The Meadow 195 What was it called? “El Amor Muere Lentamente. It means...love dies slowly. You see, the music we had to play back then was mostly for the dancing, with a quick, samba beat.” She is sure she can hear his fingers snapping rhythmically. “But now and then I got to play a mournful saxophone, though still a bit jazzy, when the lovers danced slowly.” The voice is wistful and trails off like the notes once did. “El amor muere…” Lentamente. Very sad. This she says out loud to the amber in the glass, which stirs with the trembling of her hands. “Yes, but love must be sad sometimes or you will never taste its sweetness, no?” Then it seems, she can almost hear him sigh. “And Havana then was sweet but sometimes fiery. Fue legendario .” But legends end, Marina thinks, and love. Then the music, the fragrant memory of it, is rising to the surface once more, and she remembers the flutes of dahlias in the window box and the shimmer of light just behind and an orchestra of cicadas calling into the warm night. When Marina first saw this and heard the music, she was walking in the evening. She listened as it rose from the dark. She knows she was part of all this, of the music and the streets and the force of nature that was her brother when he collided with fate. “Why did he come, tu hermano?” This she cannot really answer, or does not want to. Even now. What she does have is the faint memory of her brother always tagging along. An image she cannot keep from nudging into the present, though right now she doesn’t want it to. But it is pushing everything else aside. There was a Sunday morning when he carried his shoes silently into my room with the wallpaper of silvery birds that I loved. Where are we going, he said in the little boy voice. California—I answered without
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