Read Online The Communist's Daughter by Dennis Bock - Free Book Online

not. In fact she’d emptied her purse into his hand.

    He shook his head, she told me. “No, no. Not that much. Only three of these,” he said, picking out the coins, “only this.”

    When she insisted he grew angry. He began to shout, “I am no beggar! The pretty American believes I am a beggar!” Every beautiful foreigner in Madrid was thought to be an American.

    She told me this as I sat on the bed eating the old man’s figs. It was something that troubled your mother more than I was able to understand at the time.

    â€œSpanish pride,” she concluded.

    How would he have seen her, that old man, I wondered, this beautiful “American” in the midst of all that chaos? He would not have seen condescension in her, or pity. That was not possible. Your mother was a generous soul. She stopped people in the street. She asked questions. The smile she wore, and her soft brown eyes, perfect comprehension, would have revealed that this woman’s proffered gift was a simple, pure, muted gesture. I cannot imagine otherwise.

    â€œI suppose you could be his daughter,” I said. “He would not take alms from his daughter. That would make him weak.”

    The figs sat in their paper cone on the night table. In the street below we could hear the neighbourhood beginning its ritual evening stroll.

    â€œThe street’s filling up. Do you want to go down for a walk?”

    â€œI don’t even remember why I’m here,” she said.

    I rolled a cigarette and lit it. “I don’t believe that.” It was a cool evening. I opened the ceiling-high double windows. The crowds streamed by below. “You know more about it than I do.”

    â€œMaybe I’m just worn down,” she said.

    â€œI think that’s it.”

    â€œI’m dizzy a lot. Spells.”

    â€œHeadaches?”

    â€œNo,” she said.

    I checked her. I knelt down before her and looked into her eyes. They were not so different from those I looked into a hundred times a day.

    â€œExhaustion,” I said. “Stress. Tell me if it gets worse.”

    *

    That night we were awakened in the dark by the sound of a single rifle shot, not very far off. Perhaps a block up the street. We lay together, silently, listening, waiting for the night’s emptiness to return. I wasn’t able to sleep after that and I just kept waiting, but there was no second shot. I rose from the bed and sat in the dark beside the half-finished portrait near the window. I rolled a pinch of tobacco into the small yellow paper and smoked and looked down at the street below, waiting for someone to pass. She didn’t speak but watched me watch the empty street. I wondered what had made her say that, about her not remembering why she’d come. She couldn’t mean it. You know why you’re here, I thought, but I didn’t say that.

    Instead I began to talk about my life.

    Your mother said nothing, asked nothing. She lay staring up at the ceiling. When I stopped talking I sat and listened to her breathing and studied her eyes and the lonely silhouette of her body curled under the blanket. It was cold in the room. I didn’t need her to explain.

    I slipped back into the bed and felt her hands. The morning brought its first pale shadows to the window and the room began to expand and take shape, and the magic of the world was swallowed up by the light of morning.

    What was it that I felt with your mother in our small room at the Hotel Santander? What did I begin to feel? Again and again wed awaken together deep in the night. It was as if we had become other people and re-entered the world at a different angle, a perfect tilt that helped correct for the terrors we both knew. We became, each for the first time in our lives, ourselves. One night, after weeks of this, your mother surprised me.

    She said, “Sometimes I am afraid to sleep.”

    â€œI’m afraid of more than