The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry

To Grandfather, Now Forgetting

He was a master carpenter and musician who used the rhythms of hammer and brush to make poems and songs as he worked. He was dark and intense, prone to melancholy; a handsome man who wore his hat at the back of his head. Weekends, he traveled the island playing the guitar and singing his own songs at coming-of-age parties, where the girls were flowers in a formal garden he was privileged to walk through. The mango fruit, he once said to me, with its juice that drowns you in sweetness, should be eaten with closed eyes. As a boy he had left home to apprentice with an old man who taught him how to find the grain of wood; about the secret lives of pigments, and in the fading light of the day, how to make music with roughened hands. 75 To Grandfather, Now Forgetting The day he first saw her, he was filled with music. The words to the song he'd write for her that night came to him like grace after a prayer. And he followed the proud girl into her fifteenth year with the fascination of asleepwalker pulled from his bed by moonbeams. She was a tamarind tree in full bloom, her brown skin naturally perfumed like a flower opening in the night. When she moved—her body became a bolero, a seduction with violins. Looking at her he heard his own voice echoing deep in the hollow of his chest, starting a sweet ache. And he became aware of his loneliness. But she turned away from his suppliant's eyes, and danced with others in the crowded room where he was making music for her alone. She made him play hard for her love, knowing life with a poet would not be easy. The year I came back to his house, at fifteen, I wore my Indian dress sewn through with tiny mirrors. I stood before my grandfather while he walked around me as if I were a winding corridor at Versailles, caught by the sight of his many selves reflected on me. He said: Nina, 76 I see you have learned that the way to conquer is to divide. Papa, tonight I want to wear that dress for you, lift you out of that shroud of silence, and take you to a fiesta, where we can dance until the woman you will love catches your eye, and you can recall the words to your song, and everything can start again. 77 ...