Fiction: Aurie's Last Dance
By Linda Norlander
|
For a year after the Edificio San Jose apartment building collapsed, Aurie came to me almost every day. I talked with him on the bus stop bench outside my dorm. I talked with him in the shower--sometimes so long that the water turned cold and people pounded on the door. |
|
“Hey, man, you OK in there?”
Once, the resident adviser in the dorm invited me into his room and offered me a cigarette. I shook my head. When he could get them, Aurie smoked cigars rolled in Havana. The smoke was sweet and pungent.
“I’m—we’re worried about you. Everyone says they hear voices from your room. Who is in there with you?”
“No one,” I said.
“Are you all right?” His eyes were a liquid brown, like the eyes of Señora Benitez. I thought about her, secluded away for hours in her bedroom in the apartment in the building named Edificio San Jose with the blinds drawn and a severe dolar de cabeza that Doctor Benitez could not cure. Aurie would glance at the closed door and turn away with a contemptuous shake of his head. “See? See what Castro has done to my mother?”
I looked at the resident adviser and shrugged. “Sometimes I talk to Aurie.”
“Who? I don’t know him.”
“He is—was my exchange brother. Last year when I was in Venezuela.”
“Is he here?”
What could I say? Yes, he comes to me in the shower and when I’m walking to class and when I’m writing blue book exams?
“No,” I said. “But I talk to him anyway.”
The resident adviser inhaled deeply and the tip of his cigarette glowed bright red. Aurie used to say you should merely kiss the cigar and let the smoke swim in your mouth.
He flicked the ash into a small ceramic tray. “I don’t get it.”
“There was an earthquake in Caracas. It took buildings in my neighborhood, and I haven’t heard from Aurie since.”
“Did he die?”
If only he had come to the airport to say good-bye.
“Nobody knows.”
“So how do you talk to him?”
“I just do.”
After that, after I’d finally said Aurie’s name out loud, he stopped coming.
|
At first I tried to find something we had in common. The Beatles--stupid boys with no music in their souls; baseball--mindless sport for the lower classes; cars--I care not about what someone else drives. I asked if he would help me with my Spanish. He said, "Bah," and walked away. |
| Aurie called me "gringo."
“Gringo,” he said when I arrived at Edificio San Jose with my oversized suitcase. “We share an apartment, but nothing else.”
They called it an exchange program—my three months in Venezuela—and they called the Benitezes my host family. But there was no exchange. The doctor and señora took in a student each semester for the board and lodging money. Aurie told me from the beginning that he was not my hermano (brother), and he would not be responsible for me.
“Soy Cubano—I am a Cuban,” he said. “If it were not for that communist worm, we would be home in Havana—not here in this city of no character. We would be home and we would not be taking in gringos.”
At first I tried to find something we had in common. The Beatles—stupid boys with no music in their souls; baseball—mindless sport for the lower classes; cars—I care not about what someone else drives. I asked if he would help me with my Spanish. He said, “Bah,” and walked away.
Doctor Benitez apologized one day during the afternoon break from his clinic downstairs.
“Aurie, he is a lost child. Go on with your studies and don’t let his selfishness bother you.”
The day I arrived and Aurie told me he was not my hermano, Señora Benitez wandered out of the bedroom in a floor-length nightdress dappled with faded red flowers. She looked me up and down, sighed, and said in Spanish, “Breakfast at 8, supper at 7. You must be home by 10 every night or we lock you out.”
Doctor Benitez gently nudged me to the balcony. Once outside, he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered me one. “You see,” he said in heavily accented English. “She is not well. My Sonia used to love to cook and to dance.” He shook is head. “But since we come here, she suffers el dolar—the pain.”
I spent my evenings with the other Americans in the exchange program. We hung around Quinta Luisa, a house rented by four Venezuelan University students. The house smelled of stale smoke and mildew, but the refrigerator was always stocked with Cerveza Polar, and the Beatles played over and over on the phonograph.
“Do you know what I get for breakfast every morning?” I said to my friends.
“Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, for chrissake. The box isn’t even printed in Spanish. Hell of a cultural experience.”
