The light was strange, the nature of its clarity in contrast to the skies which seem emphatically grey. He was nott sure what was real or what was a memory, and he thought to himself that perhaps there was no veil between the two, that perhaps they were always living in the reality of their ever current memory.
Everywhere had felt the storm. But as he stood in the middle of the street that had once run in front of Ana dos Santos's house he realized that something very different had happened here. What had once been here was no more, all that was left was an open expanse of cinder blocks strewn about in the same manner a child discards toys, and the strange sunlight falling in at a diagonal and a memory lurking in the shadows of the hollowed out spaces in the blocks.
His mother’s voice called out to him somewhere from behind but he could not make out her words.
Thirty seven days he had been in love. Ricardo Montevideo. The dark hair he let go, twisting recklessly around his ears and was the feature most people recalled him by in his youth, it was dark as was his skin, an appearance that belied his mixed heritage. Where he grew up he was just another Hispanic boy, but his family could see the specter of the Chaco in his skin tone, that empty sad place from where his mother hailed. He grew up, as all boys seem to, in a parade of names. His mother called him ‘Pato’ a lovingly, chiding reference to his wide set feet, his father called him ‘boy’. To his friends he was ‘Ricky’. There were others, but not least of which was the name he had carried for only the shortest of times- three nights before the storm, Ana had wrapped her hands into his hair and called him ‘Love’.
Memory would blur eventually the brief time they were able to spend together- organization is always a repercussion of hindsight. Looking back Ricardo would never attempt to order the events of his time with Ana, preferring to grasp blindly at the memories, trying not to recall specific moments but instead to attain some manageable hold on the feeling that had filled him up in that time- when he had wove his way through the angelic procession of her laughs and buried himself in her embraces.
He cut his hair when he got home, for the rest of his adult life he would be recalled by his eyes, so dark that the pupils were indistinguishable from the irises. There was no actual ghost that haunted Ricardo, his trouble was born completely of his inability to forget. The romantic will twist this into a resolve of the spirit, a dedication of emotional affection- but Ricardo knew that his problem was that he was plagued by a fanatical forgetlessness. As he continued through his life he met no shortage of people, who’s laughs would ring loudly and who’s skin was softer than any arrangement of words he could ever assemble- but in the back of his mind he would hear her laugh ringing like bells, he would remember the flame that shuddered and rolled through his body at even the slightest of her touches. She was the high water mark of his affection, every other bludgeoning wave falling short, then receding as he recoiled from the impacts that were constant illumination of her absence.
It was not a wound, it did not pulse or ache or cry out for healing. It was simply a gap, a mono tone moan in his spirit. Ricardo tried, at the behest of all of the people who cared for him, to fill it. He tried with school where he studied physics without passion and with only the most mediocre of success. He tried with the supposedly mind expanding drugs that were so fashionable amongst the bare foot unkempt casual fools that lounged about the academic quad but they left him only parched and sore in strange places. He crawled up and down the Riverara pouring vin de pays into the gap. He developed a whimsical gambling habit that consumed all of his father’s meager inheritance yet never for more than a moment silenced him. He spent half a year at the hands of the workers on Enge Kerksteeg. There was no solace for Ricardo in the absence of Ana, except for the fact that the continuity of her absence in time formed a standard of living, a tradition of existence that was akin to solace due to its familiarity.
He married under duress. The weight of expectation, the loneliness of adulthood, impatient toe tapping of his mother, and his unvocalized hope that children might one day due what time and substance could not. His wife took his lack of enthusiasm for his fatherly and husbandly duties in stride, having never known any other man and well equipped with the mindset that usually allows for happy marriages- low expectations. He provided, plying his trade- education in the field of physics, nobly and not without some sort of talent, for he did appreciate that physics, he admitted, ‘explained everything in the world with the exception of Love.’
He abandoned the idea of time. He ceased to measure days or years, an approach that not only rebuked the idea of linear time as was fashionable, but forsook the idea of cyclical time as well. Nothing passed; there was no progression, or reoccurrence. An apathy had formed for all things, a defense mechanism again the absences within his own self. And this philosophical mindset served him well, until the first resurrection.
