Kate Wheeler

A week into our affair, Severo Marquez told me he had shot his own dog. He’d already told me about his crazy female cousin who locked herself into the bathroom every Sunday and pounded nails into her hands in bloody imitation of Christ, about the jars of ears he saw in Vietnam, and his dramatic escape from Cuba—swimming across Guantánamo Bay under fire, dragging a rowboat full of relatives to the safety of the American base. I’d also heard about his Mookie-dog, part beagle, part Doberman, so smart she could carry an envelope to Severo’s mother across a mile of Little Havana, or climb a tree to find Severo in a woman’s apartment. When he said he’d shot this unbelievable animal, his dearest friend, there was a crack in his voice through which I could see him doing it, and suddenly I wondered whether everything else I’d heard from Severo might also be the truth.

At the end of three weeks, Victoria can see the map of France in her sleep. She can make sentences for combing hair, riding the bus, detesting tomatoes. At the Pan American Academy, she gives her pupils secret French names and thinks in French about them as she listens to their hesitant clacking on twenty-four ancient black typewriters: “Je deteste Léonie. J’aime Suzanne. Hélène est belle.” She finds it strange that the same word is used for loving a man, liking a woman, and liking to eat meringues.

Every Saturday I shaved my head. At a stale hour of the afternoon I would retire from the meditation hall to the green-tiled bathing room with its dark, cool tank of water. My equipment was a mirror, a thermos of hot water, a bar of blue Chinese soap, and a Gillette Trac II cartridge razor I’d brought in from Bangkok. Shaving took an hour, and except for the bliss of leaving behind the hall and my companions, suddenly comical in their diligence, I hated it. The textures put my teeth on edge—cheap lather like saliva, sandpapery stubble, sticky smoothness of my scalp. Next day, the back of my head always erupted in a thousand tiny pimples. Irritation, I suppose. Eventually I learned that a hot washrag cured this.