The sun rose on the horizon, half way over the land, half way under the land, reddening the land the color of dawn and dusk.
Tomás lay on his side and looked out the single window of the gardener's hut.
He felt Gabby's body against his, her chest on his back, her leg over his hip, her arm around his shoulder, holding him. "
"Her hands are my hands,” he thought, “Her feet my feet, her heart my heart, her life my life. I’m not alone."
Tomás feared loneliness with a fear present and absolute, a fear he sometimes stood against nose to nose and fought against with bare knuckles and raging heart, yet a fear he sometimes fled unequivocally with weeping eyes and pounding heart, a fear that grew out of the dry, broken ground of his parents deaths, deaths he could neither fathom nor give voice to because one moment they were there with him, holding his hand, running their fingers through his hair as he drifted off to sleep, holding him in their arms, and the next moment gone, crushed by the landlord and the land until they disappeared into dust and memory, a bitter root of loneliness that grew a plant of fear.
Once, the old priest had told him, "Don't fear loneliness, Tomás. You're never alone. God promises that. God is with you. You're never alone."
Tomás loved the old priest and respected him. He didn't have much use for his metaphysics, though. There was much more comfort in the priest's friendship than in his words and ideas about God.
"Words and ideas, ideas and words," thought Tomás. "They're worth so little...yet they're so much a part of my life."
He remembered his childhood, when he was a boy in his first years of school. His mamí held his tiny hand and led him over the threshold of the door of their small house toward his first day of school. He stopped suddenly, grabbed the door frame and exclaimed, "I'm only going to school so I can learn to write!"
He learned to write, and afterwards he wrote and thought and thought and wrote all the time.
His mamí, on the way to the garden to pick fruits and vegetables from the plants and trees of the land, would find him beneath the apple tree beside the fence of the garden, his bony shoulders hunched over his notebook as if he were a human question mark, his long fingers gripped around his pencil as if he were a human exclamation point, writing the things he saw and heard and smelled and tasted and felt.
His papí, on the way back from the sugar cane fields, would find him on top of the giant rock in their yard, his eyes to the sky as if he were seeing something others were missing, his ears to the ground as if he were hearing something others were missing, writing so the world could see and hear.
Both his Mamí and his papí saw that in these moments of writing, a soft light encircled his body, the mark of a saint, a faint halo around his head.
They didn't believe in the god of the church, but they did look for evidence of god all around them, hoping against hope that god was real, hoping against hope that godd was with them, hoping against hope that god would help them. "
Perhaps god will be in the words of our son," they thought as they drifted off to sleep each night, worn down from the hard work of planting, gathering, tending, and hoping, holding each other with calloused hands in stick thin arms with full hearts hoping, hoping.
Sometimes as he wrote, and the light glowed around him at his sparse work desk, he used words to fight the loneliness - the loneliness of the farmers, giving their bodies to the land day after day, year after year, until they became the dust from which they were made; the loneliness of the workers, giving their souls to the factories, day after day, year after year, until they became gears and grease themselves; and the loneliness of the servants, giving their hearts to their patróns day after day, year after year, until they became the rags and the basins from which they served - all working, the farmers, the workers, and the servants, for subsistence, enough food to stay alive, enough wood and tin to stay alive, enough music to stay alive.
They were living for nothing, and yet for everything.
Sometimes he used words to flee the loneliness - his own loneliness, his fear of losing Gabby, his fear of losing the priest, his fear of losing the doctor.
So he used words as colors and his pen as a brush and he painted their human faces,
As he painted these pictures he wept, a weeping from a place deep within him, a place of which the old doctor had spoken.
"See with the eyes of your heart," the doctor had pleaded, "For it is then, only then, that you will see to build a new world."
He painted Gabby, her brown eyes filled with kindness, her hair hanging down to her shoulders, her nakedness beautiful, beautiful, her hands and feet calloused, her smile a light for the world.
He painted the priest, his tattered clothes from so much giving, his tarnished crucifix, the first gift he was given after his ordination, his reminder that Christ is in each and every person each and every day, his hunched shoulders from so much praying, his face so full of love.
He painted the doctor, the sparkle in his clear, blue eyes, the deep wrinkles on his forehead, his broken hands that healed.
He turned to Gabby in the morning light and held her close to him, until he could feel her heartbeat and her breath upon his body.
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