He lays three items on the table by the bed: a fading photograph of his wife, a boarding pass, and a pocket bible. Four zeroes flicker on the microwave clock marking the heartbeat in the room.
He wedges the heel of his shoes under the bedframe to free his feet. They rise and fall softly on the floor. Some years ago, he would have used his hands. Today, he does what he can to keep the aches on his back quiet.
He pulls himself up closer to the center of the bed. His arms shake in their effort. His feet sway above the shoes with a tired gravity. He swings his legs up one at a time. His back straightens against the headboard. His fingers lock across his belly like a seatbelt. Redi por teico, he says in his proud English, the ‘f’ of ‘takeoff’ replaced by an exaggerated sigh that flies through the gaps between his toes. He chuckles at the idea of taking a third flight in the morning. Otro, y uno má despué, trading the ‘s’ for another exhale. Y nos vemos mañana, tumorro. ‘Tomorrow’ he says with his native ‘r’.
Tomorrow, he will hear the words mi viejo from her mouth. He despises the sound of his daughter’s voice over the phone. He doesn’t blame her for moving four flights away. He shouldn’t blame himself either, but sometimes he does. Today, he does. Forced to spend the night in a transit hotel on this odyssey to see her, he does.
El viejo stares at his reflection framed within the television across the room. He sees a still-life documentary that has played for too long. He strains to recognize the familiar figure on this King-size hotel bed. He has shrunken in stature, surely, or else the world has grown too large for him, which is to say the same thing in opposite directions. Through the screen, he counts how many spears puncture the corrugated skin that blankets his once-bullish figure.
—Banderillas, mijo, his mother corrected when he asked what hung from the bull when he thought he was laying down to sleep.
—¿Cuándo se las quitan?
—Cuando muera.
He has never tried to remove them, each decorated in a memory, and now finds there are too many to count. He has learned to accept his injuries for the qualities that make him a lived man. A man is only a man after his first scar—he remembers his father saying with the belt in his hand. Like his father, el viejo passed his first scar on to his daughter. Leather wraps the oldest banderilla, and he wonders if she, too, can see her first. And he knows that she, too, blames her viejo for her first wound.
He finds there is a new spear—banderilla, mijo—on his body. It seems smaller, or else it reached deeper than the rest. It was not there the last time he saw himself in a television, before the men came into his house and tied his hands and feet and took what they wanted. He pulls at it to test its grip on his body. He bleeds but does not stain the bedsheets. It does not give an inch. The words ‘niña criollita’ are carved into the wood.
A photograph of la niña comes to his mind. He sees his granddaughter wearing the words he sent her on a shirt in a box on a plane. He only knows her face from the photographs. He only knows her voice through the phone. How many times did he argue with his daughter? That she could not leave, that she was a child of this land and should stay, that her children should know the taste of their food and the tune of their music and the melancholy of their anthem and the color of their naranjos and olivos. He insisted, well after her bags were packed, that she, like he, is a fruit of this people, and that her children should be, too. Will they be criollitas among such different people? Will they speak his tongue and the tongue of his mother? Will she sing to la niña in his language or the language of her new neighbors?
The ache pushes him away from the headboard, and he settles on a shower to calm the travel pains echoing through his body. He has never liked the idea of a hotel shower. How many strangers have stepped on the tile and dropped their hairs and made love with the showerhead between their legs and vomited at the prospect of yet another flight the next day? He runs the water hot to kill away any breeding pests. He counts his way to five minutes, following the beat of the microwave clock, then steps in with a small bottle of wash that feels heavy in his hand. He lets the water burn his barren scalp. It cracks like dry soil under the weight of overdue rain. He lets the water run down his face, through the crevices of his wrinkles, into his mouth, spitting it as it floods. Before he can lose all sense, which he has before in less foreign showers, he leans on the wall with both his hands. The water burns on his back, and, for a moment, it relieves the pain that drags behind him. His shoulders drop. His vertebra curves the wrong way. He clenches his glutes to take the pressure off his hamstrings. His calves soften. El viejo feels his life rush down with the water, and he wishes to slide through the drain and be washed onto the shores of his daughter’s foreign home.
