Father's Boleros

Father was dying with his eyes open. On the background a Bebo Valdez's bolero rose with my sister’s voice talking on her cell to some surgical provider—her denial of the inevitable: if a delivery is pending death will wait. We were all there. We all had come to celebrate Mother’s Day, and father in the bedroom upstairs, in his hospital bed, was dying with one regret. He had trouble speaking, but he wanted to say he lamented not getting flowers for mother, his wife of 60 years.

Sixty-one, mother corrected him, kissing him in the lips, as if time had not claimed their youth, as if time had not consumed their passion.

No, said father in his fading voice. I love her as I did at twenty-one.

Seeing them kiss I thought about the lyrics of an old bolero he taught me how to dance. I can hear his voice explaining how to arch my right hand in that juncture between my partner’s waist and buttocks, that intersection from where the avenue to all possibilities opens. I was thirteen and my partner fifteen. You have to make her feel wanted, father continued. Pull her against you, but not too hard as to appear vulgar, or miss the step and pass for a moron. The move was called semicolon (three steps forward, a pause and turn). More than a thousand years will pass, many more, went the lyrics, I don’t know if eternity has love, but there just as here, in your mouth you’ll carry a taste of me.

Father loved his boleros, he listened to them, played them and danced. Bolero—a Spanish stage dance fussed to Afro-Cuban cadence—derives from volar, Spanish for flying. Father seduced my mother playing boleros in the harmonica. He learned to play the harmonica from an American engineer who came to Ecuador to build the Pan-American Highway. My father’s first job was in the payroll office with the American construction company. He seduced my mother playing bolero blues, the American salary and doing daredevil pirouettes in his bicycle. He was a consummate biker. He rode his bike until cancer paralyzed his legs six months before he died. Cancer reduced him to his boleros and the indefatigable love that made him lament not getting up to get his lover flowers, his last lament.

We took turns keeping him company. What did I think, asked my younger sister, coming up to relieve me. There are four of us (middle-age) kids. Doesn’t look good, I said. She was crying. Her tears, I couldn’t help noticing, unlike my older sister’s—disciplined pouring out the outer vertex of her eyes—did jump in all directions. I couldn’t help noticing all the girls had inherited father’s gorgeous eyes.

I left them alone. I refreshed my drink and sat on the steps outside gazing at the tulips in the front garden. The family was gathered at the back porch. It was a beautiful afternoon. My six-year-old niece was kicking a soccer ball. My twelve-year old nephew was playing on his handheld Nintendo. I called my sons. One was kickboxing at the gym. Leave a message, said the answering machine in his deep voice, my father’s voice. The other, his voice is not deep, but having inherited his grandfather’s spirit, was playing music out in some corner of his campus. Then mother called us all to the living room. God, I jumped. The imminence of death makes you think of God, and little pains intensify, bring you back to the ground—a recondite meaning of humiliation, a word closely related to human. No, Dad had not died yet. I gulped half a glass. Mother wanted to make an announcement.

Not me, she said, Joe has one.

Joe is my older nephew. He and his wife had been trying to have a baby for sometime.
And, he said, we are going to have a baby.

All the women in the family cried. Seeing all the women in the family crying I realized no person cries the same. Group crying is like a symphony. I left the women crying and ran up to the hospital bed where Dad was waiting for Mother’s Day to end so he could retire, for he, of course, was not going to spoil his lover’s day.

Dad, I said, can you hear me?
He opened his yes.
I said Joe was going to be a father. He was going to have his first great grand child.
His eyes got misty.
Do you understand what I said?
With great effort he whispered that life was a cycle, and pointed with his laurel-green eyes the small boom box at his night table. Bebo’s record had finished. Did he want to hear Andrea Bocelli’s boleros? He smiled. He closed his eyes and flew away. He died in his sleep some hours later. He died like he lived, with dignity. This is our first Father’s Day without him.