Читать книгу One Life - David Lida - Страница 17

FICTION

Gustavo’s pockmarked face was crumpled. His Donald Duck voice cracked with emotion. “That scene where little Marcel can’t fall asleep,” he said, his tongue heavy in his mouth. “He rolls around and around in bed. He just lays there all night.” Twenty years ago he studied French literature at the National Autonomous University and he thought this made him a chevalier des arts et des lettres. “He cannot fall asleep until his mother comes in and kisses him good night.” He grasped his curls with both hands. “My God, he was the greatest. Qué chido, güey.”

That was the most insightful observation that Gustavo—an editor at one of Mexico’s most prestigious monthlies—could quack about Proust: the Mexican equivalent of “Awesome, dude.”

Armando shook his graying head. A novelist from Culiacán, up north where men are putatively men, he needed to put things in perspective. Passing the back of a hand across his beard, he said, “I read that book. Kid can’t sleep without his mother’s kiss? What a fag.”

I looked at the bottom of my cylindrical shot glass, hoping there would be an overlooked last sip of tequila. “I could have done without the first two hundred pages about the hawthorn bushes,” I said. “But the middle section? Where Swann goes after Odette? That is the greatest depiction of obsessive love that I have ever read.”

Mandarino, whose novels established him as the premier cynic in a city of twenty million of them, said, “I don’t know about your love life, my dear Richard, but that story isn’t like any kind of love I have ever known.” And he’d known a lot, at least to hear him tell it. However, the tales of his exploits were a bit bewildering to reconcile when you considered his pear-shaped body, his jowly face, and his infrequent bathing habits, evident if you sat anywhere near him. He held up two fingers. Lola the waitress—sixty, gold teeth, cuerpo de boiler—saw him and nodded. The signal had nothing to do with a drink order. She would disappear onto the rainy sidewalk for a few moments and bring back Mandarino two grams of cocaine.

“My dear Gustavo, do you know what Walter Benjamin said about your beloved Proust?” asked Mandarino. He adjusted the brim of his green porkpie hat. “That he died of ignorance, because he didn’t know how to build a fire or open a window.”

Most of my friends in Mexico City were writers. We usually drank enough for me to drown out their sexism, homophobia, and machismo. I thought they were funny and heroically quixotic—according to a survey, Mexicans on the average read a half a book per year. Still, sometimes their company made me restless. Didn’t they have anything else to talk about besides books?

We were in Mi Oficina, the tiniest bar in Mexico City. On the ground floor of an abandoned office building whose upper stories were consumed by fire a decade ago, it was a low-lit overheated room with five tables. Behind the bar was an unpolished wooden rack with bottles of cheap rum, tequila, whiskey, and a popular variety of Mexican brandy with which I wouldn’t have disinfected a toilet bowl. The toothless bartender slept on a stool, next to a tiny altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Mi Oficina’s chief attractions were its bargain-basement prices and Lola’s phantom sidewalk connection.

“Ah,” quacked Gustavo, “but if you read Adorno’s letters to Benjamin about Proust....”

I considered going somewhere else to get another drink until Lola returned. My friends may have pitied me, but their brand of blather made me relieved rather than regretful about my status as a silenced scribe.

You may have wondered about my life before mitigation. Maybe you vaguely remembered my name. Could you possibly be among the brave and happy few who read either of my books? I was a writer nearly all my life. While growing up, it never occurred to me to want to be anything else. From early childhood, my parents sent me to the library around the corner to get me out of their hair. I began to fill journals at the age of ten, and wrote stories long before I had any to tell.

I wasn’t the only one convinced that the world needed another narrator. A piece of paper in the back of a closet attested that I had an MFA in creative writing. It may have come from a liberal arts college in Maryland rather than Stanford or Iowa, but they took care of every cent of my tuition and gave me a stipend to boot. They even funded a semester in Mexico for “research.”

