Cactus Blood by Lucha Corpi

Author:Lucha Corpi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arte Público Press
Published: 2009-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Twelve

Muerte y Angel

For weeks after Darío died, I couldn’t sleep in our bed. I used to walk around the house in the dark. I would end up in the living room and sit on a corner of the love seat to look at the Oakland hills. Then, I would listen to the language of memory that filled the darkness and my solitude. Grief, I discovered, has its own distinct, organic rhythms, and giving in to them seemed to be the only way to wholeness again. From that time on, whenever I felt troubled and restless, I took my place on the love seat and let my heart speak to me. Tonight, prompted by my presentiment of danger upstairs, I had intended to wrap myself in a blanket and sit on my favorite corner of the seat to keep watch.

I went downstairs thinking that Justin was getting ready to leave. But I found him instead sitting in an easy chair. Since his eyes were closed and he was so still, I concluded he had fallen asleep. Turning the light dimmer to off, I covered him with the blanket I had brought down with me.

One of us had to be rested for the next day, which in all likelihood would be another long and perhaps dangerous journey. Events were unfolding quickly now and a resolution seemed near.

I was walking out of the living room to get a ruana I kept in Darío’s office when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shadow move swiftly across the kitchen door to my left. I turned to look, just in case, knowing in advance no human was there. This was one shadow I knew well. When I asked him, my ophthalmologist had said that the peripheral shadow was probably produced by a dislodged, floating speck of matter in my eye’s vitreous fluid. But I preferred to believe instead Mami Julia’s explanation to us, her grandchildren. Each one of us walked around with our muerte beside us, she would tell us, just at arm’s length on our left, and with our ángel, who never became visible, on our right.

As long as you see muerte’s shadow on your left, everything is all right,” my grandmother explained. “But,” she warned, “Beware when muerte and ángel decide to change places.”

I wrapped myself in the ruana.

Justin’s voice startled me out of my reverie as I walked back into the living room. “Don’t trust her,” he warned. At first I thought he was talking in his sleep, but I turned around anyway. He shifted positions in his chair, then added, “Se aprovecha de ti—She’s preying on your emotions.”

“Carlota?” I leaned on the doorframe. “She’s not preying on my emotions. I’m doing that all by myself.” I heard Justin’s soft laughter. “Seriously,” I continued, “she needed help, and I gave it. I knew all the time what I was doing, and she is gravely ill.”

I seriously doubted that Carlota was telling us the whole truth. That consideration had, nonetheless, nothing to do with my procuring the medical care she needed.

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