Читать книгу Exile - Ann Ireland - Страница 7

RASHID WAS A TIDY MAN, AND TACITURN, like a rancher. Except he was no rancher, but a pursuer of some esoteric branch of biology which he didn’t bother to explain. We shared a tiny two-storey house in the married students’ quarters on the edge of the campus of the university. On either side our house was attached to other, similar houses, except these ones were full of children and babies. Out front, plastic toys were strewn across the lawn, and in the back a row of cotton diapers danced like seagulls on the line. Impatient mothers howled at their children to get off the road, except these mothers were astrophysicists and medievalists in their spare time. Their uniform, unvarying, consisted of dark leggings under long tunics, and flat, boatlike sandals. At dusk each day there was a strange procession: a dozen heavy-breasted women wearing loose shirts and shorts jogged by, pushing baby carriages. Skipping alongside, a slim woman shouted instructions: “Watch your posture! Pick up the pace! Don’t forget to breathe!”

In the mornings I lay in bed and listened to the lives of our neighbours, the roll of tricycle wheels across the floors, the thuds and muted crashes of family life. Standing over the bathroom sink, toothbrush in hand, I could hear, less than a metre away, another man performing the same ritual, running water, spitting, splashing his face, then pissing long and hard into the toilet bowl.

Rita showed me the small campus store, and steered me away from the frozen food section with its composed meals (too expensive) and suggested that I cook “from scratch.”

I pretended to memorize her instructions as she recited recipes for egg custard pie and spaghetti, nodding with concentration as she listed ingredients, warned of possible pitfalls, suggested shortcuts.

“It’s a cinch,” she said, leaving me with an armload of groceries on the doorstep of my little house. “If in doubt, pasta with grated cheese.”

Rashid, handy in the kitchen, concocted aromatic meatless curries that sent me reeling toward the door to find supper in the Student Union Building. Sometimes I was taken out for meals by members of the university. Just as well: my stipend was a miserly $700 a month, barely enough to cover beer and cigarettes and the odd movie. I needed to eat well when I got the chance.

Rashid had no bad habits. I would watch him chop vegetables as oil sizzled in the frying pan.

“Where did you learn to cook?”

“At home.”

Home was Pakistan.

“Didn’t you have a mother? Servants?”

“Of course,” he said. “They showed me how.”

I found something demeaning in the sight of a man chopping his own vegetables for dinner. When I tugged open the fridge door to get a beer, he winced. Rashid was a devout Muslim, despite his dissident ways. When I smoked he would make little throat-clearing noises and say, “Your money would last longer without this.”

I would not learn to cook because this was something others did well, and each person has his role in life: mine was not to become a chef. I found a steakhouse just outside the campus gates and the waitress was a matronly woman who made sure I was given an extra potato with my meal. I went there often, and tipped her well, because her legs were heavy and she was tired of her life, but never bad-tempered. They kept a bottle of aged scotch for me, just like at Café de la Luna.

Rashid came strutting down the stairs of our house one morning, yawning, buckling his belt around his narrow waist, wearing, as always, a white short-sleeved shirt and dark poplin pants. It was a timeless uniform, which indicated he had his mind on higher pursuits. He looked around the living room with distaste. Early sun barely cut through the heavy curtains, and our furniture, such as it was, was shabby and too big for the room.

“Clean this shit up,” he said, motioning towards one or two ashtrays and some empty beer bottles.

I was barely awake, having sat up late into the night writing in my new notebooks, composing fast verses that surprised me by their acid tone.

“You could at least try,” he said, frowning after I’d reluctantly tidied up. Meaning I hadn’t placed the bottles in the correct place, in the recycling box, and that the ashtrays had been emptied but not washed.

A very nervous man. We would cohabit, but we were not destined to become friends.

