The Furious Spinner

Still sick. I think the fever has broken, so I should start getting better. In the meantime, I've taken out a couple of my stories which I still like. All were inspired by my work in the peace movement—mostly trying to get the US out of Central America. When Mario and I lived in Bandon, Oregon, over twenty years ago, our peace group there was perpherially involved in the Sanctuary movement. We sponsored refugees from El Salvador to come and speak and fed and sheltered them while they were in the area. "Cariño" was inspired by one of our encounters with a refugee. It was one of my first published stories. Some of it seems a bit naive now, but I still like it. I like the girl who wrote it; she was full of hope and compassion. It was published in the Fall 1984 issue of The Clinton Street Quarterly. I wrote "Another Country" about ten years later, or more, after a rather trying visit to Michigan. It was originally published in 1993 in Science Fiction Age.


Cariño

Shivering awake to darkness, I watch the still line of giant white butterflies move across the wall, less a part of the wallpaper now than they are in the day. The butterflies flutter almost imperceptibly, and my nightmare is sent back further still into my unconscious, a curiosity to be examined in the light.

I touch Jake’s shoulder and then leave the room, wanting to stand in the living room, to look across the lawn silvered with moonlight. Something stirs on the couch.

“Dahveed,” I whisper, touching his hair gently with my fingertips. “Couldn’t you sleep?”

I go around the couch to stand in front of him, gliding I think, a figure out of a fairy tale. I kneel before him and take his hands. I cannot see his brown skin well, but I feel it in his hands, a velvet softness that is almost like a baby’s: a man my age, not yet thirty, with skin so unbattered.

“You asked once why I did not watch television,” he says, his accented voice quieter than usual even in the silent house. “So I am here watching television now. We are silent companeros.”

My eyes have adjusted to the darkness, and I see he is looking at me. I reach across the room to open the curtains. It is far away and I must have moved from David, but I only remember his eyes looking at me.

The moon is out, as I hoped it would be, and it pulls me to the window. David stands behind me, only slightly taller than I am.

“I heard you weeping,” he whispers. “You do not like the night.”

“It’s only old things. Sometimes they resurface at night.”

Images of the dream come back for a moment. Always in the nightmare I cannot save David. I shake the thoughts away. The dream fades and I am grateful for his presence this night.



His face is too perfect, I think when he steps off the bus. I hesitate
before going to him. I have never met him, but I know the man I see is David. He is the only brown-skinned man surrounded by white-faced tourists who glance around and ask, “Where’s the ocean?” I reach for David’s arm—already I want to touch him—and say, “I am Cully.”

He smiles and shakes my hand. It is a child’s smile, filled with delight.

“I bet you’re tired,” I say, looking around for his suitcase, not knowing
what else to say. He holds one bag and several books are tucked under his arm. I start to ask about the rest of his luggage and then I remember he left El Salvador in a hurry, days ago, switching from this car to that after the Mexican border, a straight shot up Highway 5 until the last car could not make it, and they risked putting him on a bus to the coast. They needn’t have worried. Oregon is far from either border.

“I am fine,” he tells me, still smiling. I wait for him to look about him,
admire the day or the town, some tension breaking pleasantries, but he is watching me.

“Come on; I’ll take you home,” I say.

Jake waits for us at the house. He towers over David when the two shake hands. Jake leads David into his room. They are talking, but I cannot hear as I follow. Two quiet men. I smile. Perhaps we will all get along.



I open the door to watch him sleep. He does not stir. I want to move closer, to be in the room and feel his dreams. Jake puts his arms around my waist and kisses my neck. “Leave him be,” he whispers. “It’s probably the first good sleep he’s had in a very long time.”

I pull the door shut and turn in Jake’s arms to face him. He folds me to his chest.

“We’ll never know what he was like before all this,” I say. “He may have been cruel to his mother or harassed women in the street or beat up little boys. He may have been someone I totally disliked.”

Jake laughs and presses me closer. The world dissolves when he is this near to me, a reassuring dissolution that I sometimes crave.

“Does it matter what he was?” Jake says. “He is here with us now.”



David keeps us from the kitchen, telling us he is making his American
friends a Salvadoran meal, his speciality. Jake and I stay in the study we now share, trying to write but mostly laughing as we try to guess what David is doing. He is awkward in the kitchen. It is the only place he shows even a distant impatience. There are too many gadgets and switches even in our simple kitchen.

He is at our door. “You may come now,” he says.

In the kitchen, the shades have bee drawn and light from two candles cause the gas-station plates to shape change, making them look like bone-china. Blood shadows from the wine stain the linen tablecloth.

