Looking for The Gulf Motel

Remembering What Tía Noelia Can’t

69 Remembering What Tía Noelia Can’t In a pleated skirt and pearl choker, dusted with perfumed talc, dressed for company, not like this: wearing a threadbare housecoat pitched over the ends of her bones, sinking into the sofa, smiling without her dentures, remembering nothing I remember about her: not her old apartment in Little Havana, nor her knitted doilies like snowflakes dressing the tears on her vinyl sofa, nor the buttons like eyes, not the glassy eyes on her statuette of San Lázaro, not his 14K halo, nor the gold rimmed cups, not the café she’d serve in them, not the caldo gallego she’d cook for my father after his chemotherapy, nor my father, none of her recipes for tasajo and fricasé de pollo, nor the taste of tomatoes, cumin, the mangos from her husband’s orchard back in Cuba, not even her husband, nor the island she swore she’d never forget, not the stories she told me of peanut vendors singing, fireflies dancing in Parque Palmira, not the park, the street she lived on, the names of her neighbors, nor the name of her daughter, now feeding her black bean potaje, asking her if she knows her own name, if she knows who I am. No, 70 she shakes her head, terrifying me that a life can come to an end like this: every memory one by one slipped out of her body, her cells, until she never was, like a movie rewinding, ending on a blank screen, like petals closing back into a bud, or a broken string of pearls skipping across the floor, like a wave drunk by the sand or clouds thinning back to air, a raindrop returned to the sea, the reflection of the sky in a puddle lifting back into sky. ...