Love & Darts (9781937316075) (16 page)

With clenched pain in my chest and numbness radiating down my
left arm I woke in my bed an hour ago and thought, “So it will be a
heart attack.” If the morning sun were to rise over any other patch
of water, then I would be there. But it does not. It rises here and
rears back ready for the day. It is an uncommon thing. Swollen
light waits, dormant, just below the surface. But it’s my time. I’m
eighty-seven. The sun leans into her work. She does not relent and
with a submitting grace steps forth into the deepest part of a
purple sky. Why call an ambulance or go to any hospital? The sun,
like a queen-child of kings and godless men alike, moves across a
well-worn sky-path with confidence. When the night takes her, there
is rapture.

I wanted to call my daughter. But
what kind of call would that be? Plus, I didn’t want to wake her.
I’m in New Jersey and she’s in Denver. There’s a time difference
and she only gets a few hours of sleep as it is because of the
baby. So when the pain eased enough to sit up, pull on a shirt, and
stand, I just muttered a prayer to St. Teresa of Avila for my
daughter.
Nada te turbe. Nada te
espante. Todo se pasa. Dios no se muda. La paciencia todo lo
alcanza.
My mother said that prayer
so often to me as a child. And she told me stories from Saint
Teresa’s
Interior
Castle
. Stories I told my
daughter.
Quien a Dios tiene nada le
falta. Solo Dios basta.
So that done
now I just move from my bed, grab the door to support my weight,
ease myself through three rooms and out onto my sagging little
porch.

In agony I bend over and pick up my little fishing
pot with the knife, a couple hooks, some drop weights, and a spool
of line. I bang the pot between my rocking chair and the window so
my ghost will sense it is time to go fishing. She is deaf but
senses something. The vibrations maybe? My scent? I don’t know. But
I want her with me so we can go down to the beach, down to my
little rowboat, to face what is meant for me.

Sabby, this large white dog, bursts through the
underbrush between the houses before I even call her twice. She is
always excited to go fishing with me. I doubt I called her loud
enough. I’m sure she just heard the screen door scrape the sagging
porch roof and came bounding to me because of that. But she sees
me, sits, tilts her head, then seems to know before I can tell her
anything about what will happen. I stand sweating on the porch with
the huge dog still staring at me.

The neighbor lady used to get mad
that I take her dog fishing. She didn’t think a purebred show dog
should be out on the water in some old man’s boat, especially not
some old brown man’s boat. But the dog always wanted to go with me.
I suppose because we’re both Argentinian. After a few months the
owner eased up, said Sabby’s fishing with me would be fine as long
as I never took her out past the sandbar, in case she ever needed
to swim back. My neighbor is a nervous woman and seemed to want me
to know how precious a thing I carried. So she stood there next to
me on the beach one morning—looking at the ocean, not me—and
explained all the trouble of getting this special dog. On the
papers, her name is Fantasma de la Sabiduría, the dam was Sombra de
una Duda, the sire was Triturador de la Nube. My busy
self-important neighbor doesn’t know I call her Sabby. It is
fitting. But often I call her Mi Fantasma Querida, my beloved
ghost. I wrote a poem for her.

My beloved ghost, whose yesterdays are the eyes of
God.

My beloved ghost, whose tomorrows will be left
over

and nothing more.

Even when the next change will be so lasting

I agree with the wind that says, “Ever change.”

Usually I say it in Spanish. It sounds better.

Sabby does not have her ears clipped but severity
remains in the readied shoulders and down deep between her
eyes.

The pain comes back.

I can barely stand and think of just sitting for a
moment in the chair. I know I’ll never get up, though. So I stand,
lean against the wall of my little cottage until the big, white dog
stands up and comes toward me. Months ago I trained her to carry my
fishing pot in her mouth by its handle. So she grabs it from me.
Her profound patience stills my mind. She never once looks away
from my eyes.

When the pain eases again we move to the stairs and
take them one by one together. She lets me lean on her shoulders as
we cross the beach to the boat and thank God for the high tide. I
only have to push the boat a few feet to get it into the water.
But. I can’t lift the anchor from the sand. I consider for a moment
and then decide. I cut the anchor rope with my fishing knife. It is
still a lot of exertion but not as much as lifting the deadweight
of that anchor in the sand.

I push the boat off and climb in. Sabby jumps from
the beach into the boat and sits patiently on the floorboards as I
fit the oars into the oarlocks. The sounds are familiar to me but
she hears nothing.

I used to be a fisherman. But I’ve been retired long
enough that the longing for the smell of diesel fumes over
saltwater is gone. I don’t miss the plastic crates of fish
submerged in the holding tank. Nothing as recent as those years
matters. What I remember is standing on the rocks near my childhood
home fishing with my dad and brother.

My brother died in 1973 right before my father
forced me to come to the States. My brother had gotten himself
involved in all that political tumult. There was a mob of
protesters moving down a side street and he ended up crushed
between a trash barrel and a wall. I never got all riled up like he
used to, never got involved in the insurrection, but my dad still
didn’t think it was safe for me there at home. Though why he
thought I’d be better off living in his aunt’s basement in New
Jersey I have no idea.

But. He was elderly then himself. Wanted me to get
out of La Boca.

I miss those black rocks where waves slide back down
into the sea like a hundred snakes. That’s where I stood and fished
for corvina with my brother and dad. And I remember my mother
taking both of us, my brother and me, on the bus thirty kilometers
inland along the Rio Negro to Viedma for my first communion. I’d
never seen anything so beautiful as the Cathedral of Our Lady of
Mercy.

