Long and Dirty Night by Celia Styles

Author:Celia Styles [Styles, Celia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-01-25T06:00:00+00:00

The next two days went by in a strange, quiet sort of domesticity. I’d come down the stairs in the morning to find him leafing through my books, an English –Spanish dictionary next to him as he ploughed through Stephen King and Ray Bradbury and all the other American classics I had on my bookshelf. I didn’t like people touching my books, and illegal Mexican immigrants definitely didn’t feature in my list of ideal book borrowers, but I knew already that it was beyond me to deny him anything.

When his third morning came, he didn’t bring up the possibility of leaving and neither did I. I would go out to work in the morning, and he would clean the house and read during the day. We would talk about my books when I got home, and I would cook us up a meal of something delicious and unhealthy

We gradually, carefully, began to open up to each other, one little secret at a time. He had come to America on a whim, because he didn’t want to be stuck in his small rural Mexican town any longer. I told him about my parents and how they had died in a subway accident, my brother and how he had gone hiking to Europe and never came back.

He was extremely intelligent, and followed arguments easily. Thanks to his stay with me, his accent was increasingly losing its Mexican touch and sounding more, well, American. Unwittingly, I started picking up colloquialisms in Spanish I had never heard before. I could feel myself warming up to him, our conversations flowing easily. Staying up late nights talking to him had become the new normal routine for me, and I found myself living my days for those long, warm evenings.

Around a month into our acquaintance, we got to discussing US immigration policy, and all the things that I’d been tacitly taught over the years- that I should see these people as the enemy, and not as human beings- started to dissolve. It was impossible not to feel guilty about all the people like Gabriel who’d come over here not to cause trouble but to find a new start, the people I’d coldly turned away or cruelly thrown out. My worldview was shifting, inch by inch, and it was a liberating experience.

My unabashed physical attraction for him had, unbeknownst to me, given way to an emotional connect, and I forgot what it had been like to have a house without him in it. Cheesy though it sounded even to my own mind, I couldn’t imagine living without him. He had proved every single stereotype about his people wrong.

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