One evening I was invited to dinner at the house of the President of the university. This impressive building, with its circular drive and row of dormer windows, sat on a secluded crescent just off campus. Arbutus trees lined the front walk, creating an arbour, and a uniformed maid greeted guests at the door and pointed us towards the back yard.

This garden was almost a meadow, half an acre in size, and the patio area was immense, shaded by a flat green awning. Our host, a thin, almost gaunt man in a tan suit with an apron tied around his waist, stood turning meat on the grill. I was astonished, of course, to see such an eminent man prepare the meal, but I said nothing. His wife coasted around in a beige linen suit, touching here an elbow, there a shoulder.

“So you’re the one!” she announced, spotting my approach. “I’ll tell George.” Immediately she spun around, perhaps afraid that I might start to speak in Spanish, and went off to fetch her husband.

There was a whispered exchange over the eye-searing barbeque, then the President removed himself from his post, wiped his hands down the front of his pristine apron, and made his way towards me.

“Greetings!” he said with a hearty smile, hand outstretched.

People turned to see who this new important guest was.

“You’ll find we’re pretty informal around here, Carlos.” He slipped a hand across my back and began to guide me effortlessly through the throng of guests who parted to make way. Cordial smiles emerged on the sternest of faces. I was being propelled by the President himself, being introduced in a booming voice to “Ed Moses, associate dean of arts; Leigh Cronin, poly sci; and of course Nancy Savigneau, dominatrix of those late Romantic German philosophers.”

The President laughed at his little joke and I observed the others joining in a beat later, except for Professor Savigneau, who remained stony faced. She stood very still in a boxy grey jacket and tied-back hair, high heels digging into the grass, and I was astonished by her courage. At home I would be the first to join in with an ingratiating laugh, a despicable response to authority which is, nonetheless, necessary. When the publisher of La Voz swanned through our offices I readied myself to admire his vulgar witticisms.

The President’s booming voice was at my ear. “I insist that each guest sample my special concoction.”

We strode across the fine-toothed lawn to a portable bar set up under a tree. This was tended, it turned out, by the President’s own son, a gangly youth of perhaps seventeen, who didn’t smile or otherwise acknowledge our approach.

“Mix our man a Virtual Pion,” his father commanded.

Without a word, the boy pressed the lever on a chrome-plated, industrial-strength blender and a foamy concoction, almost phosphorescent, leapt to the sides of the machine. This was poured into a frosted glass and presented to me with the sparest of nods. I tipped it towards my nose and sniffed; a distinct smell of lime aftershave lifted into my nostrils. The President waited impatiently as I tasted the brew.

“Well?” The fuzzy eyebrows formed a chevron.

“Excellent!” I beamed.

He made a little grunt of satisfaction. “Extremely potent, I must warn you. Pions keep the stars burning and power nuclear bombs.” He squinted into the crowd before lifting his arm and pointing towards the area where the lawn began to slope.

“I shall introduce you to one more person,” he told me, then barked “Lu-cía!” in the direction of his pointing finger.

A buxom, small-boned woman quickly approached, wearing the native dress of some small southern country, an embroidered cassock with long tassels. Her type was instantly familiar, the academic who adopts the folklórico uniform of the countryside.

“Lucía Hammond Cruz, acting head of Latin American studies.” The President’s voice softened as he spoke her name, and I understood that he had feelings for this woman. “A small department, but notably active.” His voice rose again. “I leave the two of you to embark on a voyage of discovery.”

The President swiftly returned to his post behind the giant winged barbeque. Invisible waves of heat rose before him, turning his erect form rippled and dreamlike. I looked at him for as long as possible before returning my gaze to the newly introduced guest.

“Call me Lucía.” Her small plump hand withdrew from the voluminous garment and reached for mine. She spoke in a crisp and cultivated Spanish. “I have been most eager to meet you.”

I bobbed my head to acknowledge this fact. Her head, tilted upwards, reached only my chin, a welcome change amongst this race of Amazons.

