Vintage Cisneros by Sandra Cisneros

Author:Sandra Cisneros
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307429971
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

I remember how your skin burned to the touch. How you smelled of lemongrass and smoke. I balanced that thin boy’s body of yours on mine.

Something undid itself—gently, like a braid of hair unraveling. And I said, Ay, mi chulito, mi chulito, mi chulito, over and over.

Mornings and nights I think your scent is still in the blankets, wake remembering you are tangled somewhere between the sleeping and the waking. The scent of your skin, the mole above the broom of your thick mustache, how you fit in my hands.

Would it be right to tell you, each night you sleep here, after your cognac and cigar, when I’m certain you are finally sleeping, I sniff your skin. Your fingers sweet with the scent of tobacco. The fluted collarbones, the purple knot of the nipple, the deep, plum color of your sex, the thin legs and long, thin feet.

I examine at my leisure your black trousers with the silver buttons, the lovely shirt, the embroidered sombrero, the fine braid stitching on the border of your charro jacket, admire the workmanship, the spurs, leggings, the handsome black boots.

And when you are gone, I re-create you from memory. Rub warmth into your fingertips. Take that dimpled chin of yours between my teeth. All the parts are there except your belly. I want to rub my face in its color, say no, no, no. Ay. Feel its warmth from my left cheek to the right. Run my tongue from the hollow in your throat, between the smooth stones of your chest, across the trail of down below the navel, lose myself in the dark scent of your sex. To look at you as you sleep, the color of your skin. How in the half-light of moon you cast your own light, as if you are a man made of amber.

Are you my general? Or only my Milianito? I think, I don’t know what you say, you don’t belong to me nor to that woman from Villa de Ayala. You don’t belong to anyone, no? Except the land. La madre tierra que nos mantiene y cuida. Every one of us.

I rise high and higher, the house shutting itself like an eye. I fly farther than I’ve ever flown before, farther than the clouds, farther than our Lord Sun, husband of the moon. Till all at once I look beneath me and see our lives, clear and still, far away and near.

And I see our future and our past, Miliano, one single thread already lived and nothing to be done about it. And I see the face of the man who will betray you. The place and the hour. The gift of a horse the color of gold dust. A breakfast of warm beer swirling in your belly. The hacienda gates opening. The pretty bugles doing the honors. Tirri-LEE tirREE. Bullets like a sudden shower of stones. And in that instant, a feeling of relief almost. And loneliness, just like that other loneliness of being born.

And I see my clean huipil and my silk Sunday shawl.

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