“We Both Go Down Together” by Erick Castrillon, 20

Bernardo knew that they were destined to stay together when the sliding words came to him the afternoon they made love for the first time. He said, “Hold me tight, woman,” burying his face in her breasts. “I feel like I’m falling.” And his passion for Ofelina endured until their final days, almost sixty years later when she started to drift away. It was a gradual glide that allowed her to come to terms with her soul and her world during the sporadic moments when she was capable of thinking lucidly and remembering everything. She concluded then that her inability to conceive children had not only ruined any substantial meaning that her life might have had in this Earth, but also that it was a strange blessing for which she had to be grateful.

At first it was subtle. She lost track of which compartment was the freezer and which the refrigerator. And Bernardo observed this passively, like the night when she forgot which way to hold a spoon. He reached across the table and placed the spoon on her hand. He patted her head and said as if she were a child, “Isn’t that better? It’s all simple logic.”

“What?” she said.

“Simple logic.”

“Logic what?”

“Never mind . . . . Never you mind,” he said, drinking the last nip of coffee in his cup and looking at her from the corner of his eyes.

She started faltering saying her prayers. Later on she forgot the melodies of the songs during mass—an embarrassment she confessed to her priest, who affirmed that it was indeed a sign of disaster.

One night she was staring up at the ceiling unable to fall asleep, as she often did, when everything seemed to escape her mind as if a vacuum had sucked out everything right from her head. She sprang out of bed in a terrible state of confusion, cursing and pulling her hair. Bernardo embraced her hard and said, “It was a dream viejita, nothing more, nothing more. I’m here.” Ofelina struggled to escape his hold, clawing and gouging and screaming that it was no dream, no it wasn’t. Then she noticed Bernardo’s familiar smell of stale earth and patchouli, and she settled down.

“Oh, Bernardo, it’s you!” She felt his face in the dark with the touch of her hands, embraced him, kissed him softly on the neck, and wept.

They collapsed on the floor and stayed there until Ofelina said, “I’m forgetting everything . . . I’m forgetting us, Bernardo, it escapes me and I just can’t hold on. I try to, I do. I try so hard.” She started to get up, but Bernardo stood up first as easily as a young man and helped her into bed.

He bought her flowers the following morning and wrote her a poem that made her laugh. “You are the salsa in my empanada,” he wrote. “And you are like the wings of a toucan, flip-flop flopping in the wind of our love.” But at the end of the poem, her eyes watered after reading, “I’d fall to pieces if you weren’t you. I’d fall to pieces without you.” She in turn cooked his favorite meal: grilled salmon, plantains, and coconut rice with a spice of jalapeños on top, even though it gave him heartburn.

The next two years were their happiest. They talked for long hours about all the remote events of their youth that they could remember, and all the impossible labyrinths of the things that could have been but never were. He shared with her his utmost fear of death, and the sense of futility he felt every time he looked back to the times when he worried about money and longed for luxuries that he never got to have. He revealed painful secrets to her, like his affair with Consuelito, her best friend. It was only fair she knew.
Her confessions, though honest and more refrained, focused mostly on the good and trivial things of their past. The hardest reflection she ever shared with him, although he was aware of it to some extent, was the inconsolable emptiness of never having children. “There was a particular day,” she giggled at the ridiculous incident, “When I tried to steal this baby in a stroller at the fair . . . only when I was walking away, the mother showed up and made a scene, and everybody—I mean everybody piled around accusing me that I would sell the baby as a slave to the gringos.”

“And that money would have helped us good!” he couldn’t help but saying with a laugh.

During those last years Bernardo helped her more with the house chores. He organized the bed every morning and even tried to learn how to make soup. He escorted her to the plaza to get groceries every other day, holding her hand and walking ever so slowly because he knew, though subconsciously, that they were approaching a rough ending. It got worse. Most of the time she couldn’t find where the bathroom was only until it was too late and she didn’t have to go any more. Other times, she would stare at the mirror and be surprised that she couldn’t go through it. The worst times, when she really suffered, was when she was fully aware that she had forgotten something but couldn’t remember what.

