oppression

In the summer’s heat, she gets a really bad case. It used to alarm us but now we expect it. There will be a few thunderstorms at the end of May, and we sit and watch them from the veranda. They are beautiful to see. And then she rolls her eyes at me, and we smile, and we go upstairs to make love as much as we can, because soon the heat will fall.

Her belly swells up as the rest of her body drains its fluid and flesh, like wax dripping from a candle. Her eyes become like diamonds rimmed in coal, deep sunk in her face, and her face is blackened by the sun and hollow. I keep bringing bottles of water to her in buckets of ice.

It might not be so bad if she were married to someone else. But we wanted to start this inn together—she said it made her fall in love with me. So what could anyone have done? I could apologize, I could try to make her go for her own good. When I look at her to say something like that, she looks up from the stove at me and presses her lips together, her eyes soft in her dripping face. I come and kiss her as gently as I can, and I pray that the summer will be short and that it will rain much.

She is like an ostrich with her long skinny legs and long skinny neck, and her midsection swollen like a balloon. She throws her head back to drink—she can take half the bottle of water in one go, clutching it in her bulbous knuckles. Every ten minutes, she turns off the stove, drops the spoon, and strides from the kitchen with the face of one spellbound, aware and yet helpless to resist. She comes back and resumes the cooking.

We have girls to do the beds and the laundry because the heat upstairs, or coming from the vat, would probably kill her. Once we had a girl who laughed at her, at my wife. She would see her leave the kitchen suddenly and then come back, and she would look around at the other girls and laugh, throwing her head back sometimes to cackle, the way my wife does when she takes a drink. In the house my wife would walk past and the girl would put her hand over her mouth, her eyes full of mirth. I didn’t know what it was about until one night, as we were lying side by side, my wife said, “I would like to dismiss Pilar.”

I said, “Why?”

My wife said nothing for a moment. Then she sighed quietly. “She makes my belly sore.”

I really did not know what she was talking about, but the next day I looked at Pilar as I was going into town, where she was doing the laundry over the steaming vat with the other girls, and saw her looking toward the kitchen and laughing. I stopped my truck, I got out of it and walked toward them, I took Pilar by the shoulder and slapped her across the chin, as if she were a naughty child. She stared at me with innocent eyes that were filling with tears.

“Go and get your things,” I said. “I will wait for you in the truck and take you to the train station.”

I met my wife in the city, in Valencia, when we were both very young, young enough to think that we would never really fall in love with anybody. It seemed the time had passed. I met her at a party, and we talked. Other people interrupted us and we talked to them, of course, thinking we would never see each other again, that the time had passed. But then we would find ourselves talking again. I guess I must have sometime told her that night how I would like to open an inn in the country, with only a few rooms, and a bar, and serve the simplest tapas to travelers and whatever local people would accept a newcomer. Because that is what I love in the country—nobody lies in order to be your friend. It is their prerogative to accept or reject you. They won’t run you out if you don’t give them cause, but they have no reason to trust you or like you unless they choose to. I have never lived in the country, I was not brought up that way, but I wanted to live among such people because that is how I am. That is how I am with everyone except for my wife. I did not choose to trust her or like her. If you ask me now, I am not sure that I do trust or like her. I look at her, standing over the hot stove with the weather pressing in on the walls that surround her, looking down at the beans in the pan and stirring them, her brow low but calm, her skin molten, her clothes soaked with sweat, her hair piled like smoke above her head, which looks shorn naked because of the black scarf that surrounds it to hold her hair back.

Does a man choose to trust God? Does a man choose to love Him? Maybe, after a time, he says that he trusts and loves Him, that he is grateful to God, that he wishes to obey Him. But he knows all the time that God has him by the scruff of the neck, holds him like a toad in His fist. If he forgets this, God will remind him soon.

That is also how it is with my wife. When I look at her there at the stove, I am surprised to find that I don’t feel anything. I feel numb.

At night, she is so grateful to fall into bed, but she cannot let me caress her. “Not with my big belly,” she says, because she is ashamed. So I sleep as near as I can without making the heat stick between our bodies, I stroke her arm, and I smell her. She smells like everything you want—the food she has been preparing all day—coffee, chorizo, long beans and black beans, garlic, tomatoes, oil, figs, chocolate, bread, and more coffee from early in the morning, which she must have to wake up, though it hurts her belly; she smells like wood smoke and ash, like the breath off the fields of barley, like the olive-oil soap she washes her hands with all day; she smells like the peonies that sit in the window beside the sink; she smells like the perfume she dabs on her neck in the morning; she smells like sweat and that civet musk that all women excrete; and she smells a little, as she fears, like the pain in her belly.

All summer, all I can do in the night is lie awake, for it is too hot to sleep, and go half mad with smelling and not touching more than her arm. I pray for her in the night, and for rain, and autumn, and winter.

(first published 8.9.07, 11.43am)