vanilla and dead orchids

Another bright, white, tropical day of vanilla and orchids. Two years had been born and died since she left the country house of her youth. The place where time stood still and nothing ever changed.

He could not notice her hesitating into the dark, cold room with the heavy furniture and the cool red velvet chairs. She approached him, and their childhood dreams bombarded her. The buried ghost of their life together haunted her.

He was still beautiful, he had not changed. The letter he wrote her three days ago was absentmindedly folded and remained unopened in her pocket. His attempts at contact were met with determined indifference. His silence was unbearable and she hated him. The last time they spoke he asked her not be late for their wedding; she asked him to drive her sister Ángela home. Ángela, beautiful like an angel. She could still remember the taste of the moist red earth and the disdain of the brown dust as they drove away.

She kissed his cheeks as she had done since she was two years old. She took his hand; he was still wearing the watch she had engraved for him when he graduated, the gold chain she gave him for his eighteenth birthday, and the after-shave she bought in Villahermosa as a joke. Out of a blue handkerchief emerged her emerald engagement ring, and a piece of chocolate. She tucked them in his pocket, sat in a red velvet chair in the cold dark room, and finally opened his letter: <<Laurita>> He was the only one who addressed her by the name she shared with her mother. She stood and opened the heavy curtains, he hated the darkness. She hated his weakness, this new darkness inside him.

They met when she was two and he was five and he instantaneously became her solace in that gigantic, cold house. He gave her chocolates from his homeland, read to her in the hammock, and shared stolen mangos under the soft shelter of the purple rainy jacarandas. Tall, lanky with steely electric cinnamon eyes. He learned to love this sunny tierra caliente that his parents imposed on him as a child. At his thirtieth birthday dinner the only person shocked at their engagement was her mother. However, her mother was the only person not surprised, when a year later he eloped with her other daughter Ángela, on the eve of his wedding to Azucena two years ago.

Azucena couldn’t read his letter now. This time she folded it neatly, evenly, methodically, almost lovingly and carefully put it back in her coat pocket. She sat in the red velvet chair again and realized that this was the last time that she would see him, because now, just like her brother, he was dead too.