Loving Time

fifty-three

Sunday, November 14, dawned clear and bright. Maria Sanchez awoke deeply worried about what the day would bring. For two Sundays in a row Diego Alambra had walked home from church with her, and she was disturbed because she didn’t know what such a handsome man could want from an old woman like her. She also worried because Señor Diego Alambra was something of a mystery. He had a Spanish name but spoke Italian.

The mysterious Diego had started coming to her church some months before, and she could not help noticing him. He was a handsome man with hair still mostly black, like hers. Her hair was pulled straight back into a low roll at the base of her neck. His was swept up in a high curling wave above his forehead and cascaded gracefully down the back of his head to the top of his shirt collar. His mustache lay like a twig between his lips and sloping nose. He had full lips over slightly protruding teeth, a long face out of which deeply serious eyes watched her while she prayed. Sometimes his eyes were sad, sometimes thoughtful; always they seemed intelligent. He moved closer to where she sat in the very front so the priest would always be sure to see that she was there. He moved slowly, pew by pew, as the weeks passed, perhaps drawn to her by the intensity of her prayers.

Diego Alambra began by nodding at her, then bowing. And when he finally spoke, he called her “la bella signora.”

Maria Sanchez was an old woman, nearly fifty-five, and for a long, long time she had been oppressed with a deep sadness that made her feel closer to a hundred. This sudden attention from a handsome man when she had not expected ever to be noticed again made it not seem proper to leave the apartment without a touch of powder on her nose, a touch of color on her round, dusky cheeks.

She was deeply disappointed when Diego finally spoke to her and his words came out Italian. Maria Sanchez did not think highly of the Italian men in the neighborhood, so she ignored him, caressed the plastic beads of her rosary, looking severe, as the organ music swelled and the Mass ended.

“Bella signora, sì, sì” He nodded vigorously and told her his name. “Mi chiamo Diego Alambra, e Lei, cara signora?

What? The name made no sense.

Her lips curved up without her permission. A giggle as old as time rose from the deep well of memory and slipped out. “He, he.” She laughed.

Then came Father Altavoce’s command for the Kiss of Peace and suddenly, without her knowing how it happened, Diego Alambra had taken her hand and was holding it in both of his, gazing into her eyes so deeply it gave her a stomachache.

“Sì, sì. Molto bella.” This Italian who called himself Diego had to be over fifty himself but certainly had a young man’s enthusiasm for the single idea.

It was a small opening, but he bent so low over her hand, the gesture could not fail to be noticed elsewhere in the church. Maria Sanchez’s faded flower of a mouth, unrenewed for many years by lipstick or the hope of ever tasting a man again, smiled in spite of itself.

“Español?” she ventured tremulously.

“E.” He shrugged eloquently.

She had to turn the other way to move toward the exit. She felt a little stunned by the encounter and was glad she did not see him again on the street. Then later, when she was home, she worried that she had somehow done something wrong but wasn’t sure what.

This fear of being wrong was not a new feeling for Maria. For a long time she had been worried about doing things without meaning to and being punished for it. She was deeply fearful that she might have grievously sinned in the past, that she was continuing to sin even now, and the constant accumulation of those unknown sins (for which she could never atone) was the reason for her past suffering, her present suffering, and quite possibly a future of suffering that would never end.

This was the deepest and most tightly held of her concerns. Maria did not know the nature of her sins but believed only sins committed by her could be responsible for her present condition, which was a sadness that went beyond reason. She was familiar with loss. She had lost her mother and father when she was very young, had lost two sons in infancy before she was twenty. Mysteriously, she could not have more children after Mike. She and Marco did not question that. They had their sorrows, but they had a long life together, nearly thirty-four years. She did not believe she deserved more.

It was the loss of life within life that defeated her. Her son who ran around all night, worked in places that worried her. Married a woman who was cursed with so many troubles she couldn’t go out, couldn’t shop or cook, just sat by the window and cried all day until finally one day her brother came and took her away. Inexplicably, Mike’s wife, Maria, had gone back to the pitiful, broken-down house in the border town she had come from.

After that Mike fell even further away from his beliefs. He fell away from her and his father. He went back to his old ways, didn’t call them and didn’t come home. Maria would never forget the night her son came home—how surprised she was to see him, how he took her arm by the front door of the apartment and led her back into the room. “Papi is dead,” he had told her. “He had a heart attack and died at the restaurant.” He took Maria in his arms and held her so tight, she could feel the gun tearing at the armhole of his jacket.

Marco had died while making a crab quesadilla. He had not, as she had always feared, been assaulted on the subway coming home late at night from Manhattan. He had not been run over by a cab or a bus or a truck. All his life Marco had been a quiet man, so quiet Maria had often felt alone when she was with him. But when he was gone, it felt as if he’d taken her spirit with him. She did not understand how such a thingcould happen. They had not talked together very much through all those years. But with Marco she had never felt constricted. Living with her son, she was tied in many knots.

This Sunday morning it had become cold again. Mike was still asleep in his room. The powder was on her nose. Rouge tinted her cheeks. Maria was ready to go to church. As she sipped her thick sweet coffee early in the morning, she studied the frosted dead grass on the playing fields in Van Cortlandt Park and worried about Diego Alambra. What if he walked with her a third time, would politeness require her to ask him in? What would she do about her son? What did she want?

She licked up the last and most syrupy drop, then washed the cup and looked around. The kitchen was perfectly neat. There was coffee in the pot for her son. As she closed the door of the apartment, her guilty wish was that Mike would wake up and go someplace far away. Her prayer was answered. As soon as he heard the door close, Mike threw the covers off, shivered, and headed for the shower.