The Natashas Page 5

  But as she continued to investigate this strange feeling, it started to turn sour. There were guitar strums rising in her memory. Then the face of a boy came. The only boy she could say she had ever dated. They had met at the music high school. He played jazz on his guitar day and night, would even fall asleep holding the guitar across his stomach. He was brilliant; it was obvious to teachers and students alike. Béatrice felt privately exhilarated being a part of such undisputed respect. When he touched Béatrice, he touched her almost the way he touched his guitar, which made Béatrice in turn feel like she was, at least in that moment, a bit brilliant too.

  Near the end of their studies, he had composed a piece for her. He called it Keep This Angel Mine, borrowing from Blues and even Sinatra. When he played it on his guitar for her, she imagined a world full of glass bodies with nothing but light in them, like walking lanterns. As he played, he had his own thoughts. He closed his eyes, strummed those strings, and imagined Béatrice’s breasts rising and falling as she held his penis in her mouth. When the tempo quickened towards the end, he felt his palm touch her blonde scalp and press down, as his angel sucked his soul from him.

  After graduation, when Béatrice had failed all her exams, he of course did brilliantly and went straight to New York to fulfill his destiny as a musician of importance for this generation. They broke up. Béatrice expected to go into a sort of mourning, to miss him terribly and pout the way her sister did when her boyfriend went out of town for a weekend. To her surprise, when the boy finally left, his absence produced no physical yearning in her. Quite the opposite: thinking of his face, his body, his voice in his remoteness made her feel embarrassed, at times even humiliated. She did not understand why she couldn’t experience the enchanted sadness her sister expressed on a regular basis.

  As time went by, she began to realise that they had shared no private complicity at all. Together, they had merely participated in the myth that brilliant boys are noble beings. She felt degraded now to remember him, to remember how she kissed his pinkish penis with so much dedication and how terrified she was to be touched and to be left untouched by the privilege of his hands.

  Béatrice spent a lot of time alone after that. Eventually she did start seeing other men. Or it would be more accurate to say, other men saw her. They were mostly the ones she happened to meet through the jazz world, bass players, piano players, men who would accompany her on her gigs. Each “relationship” would last about four weeks and usually the men would get tired of her bouts of silence or uncommunicative nature. (Even those breasts weren’t worth such a hassle.)

  The men couldn’t pinpoint it, but it boiled down to the same thing.

  “Such a shame, with a body like that, the girl’s not all there.”

  9

  Béatrice blinked firmly and pushed the memory of him away. She drew her attention back to the mirror, concentrating on her reflection.

  She turned to one side. Then to the other. She smoothed back her blonde hair with her fingertips. She did look beautiful. She could believe it just now. She heard the radio rise again. The static covered the singer with its fur and the song went on.

  On the other side of the curtain, she heard the shop door open and close. Then the sound of heels came in her direction. They clicked one by one, then stopped. Within arm’s reach of the curtain, Béatrice guessed.

  “Bonjour,” she heard the shopkeeper say. Her voice had softened. She spoke with care.

  “Bonjour,” she heard the other woman say. Her tone was different – neither high nor low, neither husky nor metallic, but matter-of-fact. She, too, had an accent, but much lighter. From where, Béatrice couldn’t tell. The music from the radio broke through the static again and Béatrice heard the word “Vida” flow from the mouth of the singer like seaweed. The guitar streamed through her voice.

  The singer and the guitar drowned out the voices of the two women, who continued their conversation. Béatrice leaned in towards the curtain, but she still couldn’t make out the women’s words. Maybe they spoke in a different language. Maybe each in her own language. Maybe they were helping each other count to ten. Who knows. Béatrice listened intently.

  “Vida” the singer flushed over their words.

  Béatrice listened closer.

  “Qué .anto”

  “Oché yoss …”

  “Idos …”

  She could only hear flakes of the music.

  “Vida” again.

  “Ala … yenso …”

  “Outa … qué …”

  Then Béatrice heard the shopkeeper say the one word that couldn’t have been clearer.

  “Polina.”

  VI

  My man

  1

  … There was her cheek.

  … There was her eye.

  “¿Por qué me estás siguiendo?”

  “Why are you following me?” the woman asked César in perfect Spanish.

  Her black hair crawled loose from behind her ear and dropped down over her cheek. At the edge of each of her almost-violet eyes the skin was pinched, as if holding the remains up, over a cliff, of something which had long fallen sharply at the indent of her cheekbones.

  César didn’t know what to say. He stared at her. There was an eye, curved like a drying leaf. There was the nose, sloping towards her mouth. The mouth. Lips crisscrossed with minuscule lines, like baked bread. Her mouth must be very dry, he thought. As he took in her whole face, he saw that there was something very odd about it. He couldn’t say she was deformed, or even unattractive, but her features gave the troubling feeling that something was not in its proper place.

  The woman held César’s gaze, waiting for an answer. Her stare was blunt. She seemed to be willing him to speak.

  “Me … te … mo …” César started. Me temo que lo iba a matar.

  “I’m afraid I was going to kill you,” César said, though he could barely believe such words could come out of his mouth.

