They say that the cells of your body are replaced every seven years, such that you continue to be the same person but, at a cellular level, you have become another, if you compute both extremes. The idea sounds strange, because the cells aren’t all replaced at once, so after seven years you won’t have a fully-recycled body. But at the same time you will.
Things I had hoped would happen didn’t, things I hadn’t hoped would happen did, and some things I’d never thought about — like visiting the Ivory Coast — thought about me of their own accord.
But in those days at June’s house in Santa Fé we all laughed together and told stories about other times and other places, and sang songs from other times and other places (and from our time and our places) and looked at photographs. One morning we went to visit the Chimayo sanctuary, where the woman said me puedes ayudar un dólar por favor (I gave her the dollar and Fernando ignored her, asking in a low voice how I could fall for it but it was my money and my problem).
That night, as the coyotes roamed around outside, Fernando and Isabel disappeared into the room she was sleeping in, and no one asked any questions, and everyone thought it was fine. And we were so different to one another that the differences were annulled; we were a big uniformity in multiple forms.
On the Monday after the holiday, Fernando went to work at the Denver Public Library. I went to school. Carlos went to school.
That afternoon, Fernando had a cleaning job to go to.
Jay Street
Would Fernando have liked Isabel to move to Colorado? I don’t know. Would Isabel have liked to move to Colorado — or for Fernando to move to New Mexico, or to have moved with him to Puerto Rico or somewhere else in the world? I don’t know.
None of it happened, because sometimes things are the wrong answers to the questions we ask, or the right answers to the questions we forget to ask. (There is no wisdom in this. It wasn’t my grandmother who taught me — not least because I never met one of them, and I presented myself to the other one when I was almost fourteen years old and lacked the ears for teachings that she never seemed interested in passing on anyway.)
Perhaps neither Fernando nor Isabel suggested a move. Demonstrated their willingness. Like the water that you don’t offer someone because you don’t know they’re thirsty, and the water that the thirsty person doesn’t ask for because they don’t want to impose, full of bourgeois ceremony. (Strange as it may seem, it was my mother who taught me that, adding: only be ashamed of things that are shameful, otherwise you’re wasting your time. Shyness is unnecessary and boring.)
One day, years later, I visited June’s house in Santa Fé once again. Her two dogs had died. She lived alone with her piano and her O’Keeffean skulls hanging on the walls. Coyotes roamed about outside. Perhaps they were the same ones. Or perhaps those ones had been run over or killed with a shotgun and other coyotes had come to replace them.
That day, June told me about Isabel.
She never did become an actress as she wanted, June said. But you saw how pretty she was. A little short, perhaps, but pretty. When she met her husband, she was working in one of those clubs, in Albuquerque, as a dancer. You know, taking her clothes off.
I didn’t know.
That was where she met her husband, and he wanted her to stop working, and he bought that house, and married her, and you know the rest of the story.
Do you think she regrets it?
What?
Stopping working at the club.
She could have gone back.
I imagined (how not to?) Isabel dancing in the club in Albuquerque. Taking off her clothes, piece by piece, according to a deconstruction of decorum that hierarchically determined which piece had to come off first and which piece had to be last. The body twisting around itself and exposing itself in tiny doses, until it was entirely exposed (at which point the show ended, because the fun was in the process, otherwise she could have climbed up onto the stage buck naked). It must have been a sight. I’m not surprised that the guy who became her husband saw her there and wanted to take her home for free private sessions. That he wanted to rob the rest of humanity of the privilege.
I imagined him corroded with jealousy by Isabel’s past, while she accepted naturally the fact that he had been and was still perhaps a frequenter of strip clubs. Was his new wife, up in Seattle, also an ex-stripper?
But for four nights Fernando had slept in the same bed with Isabel. For four nights he had sunk his rough fingers into her dark, wavy hair — her hair as dark as crow-blue shells and shell-blue crows — and had sunk his fingers into her hips, her dark hips, two big waves that were aligned with other waves that were aligned with other waves in wavy depths that at some point would arrive (would they?) at her essence. At her essence that was wavy, dark, blue, marine, ancestral like the Colorado sea and young like a young stripper dancing in a club in Albuquerque, the HOT AIR BALLOONING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.
For four nights she had laughed with him in the same bed, slept with him in the same bed, lain awake with him in the same bed, sunk her fingers into his arms and his back and dreamed of a pair of coyotes outside and dreamed of a time when the Colorado sea covered it all and there were no coyotes wandering through Santa Fé because Santa Fé was underwater. Like the abandoned car carcasses when the river was full. She had dreamed of fish swimming through the windows of the future car carcasses in the future full river. She had dreamed of Mesozoic mollusks evolving at the bottom of the Colorado sea and dreamed in turn of future science museums. But maybe those were my dreams and Isabel’s dreams on those nights were of the order of secrets, the unfathomable. Like the Mesozoic mollusks that vanished from the planet without a trace, a mark, a fossil, a message.
Maybe those four nights were enough and anything else was superfluous, and she and Fernando would have undone the magic of those four nights with the wand of routine if they had turned into four months or four years or multiples of that.
Maybe those four nights weren’t enough but any philosophy of love involving impulsive sacrifices is one hundred percent stupid when put in practice. Saying certain things is beautiful. Living them out, not necessarily.
I know that Isabel and Fernando talked on the phone a few times. I also know that shortly after that long weekend she returned to Puerto Rico. She returned for good, as she had told us she might. She and Fernando talked on the phone a few times, until they stopped talking, like a noise that disappears into the distance and you don’t know exactly when you stopped hearing it.
I turned fourteen that December. I turned fifteen twelve months later. And I turned other ages, sixteen, seventeen — the process follows an incredible logic. Eighteen. Etc.
I returned to Rio de Janeiro once, to visit Elisa. Things were the same and different. Seven years had passed since I had left and perhaps the city’s cells had already been replaced with others. The city was the same and it wasn’t. The city was different and it wasn’t.
There were other generations of mollusks on the ocean floor in front of Copacabana Beach. I don’t know how long a mollusk lives. They were probably the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the mollusks of my childhood. At any rate, we were friends. Friends that had never met personally. Friends of friends, like in online social networks.
There were young children building sandcastles in the sand. There were their mothers. Depending on the place, tourists. Depending on the place, prostitutes.
Bodies were still jogging in the sun, muscular or flaccid or old or young. Men still wore tight speedos. Not all of them.