Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa Page A

relationships, old anger. Scars had grown over some wounds—a father who drank too much and carried on with too many women, a devastated mother, a family torn apart—and I refused to rip them open again. I had buried all that so far down, had spent years pouring earth over those memories, I was not going to dredge them up. But it wasn’t the family wounds I avoided most. Broken relationships were best forgotten, I thought, best left to wither away.
    “I hate it when you do that,” she said every time I clammed up, reversing our usual roles. “You
    go up to your balcony, looking down from up there, distant. I can’t reach you there.”
    Sometimes I fell into a dead stare, my face turned away from hers. While she was careful, probing what she knew were my wounds, I was intractable with her, insisting to know it all. Different as we were, we were fighting each other over the same things. We had lived through these things in our phone calls and letters, but without distance to protect us, and isolated in this place, there was no escape. It seemed to me that our relationship broke all patterns, and I marveled at its force, and sometimes I was frightened.
    Passion comes rarely, and when it comes, it can be like a seizure, uprooting everything, consuming and transforming, taking possession, and at the same time, freeing spirit and flesh. It brings with it all that we are and have been, incalculable joy and unmeasurable wreckage. Ours was that, all of that. I saw it even then. My depression, her fears; my dreams for her, her belief in me; my hunger for her, her need of me.
    One afternoon, the day I found out I was not getting a writing fellowship I had worked on for months, I paced up and down the apartment, flaying myself, drinking beer after beer. When she came in she took a look at my face, and she braced for the bout she knew would follow. She put a hand on my back, wanting to comfort me, but I froze at her touch and walked away. I grabbed pages of my writing in my fist, throwing them around the room. She sat down, helpless, her face caught in a vise, narrowing, beaked. I had never known a face that could change quite like that, neither angry nor sad, but implacable. She was rigid, jaws clenched, lips locked. Her composure was maddening. It set us apart. I turned on her with fury, hoping my anger would draw her out. It was a cycle we would repeat time and again.
    For me, the bleakness swallowed everything. In those black holes I fell into, residues of my childhood, when the anger turned inside me, crowding out anything light, I felt in the grip of failure. Perhaps I was reliving my drunken father’s belligerence or my brave mother’s emotional subjugation. I saw no future for me, for Elizabeth and me together. I saw nothing but abandonment and rejection.
    She was holding something back from me, I suspected. In time she would leave me.
    Elizabeth would listen to the storm raging in me. It horrified and ripped her. “This is the one thing that will destroy us,” she said, exasperated. She could not stand to watch me tear myself apart, she said again and again. She could not stand to hear the bitterness in my voice, lacerations I intended for myself but that pierced her, too. That night she left her chair and came over to me, grabbed me and pushed me against the wall and held me in her arms, and while I seemed to recover quickly, she was left drained.
    I didn’t understand then that my moods were harder on her than they were on me.
    There were times when she left me alone, unable to stand by while I ranted that she was impervious and unfeeling. She would walk out without a word and be gone for hours. On her birthday, when she had been caught up in her work and I was frustrated, unable to write, she slipped away, and thought about the insults I had hurled at her.
    “You’ve decided that I am horrid, cold, and calculating,” she told me later. “Why the hell do you live with me then?”
    These fights, with their