“Sit,” he says, pulling out my chair.

We smile and do as he asks. The kitchen smells of basil and oregano. He opens the oven and my mouth waters, anticipating the dinner. He slides the dish out.

“Pizza!” he exclaims, laughing, his eyes aflame from the candlelight.

Jake claps. I say, “Salvadoran food?”

David shrugs and sets the dish on the table. “American food cooked by a Salvadoran.”

“There are only two settings,” I suddenly notice.

“I feel as if you have not been alone in two weeks,” David says, taking a bowl of salad from the counter and putting it at my elbow. “You are married; you need time alone.”

Jake pushes away from the table; the scraping of the legs are too loud inthis small room. He takes a gas-station plate and sets it on the table,
instant fine china.

David rests his hand on Jake’s shoulder for an instant, like a butterfly
resting on a flower. Then he pulls out a chair and joins us.



“You are very happy, you and Jake?” David says. We walk along the tide mark, preferring the dry sand to the wet.

“We are very happy,” I answer. I wait for him to say what others have: “You are lucky.” As if luck had anything to do with it.

David nods. “That is good.”

I slip my arm through his. I should have known he would not have said anything else. His “that is good” tells me we deserve it, it is right.

David watches our feet as we walk, sometimes glancing up at the ocean. So often he seems oblivious to his surroundings, concentrating instead on the
people with him—or else somewhere inside of himself.

I want to ask if he is lonely, but I know the answer. He is away from his country, unable to return until after the revolution, he has told me. I know that means maybe never. Although I want to know his past, I don’t ask about it. I will not be a voyeur, watching him finger his wounds.

“My grandmother used to brush our hair when we were children,” David says. “She used this brush with a handle that looked—to a little boy’s eyes—like it was made from jewels; I don’t know that kind—madreperla?”

“Mother of pearl?”

He nods. “When I was a boy, it was the finest thing I had ever seen. I would sit very still while she brushed and looked for lice. She would tell me stories about my grandfather after he was killed. Later, she told me stories of my father and my uncle Geraldo.”

We have stopped, and he is looking out beyond the horizon.

“I wanted her to be buried with it,” he says. “But they took it.”

The only sound I hear comes from the ocean. Before I had become aware of Central America, I had little knowledge of the Spanish language, literature, or mythology. When I visited Europe, I had skipped Spain, and I had never gone to see my relatives when they lived in Mexico: I had assumed those worlds would be filled with too much machismo for my taste. Now David turns from the ocean to look at me, and I see only the soul of a gentle human being.



I stare at the blank paper, the hum of the typewriter like a buzz of an
insect in my ear. I am writing a story about a Salvadoran escaping his home. The further into the story I move, the more I realize I do not know much about the main character.

“I don’t know what hurts him,” I say aloud, temporarily stopping the
clacking of Jake’s typewriter.

“I don’t know who he is.”

“It didn’t matter,” Jake says. “Even before you met him you’d decided he was special—because of what he’d been through.”

“That’s not so,” I say. David is not special because he has seen people he loved killed. No, he is just a person caught in circumstances of the times. I shake my head, knowing that is not true. He is extraordinary. And one reason is his past.

“I didn’t really know he was special until I actually saw him,” I say. From that moment I sensed a kindred spirit of sorts.

Something gnaws at my soul: I don’t know what precisely. Some kink in the world conscience? Something that threatens me at night in my dreams. I have survived the middle years of the twentieth century. So has David.

Jake types again, and I look out the window. David is out there, staring off inside of himself. Where does his mind take him? Probably away from this foreign place. I have heard him toss in his sleep, moaning as if he had lost his soul.

Now he glances at the window, sensing my thoughts perhaps, as he often seems to do. I nod. He returns the gesture.

“I was talking about my character, Jake,” I say. “Not David.”

Without looking up, Jake smiles assent.



Jake and David play go on the living room floor. Jake is a good teacher, and David listens well. I stretch out on the couch reading. I only read Spanish literature now. David and I often talk about writing. He was a student at the university in San Salvador before they closed it and branded all the students communists. One day David bought me Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig. After accepting the gift graciously, I laughed at the title. “You’ll see; you like old movies,” David told me. “You will like this. It is…tender.” Now I glance up from the book, my second time through, and look
at David. When he is not close enough, I long to touch him; it is an ache that does not always end when my fingers touch his sleeve or shoulder. It only eases when I find his skin. Sometimes I close my eyes, and he is behind my eyes, too, and I trace the contours of his face with my thoughts.

