Читать книгу The Iguana Tree - Michel Stone - Страница 13

CRUOITA’S CHEEKS looked waxen. Was this the natural look of death, or had the women who’d prepared her body applied something to the skin? She lay in a simple casket inside the house, and Lilia sat in a wooden chair beside her.

The old widow from down the lane arrived with a small boy. Lilia recognized him as one of the children she’d often seen chasing mongrels and chickens around the village. The woman tottered with a cane, and her right cheek sagged severely from an unnamed ailment. Her eye was like a dying fish’s eye, bulging a milky blue. Lilia thanked God Crucita had died with her grace and beauty intact until the end.

The old woman pulled from her dress a pocketful of dainty, white lilies with stems too short for a vase. She did not speak but nodded to Lilia as she offered her the flowers with a shaking grip. With one hand on the boy’s shoulder, she leaned over Crucita, studying her face for several moments. The old woman ran a finger along Crucita’s stiff knuckles, then turned, nodded to Lilia, and with the boy beside her, hobbled from the house.

Lilia smelled the pale, waxy flowers from where they lay in her lap, a strong scent from such tiny blossoms. She placed them on Crucita’s breast, so she could enjoy them on her journey to the afterlife.

Rosa handed Lilia a small cup of mezcal and a dish of cake and said, “Eat and drink, Lilia.”

The girls who sold fruit and juice beside the pier entered the house and spoke to Rosa’s husband in the kitchen. Glasses and dishes clinked and music played from a cassette player in the courtyard. Maybe the music had played all afternoon; Lilia could not be certain. She tasted a small bit of cake, sweet and so delicate it dissolved in her mouth before she chewed.

“Crucita would like this,” Lilia said.

Rosa smiled and stepped to the kitchen to refill her cup and to greet the orange seller and his wife who had just arrived. They handed Rosa a basket filled with limes and three small green melons. The orange seller remained in the kitchen, but his wife came to Lilia.

“May I?” she asked Lilia, opening her leathery hand to reveal a shiny, green lime.

“Of course,” Lilia said.

The orange seller’s wife placed the lime beside Crucita. “Your grandmother always liked our fruit. She used to say our limes were her favorite.”

Lilia smiled and nodded in agreement about the quality of the limes.

The orange seller’s wife stood squat and round with oily cheeks and a mouth that always smiled. Lilia wondered if the deep creases beside the woman’s eyes were from her constant grinning or from many years of tending fruit in the severe sunshine.

“Your grandmother looks at peace,” she said, as her husband called to her from the kitchen. She patted Lilia’s shoulder then went to her husband.

The shy girl from the fields—was her name Veronica?—stood in the doorway, a paper sack in her arms. The girl wore a thin brown dress, and sunlight shone through the gauzy fabric, revealing her slender legs. When she approached Lilia, she said, “I have brought you a fish.” Her golden eyes had flecks of dark in their irises; they were pretty eyes, but they were sorrowful as well. The girl paused only a moment, when Lilia thanked her, then turned away. Lilia wondered if the girl considered another’s passing, perhaps her own mother or a sibling.

Lilia watched Veronica leave, grateful for the many who had come today to mourn Crucita’s passing. Rosa’s daughter Rosita appeared from the bedroom, carrying Alejandra. Rosita placed her hand on Lilia’s shoulder. “I think she is hungry, señora.”

Lilia stood to take the infant from the girl. Alejandra sniffled, red-faced and agitated in Rosita’s arms. Lilia’s nipples prickled at the sight of her hungry baby, and she felt her milk letting down. “Thank you, Rosita.”

The girl nodded. “Can I do anything for you?” she said.

“No, no, please. Go eat. You are very good with Alejandra, Rosita. Thank you for helping me today.”

“Of course,” Rosita said. “I’ll join Mama in the kitchen, but fetch me after you have nursed.”

