Rose Remembered

“Des yeux qui font baisser les miens

Un rire qui se perd sur sa bouche

Voilà le portrait sans retouches

De l’homme auquel j’appartiens

Quand il me prend dans ses bras

Il me parle tout bas

Je vois la vie en rose…”*

Escape…

See Dick run from Jane.

He learned to run from his Daddy.

Houdini rope tricks and torture.

He carries her heavy disappointments

hoping for distance.

When his moody jazz stopped and the lights went off, and he opened the front door to see if others were in darkness, her dog, wagging his stubby tail, ran away. He thought about leaving her doggone but knew he would not live it down. Her dog was her baby, and she was his. He wasn’t sure whose baby he was. Maybe he was too elderly to claim such sentimental infantilism. Through this haze of pained self-talk, he realizes she was still asleep curled like a little girl on the sofa and had not noticed her dog’s escape. So, he quietly grabbed the leash by the door and slipped out.

He remembered the street to be uneven and full of potholes, unexpected curves, and forks. He hated this street. Being blind to the next step, he hoped he would not fall and hurt something.

Foreign…

When the dream becomes a nightmare.

When you are not at home in your own skin.

When she pushes your masks off —

first lovingly then obsessively.

“What a strange place.”

In the few minutes of the blackout, the village had become alive. Women were gossiping and putting out mango, papaya, pineapple, and melons on tables lit by lanterns and covered with bright table cloths. Men were playing cards and dominoes and drinking brown rum by candlelight. Noisy half-naked children chased each other with flashlights.

He remembers his country where times of darkness would push people further into their isolating boxes of bathtubs and bomb shelters.

He remembers how his mother’s fire burned his father and him, It pushed him into the shadows of the hall closet. In the cool darkness, he would watch the edges of light tracing the door frame waiting to open it to any other place, any other time. He yearned for elsewhere.

He finds her dog nipping at the hem of a long pale blue silk skirt of another woman. She turns her smile from her dog to him, and he is stunned. She’s the woman he had been half-dreaming, half craving since he had started his visit to this new country months earlier.

One time, he encountered a woman like her at a music festival. He thought he was so courageous to venture to this field of loud iniquity, pulsing psychedelics, and camping hippies. He even wore a pair of jeans with his usual brown blazer. She was covered in mud and dancing in the rain — hips gyrating, arms reaching up and out. When she looked at him, the ivory of her smile curved like a tiny quarter moon against the night sky. La luna bella. He felt so awkward, overdressed, and old. She put her hand out to him. He didn’t want to get dirty or complicated, so he turned and eluded her grasp. She titled her head back and laughed loudly at his rejection. He thought he would see her again.

He looked up at the sky bewitched and wondering if the moon had left the sky and alighted on this busy street as this strange yet familiar woman.

The moon was still high and full and covered by clouds.

The clouds seemed doubtful, wrong, menacing.

He lowered his gaze into her dark brown eyes. In her, he understood home.

Wanton…

She needed you.

You wanted the idea of her.

Together, you missed everything.

Normally, he was shy, but in this moment he puts his hand out for a dance.

She takes his hand, and they sway to the music of the crowd.

There is so much he wants to say, but they do not speak the same language. So, he smiles into her. He lowers his head to smell the small beauty mark on her neck as she looks up to him. She smells like jasmine and hope.

They brush lips and open their eyes with new shared wisdom.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know — ”

They pull away as a small child with a halo of pink cantutas entwined in her black curls runs toward them waving Roman candles and singing a song that means nothing to him. Free, he laughs.

She pulls him through the crowded street to a secluded doorway.

“I think I love — ”

He notices a large mourning wreath of dried orchids on her door. She motions for him to come with her. He points to the sad bouquet. She opens a new locket to show a baby with her eyes and mouth.

“Muerta.”

He looks again into her eyes realizing now their shine is not about him but about tears of loss, then looks away to something safer like the flowering bush on the street’s edge.

Regret…

You prayed for the ocean,

then cursed the rain.

As he squints at the shrub, he barely makes out tiny dots of light pink against the dark green. Then, he smells them. Tea roses — tiny, delicate, passive, living.

“Rose.”

His Rose. His distant yet sweet Rose. His traveling Rose.

Rose grows from a budding afterthought to filling his skull. Her petals move and stretch. There is no longer room for her.

All that keeps him calm, quiet, contained comes flooding back to him.

He smiles but sees no future as an ex-pat madly in love with her foreign, dark, sweet lands. How could an older man with no country such as he help a grieving young woman so entangled by the clasping tendrils of her geography? After his semester vacation, he would move on. He would not stay; she could not go.

He remembers his rambling Rose and pulls his hand away.

She doesn’t understand.

He yearns for elsewhere.

Leaving…

Long distances lend blindness

to far away tears and sighs

of loneliness along longitudes.

Shrugging, he turns away and walks her dog back to the temporary home of Rose and him. Her dog turns his pug face back to her again and again as he hurries back tugging.

Without her, he becomes lost until he finds the bear statue he remembers to be in the town’s center. It towers over the surrounding blooming cockspur coral trees. He picks one of the orange-red blooms, and it holds no scent for him. He looks up into the carved, wide eyes of the bear and gleans no insight or judgment. At its base is an inscription he cannot read. He traces the unknown roughly hewn words with his soft fingers. Too soft, his factory father would have accused.

He wipes away unwanted thoughts of his absent father as he wipes away her deep red lipstick from his lips onto an embroidered handkerchief that Rose had sewn little rosebuds into. He lets it fall to the ground. Convenient but not heartless. He does not look back.

A Northern breeze blows through him. Chilled, he returns to the darkness away from the noise and lights of the street.

A short, chubby man approaches him and asks for a cigarette in exchange for a flashlight in broken English. He does not smoke but tells him he is lost. The man offers him the flashlight and guidance back to the villa.

When he gets to his door, he asks the man about the grieving mother in the pale blue dress.

The man crosses himself and backs away muttering, “Fantasmas.”

He wonders if the man had just said ghosts?

Soft Edith Piaf fills the room and the lamp lights come on again as he enters. The shadows of the room hold no memory of the earthy edges of the street. He has not been missed.

He unleashes her dog who jumps onto the sofa to warm Rose’s feet.

Relieved from his adventure and usual detachment, he gently touches Rose’s back motioning for her to come to bed with him.

Rose does not stir.