By my mid-twenties, I was being published in literary magazines, some of them prestigious. My first book managed to make a little noise. Published when I was twenty-nine, it was a collection of short stories about Mexicans who cut lawns and worked in restaurant kitchens, sleeping in shifts in shadowy furnished rooms in Long Island. Before the book came out, the story about Rodrigo, the gardener who has AIDS, won a prize given by Embolalia, one of the best literary magazines in the country, which I hoped would consolidate my destiny. At the end of the year, the New York Times blessed it as a Notable Book of the Year. The reviews were solid, some even splendid. It barely sold two thousand copies and never came out in paperback.

Although initially dismayed by the sales figures, I took them on the chin and moved on, imagining them to be a peculiarity of the publishing industry rather than a harbinger of the world’s indifference to what I had to say. My illusions were encouraged by Rhoda, my agent, and Lucien, my editor. Wait for the next book, they said in an angelic mini-chorus. You need to write a novel. Everyone loved the story about Rodrigo, and Rhoda and Lucien backed up my decision to supersize him to 335 pages. It took me four years but the novel got written.

I envisioned a world waiting for it with open arms. After the book was published, life would be a cruise on the Queen Mary. There would be awards, royalties from editions in dozens of languages, speaking engagements, adoring fans. And the jewel in the crown, a cushy teaching job in a small university, where I would shovel the same shit that had been thrown at me in Maryland, while I wrote the next one and the next one and the next one. By that time I was married, to a Mexican named Carla, whose steady salary kept us afloat until my ship came in.

The book came out on September 12, 2001. The day before, nineteen demolition men named Mohammed toppled a couple of buildings downtown, and there disappeared every clap of thunder that was meant to herald my novel. You want a deadly accurate rendering of how little the world cares about you? Try publishing a book the day after the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Poor Rodrigo sold eight hundred copies.

Hope springs eternal. I rolled up my sleeves and ground out another one, in a little over a year. By the time I finished, Lucien had quit editing, gone upstate, and opened a B&B with an antiques store attached. No one else at the publishing house was even vaguely interested. Rhoda sent it to thirty-seven editors, one by excruciating one. None of them bit.

That’s when I decided it was time for a break, an auspicious moment to consider what story I may have had to tell. The greatest writers in the world didn’t write 365 days a year. Even Flaubert lived it up a little, at least while he was young. If I always believed I was a talented writer, I never realized how incredibly good I was at not writing. The world proceeded apace, even though I had ceased to record its progress. The sun kept rising and setting, and if you got far away enough from the city to see them, the stars continued to shine.

I needed a job. Aside from an occasional magazine assignment or piddling fees from teaching a creative-writing workshop, Carla supported me with her salary. Though she rarely complained, it was a source of tension. A friend named Sharon Bromberg, an activist journalist who straddled the border between Tucson and Nogales, had just begun to do mitigation investigations and got me involved. “They’re desperate for people,” she said. “There are fifty Mexicans on death row and another couple of hundred charged with capital murder. There’s hardly anyone out there qualified to do the Mexico cases.”

There is no school for mitigation. Although most of its practitioners have backgrounds in social work, law, or psychology, I was as close to a natural as the lawyers were going to find. I had some experience with magazine reporting, which left me unafraid to knock on a stranger’s door looking for a good story. I’d studied Spanish since childhood. I had spent as much time as possible in Mexico since I was seventeen, when as a high school senior I was part of a student group that went to a tiny hamlet in Oaxaca to build latrines and teach dental hygiene. Most of the villagers preferred to use the woods for their toilette, and few had running water with which to rinse out their mouths after flossing and brushing. (Instead, some of them dutifully used Coca-Cola.) But I felt more at liberty and alive in that village than I ever had in Brooklyn, and through the years, on vacations and work trips, I went to Mexico every chance I got. In Mexico City, I instinctively knew I’d found another home. After I got a letter from Rhoda wishing me luck at finding another agent, and Carla miscarried and disappeared, I got an apartment in el D.F. and never looked back.

It wasn’t as if I never wrote at all. I was perhaps the greatest memo writer in the English language. The lawyers for whom I worked got detailed accounts of every interview I conducted, and longer painstaking ones explaining the life of the family of the accused, the places they were from, and a theory as to what in our client’s life brought him to the moment where he found himself charged with murder. I explained who would make a good witness and why, and which of them would be repellent to a jury of pious, closed-minded trailer trash. I alerted them to the concise menu of what might be a mitigating circumstance: mental illness; great promise thwarted; violence, abuse, and neglect; toxic waste in the well water; previous good deeds heretofore unpunished; a line of people willing to testify that they would be devastated if the client were put to death.

