After the Hurricane(47)
She wishes she could talk to someone, but not someone who knows her well, who will ask her uncomfortable questions and point out the ways in which she is foolish, cowardly, and weak. She wishes she could talk to someone she doesn’t have to explain anything to, but there is no one in her life like that, not even her mother. She has texts from her mother that she has answered with one-or two-word responses, so Rosalind will know she is alive. She does not trust herself on a call with her mother right now, a fact that she loathes but knows to be true. Her feelings about her father are leaking into her love for her mother and staining it. She wanted it to stay clean. Nothing around her now is clean. All the work she is doing to set things right is making mess, the kind of mess you need before things can really become orderly, but it’s so big it looks like it will never be sorted.
Elena remembers the man on the beach, his palm tattoo. Talking to him had been anonymous. Talking to strangers always was easier than talking to someone she knew. And he understood the island. He wouldn’t ask about Hurricane Maria, about how are things there with equal parts pity and fascination. He was a blank canvas she could paint and discard. He was perfect. She should have gotten his information.
I go to El Batey most nights.
In a way, maybe she did.
The bar, El Batey, is smoky, and Elena wonders, walking in, when was the last time she was inside a bar where people could smoke. Has she ever been to a place like this? She moved to New York long after it was the trash-strewn town of smoky bars and junkies and party girls and kidnappings, when the subway was a dangerous place. Now New York is filled with hipster parents and Russian mobsters, who are polite and do not disturb the peace, other than to ruin real estate prices, and everyone rides the subway, no matter the delays. She coughs, softly, and looks around. She hopes Fernando is there, behind all the smoke.
She sits down on a stool, which sighs under her. Everything in this bar is scratched and worn and battered, and it makes her comfortable. She can’t hurt or break anything here, it’s all already damaged.
She looks up, and sees that there is a mirror behind all the bottles in the bar, and she catches a glimpse of her own face, between bottlenecks, and obscured by the dim light and the smoke. She takes a photo of the image, not sure why, but perhaps she will show her father, if she sees him again, look, I went to your favorite place, I was there.
“What you want?” The bartender, who, despite the apathy of her expression, is luminously beautiful: wide eyes lined in black, an angled bob perfectly maintained, delicate vines tattooed up the side of her right arm and blooming over her heart in a rose, dripping with blood, all visible under her slightly sheer white T-shirt. She puts down her book, and Elena catches sight of the title, The Aleph and Other Stories. She herself has struggled through this book in college, eager to understand Borges, the Argentine genius, and worried all the time that she didn’t, and never would. She worries about this still, and is afraid to ask for what she wants from this beautiful bartender who does not seem worried about anything at all.
“Rum and Coke, please,” Elena says, in English. She tends to speak to people the way they have spoken to her, here, letting them lead on the language. The bartender reaches for a bottle of Bacardí, her expression blank. “Um, do you have Barrilito?” Elena asks, timidly. The bartender looks up and flashes her a smile. Elena’s breath stops in her lungs. She is uncomfortable with deeply beautiful people, they make her nervous, they make her long for their approval. She wonders what they see when they look at her, wonders if they find the world to be an ugly place when they compare it to themselves.
“Of course. Most tourists don’t care, don’t know to ask.” The bartender reaches for another bottle.
“I’m only a sort of tourist,” Elena says, softly, watching the generous pour of rum over ice, then the dollop of Coke. “My father lives here.” A sliver of lime, and it’s done and in front of her. She takes a sip.
“Barrilito is the best,” the bartender says, shrugging. “Bacardí is whatever. But people want it. They go do that tour and everything. I got a friend whose cousins come from New York every year and that’s what they want to do. Every time. It’s a factory! It’s not like it’s changing. It’s always the same, you don’t gotta go see it more than once. Stupid.” Not so taciturn after all, this woman, Elena sees. She nods, though. It is stupid.
“It’s not even really Puerto Rican,” the bartender says, snorting.
“I know,” Elena says.
“Everyone knows it’s from Cuba, Rita. They just don’t care,” a male voice behind Elena says, and it is a little familiar. She turns, and there he is, Fernando. She is aware of a feeling of relief and does not bother to lie to herself and pretend it is not there. It is nice to not be totally alone. “They did a new packaging shift, back to the original 1920s label, and people ate it up. Everything is about packaging.”
The bartender, Rita, rolls her eyes and reaches for the Barrilito bottle again, pouring out a shot.
“We are slaves to pretty packaging. Magpies, or trained monkeys, reaching for glossy things. Would you buy half of what you do if it all came in a brown paper bag? Think about it.” Rita shakes her head; she has obviously heard Fernando’s thoughts on capitalism before. She grabs a beer, a Medalla, the Puerto Rican standard, and places both drinks on the corner of the bar as Fernando sits down. He nods at Elena.