Despite being the middle of February, winter on the East Coast hadn't ended yet. Pablo tried to remember which month it was that supposedly came "in like a lion and out like a lamb," but he didn't think it was February. Winter in southern Mexico was much warmer, being closer to the equator, and so the flurry of New York City snow nearly threw him off.
He hadn't dressed properly for this sort of weather, so Alfred had lent him his own clothes, and though they hung off of him like a paper bag, they were still warm enough to keep him from shivering. Together, they wore two coats apiece and mittens over their hands which were occasionally used to pack snowballs to toss at one another. The snow swept from the surface of the street, and with traffic down to a surprising minimum, it caked the asphalt in long glittering flakes. It struggled to rise and hit the windows of shops with a tinkling like tapped glass. Here in NYC, it seemed that the whole round world was made delicately brittle with the cold and might shatter like a Christmas ball if dropped.
As usual, Alfred wasn't letting it bother him, apparent by the smile on his face. He was looking for a place where they could stop for coffee together, but many of the cafes were closed this Sunday, or too busy to allow in customers.
"Look," Alfred said as he pointed to one of the smaller corner cafes, mostly untouched even in the busy city. Pablo noted a Starbucks across the street, and decided that it was no wonder the poor coffee shop wasn't getting any business. It was called Sacred Grounds, no doubt sponsored by the church down the street, and no doubt running on charity.
Alfred explained that it used to be a colonial farmhouse before the farmland and building were converted into a business establishment. It was very run down, much like Pablo's own house down south, without a trace of paint on its walls.
"Probably gonna get knocked down soon," Alfred said with a hint of sadness to his voice. Then he shrugged and took Pablo's thin wrist in his larger hand. "Let's go check it out."
The inside was much larger than any Starbucks Pablo had set foot in, and with a friendlier atmosphere than that of a cyber-cafe. No free Wi-fi was offered, but the owner was a tired old black woman in a printed house-dress and lazily laced boots. Her shoulders and her bust were small and elderly, and Alfred offered her a polite smile as he ordered two mocha cappuccinos and they took their Styrofoam cups to the window seat.
Through a cracked windowpane, Pablo quietly watched the outside world while Alfred busied himself with mindless chatter about the Cupid and cherub decorations, the bows and arrows and hearts set up about the room just in time to lure in clueless young couples to buy a romantic coffee together.
"Don't we fit that category?" Pablo asked, and Alfred turned red and laughed as though he was joking. He wasn't. "Why have so many decorations, anyway..."
"It's Valentine's Day," Alfred replied, as though everyone should memorize the date. "Big holiday here in America. I don't know if you have anything like that in Mexico, but it's huge for teenage couples here."
Pablo watched as a little girl with ginger pigtails ran forward and skidded to a lurching stop before a man selling hot chocolate in a small vendor's booth across the way. Her and her brothers stopped in a bright spray of powdery snow with freckles almost as bright as Alfred's.
"Dia del Amor y la Amistad." At Alfred's look of confusion, he translated, "Day of love and friendship. You give flowers and cards and poems to your loved ones and friends. We don't decorate as much, though."
Alfred nodded thoughtfully, sipped at his steaming coffee, and said, "It's pretty much a conspiracy for women to wheedle you into buying gifts for them and for Hallmark to make a ton of money selling cheap, cheesy romance cards with campy messages inside. Not to mention the market for roses and teddy bears sky-rockets in February. It's ridiculous."
A memory of France threading a rose into Maria's hair made his stomach turn. "Roses are overrated," he said. "Hyacinths have a much deeper meaning to give your loved one."
"Which ones are hyacinths again?"
Unsurprising. Of course someone as politically busy and overwhelmed as the United States wouldn't bother to remember a little detail like Pablo's favorite flower. "The purple ones," he responded. "They're sort of column-shaped. A lot of petals, sweet fragrance. They symbolize eternal devotion. It's a lot deeper in meaning than just the cheap overnight romance that roses promise."
A silence set in, and Pablo wondered how in the world it worked out that he wound up being younger than the other. Alfred didn't act his age at all sometimes, but rather like a curious child. Which wasn't necessarily a bad thing - he was like that German story of the puppet that wanted to be a real boy. Full of ambition and dreams that Pablo always underestimated, wishing on stars for the most impossible things. Time machines, super-jets, cloning technology... true love.
Impossible, but endearing.