Still, without a writing project of my own, I felt unmoored, unmanned. It was only after I had worked on a few death-penalty cases that I began to feel like I might possibly have a significant story to tell. Every day, matters of life and death were handed to me on a silver platter. If I were to take the project on, whose story would I tell? You could hardly find a better one than that of Roberto, my first case. It happened in Harris County, whose county seat is Houston. It should come as no surprise that about half of my cases came out of Texas, which is not only home to countless Mexicans, but has distinguished itself as the Death-Penalty Capital of the Universe. They could sell T-shirts and coffee mugs with electric chairs on them. At the time I was chosen for Roberto’s case, more people had been sentenced to death in Harris County than any other in the world.

Roberto was undocumented, one of the millions of nameless, faceless Mexicans doing the odd jobs that most people born in the U.S. believe themselves too delicate to negotiate—planting and harvesting, gardening, roofing, maintenance. He was twenty-four, and had distinguished himself with some prior convictions, including a couple of DUIs, possession of a tiny bag of marijuana, and indecency before a minor. (He was busted for that one after consensually French-kissing a fifteen-year-old hillbilly. Her mother, whom he had been screwing, got jealous and pressed charges, which resulted in his deportation back to Zacatecas. Within a few months he had returned to Texas. His rotten luck.)

When Roberto tried to stick up a Dunkin’ Donuts, another customer—an off-duty cop—pulled a gun. Roberto blew his brains out. Sadly, this was not any old cop, but a cop beloved in his community, decorated for bravery, who’d left behind a widow and three sons. We were in such deep water with Roberto that I wanted to ask Donna, the attorney who hired me, why we were even taking the trouble. A Harris County jury would put him in a toaster like a slice of Wonder Bread and turn the dial to burnt.

Donna was extraordinary. If only they were all like her. She ran me ragged all over Zacatecas. Like a bulldog on a short rib, she would not let go of any lead. I got Roberto’s brothers to open up about how their father had been in el gabacho when he was born and constantly taunted him by denying that he was his son. To emphasize the point, he systematically beat the crap out of Roberto. (If anyone deserves the death penalty, it’s usually the father.) I found a beatific nun, a woman whose faith was so palpable that an aura of light surrounded her, like those images of the rays emanating from the Virgin of Guadalupe. She had given Roberto classes in Bible studies when he was seven, and she told the jury she was sure he’d had a calling.

I found a Mexican criminologist who testified about the murders committed by policemen in Zacatecas, and the mistrust nearly everyone in the state felt toward them. I got the hospital records from when he fell off the roof as a seven-year-old and busted his head open. A bunch of his schoolmates testified that he lost consciousness after banging his conk against the goalpost in a soccer match. Goal: Donna found a doctor who swore before the jury that his behavior was consistent with frontal-lobe brain damage.

They gave him life without parole. He will be in jail until he dies, no matter how many years. But the state didn’t kill him. In this business that’s victory.

“When Durex did an international study about sexual satisfaction,” said Mandarino, “Mexican women said they were the most unfulfilled and disappointed on the planet.” Apparently there were other things to talk about besides Walter Benjamin. “They are more miserable than Chinese women who bend over for five minutes in a rice paddy. They are worse off than women in Finland, for whom a fuck only means a respite from seventeen hours of darkness. Eskimo women are blissfully happy compared to ours, and all they do with their men is rub noses. We are so rotten in bed that we even have to call in reserves from other countries. We had to get Richard over there to come and help us out.”

There is no death penalty in Mexico. (In truth, there is no need; in this country people settle their scores with each other on the street in broad daylight.) So my work was only an abstraction to these guys, who saw me first and foremost as a failed writer, someone who published a couple of books that had something to do with Mexico a long time ago, and then dried up. I was their gringo mascot.

Trying to sound casual, Mandarino said, “I think our dear Richard fucked Victoria Díaz last Tuesday.” There had been a party. He didn’t like that she liked me. “I bet you got an incredible blow job, right, Richard?”

