Costa, Sierra y Selva

“I was watching a report,” she began. The words transported me back to late evening conversations over hot lemonade in a cold kitchen. Amelia has never been very pleased with the way things are going in the world, a sentiment she shares with many in her generation (and increasingly with many in my generation). Those nights we would talk about politics, the economy, neighbors, education…and whenever a topic grew stale she would introduce another with the words “I was watching a report this afternoon…”

Now the topic was time. Time flies. Time is money. Time is the one thing there is never enough of. It was an appropriate topic. I’d been ruminating over it as I’d walked the mile or so to my old neighborhood that afternoon. The leafy patterns from the trees of San Andres agitated my thoughts as I walked beneath them. I’d walked these sidewalks before, nodded good morning to the security guard on the plastic stool near the gym, seen the old women doing thai chi in the park. Could it have been so long ago? The math added up to two and a half years, gone in a second, it seemed.

A visit to Amelia had not been the purpose of my return, but as I passed the old arched wrought iron gateway on my way back from seeing another friend, I knew I owed her a visit. I rang the bell.

Moments later, I was sitting on the old sofa in the wall-papered living room. Van Gogh’s sunflowers above me continued in their eternal search for sunlight, the heavy dining room table still bore its fussy lace table cloth, and beyond it the patio was still crowded with its ferns, violets and bougainvillia just letting in the soothing afternoon rays. I could see the frosted glass of the kitchen door and the familiar china dolls, cross-stitching, and souvenirs gifted by a sea-faring son on the shelves near the windows. The house hadn’t changed much, and neither had its mistress. The lady of the house sat as she always sat, legs daintily crossed, perfectly composed in her armchair, content to be goodhumoredly discontent.

We reminisced. I’d lived in her house for nearly two years as a boarder. Those were strange, fast-flowing times, I think. A circus had moved past her as people came, put on dazzling performances and then exited stage left. It was an odd premise, a middle-aged Peruvian woman playing hostess to a crowd of young, American men with ideas no single continent could hold. They were acrobats and clowns, philosophers and poets. She observed them, taught them Spanish, fed them from a frying pan, made their beds every single day of the week (I remember arriving one evening to find my room unchanged from the morning’s disarray and thinking that the entire world had collapsed), and simply welcomed them. And they, one by one, had taken bows and flown away into the far territories.

“You know how the planets are all accelerating in the universe.” She spoke the commonplace with arched eyebrows and lifted her mottled hand to illustrate with a casual wave the celestial movements. I sipped the orange juice she’d given me and nodded enthusiastically. I tried to picture the television panel presenting their credentials by laying a pile of tabloids on the glossy surface of the studio desk.

“Well, the experts on the television were saying that, because the earth is rotating so much faster these days, we’ve actually been losing hours over the centuries.”

“Really?”

“Yes. That’s why people are always complaining about how fast the time is passing. Here we are and it is almost Christmas! The truth is that each day now only has 16 hours in it.”

“But the clocks haven’t changed,” I mentioned quietly.

“Of course it seems that way,” she said impressively.

I held my tongue. How could I blame her for trying to come to terms with watching her life flashing past her? The auburn light crept through the window and settled warmly over my face and hands and the sunflowers arched their backs eagerly. In a handful of weeks I would be leaving this place. For me, this meant nothing more than a page turned in a book whose ending, Lord-willing, was still decades in the future. It was true that there would be no more friendly evening chats in Amelia’s living room, or afternoon walks through San Andres. And yet, the years stretch before me like the Pacific, gleaming and promising. Things were different for Amelia. For her, soon there would be no more performances to behold, and the acrobats and clowns, shoes in hand, would softly pad to other, brighter rings as she sat placidly watching the planets spin out of control on her television.

An hour had passed (or, by her estimation, forty minutes) and I bid her farewell with a promise not to be the stranger I’d up to that point been. We stepped out of the house, crossed the well-waxed courtyard and she unlatched the gate for me. “It was good to be home again,” I said as she offered her cheek for a goodbye kiss. “Yes,” she said with an absent smile, “stop by and see me again, you ungrateful man.” Then she waved me down the street, past the Engineer’s bodega and the basketball court, away from Vista Hermosa and the house with the wrought iron gate.

As I made my way down the avenue and back toward the Institute, the buildings were sweeping the pavement with their six-o’clock shadows and the rush hour traffic blasted its way through the streets. I realized that the very thing that rushed this lady and myself headlong into loneliness was also the very thing that rushed us headlong into blessed reunion. I would see Amelia again, perhaps in this life, perhaps in the next. Until then, there was “world enough, and time” for the both of us in God’s perfect arrangement.