Lilia took the baby into the bedroom and changed her quickly. By the time she’d secured a fresh diaper on Alejandra, the child’s whimpers had turned to wails, her face as wrinkled as a newborn’s in her frustration, though she was nearly six months old.

Lilia unbuttoned her dress, milk already streaming from her breasts, and pushed her left nipple into Alejandra’s mouth. The baby hungrily sucked, barely able to keep up her gulping with the flow of Lilia’s milk.

Lilia’s shoulders relaxed. She closed her eyes and wondered which of them comforted the other more: she or Alejandra. Never had Lilia felt as fulfilled or as needed as when she nursed her child. Never had she experienced such a connection to anyone. She considered her own mother and how Crucita had once been a smooth-skinned new mother, too. Lilia imagined a young Crucita, her breasts full and rounded with milk, cradling Lilia’s mother in her arms, nursing her as Lilia now nursed Crucita’s great-grandchild. The circle of life and the passions it aroused bewildered Lilia. How odd the swings of human emotion could be: only moments ago Lilia had grieved with plentiful tears beside her grandmother’s corpse. Now she wept tears of joy at providing sustenance for her infant.

When Alejandra had emptied Lilia’s breast, Lilia burped her and put the infant to her right breast. The child soon lost interest, her hunger satiated. Not wanting to change clothes, Lilia pulled a butter-yellow shawl from her dresser to cover the small wet circles of milk on her dress. She kissed Alejandra’s brow, then carried the child into the front room where Crucita’s casket sat.

Lilia saw through the kitchen window the village priest in the courtyard, speaking with some men who played cards beneath the shade tree.

Rosita came to Lilia to take Alejandra from her. “You have more visitors,” she said, reaching for the child.

Rosa had followed Rosita over to Lilia and placed another chair beside Crucita’s casket. “The priest has arrived and no doubt he will want to visit with you. Are you going to eat your cake?” she said, motioning toward the small, square table where Lilia had placed the dish and her cup.

Lilia shook her head and handed the plate to Rosa.

“Keep that cup and sip from it, girl. This is a celebration of your Crucita’s life,” Rosa said.

“A festive occasion, a time of celebration of a full earthly life,” the priest said as he approached Lilia. When she stood to greet him, he motioned for her to sit.

“Our Crucita now dances in heaven,” he said, placing a candle beside the casket and lighting the wick with a match. He was an old man and had been the village priest Lilia’s entire life. Lilia had not often attended services, but the father had baptized her, presided over her quinceañera Mass, her marriage to Héctor, and Alejandra’s baptism.

The music in the courtyard grew louder, and Lilia heard Rosa tell someone to find some dominoes.

“Thank you for coming, Father,” Lilia said, her voice a whisper, though she’d not intended it to be so. As the priest took a seat beside Lilia, she imagined the hem of Crucita’s dress swinging as she danced with her long-dead husband, white lilies tucked behind both ears.

“Tell me, child, what is your fondest memory of your grandmother?”

He leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms and legs as if preparing to listen for a while. Lilia had not spoken more than a few words all afternoon, and the question unsettled her.

She hesitated. “Crucita raised me. She became my mother the instant her daughter, my mother, died bearing me. I have many happy times to recall.”

The priest smiled. “Yes?” he said, raising his bushy eyebrows over eyes like golden marbles.

Rosa approached them in silence, eager to fulfill her duties as hostess. She handed the priest a cup of mezcal and tipped the bottle over Lilia’s cup, replenishing the half she’d drunk.

“My grandmother spoke her mind. That is not a specific memory but an openness I admired in her.” Lilia took a long sip so that she could stop speaking.

The priest did likewise and said, “Can you recall a time you particularly admired her straightforwardness?”

Lilia took another sip, hoping the mezcal would make this easier.

“My grandmother took great pride in her heritage. She made beautiful pottery. She put care into all she did, and she had little regard for those of a different mindset.”

The priest nodded, shifted himself in his chair. The tilt of his graying head and the slow way he blinked his amber eyes like an ancient tortoise comforted Lilia.

