Aleida Rodríguez

V. A. There are no doors between the rooms. The archways bore through the house like a tunnel through a mountain. The room one falls into after my parents’ is the largest and serves as two bedrooms divided by an invisible wall. Half of it is my brother’s and the other half my sister and I share, but not at first. Earlier, I have a bed to myself on the side of the room nearest the kitchen. My bed is low and on one side a wooden rail can be dragged up noisily and clicked into place. It is here my little goat wakes me, grabbing the covers off me with her teeth. We play in the empty pig shelter at the far end of the patio while my mother washes clothes in a palangana and throws the soapy water across the concrete, where it steams. But my father is a butcher by profession, and my family has other plans for my goat: a Sunday picnic at the zoo in Havana. The day is huge and blue and breezy. My sister teases me for not eating and says my goat is delicious. I stray away to watch the monkeys. I give one of the monkeys near the fence my banana. As it finishes peeling it meticulously, another monkey appears behind it and shoves the banana into its own mouth. The first monkey turns around, slaps it in the face with the empty peel, but that monkey isn’t sorry and starts jumping and screeching and showing its yellow teeth. For many years, those monkeys are all I can remember about the picnic at the zoo. B. Later, when my sister and I share a bed on the other side of the room, I can see the tall narrow cabinet right inside my parents’ room. My father always puts his hat on top of it as he walks in. And at night, through the mosquito netting, it is a tall thin man wearing a straw hat, lurking just outside the door, watching me in a sinister way. The dead weight of my sister’s habitual leg thrown across my body is no talisman. I have to keep waking myself up, sweaty and tense, to make sure he hasn’t moved any closer.

Regla lesbia: Flexible rule that may be adjusted to any body to be measured. Compare regla fija: standard. —The Velázquez Dictionary I. In the garden, it’s there. Even when you’re inside you feel it, as though it were you standing naked among the weeds, the tips of the bougainvillea bursting into flame, your nipples ruffled like the skin of a lake by a breeze. You worship the invisible body like an old-fashioned lover, from afar, loving the specificity of space between you. Sometimes at night it stretches out on the empty side of the bed, stares at you with the length of its invisible surface. Every contour of your body not filled by you is molded by the attentiveness of the invisible body, whose breath surrounds you. It’s more than prayer it wants—more than language, with its conditions. The invisible body demands you invent new senses to receive it, new places on your body to marvel at its subtlety, like the eyes of the deaf percussionist that perceive sound. II. The invisible body wants you to become a satellite dish, tuned to what exists only because your body calls to it. Like the woman who had her kitchen remodeled to make room for the microwave she’d entered a contest for. Then won. III. When asked whether falling in love was about acquisitiveness, about the ego, the seventy-five-year-old poet responded that the ego had nothing to do with it; it was the need for union with the beloved. Rumi asks,Who is it we spend our entire lives loving? IV. How, then, do you measure the invisible body, which resists commitment but is faithful? Is it clear who the beloved is, when no clear body exists that can be measured against a standard? V. The invisible body sometimes acquires a body—it’s so convincing, it takes you a while to figure out it’s really the invisible body. Like someone who has been reading your journal, it has decoded from your petty, daily complaints the open sesame that slides the stone from the hidden cave’s opening and cleans you out while you sleep, leaving a sarcastic note. It wants you to know it was doing you a favor, besides, how else did you think you’d discover the cave’s precise location? When Aphrodite sharpens you, you sacrifice a little of yourself, willingly, as a knife does, so that you may become better at it. VI. This is the point at which the invisible body speaks in italics, the Ouija board of poetry. In my mind, says the invisible body,that time capsule shuttling through space, I hold, in all the languages of the world, your love, rushed like holographic platters to a table, steaming into the future long after you’ve ceased to shine, the silver faces of your beloved bobbing out of the darkness, the black velvet pillow of your life on which you offer them for view. VII. The invisible body is created out of your longing, your longing compressing invisible molecules together into an absence you recognize. That is the way one blind man sees the world—after the fact, in photographs he took, once he had passed through it.

In art, politics, school, church, business, love or marriage—in a piece of work or in a career— strongly spent is synonymous with kept. — Robert Frost She taught me the names of flowers: calendula, ranunculus, Iceland poppy. And the medicinal uses of herbs: Fenugreek opens up a stuffy head; goldenseal lubricates the cracked mucous membranes. Over a circa 1820 American dropleaf table, she told me asparagus was the broom of the kidneys. I hadn't understood at first and thought she'd used a German word I pictured as brüm and not as the little stalks standing on their heads, sweeping out the impurities. I learned to make the perfect roux for soufflé and became her efficient assistant in the kitchen—dicing and chopping, she once told me, with unparalleled patience. Then one day she began to accidentally break my Depression glassware, and I recalled how she'd giggled when she told me that in two years of marriage she had single-handedly decimated her husband's glass collection dating from 1790 to 1810, including a rare wedding goblet. In the doorway to the back porch she stated simply that my presence made her feel strangled, it was nothing I was doing or could do. We saw a therapist for six years, while my collection dwindled then became memory. With unparalleled patience I jumped through hoop after burning hoop, the therapist pointed out, but I heard that as praise for my prowess and continued to balance Bauer plates on my nose on command; hold growling tigers off with Windsor dining room chairs; juggle career, job, hope, and nightly tempests with unparalleled dexterity. I could reassemble anything: shattered pictures of us crossing the street with canes in the future, my hand under her elbow. My heart. But what I lacked, I can see now, was the ability to dissemble. Finally, she brought home a Cuisinart food processor, and I started hearing the minutes slicing away with ferocious velocity, time doing its soft-shoe faster and faster like Fred Astaire on amphetamines. Memories of flowers and herbs were sacrificed to the angry god of its vortex. Your voice is like acid on my skin, she said after twelve years, then grabbed her Cuisinart and left me behind like so much history.

She was my Sunday school teacher when I was just seven and eight. He was the newly hired pastor, an albino, alarming sight with his transparent eyelashes and mouse-pink skin that looked like it might hurt whenever she caressed his arm. Since Eva was her name, to my child’s mind it made great sense that she should fall in love with him. He was Adán. Before the Fall and afterward, her invert twin. And she, Eva, was blonde as well, though more robust, like Liv Ullmann. I loved her honey hair, her full lips; her green eyes a nameless sin. (Not that I worried all that much— the church was Presbyterian.) In Sunday school, her way to teach us kids to pray was to comment on all the beauty we could touch or see in our environment. My hand was always in the air to volunteer my sentiment. Since other kids considered prayer a chore, the floor was usually mine. My list of joys left out her hair but blessed the red hibiscus seen through the windows while others bowed their heads. Her heart I schemed to win with purple prose on meringue clouds. —For who was Adán, anyway, I thought, but nada spelled backward? While hers, reversed, called out,Ave! Ave! The lyric of a bird born and airborne on the same day. But it was night when I saw her outside the church for the last time: yellow light, mosquitoes, summer. I shaped a barking dog, a fine but disembodied pair of wings with my hands. She spoke in hushed tones to my parents. The next day I would find myself up north, in a strange house, without my tongue and almost blind, there was so much to see. This caused Cuba, my past, to be eclipsed in time, but Eva stayed, a loss. Ave, I learned, meant also this: Farewell! I haven’t seen her since.