Читать книгу The Risk of Returning, Second Edition - Shirley Nelson - Страница 15

Meanwhile, Rebecca seldom left my thoughts entirely. In dreams I often found myself a passenger in her car, my knees pressed against the dashboard, seat stuck in the forward position, as it was in actuality. In these dreams, she was always driving me to Logan Airport, where she was dropping me off, as she did—in actuality—because she was going “right by,” on her way to a conference.

I finally called her, only to get my own voice on our answering machine at home. She had not yet changed it. “Please leave us a message,” I heard myself say. So I did. “Ted, tell Rebecca everything is fine here. Ask her how she is. How is his Mom?” I left the number and said goodbye to myself. She called back when I was out. Juanita wrote down her message. “All fine here, too. No news. Your mother the same, holding her own.” Juanita thought she’d missed a word, whatever it was my mother was holding. It was all right, I told her, nobody knew.

On Saturday, at the end of the first week, I took my run later in the morning while my clothes washed at the local lavendería. Doña Rosa had been urging me to visit the chapel next to the partially restored Church of San Francisco where a 17th century healer, Hermano Pedro de Betencourt, lay in state. I lingered there maybe five minutes, staring at the mesmerizing display of the wizened corpse in a wall niche surrounded by candles, dead flowers, crutches, and scores of photos of those who claimed to be healed. A woman standing nearby muttered a chatty prayer and crossed herself repeatedly. After leaving the dim recesses my eyes took a while to adjust to the sunlight, and maybe that was part of the problem, because when I got back to the central plaza I saw her.

The plaza was alive with traffic—motor bikes, street hawkers, tourists. She was twenty feet ahead of me, looking in the window of a shop with a sign that read High Class Tipica. It was Rebecca for sure. I recognized her from the back as she walked away from me. Same height (just under my chin up close), same solid hips (“broad across the beam” as she’d say), same close-cut auburn hair, and her walk, like a thirteen-year-old boy, I used to tell her, the left foot a little pigeon-toed, arms swinging slightly wide of the body. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, as she would be. Sunglasses dangled from her fingertips.

Never mind the odds. I knew it really could be Rebecca, that she could and would fly here if she was so inclined, rather than phoning or writing, to tell me that she had changed her mind. I started after her, shouting her name. Half-a-dozen people turned their heads, and so did she, with a face that was not her own. I spun around and ran in the opposite direction as if I were chased, then studied vocabulary back at the house, finding sanity in words that were nothing but words: Rain: lluvia. Rainfall: cantidad de lluvia. The language, imbécil, just get the language.

But things were not going very well in the language department, either. I heard another student say that success in language study depended on hitting it off with your teacher. Catherine and I were not hitting it off. On the contrary, it’s a wonder we didn’t come to a blow-up sooner than we did.

I don’t know what she saw when she looked at me during those six hours together day after day, but her own appearance never changed—hair skinned back so tight under the visored cap I thought it must hurt, always the chinos and white shirt. Was it always a white shirt? I won’t swear to that now. But my sense of her was unchanging. Against the background of astonishing color everywhere around us, and in contrast to the woven tote bag she carried every day, she seemed superimposed in monochrome. She seldom smiled, unless to give me that needling half-way thing. I started a collection of adjectives to pin her down—dour, saturnine, churlish, taciturn. Atribilious. I liked that one.

Not that I was earning medals for charm myself. Often I felt like walking away. Once I did. I got up and left the premises and stayed away long enough to convey a message, which I was pretty sure she got. But otherwise I just fell back on the rules I used in teaching: level voice, never frown, never interrupt. If she disliked me, it was not going to be because I was a mannerless chump. I kept a discreet distance as we sat together at the table. I had no interest in the intrigue of accidental touching. If our legs met, as they were apt to, both of us long-legged, the arousal factor registered below zero.

Mornings were devoted to grammar. In this she was merciless, as she should be, drill, drill, slow and repetitious on her part, clumsy and hesitant on mine. I felt like Heinlein’s Martian-man, looking up the code. After the lesson, Catherine would ask me to read something aloud to her in Spanish and translate it to English. These readings were always juvenile, comics with data about the Maya (over fifty percent of the population, identified by twenty-two different languages), and a child’s version of the Popul Vuh, the K’iché myth of the world’s creation. I knew what she was doing, groping for the point where I had left off as a kid. It irked me, but I had no reasonable objection. There’s something about learning a language, anyway, that reduces you to babbling childhood.

