Swedish Tango / the Rhythm of Memory by Alyson Richman Page B

grandmother, had died before Salomé was born. But the house, originally made of stucco and mud walls, still retained a trace of her former presence.
    The entrance to the house was marked by tall iron gates, the decorating finials the shape of small, delicate birds. And inside the house, the expansive wooden floor ebbed and flowed like a large chestnut-colored river, the occasional board popping up or bowing like a small, undulating wave. Each room was designed with its own entranceway, usually an arch shaped out of white plaster. Only the room that had been Don Isadore’s wife’s remained different, for that one had a circular door.
    Inside, it remained exactly as the former mistress of the house had left it, with Chinese wallpaper completely covered with images of a thousand birds. In delicate black ink, colored by hand in a palette of pastel hues, every variety of bird imaginable was rendered. Tall, elegant cranes posed on one slender foot, hummingbirds with straight, narrow beaks and rosebud breasts nestled in pale green blades of grass, and dusty brown sparrows all fluttered over washes of delicate blue sky.
    The birdcages scattered over the rococo furniture, however, were now empty. The iron baskets with peaked domes and filigreed borders were but a sad reminder of the birds that had once sung to the woman the doctor had loved.
    She had been called
pequeña canaria
—“little canary”—by those close to her, as her sitting room was an aviary completely designed by her own hand. She had waited nearly two years for the Chinese wallpaper to arrive, and at night, as she lay down to sleep in herelaborately carved four-poster bed, she would close her eyes and dream of seeing it unrolled for the first time.
    She imagined each bird expertly painted. The feathers so real they seemed to rustle off the paper. She envisioned the reams of paper on their voyage across the sea, the rolls carefully packed in silk tissue, boxed in split-bamboo crates. She slept on pale lemon sheets, her hair raven against the dyed cotton. And when she slumbered, the birds from their cages serenaded her with their tiny chirpings, a melody that, until her untimely death, she associated with love.
    Rafael had always been fearful of the little canary woman’s former bedchamber. He seldom went in there, although he loved to explore the hacienda’s other rooms. The heavy brown furniture was sturdy to play on, and he created fortresses in which he could spend hours in endless amusement. But his great-grandmother’s room was too foreboding. When he was four years old, his great-aunt came to spend a week at the hacienda. Never married, she reveled in her role as cranky spinster. She dressed only in black woolen clothes, even at the height of summer, her pale, lined face staring down at him from a stiff, satin collar.
    At night, she would come into his room and tell him stories. Not stories like his mother or father would tell (his favorite being the one of the uncollected fortune his paternal grandfather had left in Spain). The elderly woman’s stories were far more terrifying. Worse yet, she seemed to take great delight in hearing the young Rafael squeal with fear.
    She told him how her veins were filled with floating needles from the pins she had swallowed over her years of sewing. She pulled her black crepe sleeve up to her elbow and revealed a stretch of white arm, ribboned with blue veins.
    “The needles float through here,” she said, pointing to the crosshatch of veins and tiny vessels. In the moonlight that streamed in through his bedroom window, her skin looked so white that it too seemed almost blue.
    But her story that frightened him most was of how Don Isadore’s late wife had died.
    “She was attacked by that which she loved most,” his great-aunt whispered into his ear. “Her birds.”
    Rafael’s eyes were now wild with fright, his linen drawn tightly to his chin.
    “Your great-grandfather was jealous of those birds, envious of how