Loving Che by Ana Menendez Page A

to be lost in his body, thinking that this next time it would finally happen. To feel him in my hands as one might touch one’s own self in a lost afternoon. To explore, to conquer. To take hold of a lover, to live inside another’s silence.
    Oh my child, these secrets locked tight so long. Soon I will lie at the end of a long hallway where you will no longer be able to reach me. And I think now that you might be a child again and suckle my breasts, hold them in your tiny hands. That you might fold time and reenter me, light the dark corners of your memory, back to the place where you began.
    Trimming my roses one morning, I recoil at the sound of the stem breaking. I sit with my head in my hands. A bullfrog calls to me across the grass and in the old ceiba a bird wakes. The tiptoeing of a beetle echoes with a giant’s step. Beneath my feet, the ants churn up the ground and the sound of earth tumbling on earth blots out every other sound in the world.
    At the studio, the portrait of the man and the woman sits where it has for many months. I know that I will never finish it. And for a brief moment, as if illuminated by a flash, I see the future waiting for me. I know that I will give birth to a girl and that I will send her away. I know that I will wait in vain for my lover to return, will wait even after he is dead. That my whole life will be this waiting, pure and hopeful, and the days and years will stretch no longer than the moment it takes a cloud to cross the night.
    I’m in my studio the day El Encanto burns. I hear the explosion and run down into the street. Already the crowds are gathering, running past me, bumping me. The sound of fire engines. Screaming. I walk quickly. On Galiano, I stop. Ahead of me, El Encanto is burning, ugly, smoke-ash, smell of plastic. And the sound of glass breaking and breaking, up and down the front of the building, pop, pop, pop as the fire engulfs everything: the dresses from Paris, the gold jewelry, the transistor radios, the glass display cases, the white columns, the front windows. The front windows, with their pale mannequins. I come close enough so that I can feel the heat on my face. The flames take the mannequins, crawling up their stiff limbs like a caress, setting their hair aflame, and they stand, unfeeling, in the same old pose until they start to melt, the smile still on their painted lips. … The building is destroyed, and the only casualty is a worker named Faith, who had gone back inside to retrieve some paperwork.
    I’m not going to lie to you, sweet Teresa, he says. My vocation is to roam the highways and waterways of the world forever, always curious, investigating everything, sniffing into nooks and crannies, but always detached, not putting down roots anywhere, not staying long enough to discover what lies beneath.
    Summer again, but the sky blue, Havana without rain for weeks. The heat pushing against the glass, no hope of release anywhere.
    I prop myself up on my elbow. His eyes are closed. I run my hand over his forehead, pushing the hair off his face, run my hand over his brow and down along the corner of his eyes and the side of his cheeks and still he doesn’t open his eyes. I run my finger across his mouth and bite back the desire to touch my lips to his. Down his mouth and through his beard, down to his throat, resting my hand there to feel the trembling of his breath.
    He doesn’t move. When we were still in the Sierra, he says without opening his eyes, we had a soldier named Eutimio Guerra. It shows you the little value in names. Because of war this man had not even a middle name. He was a coward and a traitor. When we found him out there was only one course of action.
    Ernesto opens his eyes. Eutimio was down on his knees. He asked quietly to be shot. He retained some dignity, out in the open, under the sun, on his knees. There was no pleading or crying or any of the shows that make what needs to be done any more