Longing Read online

  Recipient of the 1996 American Book Award.

  Critical Praise for Longing

  Longing is a work of exceptional courage, honesty, and originality which one finds seldom in the Western world--more often in Russian dissident literature. This makes the work a rare document on human relations in our society. It also makes the work automatically a kind of experimental writing of the Western samizdat type, which official literary bureaucracy will only recognize late, after prolonged battle.

  — NANOS VALAORITIS

  Winner of Grand Greek Prize for Lifetime Work in Literature

  Longing, an immensely moving and intelligent book, describes with great depth and compassion the process of individual evolution . . . the connection to our fellow creatures that we have been trying for ages to deny and at the same time longing for. . .

  — LYNN GRAY, FM Five

  A serious and interesting study in perceptual relatives. The focus is near obsessional: Is Rosa the victim or is Antonio?

  —PENNY SKILLMAN, San Francisco Chronicle

  Critical Praise for Dark Plums

  Espinosa explores abuse—physical, sexual, emotional—as metaphors for women’s subjugation and degradation. . . . Chilean-born Adrianne, of Espinosa’s Dark Plums, goes from nearly nonstop casual sexual encounters with men and women to brutal prostitution but ultimately emerges with a whole, if bruised, identity. . . . Appropriate for Latino and women’s literature collections in academic and large public libraries.

  —Library Journal

  Novelist Maria Espinosa is concerned with human communication that transcends the norms usually permitted by society. She is particularly adept at capturing the distinctiveness of multicultural communities in the United States, including Hispanic, Jewish, and rural communities.

  —Roberta Fernández, Editor of In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States, author of Intaglio.

  Brilliant, deftly written, Espinosa’s Dark Plums is the story of innocent-but-knowing Adrianne. It is not a love story, if by that one means a romantic or fairy tale. But Dark Plums is a story of love wrought out of desire, passion, and a need for tenderness in the sultry depths of mind and heart. Brava!

  —Lucha Corpi, author of Palabras de Mediodia, Eulogy for a Brown Angel, Cactus Blood, Black Widow’s Wardrobe, Crimson Moon, and other writings.

  Critical Praise for María Espinosa’s Dying Unfinished

  Some years ago when María Espinosa was still my student, she presented me with a novel, entitled Longing, she had written about her eccentric husband from Chile, Antonio, in the book. The narrative was so alive and convincing, it sounded more like a slice of life, a document. A number of other novels followed, until the present one, Dying Unfinished, which takes up the main characters of Longing, who are now seen from a distance of many years. The first novel was a brave act of defiance because it involved her family. Now most have disappeared, and the present novel is a memorial, a work of devotion towards mother, father, husband, daughter, brothers, and related lovers and friends. It is a tableau of complicated relations in which the mother is the central figure, and Rosa the daughter, still plays the role of observer, narrator, and actor in the story. Once more Espinosa shows her skill in bringing to life and literature her story, in a very unusual family novel. This time it’s not scandal, but the dual points of view of mother and daughter that make it live. My advice to readers is to read them both, to complete this dual tableau which makes fascinating open-ended reading.

  —Nanos Valaoritis, author of Pan Daimonium, My Afterlife Guaranteed; editor of An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry

  María Espinosa presents the themes of alienation and incompleteness in alternating sequences between Eleanor, an artistic-minded, assimilated Jew from a wealthy but politically progressive family and her equally artistic daughter, Rosa. Eleanor is constantly torn between her desire for her dream of freedom and the structures that confine and define her to the world. . . . As with the unnamed hustler in John Rechy’s City of Night, Eleanor seeks her essence in a series of anonymous sexual encounters. Sex, the most primal currency of communication, becomes her nexus to the natural world of desire, dreams, and identity. . . . Dying Unfinished is more than a fascinating portrait of creative souls alienated in a materialistic world; it is a brilliant discourse in the search for the language of silence and otherness with the human soul.

  —Rosa Martha Villarreal, author of The Stillness of Love and Exile, Chronicles of Air and Dreams, and Doctor Magdalena

  María Espinosa’s Dying Unfinished is not a novel. It is a long poem of great lyrical beauty, a deftly-written tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, told in the intimate voices of Eleanor and Rosa, a mother once a daughter and a daughter now also a mother. Their stories resonate in the heart of every daughter who seeks her self-realization as an entity separate from her mother, and of every mother who fiercely protects her autonomy from family demands. Carving an identity from damaged tissue, from scars and wounds left us by the most significant and complex relationship in our lives requires analytical and surgical precision but also compassion and the strength of convictions. To confront memory, that merciless, relentless accountant, who always arrives with the books of rancor, regret and sorrow neatly tucked under her arms, demands an enormous amount of courage. Elusive for Eleanor till the end of her days, these are the lessons of the heart Rosa learns, for it isn’t until the fluid connectedness of mind and spirit is restored and the essence of dreams recovered that forgiveness of self and others is possible. Bravo! Gracias, María.

  —Lucha Corpi, author of Palabras de Mediodia, Eulogy for a Brown Angel, Cactus Blood, Black Widow’s Wardrobe, Crimson Moon, and other writings.

