The Invention of Summer
Xita Rubert on loneliness, grief, and the ways we recognize pieces of ourselves in strangers.
Cake friends,
We got a slight taste of warmth over here in the Northeast earlier this week. Now it’s back to winter, leaving us lusting after sunnier, brighter days. This week, we’re holding onto that warmth by sharing Xita Rubert’s “The Invention of Summer,” a surreal piece of fiction from Forbidden Fruit set on one of the hottest days of the year.
Be sure to also pre-order Xita Rubert’s forthcoming book, The Key Biscayne Affair, which is out this fall, and submit pitches to our eight issue: Spoiled Rotten (submissions are due March 25). We’ll be sharing preorders for Steak Zine very soon.
The Invention of Summer
Essay by Xita Rubert
It could have happened any other summer and in any other town. Events like these do not depend on space or time, they only need an observer to exist. And there were people in town besides me, other possible observers of the events, but being present does not mean witnessing.
In our building, yes, everyone was gone except for me. The surnames of all the neighbors were stamped in the mailboxes, but there was always a nameless one, an anonymous creature, a ghostly apartment. Then, one day, the ghost wrote: Viuda del Señor Ochoa (Mr. Ochoa’s Widow).
It was July. I saw it—that new name—as I was leaving for the airport. I was skipping town for the first time in years, escaping the apocalyptic heat wave that, like everything definitive, conjured up a resistance. The resistance that things exert when they are about to be abandoned. And my subterranean conscience saying: Are you sure? Are you leaving? Do you really want what you claim to want? Do your actions reflect your will—or your cowardice?
The Building knew, the Widow knew, I was about to know. I put on a disapproving face, but secretly I wished for it: for the Widow to call on me. The Widow, I say now, but at the time I didn’t know who was meowing at me from above. Someone, someone on the upper floors was asking for something, shouting without being able to shout, expressing herself without communicating anything intelligible. I could only decipher a woman’s voice, although in old age features of gender, of origin, of character become confused and the same in all kingdoms. And in the kingdom of our Building, on that day of my false escape, the Widow had chosen me to rule. I say “to rule” because now I understand the logic of the moment, but at the time it seemed like an unforeseen, random event. I was running late for my flight, yet I meekly consented, and ascended four floors until I found her. She was standing outside her door.
“Can I help you?” I said.
I was preoccupied with the suitcases I’d left downstairs, in the vestibule, hoping my altruism would last only as long as altruism lasts. But there was something ambiguous in the old woman’s face: something calculating, the opposite of helplessness.
“Oh, yes, dear. Oh, dear. I didn’t know if anyone would still be in. This late in the summer, I mean . . . and someone as young as you, and so lanky! So pale! Aren’t you going to get some sun? Aren’t you going to the beach?”
The old woman had recognized me. We ghosts recognize each other even if we don’t have a name. We identify each other in a rehearsed tone. In the feigned incapacity. In the infinite chant that you can only decipher if you’ve chanted it, too. I was about to tell her that I had a flight, that I was late, that my bags were downstairs and a cab was about to call me, so could she please hurry and ask me whatever she needed.
But something in me delays what is planned when an external and inconvenient stimulus lurks—the more inconvenient the better. And besides, for years I’d been living immersed in someone else’s tempos, in measures and rhythms that were not mine but another’s. Whose? That’s the business of ghosts. At that moment, I wanted so badly to be rid of the old woman that the obvious thing happened: I gave myself up to her.
“Tell me, tell me what you need,” I insisted, pretending not to know, pretending that she wasn’t me.
“Look, I’m unable to open my own door! Suddenly I can’t. What do you think, my dear? A poor old woman locked out of her house. It seems there’s a first time for everything, even at this age.”
Very eloquent for a poor old woman, I thought. You open your door perfectly, you execute this performance every week, it’s mathematical, each time with a different neighbor, but at this point in the summer I’m the only one left. And, now that I understand the logic, I could have said this to her, because she expected that reaction—any violence so long as it involved contact. Silently, though, I took the key she handed me, and with just a slight gesture the door opened for me. But the question, of course, is not whether doors open or not, whether someone is pretending or telling the truth. That is not the question. What’s true, what’s important, is what the pretense conceals: what the woman who pretended to want my help with the key actually wanted from me. There is nothing false there—in the impulse that leads us to cover everything with something else not exactly needed. I know because, by leaving town, I was guilty of this very self-deception. That commonality made my hand into her hand as it opened the door of her lies, which was her house. The woman did not want my help, but my presence.