Afternoons were harder. This is when we were supposed to “dialogue informally,” for two whole hours, exhausting as a prospect. But even more tiresome was finding anything to talk about, for more than a few minutes, that is. “Anything” is hyperbole, of course, but day after day we faltered and came to an impasse. It was not a minor glitch.

At the beginning, Catherine offered me the choice. What did I want to talk about? I considered sports or music, but quickly backed off those, the language of each too specialized to be practical right now. The same was true of world affairs. I thought I’d get help from news reports, about East Germany or South Africa, say, but that turned out to be more than my low-level skills could take on with savvy.

What about the history of Central America, Catherine asked me one afternoon. What did I know? I assumed she meant short of the big taboo, current politics. Not that I knew anything much about that, or about the history either. I fell back on the old high school ruse, when you’re stuck make the teacher laugh. I gave a sniff. “You mean like this is where you get your bananas and stuff?”

“Divertidísimo,” she muttered. Not funny, Bozo.

“Okay, here’s something I really do know,” I said. “This will knock your socks off.” I worked it out in Spanish, first in writing, while she waited, then read it aloud. “In 1972, the great Puerto Rican ball player, Roberto Clemente, was killed in the crash of a plane headed for Nicaragua with aid for earthquake victims. I bet even you didn’t know that.”

“Puta!”

“Wowee, that’s a dirty word, right?”

I was about to be sent to my room, I could tell. All right, I said, I might be able to describe the Monroe Doctrine, though it was really just a verbal clot from a high school class. Oh, but, I added, Congress abolished it not long ago, right? And hadn’t President Reagan resurrected it recently? Wasn’t there once something called the Atlantic Charter? Or was that the Alliance for Progress? “And then you’ve got your Cuba and your Bay of Pigs, right?” She smiled in spite of herself, just a little, so I added the Battle of 1066 and the French Revolution.

All that was in English. Back to Spanish, she said. Let’s talk about you. What about my work? What did I teach? What could I say but “Lit Survey,” in a full sentence, of course, and list some classics, all of which translated badly. Well, then, how about the subject of my dissertation? I didn’t do a dissertation, I told her.

“What? No PhD?” Teasing half-smile. “How come?”

“Acrofobia academica,” I said. Sarcasm works poorly when you have to put on your glasses and look up the words. What did that mean, she wanted to know. Nada, I said.

We had already been through the “Who are you?” exercises in vocabulary. Who are you? Yo soy el hombre. Americano. Tourist, teacher, student, husband, son. And the nots. I am not a brother. Not a father, a doctor, a bus driver. I got tired of it and tried to switch the focus. Who are you? I am the teacher, not the student, was all she would say.

Once, during a water break, I asked people what they talked about with their tutors. Families, jobs, they said, life in general. Definitely not politics. Most of them joked about the “mordaza Méndez”—the Méndez gag, as it got quickly labeled.

The pony-tailed guy, Hank Stenning, the Peace Corps veteran, was adamant. Nobody was going to curb his speech. He’d made that clear to his own tutor.

I liked Stenning. He spoke Spanish far in advance of mine and so I mostly listened, catching what I could. One day he switched to English and I realized he had a speech defect, an articulation disorder, to be proper. It was somewhat charming, just enough trouble with the formation of the phonetic of “L” to require your attention. Did I know, he asked, that I’d been screened for “powiticaw extremism?”

Screened? Yes, prospective students were put through a background check, he claimed. Méndez had friends in the States who did that for him. Stenning said he wasn’t sure how he was admitted to the school himself, since his views were no secret. He could understand the caution. The country was a beehive of spywork. But “neutrawity” was naive, a sure vote for the status quo, especially during a war.

“War? What war?” I asked.

“This one.”

I tried to report that conversation to Catherine, though I knew it was pushing the envelope. She shut it off, of course, but it led to an idea that worked. Why didn’t I keep a log, I suggested, a record of various observations here in Antigua and at the Ávila household? In the evenings I could write some of those out in Spanish and give them to her orally the next afternoon. She agreed, as long as I kept to the rules.

