must separate from Elisa and her sons, locate fuel, and return once she is rejuvenated. WaLiLa approaches the threshold and peers into the dark house. Inside, nothing is left standing. Each of Elisa’s possessions has betrayed her, turned their backs on her ownership, willfully destroying form and usefulness to welcome fire’s full embrace.
Surrounded by the ravages of her life, an uneasiness settles in Elisa’s bones. She turns her back on the wreckage and clasps her fat hands on top of her head. She walks down the hall and sees the silhouette of WaLiLa’s body swaying in the doorway. She smiles bitterly at the irony of a house guest and no home. She steps to the doorway and stops when her body is a few breaths away from WaLiLa’s. The two bodies mirror each other. With the sunlight radiating behind her, WaLiLa stares into Elisa’s eyes. With the shadows of the house swirling behind her, Elisa gazes back.
“Have you ever had a fire?” Elisa asks WaLiLa.
WaLiLa shakes her head no. Hot fingers of light do not exist on her planet. Here on Earth she has been fascinated by the little fires that heat human fuel and light dark spaces, but they are nothing like the fire she experienced last night. Smoke, too, is a stranger to her systems. A toxic intruder, it creeps into the being-center and fans out through the body, triggering malfunctions of thought and action.
“I can’t…” Elisa starts to speak. She looks up at the sky with a wrinkled brow, then fixes her glance on WaLiLa. “I can’t continue. Would you go in and see if there’s anything salvageable in there?”
WaLiLa’s belly shoots arrows of warning through her body while her message-center reminds her that Elisa is her bridge to Pedro. Her message-center also reviews the Human Decency Laws, which dictate that by accepting Elisa’s offer of shelter, she has placed herself in Elisa’s debt. Human codes state that WaLiLa owes Elisa gratitude in the form of courtesy or kindness.
Against her belly’s urgings, she turns and clears a passageway for Elisa to squeeze out of the narrow door frame. They pass each other as WaLiLa enters the house. As the sunlight recedes, she rotates her shoulders back and forth—each two shoulder movements a small prayer engaged to shake off the doom pressing against her scalp.
In every room she sees nothing but unrecognizable pieces of black. Then she reaches the back of the house. There she finds the only intact door inside the destroyed home. She turns the doorknob, and the door swings open with surprising ease. Two mice scurry out of the room, racing over her feet and disappearing into the ruins. She opens the door wider, and a bird swoops out. The bird is followed by a river of roaches streaming past WaLiLa’s legs. After the roach exodus is complete, she pauses, waiting for more creatures to flee. When none do, she enters the room.
The room’s air is cool, and it rolls over her silently. She senses that this is Elisa’s room—not her bedroom, but her prayer room. Above, a low white ceiling hangs solid and certain. The walls are plastered with scraps of paper filled with the markings of human speech. The floor is covered with mounds of objects. Each mound is a strange collection of items organized by a theme unknown to WaLiLa.
WaLiLa stoops to the ground and looks around. The mound directly in front of her consists of a jar of honey, an orange silk butterfly, a necklace of yellow flowers, old gold coins, and a pile of five oranges. The pile to her right has blue ribbons, three crystal glasses of water, silver rings, a doll in a frilly blue dress, a miniature ship with many sails, and a lace doily. The room bursts with ceramics, keepsakes, fruit, flour, flowers, water, wine, money, metal, nuts, coins, beads, shells, silk.
She leans back on her haunches as she takes in all the items that surround her. She focuses on a photograph of a smiling, young-looking Elisa holding hands with a beaming, sienna-colored man. Written on the back is “La Habana, 1973.” Next to it, under a crystal glass of water, rests another photograph of the same man. He stands knee-deep in the sea, his left hand resting on the corner of a handmade raft, the right one lifted in a melancholy salute. Written on the back is “Para Miami, May 1985.” Behind the glass of water, a small bundle wrapped in white silk waits. WaLiLa picks it up and hears the soft clink of metal. She gently unwraps it and discovers two plain rings. Inscribed inside the rings is the phrase “Elisa y Gigaldo, para siempre.”
WaLiLa reties the bundle and puts it back behind the glass of water. She stands and carefully steps to the center of the room. She takes a deep breath, and the unmistakable scent of fuel sinks into her body. Suddenly conscious of the energy pulsating through the items in the room, her hands begin to tremble. Not a flower has been singed, nor a fruit shriveled. She looks around and realizes most of the mounds are adorned with fresh flowers.
When the collecting is done, WaLiLa listens to the noises in the rest of the house. She hears the muffled sound of things being moved around. Certain of her solitude, she lifts the hem of her dress and tucks it into the dress’s neckline. She presses two rose petals against the center of her torso and closes her eyes as her body accepts the fuel. Her practiced fingers feel nothing amiss. Neither her fingers nor her message-center consider that these petals stubbornly survived the threat of fire only by filling themselves with smoke.
WaLiLa sits at a round table nestled under the stairs with a belly full of mango
“Buenas!” Elisa’s former neighbor Silvia enters the open doorway ushering in the morning. Her soft, yucca- colored body is thinly covered with sweat. She sits down uninvited and asks for a cup of coffee. She runs one hand through her short curly hair, while she holds up a tattered envelope with the other.
“M’ija, this arrived for you yesterday afternoon. Papo brought it. His cousin had a visitor from Spain who carried it in his suitcase.” Silvia places the envelope onto Elisa’s lap with ritualistic flair and breaks into a self- mocking laugh. “Que triste! How sad it is that the mail travels more than we do.”
As Silvia presses her lips to the rim of the coffee cup, Elisa opens the letter. Silvia launches into an extended lament of exhaustion. Her bicycle is broken, she had to borrow her son’s, it is so hard to use a bicycle for transportation, maybe not for the children because they never had a vehicle, but wow, how she misses the old family car, and oh, what a hard life.
“What is it, m’ija?” Silvia interrupts her tirade to ask of Elisa’s contorted face.
Elisa looks up from the letter.
“My mother-in-law, she’s ill, she needs me in Spain.”
Liliana grabs the letter from Elisa and peers at her mother’s shaky scrawls. By the time she reaches the end of the letter, she is crying.
“She didn’t want us to know,” Liliana says to no one in particular.
Elisa stands and rests her arm around Liliana’s shoulder. A departure from Cuba’s arms is the last thing Elisa desires, but she’s the only one who can go. Liliana couldn’t get out of the country in a million years. Nor could any of Liliana’s brothers and sisters. Elisa, with her income and status, is the only one who can fly to her mother- in-law’s aid.
“Aiiii, mi nina,” Silvia complains, “if we were in any other country! Your poor mother may die before you get a ticket in this maldito country.”
Elisa shushes Silvia with a few clucks of her tongue.
“Don’t you worry, Lili. I’ll go get Mami, and I’ll bring her home.”
“Of course, of course,” Silvia coos. “I’ll help too. I have a cousin in the visa department. We’ll get the papers you need.”
“I appreciate it, vieja,” Liliana sighs. “I’ll go to Senor Alberto and Senora Franco to get the money Papi left with them. It’ll take me two days. You think your cousin can help us then?”
“Si, I’ll go talk to him now,” Silvia says.
“I’m coming with you,” Elisa says and goes upstairs to collect her purse. Before she leaves, she wakes her sons and tells them what has happened.