“There is so much we might speak of,” she said, and I felt a cramp of nausea. Perhaps it was the foul drink. “You must tell me your story.” At last her hand released mine. Hers disappeared under her mantle while my own flopped uselessly to my side. I guessed that Lucía was fifty years old or more.

“Begin wherever you wish.” It was the voice she might use with a shy student who was about to deliver his views on the emerging peasant movement of some barbarous country.

I eyed her but picked up no sign of mockery. Perhaps she had heard about the exile’s famous stories. My gaze fell to her feet, which were encased in blue plastic sandals. What a peculiar vanity, this marketplace garb in a woman from the intellectual class.

“Your family?” she prodded.

What on earth did she want?

“My family is healthy,” I assured her. “Although my father suffers from diabetes.”

“He is still working?”

“At the district tax office.”

“So he is, in effect, a civil servant.”

I nodded to the truth of this fact.

It seemed to make her think. “He is still in this position?”

“To the best of my knowledge.”

“I see.”

What did she see? I sipped at the merciless drink. Why was she so interested in my father?

“He has no concern for politics,” I assured her.

“Of course not.”

I found myself growing anxious. In my country we are not inquisitive. It is considered rude, perhaps because most of our old and respectable families have something to hide. It is why they have succeeded in remaining old and respectable. “He is a man of the nineteenth century,” I insisted. “Interested only in archaic cultural matters.”

“You are sure?”

“Entirely.”

She peered at me, squinting so hard in the sun that her eyes almost disappeared. “Your family knows you are here?”

“Of course.”

“And they know why?”

I hesitated, trying to read her face. Instead of feeling relieved to speak my own language, I felt uneasy, transparent. “In part.”

At last she smiled, a nod to my enigmatic reply. “You are being very careful with me, Carlos.” She spoke with a hint of approval. Then her gaze lifted and she turned to look at the thickening crowd of guests, some of whom were glancing our way.

“You are heroic to these people,” she said. “They can say what they wish in their milieu, however ill-considered, even idiotic.” Was it my imagination, or did she pause at this point? “And lose nothing but prestige.”

I considered this.

“They are safe, or so they believe.” She turned back to me with sudden animation. Both hands appeared, one sharply pointed towards my chest. “They see you and it overwhelms them. They wonder how brave they would be.”

I peered around at the professor women who posed, hands on hips in their long crepey skirts, and the men in summer suits or golfing shirts and slacks, and saw each face flush under my gaze. All these searching, intelligent faces were wondering, what has this man endured?

“Do anti-U.S. sentiments inform your work?” Lucía was suddenly speaking in English, and I realized we were being approached by a man I’d met earlier, an associate dean.

“Lucía is always on topic,” he said in a high-pitched voice, his smooth brow unperturbed. “The correct answer to her question is ‘yes’.”

I looked at this rotund man, his short-sleeved shirt tucked into a pair of ballooning shorts, and before I had a chance to respond, he lifted the glass from my hand and began to pour its contents onto the grass.

“Our President likes to force his latest invention down our throats,” he said. “One must resist.”

Alarmed by this revolutionary gesture, I glanced towards the President, who was prodding a sausage with a long-handled fork. He hadn’t seen a thing.

The associate dean laughed. “Don’t worry, my friend, there will be no repercussions.”

Lucía was watching me. “He’s right, Carlos. Absolutely nothing will happen.”

What a strange sensation to have your own fear snatched away, made useless.

“Now then,” the associate dean said as he replaced the emptied glass in my hand. “I already know you are the most interesting man here. But what do you make of us all?”

Lucía watched as I fumbled for English words.

“It is not interesting to be me,” I said after a moment. “Only frightening.”

He frowned and for the first time a wrinkle creased his brow. “Yes, I suppose it is,” he said gravely, then lifted his voice. “I must merge now with the members of my faculty. Play my part in the general hostilities.” His hand awkwardly touched my shoulder. “It’s been a rare pleasure, Carlos.”