Alfred was American from the crown of his blond head to the soles of his feet, but the sort of American that few people imagine when thinking of the nation. This America was full of youth, flashing ideas, enthusiasms, a golden fountain of ideals and symbolism.
Alfred had hand chosen him as a friend, which should have made him feel special; Alfred had chosen him because of his quiet nature, often described as being shy or awkward, hiding away in a shell that only ever cracked when around Alfred or some of his friends from Latin America. Pablo spoke little but said much, as Columbia had once expressed it, and Alfred was the type that liked to hear himself talk. His blond friend was fond of youthful, mindless chatter, but also of ideology and studies that older nations would never expect from him.
Once, Alfred had shared with him a personal experience about an old nanny that Arthur had hired to watch after him as a boy, and how her arthritic bones and quiet death had disclosed to him how fleeting life was for humans. How much Alfred himself feared it. Pablo had never feared death, and had listened with intent as Alfred explained that the woman had lived to eighty-four, and that in eighty-four years he had barely managed to find his footing as his own nation; Pablo told him that no, nations didn't have to worry as much about that sort of thing, but then Alfred reminded him of Teresa - a sweet little thing that had once represented the Republic of Texas - and Pablo was silenced again.
As Alfred talked, his expression had a wistful seriousness - his eyebrows knit, mouth frowning as he spoke - a nearness to it and unspoken things that ran through his speech like a golden thread. Alfred had grown up in Boston, he explained, after leaving the confines of Virginia; and though Boston had been a "rebel's playground," Pablo saw in Alfred all of the patient melancholy of a Virginian.
Arthur had been a man of the sea, and Alfred had been a boy of the land, attached to his crops and his plants just as Pablo was now. Alfred would interpret to Pablo the homely appearance of the beaches where he would sit and wait for Arthur's return, and in his bizarrely articulate speech, Pablo found the soul of America.
A Puritan nature, so purely Christian that Alfred's serious and devoted outlook on life had once led him to the church. Pablo asked if he still attended, and Alfred laughed.
"The priests and pastors are nice enough," he had said, "but they don't read much."
Alfred read, and he believed in God.
Now, though, as they sat together in this coffee shop, neither said anything. Every now and then, Alfred's lips would part as though to speak, but then he brought his cup of coffee to his lips and remained silent. It was strange to Pablo, who usually would sit and listen in helplessness as Alfred sparkled of talk. The freedom at which Alfred said what he pleased usually had Pablo rethinking, knocking into pieces all of his little-imagined world of mannerisms or inhibitions.
Pablo finally gathered the courage to speak.
"Valentine's Day," he said. The question was unasked, and Alfred blinked at him. "Er- I mean, do you spend it with anyone?"
He wondered it if was an okay question to ask. Alfred's face was pink as though with embarrassment and he leaned back on the two back legs of his chair. "I could spend it with someone if I wanted," he answered. "But like I said, it's a conspiracy. It's not worth the hassle."
Which was Alfred's way of saying no. That he would be alone for the holiday that supposedly symbolized teenage romance. Pablo thought of speaking up again, expressing that he too usually spent Valentine's Day alone, that maybe they could spend it together-
But Alfred froze up and continued his rant about the political and religious implications of the holiday.
"-because, you know, Aphrodite is the Greek god of love, right? But you never really see her anywhere. Saint Valentine is meant to be Christian, but there's no connection at all between Christian saints and romance. Romans celebrated a holiday on the fourteenth to honor the Queen of the Roman gods and goddesses, Juno Fructifer, but that doesn't have anything to do with love either. I mean, I know there was more than one Valentine in the early years of the church, and that at least two or three of them must have been martyred, and I think one might have performed secret marriages in Rome or something-"
There was that girl across the street again. Her and her brothers each held a steaming cup of cocoa in their small gloved hands. A woman walked with them - their mother? - but her hair was much darker than theirs. Perhaps they were adopted, he thought.
"-and he got caught, so he was imprisoned and sentenced to death. While he was on Death Row, a bunch of kids started writing letters about how love is better than war, you know? The first 'valentines,' I think. And the day itself is a Roman celebration of love and fertility. So really, I don't think it has anything to do with Christianity at all-"
Tinny music played overhead, a piano interpretation of a popular American love song that Pablo didn't know.
"-but after a few centuries, I think a Roman Emperor changed the name to honor that Valentinus guy instead of the pagan god-"
"You don't date much, do you?" Pablo cut in, his attention snapping back to Alfred's babble suddenly, and it startled Alfred so much that he fumbled his coffee cup and it dropped onto his lap.