“My husband has gone to Estados Unidos de América, and Crucita could not understand that.” Lilia drained her cup and sucked in a deep breath.

“I see. Do you understand why?”

Lilia exhaled and ran her fingers behind her ears as if tucking away loose strands of hair.

“I love and respect my husband and understand his purpose, but I value Crucita’s experience, her wisdom. I admire her fierce pride. I cannot easily reject my past because my Crucita has instilled her values in me.”

“Go on,” he said when she paused and picked at a callus on her thumb.

“I suppose my favorite memories are more like images. I have a picture in my mind of Crucita making pottery, a look of contentment brightens her eyes and colors her cheeks. When I think of my Crucita, this is what I see. Her beautiful pottery.”

He nodded, examining the bottom of his empty cup. Turning to Crucita, he smiled.

“You have lived well, Crucita. Your child here is a vessel for your worldly experiences, your tribulations, your labor. She accepts all you have given her. You may rest in God’s house and rejoice in the peace you will find there.” He brought his fist to his lips to stifle a belch.

“Father,” Lilia said. “Do you think I will disrespect my grandmother by going to my husband, by leaving the place of my ancestors? “

He took Lilia’s hand in his thick, warm palm. “Let us pray a novena of mourning, child.”

Lilia found more comfort in his touch than she’d anticipated, and she held tight, concentrating on the words flowing fast and soft from the priest’s mouth.

“Heavenly Father, be with your servant Crucita on her journey. Keep her close to you so that she may be a source of guidance and strength to those she has left behind. Help her granddaughter Lilia to feel Crucita’s spirit guiding her choices, giving her self-reliance. Strengthen Lilia’s faith in herself and in this world and the afterworld, and fill Lilia with peacefulness and renewed strength.”

“Amen,” Lilia whispered.

The priest stood and pulled from his pocket rosary beads. He placed them in Lilia’s hand and said, “Say your rosario for nine days and always on the anniversary of Crucita’s death.” He squeezed Lilia’s fist in his and, blinking his eyes slowly, added, “You will be all right, child.”

She looked into his confident, yellow eyes, and said, “Maybe,” and the tears she thought she’d cried dry choked her again.

The priest lifted Lilia by her elbow so that she stood facing him. “Death will not weaken the bonds between you two.”

Lilia nodded.

“Family is eternal. Bones crumble to dust, but love overcomes the decay, child.”

Lilia smiled through her tears and welcomed his gentle embrace as he bid her farewell. She walked with him to the door where deep shadows in the courtyard announced the end of this day. How often she’d stood in this doorway as a child, waiting for Crucita to return from the market after a day of selling her pottery. Rosa hummed in the kitchen, washing a dish. Music and laughter filtered into the house from outside, somehow more ghostlike than silence.

“I am sorry Emanuel was not here.” Rosa said, drying her thick hands on a kitchen rag.

“Nonsense. He has no business coming to mourn Crucita,” Lilia said.

Rosa filled her cup and one for Lilia, sloshing mezcal in the sink as she did so. “Not to mourn Crucita, silly girl. But to comfort you.”

“You have comforted me. My friends have been here all day. I do not know Emanuel anymore. He is like a dream to me now, so distant is my friendship with him.”

Rosita entered the kitchen. “The baby is asleep now,” she said.

“You have been good help to me today, Rosita. Please go on home now and rest,” Lilia said, squeezing the girl’s hand.

“Yes,” Rosa said. “Run along home. I’ll be there in a while.”

The girl nodded to her mother and left, saying nothing more.

Rosa swallowed a gulp from her cup, shaking her head. “You need a man to comfort you, a reliable man. You do not have that. You have me, José, and our children. We are like your family, but we cannot be for you what Emanuel could be. What your Alejandra needs. José says Emanuel asked him about you. That boy has always had a fondness for you, Lilia. I know this talk bothers you, girl, but with Crucita’s passing you must consider your options. You should believe that Héctor is gone.”

