The World in Half (16 page)

“I thought you were studying geology,” Danilo says.

“I am. But my minor is Spanish.”

“I told you she was smart,” Hernán says. “Just like me.”

I expect Danilo to say something sarcastic, but he settles for rolling his eyes.

I didn’t know why I stood up, but now that I’m standing, there seems like nothing to do but excuse myself from the table and go to my room. Who knows what I’ll do there, but I’ll figure out something until both Danilo and Hernán leave for the day and the coast is clear for me to emerge again and figure out my next move. Which is exactly what happens. I sit on Danilo’s bed, my heels digging into the mattress, my chin balanced on my knees, and watch a gecko, its skin so thin it’s nearly translucent, dart out from behind the dresser and scamper across the wall. I attempt to braid my own hair and then let it all unravel. I listen for the sounds of them leaving. But after a while what I hear instead is a knock on my door. When I open it, Danilo is standing in front of me with his arms crossed.

“Nardo can find his own shoes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you want me to go with you?”

“Where?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Let’s find somewhere.”

The next few days
are a blur, a pinwheel spinning in the wind. Danilo and I spend our waking hours together, devising plans over breakfast each morning for places where we can search for my father, teasing out any lead that seems even halfway viable, poring over maps and Internet printouts and my father’s old letters over and over again. Every day, we start out serious in our mission, though we’re rarely able to sustain our determination for more than a few hours. We abandon our plans in favor of going to places or doing things that Danilo suddenly decides I need to experience instead. Always, Danilo totes along his flower bucket, though he seldom makes a sale. He hardly even tries half the time beyond calling out to someone we happen to be passing on the street, asking the person, usually a woman, if she wants something beautiful in her day.

In the evenings, Danilo leaves me on my own. I hole up in his room and read, or else I talk to my mother or my friends. Girls call the house for him sometimes, and Danilo ventures out in the middle of the night to meet up with them. I always hear him. Even if I’m sleeping, I somehow wake up at the precise moment that he shuffles past my room and closes the front door with a soft click behind him. He joins his friends for card games or at clubs sometimes, too, I know, but he never invites me along. I don’t know whether he’s embarrassed by me, or whether he assumes I won’t want to go, or whether he just needs a break from me, but I don’t bring it up either way. He still has his own life to attend to, a life that was going on before I got here and that will go on after I leave.

Even so, when we’re together I talk to him in a way I’ve never talked to anyone. Not even my friends at home. He doesn’t ask anything of me, and yet I find myself telling him everything. Part of it, I’m convinced, is the fact that I have to speak in another language. It’s more Spanish than I’ve ever spoken with anyone. But with limitations comes freedom. I don’t have the luxury of relying on the automatic expressions I have at my disposal when I’m speaking in English. There’s no default mode of communication, few standby phrases and ready-made sayings. I have to
think
about how to express myself. I have to be creative and take roundabout routes to get across what I want to convey. Which means that I say things I never would in English. Ideas occur to me in ways they never have before. Which makes the world seem just that much different, and makes me think of myself a little bit differently—a little more imaginative, a little more spirited, a little less ordinary. Because while for most people the experience of having to measure out what they’re going to say might draw them inward, make them more pensive and cautious, it seems to be drawing me out instead, giving me access to some part of myself I didn’t even know was there.

If that was the whole story, though, I would speak to Hernán and anyone else I met with similar ease. But I don’t. I can’t. So I know that being forced to communicate in Spanish is only part of it. The other part of it is Danilo himself. There’s something about him. I love how he teases me, fishing me out of myself, casting and recasting his line, tugging gently, holding on tight, reeling until he dredges up something real. I love his inclination for rebellion and how flippantly he uses language, as if words are something to be tossed around like confetti rather than laid out like a stone path. I love catching glimpses of his vulnerability, too. When everything else has melted away, I can see it, uncovered and raw, filled with rare and piercing sorrow. But mostly I love how stubbornly he demands life from himself and from everyone around him. Life explodes off him the way snow lifts off a speeding car and showers everything in its wake. And the more I’m around him, the more I fall under his spell.

We have solemn talks about my mother and Alzheimer’s, Danilo discussing it with a frankness that other people have trouble mustering about a topic so big and so heartbreaking.

“Explain to me how it works,” he says.

“It’s in a person’s brain. There are these plaques—”

“What?”

“Like sticky blobs. And wherever they show up, they start killing brain cells. They’re like little thieves. They just sneak in and take memories and knowledge from people. And they lock the door behind them, because after a while people can’t put any new information into their minds, either. The brain starts to shrink.”

“Nothing new?”

“So part of it is forgetting. That’s the part everyone knows about. Information that people had stored in their brains vanishes as their brain cells die off. But yeah, the other part of it is that people with Alzheimer’s can’t get any new information in. So if my mother puts her fork in the sink, that’s new information. When I ask her later where her fork is, it’s not that she took that information in and can’t remember it now, it’s that the information never formed an impression in her brain in the first place, so the information isn’t there at all when I ask her to rely on it.”

“That happened?”

“No. She’s not like that yet. I mean, once in a while. I don’t know. She told me once it was like someone had taken an ice cream scoop to her head. Like there were just empty spaces all through her mind.”

I tell him one day, “I’m afraid it’s going to happen to me.”

I’ve had that thought and tried not to think it a hundred times since my mother announced her diagnosis, but saying it out loud is like a lightning rod shooting straight through my bones.

