Love Enough by Dionne Brand Read Free Book Online

and daring and then we go home and flop down on the sofaand retreat into our dimwitted vestigial selves. It is no insult to say that the care and feeding, the upkeep of the human body, the physical self, is not unlike the task that zookeepers have each day. So much forensic effort is necessary to keep this animal at bay—toilets, mirrors, soap and water. One comes upon this presence abruptly when sex wanes or falls away. Especially in a relationship of short duration where one hasn’t had the time or compassion to forgive the inconvenient animal in us all.
    Montero Baet was his last name and he had worked for
La Prensa
as a freelancer. He was also coincidentally a musician in the university café life in Santiago at the time. The former played only a minor role in the full indictment against him: the truth is, everyone with even the vaguest association with democracy was in trouble with the Pinochet dictatorship and its American friends. It was his singing that got him into trouble, and his guitar. Isador sang songs to friends who had been arrested and disappeared. And when this criminal side of him emerged—he laughed when he said that—people at the university café and the newspaper were detained. He got away.
    All this led to June and Isador riding the Trans-Canada Highway on a motorcycle in the summer of ’75 on apolitical tour. Some who know nothing about South America might say Isador was pretending to be Che. At any rate, June discovered she didn’t like the wind in her face as much as she had imagined she would. Nor the intimacy of holding Isador around his waist for hours on end. There is intimacy and then there is intimacy. The intimacy of trusting someone with your life on a motorcycle is different from the intimacy of having them enter you, strange as that may seem. And love, love as they knew it, love as she knew it, was dwindling.
    They were between Regina and Saskatoon. June saw a horse. She looked back until it was out of sight, though in that terrain nothing seemed to go out of sight. The sky was big and the land went on forever—you could be standing in one spot the whole time. When the horse disappeared June saw a sign saying “Blackstrap” and said to Isador, “Stop.” June got off in the middle of nowhere, took her backpack off the bike and said goodbye to the Chilean.
    It was a passionate goodbye but she simply had to return to the serious work of finding a job in order to keep the apartment in Toronto and to carry on welcoming refugees from political terror from all over the world. She was never one for small dirty rooms, and the bar life the Chilean seemed to love just turned her off. Isador understood, hetoo was growing a little tired of this ball-busting
morena
. He set off to write his own diaries, heading west. She waited on the side of the road for a Greyhound. It didn’t come but she’d seen the horse. Soon enough the obligatory pick-up came down the road. By ways and means, June passed through Bladworth and Davidson and Craik and Bethune and finally Regina where she took the Greyhound and slept intermittently until Toronto. Between Regina and Toronto there are long monotonous stretches of road, and she would disembark into whatever town or city along the way, buy coffee and get back on to the bus heading east.
    Back in the city, from time to time she heard from Isador who had kept going till he came to Vancouver. There he had met another June or perhaps Julia and settled in. Over the years she learned that they had moved to Victoria and had children. What an escape, June thought.
    June worked El Salvador and Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe, then Nicaragua, putting up one revolutionary after another and getting rid of them by all sorts of means. She was, in this way, in terms of love, in terms of sex, indiscriminate. The Nicaraguan, for example, was a cigarette-voiced
clandestina
from Estelí. June was electrified as Beatriz gave an intense speech in a church hall on Bloor