AMORCITO AND I
By Ismael Santillanes
There is talk there are planets of great capacity. There is an abundance of these planets, all bundled in space. We shall commandeer indigenous reproductive systems. We shall propagate beyond this animal, said a virus to the other... And so, it was...
On March 17, 2020, the Golden City, home of cable cars, piers, and the San Francisco Renaissance, submitted to a Coronavirus lockdown. The infections of a city about an eight-hour drive from this Coachella Valley desert, seemed too far to worry about. My wife, Amorcito, and I listened to the news pour in mostly through social media. Still, the news had not reached into that part of my body where fear in torpid breath resides. Surely, I thought, the magnitude of a thing so microscopic would dry up before it reached this geologic sandpit.
Insulation being what it is, it wasn’t until the first part of April that the seriousness of it seeped in front of the huge smart TV in our living room. I was captivated. At first, news accounts seemed detached, narrative. In the news feeds I was catching, much about the actual virus remained a non-issue. It was talked about in terms of international trade and immigration, often employing pejoratives – political epidemiology. Then something appeared that I have personally thought best reveals a cold truth: numbers.
However, my appreciation of numbers soured as those same numbers began to pixel the human tragedy. At times, I was filled with so much apprehension that all I could do was to stare at that point of eternity I carry in my frontal lobe. The tallies unfurled off the screen as I tried to take in as many of them as I could – to offer each death a place, if not in memory, then as an urgency to learn. The faces of the dead formatted the screen, photographs taken when they still breathed, felt pleasure or the distance of someone loved. What the photographs did not speak was the physiological process of pain, as if the theme of these souls was Remember Me Smiling. And yet, all I wanted was to forget.
I looked at Amorcito, a short woman from Sinaloa, Mexico, with kind, blue eyes. She was transfixed upon the pixels of pain despite the perjury of politics. A man I can now only disaffectionately refer to as Bunker Boy spoke of life as normal, as if the incineration of thousands too infected to bury whole were acceptable numbers numbers numbers – each cold number, a cleaver against truth with which the political butcher chunked off what constituency could not swallow. I looked upon my wife’s countenance, the softness of her world, the beauty of her truth, slowly withdraw.
“Amorcito,” I spoke as softly as I could, “¿qué vamos a cenar?”
She said nothing about dinner as she focused through the unbearable. She sat in her own emptied world, her hands stilled in that tiny moment when they began to index numbers on the screen, or the faces of strangers – then she spoke.
“Amor, ¿se está acabando el mundo?”
But, how could I answer her anxiety when the numbers on the screen were not meant for the measurement of an apocalypse? I scanned the screen for prophetic disclaimers, any sign to thwart la sal, the salt of bad omens. The protector in me began to formulate distances: to the gas station; to carnicerías, meat markets; to the garage where I stored my fishing poles. Everything I would need to provide for my wife was tagged with a distance.
That evening, from beneath a pile of odd tools, I rescued a large whetstone I bought at a yard sale from an old man who seemed to hate having to sell his treasures. I took the stone into the kitchen where Amorcito was already preparing dinner. There, hunched over the marble counter, I took my time whetting the edge on every knife in the kitchen.
“¿Y eso?” she asked, reacting to the sight of all the knives piled in the sink.
“Pa’ matar zombis,” I chuckled at my joke about killing zombies.
That night, as I thought about the coming days, I easily sliced through mi chuleta, my porkchop. I wondered with Amorcito how long it would last. Maybe a month, we thought; and that seemed a lot to me. She wondered about the virus, how she heard it was like a bad flu. I remember smiling and her asking why I smiled. But I still suffer a language barrier when I try to explain science fiction in Spanish – so I didn’t tell her that the Predator in the movie was like a bad flu. Instead, I smiled and told her we would be fine.
After dinner and a lengthy talk about the virus and what we could do to prevent infection, we prepared for bed as custom dictates. We ambled to our bedroom.
It was about 2:00 am, around the time we usually wake up to pee, that I woke up as she rolled and sat up. When she came back from the restroom, I flung my legs off the edge and went to do the same. She was fast asleep when I walked back in, so I lied there looking at the big, green, digital numbers on the clock tick away. About an hour later, I decided that if I couldn’t sleep, that I would make it count.
I quietly slid off the bed, grabbed my laptop off the nightstand, and snuck to the living room. Atop the light tan, plush, acrylic couch, I engaged the world wide web, in search of the virus. I needed to remove its mystery. What I found were stories about cruise ships, shortages of medical supplies, shortages of toilet paper, quarantines, isolation, lockdowns, death, the politics of death – until Amorcito walked in at about 6:00 am and asked what I was doing.
“Estudiando el enemigo,” I said secretively, remembering the lessons in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, before I ambled back to bed armed with a better understanding, not of the virus itself, but of the personal connection to humanity each of us have. And as I followed my caring wife back to the bedroom, I looked over my shoulder to calculate the distance to the aluminum bat propped in the corner, next to the front door.
Our love grew stronger. The answer to the question on how to love and respect one another was simply a touch on the shoulder, a look into the eyes as the other spoke, the taking of time to listen, and the recognition of life’s breath and brevity. We were fine. Then, in the beginning of April, both Amorcito and I began feeling an itchiness in our throats and stomach-flu-like symptoms.
Since both my wife and I distrusted over-capacitated hospitals, and since I had no medical insurance, we opted for a home remedy. Luckily, by then, Facebook was full of remedies. It was the first time, isolated from society, from family, sitting there sharing videos found through our phones, that I felt connected – not to others outside our home, but to the idea of others.
The remedy we selected was a simple tea of hot water, lime, and salt – as hot as one could stand and heavy on the lime – at least twice a day. We also took lengthy hot showers in which we vigorously inhaled steam through our nostrils. The aim was to dislodge any incipient viral agent. A couple of days after the homemade treatments, the itchiness in our throats was gone and the stomach flu symptoms gave way a day later. We continued with the treatment for about two more weeks. Yet, even though the stomach problems and the aching bones were otherwise convincing, I wondered if it was psychosomatic.
Whenever anyone came around (a rarity anymore), the greeting was knuckles or elbow if any contact was made. There were no handshakes, definitely no hugs – only caution and distance – unless the grandkids dropped by (even more of a rarity). But, oh, the grandkids, a 4- and 1-year-old, who knew nothing of pandemics, or distance – knew nothing of the disinfectant aerosol cans I went through to wipe down every surface I thought they could touch before they arrived. They only knew nana and tata were love, and that love smiled and hugged and lifted them to blow raspberries on their bellies – and laughter, then ice cream.
After their last visit, everyone walked outside to wave as nana and our 4-year-old grandson exchanged air kisses. Then Amorcito and I walked back in to pilot our home amidst the world’s suffering.
We are still here.
Photo/Courtesy of author.
Ismael Santillanes Between the blank page and the eyes lies a world of possibilities – at times tumultuous, at times dead silent – and I sift through its dunes with arms outstretched... As a writer, language is the medium with which I war in search of answers... And while I do believe that my responsibility as a writer is to the language, it is only that when I am writing. The writer is encased within a human body; and so ultimately, as a writer, my responsibility is also to humanity.
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