I could have asked the exchange program counselor to find me another host family. I could have told her that I felt like I was walking into a funeral every time I opened the door to the apartment. I could have told her about the steady diet of corn flakes for breakfast and ham and cheese sandwiches for supper.
But I didn’t because every night, when I stepped out of the taxi from Quinta Luisa, I’d look up to see Aurie leaning against the railing of the balcony. I felt he was watching for me, or over me.
I didn’t because every time I looked at Aurie, studied his thick, brown hair and clear, light skin, I felt his anger. Behind the eyes that were not quite brown and not quite green, something boiled and seethed. I’d never met anyone my age so filled with rage.
Doctor Benitez told me that Aurie was studying medicine at the university. “He remembers how I had my clinic next door to the house. He wants to go back some day and open it up again.” Doctor Benitez looked away. “Someday, maybe Castro will be gone and we can go back.”
Sometimes, deep in the night, I would awaken to the staccato beat of typewriter keys from Aurie’s room. When I asked him what he was writing, he shrugged me off.
“I am a poet and someday I will be a great Cuban poet.”
One Saturday night the Venezuelans had a big party at Quinta Luisa. That morning, as I ate my corn flakes, I told Señora Benitez that I would not be home until Sunday afternoon.
“Porque?”
“Una fiesta.”
“Ah.” She rubbed her slippers on the tiled floor of the kitchen. “We used to party. Remember, Aurie, how we would string the lights in the garden and put on the record player and dance?”
Aurie shrugged, pulling the morning paper closer to his face.
“Do you want to come?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Go, Aurie,” Señora Benitez said. “You go. It’s time you danced again.”
She looked at me. “Take him with you. Watch how he dances with the girls.” Her eyes glittered. “He could teach you.”
“No Mamí, I don’t want to dance with the gringas and the Venezolanas. They dance stupid. They have no rhythm.”
Señora Benitez clucked. “Remember, Aurie, Señor Benecio our neighbor. Remember how he danced to Beny Moré? No one could play and compose like Beny.” Her voice dropped off and the room grew silent.
“Aurie?” Señora’s voice was low. “Please go. Please dance. For me?”
When it was time to go to the party, I knocked on the door to Aurie’s room. He didn’t answer.
|
In Cuba, Papí had a nurse and a receptionist. He treated generals and scholars and diplomats and no one paid him with fish.” I looked up at him from my bowl of corn flakes. Aurie pressed his lips together in a tight line. “He fixed them all, and he didn’t have to iron his own shirts.” |
| Every morning Doctor Benitez pressed a clean white shirt and pulled on a pair of creased trousers. He opened his clinic at 8, closed it for siesta at noon and reopened it at 4. His patients paid with cash and sometimes with goods. A fresh fish for the cough medicine, a grandmother’s bracelet to treat a kidney infection.
One morning, Aurie watched him slip on his thin tie and walk out the door.
“In Cuba, Papí had a nurse and a receptionist. He treated generals and scholars and diplomats and no one paid him with fish.” He spat out the last word. “His patients were our friends.”
I looked up at him from my bowl of corn flakes. Aurie pressed his lips together in a tight line. “He fixed them all, and he didn’t have to iron his own shirts.”
On the balcony that evening, when I told Doctor Benitez I wanted to be a physician, he smiled and shrugged. “You will learn that you can fix the dolar del estomico and the sprained ankles, but you can’t fix the broken hearts. My countrymen, they had a good life in Cuba. But Castro came and took our homes and our livelihood and our spirit. I can’t mend the spirit.”
Below us a car without a muffler roared by. “When you go to school, learn the science and the medicine, but also learn about the soul. When you understand the soul, you are truly a doctor.”
As he spoke, I heard a faint whisper of cloth from inside the apartment. Señora Benitez stood in the middle of the living room watching us. She looked as if she had just awakened from a long nap.
“Mi amor,” she called to Doctor Benitez. “How are the children?”
“They’re fine, my love. They’re fine.”
She turned and shuffled back to her room.
“It’s the pills for her headache. They make her a little. . . .” He paused to find the right word. “A little loco. You see?”
A few weeks before my semester in Venezuela was over, I came back to Edificio San Jose early. Señora Benitez stood alone on the balcony, smoking a slim cigar. She was dressed in a long silken robe and her feet were bare on the tiled floor.
