The American

Chapter Nineteen

The days pass as most beautiful days do, leaving you grasping for the beginning before the end can fully arrive. We go everywhere, Teo and I, boarding early morning trains to faraway cities, to sunny Pamplona, where we run with the bulls, and to San Sebastián, where we lay submerged in the depth of the blue sea. We know the end is approaching because the days are getting shorter. And when our days transform into fleeting summer nights, I feel in me an arresting nostalgia for moments that have yet to pass. It is a nostalgia that no longer cares for the past before a vast, unfolding present—and that is how I know this is it.

This is everything I never knew I needed. This is freedom. This is love. And God—how I wish I could condense it into words. But love is often indecipherable to those who have not yet experienced it. It is blissful as an ideation; it is a poetic abstraction; but the scope of its magnitude cannot be understood until it is experienced firsthand. Some days, I am convinced I have found God in his glance; other days it manifests in my lustful silence before him, a lust I make no effort to control until he finally caves in. It is a primal instinct, a divine assurance—it is the first gust of wind before a violent sun storm, enveloping your body from bone to marrow, until every skeleton in your skin is calling out their name. Teo. Teo. Teo...

I love you, I want to say, but I never do. I don't have to. I know in my heart that he knows. And I do too.

"Margie?" Sahara says softly, breaking me out of my reverie. "You ready?"

I nod even though I know I am not. I know she isn't either, that she has spent the past many nights comforting my sobbing brother, who stands before me with bloodshot eyes and my father's urn. We are in the living room, waiting for everyone to gather themselves before we leave for the cemetery for Papa's final goodbye.

"I can't believe he picked this ridiculous urn," Mario says. It is his attempt at a joke, but it comes out choked, like a gasp for air.

Mario isn't wrong about the urn. It is pathetically colorful. Papa had picked it out during one of our many thrifting excursions, claiming that this was how he wanted to go: his body reduced to ashes and placed within, until his remains were spread across the only land he ever considered his home. The urn was supposed to be his home at eighty—ninety even—but the world had taken him too soon, at just forty nine.

"It's only ridiculous when you don't compare it to every other thing the man did," I say—because it is true. Papa was the most unconventional man I knew. Black bearded and loud, he was Catholic before he was Buddhist—and then he was a Hindu. We dismissed his religious explorations as another one of his eccentric phases because that was how Papa often was. He briefed through eclectic ideas until they bored him—and they always did. Nothing could maintain his interest for too long. But after a series of fortuitous encounters with Sahara's father in various neighborhood bars, he went beyond just the Gita. We didn't know just how much he valued his spirituality until we had read it in his will, just months ago. My Spanish father wanted a traditional Hindu funeral. He wanted his mortal body to perish so that his soul was no longer tethered to its physical form. He wanted to move on, to carry about. He wanted his freedom cherished even in death.

Somehow, my words elicit a chuckle from Mario. "Right."

When Gram and Gramp are ready, we hail a taxi to the cemetery: Gram, Gramp, Mario, Sahara, Teo and I. The first face I see upon reaching is Maria's. As I look at my father's remains before the only woman he has ever loved, I realize that everything hurts. Everything hurts because we are no longer just approaching the end; we are at the beginning of it.

Teo takes my hand into his, his token of assurance, but I don't feel his warmth the way I usually do. All I feel is  a distinct numbness, a scattered, empty brained nausea and an inability to let go. Beside Maria, Mama awaits us eagerly. It is cruel that out of all the things in the world, it is Papa's death that has brought us together.