So Long - Lucia Berlin

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sons as she swam with the other in her arms. No pain accompanied the sweetness of this recollection. No loss or regret or foretaste of death. Gabriel’s eyes. Her sons’ laughter, echoing from the cliffs into the water.

      The bathers’ voices ricocheted too from the stone. Ah! they cried, as at fireworks, when the young boys dove into the water. They swayed in their white clothes. It was festive, with the clothes swirling, as if they were waltzing at a ball. Beneath them, the sea made delicate traceries on the sand. A young couple knelt in the water. They didn’t touch, but were so in love it seemed to the woman that tiny darts and arrows shot out into the water from them, like fireflies or phosphorescent fish. They wore white clothes, but seemed naked against the dark sky. Their clothes clung to their black bodies, to his strong shoulders and loins, her breasts and belly. When the waves flowed in and ebbed out, her long hair floated up and covered them in tendrils of black fog and then subsided black and inky into the water.

      A man wearing a straw hat asked the woman if she would take his babies out into the water. He handed her the smallest one, who was frightened. It slipped up through the woman’s arms like a skittish baboon and climbed onto her head, tearing at her hair, coiling its legs and tail around her neck. She untangled herself from the screaming baby. Take the other one, the tame one, the man said, and that child did lie placidly while she swam with it in the water. So quiet she thought it must be asleep, but no it was humming. Other people sang and hummed in the cool night. The sliver of moon turned white like the foam as more people came down the stairs into the water. After a while the man took the baby from her and left then, with his children.

      On the rocks a girl tried to coax her grandmother into the pool. No! No! I’ll fall! Come in, the woman said, I’ll take you swimming all around the pool.

      “You see I broke my leg and I’m afraid I’ll break it again.”

      “When did it happen?” the woman asked.

      “Ten years ago. It was a terrible time. I couldn’t chop fire-wood. I couldn’t work in the fields. We had no food.”

      “Come in. I’ll be careful of your leg.”

      At last the old lady let her lift her down from the rock and into the water. She laughed, clasping her frail arms around the woman’s neck. She was light, like a bag of shells. Her hair smelled of charcoal fires. Qué maravilla! she whispered into the woman’s throat. Her silver braid wafted out behind them in the water.

      She was seventy-eight and had never seen the ocean before. She lived on a rancho near Chalchihuitles. She had ridden on the back of a truck to the seaport with her granddaughter.

      “My husband died last month.”

      “Lo siento.”

      She swam with the old lady to the far wall where the cool waves spilled over them.

      “God finally took him, finally answered my prayers. Eight years he lay in bed. Eight years he couldn’t talk, couldn’t get up or feed himself. Lay like a baby. I would ache from being tired, my eyes would burn. At last, when I thought he was asleep I would try to steal away. He would whisper my name, a horrid croaking sound. Consuelo! Consuelo! and his skeleton hands, dead lizard hands would claw out to me. It was a terrible, terrible time.”

      “Lo siento,” the woman said again.

      “Eight years. I could go nowhere. Not even to the corner. Ni hasta la esquina! Every night I prayed to the Virgin to take him, to give me some time, some days without him.”

      The woman clasped the old lady and swam out again into the pool, holding the frail body close to her.

      “My mother died only six months ago. It was the same for me. A terrible, terrible time. I was tied to her day and night. She didn’t know me and said ugly things to me, year after year, clawing at me.”

      Why am I telling this old lady such a lie? she wondered. But it wasn’t such a lie, the bloody grasp.

      “They’re gone now,” Consuelo said. “We are liberated.”

      The woman laughed; liberated was such an American word. The old lady thought she laughed because she was happy. She hugged the woman tightly and kissed her cheek. She had no teeth so the kiss was soft as mangos.

      “The Virgin answered my prayers!” she said. “It pleases God, to see that you and I are free.”

      Back and forth the two women flowed in the dark water, the clothes of the bathers swirling around them like a ballet. Near them the young couple kissed, and for a moment there was a sprinkle of stars overhead, then a mist covered them and the moon and dimmed the opal lamplight from the street.

      “Vamos a comer, abuelita!” the granddaughter called. She shivered, her dress dripping on the stones. A man lifted the old woman from the water, carried her up the winding rocks to the malecón. Mariachis played, far away.

      “Adiós!” The old woman waved from the parapet.

       “Adiós!”

      The woman waved back. She floated at the far edge in the silken warm water. The breeze was inexpressibly gentle.

      The waiter retrieved her napkin from the floor, slid it onto her lap, his other hand swirled a plate of pastel fruit onto the table before her. Music came from everywhere, not transistors walking down city streets, but far away mariachis, a bolero on a radio in the kitchen, the whistle of the knife sharpener, an organ grinder, workmen singing from a scaffold.

      Jane was a retired teacher, divorced, her children grown. She hadn’t been in Mexico for twenty years, not since she had lived there with Sebastian and their sons, in Oaxaca.

      She had always liked traveling alone. But yesterday, at Teotihuacan, it was so magnificent she had wanted to say it out loud, to confirm the color of the maguey.

      She had liked being alone in France, being able to wander anywhere, talk to people. Mexico was hard. The warmth of the Mexicans accentuated her loneliness, the lost past.

      This morning she had stopped at the Majestic desk and joined a guided group to the Sunday bullfights. The immense plaza, the fans, were daunting to face alone. Fanático, Spanish for fan. Imagine 50,000 Mexicans arriving on time, long before four o’clock, when the gates were locked. Out of respect for the bulls, her cab driver said.

      The bullfight group assembled in the lobby at two-thirty. There were two American couples. The Jordans and the McIntyres. The men were surgeons, at a convention in Mexico City. They were tennis-fit and tanned. Their wives were expensively dressed, but in that time warp doctors’ wives have, wearing pant-suits fashionable back when they put their husbands through medical school. The women wore cheap black felt Spanish hats, with a red rose, that were sold on the streets as souvenirs. They thought they were “fun hats,” not realizing how coquettish and pretty they looked in them.

      There were four Japanese tourists. The Yamatos, an old couple in black traditional clothes. Their son, Jerry, a tall, handsome man in his forties, with a young Japanese bride, Deedee, dressed in American jeans and a sweatshirt. She and Jerry spoke English to each other, Japanese to his parents. She blushed when he kissed her neck or caught her fingers between his teeth.

      It turned out that Jerry too was a Californian, an architect, Deedee a chemistry student in San Francisco. They would be in Mexico City for two more days. His parents had come from Tokyo to join them. No, they had never seen a bullfight, but Jerry thought it would seem very Japanese, combining what Mishima called Japanese qualities of elegance and brutality.

      Jane was pleased that he should say something like that to her, almost a stranger, liked him immediately.

      The three spoke about Mishima, and Mexico, as they all sat on leather sofas, waiting for the guide. Jane told the couple that she had spent her own honeymoon in Mexico City, too.

      “It was wonderful,” she said. “Magic. You could see the volcanoes then.”

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