Nina tells me she was the product of a difficult birth. It's easy to believe her. The strain of the uterine wall seems to plague her still; the muscles of her face taught, set firm from first consciousness in stress and concern, empathy for her mind's eternally bleeding mother.
She sits now next to me, the two of us crowded on her twin mattress on the floor of her bedroom, the hues of her pale beauty softly colored by the dim light and turned down intently to a book: “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49.”
“Christ, this book is so dry.” Her voice always holds the same level of dull irritation, so I never know which exclamations warrant a more ardent response.
“Why do you keep reading it, then?”
“Well, it's important history, and I would feel guilty giving up on a book with such a serious topic. It's just so much displacement and genocide, discussed solely in terms of numbers. It's like mathematics written in blood.” When she gets excited, her voice raises in pitch and betrays her slight Chicana accent, something which pains her to no end. Every time she lets it slip it startles her, and afterward her eyes dart down in embarrassment as she purses her lips and her fingers play nervously with the hem of her skirt. It's in moments like these, in her peeking vulnerability, in the struggle of her convictions and neuroses, that her beauty swells, blossoming in all of its torrential complexity to something truly incomprehensible.
We fall silent again, as I return my gaze to the wall in front of us, and her self consciousness comes rushing back, casting her eyes down once again to the birth of Israel. I, too, have a book in my lap, but I can't wrestle my attention to read it. So I'll choke down another cigarette, and wait for Nina to finish, so that we can recline and I can rest my head in the soft crevice of her underarm, find some momentary comfort in the loose, hanging flesh of her breast, her magnanimity.
She sighs, and I kiss her on her shoulder, but she is engrossed in her book and takes no notice. The air in her bedroom is still rife with steam, and it has dampened her split ends, sharpening the contrast between her near jet black hair and her light skin, pronouncing her grace.
Every Thursday I make greens, and the hours of boiling choke air out of the claustrophobic apartment she and her sister share, filling every room and crevice with thick, pungent salt-and-lemon steam. Her sister complains, telling me that Greek food smells like old men, and I should either learn to cook Mexican or stop cooking in their apartment. But Nina tells me to take no mind, that she likes my cooking and would be perfectly happy to never eat a taco again in her life.
I look on her, for just a fleeting moment, in awe. Her beauty is rich with burden, but she is no matron, nor will she ever be. Instead, she bears the confusion of mystics proud and stalwart enough in empiricism to deny a search for god, clinging desperately to a cold and unanswering logic. Her pain is the marriage of an intelligence too keen to deny the world's eternal cycle of suffering and brutality and a humanity too bright and unrelenting to accept it, and the pain is never absent from her face. It shines across her soft cheek, illuminating, resting in the final, sharp bend of her eyebrow, casting a shadow over her deep and quizzical Chicana eyes.
“ το κατσαρό σου, τ'άρμενο, βρε αμάν αμάν
σαν το πουλί πεταμένο”
Had she not been born into a parched and sprawling hell, San Antonio, Texas, into the servile class of a servile society, she would be a different person, a heroine, perhaps. But that, too, as so many things that come along with Nina, would have been impossible. Texas is the land of impossibility. There is great wealth here, but it is stuffed into the jowls of the natives, the bloated and rich Texans cloistered in their cacophonous ignorance and fear. For us there is only work: the restaurant, side jobs landscaping and cleaning pools under the punishment of the brutal and uncaring sun, and for anything else we have to run hard and blind, to cut ourselves against Austin's hot pavement.
“What time are you going in tomorrow?” I ask.
“Five to close. Do you know who else is working?” She doesn't look up from her book.
“It's me and Ricardo in the kitchen. I'm not sure who's up front. Friday it's usually Erica and Colin.”
“Oh, good. All my favorite people.” She looks up at me with a soft, vulnerable smile. I lean in and taste her scrambling, wet kiss. Even in acts of love and sex she is frenetic: her tongue darts nervously when she kisses and in moments of pleasure she seems to try and distance herself from the sensation, to be careful not to moan too loudly or convulse during orgasm, lest the thrust of her pelvis reveal some tucked away pinch of fat on her stomach.
Tomorrow, as we do six days of every week, we will go into work. I'll singe my knuckles cutting gyro meat and further blacken the callouses of my fingers on the burning stone of the pizza oven, and she will ferry the food to the dormitories in her battered Nisan, to the vacuous, expressionless morons being groomed as the power-brokers of tomorrow. They'll tip her two or three dollars, and expect her to flirt with them in return, as though three dollars were a small fortune to this poor, pretty Mexican girl, hence buying some recognition of their juvenile, leering sexuality. But she won't. She'll thank them in a flat, stable tone, and drive back to the restaurant. At the end of the night, she'll get off an hour before me, and will sit in her car and wait, listening to The Smiths, while Ricardo and I close the kitchen; pull the filthy, thick rubber mats outside, and drag dishwater rags across every surface, and wrestle to scour 30 years of grease from the concrete floor. Then we'll return to her apartment, and use the 40 minutes before her sister comes home to have exhausted, fumbling sex in the low light under the contorted face of the virgin Mary hanging above her bed, both of us still covered in a thin sheen of grease, before falling into a deep and heavy sleep.