I liked the idea, myself. I had often given journal keeping as a student assignment. I began with the mountains, the surrounding volcanoes, since they were hardly avoidable. In a bookstore I picked up an account of their history. Antigua was nested among three. Of those, Volcán de Agua was the largest, a looming pyramidal presence dominating the city. The tip was long gone, the huge mouth ragged, and therein lay the story. On the night of September 10, 1541, after three days of torrential rain, an earthquake hurled collected water out of the mountain’s cone, taking with it a massive portion of the top. The city on the slope below, the new colonial capital, was buried under tons of mud. I wrote it up in my own words (well, a little unavoidable plagiarism) and received Catherine’s outright praise.

That led to a discussion of other earthquakes in the country, catastrophic ones, that is, eighteen on record since 1565, three of them in this century. But when we came to the one in 1976 in which over 20,000 people died, she refused to talk about it because the international relief efforts were “highly political.” I added a silent “anomalistic” to her list of adjectives and almost walked away again.

Still, the journal strategy was working. My stipulation to students was to log only observations of life outside themselves. The point was to steer them away from the inevitable tendency to moon about their inner lives, which usually led to very bad writing. I liked it now for the same discipline. I found comfort in gathering a list of details—a line of little girls in blue uniforms crossing the street with a nun at each end, a man selling newspapers, piled three feet high on his head. I counted things: the arches on each floor of the Palace of the Captains General (twenty-seven) and the number of women I saw with at least one gold-capped tooth (forty-three).

Then the process itself pulled a couple of tricks. I was walking back from the school to my digs at the end of the day. The sun was still out, rain clouds delayed. The white sidewalk ahead, at right angles to the white building facades, appeared to be part of the architecture, a long geometric shape with sharp shadows and shafts of light. I walked through it, becoming part of it, then in my room described it, put it in an envelope and mailed it to Rebecca. She’d know what it was, another answer to a question she had repeatedly set before me, in her ongoing analysis of what made me tick. What really thrills you? That was how it went. What was I passionate about? Usually I just grunted, but one day I shot back an answer.

“Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo. The Adagietto Movement of Mahler’s Fifth. Moby Dick. Any of the Impressionists. All of Dostoevsky. Emily Dickinson. Pinot Grigio. The Great Gatsby. Ted Williams. An inside-the-park home run. Simon and Garfunkel. Bach. Starry Night. Did I say Emily D? Doonesbury. The quartet from Rigoletto. King Lear. The Seventh Veil. Bob Dylan. Dylan Thomas. Sergeant Pepper. The big bang theory. Bucky Fuller. Lucky Jim. Hucky Finn. Marshall McLuhan. Howl! Franck’s D-Minor. Sibelius. The printing press. Arts and Crafts. Gilbert and Sullivan. Fats Waller. Isaac Asimov. The Parthenon. The Iliad. Barbra! Aretha! Did I mention John Coltrane? John Cage? Well, maybe not John Cage. John Lennon? Oscar Peterson? Koko Taylor? Lena Horne? Hammurabi’s Code? How about the theme from A Love Story, as sung by Andy Williams?” I took a breath and bellowed: “She fills my heart!”

Rebecca laughed, to her credit. I reminded her of Binx in The Moviegoer, she said, “Passion by proxy.” I told her I was pleased to be associated with any Walker Percy character, especially Binx, who was prone to hearing a great “rumble” in his “descending bowel.”

The truth was I could never predict what would “really thrill” me. I actually got a lump in my throat watching the TV retirement ceremony for John Havlicek during half-time at a basketball game at Boston Garden. And once when I was standing in the stadium at Fenway Park before a game began, impatiently waiting out “The Star Spangled Banner,” I was knocked for a loop by the words “still there.” Not that the flag was still there, not the ramparts, not anything in the song itself, God knows, but the fact that something was “still there.”

What was happening now was different, but not totally unfamiliar. Thoreau, one moonlit night, fishing from a boat with a sixty-foot line, felt a faint “vibration,” a message from another reality far below the water’s surface. And Henry James said something once about guessing the unseen from the seen. Though that seemed fatuous to me, I often told students to listen for the faint tap-tap-tap when they read fiction, like a knock on the door in the night, gentle at first, then louder and louder.

I didn’t tell them to listen for that in their own experience. But now, for instance, I would be in a tienda, say, buying toothpaste from a very cordial clerk—cordial the way almost everyone was, with a little air of old ceremony—and suddenly tap-tap-tap, I would know for a just a second that I was living in two worlds, and the one that was visible to me was not the realest reality.

