So Long Read online

  Also by Lucia Berlin

  A Manual for Cleaning Ladies (1977)

  Angels Laundromat (1981)

  Legacy (1983)

  Phantom Pain (1984)

  Safe & Sound (1988)

  Homesick: New & Selected Stories (1990)

  Where I Live Now: Stories 1993–1998 (1999)

  A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories (2015)

  This is

  A Black Sparrow Book

  Published in 2016 by

  DAVID R. GODINE, PUBLISHER

  Post Office Box 450

  Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452

  www.blacksparrowbooks.com

  Copyright © 1993 by Lucia Berlin

  Copyright © 2016 by the Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin LP

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact Permissions, David R. Godine, Publisher, Fifteen Court Square, Suite 320, Boston, Massachusetts, 02108.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Some of these stories first appeared in Phantom Pain, Tombouctou Press (1984) and Safe and Sound, Poltroon Press (1989). Some of the stories also appeared in the following magazines: City Lights Review, Folio, Gas, In This Corner, Jejune, Peninsula, Rigorous, Rolling Stock, The New Censorship and Zyzzyva. Many thanks to those publishers for permission to reprint.

  SOFTCOVER ISBN: 978-0-87685-893-6

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-57423-230-1

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA BERLIN, LUCIA.

  So long : stories, 1987–1992 / Lucia Berlin.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-87685-894-9 (cloth) : $25.00.

  ISBN 0-87685-893-0 (pbk.) : $13.00.

  ISBN 0-87685-895-7 (cloth signed) : $30.00

  I. Title.

  ps 3552.e72485s6 1993

  813’.54–dc20 93-6659

  CIP

  For Monica

  Contents

  Luna Nueva

  Sombra

  Friends

  Our Lighthouse

  Unmanageable

  Teen-Age Punk

  Good and Bad

  Grief

  Daughters

  Bluebonnets

  La Vie en Rose

  Macadam

  Love Affair

  Our Brother’s Keeper

  Strays

  Fire

  Melina

  Step

  Fool to Cry

  Mourning

  Panteón de Dolores

  Dust to Dust

  So Long

  Luna Nueva

  The sun set with a hiss as the wave hit the beach. The woman continued up the checkered black and gold tiles of the malecón to the cliffs on the hill. Other people resumed walking too once the sun had set, like spectators leaving a play. It isn’t just the beauty of the tropical sunset she thought, the importance of it. In Oakland the sun set into the Pacific each evening and it was the end of another day. When you travel you step back from your own days, from the fragmented imperfect linearity of your time. As when reading a novel, the events and people become allegorical and eternal. The boy whistles on a wall in Mexico. Tess leans her head against a cow. They will keep doing that forever; the sun will just keep on falling into the sea.

  She walked onto a platform above the cliffs. The magenta sky reflected iridescent in the water. Below the cliffs a vast swimming pool had been built of stones into the jagged rock. Waves shattered against the far walls and spilled into the pool, scattering crabs. A few boys swam in the deeper water, but most people waded or sat on the mossy rocks.

  The woman climbed down the rocks to the water. She took off the shift covering her bathing suit and sat on the slippery wall with the others. They watched as the sky faded and a new orange moon appeared in the mauve sky. La luna! people cried. Luna nueva! The evening grew dark and the orange moon turned to gold. The foam cascading into the pool was a sharp metallic white: the clothes of the bathers flowed eerie white as if under a strobe light.

  Most of the bathers in the silver pool were fully clothed. Many of them had come from the mountains or ranchos far away; their baskets lay in piles on the rocks.

  And they couldn’t swim, so it was nice to lie suspended in the pool, for the waves to rock them and swirl them back and forth. When the breakers covered the wall it didn’t seem that they were in a pool at all, but in their own calm eddy in the middle of the ocean.

  Street lights came on above them against the palms on the malecón. The lights glowed like amber lanterns on their intricate wrought-iron poles. The water in the pool reflected the lights over and over, first whole, then into dazzling fragments, then whole again like full moons under the tiny moon in the sky.