“I can’t tell you it won’t,” Danilo says.

“I know.”

“But you shouldn’t live like it will.”

“People lose themselves.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s like if you were a bridge and pieces of you just started crumbling off and dropping down into the water and sinking and you could never reach them again.”

“And after enough pieces fall off, the whole thing collapses. You’re not anything anymore.”

“Exactly. I just don’t want to forget everything.”

“I don’t think anyone would want that,” he says.

Although, I think, maybe my mother is an exception. She tried so hard to bury the past and erase her own history—moving from New York, keeping undone the ties she was forced to sever, relegating my father to one brief episode in her life. Now, in a strange way, she’s getting exactly what she wished for. All of it is leaving her piece by piece. Even though—and this is the cruelty of it—I’m pretty sure that while she acts like she wants to forget, she has all along silently and secretly been holding tight to those memories.

Any discussion about Danilo’s parents is off-limits, but he confides in me about the strained relationship between Hernán and him. Hernán is angry and hasn’t forgiven him for dropping out of school, because he believes that Danilo is making a mockery of the life that Hernán worked so hard to give him after his parents left.

“He used to make jabs about it all the time, which was annoying as hell. Hernán’s soft, though, so he still tries to be nice to me, but things with us were never the same after I told him I was quitting school.”

We’re at a food stand called Donde Iván, sitting at a picnic table while I eat a shrimp
empanada
and Danilo drinks a beer—one called, simply, Panama. Every so often he picks at the edges of the paper beer label with his fingernail, tearing off the pieces. I have the thought that he’s doing the same thing with himself—peeling back a layer to show me what’s underneath, making himself as transparent as glass.

“Hernán doesn’t know everything, though,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“He doesn’t know that I have other shit going on. Haven’t you looked around in my room?”

I smile. “Did you want me to?”

“I just figured you might have.” He takes another swig of beer.

“Maybe I’m not that interested in you,” I say.

Danilo shrugs. “I keep my drawings in my bottom dresser drawer.”

“What drawings?”

“I’ve been doing them for a long time. Just pencil and paper. They’re like comics. But not kid-stuff comics. Nicer than that. More sophisticated.”

I don’t know the word—
tebeos
—so I ask.

“Like Spider-Man,” he says. “But more adult. Even though I guess I know plenty of adults who like Spider-Man.” He finishes the beer and puts the bottle down on the table. The glass bottom half covers a rusty nailhead in the wood. “I’m going to get that shit published, though. One day. And when I do, I bet Hernán won’t give a fuck that I dropped out of school.”

“Can I see them?”

“What? The drawings? You know where they are now,” he says, and leaves it at that.

Of course, I do look for them later and find more than a dozen lined notebooks filled with sketches and doodles and illustrated panels that, stacked next to each other, tell a story. On some pages, handwritten notes cascade straight down the margins like ivy. His handwriting is like I knew it would be: wide, flattened O’s and angular S’s and stylized F’s, all of it in thick graphite marks. It looks like graffiti.

Once, on the bus, Danilo asks whether I have a boyfriend at home. I tell him no, and then admit that I’ve never had a boyfriend, even though, as it’s coming out of my mouth, I can’t understand what would possess me to say such a thing, especially to him. But that’s how it is. I want to give up every inch of myself to him. I want to hand myself over and say, Here, this is me, this is all so you’ll understand me, and even though I’ve never offered all of this to anyone before, I’m giving it to you because I trust you to hold on to it and take care of it and handle it gently.

I’m elated to talk to him about nothing, too, having conversations that unravel haphazardly and that make little sense. I mention once that I like the way the roosters in people’s yards sound in the morning. “They sound like this:
pío, pío.
”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

We’re on Salsipuedes, a street crowded with dozens of makeshift markets, people selling enormous baskets, pottery in the shape of animals and miniature huts, sterling-silver jewelry, Guayani dresses in bright colors, wood carvings made from cocobolo wood. It’s noisy with the conversation of everyone around us, so I’m not sure he heard me.

“Pío, pío,”
I say again.

“Guau, guau,”
Danilo replies.

“What’s that? That’s not how they sound.”

“That’s for the dogs—
guau, guau.
”

“So you do know
pío, pío
?”

“I know
pío, pío.
” He’s ambling with his particular confident strut. “Haven’t you seen those chicken restaurants all over the place? You know, with the yellow signs? Pío Pío.”

“In the United States the dogs say
woof, woof.
”

“‘Woof, woof’?”
Danilo repeats, wrinkling his nose in distaste.

“Woof, woof!”
he barks loudly, and when people turn to stare at us, I crack up, covering my mouth with my hand.

Over the weekend, I ask him to take me to a bullfight.

“Where do you think you are? Spain?” Danilo asks. “We don’t have bullfighting here. Well, I’ve heard about it in Los Santos, I guess, but it’s just a bunch of farm workers in a little pen playing games with a bull. It’s nothing official.”

“I thought I saw a photograph once of a bullring here.”

“A long time ago, maybe. But not anymore. Now we have cockfighting. You want me to take you to a cockfight, I will.”

We’re in the kitchen in the morning. He’s wearing a gray T-shirt, long navy blue mesh shorts, and the rubber flip-flops he always wears in the house. He’s standing with his hips against the counter, his ankles crossed.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“You’d go to a bullfight, but not a cockfight? What’s the difference?”