The shadow lurking in Fulgencio’s soul had been there long before, like a congenital birth defect or the scars and trauma of his tortured childhood. And it had taken this chain of events for the darkness to finally consume him. As he walked away from Carolina’s house that chilly December night, he felt transported. Not by his own legs or his own will, but as if he were being carried away by the river, flowing out to the Gulf of Mexico. Amac. Analco. Atlaza.
He yearned to scream and cry as he drove back to the Balmori’s, but he could not find the will. Something inside of him was dying. He sat in their driveway as rain rattled on the metal roof. Forlornly, he watched his old friend and borrowed family share Christmas cheer through the living room window. Searching for something to ease his pain, to soothe his wounded soul, he recalled a bitter song he had heard his grandfather sing. It was called “Error,” and he sang it in the cold chamber of the car:
No me habia dado cuenta
(I hadn’t noticed)
De mi error
(My mistake)
De la dicha fingida
(The feigned blessing)
De tu amor
(Of your love)
De que fuí tu juguete
(That I was your plaything)
Y te quize
(And I loved you)
Y te sigo queriendo
(And I continue loving you)
Eso es lo peor
(That’s the worst)
Más cuando pase
(But when it passes)
El sopor de mi tortura
(The height of my torture)
Y me olvide de tu embrujo
(And I forget your spell)
De mujer
(Of a woman)
Y comrependa que ese amor
(And I understand that this love)
Fue una locura
(Was sheer craziness)
Te prometo que nunca
(I promise you I’ll never)
Te volveré a querer.
(Ever love you again.)
After a heart-wrenching rendition, he fell quiet. He had never bothered to learn the songs that fit this occasion, the dirges that would soon fill his repertoire with sorrow, bitterness, and pain. So he spent the rest of the night sitting silently in the car, pondering the depths of his misery. The next morning, Christmas Day 1961, he hitchhiked his way back to Austin, sitting in his crumpled and soggy black suit in the bed of a stranger’s truck, his tears clinging to his face beneath the frigid, streaming rain.
Fulgencio never returned to Carolina’s house. He never explained. He never opened her letters or answered her phone calls. He simply wished to forget. Yet he lived to remember.
Part II
Twenty
1987
Their eyes met for the first time since that day she waved goodbye from the front seat of her banana-yellow convertible twenty-six years earlier. And although her skin betrayed the inevitable passage of time, her eyes still glowed of gold, and her curls still threatened to emerge, now pulled tight behind her head. She was a beautiful woman, he thought, his black Stetson clutched firmly in his hands as he stood nervously at her door. Clad in black, her delicate figure still held the graceful traces of the girl he had once known and loved. And her ruby lips, only slightly faded, still beckoned as his eternal address.
The long year of waiting had passed. And here he was at last, for his much-awaited audience.
She gazed at him impassively, blocking the doorway with her arms crossed, an unyielding expression on her lovely face. He wondered what she might think of how he had changed over the years. He too was dressed in the color of night. They must have seemed like two ravens contemplating fight or flight, Fulgencio mused. He still cut an imposing figure, made harder and stronger by the flow of time through his veins. A bit thicker around the waist and chest. Solid. He was still the powerhouse others had feared but she had adored. His weather-beaten skin was cut deep with the carvings of the sun and wind on El Dos de Copas. His eyes remained forever a forest of earth and emerald hues in which she could easily become lost. Even now that she had hardened herself against his advances, she could feel his mysterious pull.
The air hung still around them. The last leaves of autumn plunged from the trees and swirled in the barren lawn. The remnants of the rosebush beneath the window crumbled in the wind.
“Thank you for seeing me,” Fulgencio said.
Reluctantly, she motioned for him to enter the darkened foyer, where he spotted his weekly letters lying open and scattered across the entryway table.
“You can thank Little David for me agreeing to this madness,” Carolina said. “I felt bad for him when you sent him with your gifts and your letters.”
Tentatively, he followed the clicking of her heels into the shadowy recesses of the living room.
The plastic had vanished. The furniture been replaced. Gone were the lace doilies and trinkets. It had become an austere room, the drapes drawn shut in eternal mourning.
She motioned for him to sit on the sofa. Fulgencio assented with his hat clutched on his lap, his knuckles white, fabric buckling. And Carolina sat precariously on the edge of a wingback chair across from him, an uncomfortable distance yawning between the two. Not the distance of a coffee table, but rather the distance of decades of loneliness and yearning, the distance of interminable suffering, the distance of regret, confusion, and misunderstanding. The distance of a death, the death of their relationship so many years before.
“So,” Carolina whispered hoarsely, “you’re here.”
“Yes,” Fulgencio managed to utter.
She waited, her face tilting toward the floor.
“It’s been a long year,” Fulgencio said.
“It’s been a long life,” she quipped, her lips pursed in a dour grimace he’d never seen on her face in their younger days.
He shifted in his seat, deterred by the bitterness lurking in her voice.
“You received my letters?” he ventured, trying to get something going.
“Yes,” she stated. “I never knew the life of a pharmacist could be so fascinating.”
He sensed the sarcasm in her tone. He had written the idle musings of his weekly life. He had been wary of releasing too much passion or pent-up love, suspecting it might frighten her after all these years of silence. Sure, he knew the letters were probably boring, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances to keep in touch with her, to try and build some sort of common ground, some sort of foundation to start upon at the end of the year’s wait.