El Partido es el Verbo

Silvia paced the length of the narrow hallway from her front door to her first room, the kitchen with the bathtub in it, now covered with its enamel tray that converted it to a cooking counter. When she was writing she liked to pace this hallway, her own dog run. Late at night she paced and wrote, late at night when her mind was once again her own she was still a poet.
The hallway ran the length of the next apartment's first room--a big living room. Silvia was in it the day her neighbor Maxy knocked on her door to ask her if she had some brandy (Silvia didn't have any, she didn't drink; and Rob had drunk every last drop of his). Maxy invited Silvia in for tea instead, to confess she'd just come back from getting an abortion. The hallway ran the length of the room after that, an actual dining room where she'd sat with the waiflike woman drinking camomile tea, and eating toast with orange marmalade while Maxy described the splatters of blood on the ceiling of the abortion room. She'd never been inside Maxy's before, they barely said hello in the hall and Silvia knew she and Maxy would never speak again after this. Maxy's big rooms often appeared when Silvia dreamt her own tiny apartment had sprouted another space, but hers were always different than Maxy's rooms, no dark oak furniture, no dark wall hangings. Silvia's dream rooms had moorish tiled floors, and bright yellow walls, and windows that opened onto royal palm trees.
Trying to find her mind Silvia paced the hall and studied the places where long ago doorways had been filled in and plastered over when her small apartment was sectioned off from Maxy's big one. The day of Maxy's abortion they also talked about the mob widows, the older women without men who lived in their six story beehive of chopped up apartments. Maxy said the apartments reminded her of the women, bigger lives and bigger spaces made small. Now Silvia wondered if she and Maxy were ever as different from the widows as they fancied they were.
Soon after the abortion Maxy decided to sell her lease. Silvia let herself just for one second want to buy it, but with her Partido functionary salary as reportera at their paper Redencion, she couldn't scrounge up the $3,000 Maxy wanted. She must have already known Rob's season was about to end because she never got around to talking him into getting the money from his parents. For a few days Silvia's best friend from college Zoe considered buying the lease so that when Silvia moved out she could rejoin the two apartments and make Maxy's giant living room and dining room into a dance studio. Silvia was still with Rob then and had only just begun to work for the Redencion. If Zoe and her new boyfriend Adam had moved in next door her life would have gone another way, her artist poet self would have maybe taken hold, she might have assimilated as a City person. She never quite took in that Zoe wanted the place only if Silvia guaranteed that she and Rob would go. To her the plan meant she and Zoe, although they each had mates, would go back to how things were when they were roommates. She never took in that Zoe changed her mind because she couldn't be sure Silvia and Rob would go until Rob pointed it out during a fight and then she threw a wooden plate in his direction and cracked it against the wall over his head. When Zoe changed her mind Silvia didn't let her heart break. She didn't grieve or rage or yearn. Things ended. Life had chapters, or seasons, settings and characters changed, plot lines exploded or resorped. These changes sometimes happened from one instant to the next, one boat ride or plane ride or even subway ride took you from one entire life to another. She ran her hands over the seams of the old doors to Maxy's apartment. Whoever filled in the holes and plastered them over long ago did a very sloppy job. Zoe stayed behind in the world where art was the reason to live and Silvia went on to the world where revolution was the reason. Life with Zoe was over but life with the Partido had just begun.
Silvia paced up and down the hallway feeling herself almost ready to sit down and write. Now she touched the heart shaped dent where Rob had punched into the wall the last time he stormed out the door. How did she become the powerful one and he the supplicant in their relationship? She'd spent more and more time with the Partido, at meetings, working late; every Thursday she stayed at the office overnight putting the paper to bed. The world where poetry was the reason to live was closer to Rob's world of pot and brandy than the world where revolution was the reason. She moved on while Rob stayed behind where nobody knew what came next. While he and his friends schemed to make money selling dope, she and hers were going to free the Island, make a revolution like Ventura's. Actually, it was they, the Partido, who ran the world! Knowing they were in charge made them able to work hard, and laugh a lot, and reinvent love. One of her coworkers at the Paper was a storyteller and she'd begun to love him. Now she laughed remembering his catch phrase: "Fuera del cilantrillo." He'd told the story so often of how his grandmother's scream burst from the kitchen window as if she had xray sight, when he and his brother were playing outside in the cilantrillo patch,in their Island mountain home that now, all he had to do to make them laugh and wake them was call out, "Fuera del cilantrillo" whenever it looked like they were about to fall asleep or get too desperate from fatigue after they'd been up for hours stripping in the corrections, waxing them and rolling them onto the columns of type, inserting graphics, scrambling at the last minute for filler shorts when there was unexpected blank space or to edit the tippy points of the inverted pyramid of the news articles when they were short of space, coming up with witty revolutionary captions for cartoons pirated from mainstream magazines when at the last minute a graphic had to be produced from thin air. Somehow every week they managed to get the paper to the printer just in time to make sure the nucleos got their bundles for the Saturday door to door and street corner sales that built the party.
One Friday dawn she got home and found Rob passed out drunk and the avocado tree he'd nurtured uprooted and tossed onto the middle of the floor. Before she got upset about the tree she had one moment of elated triumph and the thought, so now you know what it's like to stay home and wait, to be the one with less power, the one with the small life. You know what it's like to be a woman.
It was time to settle down to write. She sat at the desk Rob had built from a fancy door they'd found on the street. The wood was smooth and had an inlaid sunray pattern. She looked out the window at the same view she'd stared at that last morning with Rob, the domed roof over the chicken butchery. Not long after the murder of the avocado she and Cilantrillo kissed outside the Redencion paste up room. Rob intuited soon enough that her distraction was caused not only by political euphoria but by something visceral, sexual. He cross examined her for hours one of those Friday mornings until she broke down and told him she could well be in love with Cilantrillo. He threw the bottle of brandy he'd been swigging from against the mirror facing their bed, yanked the telephone cord out of the wall, punched the hallway wall, all the while screaming, "I'm a cuckhold," again and again. Next morning she discovered he'd wiped out the $400 in their bank account before he left. She didn't know for years exactly where he went.
She filled her fountain pen and wrote with green ink on the left half of the ruled notebook page

El Partido es el verbo
el verbo nuevo
engullimos desde adentro
lo que existe

la explotacion
verbo del pasado
del miedo
de lo poco excelente

El Partido es el verbo
el verbo fuerte
el verbo del futuro

del presente