| HABÁNAME Chapter 10 - 3 - on the beach in Key West. She numbly flattened the paper into its original form and looked at the beginning of the message again. September 13 How I miss you. I really can?t go on any longer without you by my side, Barbara. This isn?t a life. It is just waking up to your absence and then falling asleep to it every night. I think about what I want for us and it is a life together where we are the ones who decide our fate, cariño. I have been reading the old stories these days, love. I know that our governments like to think they are these rational and scientific creations that are such an improvement over the theocracies of old, but they are not very different from those puffed-up gods and goddesses of whom Homer sang, who thought nothing of breaking human lives apart on a whim. So tomorrow I will start my journey by sea to make us safer from their heartless games. We need to share a citizenship, my love, so that nobody can say, ?Look, her passport is blue with a gold eagle and yours is not, so she is forbidden to you.? I will do whatever it takes to never let them take you from me again. I think it?s funny that I am to become a U.S. citizen. We were raised to despise and fear the U.S. You will remember that tacky billboard on the Malecón that says, ?Mr. Imperialist, we are not at all afraid of you!? We learned all about the Rosenbergs in school and about lynching. We learned about the Klan and the Japanese Internment and Wounded Knee. And I know that all that is true. But then there are all the people who survived these horrors and all the people who spoke out against them. Aren?t they the U.S.? And then there is you. You did not make yourself, Barbara. No one does. So the U.S. is also a place that taught you the values that led you to help others so selflessly and it kept your mind curious and seeking. I would like to see those places and those people who made you, you know. And soon, very soon, I will also be a part of the U.S. ? a part it never expected and that may goad its conscience at times ? but a part that will love the whole because I love you? She stopped reading and paused both to center her thoughts and to straighten out the sheet of paper. Then she read through to the bottom of the page. Well, she thought, glancing at the boxed manuscript, this is how it ends. This is how it really ends. She stood up and stumbled to her desk. Before faxing the wrinkled thin paper, she hastily penned a cover sheet to Deirdre. Deirdre, I know it?s late in the game for additions, but this can be placed right at the end without altering any of the preceding text. You should add the notation ?Author presumed lost at sea? right after it. Just do it. Don?t call me. I don?t want to talk about it. The fax went through on the first try. She turned and looked at her apartment, her shower long forgotten. She was too exhausted to pick up the broken ceramics and glass or even to properly tend to her bruised and painful digits. She threw herself on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She might have survived that cut on the shoulder that night, but she didn?t survive meeting me. Barbara imagined herself making time run backwards: she visualized hastening away from the seawall and going back into the hotel long before the appearance of the stunning woman who fell bleeding a few paces away from where she stood playing her guitar and singing. I always thought we would end differently, she thought ruefully, recalling the lyrics that were cut short by Chela fainting: I?m the kid who always thought we?d be lovers Always thought that time would tell Time was talking, guess I just wasn?t listening No surprise if you know me well. No, no surprise at all. What is surprising is that someone that beautiful gave me a second look and forgave all my arrogance and cowardice. She just loved me. And in a few hours I am going to have to get up and walk back into a world in which she no longer exists. I just don?t think I am brave enough. ~~~~~~ Later that day She told Eladio as soon as she arrived ? uncharacteristically early - at the department for the weekly seminar that afternoon. She was profoundly grateful when he excused her: there was no way she could sit still through the rather abstract discussions of social suffering. Today she would have screamed, laying into the unfortunate colleague who dared to reduce the human toll of structural violence to economic terms; or she would have gone to the other extreme and started sobbing if a remark hit too close to home. She always had difficulty with her fidgeting in the best of circumstances. The reprieve from academic activities left her with a void to fill in her schedule and she decided that the wisest option would be to stay busy. She checked into the clinic hours before her shift formally began. She managed not to cry as her staff tended to the bruises on her hand from the early morning agony and splinted her broken toes. She insisted on working although she couldn?t stay on her feet for very long due to the damage she had inflicted upon herself. Her first cases were uneventful: an elderly diabetic with a bad laceration on her foot and a young homeless man with an upper respiratory infection. It was the third case that caught her attention and reminded her that what she and Chela shared was not truly over. The little girl was four and impeccably dressed, with bright yellow ribbons tied into her curly hair. She was in terrible pain ? the tears streamed out of her big round eyes and rolled down her cheeks - yet she showed remarkable control for one so young. As Barbara quickly reviewed the chart she discovered why: her little patient had sickle cell anemia and was a frequent visitor to the clinic for her painful crises. As she assessed the necessity for transfusion therapy, Barbara recalled the harsh words of the Cuban health aide on the day Tomás Stevens had been quarantined: before effective testing of the blood supply there had been many casualties from HIV among ?sicklers? in the U.S. She was grateful that that risk at least was not at issue in her deliberations here. She |