He was thirty eight when he heard Ana again. He heard her laugh coming from the fifth seat of the fourth row of the class during the third bell. He dropped the pen he was writing with when he heard it. At first he was not sure that it was not the manifestation of the last unhingement of his abandonment of chronology, but when again her laugh rang out he was sure that it was real, and that some how Ana was sitting there in his class. For the rest of the hour he studied her as he went through the motions of a day’s lecture. Oscillating through the classroom to behold her, calling on her to answer a question, looking for a person swept away twenty years earlier in fist of angry water, torn from him by talons of angry wind. She was there though, in the timbre of her voice, the luster of the light reflected in her caramel eyes- Ricardo was sure of it.
She was not of course Ana dos Santos, she was Isabel Mayfleet. He was not insane, he was more than aware that the face did not match. Gone were the endless black ringlets, the comforting round features of her face, the almond shape of Ana’s eyes. Instead Isabel’s hair fell in mismanaged unremarkable brown tresses, her face was angular, cheek bones high, lips thin. Ana had not the face or figure that was unforgettable, Ricardo was able to recall it only after a strained pillaging of his memory, nor was Isabel’s all that memorable. But as the weeks went on, as Ricardo tactfully pried at Isabel he became more and more sure that behind that strange flesh was Ana- awake and living, possessing everything that had made Ana Ana, everything except Ana’s memories and experiences.
To call what happened to Ricardo a revival is to misrepresent how he had lived. So long he had gone through his life with an enthusiasm that reflected the constant monotonous moan inside him that when he seemingly exploded back to life the people in Ricardo’s life thought simply that he had finally arrived. He had never told a soul about the girl who died in the hurricane so many years ago. He rose with vigor, ate hearty meals with an interest that befuddled his doughy wife. His children were too young to analyze the sudden change in their father but enjoyed his new interests in their lives, attending sporting events and being able to recount what had occurred or commenting on new dresses and hair cuts for the first time. His wife, being older and wiser, was suspicious. A surge of energy she would have would have been willing to abide, even would have welcomed, but to walk into onto the porch and find her husband with a glass of wine in hand, staring off at the tree line, singing the words to that old Slowhand song ‘Badge’ was too much. Yet she could not really dind it within her to worry, she knew her husband better than any person alive and she could not bring herself to love him and with his dour features, the knotted brow, the serious mustache, the wings of white forming above his ears there seemed no reason to believe he would have taken a mistress. She could not imagine who would have him.
Ricardo approached his day to day life as he did his memories, as he had before approached his concepts, now shattered- for nothing shatters the illusion of the anonymity of time like the divine revelation of resurrection-, of time, not by thinking but by feel. He knew not what would happen, or even what he wanted to happen. He was not crestfallen by what failed to occur nor did he live on the hope of what might occur. He pursued without purpose or intent Ana, Isabel. He took interest in her music, her pursuit of the upright bass. He took notice one day of the poem she idly scrawled into her notebook, and offered to edit and assist her with it. He did these things though they were ultimately foreign to him, and of no interest to him except for the few extra moments of conversation such efforts provided him, except for the thunderous snaps of her raucous laughter he managed to steal for himself.
Like hearing a song that once moved the soul, her voice brought hidden flush to his arm. That laugh sent trickles of fear and wonder down the length of his spine. Time formed, a measurement based on gaps between the matters that consumed him. One thousand and twenty minutes since he had last seen her- a wave from down the hallway, a thirty five hours since he had last heard her laugh- at some antic of his boyish enthusiasm in class, eleven days since he had seen her wear that red scarf in her hair, cutting the figure of some gypsy heroine. While all of his life reaped the benefit of his resurgence in the end the only thing that mattered to him was Isabel, and Ana reborn in her.
The impossibility of it all never caused Ricardo much trouble. He had no expectations, he could not see into the future. Consumed as he was no thought was given towards the making of plans, aspirations for fulfillment, the creation of a life with Isabel. His lack of forethought manifested itself in a variety of ways but none more poignant than the last. A slip of the tongue one day and he called her ‘Ana’, and he watched, unable to control what would unfold, the air clear between them, like a mist being pulled away. In the back of his head he could hear a coin spin. Isabel was confused, concerned- in that name she had heard an affection that had startled her and the way he had said it, calling her- it had not seemed a mistake or a momentary confusion to who he was speaking. She decided in an instant that it was some sort of pet name, and while strange accepted it, calmed his obvious panic by placing her hand on his. The flame that consumed him, tore through him in an instant was anything but innocent- and he remembered in that moment every urge he had felt those years ago. He pulled his hand back as if bitten and to her hasty goodbye, Ricardo did not even respond.