Thinking of it now it weighs like a brick in my stomach, sucks the air from my lungs.
“Nina, I've been thinking. How long are we going to keep doing this whole miserable fucking Texas thing?”
She looks up from the book, displaying frustration with just a hint of sympathy. We've had this talk one million times before. “Doll, please. I can only take you shitting on Texas so many times a day. Besides, it's not like things in Ohio are any better.”
She hates Texas, but hers is a real hatred, born of intimacy, something which I'll never understand, and for her my resentment of the state is cheap and transient, a knee-jerk reaction of insecurity and alienation rather than a true knowledge of the place's misery. For her it's the nightmare of her childhood: strip malls and taco carts in a dull, oppressive heat and diabetic children sucking down Sabor and candy covered in a coarse dust of cayenne pepper and artificial lime; desperate and confused sexual encounters and blood spilled in bowling alley parking lots while tejano strains the speakers of an F-150; the stink of the carneceria thick with flies as the city drags itself further north, into the desert, away from water; her mother's chronic pregnancies.
“Not Ohio. Forget about Ohio. I'm never going back. We just have to find a way out of this situation. I don't know how much longer I can keep on being these assholes' slave.”
“Then go back to school! Or get a real job! Do something for yourself! Don't just sit here and pretend like terrible exploitation at shit jobs is purely a Texan phenomenon, and leaving will magically rectify everything.”
“I can't do that. You know I can't. This shit might not be Texan, but it's definitely American. Such a thing as working class dignity exists in other countries. And culture! A life that's something more than this work-television-bar bullshit. Why don't you move in with me? We can save half of the money we spend every month on rent. Then maybe in nine months or a year we can try for Europe.”
She, too, wants to leave the United States. She has spent years studying the Slavic languages, reads Dostoyevsky in his native tongue, and understands Serbian and Bulgarian. And she wants to learn Greek. The morning after the first night she went home with me she wouldn't kiss me until after we went to a taqueria and I spent two hours teaching her the alphabet and how to say “hello” and “how are you?” I tell her we should go the Balkans, to the mountains of northern Greece, or Bulgaria, or even Serbia. That maybe she could sing if the song were in 7 or 9. She tells me she's had enough of poverty, and if she wanted to live in a destitute country she would go back to Mexico, to rectify the horrendous misstep made by her parents in coming to the savage colossus of the north. I try to tell her that poverty without ignorance isn't poverty at all, and that the Balkans are beautiful, one of the world's last refuges neither ruined by the great Anglo-Germanic industrial greed of the west, nor shadowed in the darkness of religion. She wants to go to England or France, to the very germination of the disease which torments us so relentlessly here in Texas, and I turn my head away from her and pout like a refused child.
“Doll, I love you so much, but you know I can't do that. What will my sister do? And besides, your house is disgusting. You have cockroaches and you never turn the air conditioning on. I couldn't live there. Just wait, in two years I'll finish school and we can start looking for something in Europe. Okay?”
And she does love me, and there is no malice or cheap vanity to it, for there is none within her. But her love is not simple; it's convoluted and unsure of itself, so I can trust it. Only spurious emotion is simple: lust, envy, infatuation. Meaningful emotion is complicated and confused, as is her love for me and mine for her, and so it's powerful and penetrates through all facets of life. It echoes through the tremor of my hand and my mild alcoholism, through the wheezing cough that wakes me every morning, through the slight look of sadness and dis-empowerment in Nina's eyes when I bring her Thai food or do something nice for her, through her nervous fidgeting whenever she's naked around me, through her insecurity and my frustration, through our bewildered and panicky struggle to imagine some sort of liveable future together.
“Okay.” I tell her. Because I know she's right. That our long and arduous journey together will have to wait until she's finished her education, that then we will be better equipped to carve some sort of life out of whatever mountain or desert or plain wherever in the world.
She gives me one more wistful look and smiles, the light on her face by now brightened a bit, her eyes meet mine stolid and unfaltering: rich, serene, and unafraid. The hugeness of her beauty and the fortitude of her gaze start me for a moment, before I lay my head in the crevice of her underarm and feel the tension leave my body. She is so warm and human that my pulse begins to relax, and I know soon consciousness will leave me, and I can drift off to sleep in Nina's embrace.
-Kithira, Greece, June 2013