  The woman pursed her lips together, then released them.

  Demasiado tarde para eso ahora. “Too late for that now,” she said.

  Es una pena, Julio César. “Too bad, Julio César.”

  César’s heart strained at the sound of his full name. The woman raised her long fingers and drew them through the dark fluidity of her hair. Not a single tangle.

  “I go by César now. Just César.”

  The woman smiled heavily. “Very refined, very European … Please excuse me, César. As for me, I still have my old, brutish name: Rosa.”

  César’s gut clenched.

  “What happened to you … Rosa?”

  Rosa looked deeply at César. Her eyes seemed to be giving off steam. She took his hand and guided his fingers through her hair as if they were slipping through water. César’s fingertips felt wet. But then he realised it was his eyes which were wet. His tears fell through the years, and landed at the feet of a girl standing at the window, watching a car drive away.

  2

  There seemed to be no connection between the questions César was asking and the answers Rosa was giving. César wondered if she could hear him.

  “After you left,” Rosa began, “I moved north to another village to work as a receptionist at a small hotel. My manager, who was exactly my father’s age, took notice of me. He gave me the best shifts, sneaked fresh cakes from the kitchen into my locker … Part of me was terrified of him. He greased his hair back and shaved his face every day. We got married.”

  “Did you love him?” César asked.

  “… He didn’t ask me to sing for him. He didn’t know I had a good voice. Did you know I had a good voice, César?”

  César paused. “That’s what they used to say … But I never heard it either …”

  “Well … maybe you should have listened closer …” Rosa replied. “He didn’t listen very closely either, my man. I was his young, ugly bride. For some, this is enough … We got married. After our wedding ceremony, we went to stay in the hotel suite, because
he was the manager. He asked me if I wanted to take a bath, and ran the water for me carefully, making sure it wasn’t too hot. He tested the temperature on his wrist, like for a baby. He told me to put my wedding dress back on. He told me to take my hair down. He told me to get into the tub.

  “I picked one foot up and pierced the bath water with my toe. I dropped one foot into the water. Then the other. I was standing in the tub and he was crouched near the edge, like a little boy. He dipped his right hand into the water, then drew it around my ankle, then moved it up my calf. He continued upwards, over the back of my knee. Then around my thigh. He let his fingertips slide beneath my underwear. The underwear was a coarse white lace. He hooked his fingers underneath the lace and pulled down. The underwear stuttered. He tugged again, but it wouldn’t slide completely off. He brought his other hand up and pulled both sides down so that the underwear came off and floated in the bath water around my ankles.

  “He told me to pull the skirt of my wedding dress up higher so that he could see. I pulled it up to my waistband and held it there. He dipped his other hand into the warm water, cupping some, bringing it towards him and turning his cupped palm over his head. The water trickled down his temples. He closed his eyes as the water ran over his face. Then he must have opened them. He brought the hand back into the water, then drew it upward, inside my thigh.

  “I couldn’t see him any more because I was holding the bulky white lace skirt at my waist, trying to keep it from falling. Suddenly his fingers were inside me. I almost fell into the tub. He caught me and laid me down. My skirt floated in the water, my white lace underwear around my ankles still, like a wet spider web. My black hair soaked into the water and wavered around my breasts. He stepped into the tub over me. I could see his erection bulging above me in his trousers. He lowered himself to his knees. The ends of his trousers got wet and stuck to his calves. My hands lifted out of the water and moved towards his body. I caught something falling from his chest. His gold chain with a cross on it. Droplets of water rolled down my arm and fell on to my cheek.

  “He caught my hands and clasped them together, then folded them into my throat, right under my chin. My fingers were crumbled into each other, illegible. He pushed and pushed my balled-up hands into my own throat. My breath pulled in and was immediately pushed out. He pressed in with his full weight.

  “My knees twitched up. My tongue began to flail inside my mouth. He squeezed all my breath out of me.”

  3

  “He never heard me sing. Like you. I left this world his young, ugly bride.”

  4

  “The story was in the papers and on the television, you know. With a photo of me that my mother had picked out, a flattering photo actually—my mother always knew how to make the best of a bad situation. The light in the photo smoothed out my features. I looked tragically erotic like one of those American child stars. I think you would have liked this photo of me, César …

  “… He was sent to prison, my one-day husband. Not because he took the life out of me. But because he did it in such a special way, you know. With my own hands. He was sent to a special prison for that. On those islands, in the archipelago off the coast of Nayarit: Islas Marias, named after the Three Marys in the Bible. On the main island, the Mother Maria Island, there’s the Federal Penal Colony. No fences or gates or electric wires. The island is its own vigil. The inmates live in a version of freedom, one could say, no chains or locks. They walk around the chapped walkways with heavy footsteps beneath the oily sun. The guards have faces that resemble the inmates. One thing that separates them is the uniform. The criminals wear beige pants and shirts. To the left of their hearts is their inmate number, printed on their shirts. The guards wear dark pants and a white shirt. They have no printed number. The guards have names and guns.”

