The Noise of Infinite Longing by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa Read Free Book Online

day, I could see it. He seemed stronger, his arm firmer, and he had lost his barrio shuffle. Angeles was the center, where she always was, even when she said nothing. She had become mother.
    She was dressed like the rest of us, in black, and wore her sun- glasses even inside the church hall.You look like a movie star, I said to her, half kidding, something exotic and bruised and beautiful (she had a knack for the camera). Well, in this place, she said, taking off her sunglasses, twirling them in her hand, we are movie stars.
    We huddled side by side, running outside to smoke, and when the lunch was finally over and people dispersed, we took our places on foldout chairs that had been placed on the lawn, to take a big picture. Angeles and I, hair in place, sunglasses on, legs crossed, sat center stage, in the front.Amaury, Olga, Sara, and Carmen stood behind us. People came by, saying their good-byes, saying those sweet things to which no one expects an answer—remembering a gift my mother gave them, the way she spoke, her charming accent, they said. She was such a good person, they said, not knowing what else to say. She was so elegant.Yes, she was, thank you, I said over and over.
    But they didn’t know her. At least, they didn’t know the woman in the picture she had given my father when she was young, a year before I was born—“Amaury, te quiero mucho, María Luisa.”
    They didn’t know, the two of them.
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    In the beginning, when they met, she was a swimsuit beauty, a cheer- leader and sorority queen who rode horses and played the piano. He was already out in the world, the first of eight children, the first in his family to have gone to university, the oldest son of a small-town drugstore owner. He had reached the middle age of his youth. Slen- der, pale-skinned, narrow-faced, jagged already, a twenty-five-year- old man of many women even then. He was a man with a past and the willful temper and ambition of the hard-born.
    She was twenty-two, a face imperfectly sculpted, smooth as rain- worn stone, the nose not quite aquiline, the eyelids perhaps too sor- rowful, but cheeks perfectly boned, sharp slants toward her mouth. It was the mouth, always, which betrayed the consuming ardor, the consuming longing that had been born in her. Dark-haired, with the sighful movements of a Dolores Del Río (in María Candelaria, flowers cascading from her goddess head) and lips just a moment before pout- ing, just a shade softer than rose, she played the leading roles in all the worlds she lived in, and in all those worlds, she was imperious and yet submissive, and men fell on their knees, or broke her heart.
    She was a party girl. A brilliant girl, studying law like her father, but capriciously, absorbing books like air, because the stuff of books, and words in all forms, came easily to her. She liked to say that when she and my father came together, it was destiny.They met in passing, and he ignored her. She was his sister’s college roommate, too young for him, virginal. But he must have noticed something because months later, after that one fleeting meeting, he still remembered her face. He called her and invited her to dance.
    What a dancer he was.
    The palm of his blunt broad hand on her waist, he swept her, lit- erally, across waxed floors, heat rising on her cheek, on her bare neck, on her breasts, their hands clasped, bodies infinitesimally apart, then as one, swirling, circling, a storm rotating, dipping,

    brushing everyone else aside. She was his already, her legs entwined, her feet following without thinking, clouds under her. Boleros never seemed to end for them, and tangos that exhausted passion until they closed out the night. In the dawn, pearl gray like her eyes, his white dinner jacket was soaked with her, her chiffon gown limp, her mouth half open on his lips.

    Era el amor de loca juventud. . . .

    He wrote her letters. His unintelligible scrawl became so famil- iar, she knew the words by the slant.The