Free Loving Che by Ana Menendez Page B

face unrecognizable. I close my eyes into a thin crack and bring my hand to my head. Oh, Teresa. He comes to me and takes my hands. Oh, oh, you are so warm. Too warm. He touches his hand to my forehead. I am weak, I say. And maybe at that moment I begin to feel the first flutter of regret.
    Calixto moves aside the covers. He holds his arms out to me and I sit up. He raises my nightgown over my head. I sit naked, eyes closed. I let my husband lift me. I feel myself rising from the bed, light, inconsequential. Calixto carries me to the bathroom and sits me on the tufted chair while he runs the water in the tub. I was surprised,he says, to find the house so dark. It frightened me. He speaks with his back to me, running his hand back and forth beneath the stream of water. I suddenly thought you had gone, that something terrible had happened. He stands and puts his hand to my forehead again. Then he lifts me, his arms beneath my naked legs, supporting my arching back. He lowers me slowly into the water.
    He sits in his good gray pants at the edge of the tub and soaps a sponge and begins to bathe his wife. I close my eyes and sink lower into the water. The rough sponge over my forehead, down my face, beneath my neck. The sound of the water being wrung from the sponge. The sound of water displacing. The sponge across my chest, around each breast, down beneath the water. How do you feel? I open my eyes. Sweat has darkened Calixto’s hairline a dark blond. His eyes are greener and brighter than I remember. He holds his hand out to me and leads me out of the tub. He wraps me in a towel and brings me back to bed. I whisper, I am new now. A happy weariness comes over my body inch by inch, an exhaustion so complete that it takes hold of me suddenly. Within seconds I am inside a deep black sleep.
    Late in the night I wake to the soft flutter of birds’ wings. At first I don’t know where I am, imagine myself back inthe shabby studio, and I draw my breath. Gradually I return to the bed where I lie, my own white room, the lace curtains over the windows that now let in the moonlight.
    The next morning, I butter Calixto’s bread slowly and hand it to him. I watch as he dips it into his coffee without even looking, his eyes on the newspaper before him. A toothpaste shortage now, he says and arches his brow. He doesn’t say anything more and neither do I. Politics do not interest me.
    Calixto puts his paper down and finishes the bread. He kisses me on the cheek. I knew we could cure you, he says and smiles. I sit at the table for a long time after. And then I pick up the breakfast things and take them into the kitchen and wash them one by one, glad for the hot water and the way it stings and reddens my hands back to life.
    Once again I can discern the wind that brings rain, the smell of wet earth miles away. And this new awareness, I tell myself, is proof that what I am doing is right, for the world seems so new and lovely now and my place in it assured at last.
    Every day I step into a new self. I walk the streets, where the trees whisper secrets and the flowers are so red and full that I wonder why the priests don’t denounce them in their sermons. Some days, the clouds hang so low and heavy that I have to turn my face to the ground.
    One afternoon, in the middle of a downpour, lightning falling with thunder on its heels, I step outside my studio and begin to walk in my green flowered dress, the water soaking first into the fabric and then running cool under my skin. The streets are empty, shutters closed on the houses. No one passes me. I have the sensation of being the last survivor of a cataclysm.
    When I pass El Encanto, I almost weep at the sight of the plastic mannequins who have never known love.
    I begin a new painting of the couple. In this one too, the woman is gripping the man’s arm so that though she is smiling, her bent fingers suggest something else. But the man’s eyes are still giving me trouble.