I know we’re tourists, but you never feel like one as a sailor. We’re all just a bunch of people. The world doesn’t belong to any of us. I’m almost physically incapable of paying for a ticket anymore. So instead we just walk around the seawalls, which are pink due to being built out of coral. The churches are pink. Everything is pink & yellow, even the cubes of spiced and salted mango on a stick that Juliet likes. Plus of course she also likes her aguardiente in the evenings when she gets a little melancholy. There is a small park w/ a statue of Simón Bolívar where you can buy cups of cracked corn for a few pesos. The kids feed the pigeons while we watch. By then the heat’s eased up a little and I venture to hold her hand. At that hour there’s this closeness I feel to her that I can’t talk about. That I would lose if I talked about. It’s like having an unopened letter in your breast pocket. That’s what being married to someone for a long time feels like. I steal a glance when a sea breeze blows her dress against her knees.
I know what you’re thinking, she says, huskily.
I have to tell her, No. No, you don’t.
* * *
—
He really knew how to enjoy his food, my husband. In fact, he really knew how to enjoy the air too, and sailing, and negotiating with port captains—from first to last, he enjoyed the whole thing. He was a doer. He was a meeter of challenges. He was an appreciator of sausages. It was infectious. I remember how happy he looked, opening up the wax paper worshipfully, aromatic with oil and fennel. He’d eat his sausages pinkie-up, grunting, licking the grease off his wrist. It made me laugh.
This is why I cannot say I regret going. I don’t regret watching my husband eat a sausage. I don’t regret laughing.
I don’t regret laughing in the Plaza de Bolívar.
March 29. LOG OF YACHT ‘JULIET.’ Club Nautico, Cartagena. Dinnertime. NOTES AND REMARKS: Sometimes it’s the last thing you expect. Juliet got an email from her mother yesterday. The monster who hurt her is dead. The fucker had the good luck to die in his sleep after a short battle w/ cancer.
She’s been doing so well. Will this set her back? I’m worried. We’ve got our big sail to Kingston coming up. Wondering now if we should put that off. Man, I hate this time of day. I hate it for her sake. Too hot. Plus, in the late afternoon she gets sad. Sometimes the heat wrings it out of her. I’m angry, I guess. For her. And for me. I realize that now that he’s dead, I’ll never get a chance to punch his lights out. It was all kind of abstract for so many years, since we never saw Lucinda. That’s going to be the hardest part, hearing from her mother again, after so little for so long. What a waste of time.
I say, Juliet tell me what I can do.
She says, Walk with me on the walls. You can tell me about pirates and empires and Napoleon. We can watch the kids run around.
Do you want a drink? I ask. Some firewater?
No, she says.
So we go to the walls. Everything is pinker this time of day.
What do you want me to do?
I don’t want you to do anything, she says.
I’d cut off my hand to make you feel better, I say.
But that wouldn’t make me feel better, she points out.
I know. I know! Then I will keep not doing anything, I say. Because doing nothing is the hardest thing for me to do.
Georgie and Sybil chase each other around us. Then they run ahead where a group of little kids are squatting over something.