José entered the kitchen from the courtyard, his face flush from drink.

“Oh, poor Lilia. Come join us. Listen to music and play cards with us. Oh, and here for you is a note from the shopkeeper Armando. He stopped by but could not stay. He asked I give you his condolences.” José pulled from his pocket a small scrap of paper, folded in half. He handed the message to Lilia.

“Thoughtful of him to stop by,” Lilia said, fingering the folded paper.

“Come play cards, Lilia,” José said.

“This day has been long. Perhaps I will watch you play,” Lilia said.

“My God,” Rosa said, flailing her hands in the air. “Crucita is with God now. She has no pain. And you mope so for Héctor. Be strong, girl. Lift yourself up, Lilia.”

Someone in the courtyard called for José. “Come out, Lilia,” he said.

“She’ll be along in a moment. I need to finish speaking with her the way her own mother would have spoken to her,” Rosa said, motioning her husband out the door.

“That old woman lived a long and rich life,” Rosa continued, jerking her head toward Crucita’s corpse. “She died happy, cooking. Your own mama died giving you life, a life she anticipated with great joy. But you … I suspect your constant sorrow is as much about Héctor’s leaving as Crucita’s passing. Crucita and Héctor are gone. Drink something. Laugh a little. Dance. I guarantee you that is what Crucita is doing in heaven now with your own mama, perhaps with Héctor, too.”

“No, Rosa,” Lilia said. “Not Héctor.”

Rosa spun on her heel splashing golden liquor from her cup onto the floor and Lilia’s sandals as she marched to Crucita’s casket.

“Crucita,” Rosa shouted at the dead woman’s face. “I cannot get through to Lilia. She cannot even celebrate your life without depressing me. Give this child a sign that Héctor is there with you, if he is not in hell for abandoning his family.” Rosa took the cup of mezcal and poured it into Crucita’s casket. She then tossed the cup in at the old woman’s feet.

“Enjoy yourself, Crucita. Someone in your family should.” Rosa turned and glared at Lilia.

A rage exploded inside Lilia. “Never speak Héctor’s name again! You are crazy.”

Rosa shook her head. “And you are a fool,” she said, brushing past Lilia.

Lilia grabbed a kitchen rag and went to Crucita, dabbing at her grand mother’s burial garments. The music outside stopped as Rosa barked at the card players in the courtyard. The white lilies had fallen from Crucita’s dress into the casket, and Lilia returned them to her grandmother’s breast, their perfume lingering, despite the mezcal’s strong odor. The drunken voices in the courtyard faded as the card players’ party moved elsewhere.

Lilia fingered the cream-colored lace on her grandmother’s pale blue dress until long shadows overtook the room. When finally she stood, her shoulders relaxed for the first time in hours.

She walked to the courtyard and sank to the ground beneath the tree, fishing in her pocket for a handkerchief to blow her nose. She felt a scrap of paper. What was that? Oh, yes, the shopkeeper’s note of condolence. She would read it tomorrow.

She clutched her knees to her breasts and listened to faint laughter somewhere down the lane. She ached, tired from mourning, from visitors, and she welcomed the courtyard’s familiar solitude this evening. No hint of stew drifted on the thick air, no scent of Crucita’s incense permeated this place. And how could that be? Who, but God, knew if Héctor were dead, too? And maybe even God didn’t know some things. Some mysteries remained unsolved, complicated, and senseless.

Slats of moonlight fell into the courtyard through the shade tree, shaping silhouettes of leaf and limb, light and dark, illuminating a small white crescent, perhaps a child’s sock or a crumpled bit of paper. The slight object glowed in the moonlight near the center of the courtyard. Lilia rose to fetch it. She bent, caressing the leathery strip between her fingers, uncertain of what it could be. She lifted the thing to her face, examining it in the soft moonlight. Then she recognized the shell of an iguana’s egg, curled and dried, and she wondered what had become of its insides. How often she had seen the iguana sunning on a low limb, constant company for her and Crucita in their courtyard.

