Forever (58 page)
I dream’d in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth;
I dream’d that was the new City of Friends.
—W
ALT
W
HITMAN
, “L
EAVES OF
G
RASS
,” 1891–92
A chill wind blows north on Sunday evening. Cormac leaves the
6 train at 110th Street and walks east. The streets are emptied by the cold. Police cruisers move slowly along the avenue, suburban eyes studying the city profiles. They peer at Cormac too, a white man probably searching for a connection. Before him are tenements, bodegas, a shuttered church. But other images rise from the pavements. He sees the African faces of old comrades. He sees hills that were scraped away. He sees the subway tunnels being chopped out of earth and granite. He thinks: I’m making a long circle home.
He sees an old brown-skinned man staring from the top of a stoop. He doesn’t see Cormac. He is staring into the past. A man who was an infant when Cormac was already old. Does the brown-skinned man dream of palm fronds rattling on a tranquil shore? No: Cormac is sure he dreams of a lovely woman who is now long gone.
This morning, as on every ninth of September, he walked to the river to drop a rose into the flowing waters. A rose for his mother. He wonders now if any of his flowers have ever reached the dark Atlantic, where they might catch a current bound for the Irish Sea. No matter, perhaps: With any luck he will see them all soon, in the place of emerald light. He imagines Kongo somewhere in the city, wonders where he sleeps, or if he sleeps at all, wonders where Kongo has been while he has lived his own long life in Manhattan. In this neighborhood, in this East Harlem, here in El Barrio, many people would understand the existence of a babalawo.
Now Cormac arrives in a dark street of darker tenements. The iron calligraphy of fire escapes. Lights glowing beyond curtains. New lampposts with hard bright burning light. Cars jam the curbs. Two men work on a double-parked Chevy, each wearing woolen gloves. A few kids run past hills of stuffed trash bags (where did all the garbage cans go?), darting from one tenement doorway to the next.
Here is the building. Number 378. No stoop. Just a door on street level, with clear glass to reveal anybody waiting in ambush, and then a second door with stairs beyond. Cormac enters the vestibule and sees rows of mailboxes and bells. He rings 4-A. Top floor. A buzz comes back, and he enters with a click. The stairs resemble those of a hundred other tenements that were old the year they were built. A banister scabby with layers of paint, the pentimento of the poor. Walls chipped and painted and dirtied and painted and battered and painted. Up one flight. The joined odors of meals, of sauces and roasts and chicken, seeping through closed doors (as they no longer drift into the streets), along with soundtracks from sit-coms and telenovelas and baseball, and the flooding vowels of Spanish warring with the consonants of English. The word
PUTO
spray-painted on a wall, and a reply, in a different hand, with an arrow pointing, saying
SU NOMBRE
.
Another flight. On each landing a sealed door where once a dumbwaiter hung from ropes. Now
dumbwaiter
floats in the Sea of Lost Words. The last flight. A closed green door, with 4-A neatly lettered on its face.
He knocks.
The door opens. He sees no face, no light: a darkness.
And then the sound of a fat wooden stick hitting a block of wood.
Klok-klok, klok-klok-klok.
And the lights explode, and Delfina is standing there, all golden and shining, with her wide white grin, and behind her there’s a band, and they smash into the music, four musicians jammed into the kitchen, a man on timbales, an old man with a gourd, a kid bent over a tall conga drum, a bearded young man playing flute, the music loud and full of joy. And from other rooms come smiling men and laughing women, and Cormac sees a table against a wall, heaped with food, and a bucket full of ice and canned beer, and the music drives and now more people are coming in the door with more platters of food, neighbors celebrating a stranger, and Delfina grabs each of his hands and says: “Oye, como va?”
For that’s what they’re playing; that’s the tune the musicians sing, the words full of flirtation and bravado, all of them beaming at the success of the surprise, at Cormac’s astonished face, at the many fine women, at the children who start dancing, at the great exuberant release of the music.
