I can look back and remember all the good and bad things now
that I am convalescent. I can sit for
hours looking out from my patio door, and see places and faces, and
parties. I can even, if I try hard
enough, recall tastes and smells – rich Cuban rum, liquid molasses, sugar on
Alegria’s sweet, fat lips. And no longer
do I have any remorse, for I am an old man.
An old man with a mangy white beard, sun-shrivelled walnut skin, and two
rickety legs; only my eyes, and my hands are still young.
The view from my patio is of hills, hills steeped in almond
and olive groves that lead in regimented fashion down to the sea. The sea today is aquamarine, and the sun has
burned through the purple clouds that were sealing off the sky when I awoke at
first light. The sun is burning through
the acacia trees that canopy the patio, and splashing off the paving stones, paving
stones strewn with foliage from last night’s storm, paving stones streaked with
the residue of mud and rain.
Alegria lived with my wife and I when I was working in Cuba . She was our maid. I met her in Henky’s bar in down-town Havana . It was the place where Americans like me
gathered: writers, painters, retired sailors.
Alegria worked behind the bar, served and waited on tables. She was perhaps twenty, buxom, burnished
brown, with dark eyes, jet black hair, in the habit of wearing low cut
blouses. She was beautiful, and had a
sense of fun. We got on, I asked her to
work for me, she said ‘yes’. Then up in
the valleys, one thing lead to another, and without my wife knowing, we became
lovers, and I made Alegria pregnant.
When Alegria discovered she was to have a baby she left us,
but wrote me a letter some weeks later telling me she had decided to go ahead
with the birth. Today I can remember
receiving the news – my wife and I had tried for children without success – and
with Alegria’s letter in my back pocket, I took my rifle and went shooting
White-crowns in the jungle-cum-forest behind where we lived. That evening I came back with two birds and cooked
them for my wife and we ate in silence.
As for Alegria’s letter, I nailed it to the trunk of a Royal Palm in the
heart of the forest, by way of a confession to Mother Nature, and, in a
roundabout sense, to my wife.
Some years later, on returning to Cuba , my wife and I revisited the
valley where we used to live, and while our house survived, much of the forest
had been cleared. Things had taken a
natural course, and that for me was justification enough for hiding the truth.
Do I wonder where my son is today? Yes. Do I wish to hear from him? Yes. But it is surely impossible. And why wait on something impossible?
I went for a walk yesterday, as the storm was building off
the coast, and I picked up a pebble, bevelled and lined with quartz, thought of
how I used to skim pebbles as a child, but this time I decided not to palm it,
and let it lie where the sea had left it, let it lie among strangers.
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