Garcia Marquez Redux

Illustration: TBS

In the cab, settling in for the fairly long ride, her mind flew back to the two previous trips she had made. It had been for their mutual desire. Their lovemaking was invigorating and unbearably pleasurable, practiced and sure. Yet Javed had his predilections. He never quite denied them. 

Women succumbed to that long limbed easy grace, that old world courtesy, the patrician demeanor, the salt and pepper hair and that rare hint of a smile, never given too easily. Not a finger did he lift for attention.

She had to make allowances, keep her equilibrium, and learn to ignore. She navigated deftly but stifled the feelings that often threatened to overwhelm, bruise and bleed.

Her stay with him resulted in sun-kissed days spent writing, discussing all manner and theory of politics, philosophy, publications, the history and geography of all things. Matters mundane to the most esoteric and over countless plastic cups of wine, the love poetry of Neruda, the deathless prose of Marquez on the sandy and rocky shores of the promontory where he lived.

She accepted deep in some unknown recess of herself that, when she was not there, perhaps there resided in Javed's solitary psyche, twists and turns and byways and hidden desires, unarticulated, comatose, that no amount of revelry or willing participation from her could assuage! 

She suffered the nebulous unarticulated fears, swallowed the toxic gall leaking ever so often, threatening a relationship conducted over distance, having in the final analysis the resilience of a house of cards or the shifting sands of the beach she loved to walk with him.

Lately, long distance, over the phone, on his part abstracted conversation, lengthening pauses, lack of engrossing or titillating subject matter, leaving vacant spaces of discomfort and disengagement.

And yet, here she was in the blue cab, speeding to her destination. She dreamed that theirs would be the 'Love in the Times of Cholera', her favorite novel, in which the couple finally comes together after years of yearning. 

She still had the key he had given her the first time, never asking for it back. The gesture made her feel there could not be an end in sight, it was a talisman. Now she clutched it in her left hand.

She paid out the exact fare and stepped out. His home was on a hill, an escarpment; short climbs of an incline, cement steps and then again terrain and incline and more steps. Tiny 2/3 bedder flats and homes buttressed out, vibrantly hued, Mediterranean in feel but more sedate, lacking the European spirit. Nevertheless, Anya loved the quaintness.
At the top of the stairs outside Javed's door she gently inserted and turned the key in the lock. It was Saturday evening, now late. He was unsocial, with nowhere to go, perhaps finishing his supper. She stepped directly into the living room of the flat and found Javed standing by the pine refectory style dining table in the fluffy white toweling robe she had bought him. 

A steaming mug of coffee in his hand, the teaspoon raised to pour out the honey she had left behind and gotten him into the habit of using, rather than refined sugar! Their eyes locked.

There was no guilt, no shock, no flicker of embarrassment in his. A quizzical look, a fleeting shadowed pain, imagined, impossible to tell followed by that devastatingly gentle smile.

"Dear, this is unwarranted," a pause, a slight deliberation. "I cannot call it an intrusion, I gave you the key to come and go; but perhaps a warning? Darling, I am caring, I do not deliberately hurt you, but now you will hurt, and I had not the slightest intention. You should have waited. You are intuitive beyond measure, just a couple more months for things to run their course." 

With the utmost childlike candor, a Peter Pan from Neverland, he continued, "Things would have righted themselves. They always do and you could have spared yourself the money and all of the pain!" He shook his head gently agonized!

Anya watched, transfixed, that perfect mouth. She dragged her feet past the short corridor and kitchen where she had tried to make a three-egg omelet in a tiny Teflon frying pan and painfully scalded her hands still bearing two ugly scars!

The girl in the bedroom, Anya noted, was 16. A tawdry thong and front fastening bra were draped on the bed head. Anya caught her lying supine and when she saw her, she drew up her knees and the bedsheet to partially cover her vulnerability. 

The room smelt lightly of synthetic perfume. Anya's soft underbelly which no amount of planks or core exercises could strengthen at her age twisted. The imaginary punch nearly leveled. Nausea threatened to swamp her completely.

She confronted him, voice ragged and hoarse, "Playing out Marquez's last novel, my love, an ode or should I call it a requiem 'To all my Melancholy Whores?" 

But Javed, The Man was head and shoulders above this. "Darling do you really think this interlude will propel you to write that kind of fiction, that this is enriching?" 

Anya's voice trembled, her body shook. "You are experimenting with a whore to propel yourself into deathless prose. Did you never question that this could never be the answer? You are the quintessential Bohemian, flower child, is she even of permissive age? You have seen and done it all, you didn't need this, we if there ever was a WE didn't need this."

Javed said softly almost out of earshot, "Darling we all have our need to experiment, we find and take our muses where we can, and then we part ways. A storm in a teacup, it would have blown over, but your intensity would not allow you to forget, to make allowances. If only you cared a little less."

Anya was dissolving fast. Her entrails in knots, she heard him from far away. She knew she cared, would always care, strangely enough the saddest part of all was that she knew that in his own way Javed did care. 

All she knew was that she needed lungful of air if she were to breathe and feel the stinging rain on her face and skin seeping her through to the very bone. The rest she would deal with later. She covered the short distance to the door, opened it, raced down the stairs into the open patio and kept walking. She never looked back. 

This story is part of a collection developed in a creative writing workshop run by Shazia Omar. If you would like to join the next workshop, please email her: [email protected]