  The woman dove into the water. The air was cool, the water warm and salty. Crabs raced over her feet, the stones underfoot were velvety and jagged. She remembered only then being in that pool many years ago, before her children could swim. A sharp memory of her husband’s eyes looking at her across the pool. He held one of their sons as she swam with the other in her arms. No pain accompanied the sweetness of this recollection. No loss or regret or foretaste of death. Gabriel’s eyes. Her sons’ laughter, echoing from the cliffs into the water.

  The bathers’ voices ricocheted too from the stone. Ah! they cried, as at fireworks, when the young boys dove into the water. They swayed in their white clothes. It was festive, with the clothes swirling, as if they were waltzing at a ball. Beneath them, the sea made delicate traceries on the sand. A young couple knelt in the water. They didn’t touch, but were so in love it seemed to the woman that tiny darts and arrows shot out into the water from them, like fireflies or phosphorescent fish. They wore white clothes, but seemed naked against the dark sky. Their clothes clung to their black bodies, to his strong shoulders and loins, her breasts and belly. When the waves flowed in and ebbed out, her long hair floated up and covered them in tendrils of black fog and then subsided black and inky into the water.

  A man wearing a straw hat asked the woman if she would take his babies out into the water. He handed her the smallest one, who was frightened. It slipped up through the woman’s arms like a skittish baboon and climbed onto her head, tearing at her hair, coiling its legs and tail around her neck. She untangled herself from the screaming baby. Take the other one, the tame one, the man said, and that child did lie placidly while she swam with it in the water. So quiet she thought it must be asleep, but no it was humming. Other people sang and hummed in the cool night. The sliver of moon turned white like the foam as more people came down the stairs into the water. After a while the man took the baby from her and left then, with his children.

  On the rocks a girl tried to coax her grandmother into the pool. No! No! I’ll fall! Come in, the woman said, I’ll take you swimming all around the pool.

  “You see I broke my leg and I’m afraid I’ll break it again.”

  “When did it happen?” the woman asked.

  “Ten years ago. It was a terrible time. I couldn’t chop fire-wood. I couldn’t work in the fields. We had no food.”

  “Come in. I’ll be careful of your leg.”

  At last the old lady let her lift her down from the rock and into the water. She laughed, clasping her frail arms around the woman’s neck. She was light, like a bag of shells. Her hair smelled of charcoal fires. Qué maravilla! she whispered into the woman’s throat. Her silver braid wafted out behind them in the water.

  She was seventy-eight and had never seen the ocean before. She lived on a rancho near Chalchihuitles. She had ridden on the back of a truck to the seaport with her granddaughter.

  “My husband died last month.”

  “Lo siento.”

  She
swam with the old lady to the far wall where the cool waves spilled over them.

  “God finally took him, finally answered my prayers. Eight years he lay in bed. Eight years he couldn’t talk, couldn’t get up or feed himself. Lay like a baby. I would ache from being tired, my eyes would burn. At last, when I thought he was asleep I would try to steal away. He would whisper my name, a horrid croaking sound. Consuelo! Consuelo! and his skeleton hands, dead lizard hands would claw out to me. It was a terrible, terrible time.”

  “Lo siento,” the woman said again.

  “Eight years. I could go nowhere. Not even to the corner. Ni hasta la esquina! Every night I prayed to the Virgin to take him, to give me some time, some days without him.”

  The woman clasped the old lady and swam out again into the pool, holding the frail body close to her.

  “My mother died only six months ago. It was the same for me. A terrible, terrible time. I was tied to her day and night. She didn’t know me and said ugly things to me, year after year, clawing at me.”

  Why am I telling this old lady such a lie? she wondered. But it wasn’t such a lie, the bloody grasp.

  “They’re gone now,” Consuelo said. “We are liberated.”

  The woman laughed; liberated was such an American word. The old lady thought she laughed because she was happy. She hugged the woman tightly and kissed her cheek. She had no teeth so the kiss was soft as mangos.

  “The Virgin answered my prayers!” she said. “It pleases God, to see that you and I are free.”

