Loving Che by Ana Menendez

off the necklace, he says, not harshly but without smiling. I hesitate. Why? Because I ask you to. I stand for a moment. Is the door locked? He nods. I take the necklace off. And the blouse, he says. I lift my chin to him. It has never been like this. Always he has taken off my clothes himself, slowly, teasingly, so that I have barely been aware of my own nakedness. Please.
    I do as I’m told. I unbutton the blouse. I look back at him but he doesn’t speak. I slip the blouse off my shoulders. The skirt, he says. It’s a pin-striped skirt I bought a long time ago at El Encanto. I unzip it. And the slip, he says. I let it drop with the skirt. I’m in my underclothes.It is hot, but the sweat on my skin makes me shiver. He has not moved. He is watching. He nods. I shake my head no. He points to me. Do it.
    I reach back to undo my brassiere, the lace one that I wear in the daytime for him. And then, not wanting to show embarrassment, I bend to lower my panties. I roll them down as I go, and the movement of this last layer over my skin introduces me to a new anticipation. I stand bare-breasted and open to this foreigner, like some fetish of a woman, some stone carving from the mountains of his travels.
    But he does nothing, only looks. For a long time, he looks. And then he walks slowly to me. Without touching me, he bends and picks up my brassiere, helps me with it. He lifts my leg, one and then the other, and pulls my panties up. He pats my skin, lingers at my waist. And then the blouse—hole by hole, he buttons it. He slides on my slip. He holds my skirt open so I can step into it, my hand at his shoulder for balance.
    For hours after he leaves, scarcely aware of my hands, I work, charcoal staining my fingers like smoke.
    I trace his face, lightly at first, the way memory returns, indistinct, held together by the barest outlines. And then I dig deeper into the paper, darken shadows, rub light into the places where his forehead protrudes. When I was younger, truth was a flat plane, dimensionless, weightless; and the white paper was more honest than all the false green pastures of paint, a single blade of grass more real for its ignorance of space, its vegetable disregard for eternity.
    But now I know that this is also true: that I can conjure his features from dust, blacken the paper with fire-ash, and have him speak to me again, if only in this language of deaf-mutes. I can form his soundless lips to my memory and only I will understand why I have given him half a face, dissipated half his features over the wide world. This much remains of my own possession: this curl in the hair, this eye that turns down in sleep and sadness, this eye that narrows in private joy.
    I sit back, a little tired, but also filled with longing, my heart beating fast, in the old way. I am still for a while, only the movement of my chest rising and falling. And then I take the stick of charcoal to my hand, pressing into the flesh of my palm. When I’ve darkened my hand, I move around my wrists and up the inside of my arm, casting myself in pale shadow. It’s like the old days when I could trace a pen to paper for hours. I move the charcoal into my armpits, and my skin shivers beneath its tracks. I close my eyes, nothing but the soft dusting of coal, wandering gray. The hand of God painting my skin, tracing riverbeds in some ancient map. And now I am far away from myself, and the only thing connecting me to my body is this dusty string, this story forming beneath my fingertips.
    Daughter of my heart: You must remember that all our walking is a stepping into the other. We enter rooms and canvases, we look into one another’s eyes, we open packages, we travel into other lands. We laugh and taste with wide-open mouths and our hands seek to touch and hold.
    So it was with Ernesto and me when we opened the door to the small room at the top of the stairs so we might enter different lives. My going again and again to him, wanting