“Come feel the breeze out here.”
I’d never been alone with her before.
“Do you see the little barrio over there?” She pointed to a once vacant lot two streets over that was now overrun with cardboard shanties. “They come in the middle of the night and make their poor little neighborhoods. The police will come and tear them down soon.”
I nodded.
Señora Benitez swayed a little against the railing.
“In Havana, I would go to the outdoor market near one of the very bad barrios. I always took Maria, my housekeeper, with me. Oh, they had beautiful fruits—mangoes and papayas and bananas. And always raggedy children with dirty faces tugging at my skirt begging. Maria would shoo them away from me. They were annoying—like little mosquitoes.”
She blew the smoke from her cigar out over the balcony. “One day a little boy sat on the curb near my favorite fruit stand. His legs were withered and he held a little tin cup. ‘Señora, señora, por favor.’ He was light-skinned and his eyes were the same color as Aurie’s, not the deep brown of the other beggar children. He could have been Aurie, and I couldn’t look at him anymore. I hurried on to buy my mangoes.”
She turned to me. “Do you understand?”
I smelled rum and tobacco on her breath.
“Later, I sent Maria back with some coins but she said he was gone. I didn’t go back to the market after that because I didn’t want to see the hungry children with Aurie’s eyes.”
Señora Benitez sighed deeply. “How can I tell my husband and my son that I’m not sure the revolution was a bad thing? How can I tell them that we lived a life of privilege, and we never saw the little children with their withered limbs and their tin cups?” Her eyes flashed. “Tell me that.”
She flipped the cigar over the balcony and turned unsteadily to the apartment. I reached out and caught her arm. “Here, let me walk you back in.”
“You are a good boy. Maybe some day my Aurie will be a good boy, too.”
Two days before I was to leave Caracas, Aurie met me at the door of the apartment in Edificio San Jose.
“Shhhh,” he pointed to the balcony.
Doctor and Señora Benitez were standing together looking out over the city. He had his arm around her waist.
“Her pain is better tonight.”
“That’s good.”
“She received a letter from her sister, Tia Margita, in Miami. Tia says that Castro is sick, that he hasn’t been seen for over a month. Tia says that there’s talk that he has died and that we can come back.”
“Do you believe that will happen?”
Aurie flashed a smile. “Si, gringo. Es la verdad. We will go home soon.”
|
"He placed both his hands on my hips and guided them until our movements were synchronized. When the music finished, my heart pounded and sweat poured down my forehead. Aurie pointed to my reddened face and said to the partygoers, “We will make a Cuban out of him yet.”
|
| His face was suffused with joy and relief—the same expression I would later see on my patients when I said to them, “The biopsy was benign. You don’t have cancer.”
The power of his happiness saddened me. I wanted Aurie to be alive. I wanted to see his mended spirit before I went home. But, in Venezuela, in the little barrios that spread throughout the periphery of the city, I’d seen poverty. I’d seen the children running barefoot on dirt paths while raw sewage snaked through open ditches. And I remembered the time with Señora Benitez when she talked of the crippled child in the market. If Castro left Cuba, would the crippled children come back?
“Gringo, what is wrong?” His voice was rich with sympathy, like his father.
“What about the poor in Cuba?” I asked.
Aurie looked at me in surprise. “Why do you say that? We took care of our poor. Papí went to the barrios.” He paused. “Papí said that they were poor because they were ignorant and they were ignorant because they were stupid. Castro’s revolution won’t fix stupidity.”
When I woke up in Edificio San Jose the morning after Tia Margita’s letter, the household was already astir. Instead of corn flakes, Señora Benitez dished up scrambled eggs with a hot sauce mixed in. Instead of Nescafe, she poured me a demitasse of thick, sweetened coffee. “Es Cubano,” she said.
Doctor Benitez, in his crisp white shirt said, “We will have a little party tonight.”
That evening, Doctor Benitez met me at the door, a drink in one hand and a cigar in the other. “Bien venidos. Welcome at last. Tonight you will see true Cuban hospitality.”
I drank rum and Cokes, Cuba Libres, until my head began to spin. Doctor Benitez and Señora danced a samba, moving back and forth as a single body. The doctor’s face was flushed and he had eyes only for his wife.
