the way back home.”
“He is not here for long,” the Señora says. “But you are.”
“I have a feeling he will be here longer than I will,” Karen says, looking at me before turning her attention back to her plate. “Just a feeling.”
The Señora directs her attention toward me now. She asks about my family.
“I have a wife, who is a librarian at a local university, and we have a child on the way,” I reply, without offering to show the only picture I brought of Yelena, or the ultrasound, certain that the Señora would not know what an ultrasound is, and certain that she would not understand what Yelena has contemplated in talking about ending the baby’s life due to its supposed imperfections. “My mother raised me, and I never knew my father very well, apart from my few visits here. My mother is rather conservative, albeit an alcoholic as a result of my father’s departure, set in her job as a teacher and as a patron at a local tavern with no plans to retire from either. My father, as you probably know, idolized Kerouac and his lifestyle. I read all of Kerouac’s books as a result, even his obscure, rambling diaries and poems that really should’ve been left in obscurity or in the realm of discarded thought. I read a book written by the South American Kerouac, Che Guevara, who travelled all around this continent with a friend on a motorcycle.”
The Señora, confused, turns toward Karen, who translates all of what I have just said, which I now realize was communicated in a mixture of English and bad Spanish, into the Señora’s native tongue.
“Ah, ya,” the Señora says, continuing to speak, this time in a rapid Spanish interspersed with local expressions, none of which I can understand.
When she finally finishes, I ask Karen: “What did she say?”
“She says your father used to play the bagpipes on the spot overlooking the ocean, where he was buried, all the time, whenever he wanted to forget. She said they must have been able to hear him all the way over in China. And she said that he, like you, ran away from his family. She says, not in so many words, that something tormented him about being here, away from his family, and she sees that same anguish and suffering in you. She thinks it was his family back in Canada, you and your mother, that made him resentful when she half-jokingly talked of marriage with him. It was as though the word marriage, when repeated, infused him with a tremendous guilt, just as, whenever he saw a child on the street, it must have reminded him of you … she says he had a touch of hubris, which is why he never went back, and why he died here.”
“Hubris?”
“Well, she said it as arrogancia. Arrogance, excessive pride, it’s all the same. After he left you and your mother, his ego would never let him reverse his decision, which became somehow more resolute over time, and so the years and the decades simply passed with him here, and you and your mother there. Quite sad, actually.”
As I listen only peripherally for the sound of my name while they continue their conversation, the meaning of my recurring dream of a closed closet door, with the sense that Yelena is inside, suddenly becomes somewhat more clear when I combine the Señora’s statement with one of Jung’s contentions. Jung asserted—when discussing the mother and the womb, the body and the physiological, that which creates and symbolizes the fundamentals of consciousness—that confinement suggests the nocturnal and a condition of nervous apprehension.
The panic and anxiety I experience at night, sometimes with that dream and sometimes without, might be ended through reaching out in my dream to expand beyond the simple confines of the one closet door, where I might encounter my mother in the darkness, and another closet door, beyond which I would sense my father, who I am told always fought bitterly with my mother whenever they were together, perhaps staring at an endless series of closet doors with my same sense of remorse and shame, undertaking no actions to reconcile with the source of his sorrow, apart from the unwitting sensation of having experienced such sentiments.
∞
“You know, the Señora’s daughters have applied for a visa to go to New York to be with their father,” Karen says to me later, as we step away from the apartment and walk barefoot toward the beach. “The Señora applied for one too, but I can’t see her ever going there. It’s obvious to me that she has never left Manta. At least, never for long.”
“Maybe she’s trying to understand what might happen if she does,” I say.