  Maria Espinosa’s daughter and mother yearn for contact – who among us does not! – and the sensation of being consumed is overwhelming. This novel takes the reader into eerie alleys of the heart with language as beautiful as the gardenia, sometimes delicate, sometimes full-bown, always pervasive and alluring.

  —Clive Matson, author of Chalcedony’s First Ten Songs and Let the Crazy Child Write

  Other works by María Espinosa:

  Novels

  Longing

  (American Book Award)

  Dark Plums

  Incognito: The Journey of a Secret Jew

  Dying Unfinished

  (PEN Josephine Miles Award)

  Poetry

  Night Music

  Love Feelings

  Translations:

  Lélia, by George Sand

  Longing

  a novel

  María Espinosa

  San Antonio, Texas

  Ebook • 2012

  Longing © 1987, 1995, 2012 by María Espinosa

  Longing was first published by Cayuse Press (Berkeley, CA) in 1987.

  It was republished by Arte Público Press in 1995.

  Cover art by Bryce Milligan. Used by permission.

  First Wings Press Edition

  ISBN Paperback: 978-0-916727-89-5

  Epub ebook: 978-1-60940-204-4

  Kindle ebook: 978-1-60940-205-1

  Library PDF: 978-1-60940-206-8

  Wings Press

  627 E. Guenther

  San Antonio, Texas 78210

  Phone/fax: (210) 271-7805

  On-line catalogue and ordering:

  www.wingspress.com

  All Wings Press titles are distributed to the trade by

  Independent Publishers Group

  www.ipgbook.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Espinosa, Maria, 1939-

  Longing : a novel / Maria Espinosa. -- 1st Wings Press ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-916727-89-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-204-4 (epub ebook) -- I
SBN 978-1-60940-205-1 (kindle ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-206-8 (library pdf ebook)

  1. Married women--Fiction. 2. Young women--Fiction. 3. Paris (France)--Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3555.S545L6 2011

  813’.54--dc23

  2011037458

  Longing owes its existence to support as well as valuable critical feedback from many people. The author would like to express special thanks to Nanos Valaoritis and Roberta Fernández.

  In memory of Mario Espinosa­

  Prologue

  Paris, 1962

  To escape the cold which seared through her, Rosa walked into a café on the Quai Malaquais. It was crowded. The rooms had a warm, yellow, electric glow. The mirrors, which were characteristic of Parisian eating and drinking establishments, reflected her image.

  She was a gaunt young woman with streaming black hair, dressed in a grey coat, and supported by shoes with very slender heels.

  Two men sat at a table towards the front. One was plump and dark and jovial. The other was thin, with sharply delineated features and a certain intensity. He reminded her of the sea—his was the face of a man who lived by the sea. Something propelled her towards him. But they were deep in conversation and did not notice her.

  Rosa walked through the entire café, as if looking for a place to sit, but her mind was fixed on the man with the seafarer’s face. Once again she passed by their table. “Won’t you sit down and join us in a glass of wine?” asked the plump, dark man, glancing up at her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. I will.”

  The slender man, whose name was Antonio, and Rosa caressed in the back of a taxi while they sped towards his apartment. She sobbed because this kind of thing had happened so many times before. She despaired over her promiscuity. These casual encounters had produced a certain frigidness in her. But sex, no matter how unsatisfying, brought in its wake intimacy that she craved.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, unable to tell him the truth.

  “Pauvre petite. I could feel the electricity you sent out when you walked behind me at the table. I could feel it in my spine.”

  A week later, as if he sensed the full intensity of her loneliness, he asked her to move in with him.

  PART ONE

  Paris

  CHAPTER ONE

  In mid-November 1963 the wedding took place in the Mairie of the Fourth Arrondissement in Paris.

  Rosa wore a yellow print dress she had bought on sale at Monoprix. Antonio wore a charcoal flannel suit. She was seven months pregnant.

  It was a mass wedding, and they repeated their vows along with six other couples under the direction of a grey-haired magistrate. Afterwards they received a slender maroon-bound booklet entitled Livret de Famille, which recorded their marriage in ornate handwriting.

  Livret de Famille. Family booklet. It seemed strange to Rosa to think of them both as a family, along with the mass in her stomach that kicked and stirred.

  Antonio kissed her quickly on the lips. His face was impassive. Glacial.

  “Congratulations! I see a little one is on the way,” said the magistrate.

  “Bien sûr,” said Antonio.

  In France, Antonio told her, people did not take these things as they did in America—here it was not unusual, even in the upper-middle classes, to be married after you were pregnant.

  Oh God, why the hell did you marry me? Why did I want you to? But it was your idea. For the baby. I hate you. I hate myself. I wish I were far away, and what am I ever going to do with a baby, a little monster to tyrannize over me the rest of my life? I’m scared.

  But she had not wanted an abortion. She ate yoghurt and liver and fresh strawberries in quantity, until one evening as she spooned yoghurt into her mouth—she was scheduled to go for an abortion next week, but just in case she didn’t, she felt she owed it to the unborn creature to nourish it—he said to her, “The baby is too healthy. Making you eat like this. We’ll get married.”