And now Delfina takes Cormac and she begins to dance with him. To move him with her hands: a touch, a nudge, a shift of the wrist. And then she adds the staccato of her shoes against the floor, the abrupt bump of a hip. And he surrenders to the music and surrenders to her. His hands come up, and he feels the music in his hips and his waist and his legs, in his shoulders and hands, he feels the music pushing him, driving him, he feels it invade him, he feels himself taking small precise steps in the narrow space of the kitchen, crowded with dancers, feels the music in his bones and in his flesh: he cuts left, then right; he laughs and whirls; and gazes at Delfina, at this golden woman, at her fathomless eyes, at her urgent grin, at her body showing him the way, her body telling him how and where to move, her body telling him when to pause and when to explode, her body setting all the moves.
And then the band finishes and shifts into a bolero and she pulls him close and puts her hands on the back of his neck.
“Happy birthday,
mi amor
.”
He pushes his face through her hair to kiss her skull. He feels her breasts and belly against him, as someone dims the lights, and then Delfina, still dancing, is introducing him to her friends and her neighbors. This is Elba. Mariano. Rosa. Gerson. Meet Cormac. Hey, glad you’re here, happy birthday, man. This is José. Marisol. Pancho, a crazy Mexican from the second floor.
Hola, cómo está
… This is my friend Cormac. Chucho. María Elena. Doris. Ramona. You better be nice to this girl, man. Yes, Cormac says.
Claro que sí.
They are dancing in every room of the railroad flat, and Delfina gives him a tour, still dancing with him, leading him, moving him. Hey, meet Miguelito. This is Cormac. My lonesome gringo. The rooms are laid out like those of every other railroad flat in history: first the kitchen, with its table, refrigerator, shelves, and sink, the furniture pushed against walls to make room for the band, the windows open to the night, and a door leading to the bathroom; then two tiny bedrooms, which give way to a living room that overlooks the street, a room filled with a large bed, an armchair, a television set. Four couples are dancing in the open space beside the bed. To the right of the bed is the only room in the flat with a door. The door is closed. Delfina pauses, kisses Cormac on the cheek, but says nothing under the force of the driving merengue that follows the bolero. She makes more introductions, while he puts a map of the flat into his head. The first bedroom holds a desk, computer, and printer, with five or six small Mexican mirrors, a map of Hispaniola, a wall of books. The second bedroom is all books. On the walls above the bookcases there are rows of primitive masks; small tin hands with eyes painted on the palms; framed browning nineteenth-century photographs of bejeweled women and mustached men squinting in the harsh Caribbean light; a poster from the Museo del Barrio for a show of Taíno art. It’s a smaller version of Cormac’s own eclectic piece of New York. He tells her it’s beautiful.
“Hey, it’s not much, but it’s mine,” she says.
More than half the books are in Spanish: histories, treatises, reference books, novels, and poetry.
“I had a friend,” she says, leaning close so he can hear over the music, “an old Dominican man who lived on a top floor on 116th Street. He was a schoolteacher back home and an exile for forty-five years. When he died, his grandchildren wanted to throw his books in the garbage. So I rescued them…. You know what I really mean: I stole them.”
She laughs.
One shelf is packed with books on physics, the legacy of Hunter. Another is jammed with histories of the Dominican Republic, including a few oversize volumes from the nineteenth century, and she points at them in an excited way, tells him how rare they are and how the first editions were lucky to reach three hundred copies, and her excitement reminds Cormac of talks they’ve had across the summer, scattered over dinners and long evenings together. Then she turns away from the books and pulls him again into the dancing, into the music, into the rising heat of the rooms, into the bumping collisions of bodies, into the drum breaks, and the scratching of gourds, and the sound of vowels: and he is for a moment back in Stone Street, in Hughson’s when the Africans played for themselves, when they took Africa into New York to stay; when they joined the Irish in filling their laments with defiant joy.
He takes Delfina Cintron by the hand and dances to the music of her time. And his.
Food becomes feast. A deep covered dish of steamed string-beans cut lengthwise in a vinaigrette of olive oil and lemon juice. Bowls of moros, black beans, or red beans, to spread wetly on a field of white rice. “Blacks, Indians, and white guys,” she says. “Mix ’em all together and you’ve got me.
Una trigueña.
” Then two kinds of chicken, roasted and boiled, and slices of pork, and
pescado en coco,
red snapper with a coconut milk sauce, reddened with annatto (she explains) and laced with cilantro. On the side, platters of sliced avocado and limes. The band breaks, descends upon the food, and everybody pauses while Benny More sings from the grave on the CD player. Hello. Welcome. Happy birthday. How old are you? Too old. Yeah, like everybody. I hope you’re not married, man, or Delfina gonna put you in a river.