  Back and forth the two women flowed in the dark water, the clothes of the bathers swirling around them like a ballet. Near them the young couple kissed, and for a moment there was a sprinkle of stars overhead, then a mist covered them and the moon and dimmed the opal lamplight from the street.

  “Vamos a comer, abuelita!” the granddaughter called. She shivered, her dress dripping on the stones. A man lifted the old woman from the water, carried her up the winding rocks to the malecón. Mariachis played, far away.

  “Adiós!” The old woman waved from the parapet.

  “Adiós!”

  The woman waved back. She floated at the far edge in the silken warm water. The breeze was inexpressibly gentle.

  Sombra

  The waiter retrieved her napkin from the floor, slid it onto her lap, his other hand swirled a plate of pastel fruit onto the table before her. Music came from everywhere, not transistors walking down city streets, but far away mariachis, a bolero on a radio in the kitchen, the whistle of the knife sharpener, an organ grinder, workmen singing from a scaffold.

  Jane was a retired teacher, divorced, her children grown. She hadn’t been in Mexico for twenty years, not since she had lived there with Sebastian and their sons, in Oaxaca.

  She had always liked traveling alone. But yesterday, at Teotihuacan, it was so magnificent she had wanted to say it out loud, to confirm the color of the maguey.

  She had liked being alone in France, being able to wander anywhere, talk to people. Mexico was hard. The warmth of the Mexicans accentuated her loneliness, the lost past.

  This morning she had stopped at the Majestic desk and joined a guided group to the Sunday bullfights. The immense plaza, the fans, were daunting to face alone. Fanático, Spanish for fan. Imagine 50,000 Mexicans arriving on time, long before four o’clock, when the gates were locked. Out of respect for the bulls, her cab driver said.

  The bullfight group assembled in the lobby at two-thirty. There were two American couples. The Jordans and the McIntyres. The men were surgeons, at a convention in Mexico City. They were tennis-fit and tanned. Their wives were expensively dressed, but in that time warp doctors’ wives have, wearing pant-suits fashionable back when they put their husbands through medical school. The women wore cheap black felt Spanish hats, with a red rose, that were sold on the streets as souvenirs. They thought they were “fun hats,” not realizing how coquettish and pretty they looked in them.

  There were four Japanese tourists. The Yamatos, an old couple in black traditional clothes. Their son, Jerry, a tall, handsome man in his forties, with a young Japanese bride, Deedee, dressed in American jeans and a sweatshirt. She and Jerry spoke English to each other, Japanese to his parents. She blushed when he kissed her neck or caught her fingers between his teeth.

  It turned out that Jerry too was a Californian, an architect, Deedee a chemistry student in San Francisco. They would be in Mexico City for two more days. His parents had come from Tokyo to join them. No, they had never seen a bullfight, but Jerry thought it would seem very Japanese, combining what Mishima called Japanese qualities of elegance and brutality.

  Jane was pleased that he should say something like that to her, almost a stranger, liked him immediately.

  The three spoke about Mishima, and Mexico, as they all sat on leather sofas, waiting for the guide. Jane told the couple that she had spent her own honeymoon in Mexico City, too.

  “It was wonderful,” she said. “Magic. You could see the volcanoes then.” Why do I keep thinking about Sebastian, anyway? I’ll call him tonight, and tell him I went to the Plaza Mexico.

  Señor Errazuriz looked like an old bullfighter himself, lean, regal. His too-long greasy hair curled in a perhaps unintentional colita. He introduced himself, asked them to relax, have a sangria while he told them a little about the corridas, gave a concise history and an explanation of what they were to expect. “The form of each corrida as timeless and precise as a musical score. But with each bull, the element of surprise.”

  He told them to take something warm, even though now it was a hot day. Obediently they all went for sweaters, got into an already crowded elevator. Buenas tardes. It is a custom in Mexico to greet people you join in an elevator, in line at the post office, in a waiting room. It makes waiting easier, actually, and in an elevator you don’t have to stare straight ahead because now you have acknowledged one another.