When I spotted him a moment later he was standing with two women, laughing loudly as he replaced empty glasses into their waiting hands.

“Well?” Lucía called back my attention.

“Well what?”

“What do you make of us all?”

“Tell me the answer, Lucía. I am tired.”

“You’ll have to do better than that. You’re the poet, after all.”

The poet lacked imagination in so many ways.

“Why do you ask so many questions?”

She looked amused. “One is interested in the larger world.”

“An interrogation is not a conversation.”

She flinched, then said coolly, “I am sorry if there has been some offense taken.”

Hot-faced, I strode away, heading towards the bar where I’d spotted an insulated container full of local and imported beer. Perhaps Lucía had been flirting with me. It was so hard to know. I shouldn’t have spoken sharply, yet if I had to always watch each footfall, each word, how could I exist here? My character was being flattened by self-consciousness. Partly drunk, I decided to feel sorry for myself.

The President’s son reached into the cooler and pulled out a beaded bottle of lager, snapped it open, and passed it to me without a word.

Lucía was alone now, lying stretched out on a massive rock that must have been dredged from the beach a kilometre away. Her feet were bare, her eyes shut, her chest under the embroidered garment was rising and falling steadily. Clearly she was asleep, or passed out from downing too many Virtual Pions. I tiptoed past to collect my jacket. Our hostess followed me into the foyer of the house, where, touching my wrist with the tips of her cool fingers, she leaned over and kissed me lightly on the cheek.

“Hasta luego.” She spoke in a low voice, and handed me my hat, a dark beret. Yet before I had a chance to pluck it from her hands she was placing it on my head, tilting it just so.

The President himself drove me home.

“Did Lucía give you the treatment?” he said as he swung the car onto my street.

“Excuse me?”

“Pepper you with questions?”

“Ah, yes.”

“One of our finest teachers, but…” He stopped the car near a hydrant and peered out the windshield.

“Yes?”

“Prickly.

No small talk.” “No small talk,” I repeated, enjoying the phrase.

“This your place?”

I had to lean forward to check the address. All the houses looked the same. “Yes.”

“Good of you to come, Carlos.”

He waited while I slid out of the passenger seat and crossed the lawn to the door of the miniature house I shared with Rashid.

One evening, Rita phoned.

“How’s it going? Getting some work done?” Her voice was calibrated to sound friendly and not too inquisitive. I wondered if it was her job as a board member to call at certain intervals.

“Everything is excellent,” I said, because I wanted her to sleep well. “And I hope that you and your son are happy.”

I could hear her breathing. “It’s prime season for bookings at the Grad Centre so I’m on the phone all day. I’m not getting anything of my own done.”

“Tomorrow I will take you out,” I told her. “Maybe for a coffee, a drink. We will talk. And you will not work for one hour!”

“Thanks,” she said, and laughed a little. “But please, let me take you.”

It was part of her job to look after me: I was another segment of the world that kept her from dancing.

The work that I was supposed to be doing, which my rescuers hoped would become a book that would sell to the multitudes, was not going well. They wanted the story of my difficulties, but all I’d managed to do was draw a map of my childhood home, with diagrams of the furniture, the piano, the leather footstool, the ornate chairs inherited from various uncles and aunts. It looked like the scene of a domestic murder. All that was missing was the blood and the outline of my own body.

I had been given an office, a tiny room high up in a concrete building. A single window overlooked an unshaded parking lot. I used to capture ants when I was a child, put them in a glass jar with sand and watch to see what sort of tunnels they would carve. But they never performed for me: they would scuffle hopelessly up the glass sides and fall backwards, then, after an hour or so, they would die.

I met Rita in a Vietnamese restaurant with steamy windows and a noisy air conditioner wedged over the door. She was waiting inside, reading a magazine which she slid into her patterned bag when she spotted me. I greeted her with pleasure, despite my bewilderment at this choice of restaurant, and her smile was swift, disappearing as quickly as the magazine.

