Elephants in the Sky Tula Singer

Tula Singer

i. elephants in the sky

Elephants were marching in the sky. They were marching sadly, severely, they were headed towards the sun.

The sun was a small red coin of fire.

Pia Pavese lay on the grass, regarding the herd; a flame tree bowed over her and the garden. At the zoo, the elephants were always locked behind bars, locked with a key. She didn’t have that key. The guard had it. He wore it on his belt, which jiggled. Once, she’d asked him what the elephants had done to end up like that, like delinquents. He’d only shrugged and clumped coarsely away. She’d also asked the elephants as they stood collectively like mountains in front of the sea, but none knew the answer to their terrible fate.

Wind stirred: a stand-in ghost. It came from the ocean, just like Pia Pavese. The grass was parched and it quivered under her legs. The flame tree quivered too, and a premature bud drifted down to her nose, completely composed. She flicked it away—it smelled of nothing, it smelled of air.

Pia Pavese bit into another watermelon, spit a seed into the grass. She had learned never to swallow the black seeds, or else a melon tree would grow in her belly.

There were eight elephants. Vittoria Tadeo was on her way to buy milk at the distillery.

“Is that you, Pia Pavese? Why are you in the garden? Didn’t you know that scorpions are drawn to still, dark corners?”

“I am counting the elephants in the sky.”

“Elephants?”

“Those are not elephants! They are clouds!”

“Clouds don’t take long steps in the sky. Clouds don’t play or eat watermelons.”

Vittoria Tadeo laughed the laugh of a fat woman. “All right. But you better watch out for the scorpions…if they sting you, you’ll lose all sense of touch for at least fifty-eight days. Tell your mother to save me a case of rice!”

Inside, Mama was pouring a pale lager into the arroz con pollo. A pepper caught fire on the stove and the red skin went black as coal. And the windows were open, and the doors were open, and the ingredients were everywhere, and María de León, who lived five and a half blocks away, inhaled the hot beer, cilantro, and roasted pepper, and asked her cat Changó why she’d never learned to cook like that, then swallowed down another fermented prune, or at least, that’s what it said on the box. So Mama cooked, and Tía Paloma sat on the stool by the kitchen door, the one that led to the cobblestone alley where milkweeds busted in the cracks. She smoked her cigarette of the day: a temporary temptation.

Once the sun had reached the crown of the sky, Pia Pavese’s family began arriving in threes. They were coming for lunch.

The cousins sat in the shade. Tía Paloma sat with them, and spoke of the cashapona tree which had appeared across the street only a few months before—el árbol que camina. She said it had walked all the way from Dolphin Plaza, moving to the light of night. Pia Pavese thought that the tree would be gone by the full moon.

Tía Paloma scratched her head of ash and tickled a cousin who was trying to rob a square of chocolate. “Not yet,” she said. “The chocolate is for later.” Chocolate always came from the watchmaker’s son. He travelled abroad every other week and never once forgot to sneak back this sort of delicacy.

The chocolate melted in the shade.

Arroz con pollo was served on the porch, and the table was swarmed by hands of varied colors and sizes as they all reached for the ladle at once. Heels clicked on the white and red tiles, voices clicked together, too, waves were absorbed in the west. Only six people sat around the table; the rest ate on the grass and on the swings and on the plastic chairs that leaned against the house. Neighbors gushed in from the kitchen door as Tía Paloma yearned a second cigarette.

The dish was yellow, it tasted yellow. Pia Pavese ate two servings and remembered how it tingled her tongue to lick a marble in the heat. Music played with the wind and roses.

In that precise moment, a snarl tore the breeze and two beaming red eyes blinked within the bushes: it was the drunken monster, again. Pia Pavese soared into the house, the cousins followed. They screamed, daunted, hiding in the closet, under the bed, behind the curtains, and even in the kitchen cupboard. Martha—the oldest of them all—refused to be a part of such nonsense. She said that they were only running from the pink plumerias that bloomed in the bushes; monsters didn’t exist.

The children were so busy hiding that they missed out on the chocolate; Mama, Tío Ricardo, Tía Paloma, Tía Rocío, Anastasia Colina, and Lela had devoured it quicker than tigers. The incident caused much of an uproar among the younger members of the family. Tía Paloma promised to take them out for plum ice in the evening.

As the afternoon chilled, Pia Pavese returned to the sky. The elephants were still marching. She wanted to fly to the ether and ask them why they hadn’t come down to play. Tía Paloma explained that they were on their way to the City of Amber, and could not be held up.

The cousins pointed sharply to the sky and spread their eyes like leather pockets.“Lion! The lion will eat the elephants. The lion will gobble them up!”