  She smiled briefly, then let her mouth close in like a wound. She trailed off for a bit and walked in silence. The air smelled of a peeled fruit, a ripe familiar smell he couldn’t quite place. Rosa started nodding as she walked, perhaps to music in her head. Her eyes drifted close, yet she continued walking, nodding gently, with her long black hair undulating behind her. She began to recite:

  “But Mary stood outside by the tomb weeping, and as she wept she stooped down and looked into the tomb. And she saw two angels in white sitting, one at the head and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. Then they said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him.’ Now when she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there …”

  Rosa opened her eyes and looked at César.

  5

  “You know what he found there, on that penal colony, my man. He found the miracle of God. One afternoon, he ran up those sun-bleached steps with sand encrusted into his knees, saying that Jesus came to him. My man, he looked straight up at the sun, with a bit of drool coming from the chapped crease between his lips. He looked as far as he could look, because his eyes were free, the freest part of his body. His sight now was his soul, he looked to see if he could see behind the clouds, if his soul could penetrate the invisible barriers, if it could penetrate the clouds and stratosphere and slip into the holy villa. His mouth trembled for prayer. Recitations from his childhood dribbled out. His voice was coarse and flaked between a man’s and a boy’s. He clasped his hands together and pressed them into his chest, pounding and babbling into the sun.

  “I was there, too, actually. Just visiting, you could say. I was standing with the hot sand cushioning my toes. He did not see me. I was far off behind him. But even if I was right in front of him, he wouldn’t have seen me. Every now and then I had to remind myself of this. When you look at someone, it is very hard to believe that they may not be seeing you too …

  “I walked toward the crouching man until I was within arm’s reach. With each step towards him, I told myself, even if he turns his head now, even if he stands up and turns around, he will not see me. I raised my hand and hovered it over his thick shoulder, watching him rock and shake and drone in his prayer. My hand felt very strong. Could I crumble this man’s whole head in it, like an unwanted letter? My man. I did not crumble his head. I placed my hand upon his shoulder and held it there. His body flinched then let go of the tremble. He became still and peaceful. He looked around himself, dumbfounded and asked with a shy voice: Jésus …?

  “This was funny to me. I wanted to laugh. But as soon as my mouth began to smile, I felt very pained, very sad. I straightened my mouth and it went away. He looked about him slowly, attentive for a signal. The beach remained as it was. The clouds in the sky continued to roll. The sun pressed its thumb upon the land.

  “‘Jésus?’ he asked with more confidence. I kept my mouth very straight. He glanced around him, to the sea, to the sky, back inland. No response. I can see him exactly as he was in that moment. Although I was behind him, I could see every muscle of his face. His face was singed with pink from the sun. He looked like a baby pig with cataracts trying to see his mother.

  “I took my hand that was on his shoulder and smoothed it across towards his spine. At his spine, I spread my fingers and lightly drew them across the back of his neck, towards his hair line. At the first touch, he jolted his neck to the side. Then to the other.

  “‘Jésus!’ I grazed the back of his neck again with my fingertips and he flinched his head once more and yelped, ‘Jésus?!’ He was laughing now. He was crying. He fell forward and caught himself with his palms in the sand, then lifted himself up and wiped the tears from his face, covered his skin like sandpaper.

  “Perdóname. Sálvame. Bendice a mí. ‘Forgive me. Save me. Bless me,’ he kept repeating for lack of prayer. Those were the only words he could pull together in time, the only words that felt clean enough.

  Perdóname. Sálvame. Bendice a mí.

  Perdóname. Sálvame. Bendice a mí.

  Perdóname. Sálvame. Bendice a mí.

  “Th
e more he repeated, the more tightly I grasped his neck and massaged it, around the sides and up the spine and into the back of his skull, through the buzzed hair, and down his vertebrae. His knees were pinned into the sand, but his head was turning loosely around and around like in a trance.

  “I took my hand off and he fell mouth-first into the sand. His hands remained limp at his sides. He exhaled into the sand and some of it tunnelled up his nose. He spoke into the grains. He sido bendecido por tu amor. ‘I am blessed by your love.’

  “I realised that there was a tear rolling down my cheek. It was small and oily and filled with pain. I leaned down over him. The tear rolled heavily down and dropped straight into that worm-skinned ear of his.

  “Vete a la chingada. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ I whispered.

  “He smiled so big and blessed with his mouth wide open, so the sand mixed in with his saliva and gullied down his throat.”

  6

  Rosa stopped walking. She turned away from César and put her face into her hands. It was not a gesture of sadness. It was more like suddenly her face became too heavy and would fall off unless she held it in place.

  “Rosa,” César touched her shoulder. “Are you alright?”

  “The worst is to lose your gratitude for life. To no longer see the grace in the living …”

  He wished he had the words to console her, to lessen her pain, to ease her memories. But before he could think of something else to say, he heard a familiar melody. His body leaned in. Rosa was singing.

  “Gracias a la vida …

  que me ha dado tanto”

  Her voice was like nothing he had ever heard before. It seemed to be coming from miles away, lacquered and greasy. He felt it coursing through him like his own blood.