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Maria Elena

On the night after the bullfight she had asked me, frightened and clutching Maria Elena’s silken body, if I could please close all the windows and shut off the light.

“Why?” I had asked.

“I don’t want to see anything right now.”

In the dark, I could hear her soft, shallow breathing, and an occasional quickening of breath, five-second bursts of frantic, tearless sobbing. I pretended to sleep, listening to her silent, desperate cries all night, and thought to myself this must be what dying feels like.

She seems anything but small or frightened now.

“How long to Barcelona?” she asks in the car, finally taking off the thick, stickered headphones she’d kept on since getting off the airplane. Like last time she passed on the hellos. As soon as I answer, the headphones go back on.

In Barcelona, she changes the batteries on her CD player and eats the stale muffin left over from her airline breakfast. In the bathroom she applies half a tube of Ack-Nee Kreem to her face before settling down on the spare bed with her glossy magazine and her headphones blaring. I stare at her reflection in the mirror. She is prettier now. Taller, as expected. But her eyes seem duller; they’ve lost that intensity they had when she was a little girl, when she took her first determined step, years ago, off the plane and onto the cold Spanish ground.

“You are my uncle,” was all she had said, knowing strangely that she had to convince me. I remember she carried her own suitcase.

…
The letter from Raymond came eight years ago on a Tuesday, and Rosie came across the ocean a week later. Rosie isn’t responding to treatment well, it said. She said she wants to see Spain.

She came with instructions, like the orchids Raymond and I would send mother every Christmas. One red pill every six hours. Never more than four in a day. Never less than three. She wore a tag on her wrist made of cold surgical steel with her name and a list of conditions. I am Rose Alexandra King, I am American, and I am broken. Around her soft neck hung a beautifully engraved iron locket, filled with emergency pills. Her illness did not scare me, as it did my brother and so many others. But the instructions worried me, haunted me even. I could think of nothing but the day Raymond and I had gone to Nice to arrange mother’s funeral and organize her things, and we found among her scattered clothing and belongings the orchids we had sent. All of them had died.

Her arrival was anticlimactic, the next few days even more so. I suppose I had imagined myself as her noble guardian, protecting her from every threatening bump or turn or possible fall. I created in my mind these terrible scenarios where she would fall ill in the middle of the street and I would take her and give her medicine and hold her tightly until we arrived at the hospital. She would wake up while I sat by her bed, look me in the eye, and ask, “Why are you so sad, sir?”

If she knew these terrible dreams I had, as she seemed to know so much else about me, she refused to play along. She was not in any way the fragile, wilting flower everyone expected her to be. There was, firstly, her unreasonable fearlessness about traveling almost alone in a country so different from her home in the comfortable suburbs of Oregon. There was dirt here. Crime. Poverty she could not have seen from the backyard swing of her father’s house. None of it surprised her.

“Have you been to Oregon?” she asked me, while we waited for a table at my favorite café.

No, I said.

“I should tell you what it’s like, then.”

She told me about Oregon while we saw the sights. She seemed mostly unmoved by the city’s expanse and history, taking more interest in educating me. She was not a talkative girl, however, and chose her stories carefully. At café Fiore she told me of housing associations. At the opera house, she described in great detail her average trip to the FoodMart. “It’s bizarre,” she said. “Especially the condiments aisle.”

She seemed so indifferent to sightseeing that I decided not to take her out the last day, a little resentful that she had been so unexcited about what we’d seen and extremely resentful that she hadn’t needed any protecting. I hated her for being strong. “Are we going anywhere?” No, I said, there was nothing left to see. She shook her head and said there was everything to be seen. I asked what she meant by that.

“I want to see a bullfight.”
. . .
“Rosie?” I say, but the girl in headphones doesn’t answer. For some reason I am afraid to raise my voice. Eventually she notices me staring at her from across the room and lifts her headphones barely off her ears, ready to plant them back on as soon as we are done here. “Rosie, is there anything you’d like to see?”

She shakes her head no. “I go by Alex now.”
And we are finished.

. . .
Raymond had only one other instruction for me than to keep his daughter alive for a week. Please do not take her to a bullfight.

She was short enough that I did not have to buy her a ticket.

I remember little else about that day, or about any other bullfights I saw before and after. I do remember what I told Rosie before the fight, that bullfighting was a beautiful and amazing experience and that it changed my life. I did not tell her that I first fell in love with bullfighting when I moved to Spain to be a writer. I found it operatic and elegant, but at the same time it made me recoil violently. Unlike me, it was passionate. It was all I would write about. When I sought publication I was told, “If you’re going to copy Hemingway, at least be good at it.” I was published once, unpaid, on the back page of an issue of The Bi-Annual Journal of The Ernest Hemingway Society.

I sent the money from selling my typewriter to Raymond, whose wife had just left him for a Parisian musician. He almost mistook it for compassion, but knew better.
“I hope it is amazing,” she said. How could it not be, I asked her. Look at the faces around you. Look at the tear-stained faces, I said.

“I have seen people cry about lawnmowers,” she said, unmoved.


. . .
I have said I do not remember the bullfight. That still stands. I do remember Rosie, staring intently at the ring, even through the fight’s most violent moments. She forced back all but the early sobs, which rose up and out of her tiny body when the bull was first struck. Her hand held mine so tightly that I felt my heart stop. She kept her eyes open and focused on the fight. She was so brave I almost could not take it. I pretended to be sick, knowing she would leave for me.

On the way home, she did not want ice cream. We stopped at a gift shop on my street when I reminded her that it was her last day in Spain. Her father might like a nice hat, I said. She said nothing, only nodded and followed me, never looking up. She did not spend time, picking up the first hat on the shelf with a poorly sewn Barcelona logo on it. “Dad will like this,” she said. I am sure she did not even look at it.

After paying, I found her staring through the window of the shop next door. She was looking at a doll. Without turning to me she said it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. On its face was a painted black tear.

“I will get it for you then,” I told her. “I can afford it” I said, lying.

“I could never touch something that beautiful,” she said. “It would be like destroying it.”

I insisted, and we named the doll Maria Elena. After that I would not hold Rosie’s hand.



…
Alex is asleep now. There is Ack-nee Kreem all over her pillow, and she is snoring. All the lights are on. I am sifting through her things. I find no jewelry of surgical steel or iron, or instructions, or pills. Maria Elena is also absent. I find only magazines and CD’s and unfolded clothing. In her diary there are only mentions of famous people, with magazine pictures taped inside. There is also some boy named Bradley. When I am done, I sleep with the lights on.

In the morning, she wakes me up. Mom and Luc are picking me up at the airport in an hour, she says. Then she packs with her headphones on. She does not say gracias to the waiter who serves us breakfast. I say nothing during the drive, and when she asks me how much longer to the airport, I pretend not to hear. Before she gets out of the car, I ask about Raymond, hoping she will hate me.

“It seemed painless, I guess,” she says blankly. “He seemed really happy that he got to die before me.” She shuts the door and joins her mother and her mother’s boyfriend without saying goodbye.

I wish I was so lucky, I say, but she does not hear me.