After the Hurricane(96)
“I’m sorry. I wish I knew more,” Elena says, the words the exhausting litany of her life. The woman shrugs, and stands up.
“Let me show you the way.”
They walk through the cemetery, and the clouds have gathered, now. It looks like rain, which comes and goes so fast on the island it’s rarely worth worrying about. But the darkened sky, with patches of fierce blue here and there, and still-brilliant sunlight, makes the landscape otherworldly. The woman, whose name is Naomi, Elena finally gets around to asking, deftly leads her through rows and rows of graves, festooned with teddy bears and incense holders and mounds of fabric flowers and candles and sometimes nothing at all. Some are new, others older but well cared for, some completely broken apart, tipping and cracked. Birds, pigeons, rock doves, and the little black birds with long tails fly grave to grave, while their footfall disturbs tiny lizards, who scatter as she and Naomi pass by.
Elena loves cemeteries. She finds it odd that some people she knows think of them as scary or creepy. She finds them charming and strange, the way people work impossibly hard to celebrate the dead, to give them a final resting place made of marble, to glorify them with a memorial they will never see. The performance of it, the pretense, it’s endearing, the way people pretend it is for the dead person, and not the living. Like an infant’s birthday party, an event for a guest who neither knows or cares about it.
This one may not be as fancy as some of the famous ones she has seen in her travels, like the one she saw in Buenos Aires filled with Argentine celebrities, or as well planned as the Greenwood cemetery, in Brooklyn, whose rolling hills and colonial graves make it a tourist attraction, but she likes it, nonetheless. It reminds her of the one she played in as a child, the one connected to St. Peter’s School, the elementary school she attended. When her father was late to pick her up, which was every day, she would play hide-and-seek in the cemetery, sometimes without anyone there to seek her, just hiding, hoping someone would come. He never found her there, never even looked, to her knowledge, and eventually she would emerge to find him talking with a teacher, or reading a newspaper, or not yet there at all. Yet she never stopped hiding, never stopping wondering if this day he would finally come and see her, crouched behind the grave of a Revolutionary War hero or a well-loved housewife. And here she is again, decades later, in another graveyard, waiting for him to find her all over again.
Now, she wonders if he let her play. If he knew how much she loved it, and let her be, in her happiest of places. She wonders how much time she has spent thinking the worst of him because of what he has become, rather than seeing the change in him over time. He is her father, and he has failed at that, but didn’t he also succeed, sometimes? Weighed down by the deaths of people she will never meet, the many stories of his life, his past, that she will never know, and yet he did come, every day, to pick her up, and let her play in the gravestones. That isn’t nothing, is it? There is so much about him she will never understand, but what she has, what good and true there is, she can’t let be clouded by the pain she feels now, can she?
She thinks of what Diego said about him, that he hated himself most of all. She wonders how much of her father’s life in the last decade and a half, or even longer, has been an act of escape, from everything he doesn’t want to be, the things she doesn’t know he is, and the things she does. She has always thought he left her, abandoned her because he preferred oblivion. Perhaps he does. But maybe it wasn’t really her he is escaping, but himself, and the parts of her that remind him of himself. Elena wonders what her father sees when he looks at her. Does he see her, some version of her, or does he see pieces of him and Rosalind, and his family, and his mother, and Rosalind’s family, like a mosaic? Maybe he sees in her all the history he has denied her having. Maybe she can never be a whole separate person for her father, but a sum of parts, a refracted vision of his life and past and pain.
Naomi stops, pointing at a grave that is decently cared for, with a few flowers, faded but not decayed, resting at the base of the tombstone. It reads Teofila Caneja, 1914–1978. There are some other Caneja graves nearby, but this is the one that Elena’s eyes are glued to, for this, she knows, is the grave of her great-grandmother.
“Oh, that’s lucky. Do you think they are related?” She barely hears Naomi’s question, and looks up, confused. The woman is pointing to the grave next to Teofila’s, and when Elena’s eyes focus on it, she reads Esperanza Caneja Marin Vega, 1930–1986. Her grandmother’s grave. And there are flowers on this one, too, the same ones that sit fading on Teofila’s grave. Elena recognizes them as azucenas, sweet-smelling white flowers that grow in the mountains. A man walks around San Juan during the week in the mornings selling them, his loud call of ahhhhhhh-zu-CEN-ah audible through thick walls and closed doors.
“Yes. I do,” Elena says, faintly. Naomi looks at her for a moment without speaking, and takes out her phone.
“I think there is someone you should meet,” Naomi says, explaining. Elena nods, looking at the graves, barely registering Naomi’s words. This is her family, lying here. She sees more Canejas around Teofila and Esperanza, the dates on the stones reaching back into the past. She does not need to look for Vegas, she decides. Her grandfather was buried in the military cemetery. But her grandmother and great-grandmother and other people whose blood has eked its way into her own veins lie before her, a family tree with bone branches. There is a Marciano Canejas who died in Vietnam, and an Ana Lopez Canejas who lived just seven years, dying in 1904, and an Aida Canejas who is mourned by her husband, Ivan, and a Jillian Gonzalez Canejas whose grave is covered with wreaths of electric-blue fake flowers, grimy with age. There are people here she will never know, stories she will never hear, a whole legacy of nothing for her to mourn. She carefully takes photos of each grave, each potential relative who is also a total stranger. She barely hears Naomi speaking on the phone next to her, and startles when she feels a hand on her shoulder.