  They were between fights.

  They fought at least every two or three days, and after each battle she was reduced to tears, to speechless rage, fear, and hopelessness.

  Fighting, she thought, instead of making love.

  They rarely made love.

  Never had she been with someone with whom she had such an awful sexual relationship. How ironic to marry him. Yes, ironic. While he murmured of blonde, blue-eyed beauties who turned him on.

  As they walked along the Rue Saint Antoine back to their apartment where friends of Antonio’s would meet them for lunch, she felt terribly isolated, as if the two of them were alone together in an endless rushing grey mass. It seemed as if there were no one else in the entire universe.

  Before Rosa met Antonio there had been psychiatrists and a terrible year inside an institution with pastel walls. They admitted her when, after asking if she heard voices, she admitted hearing an occasional murmur. They seemed so interested that she enlarged. “And why are you hiding your face?” they asked. Startled, she put her hands in her lap. “When I stare in front of me,” she said, “everything gets blurry. I feel paralyzed. People seem as if they were cut out of cardboard.” “Do you ever think of killing yourself?” they asked. “Yes,” she said.

  The rudeness of a bus driver on the way to their office had made her want to dissolve. Everything overwhelmed her. Yes, she said, an institution would be all right. The walls would be comforting. She would not need to make decisions. For a while she would be protected.

  But she did not hear loud voices, nor did she hallucinate the way patients did in the locked psychotic ward upstairs. Her voices were occasional muffled sounds, a paranoid amplification of what lay within the atmosphere.

  She saw a therapist three times a week. For the first time she met people her own age who suffered her inadequacies, even some who suffered terrible things of which she had no comprehension.

  Nothing much seemed to change. The green grass and the hot sun in the summer seemed healing. When a year was up they released her.

  It cost her parents thousands of dollars, a large part of what they had recently inherited from her grandfather. She reflected that perhaps she would not have been confined so long if she had been a ward of the State, because the hospital received three times as much for each private patient.

  Why hadn’t she realized this at the time? She had wandered around the hospital grounds as if she were anaesthetized, overpowered by the harshness of everything outside. She did not want her parents to spend so much money on her.

  She too inherited money from her grandfather. With it she flew to Europe to get away from the accusing, interrogating voices, the turmoil of the past. She felt worthless. The only way she could affirm herself was to write the feelings that pressed down on her. But her emotions were too intense, the anxiety too acute. She wrote hundreds, thousands of pages but failed to find cohesive forms for the chaos that churned inside her. Even the power of expression had been taken away.

  She was lonely and sick with a bad chest cold that would not go away when Antonio asked her to live with him. He cooked her chicken soup and gave her shots of vitamin B-12 to strengthen her. He was comfort. A hand reached out to save her from drowning, just when she was going under.

  He was fifteen years older than she, had never married, and he came from Chile. He was a writer who supported himself in Paris by doing odd jobs—apartment painting, photographic portraits, an occasional piece of journalism.

  After she moved in, his economic situation became difficult. He increasingly depended on the monthly income that was sent to her from what remained of her inheritance. When she resisted giving money, he became angry and accused her of alienating his friends with her attacks of hystérie. His friends were his sources of jobs. He used to be invited out to eat. He no longer was. She broke the spigot in his apartment which supplied illegal but free gas. Living with her cost more in all ways.

  She grew confused. She could
no longer discern what was true from what was false. She did not want him to leave her. He took a more intense interest in her than anyone else ever had. He praised her, stormed against her shortcomings, became outraged when he felt she was wronged. No one had ever before been outraged on her behalf.

  After all it was not money that she’d earned or in any particular way merited, but money bequeathed as a tax-saving stratagem to each child and grandchild by her mother’s father, a dapper gentleman whom she always pictured in a straw hat with white hair, dressed in a seersucker suit with a tennis racket under his arm. He had been gently unconcerned with the chaos of the world.

  Antonio wasted the money on expensive meals in restaurants, vintage wines, and on needy friends.

  Why not? she thought. Better to spend the money like this than on shrinks. Soon the money would run out. Thank God. She looked forward to that time. Then they would be rid of the false cushion that shielded them from reality.

  He alone saw who she truly was, underneath her wisps of flying hair, underneath what he called her hystérie.

  She ached for him.

  She wanted to heal him, as he was healing her. No one understood how his rages healed her. He raged when he was wounded. He raged because he cared about her, because he was too sensitive, as if he lived without a skin.

  “Well, Petite, are you satisfied now that I’ve married you?” he asked teasingly.

  She fingered the cheap wedding ring on her finger. They had bought it too at Monoprix. It was not real gold because they could not afford such an expense. They must save for the baby, and Antonio was just a pauvre gar.

  She wanted to shout, No, damn you. I’m not satisfied. But an immense relief flooded her. For months they had tried to get married. Time after time they had gone to the Palais de Justice to apply for a license but had succeeded only after Antonio bribed several petty officials. The French did not encourage foreigners to marry who seemed likely to become a burden on their socialized economy.