Hot Springs

The old woman from Cuba laughed when she remembered how one day in school she was asked which she would like to study: Russian, or English?

And like a fool, she says, I chose Russian. Not sensing the future where forty years later she would be handing out towels

at this hot springs and spa in New Mexico, where rich men from L.A. and Denver come to soak their capitalist bones.

It is morning, and Monday, and empty before the next tide of tycoons arrives— and we chat in bad Spanish. This is

the unnamable, quasi-erotic moment in which I get to look fully into her nice plump face and brown, post-Communist eyes

while the windows steam up all around us and the pools quietly fume and bubble, like memory,

with the leftover heat of volcanoes.