After the Hurricane(73)
On a cool day in early November, on one of his usual walks stretching his legs after a particularly challenging seminar on contemporary American policies in Central America, Santiago tripped over a pair of legs. The person attached to these legs had been invisible to him, so lost was he in his anger. The seminar had broken down into a debate about the moral implications of American imperialism, and a fellow student in a sweater vest had smugly lectured Santiago about the Monroe Doctrine for five full minutes, talking to him like a child, while the professor did nothing. Santiago had restrained himself from retaliating, and was planning his response for the next class, when his head crashed into the ground beneath him. As was his habit from childhood, he checked his glasses first, his precious glasses, then the rest of his body, which seemed to be on top of another body, a female one.
“I’m so sorry,” said the owner of that female body, and looking up he saw a blurry shape. He slid his glasses on his face and a small brunette with wavy hair and a rust-colored sweater came into focus. She was peering at him over a book, and he saw the words One Hundred Years of Solitude on the cover.
“I didn’t know that book had been translated,” he said, breathlessly. She looked down at it.
“It’s recent,” she explained.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
“I’ve just started it. It seems different. The first line is good,” she said, shrugging. “‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’” As she read the first line of the book, Santiago closed his eyes, trying to remember the exact words of the original. This was close enough, he thought. He looked at the girl. The longer he looked at her, the prettier she became. She had big serious eyes, hazel, and her hair, which at first looked brown to him, had reddish tints in the sunlight shining down between the leaves of the tree she leaned against. Years later, he would tell people that he fell for her right away, and she would laugh, explaining that it was literal.
“I don’t think you’ll finish it in time,” he said, pointing to the book.
“In time for what?” she asked, confused.
“Our first date,” he said, confidently. “Maybe by our fourth, or tenth, depending on how fast you read.”
“Who dates anymore?” she asked, but she didn’t say no, he noticed. “I don’t even know your name.”
“You tell me yours first.” He smiled with his whole mouth. It was a mistake, he never did that, never liked people to see the missing tooth, but looking at her he could not stop his lips from parting. She didn’t frown at him, though, her expression stayed just the same as before she had seen his teeth, and he closed his mouth, quickly, a lucky escape.
“Rosalind Goldberg,” she said, reaching out her hand.
“Santiago Vega.” He left off the Junior. He didn’t need it. He shook her hand.
“I read fast,” she told him. She really did. By the time he actually convinced her to go out with him, two weeks later, she had finished the novel. He took her to a movie, a Western, and she fell asleep after the opening credits, because she had been up reading the night before, trying to finish it so they could talk about it. They shut down a coffee shop in Palo Alto because they had too much to say, each of them. He learned that she came from Philadelphia, that her family owned a department store, that she loved animals, that she wanted to study art and architecture and that she believed buildings had souls, that she hated her sister, that she loved French theater and good coffee, that she had eaten more kinds of foods than he had ever heard of.
She kissed him good night and told him he was strange when he didn’t accept her offer to sleep with her, and he told her that he was going to marry her someday.
“Great, you’ll be married. What will I be, then?” Neil asked him, annoyed, when he came home, lighter than air.
“I’m sure you’ll find someone,” Santiago said, placating him.
“You better find me someone, then, if you’re all sorted out with this Rosalind. Now you’ve got time to help me,” Neil said, firmly.
“I’ll do my best,” Santiago promised him.
After he arrived in San Francisco a week before school started his first year of college, it took Santiago three separate train rides to get from the San Francisco airport to Stanford University. It was his first time anywhere other than New York and Puerto Rico, and everything about California seemed strange to him, like entering an alien land. He could see the city through the train windows because a lot of it was above ground, which only happened outside the borough of Manhattan in New York City, and confused him. But what was even more confusing was when he changed trains again and boarded the final train to Stanford, which passed through greenery, nothing but greenery. Then, neighborhoods, pristine and well tended, like he had seen on television. Perfect little box houses, one after the other, and trees so tall they looked like they would never end, and palm trees, and strange spiky plants like something from Lost in Space. Later he would learn the differences between cacti and succulents, would learn about the plants and animals of Northern California, would learn to find them beautiful. But on first glance they were strange, another sign that he was far from home.
The campus itself was beautiful, and so very big. The buildings looked a little bit like some of the buildings in San Juan, but instead of being brightly painted they were all golden brown with terra-cotta red roofs. And there was so much space between them! How could so much empty space exist, anywhere? How could anything be so very open?