I met Ana Iris after Ramón’s business failed. Not enough ricos around here, he said without discouragement. Some friends set up the meeting and I met her at the fish market. Ana Iris was cutting and preparing fish as we spoke. I thought she was a boricua, but later she told me she was half boricua and half dominicana. The best of the Caribbean and the worst, she said. She had fast, accurate hands and her fillets were not ragged as were some of the others on the bed of crushed ice. Can you work at a hospital? she wanted to know.
I can do anything, I said.
There’ll be blood.
If you can do that, I can work in a hospital.
She was the one who took the first pictures that I mailed home, weak fotos of me grinning, well dressed and uncertain. One in front of the McDonald’s, because I knew my mother would appreciate how American it was. Another one in a bookstore. I’m pretending to read, even though the book is in English. My hair is pinned up and the skin behind my ears looks pale and underused. I’m so skinny I look sick. The best picture is of me in front of a building at the university. There are no students but hundreds of metal folding chairs have been arranged in front of the building for an event and I’m facing those chairs and they’re facing me and in the light my hands are startling on the blue fabric of my dress.
—
THREE NIGHTS A WEEK we look at houses. The houses are in terrible condition; they are homes for ghosts and for cockroaches and for us, los hispanos. Even so, few people will sell to us. They treat us well enough in person but in the end we never hear from them, and the next time Ramón drives by other people are living there, usually blanquitos, tending the lawn that should have been ours, scaring crows out of our mulberry trees. Today a grandfather, with red tints in his gray hair, tells us he likes us. He served in our country during the Guerra Civil. Nice people, he says. Beautiful people. The house is not entirely a ruin and we’re both nervous. Ramón stalks about like a cat searching for a place to whelp. He steps into closets and bangs against walls and spends close to five minutes running his finger around the basement’s wet seams. He smells the air for a hint of mold. In the bathroom I flush the toilet while he holds his hand under the full torrent of the shower. We both search the kitchen cabinets for roaches. In the next room the grandfather calls our references and laughs at something somebody has said.
He hangs up and says something to Ramón that I don’t understand. With these people I cannot even rely on their voices. The blancos will call your mother a puta in the same voice they greet you with. I wait without hoping until Ramón leans close and tells me it looks good.
That’s wonderful, I say, still sure Ramón will change his mind. He trusts very little. Out in the car he starts in, certain the old man is trying to trick him.
Why? Did you see anything wrong?
They make it look good. That’s part of the trick. You watch, in two weeks the roof will start falling in.
Won’t he fix it?
He says he will, but would you trust an old man like that? I’m surprised that viejo can still get around.
We say nothing more. He screws his head down into his shoulders and the cords in his neck pop out. I know he will yell if I talk. He stops at the house, the tires sliding on the snow.
Do you work tonight? I ask.
Of course I do.
He settles back into the Buick, tired. The windshield is streaked and sooty and the margins that the wipers cannot reach have a crust of dirt on them. We watch two kids pound a third with snowballs and I feel Ramón sadden and I know he’s thinking about his son and right then I want to put my arm around him, tell him it will be fine.
Will you be coming by?
Depends on how the work goes.
OK, I say.
My housemates trade phony smiles over the greasy tablecloth when I tell them about the house. Sounds like you’re going to be bien cómoda, Marisol says.
No worries for you.
None at all. You should be proud.
Yes, I say.
Later I lie in bed and listen to the trucks outside, their beds rattling with salt and sand. In the middle of the night I wake up and realize that he has not returned but not until morning am I angry. Ana Iris’s bed is made, the netting folded neatly at its foot, a gauze. I hear her gargling in the bathroom. My hands and feet are blue from the cold and I cannot see through the window for the frost and icicles. When Ana Iris starts praying, I say, Please, just not today.
She lowers her hands. I dress.
—
HE’S TALKING AGAIN about the man who fell from the rafters. What would you do if that was me? he asks once more.
I would find another man, I tell him.
He smiles. Would you? Where would you find one?
You have friends, don’t you?
What man would touch a dead man’s novia?
I don’t know, I said. I wouldn’t have to tell anyone. I could find a man the way I found you.
They would be able to tell. Even the most bruto would see the death in your eyes.
A person doesn’t mourn forever.
Some do. He kisses me. I bet you would. I am a hard man to replace. They tell me so at work.
How long did you mourn for your son?
He stops kissing me. Enriquillo. I mourned him a long time. I am still missing him.
I couldn’t tell that by looking at you.
You don’t look carefully enough.
It doesn’t show, I don’t think.
He puts his hand down at his side. You are not a clever woman.
I’m just saying it doesn’t show.
I can see that now, he says. You are not a clever woman.
While he sits by the window and smokes I pull the last letter his wife wrote him out of my purse and open it in front of him. He doesn’t know how brazen I can be. One sheet, smelling of violet water. Please, Virta has written neatly in the center of the page. That’s all. I smile at Ramón and place the letter back in the envelope.
Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn’t do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.
—
HERE IS WHAT the wife looks like. She is small with enormous hips and has the grave seriousness of a woman who will be called doña before she’s forty. I suspect if we were in the same life we would not be friends.
—
I HOLD UP the blue hospital sheets in front of me and close my eyes, but the bloodstains float in the darkness in front of me. Can we save this one with bleach? Samantha asks. She is back, but I don’t know for how much longer. I don’t know why I don’t fire her. Maybe because I want to give her a chance. Maybe because I want to see if she will stay or if she will go. What will this tell me? Very little, I suspect. In the bag at my feet I have his clothes and I wash them all together with the hospital things. For a day he will smell of my job, but I know that bread is stronger than blood.
I have not stopped watching for signs that he misses her. You must not think on these things, Ana Iris tells me. Keep them out of your mind. You do not want to go crazy from them.
This is how Ana Iris survives here, how she keeps from losing her mind over her children. How in part we all survive here. I’ve seen a picture of her three sons, three little boys tumbled out in the Jardín Japonés, near a pine tree, smiling, the smallest a saffron blur trying to shy away from the camera. I listen to her advice and on my way to and from work I concentrate on the other sleepwalkers around me, the men who sweep the streets and those who stand around in the backs of restaurants, with uncut hair, smoking cigarettes; the people in suits who stumble from the trains — a good many will stop at a lover’s and that is all they will think about while they’re eating their cold meals at home, while they’re in bed with their spouses. I think of my mother, who kept with a married man when I was seven, a man with a handsome beard and craggy cheeks, who was so black that he was called Noche by everyone who knew him. He worked stringing wires for Codetel out in the campo but he lived in our barrio and had two children with a woman he had married in Pedernales. His wife was very pretty, and when I think of Ramón’s wife I see her, in heels, flashing yards of brown leg, a woman warmer than the air around her. Una jeva buena. I do not imagine Ramón’s wife as uneducated. She watches the telenovelas simply to pass the time. In her letters she mentions a child she tends who she loves almost as much as she had loved her own. In the beginning, when Ramón had not been gone long, she believed they could have another son, one like this Victor, her amorcito. He plays baseball like you, Virta wrote. She never mentions Enriquillo.