The thing, of course, is that we don’t turn up unless we feel useful, and the people who want things from us internalize that to the point of turning themselves into needy invalids. I stepped into the apartment and, Alice in Widowland, I shrunk. The hallway was strangely dark for that yellow July and extremely cold for such a heat wave. The furniture was covered with picture frames, plastic bags, and what I thought was rotting fruit, but now know to be tubers.
“I’m leaving, señora, have a good . . .” I said, and then, because I’m the first one to betray my decisions and pretend that external forces make me truncate my plans, I added, “But señora, do you live alone?”
“Do I live alone?” She laughed with not a trace of the brittle tone, as if those two words, live and alone, did not mean what they meant at first sight—as if I, young but old like her, used them oblivious of their hidden meaning. She stared at me with an abusive kind of hope. And since I understood her perfectly, I pretended not to understand.
“Yes, I asked if you live on your own. Or if you need anything else. I have to go now, but if you do live alone, I’ll come and visit when I get back. I’m leaving now.”
“You’re leaving?”
She knew. She knew that I knew. She knew there was no need to ask me to stay with her, that it would happen anyway, that the true bond, like a toad, goes around and above words, it says croak and people understand, you and I understand, and the Widow understands. I walked down the hallway like it was an aisle, like I was a little girl parading for her first communion. And then I saw the face: the face of that man. I realized that my summer had begun when I saw the portrait. She didn’t even need to point him out to me.
“Who is it?” I said, gesturing to the frame.
But I knew the answer before I heard it, even before I asked. She didn’t reply right away; she kept me moving down toward the living room, as if staying in the hall was rude or unusual in such a ceremony, and we came to an even darker room, more cluttered with junk and bags, and I knew that this was my destination, that I had taken my plane and landed. From this place, which was not exactly her home nor mine—it was our new land—she kept silent.
I saw for myself what I was supposed to see: Among the organic waste, there were hundreds of frames with hundreds of photographs. If you looked closely, it became clear that all the photos were the same; hundreds of renderings of the man’s face populated the apartment. They hung among rotten fruit, paper bags, and what I realized were pomegranates. The pomegranates glistened, and, ironically, looked like decoration rather than waste. Of all the decaying fruit in the Widow’s home, only pomegranates resisted, insisting on looking alive.
The kitchen seemed less cluttered than the rest of the apartment, and before I said anything the woman intervened:
“Well, I need some space there for kitchenware.”
She said it justifying herself, as though there was too little garbage in the kitchen, but she and I knew that nobody cooked there, that it was a theater kitchen, a prop like her apartment and mine, an embarrassed mime like her and like me. And it was for this purpose—to unmask us—that summer was invented. I don’t remember much else, because then she spoke to me about her late husband openly, without mystery, a strange clairvoyance in an insane house, direct speech from a crazy being, but I was thinking about something else, again a resistance brewing in me—not because I didn’t want to listen to her, but because listening to her meant listening to myself, croak, and summer was invented to pretend that there’s a melody and a story other than the familiar one, the one that repeats itself, insisting that Alice and the Widow are opposites.
Not knowing where to place my senses—where to rest my hands, where to focus my eyes, whether on the surprisingly red pomegranates or on the photographs—I looked at the Widow’s face and instead I saw her husband’s; I refused to look into the mirror she was gesturing at. I told her that I had to go, that I was missing my flight, that I would come to visit her upon my return. Before I closed the door, I heard a man’s voice calling.
Little does it matter who that man was, if it was a man or a woman, if it was a real voice or a hiss heard only by her and me. It was the gagged person on every apartment-building floor, in every kingdom—the ghost that invents summer to conceal itself before the others say to him: disappear, go. The Building knew, the Widow knew, and I knew it then. I saw it all and said nothing about Mr. and Mrs. Ochoa, who live or die in my building surrounded by dark, rotten fruit, and I gravitate toward them as I do toward every enigma that pretends to be home.
Xita Rubert is a Spanish novelist and the author of The Key Biscayne Affair, forthcoming with Ecco, where a family moves to Florida and ends up ensnared by diplomats and misled by papayas.
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This was so beautifully written. I love it.
So excited for steak zine!