Tomás whispers, ‘Please give it back. You don’t know how sad Mami is.’
(No.)
‘Why are you blaming her? It was Papi who said you couldn’t go.’ When I don’t reply Tomás says ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you. Why didn’t you say anything to us?’
I will not answer him.
‘Hormones,’ Tomás says, to goad me.
Tick, tick, no answer. But as soon as he leaves, I call home. Mami answers and her voice is hoarse and thin, and I think, Fight me better than this.
And she does. Chabella says that she is fine. She does not talk to me about the collar. I say I have been tired lately, and of course she is concerned and of course she thinks she has something that will help. Should she bring it over? I say ‘No’ louder than I mean to.
Amy Eleni is brusque with me when she calls. ‘Now, tell me what’s the matter, Maja.’
I am sitting up in bed with my head against the head board; the phone is pinned between my shoulder blade and my ear. My arms feel weak. I didn’t want to speak to her, but Aaron gave me such a look when he handed me the phone. I tell her, ‘Nothing. I’m pregnant. Nothing. I’m going to die.’
‘Shut up! Aaron’s worried sick. You tell me you don’t want to see me, you act all fucked up, but because I’m your best friend you know I can’t just let that stand. Another thing: you sleep all the time.’
‘OK, it’s sleeping sickness.’
‘Didn’t I just tell you to shut up?’
I shut up.
Amy Eleni says, ‘I read my class a wonderful poem, a stunning poem, the Elizabeth Jennings love poem about stargazers, and the only comment I had was anonymous — it came from the back, and it was “I don’t get it, man.” They think they have to “get” it. When I talk about Shelley, this same kid at the back shouts out, “Who’s Shelley?” When I talk about Marvell or Donne, this boy or deep-voiced girl shouts out, “Who’s Marvell? Who’s Donne?” When I talk about Shakespeare, this little shit at the back shouts out, “Who’s Shakespeare?” I look and look but there’s about eight of them with their hands over their mouths. Their last teacher was male, and he cracked after someone spat on his head; he couldn’t identify the culprit and everyone thoroughly denied it, so maybe they’re expert liars or maybe they got this man so nervous he imagined saliva. They’re trying to. . well, anyway, I won’t do it, you know?’
Suddenly I am telling Amy Eleni about Magalys and Papi and Mami. I talk for a long time.
Amy Eleni says with certainty, ‘Listen Maja, I think you’re pulling a Vertigo on me with this distraught chat about oh, something missing in your Cuba memory and how you feel so trapped by your dad not letting you go. The reason why you’re not going is that you know it’s not what you need — what you need is here. If you really needed to go back, you’d come to the regretful conclusion that it’s none of your dad’s business and you’d go anyway. Wouldn’t you? There’s nothing between you and yourself. If Madeleine Elster or Judy really needed to kill herself, then between that person inside her telling her that she had to go and Scottie saying, “Hey you’re pretty and I like you so don’t die,” Scottie didn’t stand a fucking chance. The Elster chick, or Judy, or whoever, she could have just shot herself in the head if it all got too much. But she didn’t. She let Scottie get in the way.’
I listen to Amy Eleni breathing on the other end of the line, and I listen to the leak. I listen to the African news channel that Aaron is watching next door; I don’t listen to what the newsreader is saying, but to how she is saying it, her tone of perpetual astonishment.
I sleep. I wake and put Chabella’s collar back on to make my sleep uncomfortable, to give me a better chance of waking. Sometimes Aaron is there. More often he is not there. When he speaks on the phone to Geoffrey, he speaks in Ewe because he doesn’t want me to know what he is saying. The smell of damp collects in my bones.
I warm myself up some tomato soup and before I can sit down to drink it I’ve become carbon, the black before a diamond shows itself. My senses turn crystalline and abrade each other until I lay down my spoon. If this spoon should scrape against the bottom of the bowl just once, and I should hear it scrape, I am not sure of the result. I am not sure where the hysteric and I are going to go when that bad sound comes. I hold the spoon away and I breathe and do not eat.
Aaron looks at me over the top of his own bowl of soup, and the circles around his eyes are so dark that I begin to think I am reflecting him.
‘You have got to eat,’ he says. His voice is very hard. It hurts. He stands over me and drags my wrist so that I have to put soup into my mouth. I let him; with his hand over mine there is less risk of the bad sound coming. A spoonful at a time, we do it. The cold in this kitchen never ends, the steam off the soup is nothing. Whenever I think I am going to spit soup in Aaron’s face, he knows, and he warns me with his eyes.
I say I’ve had enough, and Aaron looks into the bowl. It is still more than three-quarters full. Aaron says, ‘Don’t be selfish.’ He jams the sloppy spoon into my mouth. It isn’t deliberate when the metal strikes my teeth — but the metal does strike. I take the spoon myself and continue the work. Aaron watches me swallow; he is sad that he has to do this, but he is strong. In his eyes I am a throat working down red juice, I am a shaking hand and a spoon and beyond that his baby.
(Herr Doktor please die as I cannot have you think of me this way.)
I am so ashamed of my tears that I am going away, not up and out, not inside, I don’t know where, just away. My shame brings me escape velocity, brings me Gelassenheit. I love my son, so when Aaron is gone, I do not throw up to spite him. I let the soup stay. I let us have the soup.
Aaron has to go when there is a cardiac arrest and he is on night cover; he has to go for fourteen hours at a time on a lot of days. He has to be gone full stop.
Amy Eleni has tousled her hair up with gel. I peek into the sitting room and watch Aaron wrap his arms around her; she nips his cheek, talks to him for a moment
(the first thing she says is, ‘this place smells worse and worse all the time.’ I think he offers her words about the plumber, or time, or something, because the second thing Amy Eleni says is, ‘she will lose her mind in this smell, you know.’ I don’t hear the third thing)
then she comes through to me.
She has brought me an armful of coffee-table books about Cuba, two torches and a grab bag of salt and vinegar crisps. I refuse to let the books remain in the bedroom.
‘But these are good, I promise,’ she says. ‘I meant to give them to you for your birthday, but this is an emergency. Anyway, shut up.’
Amy Eleni has inscribed the inside of the first book: ‘Friends make the world strong and beautiful — Jose Marti’
We crawl under the covers with torches, Amy Eleni lies flat on her stomach, I lie on my side. Our breath tickles the pages, and we stare at Cubans and the words that they have said to the photographers, the words printed alongside the monochrome and sepia images of bearded men waving out of the windows of long brown cars, houses with tiled floors and open wooden shutters and pictures of Che Guevara beside pictures of Jesus, leathered women in aprons churning butter, a queue of uniformed girls following a nun down the street with their buckle-shoed feet caught in variations of the cha-cha-cha, each grabbing the other by the ponytail.
My fingers turn the pages to salt and vinegar, but they stay on a page where a black Santero woman strewn with the beads of her gods lets her laughter throw her head right back. She is a big woman, and a diamond-patterned headscarf covers even bigger hair in a turban wrap. Behind her on the wall, in blurry focus, is a wooden crucifix, and the words next to her picture don’t matter.