  They all got into a hotel van. The two women continued a conversation about a manic depressive called Sabrina, begun back in Petaluma or Sausalito. The American doctors seemed ill at ease. The older Yamatos spoke softly in Japanese, looked down at their laps. Jerry and Deedee looked at each other, or smiled for photographs they had Jane take of them, in the hotel, in the van, in front of the fountain. The two doctors braked and cringed as the van sped down Insurgentes toward the plaza.

  Jane sat in the front with Señor Errazuriz. They spoke in Spanish. He told her they were lucky to see Jorge Gutierrez today, the best matador in Mexico. There would also be a fine Spaniard, Roberto Dominguez, and a young Mexican making his debut, his alternativa, in the plaza, Alberto Giglio. Those aren’t very romantic names, Jane commented, Gutierrez and Dominguez.

  “They haven’t earned an apodo like ‘El Litri,’” he said.

  Jerry caught Jane looking at him and his wife as they kissed. He smiled at her.

  “Forgive me, I didn’t mean to be rude,” she said, but she was blushing too, like the girl.

  “You must be thinking of your own honeymoon!” he grinned.

  They parked the van near the stadium and a boy with a rag began washing the windows. Years ago there were parking meters in Mexico, but nobody collected the money or enforced the tickets. People used slugs or simply smashed the meters, as they did with the pay phones. So now the pay phones are free and there are no parking meters. But it seems as if each parking spot has its own private valet, who will watch your car, a boy appearing from nowhere.

  Electric, exhilarating, the excitement of the crowd outside the plaza. “Feels like the World Series!” said one of the doctors. Stands sold tacos, posters, bulls’ horns, capes, photographs of Dominguín, Juan Belmonte, Manolete. A huge bronze statue of El Armillita stood outside the arena. Some fans laid carnations at his feet. They had to bend down to do this, so it seemed as if they were genuflecting before him.

  The groups’ bags were searched by heavily armed security guards. All women, as were most of the guards all over Mexico. The entire Cuernavac
a police force is female, Señor Errazuriz told Jane. Narcs, motorcycle cops, chief of police. Women are not so susceptible to bribery and corruption. Jerry said he had noticed how many women there were in public office, more than in the U.S.

  “Of course. Our whole country is protected by the Virgin of Guadalupe!”

  “Not that many female bullfighters, though?”

  “A few. Good ones. But, really, it is for men to fight against the bulls.”

  Below in the plaza monosabios in red and white uniforms raked the sand. Pointillist whirls of color as the spectators climbed far up in the tiers to the blue circle of sky. Vendors carrying heavy buckets of beer and coke scampered along the metal rims above the cement seats, ran up and down stairs as narrow as on the pyramid of Teotihuacan. The group looked at their programs, the photographs and statistics of the toreros, of the bulls from the Santiago herd.

  Men in black leather suits, smoking cigars, charros in big hats and silver decorated coats gathered around the barrera. Except for the two Spanish hats, their group was definitely underdressed. They had all come as for a ball game. Most of the Mexican and Spanish women were dressed casually, but as elegantly as possible, with heavy makeup and jewelry.

  Their seats were in the shade. The plaza was perfectly divided into sol y sombra. The sun was bright.

  At five minutes to four six monosabios walked around the plaza bearing aloft a cloth banner painted with the message, “If anyone is surprised throwing cushions they will be fined.”

  At four o’clock the trumpets played the opening thrilling paso doble. “Carmen!” Mrs. Jordan cried. The gate opened and the procession began. First the alguaciles, two black-bearded men on Arabian horses, dressed in black, starched white ruffs, plumed hats. Their fine horses pranced and strutted and reared as they crossed the plaza. Just behind them were the three matadors in glittering suits of light, embroidered capes over their left shoulders. Dominguez in black, Gutierrez in turquoise and Giglio in white. Behind each matador followed his cuadrilla of three men, also carrying elaborate capes. Then the fat picadors on padded, blind-folded horses, then the monosabios and areneros, in red and white. The men who actually removed the dead bulls were dressed in blue. In the last century in Madrid there was a popular group of trained monkeys performing in a theatre, whose costumes were the same as the men who worked in the bull-rings. They were called the Wise Monkeys—monosabios. The name stuck for the men in the corridas.