After the Hurricane(36)
“How often is sometimes?” Santiago asked.
“Every fucking day,” Diego said. He drank deeply. “You know, he laughed at me, the way I’ve always been so careful. In sex. Teased me that I couldn’t get him pregnant, so why did I bother with rubbers? Told me it was all that Catholic education, the way I saw sex as unclean. Always needing it to be sterile, so the sin couldn’t touch me as hard. And you know what? I wish I hadn’t. I wish I was dying like he was.”
Santiago couldn’t breathe.
“Fuck you,” he said. Diego looked at him. “Fuck you for wanting that. Fuck you for wanting to rob me of two friends instead of one.”
“So I have to live without the love of my life so you can be fucking happy?”
“Yes, you fucking do,” Santiago said, so angry. So scared. “You don’t get to leave me, you asshole.”
“You’re the one leaving. You need to get on a plane. You’re having a baby, idiot.”
“I can’t go,” Santiago said. “I, I can’t face it.”
“You’re telling me you are going to leave your pregnant wife, not meet your baby? That’s what you’re saying to me right now?”
Santiago nodded, and burst into tears. Diego watched him for a long moment, then handed him a napkin. He grabbed for the bottle and poured out the rest of it into two glasses, nudging one into Santiago’s hand.
“Shut up and listen to me,” he said, although lovingly. “You are being terrible right now and I will only forgive you because we won’t remember this. This is to Neil, the world is lesser for his loss. This is to your baby, the world is better for her birth. You’re going to drink that, and get on a plane, and hopefully by the time you get to Philadelphia you are going to be sober enough to take care of your wife, better than you’ve done for me. I’m going to drink this, and go to sleep, and tomorrow the world will be a terrible place, like it is today, and the next day, and the next, but maybe your baby will make it better, I don’t know. Okay?”
“What if I can’t do this?” Santiago asked, so quietly he could barely hear it himself.
“Then you’ll give the drink to me.”
“Be a father,” Santiago muttered, sipping before Diego could take his whiskey. Diego shrugged.
“You’ll figure it out.”
“How?” Santiago asked, plaintively. How did someone be a good father? He had no idea.
“You just have to put them first. That’s all it is. Putting your child first,” Diego said. Santiago had watched him with his family earlier that day at the memorial. Unlike Neil’s family, who had not spoken to Neil since college, Diego’s family had come in droves to support Neil in his illness, and Diego. They sat with Diego, his father tall and broad, his mother small and soft, Diego’s many sisters and brothers and nieces and nephews fluttering around them, translating the English into Spanish, holding him up as he faltered. How easy it was for Diego, to know that he was loved, to know how to love others, to care as he had been cared for.
In another life, Diego would have made an excellent father. Not like Santiago at all.
“That’s all?” Santiago tried to smile. He had no idea how to do it. Rosalind did all the work with them. The only way he had survived his life so far was by putting himself at the center of everything. Diego held him close, kissing him gently on the forehead.
“That’s all. And if you fuck it up, well, Neil’s watching.” Santiago laughed, surprised by the joke. Diego grinned, then wiped away the tears that had begun to flow again. He raised his glass, more tears pouring down his cheeks.
“If I have to keep living, then so do you. If that’s our curse, if that’s what he left behind, then I’m not doing it alone. You want to know something so stupid? He used to make me read him Neruda. In Spanish.”
“He didn’t speak Spanish.”
“Like I don’t fucking know that? Like we didn’t talk about him to his face like it was some kind of stupid code? He made me read it to him. Poems. Said it was romantic. So fucking cliché, but I loved it. I never told him that. I complained every time. I pretended it was idiotic. But I loved it.” Diego closed his eyes. “‘When I die I want your hands on my eyes: I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me one more time / to feel the smoothness that changed my destiny.’ You remember that one?”
He did. He’d studied Neruda in college, he’d had to. He’d read the poems to Rosalind, who didn’t even like poetry, but she’d loved Neruda’s sonnets.
“Do you remember how it ends?” Diego asked.
Santiago shook his head. “How does it end?” He didn’t think Diego was asking about the poem. He was asking about love, really, what happens when that ends? Can it end? When the people who feel it die, where does the feeling go? God, he was drunk. Diego closed his eyes again, his glass up in salute.
“‘I want for what I love to go on living / and as for you I loved you and sang you above everything, for that, go on flowering, flowery one, so that you reach all that my love orders for you, so that my shadow passes through your hair, so that they know by this the reason for my song.’” He paused, and laughed. “Slick Chilean fucker. You know he was also a senator? These South Americans really make us look bad, eh, Santi?” He looked at Santiago. “Neil is gone. But if we aren’t allowed to follow him, then we have to go on.”