Conversation
- Cuba, 1962 - More
Last
night, I dreamed of America. It was prom night. She lay down under the spinning
globes at the makeshift bandstand in her worn-out dress and too-high heels, the
gardenia pinned at her waist was brown and crumbling into itself. What's it worth, she cried, this land of Pilgrim's pride? As much as
love, I answered. More. The globes spun. I never won anything, I said, I lost
time and lovers, years, but you, purple mountains, you amber waves of grain,
belong to me as much as I do to you. She sighed, the band played, the skin fell
away from her bones. Then the room went black and I woke. I want my life back,
the days of too much clarity, the nights smelling of rage, but it's gone. If I
could shift my body that is too weak now, I'd lie face down on this hospital
bed, this icy water called Ohio River. I'd float past all the sad towns, past
all the dreamers onshore with their hands out. I'd hold on, I'd hold, till the
awful heaviness tore from me, sank to bottom and stayed. Then I'd stand up like
Lazarus and walk home across the water.
We
smile at each other and I lean back against the wicker couch. How does it feel
to be dead? I say. You touch my knees with your blue fingers. And when you open
your mouth, a ball of yellow light falls to the floor and burns a hole through
it. Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear. Did you ever, you start, wear a
certain kind of dress and just by accident, so inconsequential you barely
notice it, your fingers graze that dress and you hear the sound of a knife
cutting paper, you see it too and you realize how that image is simply the
extension of another image, that your own life is a chain of words that one day
will snap. Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands, and
beginning to rise heavenward in their confirmation dresses, like white helium
balloons, the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning, and above all that,
that's where I'm floating, and that's what it's like only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible. Could anyone alive survive it?
When the rooster jumps up
on the windowsill and spreads his red-gold wings, I wake, thinking it is the
sun and call Juanita, hearing her answer, but only in my mind. I know she is already
outside, breaking the cane off at ground level, using only her big hands. I get
the machete and walk among the cane, until I see her lying face-down in the
dirt. Juanita, dead in the morning like this. I raise the machete--- what I
take from the earth, I give back--- and I cut off her feet. I lift the body and
carry it to the wagon, where I load the cane to sell in the village. Whoever
tastes my woman in his candy, his cake, tastes something sweeter than this
sugar cane; it is grief. If you eat too much of it, you want more, you can
never get enough.
