Free Loving Che by Ana Menendez

was arranging flowers on the desk, that the wedding album had been hidden again. I didn’t think anything then. It is very difficult to perceive one’s life as it is. It is only in retrospect that we come to understand what our mind knew all along, not from a mystical understanding of the universe, but from the slow accumulation of fact that the waking self doesn’t have the heart to accept.
    Or it could be that I was merely knitting the thread that led back into my justifications and forward into my falling. Calixto seemed to me in those times parched, removed, as if he had discovered a way to subsist on words alone. When I moved to kiss him, I felt a seizing up, as if he resented my hunger. But it could be that this is the way that I began to remove myself from him. I wonder now if people don’t make up their reasons for deception after the fact. And that what truly leads us into the arms of another lies beyond our comprehension.
    The buildings on the malecón face the sea with boarded windows. The grass is dead from the heat, the flowers are dead. The only color comes from the red paint on the whorehouse door, the pale, weathered blue of a window frame, the pink of morning beginning in Oriente. The heat seeps in everywhere like sickness, like an ordering force occupying hidden courtyards, decreeing sleep, slow movements. Heat inside the dried-out stems of a crocus, in the powdering space between the sidewalks, inside the green leaves already going pale from suffering.
    I imagine it all first: My skin is hot glitter in the sun and I long to peel it off, layer by layer. Ernesto follows me home to where my husband is just now getting up to go to work. He watches Calixto kiss my silent body. I wake and turn, and he is waiting. I am raw, burned; I am in the time of life when to feel is the purest truth. No words, but the slip of his tongue like an island of madmen. Adrift, searching.
    I begin, even at that moment, to remember everything. I embalm the memory while it yet breathes. I forget everything else, that Ernesto is newly married and that my Calixto is kind. Strange thoughts torment me. I feel the doorknob before it reaches my hand. I hear the sobs of amother in Holguin. I smell the Antarctic sea, salt ice and sharp. I know everything before it happens. And still I turn to him. Let him press his body against mine.
    Already I knew him from long ago, had stood many years with him watching the moon set and rise again. His lips full and moist where palm trees grew and the peasant women came to be filled. In the long night that followed, the stars spun and his voice sang from the mouth of a shallow stream.
    Together, we climb the stairs to my studio. Everything is new to me again. I notice for the first time the smell of cooking, the sound of shouting behind closed doors, the crowds in the street. The stairs we climb curve and turn, curve and turn. We walk through several narrow passageways and into a hallway that turns again onto a single door. The room is small and dark; its three windows looking out over a central courtyard; it is my studio, but now it’s as if I were seeing it for the first time. Pushed against the wall are paintings I don’t recognize.
    I sweat in my flowered dress. In that small room, his smell overtakes me again: mountains and dirt and unwashed skin and heat.
    I think back to the night I saw him first, the party in my house when I wore the dress of blue satin. Not love or lust—a thirst for him that I might die. And how I tried to be good and polite. To sit with my legs crossed. To laugh and be bright, to swallow my desire like bile in the throat. Thinking always that I must hold the balance of my world steady in my hands. Must not stumble.
    And now in the small room, I at last take hold of the shifting, embracing it, tenderly first and then clutching into my fall.
    His chest is narrow and racked from his illness. He whispers in my ear. Sweet sweet savagery. Time dismantles