“I have an illness that science cannot explain,” Rosama said, lighting her cigarette. She had a big smile, white teeth that brought out the furious tan of her skin. Dark from top to bottom, she had dead-lace hair that reminded me of the ciguapa stories I’d hear Abuela tell me as I sat on her lap during nights of repetitive blackouts and only bread with melon water to feed us. I’d learned through experience that some facts ought to be received with the same neutrality as they are told.

A cigarette seemed a decent excuse to continue our conversation, so I asked for one, knowing that the darkness wouldn’t hide my trembling hands. I didn’t push her subject; I asked for a whisky on the rocks. “Thank you, my brother,” I told the bartender.

We did cheers and Tony, the bar owner who was DJing, played some meringues on the speakers. Rosama and I danced closely as if we were stitching fabric together. She searched for things she seemed to have lost years before under my wrists and around my lower back. I smelled her hair and gusted with laughter each time we caught eyes because I already knew, in the long run, that was all I would be keeping with me of hers.

“You’re like a horny dog,” she said, grabbing my ass and pulling me closer. Her condition didn’t bother me; her dwarf-limbs pushed me toward a dark corner and I felt my crotch strongly held. I let myself be taken advantage of. Her big lips found an ear, and with no shame she told me that the worst part of her condition was that she could die at any moment.

There were many reasons why I liked this bar, one of which was that Tony every once in a while surprised me with a live concert video of “Lagrimas Negras” by Bebo y el Cigala on the big-screen TV. Lachan, one of my oldest friends, requested “Vete de mi” with tears in her eyes, and then she asked for another drink even though her current one was new. She hit the bar counter with a slight force and spread her suffering throughout the bar’s atmosphere. That mood, her suffering, would swell and haunt two or three others in the bar for the rest of the night. I knew it was possible to listen to this record straight through but after so many drinks, so much coagulated smoke in the air on its way to stagnate by the bar’s ceiling, and such little light, any being with any amount of emotion, even a mere amount, would have his or her heart shatter into pieces, so I felt it was better to end things on a positive note. Rosama and I left after “Corazon loco” and the record’s Portuguese song to walk other planes of suffering.

I felt like Gian Maria Volonte, like Pollack: cigarette in hand, facing a drink, suffering. No kiss has tasted as sweet as those that I stole by the corners of that bar, of that lair we found ourselves in that night. I can, but don’t want to, remember the dances we generated under the effects of the beauty that bar radiated. That bar’s walls were capable of destroying anyone’s link with the world, with emotions, with the solitude they discharged.

It was time to pay up and she limped over and pushed the subject she had brought up previously while we kissed and flirted, wasting time, at the bar. With the courage only a drunk could come up with, she told me, “I don’t want to die a spinster. I want a wedding ceremony.” She suggested I do her the favor, and a favor isn’t anything I deny intimate friends.

“Would you marry me?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said searching her purse for her car keys. She was ready to go.

We made it to her home while I premaritally groped her. I stole some more kisses before her father opened the door which was of course a bit small. Her father came out smiling but it was difficult to see him in the dawn’s tranquility. It was very silent in that night.

“Father, we’ve done it,” she told him, presenting me. I knelt down to hug my future in-law. Ernesto, her father, was a dwarf.

I tried to seem as if I was comfortable in this house with its abnormal characteristics. The house reminded me of a childhood story where someone arrived at an abandoned home furnished with miniature furniture. Her father took me out to the patio that, because of all the small chairs, small tables, tiny flowers, seemed huge. The miniature ceremony was ready as if it’d been ready for ages. Four brothers, her aunts, her cousins, and her mother were garrisoning the furthest end of the small table. They were all dwarves.

They were kind to me, which I found strange. I wasn’t going to wear a suit because there was no time to get one under the circumstances, but for formality’s sake they were adamant on getting me a pajarilla and they placed a mini rose into my shirt-pocket. Her brothers took me to wash up and get the smell of whiskey off my breath.

The smell of sancocho de pollo coursed from the kitchen and filled the house while my future bride got ready with her cousins in another room. A moment before the ceremony began her father motioned that he needed to speak to me. “Formalities,” he said, deciding we should sit in the living room. “Whisky?” he asked.

“On the rocks,” I answered. He served us two glasses, and then he sipped a bit from the Blue Label bottle.

“I know she’s explained our circumstances and there seems to be no way to explain the great joy you’ve brought us,” he said. I was going to respond and he saw this, but he forcefully held me back with his small hand. He crossed his legs and said, “We’ve been preparing for this moment since she was a child. She might not seem too short, like she’s kind of normal, but she has dwarf organs and the doctors told us that she wouldn’t live past twenty.” He paused. He was silent for a bit, contemplative for a second. “She’s twenty-three right now!”

“She doesn’t seem it,” I said, bullshitting him.

“She is. That’s not the point,” he said holding back and swallowing his tears. “If she chose you, I’m sure it’s because you’re a good man.” He spoke like a beaten wife in denial trying to convince herself that her abusive husband was really going to change, that when he told her that he wasn’t ever going to hit her again, he really wasn’t going to hit her again. “We will love you as our son. But please understand this is a mere formality. You must leave tomorrow and save yourself from the pain of losing her. I only ask, as a father and as a man, that you be very careful with your memory of her.”

It was a short, powerful, and efficient ceremony. We quickly said, “Yes,” and her family’s small, happy hands applauded. It was almost day-break, but the small people and I continued dancing. Her family gave us best wishes and took pictures of us before the wedding cake. After the celebratory merengue and the endless bachatas her smallest cousin came up to us with his small guitar and rum-sang something he’d just written on a liquored-up napkin:

“I want to sing
you an undersized song.
I want you to live forever
while I hunt stars lit
in the glow of your
beauty and desire.
I want to drive
the roads of your lips,
to live in your smile and escape the
world’s sour caramel pain.
Baby, oh baby, I’d end wars
for you and name
seashells after you.
I want to detune all the violins of the world.
I want to, in the darkened white shades
of the mountain sides,
question poetry and make your mouth our mouth,
turn pain into sour caramel.
I want rid myself of this ajonjolí desire
with you. It’ll take just a minute, I promise.
I have a bell-shaped mouth
full of ripe mamayas for you.
I want and I can and I do want.”

The sun finally rose and Rosama excused herself saying she was having an intense pain in her chest and her family began preparations to take her away to her room. I couldn’t let her leave yet; I gave her an intense kiss to denote our new bond. Her father showed me the way out. I’d never see her again. I wobbled aimlessly through the streets bumping into soulless people in a hurry to work, women with stupid questions incapable of truly loving another person. It began to rain. There was nothing here in this city for me. I went to the airport with no luggage. There was nothing of mine in this city. I had no one to say farewell to. No one stood with me on my final night in this city on the beach feeling the salt-winds slap my face as my tears joined the Caribbean Sea.