There was a time, I know, when I didn’t know any of those women, even though I can’t remember it now. I’d forgotten them, or simply hadn’t thought about them, for a long time. Perhaps I’d’ve never thought about them again unless—well, unless my mother hadn’t died. Of course, it had to happen some time. A few people in this world can predict such things, supposedly. Do they plan their lives accordingly—that is, do they plan more than I do, or more than almost anybody else does?
When you wake up in the morning—or whenever you wake up—all you actually know is that you have a certain amount of time—though you don’t know how much, exactly– ahead of you. Seconds, minutes, hours…how many days, how many years? You can’t know for sure, and really, it has nothing to do with the amount of time you’ve passed. A young man will die today; his grandmother could live to see his grandchild, whom he’ll never know. Happens all the time on this block.
Or you come back and the men are gone. To where, almost nobody knows. I can—perhaps I will—tell what happened to at least one. I may’ve already mentioned one, Adam. He’s the only man I ever knew, or knew me. He was on this block longer than any other man, I think. When I was hot and thirsty, he gave me cold sodas. When I was bored, he told me stories, most often about himself. But he never recited them with that vacant, faraway look you see when someone’s telling you a story he or she could’ve told any number of other people who’d never listen. It seems that most of what men have told me, they related in that absent, absented monotone I’ve only know one woman to use when speaking to me.
She’d come, by way of Venezuela, from some other country, to this block to “conquer America.” She was gone not long after she came; mother knew I wouldn’t ask about her because she wasn’t willing to talk about her—whether from lack of information, I’ve never known. None of the other women mentioned her, either, as if they knew enough not to.
Word was that she’d come her to meet husband number three, four or five. Or that she’d never been married to number one or two, or had never divorced them. She’d had two sons in Germany, a daughter in Macedonia or some other place nobody on this block had ever seen or cared to see. One son had denounced her to the police, supposedly to get out of compulsory military service in some country. Then the same son wrote her a letter begging her to come back to Denmark—or Sweden, or wherever he was living after she’d left him, Her daughter wouldn’t speak to her because she was “at that rebellious age”; a week later she was seven and pining for her mother.
She’d come to this block long after Adam’d died—long, anyway, in that seemingly eternal expanse of childhood as it is spent on this block. Somehow I think he’d’ve been the only man who wouldn’t’ve been charmed by her and her talk of “amore” and “espirito”. He might’ve been the only man who wouldn’t’ve cared when she hiked up her skirt as she gesticulated toward the god that gave her “la force,”
Memories And Those Who Stayed 