Cormac feels pleasured by the small perfections of spice, of taste and texture, the flow of vowels, the humid warmth. Thinking: How many meals have I consumed on this passage? How many as good as this one? And then remembers the Cuban barber:
I star’ thinkin’ abou’ things like that, ’mano, I go nuts.
Music again from the CD player in the first room off the kitchen: Juan Luis Guerra (Delfina says). Fragments of grief and anger behind the smooth vowels; here, timbales serve as consonants. Then the front door opens, and three kids come in with a birthday cake on a platter, huge and creamy and bearing a single candle. A large beaming brown-skinned woman is behind the kids and the platter, and Delfina directs her to a space on the table and then lights the candle, and then Pancho, the Mexican from the second floor, pushes in with a steel guitar, plays a few notes, and starts to sing “Las Mañanitas,” a song as sad as Done-gal, a song about all the little mornings of life, and then everyone is singing.
Estas son las mañanitas
Que cantaba el rey David…
The emotion fills the room, one woman sobbing, not for Cormac, and not for herself, but for loss itself, for vanished mornings, for years that won’t come back. At the end, cheers, and shouts of
vaya!
Cormac bows to Pancho from the second floor and the Mexican smiles and bows back, holding the guitar as if it were the weapon of a glad warrior, the way Bobby Simmons held his alto in homage to Horse Campbell. Then here comes the coffee, the aroma permeating the entire flat, the taste rich and sweet, brewed in a
greca,
sipped from demitasse cups.
Dos cafecitos, corazón
. She tells him it’s Café Santo Domingo, but if he wants American coffee, they have that too. Then an immense plate of guava paste and
queso blanco
. And the band playing again, after shots of dark Barcelo rum. Cormac lights a cigarette and Delfina points at an ashtray, where three cigars are smoldering while their smokers dance. He tamps out his own cigarette after a few drags, grabs her, and they dance, Cormac leading her now, moving her body with his, leaving behind his past for this present, for this room, for this woman before him, for all the other joyous dancers.
Cuidado,
man: Don’t mistake this for a Happy Nigger scene. No, he answers himself: I know better. His head then fills with images of verandas, tropical foliage, the bougainvillea on a wall in Sargent’s watercolors, the wind in Winslow Homer.
Que tropical, señorita.
And white men in white suits unleashing machetes with a nod and a grunt upon the brown necks of Dominicans. Upon the bodies of slaves and Indians and rebels. The world that sent Delfina here, as remote now as the arctic Irish wind that sent him on his own long voyage to Manhattan’s granite shores.
She reaches for his face.
“Why are you crying?” she says.
The band leaves first, bound for another gig, all smiles and carrying away pieces of cake wrapped in napkins, refusing money. Cormac tries to help with the dishes, but Elba and Rosa and Marisol and Doris and María Elena and Ramona push him aside. “It’s your birthday, man,” says Elba (bony and a bit worn around the eyes). “You just be nice to Delfina, you hear me?”
Delfina comes in from the other rooms with glasses and plates and one of the women (Marisol? Doris?) takes them and washes them and stacks them on a drainer (for there is no dishwasher), while someone else (María Elena?) scours pots and pans and another wraps unfinished dishes with Saran Wrap. “You can eat here for a month,” says the woman named Rosa. “Maybe more!”
In the bathroom off the kitchen, the door closed and the guests all gone, Cormac sees lotions and vials and soap, towels and facecloths, all arranged on shelves as neatly as her books. Over the toilet, there’s a portrait of Trujillo, the old dictator, with his white pancake makeup and killer’s eyes. When Cormac comes out, the women are gone, as if on command, and Delfina is leaning against the opening to the rest of the flat. She has changed into a long high-collared yellow gown. Cotton. A kimono. Her feet in red thong slippers. Nails painted yellow too.
“Thank you,” he says in a soft voice.
“You danced.”
“I did. Thanks for that too. Maybe most of all.”
She says nothing, then flicks off the kitchen lights. The flat is now dark. She takes his hand, and her palm is damp. She leads him through the dark book-lined rooms to the place where she has pitched her bed. In the darkness, he hears her kick off slippers, and he sits on the edge of the bed and unlaces his shoes.