Hissing, Alfred grabbed up a few napkins from the dispenser on their table and cussed as he wiped himself up. It was almost comical to see him flounder with the scalding coffee splashed over his jeans. "D-date?" he asked, his face almost completely red from neck to hairline.
Pablo set his own cup down before he too became in danger of spilling on himself. Normally this would be a place he could smile and wave a hand to push the spotlight back to Alfred, but instead he cleared his throat and spoke up.
"I just..." Awkward, that shell hiding him again, but he pushed to move past it. "If we both spend the holiday alone, then... maybe this year we could spend it, y'know. Together."
An awkward silence set in again. Alfred gave a half-laugh like he was nervous about something. After a moment of Pablo just looking at him, watching the gentle motion of Alfred's fingers folding and refolding the napkin he'd used to clean himself, his friend's expression softened.
"You're serious?"
The piano music was reaching a kind of crescendo, swelling and dying like the tide.
"I'm serious."
And there were Alfred's fingers - long, piano-player fingers, and Alfred played, he remembered that Alfred could play piano, not that it had to do with anything - picking at that napkin again, the same way Alfred would twist the hem of his shirt when he was nervous. It was a sign of self-consciousness. If Pablo wanted to get specific, it was a sign of body-consciousness. But Alfred was beautiful, and Pablo had always thought so.
Alfred's eyes flicked from the napkin up to Pablo, but once seeing that Pablo was looking so expectantly at him, he glanced away again. One of the cardboard cut-out cherubs seemed to catch his undivided attention for a minute.
"I don't know," Alfred sighed. "I don't- I might be busy, and... you know, I mean, if my president found out that we were spending it together..."
The aching sensation that followed was answer enough. It was a sort of slow twist that took up his heart in a clenched fist, squeezed and pulled until he had to avoid Alfred's gaze altogether. If they were found out...? But what did that mean? Alfred was ashamed of him, maybe, not that it was too surprising - the anti-Latino sentiments spreading throughout the U.S. were the worst they'd been since the Zoot Suit Riots.
Still, it wasn't like Pablo was going to steal anything from him, wasn't like he was going to embarrass him in public or anything like that. He just wanted some company; but maybe Alfred didn't even want that much from him anymore.
"Alright," Pablo said softly without even arguing about it, stirring his coffee around by spinning his cup around the base. Alfred frowned, but Pablo just said, "Alright. We don't have to."
"Pablo-"
"Esta bien," he interrupted. "Honestly. I don't care." Yet that instinct to argue was rising up, his liberal affinity for fighting for what he thought was right. "What do you think would happen even if we were seen together, Alfred? If you don't want my company, at least say it to my face."
The coffee was becoming increasingly colder and staler the longer they sat together. The cherubs above them pointed their sharpened arrows at them with the accuracy of snipers, fat naked bodies full-figured with childish innocence.
Alfred finally looked Pablo in the eye. "That's not the problem," he assured, but Pablo would have none of it. Too many times had he been attacked by white Americans, all of them under the assumption that he was one of the many illegal immigrants working American crops.
"Enlighten me," he challenged with the feeling of betrayal lacing his tone. "What the hell would be wrong with someone seeing us together, jefe?"
He hadn't worked in the fields of the United States since the forties, when he came over to assist the Americans in harvesting sugar beets. He'd made plenty of money back then while Alfred was off to war, enough to purchase a zoot suit for himself - enough for those Navy boys to paint him with the same brush they painted the Mexicans residing within the borders.
Was that what Alfred was doing now? Painting him with the same brush?
The look on Alfred's face depicted many things, but namely guilt. It was a good start, but it wasn't enough. "Stop trying to make me look like a bad guy. You know that my people aren't exactly... friendly toward yours-"
"You are your people." The reminder brought upon another chilling silence. They seemed to have a lot of those. Pablo felt his heart twist in shame and anger at the thought of his supposed best friend abandoning him... avoiding him. The feeling nearly choked him; he finally stood up, glaring down at his coffee. "Forget it. Spent it alone. I don't care."
He told himself that he didn't. In the contours of his mind, he whispered assurances to himself that Alfred could go eat shit for all he cared; spend the holiday curled up alone on his sofa watching god-awful American romance movies. But in his heart, he imagined he and Alfred maybe going further than this rocky friendship he clung to so desperately.
Alfred tried to stop him as he fled the small colonial coffee shop, but Pablo had already left.