She waited until we were slurping noodles from cracked china bowls before getting to the point. She seemed uncomfortable and avoided my eyes.

“You’ve been going through the money too quickly,” she said at last. “We simply can’t afford to front you extra cash; it’s been twice now.”

I nearly choked. Yet she sat there calmly eating, while around us the clink of plastic chopsticks against bowls never ceased. I thought we had come together to talk of our lives as artists.

“My tooth was abscessed,” I said curtly. “I was supposed to tie it to a doorknob and pull?”

“Of course not. But the clothes…”

“I left home only with what was on my back.”

She stabbed at the bowl with her chopsticks. “There are second-hand places we could have taken you to.”

My forehead tightened. I wondered if she and her professor friends bought used clothes. Who knows who’d been wearing them, what diseases they had.

“Daniel Rose is about your size. He’ll have stuff.” Finally she looked up at me. “Also, I don’t see why you go to Millie’s all the time.”

“Millie’s?” This was not a conversation: it was another interrogation.

“The steakhouse. No one I know can afford to eat there three nights a week.”

I stared at her. I enjoy meat. I enjoy a few ounces of scotch with my dinner. I enjoy real food, not these damp noodles and bits of chewy pork. It was not my fault that a nutritious meal costs twenty dollars in this country. But I said none of this. Never before had a woman dared to speak to me in this way, not even when I was a small child in school with the nuns.

She saw my expression. “I’m sorry, Carlos, but we are just trying to help.”

A spritz of cold air hit my backside as the air conditioner switched on. Is this what it was going to be like? I would have to ask permission before eating a potato or buying a shirt? I hated the restaurant with its tippy tables and the plastic tablecloths, which were whipped off between customers. Did she think I wouldn’t know how to behave in a real restaurant with a wine list? In my country, if I met a woman for lunch there would be linen napkins, heavy wooden chairs, soft lighting, and discreet, perfectly trained waiters. And we would not be eating with sticks.

Or perhaps I should be like these Oriental people, working for two dollars an hour and all the noodles I could eat. I should be grateful, always grateful to be here, in Gold Mountain.

I slipped out a Camel and popped it in my mouth.

Rita stared.

“I smoke,” I said. “It’s what I do.”

“Perhaps you can’t afford to smoke so much, Carlos.”

“I am a grown man. I do not need instructions for living.” She poured herself tea from the chipped pot. “There’s one more thing.”

I sucked hard on the cigarette, feeling exhausted. Perhaps it was better in Marta’s basement, where no one was watching and judging.

“We’ve had a few complaints about your behaviour at The Hub.”

This was the student pub on campus. I went there in the evenings when I was lonely.

“I understand you’re there six or seven nights a week.” Seeing my expression, she added quickly, “Your business, except…”

I waited.

“You’ve been borrowing money from the students, telling them that CAFE would pay them back. We can’t keep you in booze, Carlos, and neither can these kids, most of whom bust their asses all summer for tuition money and are living on less, far less than you.”

I stood up, pushing the flimsy metal chair backwards.

“Perhaps next time your group decides to rescue a writer you will conduct much research. Send out questions to all his friends and colleagues, make him sign a temperance petition. I am sorry. I am sorry to all of you.”

I left, or tried to; there was something wrong with the door and it wouldn’t open, though I turned the knob first to the left then the right. Goddamn Vancouver door! When I turned to look at Rita, she was sitting upright in her chair, pale and expressionless.

“Coming or going?” A young man pried open the door from outside and held it for me.

Could I trust one foot to follow the other on the pavement outside? Perhaps the sidewalk had been transformed into a carpet that would be snatched away. I stood there for a moment, dizzy, heart racing. Yet my anger was a mistake. I thought of the woman I had just left in the restaurant, how she had once held up a sign at the airport as she waited for me, her hair raked flat by the rain.