She considered the egg’s innards, long gone, once swelling from liquid into a living creature inside the opaque shell, life coming from life, something substantial from something less. Perhaps one of the yellow-headed blackbirds that often scattered leaves and droppings and petals from the limbs above had pecked this egg, had drunk the slick insides. If so, the egg would never become an iguana, would never become what the mother iguana set out for it to be. The egg had served, perhaps, as sustenance to a bird. The bird—careless, distracted, and indifferent-soon flying off to other trees, other courtyards.

Lilia stretched her arms, leaning against the wall of the courtyard, the remnant of eggshell in her fingers. She thought of Héctor’s dreams, of the mother iguana’s dreams, the yellow-headed blackbird’s dreams.

And Héctor, she considered, like the life-giving substance within the eggshell, existed to provide for his family, to nurture his and Lilia’s future children and Alejandra’s future children, but perhaps he, too, carried a fate like the unformed iguana, a slippery yolk destined to be destroyed for the sake of others. Perhaps Rosa had spoken truthfully.

The thoughts unsettled her, and she held the shell up before her eyes, turning it in the moonlight.

She whispered, “Is this my Héctor? Is he dead?” Lilia pictured Héctor’s white bones unmistakable and jutting from his corpse, a vulture pecking his flesh in the hot desert until the winds came and blew sand over what was once her Héctor, covering him, dissolving him into the earth like a raindrop, and he would be gone, save for the memories of those who knew him. “Can this be Héctor, Iguana?” She shouted the words at the limbs above, “Tell me, Iguana! I must know.”

The iguana’s response came as words spoken by the breeze rustling the leaves above, and the words of the breeze blew foreign and indecipherable, and Lilia understood the iguana would offer no answer this night. She closed her eyes, her head against the courtyard wall, and hoped sleep would come soon.

“Lilia?”

She heard her name as in a dream.

“Lilia.”

Someone stroked her hair. Lilia opened her eyes. A red shirt. Emanuel. Crouching beside her. He smelled of soap. A trace of sotol on his breath, but his eyes were clear, gentle.

“Girl. Sweet Lilia. What a day you have had. Let me help you inside.” He smiled at her, and Lilia felt his hand gently lifting beneath her elbow.

“Emanuel,” she said, and let him help her to her feet.

“I have thought of you. Worried about you,” he said, as they entered the dark house.

He turned on a lamp.

“Do you need anything? Have you eaten?” He helped her to a chair.

Lilia waved his questions away, yawning. “So much food, Emanuel. Rosa acts as if I am dying of hunger, always pushing food at me.” She motioned to the table, piled with tins of sweets, and she smiled as she spoke, despite her tiredness.

“I am sorry I am so late. I see the wake celebration has ended.” He sat on the floor beside her chair. How young he looked, how much like the boy Lilia had known in school. When he reached for her forearm, his warm fingers gliding to her hand, she did not pull away.

“You did not need to come, Emanuel.”

He smiled. “You have been my friend for years.”

She tightened her hand around his and whispered, “Thank you, Emanuel. You are thoughtful.” She wanted to say more. To tell him not to leave her. To ask him to sit beside her and keep her company. She wished to say that she felt Crucita’s presence so heavily within these walls that at times she became frightened, and that Héctor’s absence left a void within her that she could never explain. She wanted Emanuel to know that Alejandra, who slept soundly in her cradle, might be all Lilia had left, and that her allegiance to the child burned within her breast, the incredible responsibility, the immeasurable love filling her in a way that nothing else seemed worthy of her emotion.

He squeezed her fingers, then cradled her hand between both of his. He lifted her fingers to his face, to his cheek, then pressed them to his warm skin.

She wanted to tell him of Rosa’s drunken harshness, of her cruel words, of the drink now soiling Crucita’s burial dress. Perhaps Emanuel would agree with Lilia that Rosa was crazy.

