Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

Aurelia frowned. “You are as superstitious as a grandmother. You should learn to read fortunes in the sand.”

However, Teresa could feel that Aurelia took her fears seriously; it was as though Aurelia was able to see Teresa’s visions of evil. And that was frightening to Teresa, a confirmation of her fears.

Still frowning slightly, Aurelia changed the direction of their talk. She said, “You really should come to work for me. Ernesto could find some work in Ixtapanejo.”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Teresa, vaguely.

It was that very night, however, that Ernesto told Teresa that he had almost finished building his own hut on the plantation, Señor Krupp’s plantation, where he worked. Where Señor Krupp permitted such building, for his workers. Then they should marry, Ernesto said. “You are so good, I want you always in my life.”

They were married in January, just after the New Year—a day of the new moon, which Teresa had chosen, for luck. (The earthquake, years back, had taken place at a time of the full moon.)

And indeed, a long time of happiness and luck did succeed their marriage, so that Teresa became greatly less fearful, almost forgetting her former black forebodings.

In the month after the wedding she discovered that she was pregnant, and, unlike most of her cousins and friends, she experienced at that time extraordinary good health, wellbeing. At first the pregnancy scarcely showed, but many people remarked on how pretty she had suddenly become. Even Ernesto, who was generally kind to her without many words, murmured that she was beautiful, and on the next market day, a Saturday, he bought her a necklace of bright black beads—like her eyes, he said.

Teresa decided that her old superstitiousness had been a part of her girlhood, now outgrown, along with certain pains, and bumps on her face. The important thing was the child she carried; from its movements she was sure that he was a boy, and that he would be remarkable.

Felipe, who was born on the night of the first new moon in September, was a strong handsome baby, but difficult from the start: always willful, never eating or sleeping at proper times but seemingly moved by some interior plan of his own. However, Teresa and Ernesto were vastly proud of this boy, this small strong dark child who had, already, his father’s thunderous dark eyes.

During her pregnancy and then in the early years of Felipe’s life, Teresa continued with the painting of the potter’s jars. It was fairly easy work for her to do, and she enjoyed it, and the potter said kind things about her efforts. He stopped telling her what he wanted in the way of decoration, so that Teresa could make her own patterns, trailing leaves, or sometimes bright bold stripes, in colors of her choosing.

Thus occupied with her baby and her pottery work, the cooking, and the cleaning of the hut, and all the laundry (to be washed in the plantation workers’ communal tub, then spread on rocks to dry), Teresa paid not much attention to her husband, to Ernesto. He left early in the mornings, while she and the baby still slept, and he came home late, silent and exhausted. Neither he nor Teresa had the habit of exchanging changing words about their separate days, describing things to each other, perhaps because their activities were so divergent. Teresa could not, in her mind, see the smashing of coconut shells, the extraction of the meat. And often both she and Ernesto were too exhausted for speech. Sometimes in the night Teresa would wake, aware of the warm breathing body beside her, and then she would think how little she knew him, Ernesto, who had chosen her from among all the other girls. Who had given her their son Felipe. Who sometimes in the night made love to her, quickly and silently.

Within the next ten years Teresa had four more children, all girls, the last of whom died of a fever one week after her birth. Leaving Felipe, and his three younger sisters.

As Felipe approached his young manhood, at eleven, then twelve, thirteen, he was still quite small, with protuberant shoulder blades and eyes that seemed always full of thunder, like his father’s. And like Ernesto he stood very erect, straight-backed, his head proud; he seemed eager to have done with being a child, to become a man. Watching the two of them together, her husband and her son, Teresa sighed: how dark and mysterious they both were, and how distant from her. She felt closer to the little girls, all of whom were rather quiet children, and much easier to care for than Felipe had been.

On an afternoon in September—a day of the full moon, and shortly after the fifteenth birthday of Felipe—the little girls were out playing in the clearing, near the communal washing tub, and Teresa was inside the hut working on the decoration of two large matching jars. Felipe had gone off to work with his father, as many of the boys of his age often did; the boys would watch the men, and sometimes they would help, pretending to be men themselves, although Señor Krupp and the overseers never offered to give them any money.

Suddenly, Teresa, sitting on the bare dirt floor of her hut, felt a terrific trembling beneath her, shaking her bones, and before she could stop them the two jars had crashed into each other, breaking open. An earthquake: Teresa ran outside screaming for her children, although the tremors had stopped almost as soon as they began. The little girls ran over to her instantly; they were perfectly unharmed, of course, and had not even noticed an unusual event—although, at the sight of the broken jars, and of their mother’s evident terror, they began to cry, and to cling to her. The four of them lay down together, Teresa and her small daughters, and they remained there for the whole afternoon. And, at the same time that she was attempting to soothe her children, Teresa experienced again the worst of her old visions. The earthquake was an omen, she knew, and worse, much worse, would follow. She could scarcely wait for the return of Ernesto and Felipe, so terrified was she that some disaster had befallen them.

At the first sight of their faces, as they came through the door that night, Teresa thought, Oh, I was right. Her husband’s face was pale and stormy, his mouth tight shut, and her son Felipe was paler still. On both their faces she read great rage, and a violent fear.

It was a while before Teresa could understand what had happened, but slowly it came out: that morning, a little before noon, there had been a ferocious quarrel between Señor Krupp and Luis Sender, a worker, a friend of Ernesto’s. Because Luis was late for work (his mother was sick) and because Señor Krupp had been drinking beer all morning, he shouted and yelled terrible threats at Luis. And that afternoon the body of Luis had been found, face down in an irrigation ditch, bloody and battered and swollen. As Ernesto described the dead Luis to Teresa, she saw the face of her son go paler yet, until he was greenish yellow, and then she saw him rush out the front door, and she heard the sounds of his retching.

The days that followed the day of the earthquake and of the murder of Luis Sender were rainy and drenched with gloom and fear, for everyone: for Teresa and Ernesto, for Felipe, for all the men who worked on the coconut plantation. What everyone knew was that Señor Krupp had killed Luis Sender and that nothing had been done to Señor Krupp; he had got away with it. He could get away with anything, probably.

Teresa began to feel a perpetual weak aching in her bones, a trembling that seemed to originate within her breast. She even thought of running away, of trying to escape the next calamity, which she was sure would come very soon. Maybe she would run to Aurelia, to Ixtapanejo, on the beach. But actually she could not run away; truly, there was no escape.

No visions or forebodings, though, had prepared her for the rainy afternoon, late in November (a time of the full moon, of course), when Felipe ran home, ran into the hut and stood there before her, his face the color of ashes, tears running from his eyes. Ernesto . She screamed out the name even before Felipe told her, and she went on screaming, wailing even as he spoke: Ernesto had argued with Señor Krupp, had complained about money withheld from men who had sickness, about no raises, ever—and Señor Krupp had knocked him down, and then hit him again. Ernesto’s head had been bashed into a rock. Dead, murdered. A small child, unseen by Señor Krupp, had witnessed all this and reported it to Felipe, and to the other men. “Then I looked for him everywhere but he could not be found,” Felipe told her, in a terrible new voice. “I would have killed him with my hands. Carlos Krupp is a murderer.”