Temple of My Familiar (3 page)

It was of his mother that Arveyda thought the first time he met Zedé. That small, sad, Indian-looking woman so proud, Carlotta had told him, to be Spanish.

Zedé sat in the middle of a garishly decorated living room of sky-blue sofas with fringes on the bottom and lamps with colonial Spanish ladies endlessly promenading around their bases. She was binding peacock feathers together to make capes, using the broken and partially ruined feathers as inset pieces in shoulder bags. She watched him suspiciously from lowered, tightly controlled, birdlike eyes. He could see he confused her. Brown skin, kinky hair, beautiful body, ready smile. She looked at him sadly, as if remembering him, and he thought she sniffled, as if she had a cold, or was about to weep.

When Arveyda was brought to meet Carlotta’s mother, he had not known what to expect. Zedé had yellower skin than Carlotta, and her hair was bleached auburn, frizzed up in a style that seemed matronly. It was a surprise to him to see how young she really was. This woman who, in her lifetime, had known both magic and priests, in a country to which, for instance, television and the pickup truck—until very recently, he imagined—were unknown. A woman who had been arrested as a Communist, spent years in prison—at least three, Carlotta had thought—and then somehow made her way to North America. He bowed over her hand and would have kissed it, but Zedé shyly drew it back and put it out of sight, in the pocket of her smock.

She was dressed in an outfit of the dullest blackish-green, and from beneath the nest of her frizzy brown hair, fried lifeless, her slanting eyes glittered.

“How do you do?” she asked in the diffident style of night classes at San Francisco State.

“Just fine. How’re you?” he answered in the same style. Then, because her smallness and bashfulness moved him, he added, “Not bad atall.”

She and Carlotta, in their new prosperity, lived now in a roomy, light-filled flat on Clement Street, surrounded by restaurants. From one of them Zedé had gotten their dinner, which she dished out timidly, as Carlotta showed him around the flat.

Alone as he had been while growing up, and as he was now, Arveyda was wounded by the intense isolation of these two. There were schmaltzy pictures of sunsets and trees, happy white children chasing balloons, but none of relatives or of people who resembled Zedé and Carlotta at all. In Zedé’s bedroom, on the night table, there was an old snapshot of her and Carlotta taken just after they arrived in San Francisco. Zedé’s drawn face, seemingly frightened even of the photographer, was partly in shadow. Carlotta, her face moonlike, a string of beads around her tiny wrist, leaned out of her mother’s arms, as if eager to embrace this new land. In both their faces he recognized the stress of oppression, dispossession, flight.

He would know them a very long time, he felt, sitting down to a tasty Vietnamese meal, and smiling from one to the other of them, like a man of serendipitous choice.

“I
T IS AS IF
you went out,” Carlotta’s mother sobbed after that first meeting, “and brought your father home. Ai, ai,” she cried, striking her head with her palm in a gesture of pain Carlotta had never seen before, but which she was instantly tempted to duplicate. “He was Indio, your father, and his hair was rough.”

But now Carlotta and Arveyda had been married for three years. They had two children her mother adored.

“Arveyda loves you,” said Zedé. “You must believe this. But also, he and I loved each other from the start.”

A
RVEYDA WAS RICH
. H
E
had more money, Carlotta sometimes thought, than the government of her mother’s country. Once, to prove to her she would never again be in want, he took thousands and thousands of dollars from the bank and blew them all over her bedroom with an electric fan. Then they lay on the bills, as if on leaves in a forest, and made love.

Carlotta would have none of his money now. She had studied women’s literature in college. That is what she would teach. Taking her children away from Arveyda and Zedé was the only way she could make them hurt as she was hurting. She could not know at the time how much she was hurting herself.

Letters from them as they traveled through Mexico and Central and South America she resisted opening for many months, preferring to think of them as dead. But they were her only family, after all.

Actually, only her mother wrote. Short, grieving, heavily scented letters that recalled Zedé vividly.

“Mija, mi corazon,” they all began. (My daughter, my heart.) And there was the sound of Zedé weeping. But as the letters continued to arrive, Carlotta, reading through the evaporated teardrops, which had left puckered circles on the pages, sensed an animation in her mother’s spirit she had never felt before.

