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I hung San Cristóbal back around my neck and blew on my fingers, grateful for a place where I could forget I was a man without a country.
Tití Luz’s voice was in my head again. No digas nada. Dogs tame easier than people. It is why there will always be yanquis trying to convince you you’re a mutt instead of a man. Don’t you believe them, Benigno.
América, la tierra de oportunidad, I thought. A homeland for “Schemers and Dreamers” who dared to change their fates.
“Fate favors a bold spirit,”
We all cleaned our plates despite Vera’s culinary deficiencies, which told me more about my new housemates than their posters in the Menagerie ever could. You only swallow ashes if you know what it’s like to go hungry.
“Being a carny don’t require being odd on the outside,” she remarked, shaking her skirt out. “It’s a state of mind.”
“Is also much more pleasant for to be famous than feared. Is not so loud, the screaming.”
“It’s like this. We got a credo in our line of work,” Lulu explained. “It goes: With it, for it, never against it.”
“‘It’ is the sideshow,” Matthias replied. “But it’s also the sideshow life. Being ‘with it, for it, and never against it’ means being tied to this here family. Devoted to it. Ready to die to protect it.”
Not that I wasn’t used to being glared at; between the brethren of Irish ironworkers and the gentry of Nueva York, it was the daily reality of living where my existence was offensive.
But if I had to guess, the merman wasn’t leering at me because I’d killed the mermaid or helped kidnap him. In the same way I resented everyone who’d ever stood by while Farty Walsh tortured me at the furnaces, el tritón leered at me because I’d watched. And I’d done nothing to stop it.
“’Tis natural to fall ill when one’s life path has shifted,” Navya said sagely. “The former self must be purged that the new self may emerge.”
I believe him, ’cause I know a survivor when I see one. And if I was you, I’d take a long look at my pale-ass face in the mirror and think about how that Caribbean kid crossed an ocean for a slice of freedom America ain’t never gonna give him.”
Just when I thought my words had run out, one came to mind that I didn’t dare say out loud. Hermoso.
What I said next came out in Spanish. Because all my truest thoughts were in Spanish and because I knew he understood it.
“It is no wonder you cried out,” I breathed. “I cannot imagine losing your liberty and your mother in the same breath. I am so very sorry.”
“If you must call me by a name, then you will choose it,” he said. “To give you my name is to give you the last of myself, and humanity has taken enough from me. My name is my own. You may not have it.”
“How ’bout ‘Río’?” “Río.” He mimicked my rolled R like a native boricua. “Why that name?” A river can be both devastating and beautiful. I shrugged. “It suits you.”
“It is the simple truth of every creature with a soul. You are not your body, Benigno.”
“And kindness is its own food.”
As he labored for breath, he called me perfect—an ignorant assumption, for there is nothing perfect in the choices I made under the moon’s light. But perhaps the word’s meaning differs for a creature who dwells in shame of his body’s strange deficiencies.
“All language is music, all music is language. But the song of the sea is a dialect unlike any other.”
“So, your name suits you too, Boy Named Kind.”
A new ache dwells in my spirit tonight I dare not examine, and yet, what else can I do in this cage with so costly a gift as Benigno’s song except place it in my heart beside the moon? Would that he had sung for me until the dawn.
Are you my captor or my savior? I ask. His answer is a musical refrain my mind plays over and over again until I wake. Benigno, you and I are both.
“Your skepticism is human. Your kind worships your individuality, injuring yourselves in the delusion of being separate from each other and the world,”
“The children of Neptune live as waves on the water—unique and separate only in appearance, for we are united in spirit by the vastest element on earth. Thus, when the Currents call, we obey.”
“I am even more of a stranger to myself here. This country has no better idea of what to do with me than it does of what to do with my island. They won the Spanish-American War and inherited an angry, wounded youth in the Caribbean. I often wonder if the people of Borínquen will always be caught between the master who conquers us and the master we wish we could be for ourselves.”
“The noise shall keep us a secret as well, I expect?” “‘Us’?” He held up a pearly-white coquina shell. “Our friendship.”
I didn’t usually like poking around the old, abandoned corridors of my past. But Río was a natural at getting my malas mañas out of the way. Tactless though he was, when I turned over my memories to him, he handled them carefully.
I shrugged—“I learned all I needed to know about what the world thinks of ‘someone like me,’ by which I mean . . . Manos a Dios, I don’t know how to say this . . .” I drew a deep breath. “A Puerto Rican boy who falls in love with other boys.”
“Benigno, why in the Seven Seas should it matter who we love?”
Revealing your truth is like swimming, Benigno. It may not come naturally or easily. But in still waters, it can be learned,”
“Safe,” I repeated, looking down at his conviction with envy. “In my whole dumb life, I’ve never felt as safe anywhere as I feel sitting on a metal grate twenty feet above the ground with you.”
Something in his nature calls to mine with music both familiar and strange.
Despite the wisdom of my harmony, despite everything I believed possible, my heart is cultivating a pearl. For a human. And the more I learn about Benigno, the more he teaches me to swim.
“Salt water has healing properties. That is why our tears are made of it. Why should you hold them in?”
if I dwelled on the injustices of my life, the hurricane would rage in me long after the clouds had dissipated and wash me out as well.
The softest hearts wear the thickest armor.
“The moon and the ocean are lovers. Companions in the night,” he murmured.
“When the moon is full and the sea is calm, it hangs so large and luminous in the sky; I would go to the surface just to bathe in the silver glow and feel the tides rise to greet it.” His voice seemed to carve a path through the noise directly into my heart as he added, “Would that the moon could know the depth of my gratitude for its comforting light.”
I nearly asked him if he knew. If, when he fixed his blue irises on mine, he could see into my dreams and find himself there.
Before I left, I put my hand against the glass. A promise to return. He came and placed an argentine palm on the glass against mine. A promise to wait.
Río was objectively beautiful; it was easy enough to write off my fascination as the probable outcome of daily exposure to a mystery of nature. But the more time I spent with him, the less monster waves invaded my nightmares, and the more I dreamt of Río and me, the open sea, and his deep, musical voice delivering me to the sunrise.
What would he do if he knew that, when he is near me, I hunger for more than my freedom?
“Life ain’t taken away our choices, even when we been tricked into thinking it has. Way I see it, you can spend the rest of your dreary days hammering metal or painting walls ’cause that’s what the world’s told you you’re good for. Or you can ask yourself what you really want.”
“What if I’m not allowed to have what I want?” I asked. “Not allowed? Or too afeart to go after it?”
Don’t waste your damn life trying to smother a spark what wants to be a blaze.”
How would it feel to wake up to the ocean of his eyes? To measure his perfect dimensions against my imperfect ones, breathe in the turquoise sea off his skin, and feel like home had come to find me instead of the other way around?
Shivering, he presses his palm against it in a wordless bid—for what? Forgiveness? Consolation? My very heart? He can have them all. Beautiful Benigno, who works so dutifully to bring comfort to my circumstances, then sacrifices his own by sleeping on a cold ledge.