“That’s your fantasy,” I said. “We just flirted a little bit.”

Lola arrived and took Mandarino’s right hand in both of hers: the cocaine delivery system, each gram folded inside a tiny piece of paper.

“I’ve been waiting for you forever,” I said, holding up my empty shot glass. “Could you please make it a double this time?”

“Why not, mi amor?” she said, running her fingers through my curly hair. “Anything I have is yours.” As she took the drink orders for the rest of the table, a woman walked into Mi Oficina. Somewhere in her twenties, because of her diminutive stature, she looked about twelve. She had fetching bangs, huge eyes, and wore patterned black tights under a miniskirt. She went straight for Mandarino and gave him a hug.

“This is Olivia, gentlemen,” he said, a proprietary arm around her slender waist. “Where have you been, mi vida?” he asked. “I’ve had to suffer the company of these brutes for hours waiting for you.” And to us: “I gave a workshop at the School for Dynamic Writers and Olivia was by far my most gifted student. One of these days I might even get around to reading something she’s written.”

Lola pulled up a chair for Olivia and set it in between Mandarino and me. She merely nodded when I introduced myself, preferring to engage in obligatory banter with her teacher and the other writers. In Mexico City, there are poor benighted women who like writers. Most have ambitions of writing a book themselves, which if it ever gets published will be one of those books read halfway to the finish line by fifty or a hundred people. Some of them might even read the other half the following year.

Armando from Culiacán asked her what she was working on. “My first book is about to come out,” she said, her eyes alight. “It’s a book of essays about Cinderella.” There is something jarring about a grown woman who looks like a child writing essays about a fairy tale; no doubt Olivia understood this. “I describe the differences between each adaptation: Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, the Disney version.” She was losing him but knew how to reel him back. “And what they all have to do with contemporary sexuality and eroticism.”

“Excellent,” said Armando, having heard only the last three words.

A half hour later, after her conversations with the others ran out of gas, she turned to me and asked, “Are you a writer too?”

I pursed my lips and shook my head.

“Thank God,” she said, having co-opted some of Mandarino’s cynicism. “The last thing the world needs is another one of us. What do you do?”

Most people can describe their work in three words or less. I had to take a deep breath before I let you have it. After, most of the time I had to listen to your position about the death penalty. There were only three: yes, no, and maybe, under certain circumstances. Everyone stated these opinions as if they were the first to have considered them.

In the U.S., I tried to avoid those conversations. Sometimes I told people I was a driving instructor, just because it is such a boring job and, as such, people changed the subject as soon as I’d declared it. However, in Mexico, talking about my work had its advantages. I looked at Olivia’s eyes with their hopelessly long lashes and conjured a vision of how the night could end. “I try to save people’s lives,” I said. Her brow wrinkled. “Don’t worry, I’m not a priest.”

“You’re a doctor.”

“Not even vaguely.” I took that deep breath and told her about how I tried to stop her countrymen, one poor devil at a time, from being injected with toxic poisons in U.S. prisons. How I traveled from hellholes in Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama to others in Michoacán, Chihuahua, and Durango to piece together the stories of their lives. Little by little she began to melt. I imagined waking up in the morning, her slender frame against mine, running my fingers along her ribs. I could have stared into those eyes for the rest of my life.

“Qué chido, güey,” she finally uttered. “Thanks.” She looked at me as if I were Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

When I started out as a mitigation specialist, I made sure to tell Mexicans that it was a job and I was paid to do it. I didn’t want them to get the mistaken impression that I was Mother Teresa. Nonetheless, they would continue to look at me with admiring, watery eyes, and keep saying things like “qué chido, güey” in choked voices. And just as I came to understand that they wanted to believe I was a licenciado, even after I explained that I was not, I also realized they liked to imagine I was a saint. Far be it from me to disappoint them.

Olivia wet and then bit her lower lip. “That’s sounds like a tough job,” she said.

“It’s a great job,” I replied. “I get to go places and meet people I never would otherwise. And I am never, ever bored.” I looked toward Lola and held up one finger.