Arveyda and Zedé traveled through countries of incredible natural lushness. Zedé had never seen such rivers, such fish ... there was a fish that mated for life, she wrote; when they caught one from the boat and prepared it for dinner, its mate swam furiously around and around the boat and actually followed it for miles ... such trees, fruits, birds, and sky.

Carlotta imagined her mother at the railing of a ship, relaxed against Arveyda’s body, the sun finding white glints in her once-again straight black hair.

“The food, every bit
is good.
Muy
delicioso!”
she wrote. And Carlotta remembered the crab sautéed in onion and peppers her mother liked and how that had been their once-a-month treat after her mother began selling the feathered things. Now she thought of her eating the food she liked all the time, growing sleek and maybe a little plump, the wrinkles around her eyes and on her forehead filling out. Her skin losing its sallowness and becoming tan and vibrant. She realized she had never known Zedé at peace. Always, she had been anxious, worried, frantic over the requirements of life for the two of them.

They’d slept together only once, Arveyda and Zedé, before Carlotta was told.

Arveyda had brought the children for Zedé to keep for the weekend, as she often did. Their brown, warm little bodies did magical things to her. She held them, squirming and wriggling or drowsy and contented, in her arms, and her cares seemed far away. That day they had been playing on Zedé’s big bed, the children in the middle, she and Arveyda on the edges. It was a gray, rainy day, and her bedroom was all pink. Soft music was playing, by a man, Sidney Bechet, she liked. The children drifted off to sleep. As Arveyda lifted their limp bodies to take them into the other room, nearly asleep himself, she’d felt, as she did so often and as often tried to hide, a deep longing for him. But he is so young, she thought. El padre de mis nietos. El esposo de mi ninita. My son-in-law. Here she giggled, because she always confused the word “son” with “sun.”

Arveyda looked at her, the sleeping baby in his arms, one plump arm flung wide in peace. Longing was like a note of music to him, easily read. He knew.

When he came back, he sat on the floor beside the bed. His voice shook. “We can’t do anything about it, right?”

“No,” she said, her voice also trembling. She tried to laugh. “I am grandmother. That’s it.” She meant, “That’s all.”

“I love you though,” he said. “Not like a grandmother ... maybe a little like a mother.” He apologized with his smile, which was in his voice. His face was still turned away from her. “No,” he said, “like a woman. Zedé. I love Carlotta; don’t worry. I also love you.”

How long had it been building between them, she wondered. Since the first day, since meeting. She’d smelled the scent in his hair as he bent toward her hand. The spiciness of it, the odor of her village flowers. She’d taken back her hand and hidden it, flaming, from him. After all, he was Carlotta’s. Carlotta had found him.

“Nothing we can do, yes,” she said, firmly. But with a glowing point of light, hot, growing in her heart, and between her legs she was suddenly wet.

Her hand trembled as she touched his hair, and the scent of him—the scent of safely sleeping, well-fed babies—reached her nose. His hair. There were flecks of gray. Glints of red and brown.

Kinky, firm, softly rough. Exactly the feel of raw silk. The only hair like this—
pelo negro
—in the world. Running her fingers through it, tugging. Trying for the light, resigned touch. Trying to be
la madre
. Trying to be
friends
. Her womb contracted so sharply she nearly cried out.

She prayed Arveyda wouldn’t turn and look at her. He did. His eyes inches away. His white teeth, his mustache and beard. His brown eyes that seemed so pained. His sweet breath. Like coconut. She smiled to think this about the coconut; she was such a campesina! He leaned forward to kiss the smile. She drew back.

“And you, Zedé?” he asked. “Am I just the son-in-law? I know we can never do anything ... but I want to know.”

“Ah, me,” she said, attempting a little laugh that denied the hot heart and the light in her womb, the wetness nearly on her thighs. The laugh, so false, so incapable of all the deceit required of it, turned into tears. Arveyda took her face in his hands. It had become younger since he’d known her. The birdlike eyes didn’t dart about so, the twitch was gone. Only the sadness of the dispossessed of love remained. He would kiss it away.

Zedé had made love only twice before in her life. Until she met Arveyda she hadn’t thought about sex; she was too busy and her memories were too painful. Though she had had sex, it had been brief. Sometimes her daughter was the only proof that a man had made love to her. Now it was as if she had a new body. Arveyda was kissing all of it, the way she would have wanted someone she loved to kiss it when she was
embarazada.
Under his lips she felt the flowering of her shriveled womb and under his tongue her folded sex came alive. The hairs on her body stood like trees. In truth, the light that she felt inside her in womb and heart now seemed to cover all of her; she felt herself dissolve into the light.

