Mangos, Bananas and Coconuts by Himilce Novas

Author:Himilce Novas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arte Público Press
Published: 1996-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

And on they went, Juan and Esmeralda, not really knowing where life was leading them, to a future that seemed to be their antecedent.

Of the mechanical world on the outside, of the way they conducted themselves at their first meeting, it could be said to be the shadow play of new lovers everywhere. Their hearts knew at a glance not really what they were—a twin brother and sister born in Cuba and separated at birth—but who they were. And they knew that regardless of their different stations and beliefs or the way they had oriented their faces towards heaven or hell, north or south, they wanted nothing more than to be facing each other now.

Juan had always been the most reluctant of lovers; he automatically checked the exits before entering. And when he entered, it was always because he was beckoned and begged, never out of spontaneous volition. He heard himself say words that he would have privately laughed at if, in his life before Esmeralda, he had heard a man say them in a movie or in a line to a movie theater, which was just where he voiced what his heart felt for the first time.

“I want to squeeze the universe into a ball,” he told her, using T.S. Eliot, whom Esmeralda had never read or heard about, “and place it all at your feet, Esmeralda. More than frankincense and myrrh, more than all of King Solomon’s treasures, I wish to bring everything that’s beautiful to you. You who are the most beautiful.”

And this medieval profession of love, this courtly Spanish gesture that came out of he knew not where, but which no doubt had been part of his psyche and part of the way his Cuban roots, even those denied, spread wide across the Atlantic and back to the Iberian Peninsula of his ancestors, met an equal response from Esmeralda.

“And I to you, Juan. I want to give all I have, not only with my heart, but with my friends, the butterflies, who I believe have been our telephone line.”

The first day, after church, Juan helped put away the chairs and bring down the wooden cross. He then mingled with the parishioners, who were surprised that a rich Cuban, an exilado in a fancy suit, would be interested in Jesus when he probably had the Pope’s ear. They nevertheless regarded him as an omen, a lucky sign that money would soon come their way. In the eyes of many, including Arnaldo, money begat money, and if a rich man walked in the door, money followed him like a battalion of soldiers, dropping gold coins like bread crumbs for pigeons in his path.

Ricardo Maldonado, a Puerto Rican who was a carpenter by trade, was the first to ask Juan to tell him his favorite numbers. And before the group dispersed an hour later, after Cuban coffee and cuchifritos which Esmeralda served the believers on Sunday mornings, everyone had privately asked Juan to whisper a few numbers in their ears.

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