After the Hurricane(106)
“Do you like it here?” He spreads his arms, and she does not know if he means the town, or the island, or the earth.
“Do you?” she asks. She knows the answer. He loves it, and it consumes him, and he is bleeding away into it, and happy to be doing so. He came back to the island to sink into it, to let himself go. To let it receive him as he fades away. Like is not the word.
“It doesn’t matter if I like it. It’s home.” And then he turns around, and walks back in the direction of the bar.
And it is in this moment, watching him walk away from her, after all of this, that Elena knows fully and completely she will never have more of him than this. She will never get what she wants from her father. This is not, as she has always somehow secretly believed, because there is something wrong with her. Something that makes him unable to be close to her, to share with her, to love her as she should be loved. It is not because she did not try, did not come for him and find him here. It is because he does not know how. He does not know how to love people, because he can never love himself, never trust that he should be better than the worst of himself. I think my mother suffered from being unloved. But that was not his fate. His fate was to be loved, and not understand the value of it, the care of it, that love must be respected and maintained in order to survive. He does not understand the work of love, the work he owes it. Owes those who love him. He cannot be different than he is. His body, his condition, they created great barriers to this, chemical pathways and dependencies that made it so much harder than it was for the rest of the world. That does not mean they could not have been overcome, but the work is hard, so hard, and he has given up the task. He fought, she knows he did, but now he has laid his weapons down. She is in his Valhalla, and there is no coming back from here for him. What warrior leaves Valhalla for another round of battles?
She found her father, yes. But he will always be lost to her.
She thinks of the person Diego told her about, the person she has glimpsed through photographs and stories. The man who came from nothing, who had nothing, who clawed his way up out of poverty, yes, but also out of a family that would have drowned him, a mother who was ever descending into worlds no one could visit in her mind, relatives who didn’t, wouldn’t, deal with it, and so many other things that Elena will never understand, never know. This man was an astronaut, he shot out of his world and into another and he never looked back. In another person, with another, unburdened brain, with better internal chemistry, he would have stayed as great as he once was, maybe. He would have risen higher. She would have him still, the better parts of him. He wouldn’t have left her behind.
But he isn’t another person. He’s himself, defeated by his past, betrayed by the brain that once saved him, buried in his parents’ sins as badly as if he had never left New York behind. The “gifts” Esperanza and Santiago Vega Sr. gave their son are poisonous ones, eternal thirst and a brain that moves in circles, up and down forever, but he cannot part with them. Elena always thought it was a choice he was making, and perhaps some part of it is. But it is also a compulsion. Maybe her father did leave her, like she thought, but maybe he wanted to save her, stop her from watching his decay, protect her from himself, his history, his curses and his gifts. She wishes she could have seen him at his best, his most brilliant, seen him shining bright. Her childhood images of him sparkle and she knows that there was something brilliant about him back then, dulled as he has become now. What a life she might have had if he had never faded.
What a life she has, now that he did.
She looks out at the house he has shown her. Perhaps this is her grandfather’s house, or perhaps it is not. Perhaps her ancestors walked these streets and lived and died and left their essence for her to find, or perhaps they would have spat at her and cast her out. The decaying house in front of her doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t move her or fill her with a sense of coming home, of family, of return to self. It’s just a house, falling down on itself. It’s just a town, a bunch of cement boxes and wires and pipes. It’s not hers, not really. It isn’t places that have meaning, really, but people. People give things meaning. Home is people. And there is no one here for her.
By the time she returns to the bar, he has started a game of pool with some other people, regulars, she supposes, men like him who arrive at the bar before noon. She retrieves her belongings from Eduardo, and stands, clutching the albums, looking at the man she has been chasing. The ghost she has sought out. He is comfortable here, with strangers who are all like him. They bear the easy sodden looks of lifelong drinkers, and they laugh at his jokes, ones he has told them a thousand times, ones they will never remember. None of them are talking to each other, not really, she can tell. For each of these men, the rest of the world is a blurry audience, not exactly real, but real enough to reassure them that they are not entirely alone. She wonders who comes and gets them when they have passed out, if they cannot stumble home. Who will come and get her father? But he does not want to be fetched, she understands now. He wants to stay where he is. Maybe he will come back to San Juan someday, or New York, or even Philadelphia. Maybe he will show up at her doorstep, maybe he will fly to Paris.
But probably not. Because home is here for him.
He makes a tricky shot, and the other men clap for him. He readies himself, surveying the angles, aiming carefully. He is so agile with the pool cue, his hands gentle and sure. She remembers the day a boy pushed her in the schoolyard when she was seven, and how her father picked her up from school that day. He had been concerned about the Band-Aids all over her knees and palms, placed by the school nurse, and that night after her bath he replaced them all, his hands careful, his aim true, to cause her as little pain as possible as he attached each one on her body, shielding her wounds from the world.