When Tayo straightens, his eyes find Aya. Aya stays still, but she fears her face will crack under the pressure of keeping her eyes open to just this degree. Then, as the fear grows strongest in her, Tayo turns away. He softly tells the air, or Amy, ‘She’s very ugly.’
Amy surfaces from sleep for him, says, ‘Tayo.’
Blood mists her face in tiny, diamond buds.
Tayo kneels by her and says her name with sorrow and they lay their heads together and are hidden there in Amy’s pain and in her hair. When Aya comes to take Amy’s face in her hands, there is the bruise. It stains Amy’s cheek in dull blue and brown veins, starbursting as if a finger has punctured a pressure point in her cheek and opened other tunnels.
Amy touches Aya’s hand then, and smiling rigidly, she rolls up the sleeves of her long T-shirt, rolls socks down, brings daylight to bruises burnt old and deep purple, bruises clicking together around her arms like connected bangles, or another skin. Amy’s blood runs and will not turn back, though Aya counters it with water, with her vanilla. Tayo watches her. A smear of ash is on his temple. She cannot bear his gaze.
‘Have you come to help us?’ he asks Aya, and his laughter is so sudden and so quickly spent that it divides Aya from her nerve, sends her to the door, hauls her out.
10 presentiment (that long shadow on the lawn)
Magalys and her older brother Teofilo are the only people in the studio, and they are dancing together between the mirrored walls; he promenades her, then draws her to him, pretends to back away from her, beckons her on. They step slow, quick, quick, slow, quick and quick, to a Xavier Cugat song. It’s the kind of music I laugh at when Mami and Papi dance to it. But Magalys and Teofilo move and I see that inside this song there is something even, something near to perfection; there is a rhythm that a dance keeps.
Magalys in dance-teacher mode is scary-looking; she has added some drama by wearing a black flamenco skirt and bodice, hiding her hair beneath a black headscarf and daubing her lips with red lipstick. Teofilo, who has no place at all in my blurred memories, is half a head taller than Magalys and three years older, brown-skinned and curly haired. He smiles with sharp-looking teeth when he sees me, but he and Magalys dance the song to the end. I clap, and Magalys comes to embrace me. Teofilo holds out his arms in an invitation to dance. We consider each other. I say, ‘No, thank you,’ and forget to soften my refusal with a smile.
Teofilo laughs; the tape rolls on to the next song. ‘You’re Cuban? And you can’t dance El Son? Not even the basics of it? Nobody taught you El Son?’
His English accent is better than Magalys’s.
‘She should know it in her bones,’ Magalys gasps, pretending shock from her place on the floor, where she is changing her dance shoes for trainers. I feel attacked, so I smile. He takes my hand. ‘Come, I’ll show you.’
I try to back away but he is busy positioning me, straightening and extending my arm so that it matches his, wrapping his other arm around my waist to try and make me sway. I know that I cannot do this dance — there is something inside me that is slow, something that rises slowly, dips slowly. Something that does not talk back to a drumbeat.
‘I don’t want to,’ I say, too quiet. He steps to show me how to step, and I am dragged along with him. I see myself in the mirrors; I am wide-eyed and tight lipped, and where Teofilo is not holding me straight, I flop like a dummy.
‘Please! I don’t want to!’ I say, and I am louder than the music. Teofilo lets me go, shrugs at Magalys and turns away to switch off the cassette player. To Teofilo’s back, and to Magalys, I say, ‘I just don’t really feel this kind of music.’
Magalys tucks her arm through mine, pats my shoulder reassuringly and tells me, ‘No te preocupes, no es nada, no es nada. But you should know that, though it is not quite your jazz singing, it is really not all that different.’
We walk to the coffee shop across the street without saying anything else to each other, listening to the conversations around us and the traffic humming nearby and looking at each other without embarrassment, as if we are content to let the traffic be our speech.
We find a corner table and settle, carefully rolling our mugs of coffee over our palms to counteract the cold. We chorus, ‘So how are you?’ Magalys answers first.
‘I am doing well,’ she tells me. ‘Teofilo has a lot of students, so we share them and it means he gets to have longer breaks.’
‘Is that why you’re here?’ I ask her.
Magalys looks at me blankly, waits for me to elaborate.
‘Did you want to come here to teach dance?’
Magalys shakes her head, her curls bounce. ‘Oh, no. I just came over here to see what it is like. To see if I miss Cuba. I certainly don’t miss la lucha. I certainly don’t miss having to be clever every day and having to smile at ugly men who have ranking and can allocate me more meat than I’ve been allocated, or more fish than I’ve been allocated, or a new kettle.’
She sips her mocha, blows on it, sips again, says, ‘But,’ at the same time as I say it for her, as a question. She looks around the coffee shop, at the casement-framed paintings and the people chattering on the purple sofas, as if the whole shop will fall down on her if she is not grateful to be here.
‘I don’t know, sometimes it just doesn’t really feel like anywhere over here. I look at maps and stuff and none of the places seem real. I think that’s what happens when you don’t belong to a country, though — lines are just lines, and letters are just letters and you can’t touch the meaning behind them the way you can when you’re home and you look at a map and you see, instead of a place name, a stretch of road or an orchard or an ice-cream parlour around the corner. You know. It’s OK, though. I didn’t expect to know this place. You haven’t told me how you are doing.’
I say, ‘I’m fine.’ There is an awkward silence because we both know that I don’t want to give her any more than that.
‘You really scared me at that Vedado party, you know,’ Magalys says, eventually.
My heart hammers in my chest and there is no room in there for me to be louder than my heart and tell her that I’m sorry about what happened to her. I drink my coffee, drink it down as if it’s going to save my life, and say nothing.
Magalys says, ‘I thought about you a lot when you went away. I used to worry without really knowing why. I felt as if I knew you well because I had seen you fall ill.’
‘Fall ill?’ I examine Magalys’s face; she is frowning.
‘Don’t you remember?’ she says. ‘We were under the table, and —’
‘A woman came and started to sing,’ I interject, but Magalys only skips a beat before waving my words away: ‘You don’t remember? We were under the table, playing dominoes, and all the grown-ups were at the table eating and drinking and some of them were asking where we were, and we started laughing, but then you said “shush”, and put a finger to your lips. You started shaking, and I knew it wasn’t normal shaking, I straightaway knew. Your eyes were rolling so much, and you were biting your tongue, and you were. . I don’t know — but you were staring at me and I felt as if you’d closed the world or something. I yelled so loud that everyone looked under the table at almost exactly the same time. And your Mami took you away. You don’t remember?’