“I knew it was cancer,” she says. “They told me that before I left. But that wasn’t why he died. It was everything else. Cigarettes and rum and heroin and cocaine. Like every poor fucked-up musician who ever lived. But it was women too. Always women.” A pause. A hesitant smile. “I went to the hospital, and the room looked like a beauty parlor. He was dying, all gray and shrunken up, and all the women came to say good-bye. Fat, skinny, young, old.” She chews a piece of maki. “If the cancer didn’t kill him, the perfume would’ve done the job. You’d have thought he was Warren Beatty.” She sips green tea and smiles. “I just slipped into the room, stood with my back to a wall. I counted three former wives. And yeah, four young guys came in and out, his sons by different women, but mostly it was women, all staring at him, with the tubes in his arms, and the Virgen de Altagracia above his head.”
She has told Cormac about this Virgen, the divine Madonna who intercedes for all Dominicans. Now she is moving into street rhythms, into that language that she dons like a shield. “But it’s not just the wives, who are whispering and praying and crying all around the room. It’s the whores too. They’re showing up from everywhere, and in comes a fat shiny mulata chick with four gold teeth and la Virgen tattooed over her left boob, and she’s bawling. The nurse—skinny, eyeglasses, white uniform—she goes, ‘You gotta leave, m’hija!’ and the mulata chick goes, ‘How can I leave? I’m the only one he ever loved!’
“The nurse busts out laughing. I mean, every fucking whore in Moca is in the room or out in the hall. And I can’t help myself, I start laughing too. My father’s dying, but, Jesus… The nurse grabs the end of the bed to hold herself up, she’s shaking with fucking laughter, and I grab the door frame, and we’re both pissing in our pants.”
She starts to laugh now, remembering.
“But the whore with the gold teeth looks at us like we’re totally insane. She goes, ‘What’s so funny, you hijas de putas? What’s so fucking funny?’ The sons look at each other, and so do the ex-wives, and I’m waiting for the knife to come out of the whore’s panties, and then she looks at my father, as if asking his permission to kill us, and now his eyes are open, and she screams: ’He’s alive! This motherfucker is alive!’ ”
She bends toward Cormac and grips his wrist.
“I mean, he was alive all along, but this crazy whore must’ve thought he was dead, because she spreads her legs and goes down on her knees and starts giving thanks to God. She’s got no panties on, so I was wrong about the knife, and now the four sons are looking at her box, which must terrify them—and she goes, ‘Oh, thank you, God, you are a great fucking man!’
“Now the nurse bounces back, screaming in laughter, and knocks me into the wall! I see my father’s eyes get wider, and now all the other whores are crowding in from the hall to see what all the hollering is about, and it’s like the six train at rush hour. Now a little security guard comes in, gray mustache, big wide eyes, wearing some kind of old UPS uniform—and he starts shouting, ‘Out, out! Everybody out!’ The fat whore with the gold teeth is still on the floor, surrounded by a wall of boobs and miniskirts, and she goes, ‘No, you get out, pendejo! This is a fucking miracle!’ ”
Cormac joins her in slamming the table and laughing. Delfina struggles now to breathe, then calms herself.
“And then he sees me.”
A pause. She daubs at her eyes with a napkin, wiping away the evidence of laughter.
“He sees me, and he stares at me, and for the first time all of them—the fat whore on the floor, the sons, the nurse, the whole team of other whores and the security guard—they all turn to look at me. Everybody shuts up.
“ ‘Delfina?’ my father says. It’s the first time since I got there that he said a word.
“I go, ‘Sí, Papi.’
“Tears come into his eyes. His fingers curl, long piano-player fingers, calling me to him. I go to his side and take his hand, which is very cold. I lean down close to his ear and say, ‘I love you, Papi.’
“His lips move—they’re blue in the light—but nothing comes out. I massage his hand with both of mine, trying to make his hand and fingers warm. I put my head next to his mouth. And then I hear the words. The words I came to Moca to hear.
“ ‘Lo siento,’ he says. I’m sorry.”
She chews at her lip and shrugs.
“Then he dies. He takes two more breaths and then nothing. He doesn’t look scared, or even relieved. He just stops.”
She stops now too for a moment. Her forefinger is curled in the tiny handle of a teacup. Wiggling it.
“The whores scream and wail. The fat whore tries to get up, to rush to my father, but she can’t do it, she’s too fat. She grabs the leg of a skinny whore like it’s a small tree and tries to pull herself up, but the skinny whore gives her a shove back on her knees. Two of the young men go over to help her, each grabbing a foot, so they can peer at the holy of holies, and they roll her over, so she can get some traction. They lift her like she’s a manatee they found on a beach. The security guard gives up and walks out, leaving the nurse to control the crowd, and I wish you were with me.”
Cormac touches her hand. She turns away, shaking her head slowly.
“The dumb son of a bitch.”
A muscle ripples bitterly in her jaw.
“Everybody loved him, but he couldn’t love anybody back. Not my mother. Not me. Not himself.”
She exhales, gestures with the cup.
“I gotta go back to my job.”
Cormac glances at the clock. She has ten minutes to walk to the Trade Center, and mumbles about calling later and picking a time to go to her place. He goes with her to the door. She looks at him.
“It was enough,” she says. “Lo siento… It wasn’t ‘I love you.’ It wasn’t even about me. It was about him, and how he felt. But what the hell.”
115.
That’s all there is to the great return. Hair, wetness, food, laughter. Most of all, laughter. And then departure. Staring at the door, Cormac notes that she never once mentioned Reynoso and uttered no words of regret, no request for forgiveness. Cormac smokes a cigarette and wraps the garbage and rinses the plates before stacking them in the dishwasher. He thinks that perhaps this is the style of her generation, common to all who grew pubic hair in the age of AIDS. Don’t risk true intimacy (so desired by Elizabeth Warren). Don’t delude yourself about love. Death could come at any time, and love would only add to the pain.
The computer might be part of it too, he thinks, allowing them to create little folders inside their brains. Each marked with an icon separate from all others, easy to call up or erase. Even if sometimes they cut and paste. After all, the high-speed printing press changed New Yorkers, adding urgency, fear, envy, even solidarity to their daily lives. It gave them Wordsworth and Homer and the Evening Graphic, Buffalo Bill and Moby-Dick and Jackie Robinson, gangsters and gun molls and the Death House at Sing Sing. Around 1840, New Yorkers started thinking in words on paper, visible or invisible, and acquired the habit of telling stories, and recycling them, and letting them marinate into myth. Human beings weren’t like that before the printing press and the penny paper. Cormac thinks: The computer must be making a similar alteration. Another grand mutation. With any luck, I will not live to see the results.