Often I look at David and see beyond him to his country, and I feel an
overwhelming sense of sadness and guilt. Jake does not feel the same guilt that I do, or the urges that accompany blind anger. Perhaps it is because he is a Canadian. He does not have the staggering load of sins to atone for.

David looks up at me. I wish I could see beyond his eyes. I want to help him, save him. He looks at me sometimes as if I were completely
unfathomable.

Perhaps I am.



“You are different in the day,” David says. We sit on the back porch,
listening to the ocean and watching the clouds change color as the sun goes down. “You change as the clouds do,” he says, gesturing toward them.

I lean against him. His cheek brushes my hair, and my stomach lurches.

“I become a child at night,” I answer, hesitating. My fears cannot equal his own, my terrors petty in comparison.

“The night can bring many things,” he agrees. “It can bring protection, too.
Sometimes evil cannot see at night just as we cannot.”

“I never thought of evil as being something that could see.” I say.

“You are right,” he says. “Evil is blind.”

“David,” I say. “I don’t want you to leave, ever. Stay here with us.”

I do not understand what I feel for David. Sometimes I think it is what a parent feels for a child. I have never had children, so I do not know. I have had lovers and what I feel for David is not lust couched in love. It is not the same as what Jake and I have. Jake knows me so well that sometimes it is as if we are connected and always have been. No, it is different. When David touches me—and it is not often—I feel a peculiar humanity stir throughout the world. As if after all he has been through, he is still human.

“Sometimes the night brings back memories,” David says, “but so does the day.”



“He can stay here as long as he wants, Sister Mary. He’s safe,” I say into the phone. Jake and David are outside and I will them to remain there.

“You and Jake were very kind to open up your home. We have so many refugees.” She sounds tired as she says the word refugees: they are not legal refugees because the U. S. government supports the military government they flee from. “But your town is small. He will be easily found once they start looking for him.”

“He is safe here,” I say again, tears shaking my voice.

“He has seen his father tortured and finally killed, and his grandmother shot. His brother has disappeared and he watched his mother die from fear and a broken heart.” I shake my head, knowing it all. “Doesn’t he deserve to be safe?” she continues; her weariness has turned to anger. “If they send him back, Immigration hands his name over to the military who in turn gives it to the death squads. He is a dead man.”

“No,” I whisper. “He is not a dead man. If you think he would be safer with your people, I will tell him. I’ll call later to arrange it.” I drop the
phone onto its hook.

As I watch David and Jake out the living room window, I remember a night with moonlight stretched across the lawn and David next to me as Jake slept in the other room. My nightmare had disappeared, and I felt enveloped in safety and affection.



Jake calls from his part time job to say the presses have broken down and he will be gone all night. I take a blanket from the bed and curl up on the living room couch, hoping the dreams will not catch me this night alone.

I pull out of the nightmare gasping Someone is saying my name. I lay crying silently, not because of the dream, but because of David, who will be gone from my life in two days. His voice gentles me into awareness.

I open my eyes. David is kneeling at my side, peering closely at my face.

“I heard you,” he whispers, his breath warm on my cheek. The butterflies have moved off the wallpaper in my bedroom and now seem to fly all around David. “You said my name.”

His hand reaches up to my face. He moves hair off my cheeks and forehead without touching my skin.

“You dream about me?” he asks.

“Sometimes I tell them I am your wife and I am going to have your child, so they let you go.”

He smiles and lays his hand against my cheek. I turn my face to his arm and kiss it.

“It would make no difference.”

“I know,” I say, crying again. We both know what they do to women with “future guerrillas” in their wombs.

“I dreamed, too,” he says. “I was an old man living in the Salvador
countryside and you came and brushed my hair and told me stories.”

I smile in the darkness.

“Perhaps it is a sign of the future?” he says, sounding unsure. He is
frightened of what is coming, too. We look at one another, and my body aches, as if something is being pulled from me when I think of him leaving.

“Come sit with me,” I whisper, holding the covers open. He sits next to me, and as we touch, the pain eases away. He puts his arm around my shoulders and pulls me toward him. I lay my head in the curve between his shoulder and breast. It is the most comfortable spot I have ever been in. I listen to his heart and feel the warmth of his body through his clothes. For an instant, everything is still as we hold one another tightly. In these moments, I know we will never let each other go. He kisses my hair, and we relax, hugging each other gently again. My fingers find an opening in his pajama top, an there they rest. David breathes deeply and then sighs. I close my eyes to sleep, knowing we will be safe through the night in each other’s arms.

In the morning, the butterflies have flown and the room is bright with light as Jake leans over the couch and kisses us each awake.

copyright © 1984 by Kim Antieau





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All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.