The Rhythm of Memory by Alyson Richman

his priorities were now. She wanted to chastise him for not getting away from his silly movie and coming to her side, as he had always promised. But she had known for quite some time that their child’s birth was coinciding with the final scenes of the movie and that her husband could not control his schedule, let alone the direction of his life, at this moment.
    It was just that she missed him and the way things had been only a year before. She had dreamt that when their child was born, he would be only steps outside the delivery room.
    Now, as their life was changing so quickly, she was yearning for something to be constant between them.
    “My love is constant,” he had told her time and time again as she voiced her concern and her desire for her poet to return.
    “Can’t we at least get away for a weekend before the baby comes?” she had asked him more than once.
    “This will only be for a short time, Fayum,” he had said, tryingto comfort her. “After the film wraps, we’ll get away…just the two of us.”
    But she knew that those were naive words. Octavio was committed to at least two more movies after
Buenos Dias Soledad
. And she would have their baby by then. No longer would it be “just the two of us.”
    “We will plant an orange grove,” he promised her as he drifted off to sleep. “I will write more poems when I have more free time,” he whispered.
    She never said aloud that she knew that it would never happen. That she could already anticipate the responsibilities of motherhood and foresee how he would respond to the responsibilities of fatherhood.
    Somehow the pressures of life had caught up with these two people who had always believed they were destined for an uncomplicated life grounded simply on love.
    But whereas Salomé could see the decisions that Octavio was making would affect their relationship, her husband seemed to still maintain his idealism that, one day, all would return to the way things were when they had first courted. She thought him naive, but well-intentioned. She only hoped he would not wake up one day and regret he had taken a path on which there were consequences he was ill-prepared to bear.

Thirteen

G ÖTEBORG , S WEDEN
    M ARCH 1969
    Samuel Rudin hadn’t been prepared for the Scandinavian winter. He missed the Peruvian sun. He missed the mountains. He hated rising in the morning and seeing darkness. Nearly every night, as he lay in his bed, his eyes closed shut and his fists clenched to his sides, he shivered himself to sleep. In his mind, he counted down the days until midsummer.
    His apartment, a modest place cloistered in the old town, along the south side of the Göta River, was lonely and sparse. And when he returned there from seeing his patients, political refugees who had come to Sweden hoping for a better life, he would boil himself a cup of hot water, stir in a spoonful of Nescafé, and slouch into his sofa. Often, he would find his mind wandering back to his few memories of Paris, the long boat ride to Peru, the deterioration of his mother’s mental health, and the depression that hung over his family like a wide bolt of mourning cloth. He saw his life like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, certain events disjointed from the main configuration. He frequently did not know what to do with the memories whose edges were not smooth and neat, the ones that didn’t fit snugly into the picture he wanted to have in his head.
    He had gone through psychoanalysis in school, where the roles were reversed and he was forced to be the patient. At first, he could not detach himself from the doctor within. He could hear himselfanswering the questions in a way that would reveal little of himself, as he was afraid that he might say something that might flag him as a poor candidate for the psychiatry residency. But after a few sessions his analyst told him that it was in his best interest to be honest with himself. “Every student believes he can outsmart his shrink,” he told