The lion shadowed the elephants in the sky, then sauntered away.

ii. jazz

Thelonious Monk was playing in the shadows of the café. There were a lot of people inside, and the waiters were standing in corners, talking politics. Pia Pavese’s café con leche cooled on the table—now it tasted gray. At home, the coffee was bittersweet, with milk froth and cinnamon and a pinch of salt. It was certainly the water.

Pia Pavese was with friends. They were first-class. They wore chokers, blood nail polish, and denim skirts. Some even had tattoos on their ankles, hidden under their socks. Pia Pavese listened to the conversation. They were reviewing Mario Bahía’s new album, the songs they’d liked, the ones they hadn’t. They were complaining about Ms. Urabo and the paper she had assigned on the metamorphosis of perception, they were complaining about the sun. Pia Pavese pushed her coffee further away and got up to buy a pastry. She asked her friends to guard her bag, but they didn’t hear her.

At the counter, she couldn’t decide between the cloud cake and the anise cookie. The waiter said the cloud cake was more popular, but she chose the anise cookie instead. It tasted of New Year’s Eve at home, when they would burn the hay doll in the center of the city and throw eggs at the fourway intersection in the road and eat twelve grapes for fortune. It tasted of geometric tiles, of the flame tree that guarded the yard. It tasted of black scorpions, which Tía Paloma would always end up killing with the water boiling on the stove, while everybody else climbed onto sofas and stools and tables, frantic.

Pia Pavese had been sculpted into a new school, into a new city. She’d learned the language and the people, and she had friends. Her friends were as chill as they were confusing. Sometimes they talked too much about things that didn’t matter, like Paulo’s new Volkswagen, and played games she didn’t understand, like the one where they would go around in a circle and rate each other from one to twelve, or the other one where they would drink cheap rum until they couldn’t say one lemon two lemons three lemons. But they taught her many things, too. They taught her to always confirm that the person you are kissing has their eyes closed, they taught her which end of the cigarette to put in your mouth, they taught her how to get a taxi at night. They even taught her how to make sangría without wine, although she wasn’t sure she trusted the recipe.

At first, Pia Pavese would walk to school along the promenade, but then the sea was gray and

trapped, the sea was sad. She’d begun walking through the city streets instead. The streets smelled of sewers and buses and old food, but the sea smelled worse: the sea smelled of death, of boats and plastic and gasoline.

Pia Pavese had not returned home in four hundred and eighty-eight days, and now the rattle of the dominos at dusk or the rain tapping on the road like rice or the peacocks eating bread crumbs outside the bakery had assembled in her head as a fantastical empire. And here, where the streets were black, where the pigeons were scared of the people, she was an indefinite visitor. She missed her city. She missed her trees, her ocean, her aunt. Tía Paloma wore a necklace with a grain of rice that had her name on it.

Pia Pavese’s friends said they liked her blue earrings. Pia Pavese liked them because they were the color of the sea, but her friends liked them because they matched her dress. She would have told them about the ocean in her home city, about how the water protects you and takes you to shore when you’re too far out, about the unicorn fish and the stars that had peeled from the sky several eras before, about how the sand sucks black-hearted people inside, and leaves them there to rot among the spiky shells.

Then they complained about Thelonious. They thought his music was dry and abstract. They didn’t think it was music if you couldn’t sing along, and Pia Pavese nodded too. The instruments confessed to each other in a noble argument.

Thelonious strolled over and whispered in her ear. He had a voice of rocks.

iii. mémoire de daisen-in

Pia Pavese’s young cousin Alarica called from home, again. She liked to hear about Pia Pavese’s adventures overseas, she liked to tell her about her own adventures, too. They never talked for very long, though, because Pia Pavese worried about money, and after just a few minutes, the international calls would just get too expensive.

Alarica asked about winter. Her neighbor had told her that when it got really really cold, the stars cracked. Their shatters dropped all the way from the sky and melted on the city. Pia Pavese explained that snow was just water that had frozen in the clouds. Then Alarica asked about the lake, if it really was sweeter than chocolate milk; that’s what her school book had said, that lake water was sweet. She asked if people drank it when they went swimming. Pia Pavese told her no, no it wasn’t that type of sweet, and naturally nobody drank it—lakes were made from ice and streams that dripped from mountain peaks. Alarica also asked about the skyscrapers. She asked how they could build towers that were so tall they touched the clouds. “That’s only a name,” said Pia Pavese. “They don’t really reach that high.”