Aurie danced with a heavyset young woman. While his dance partner plodded, Aurie swung his body and rotated his hips as if the music filled his soul. I’d never seen a man dance like that.
When the music was over he called to me, “Gringo, it’s time you learned to dance the right way. Not your stupid disco but real Cuban dancing. I will teach you.”
He grabbed my arm and pulled me to the middle of the floor. “See, you must move your body to the beat. Don’t worry about your arms, worry about your legs and your gut.” He pressed his hand into my diaphragm. “Breathe the music.”
He wove himself into the rhythms of the music. I tried, too, my head roaring with rum.
“No, no,” he said. “Loosen your hips.” He took my hand and guided it to his hip. “Feel this.” I wanted to pull away, embarrassed because I’d never touched another man like that, but I felt a connection that traveled like electricity from his body to mine.
The Cubans laughed and pointed. Aurie laughed, too. He placed both his hands on my hips and guided them until our movements were synchronized.
When the music finished, my heart pounded and sweat poured down my forehead. Aurie pointed to my reddened face and said to the partygoers, “We will make a Cuban out of him yet.”
They clapped and hugged me as I made my way to the balcony to cool off.
On the balcony, Aurie joined me. He was so close I smelled the coconut sweetness of his hair oil and the lingering cigar smoke on his damp shirt.
“Will you come to the airport tomorrow and see me off?” I asked, still trying to catch my breath. The balcony tipped slightly and I leaned into Aurie to regain my balance.
“Ay, gringo, too much Cuban rum.”
The stars above the hills surrounding Caracas blurred as I stared at them, trying to steady myself. “Whoa.”
Aurie laughed, “Borracho. You’re drunk. Let me get you to your room.”
He guided me to my little room off the kitchen. At the door, he stopped and put his arms around me.
“Mi hermano,” he pulled me so close I could smell the heat from his body. “Someday we will be together in Cuba. I can feel it in my bones.”
I stood stupidly, my arms at my side, the air around me pulsating, and said nothing. Aurie kissed me then, full on the mouth, as if I were a girl.
When I fell into bed, the room spun round and round and round.
The next morning, with my head throbbing from the Cuba Libres, I tapped on Aurie’s door.
“I’m leaving.” The apartment was silent and smelled of stale cigar smoke and spilled rum.
Aurie did not answer.
All the way to the airport, I looked back, wondering if he was in a taxi behind me. As I walked onto the humid Tarmac of the Maquetia Simon Bolivar airport, I thought I heard Aurie’s voice. When I looked back, only the porters stood lounging by the door to the airport. When I looked back, I felt the earth roll beneath my feet.
I’m told that only a few buildings were destroyed in the earthquake and that three of them were apartment buildings designed by the same Cuban architect. I’m told that Edificio San Jose collapsed one floor at a time. Perhaps Aurie danced his way back to Havana that morning to the rhythmic beat of concrete against concrete.
|
 | | | |  | | About the Contest and Its Winner | Linda Norlander (B.S.N. ’74, M.S. ’98) has published fiction, nonfiction, and humor regionally and nationally. Her story, “Song of the Lake,” won the second Minnesota magazine fiction contest, in 2001. She won a Loft Mentorship in Fiction in 2004 and an International Loft Mentorship in 1995. Her humor has been published in Minnesota Monthly and Mpls.St.Paul Magazine. Her nonfiction publications include two books, Choices at the End of Life: Finding Out What Your Parents Want (Fairview Press, 2001) and To Comfort Always: A Nurse’s Guide to End of Life Care (Sigma Theta Tau Press, 2008). “Aurie’s Last Dance” was inspired by a trip to Cuba and the memory of Cuban expatriates she knew as a high school student in Venezuela. Norlander resides in Tacoma, Washington, and is the clinical manager of a hospice and home care program.
Minnesota magazine’s fiction contest is open to all University of Minnesota students and alumni. An independent judge selects the winner from a group of finalists chosen by the editorial staff, and the winner is awarded a $1,500 cash prize. Visit www.alumni.umn.edu/fiction for contest guidelines.
|
|
Print View