For the most part, however, she remained functional, competent, and also aware that time, no doubt, was running out for them. So she also made her best efforts to make Bernardo smile. One day she surprised him when she threw a rock at the window and he saw her outside with a band of mariachis dancing and singing love songs for him. She said, “Pay the nice gentlemen, Bernardo, because I forgot where I put my money!” He hugged and kissed her head and invited the musicians inside to celebrate with them. That same night, on his way to the bathroom, Bernardo heard her sighing almost with hope in her dreams, “Rosalba! Consuelito! I’m almost there, I’m coming . . . I’m coming.” Then he had the impression that the house was trembling, as if his steps across the room were disrupting a delicate balance between the two of them that kept the house from collapsing at once.

Another time, inspired by a strange curiosity, he asked her whether she regretted anything other than not having children. She replied, “Yes, but I don’t regret having lived with you if that’s what you mean.”

“There must be something,” he insisted.

“Well . . .” It took her a long time to organize her thoughts, and finally replied, “You know that big wheel they have at the fair?”

“Oh, Ofe, not that.” Bernardo covered his eyes and shook his head.

“I wish you’d force me to ride it. It’s frightening being that high, you know . . . but I always wanted to see how things looked from all the way up there.”

It was something that he couldn’t have anticipated. But he had asked, and that answer stroke home for Bernardo because they shared the same fear of heights.

The day came when Ofelina had forgotten how to get dressed, and conversations between them diminished. Entire days would pass without a word being said. She liked to lie in bed, oblivious to everything except the vanes of the fan that went round and round.

In one of those final days, Bernardo came inside their room with a bowl of soup that he had prepared for her. And in a moment of unexpected clarity she sat up on the bed and said, “I’m losing. I’m going. Thank you for being you, Bernardito. I love you so very much.”He stopped cold, petrified, horrified by the tender words. The bowl slipped right out of his grip and shattered on the ground. Then he walked to her as if it were the last time he would ever see her again, and he lay down next to her, crying and lamenting.
“I’m sorry for all that we’ve gone through,” Bernardo said. “I’m sorry that I shaped our lives. I’m sorry that this happened to you. I should have . . . we should have done more . . . yes, I should have . . . ” And they lay solemnly; he weeping, and she as cold and confused as she had been a few minutes before.

The following morning he dressed her up in her best clothes, combed her hair, and took her out for breakfast. After they had eaten, they took a bus to the fair. The day was blue and sunny, and the noise seemed to stimulate Ofelina in a good way as they sat at a bench in front of the Ferris wheel. Bernardo was feeding Ofelina cotton candy and watching the people pass by with their frowns, and their smiling children, and their safety in numbers. He was drenched in sweat, carving a line with his nail on the wood of the bench. His eyes seemed to turn wan after they had finished eating the cotton candy. He left her alone for a moment, and a little later came back with two tickets inside the pocket of his Sunday guayabera. “No regrets, right?” he looked at her blank expression, tried to smile (though he couldn’t), and then helped her up on her feet.

They approached the line, waited out their turn, and stepped inside one of the baskets of the old wheel. The door banged closed with a rusty squeal, and the entire structure started moving, stopping, moving, stopping. When all the vessels were filled with people, theirs was half way to the top, and the ride at this point began moving smoothly and continuously. Bernardo saw the dirty tops of the tents and the people getting smaller, further away from him like ants. All seemed so ephemeral. Almost at the zenith he gazed at the horizon and pointed to the distance. “That way is the Pacific,” he said to her with a resigned voice. “I’m sure. It has to be.” She was frowning and sweating, though as the basket came down, her face turned blank and oblivious like it was before. They reached the bottom and then the peak one more time, and Bernardo said, “Not yet, not yet,” gazing into the same horizon that seemed to vibrate between a big thing of blue and green. They came down again and started a third revolution. He stood up midway to the top and helped Ofelina hunch by the edge of the rail. They were going up so high, so near the clouds where there was no gravity—at least for them. He put one arm around her waist and pulled the lever to open the gate of the basket with his other hand. He kissed her in the side of her head, and when they reached the very summit, he let his body fall out of the basket dragging her along with him.

This story is currently being turned into a short film. Donations for this project are desperately needed. If you would like to support this endeavor or simply find out more about it please contact mightykamelot@hotmail.com.