Chopin’s music spills softly over the piles of books on the ground. Piano keys leave warm prints onto the wooden floor, then travel slowly to fill every curve, caress the mahogany painting stand, then crawl up the sheet hung on the window and spill back till they reach her frozen toes. Chilly mornings like this taste like kiwi…and me.
She feels pain east of her belly-button and a lonely violin string that ricochets from the window and lands in the softness of her belly. Her window breaks the light and paints part of the room in darker red. Chopin’s music spills softer there.
‘Hey, hurriedly stripped clothes and expectations belong to the ground.’ she tells me, the shower overdubbing her words.
The condom had broken. In rhythmic passion, I had filled her with wildness that tolerated no suspense.
Snap the rubber goes. He knows. Contraction. Pause
I hadn’t stopped. It wasn’t her. What had made me go on, I mean. It had been the fact that the room had red walls and no electricity. The fact that she still hadn’t moved in and all her books lay on the ground. The fact that candles had spilled dancing rivers towards us. The fact of Chopin. A goose bump is a tune that self-assuredly travels down the lifeline of a palm.
‘I need to get a proper bed and curtains’ she says when I get in the room, ‘and if you leave me some money for the after-pill it would be good.’
I wonder where her rawness ebbed. Perhaps, I would have loved her if she said things the same impudent way she had bit me last night. Kali of the night. And her acoustic guilt. There would be no emotional calamities if people knew how to keep in rhythm.
But old gramophones skip.
The coffee stains on the mattress make me ache to take her to breakfast and buy her all the croissants she wants. The tragedy of this world is that people live with details. Coffee stains on the mattress make me yearn to hold her hand on the way for breakfast.
Holding my hand! She thinks, Holding my Hand!
Just to press this pulsating heart in the middle of her palm. Press her and ravage her and have her melt on the floor like a candle. If she were to refuse putting furniture in her flat, I would love her. Love the velvet of her hair. Love the string of her back. Love that red room and the moans stuck to the walls.
But old gramophones skip and slice the silence open.
***
3243 breaths-in and breaths-out and the nurse still looks hollow-eyed and says nothing. The test is positive.
Snap the rubber goes. He knows. Contraction. Pause
***
A for Agony. I for Irony. D for Death. S for Stupor.
I can’t blink.
***
The bus to Havana is full. It is golden with rust. The glass reflects part of my nose and my mouth and collages them on top of the houses we drive past. My half image stuck to other people’s lives. No need for the other half of my nose, the other half of my mouth. There are three things people underestimate and this seems deadlier to me than the dirt that taints my blood. First, the courage to commit heroism in peaceful times. Second, the power to say ‘no’. Third, the audacity to admit that there was never so much abundance in the choice of direction as when one is lost. ‘The black widow…’ hums the driver, ‘the black widow of the past left behind…ahead a death row’…and me? I am here. Living. Now. A toothless grandma laughs three seats away from me. Havana lies ahead. My lungs are full with summer, my blood with death.
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