Lilia felt herself falling, letting go in a way she had not been able to do. Her fingers skimmed Emanuel’s cheeks and lips, and he kissed her fingertips.

So many emotions rose within her, but mostly a need for Emanuel to be right here for her now, for someone who knew her, really knew her, to hold her, to love her, to tell her all would be fine again. Rosa did not understand; Crucita was gone and had never understood fully.

She placed her hands on either side of Emanuel’s face, pulling him toward her lap. Lilia caressed his hair with her fingers as if he were a child in need of comfort and she his mother. He rested his cheek on her thigh.

Emanuel slid his hands beneath the hem of her skirt, grabbing her ankles tight and lifting his head from her lap, looking into Lilia’s face. His eyes burned bright, and he looked more alive than anyone Lilia could recall.

“I could take care of you,” he whispered, his breath hot.

She said nothing, unsure of anything. His left hand slipped up her leg to her knee, and with his right hand he pulled her chin to his. He kissed her gently on the lips and Lilia did not pull back, longing to be held, to be loved.

Emanuel raised himself to his knees, lifting the hem of Lilia’s skirt. He bent to her, kissing her ankles slowly, then moved to her calves, kissing one, stroking the other. His touch was more than she could bear and she leaned to him, pulling his face to hers. Her mind tumbled, blurring right and wrong. She pressed her lips to his.

The world twirled slowly, gentle and good for the first time in too long. Emanuel parted his lips, his hard, probing tongue pushing into Lilia’s mouth, his hands too tight on her forearms, pushing down on her, confining, trapping, and the world sped up, spinning uncontrolled and wild and wrong, and Lilia sat upright, pushing him away, her hands firm against his shoulders.

“No. I cannot do this,” she said.

He stared at her.

“Oh, God. I don’t want to do this, Emanuel.” She leapt to her feet, her hands at her temples.

He sat before her on his haunches like a dog caught stealing a chicken bone from the kitchen. “Lilia,” he said, half asking, half commanding.

“No,” she said.

He shook his head, wearing the unmistakable expression of disgust, of disappointment.

“Foolish Lilia. You make life difficult. Things could be simple for you and your child, you know. Almost easy.”

“You should go, Emanuel,” she said.

He stood, staring hard at her face as if he could will a change of mind.

“Please, go,” she said.

The waning hope in his eyes flashed to anger, and he shook his head in utter disbelief, as if discovering something unexpected and repulsive in Lilia.

“Now,” she said when he made no movement to leave.

“You will regret this, Lilia,” he said.

She said nothing but followed him to the door, and then watched him walk into the night. Heat lightning illuminated the far sky, and Lilia wondered what caused the flash. She’d learned in school about storms and electricity, but science could not fully explain such momentary brilliance in the black heavens. She imagined her soul as a dark mysterious place, and longed for a flash of light there, just a quick moment of lightness and clarity, of relief. She watched the skies a few moments longer, but no mysteries revealed themselves in that black expanse, and so she slipped inside, hoping sleep and dreams of distant places might help her restlessness.

Lilia unbuttoned her dress, and as was her habit checked her pockets before tossing the garment across the back of the lone chair in her bedroom. Lying across her bed in her underwear, Lilia opened the dirty scrap of paper. Scrawled in pencil were the words, Héctor called. He is across the border and good. He will call you later. Then in black ink across the bottom the words, Sorry about Crucita. But she is with God now, so that is good. Armando.

Lilia clenched the paper in her fist, laughing and crying. “Here is your sign, Rosa,” she shouted, waking Alejandra. Lilia laughed louder, scooping the infant into her arms, pulling her close. An old t-shirt of Héctor’s remained in Alejandra’s cradle where Lilia had placed it that morning. Lilia grabbed it, clutching the fabric to them both.

“Do you smell that shirt, Alejandra? That is Papa’s scent, and he is safe, my baby. You will know your beautiful, brave papa.”