Lying in bed later, exhausted from orgasms that shook her core, Zedé traced round and round the black mole on Arveyda’s right breast. They were both relaxed and frantic.

“It won’t happen again,” she said. “It can’t.”

Her lips were drawn to the mole. She kissed it without knowing she did.

“No,” said Arveyda. “I’m sorry. All my fault.” His face was lost in her hair. He grew large again against her thigh. She grew wet.

“Mamacita. Daddy.” It was the oldest child, Cedrico, calling, waking up.

For months they avoided each other. But she loved his music and played it on the stereo all the time, so she cheated. He never left her, though he was away performing in other cities and other countries. She listened to the music and sometimes she cried. Sometimes, crying, she lay back on her pink bed, her hand between her legs. There was one piece of music, especially, in his last album that moved her to her knees. She knew he had written it while thinking of her. She could come just listening to it.

Arveyda lived in the clothes she made for him, earning himself finally the nickname “Bird,” or, as he loved to translate it, “Charlie Parker the Third.” Wrapped in his feathered cape, his winged boots, he sent his soul flying to Zedé while holding his body, his thought, his attentions on Carlotta, whom he did not cease to love. Only, now he began to think it was Zedé he loved in Carlotta. Scrutinizing Carlotta’s face he looked for traces of Zedé. When he found them he kissed them with reverence.

How do you tell someone you love that you are in love with her mother, as well? It was probably illegal, moreover. Arveyda thought and thought about the problem; his music, so mellow and rocking, became tortured and shrill. Sometimes in rehearsal and even in performance he played his guitar in a trance.

Arveyda’s music was so beautiful no one minded how long he played. There he stood, his slim legs in soft jeans, his brown suede feathered boots glowing in the strobe lights, a sliver of his narrow chest revealed; his face, the face of a deeply spiritual person, intense behind guitar or flute. It was not without cause that he was rich and famous: Arveyda and his music were medicine, and, seeing or hearing him, people knew it. They flocked to him as once they might have to priests. He did not disappoint them. Each time he played, he did so with his heart and soul. Always, though he might be very tired, he played earnestly and prayerfully. Even if the music was about fucking—and because he loved fucking, a lot of it was—it was about the fucking the universe does through us as it joyfully fucks itself. Audiences felt this so much that there was a joke about how many Arveyda babies were conceived on full-moon concert nights.

He played for his dead mother and for the father he’d hardly known; the longing for both came out of the guitar as wails and sobs. There was a blue range in his music that he played when he was missing them. Carlotta was yellow. The young, hopeful immigrant color, the color of balance, the color of autumn leaves, half the planet’s flowers, the color of endurance and optimism. Green was his own color, soothing green, the best color for the eyes and the heart. And Zedé—Zedé’s color was peach or pink or coral. The womb colors, the woman colors. When he played for her he closed his eyes and stroked and entered her body, which he imagined translucent as a shell. He remembered making love to her and imagined himself the light within the translucent pink shell. He often wept while he played.

Carlotta could not believe the beauty of the new music, discordant as it sometimes was, and wailing. She would sit in the audience watching him play and, though she lived with him, it was as if he were a stranger, far from her, far from anyone. If she had managed to drag Zedé to a performance, she would turn to her in her excitement over a new riff. But Zedé inevitably held her head down. Carlotta could never recall later how she first became aware.

For months Arveyda and Zedé barely saw each other. This, Carlotta knew. Arveyda was traveling; often Carlotta went with him. Zedé remained in her house and cared for the children. Every night while they were away, Carlotta called to check on them. Was Cedrico eating? Was Angelita wetting the bed? Were she and Arveyda missed? Zedé answered her questions with energy and enthusiasm. Yes, Cedrico missed them, but he was “un niño muy grande.” Sure, Angelita wet the bed, but there was luck in this (some superstition from the old country, Carlotta assumed, and Zedé never explained), and they were both eating like crazy. And so on. After a rundown of her own activities in whatever town they were staying, and after Zedé had mentioned any small news she had, there was an awkward silence.