New and Selected Stories by Cristina Rivera Garza

Author:Cristina Rivera Garza [Garza, Cristina Rivera]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Last Sign

The whirlwind came out of nowhere. They were slowly walking across the median strip when the leaves from the trees suddenly started to swirl into the air along with newspaper pages and plastic bottles. The dust forced him to close his eyes and, almost immediately, to grab onto the thin trunk of a poplar tree. An embrace. Some time later, one of the pedestrians who saw the spectacle from the sidewalk would say in his testimony that the image of the man embracing the tree had seemed beautiful to him: he was carrying his briefcase in one hand and his tie, skinny and blue, was flying up toward the sky along with his hair. He would add: there was a kind of abandonment in it. A desire to stay. Something of a shipwreck.

The pedestrian, who spoke like a poet, wouldn’t say anything about the woman.

As soon as he opened his eyes, the Man from the Tree looked for her. He was smiling in anticipation of their reunion, wanting to share something someone had told him as a child, that whirlwinds of that kind—sudden, slender, violent—meant the devil was close by. He hoped she would open her mouth and then pull from her lungs, from the humid insides of her body, that funny, true laughter that so pleased him. He imagined she would take him by the hand and, still laughing, even shaking her head, lead him away from there. They would walk together, he thought. But he lost her.

He assumed the whirlwind had scared her and that, coming from so far away and unaccustomed to that particular climatic phenomena, she might have sought refuge somewhere. He was tempted to believe that, disoriented by the violence of the wind, she’d found shelter in some nearby doorway. He hoped he might find her in the shop next door, squinting at records. In passing, he imagined that the whirlwind might have lifted her up by the waist and taken her to the devil’s house. He smiled again and headed home with untroubled steps.

When he called her the first time, he thought that even though she didn’t answer, she was there, her hands under running water washing a plate, two cups, a spoon. He’d always liked her carefulness, that way she moved among the objects of the world as if they were about to break or about to hurt her. How her voice fluctuated. The way she lowered her gaze before praise, flirtation, or shame. Her faint footsteps over the floorboards. When he dialed her number the second time, he imagined her waist and the devil’s arms around it. He looked up at the night sky: two creatures tangled like threads of smoke. Vanishing. He drank the green tea she had brought to his house in a little tin can. She had shown him the correct way to prepare and drink it. He pronounced her name. He said: Xian. Then he picked up the phone again. It was past midnight when he started to worry.

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