Pia Pavese asked about home, although they were running out of minutes. She asked about school, friends, and old neighbors. She thought that Tía Paloma should quit smoking and finally find herself a job.

Her little cousin told her about the house she had built in the yard for the fairies. She had made the roofs with the moss that grew on the rocks, and the walls with sticks she had found in the woods, and the hammocks with old corn husks from dinner. And she’d made the bowls with mamoncillo shells, and the salad plates with flat pebbles from the ocean, and the tables with bark, and the chairs with shells. And she’d made a splendid meal with red berries and honey, and the following day, she’d found that the little houses and tables had all been knocked over, which was the fairies’ way of indicating that they had enjoyed the offerings. Pia Pavese laughed and explained that the wind was fierce in the night, it had struck them to the ground.

Pia Pavese gazed in the mirror while Alarica went on. She was yellow and bushy the way a lion is yellow and bushy. She wore citric roses—a foreign perfume. Her eyes were round and fragile, they fell in the corners. Her lips were white. For a moment, she couldn’t recognize herself in the mirror.

When they hung up, she realized she had forgotten to ask about the sea.

iv. the sea

Tía Paloma breathed heat over her shoulder. Her throat still carried sambuka and her skin, sweat and tobacco and apple cider vinegar.

“No, I don’t remember,” said Pia Pavese. “I was just thinking about the clouds from when I was a little girl.”

“I am actually dead, you know.”

“I am here for your funeral.”

“Black never has been my color. I would have preferred a dark purple or green theme.”

“By the way, we found a bouquet of dry flowers under your bed. What do you want with them?”

“The milkweeds? Those flowers are so ugly. I never found them very appealing, aesthetically. Why do you think I hid them under the bed?”

“Should I tell them to throw them away, then?”

“No! Hide them under your bed. They are filled with secrets. I used to pick them in the alley behind your kitchen.”

Pia Pavese picked up a fat shell and hid it in a pocket. Tía Paloma had named these shells “telephones of the sea.” Now she was dead. According to the malady experts, she’d been watering the snake plants when all of a sudden, a gust of wind had pierced the window over the sink; she had never been prone to illness, and she certainly hadn’t taken a fall to the head—rather, they came to the conclusion that the wind had taken her breath with it.

Pia Pavese had sent her aunt countless letters that never arrived. The postal system was corrupted ever since the old spinsters from Calle del Tieso had begun hoarding the mail. This malfunction only came to her attention upon returning; she thought Tía Paloma had died knowing everything about who she had become. How she would study physics in the fall at one of the most

prominent academies in the country. How she had travelled to places where vultures hovered over the water and where lakes chill at the foot of a mountain that gets lost on its way up to the sky. How her first kiss had tasted like the sun, how she’d fallen in love, out of love, and in love again. How she’d graduated with the highest notes in the institution, how she’d written about time in a nonlinear form, and how hundreds of people had read her work.

“I am sad to be back.”

The moon settled like a scorpion, then stirred the coolness.

“I’m sad to be back and I hadn’t wanted to come, not even for you. You are dead now.”

“Yes, I am.”

“I am sad to be a visitor. I struggle to grab a taxi off the street, or negotiate melons at the market. I no longer enjoy fried milk, mamey smoothies, not even plum ice. Now the ocean is warmer than before.”

Tía Paloma spread her lips, her teeth were yellow.

“Under the flame tree, I took naps. And I had a recurring dream. In the dream, I woke up. I floated to the moon. I grabbed a star, and grabbed two stars, they hung in the blackness, then melted in my tongue. They tasted bitter and good, bitter like a grapefruit. Do you remember, tía, how you would serve us the grapefruit? With honey? We wouldn’t eat it. We wouldn’t eat it otherwise. We ate it with the honey, I liked it with honey.”

Waves expired on the sand, pebbles rolled with it.

“I always thought the clouds were elephants. I thought that the ocean played with me when I swam in the coast, that the grass was an orchestra. I used to taste tulips when I drank water. I don’t know what tulips taste like…they don’t have a taste. What is their taste? I used to lie under the trees with Eliza, and we would watch the clouds. We thought they were elephants. We thought they were going away, to nowhere, or somewhere, to the sun.”

“Do you know where all my letters went?”

“No, but I have them now.”

water. Tía Paloma kissed her shoulder. She walked through the black sea. Her head sunk into the

Mama had prepared a coconut ceviche, and as Pia Pavese walked back, the mint and the lemon took hold of the air. She thought about the elephants. About her aunt, about the sea. Her aunt was dead.

The shell was in her pocket, it was rough and pink. She pressed the crevice to her ear and a note curled inside: it was the bottom of the sea.