In broad daylight at an otherwise un-noteworthy three o’clock in the afternoon, Isabel was hit, while walking home as she did everyday, by a drunk driver. They found the old pick up truck embedded in a collapsed telephone pole. They found pieces of Isabel in the lot off the road. The police at the scene mumbled between themselves, mused on the fact that there were no skid marks- they had never seen anything like it, the driver had not even attempted to break. In the following days her peers at the school wept in droves and while the sky filled with a host of warring clouds, there was no rain.
Ricardo stood between the tracks the tires had made, staring at pole which authorities had left in its stricken state. He knew why there was no rain and his eyes noticed without wonder the light from his memory. And while he was miles from the coast and the hour of the day was different, he knew none of that matter. He was not in a place or a time. He was in an event, an event he had known before- the world when Ana died.
A discourse on the descent of Ricardo Montevideo would not do it justice. There was no sense to it, no progression. While it was born of a thwarted passion it was not typified by passionate outbreaks, more that it was an unsystematic capitulation. In the weeks that followed his wife left, with the kids who offered up no protest, to live with her mother. She had found him there on the side of the road the night he had gone out to see the place where Isabel had been struck down. He offered up no explanation for his being there, no response to the inquiry how long he had been there. And in the silences that filled the space between them she concocted a story of lust and unfaithfulness and devotion that was not incorrect in the degree of passion she attributed to it, only incorrect in the fact that she viewed it as a march of shared illicit reciprocal events. Outside of his family life Ricardo crumbled, he ceased to learn his students’ names; his lectures were listless and colourless. Within a few years his employers bemoaned, none too quietly, about their inability to fire him due to the constraints of the tenure system- words upon which hearing Ricardo could not rebuke. At home he ocassionally, broke plates, drank cheap beer, failed to clean his house, constantly missed paying his bills not for lack of funds but for interests in the world at all. He shaved his head leaving his aging now menacing mustache. He wrote senseless agonizing poetry with markers on the living room walls and often fell asleep outside face down in the grass only to be awoken in by his shaking of cold and incrusted with dew. After Isabel died people would remember of Ricardo Montevideo how remarkably lifeless and flat his eyes were.
There is not though any such thing as depthless despair, bottomless anguish. Underneath that chaotic inferno, there is a quiet submission, some sickly close cousin of resolve that is more depraved than surrender, a feeling for which Ricardo could never give a name but that he could feel inside himself like a cold dark lake that swallowed all light and muted sound. The years that slipped by were without number or purpose. And while Ricardo was aware that many people lost people they loved, he was sure that no one in all eternity had lost the same love of their life twice.
He was thumbing the handle of his unadorned cane at a bus stop, waiting as was his habit for a bus to take him down to the shore where he would sit before catching the last bus back to the home he stayed at, dreary in its falsetto mauves the poorly named Bella Vita, when he heard her again. The young woman to his right had laughed. Ricardo had turned in shock to look at her; she had the ripening glow that all young women have to old men, as if they simply emanated life. Her hair was cut close to her head, her ears adorned with large gold hoop earrings. He knew who’s eyes she would have, they were Ana’s and the voice that responded ‘Catalina’ to his inquiry, when he stood and asked about her name, she was no stranger to odd old men at bus stops, was the voice he had remembered.
In that moment almost all the universe ceased to make sense to Ricardo. He knew that he had no understanding of why the life worked like it did, how he could be here, how she could be here again. He knew that he could have no affect on what happened, or did not happen. That the tragedy that would befall him again, and he knew it would, he could not avert, he could not bear it. That he could be again in this place so encumbered and so powerless seemed a great cruelty, except that there was no reason to it and so that cruelty itself became non existent. The madness of existence swirled without end around him; he remained anchored in the center of it by the only force he had ever known that made any sense to him, his love for Ana dos Santos.
When he asked her for a favor, she obliged hearing what it was. It was a strange request and she would have balked, except that she was sure there was something familiar about the old man. There was something about the way he phrased the request, an innocence and a sadness, that removed from it sentiment that would have otherwise be unnerving.
When the police came theyhad questions, for it was not every day that an eight four year old man throws himself into traffic. Catalina had beheld the incident without surprise. Through the assault of screeching breaks and horrified screams, she could only notice how odd the light fell, clear and bright and at an angle in complete contrast to the host of looming grey clouds.
When the police asked her if she had any idea why the old man had done it, she responded with a single word, that word the old man had asked her to say for him, ‘Love’.