He grabs the towel off the hook and pats himself dry. He tries to mimic his mother’s hand. He sees her through closed eyes holding him in one arm, the towel in the other, dabbing his face with the delicate touch from her fingertips. She turns him, presses the towel on his back and down his legs. She meanders through his banderillas, the few that have already pierced him at this young age. The towel falls to the floor, and el viejo opens his eyes before he can see his father drag his mother away. But he hears his voice anyway.
—Déjalo, que sea hombre, and he was left alone to dry himself ever since.
To wear pajamas in a hotel room has been a rule of el viejo’s for a long time. In his own bed, he will sleep naked and sweat directly on the bedsheets through the hot nights of his miserable country. How many people have slept in this bed? How many people bring their private habits into these liminal spaces? He remembers what he would do when he was younger with his wife by his side. No, pajamas are necessary, so he slips into his travel set and buttons himself carefully. In their final years together, his wife would button him, and he would button her, and they would lie together happily refusing to partake in the parade of lovers through public bedrooms and loving each other more deeply than all the rest. They traded acts for words, moans for whispers, and held each other through their clothes while they fell asleep to the promise of another day together. The first night he slept alone, he woke up to the feeling of a banderilla. He spots it on the television as he crosses to the chair in the corner of the room. He sees the buttons hanging off the spear, unbuttoned.
He must sit on a chair to put on his socks; he cannot reach otherwise. He wonders how much a chair like this is used in transit. His first instinct upon entering was to get on the bed, and he has always considered himself a very ordinary person. How many travelers would choose to sit and read in such an armchair, under such a lampshade, in such a light? Crimson under checkered crimson under white light: not the choice he would make for a reading corner. Yet, he cannot remember his reading corner at home.
He focuses instead on the stains that tell the story of such a chair. Wine or coffee or both? El viejo cannot tell. Coffee, surely, on a reading chair. Who reads with wine? He has, of course; who hasn’t? How else to read a sonnet or an ode but with the source of all inspiration. He doesn’t remember the last time he did it, drink wine with a book of poems, or read poems with a glass of wine, which are not the same thing whatsoever. There was a time when he could recite García Lorca, even better after a glass or two. ¡Cigarra! He yells, and laughs, and chokes, and regains himself. No other lines come through his mind at this moment, so he settles in the solitary chair and closes his eyes. His hands grip the armrests as he aches against the back.
He sees Federico, his friend, not the poet. Though, Federico always wanted to be a poet. A la García Lorca, he would say with a notebook under his arm and no money to his name. It was Federico who had introduced the Spanish poet to el viejo; Federico who helped el viejo fall in and out of love; Federico who held his hand at the grave of his wife, until el viejo found himself alone at Federico’s grave. He visited his tombstone before he left on this journey to thank him one last time. Then, he visited his wife’s and left a page from Poema del cante jondo—the lines of Baladilla de los tres ríos—on the stone and whispered as he turned away:
—Ay, amor que se fué por el aire.
El viejo cannot fall asleep without prayer. He reaches for the bible, pushing the boarding pass off the side table. His mother taught him to pray; his father taught him to pray for forgiveness. Pecadores, todos nosotros, his father says. Y rezamos hasta la muerte, his mother answers. El viejo opens the bible to any page and reads: y por la lanza sangró Jesús, y en la cruz murió, y por su muerte vivirás trás la tuya.
As he steps to the bed, el viejo lifts the boarding pass from the floor. All the information has disappeared. No departure time, no arrival time. The microwave clock slows its flickering zeroes. No terminal, no gate. The reading chair settles into its eternal solitude. No seat, no boarding time. The towel dries on the floor of the bathroom. No aircraft number, no terminal. The television has nothing more to show. No origin, no destination.
He trades the boarding pass for the photograph of his wife. He sees the colors take life. He sees her curls and the sharpness of her chin. He hears her calling him to bed. He feels his buttons buttoning again. He sees her cheeks glowing firm in the still, red light. He whispers, te amo.
He slips into the sheets, turns on his side, and lets the banderillas hang off the side of the bed. The sheets cover the mass of el viejo, and in the firm light of the clock, a bullish figure appears red against the headboard, ready to sleep. One by one, the banderillas fall to the floor.
*****
Luis Gonzalez Kompalic is a new writer from Venezuela living in Boston. This is a debut.