This is pain like I have not known. But I’ll be with
my mother, my brother, and my dad soon. In no time.

Heather grows along the bulkhead.
Someone—Nuestra
Señora
de la Merced, maybe, but definitely someone unknown to any of
us along this stretch of beach—planted it here during the 1940s and
it abounds in the spray of the surf. Like the ruff of a little
boy’s hair the heather swirls and tosses in the wind that comes
down through two tall rocks at the horizon. That whipping breeze
hugs the cliffs and the sandy beach. And we smell the seasons
before their time.

I only have a rowboat now.
The Reprieve
, I
call it. There was once a fishing boat and then a charter fishing
boat, but they are both gone. One was stripped down and rebuilt for
a radio station to broadcast advertisements to the throngs along
the bayside beaches. The other I burned here near the heather. But
this little dory does just fine.

The rowing will be difficult for me. Sabby notices
how slowly we drift through the water. Her satiny white body is
muscle-bound, alert, but she is in no rush. She is as old as I am.
And there is no hurry left in either of us.

She lies down, leans against the side of the boat,
and shuts her eyes.

For a moment we rest on a glassy impossibility. The
air is still. The water is flat except at the very edge where
imperceptible waves give in, repeating a hushed lullaby for the
slumbering sea. The birds on the cliff are done with their dawn
songs. The gulls preen themselves on the jetty and stand looking to
the north. There are no other boats this morning. Once there were
many fishermen but now the beach is for weekends, not work. The
water drips from my oar in three places. The sea receives the drops
in a dignified series of ripples. I see the sand and rocks of the
beach beneath us steeped a yellow-green at high tide.

We move out in rhythmic thrusts. My companion is
awakened after her short drowse on the cross thwart. She climbs
over my seat. Rising up, she places her front paws on the transom
and looks back at the shore as I row out onto the water.

I like to get out past the sandbar, even if my
beloved ghost’s owner doesn’t like it. Fish in the shallows don’t
bite for me, it seems. The fish are in colder water beyond the
sandbar so we’re three-quarters of a mile offshore and, if I had
it, it’d be time to put the anchor down.

It takes me so long to lift the oars out of the
oarlocks and stow those smooth pieces of wood. But I manage it the
way I like. I slide them back behind me, get the handles crossed
down under the back seat and the blades vertical along the
gunnels.

A cormorant eases by and sits on a boulder which
rises out of the water to the east. Our eyes follow its journey,
but the bird is nothing uncommon. We always see cormorants when
we’re fishing in the morning.

If I am fishing, sometimes my past comes to me. It
comes and strokes my hair like a mother. And I rest wearily against
it as events occur again. I remember others laughing and my jokes
that would last for days. I remember the ocean water in all her
costumes and moods. I remember the oceangoing charters and an
Atlantic full of fish. Now that is all so close to nothing. The
fishing line is wrapped a hundred times around a piece of
driftwood. I can barely tie a hook to the line and have nothing for
bait but I am fishing still. I drop the hook easily over the side
of the boat. It is held plumb with a tiny lead weight.

The sky is colored an early-morning steel. And the
blue-gray waters meet it in every direction. “Mi fantasma querida.
My beloved ghost.” She comes closer and I stroke her strong back,
reciting my poem for her:

Mi fantasma querida, que ayer
es los 

 
ojos del Dios. Mi
fantasma 

querida, que
ma
ñ
anas
se entienden para ser 

dejadas excesivas y a nada
más. 

Mi fantasma querida,
convengo 

con el viento cuando dice,
“Cambio.” 

Y el cambio siguiente, el
viento me 

dice que, se
duren
.

She lies down with her paws outstretched. Her head
rests next to me on the wooden seat. And she says nothing. The line
is heavy with a catch. But it is likely a sand shark, so heavy in
these small waters. I release the driftwood spool into the water
and forget fishing. I hold the edge of the seat and lean back under
the morning sky, to see its everything once more so fully, and feel
the waves rocking the small boat, pushing us. We are tethered to
the water by no anchor rope. And the waves push us east well beyond
what would have been its limit.

This pain comes and goes. But it is too much. I want
to lie down now.

The dog helps me get onto the floor of the boat. I
am soaked by the water in the hull, but it is a familiar thing, and
I cannot doubt its pleasure.

“Mi fantasma querida, usted debe saber, yo está
muriendo.”

Her eyes see into me and say, “Shhhhh. It will be
okay.”

I wonder. “Le creo. ¿Pero mi fantasma querida, dónde
voy a ir? ¿Cómo yo deje para ir?”

She sits up and looks straight into the splitting
place between the ocean and the sky. It seems, with the colors of
the dawn, that no such place exists. But she looks straight into it
and does not balk. She is saying, “That is where you are going. And
do not be afraid.”

I hold her satin body next to mine
and wonder who will find us. An early-morning beach walker, maybe.
A man drinking coffee up on the cliffs. They will say,
Why is that old man’s boat drifting away past
the sandbar? Why is the dog there? Where is the man? What a strange
picture postcard for our memories.
And I will be lying here on the floor of the boat where no
one will be able to see me. And it will be a somber picture from
the beach—boat, three-quarters of a mile offshore, with a huge
white dog wearing its loyalty and pride. And so it will be against
a steely ocean that they will find me. And so it will be with a
neighbor’s dog that they will find me in the bottom of The
Reprieve
.

Mi Fantasma Querida looks into the impossibility.
She looks straight into the invisible morning horizon and escorts
me. The boat drifts further, my last grip around her loosens, but
she does not quiver.