I don’t mean by that the seamier aspect of the city. That was here too, like the scorpion that frequented the school bathroom, or the beggars who appeared out of nowhere. Or thieves. Once I watched a pickpocket apply his remarkable skill in plain sight and walk away into traffic, all before I caught on. Or the curious amount of public drunkenness. I learned to be careful to skirt fresh puddles of vomit on my morning runs.

One morning I came upon a young man lying on the sidewalk, head in the gutter, a woman sitting quietly next to him, a baby on her back. Had they been there all night? The guy looked unconscious, but he was breathing, just falling-down drunk. I tried to ask the woman if I could help, move him to safety, at least. But she turned away from me before I could speak, while the baby sucked placidly on the end of her braid.

The new reality I sensed was far less obvious than all that. Of course, I considered Stenning’s claim that a war was in progress, right now, all around me. But if so, there was no convincing sign of it. The television news shows I caught in the bars and the Ávila parlor never mentioned war, and the omnipresent camouflage fatigues, the clink of metal and squeak of leather as soldiers passed you on the street, seemed more decorative than anything else.

I inquired. I raised the subject with a couple of fellow drinkers at a bar. “Tell me what’s happening here. Is the country at war?”

These were guys I had met here before, always easily sociable, enduring my awkward Spanish. Neither of them answered. One gave me a look that suggested I was nuts, and the other suddenly saw someone he knew across the room, picked up his beer and left.

Then one morning I saw a photo tacked on a tree in the park, a young woman, smiling, a graduation picture on a sheet of cardboard, edges curled by rain, and under it the words ¿DÓNDE ESTÁ? Where is she? There were more, on another tree and another. Six or more of them, men and women, most of them young, some with that eerie question ¿DÓNDE ESTÁ? and others with PRESENTE, an odd Q and A: Where is she? Where is he? They are here.

That day at lunch—it must have been Thursday of the second week—I asked Marco if he ever heard news of the war. I asked it casually, and I didn’t ask his father, who sat across from me. That would have lent too much meaning to the question. Marco stopped eating and looked at me in genuine perplexity. “What war do you mean? Cold War?”

“No, here. In this country.”

“There is no war here.”

“No fighting anywhere?”

“Fighting. Ahhh,” he said. “You mean los guerrilleros? No, no. They are far away in the hills.” He slipped into his goofy accent. “Communeests, señor. They are heestory now.”

At this point his father jumped in. “Aqui no tuvo tanta fuerza la violencia,” he told me, emphatically. “Verdad?”

“You hear the man?” said Marco. “He say he doan know nothing about no war.”

“But he said la violencia. What does that mean?”

“In the mountains. The mountains. It’s over. Kaput!”

I said thanks, and went back to eating, but Marco was too far into his act to let it go. He leaned toward me with conspiracy. “Never mine, my fran. You wan a war, we fine one for you. Give me a day, maybe two. A full week at most.”

Don Francisco hushed him. “No hay problema, señor,” he assured me. He went into a little speech that Marco translated, switching instantly to his father’s earnest manner, deepening his voice. “La guerrilla has now been defeated, thank God. True, they are still causing trouble in the mountains. Are you planning to travel about the country?” His hands drove a car.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Ahh. Pues, ten cuidado,” said Don Francisco. Be careful. I looked at Marco. He sliced his throat. “Delincuentes,” he whispered.

“You see, Mr. Peterson,” Don Francisco continued, suddenly in English, “many Indian given gun, by los guerrilleros, you see, and they use, you know, to rob and kill.” He stood to go, then paused behind his chair. “You must not think bad our country. We are democracy now. Our president elected civilian, first civilian fifteen years. Pero, your own country, Mr. Peterson, that is also famous for big crime, verdad?”

“Bingo,” I said.

He looked perplexed but carried on. “Crime, okay, but war, finished, thanks to General Ríos Montt. You know General Ríos Montt former president? He fix things in big hurry, that man. Five years ago. Bring law and order.”

It was the most he had ever said to me directly and there was no stopping him now, standing there behind his chair, with me as his only attentive audience. Marco yawned. Juanita asked to be excused, granted by her mother, who picked up our plates and retreated to the kitchen herself. Don Francisco sent Marco to get something. It turned out to be a poster, a big blue hand on a white background, two fingers and the thumb held up in a pledge. I don’t steal, I don’t lie, I don’t abuse, the lettering said, as I translated it. These posters, Don Francisco said, had been distributed all over the country during General Ríos Montt’s regime, every store, every business.

He wound up finally with another name, Elizondo, the “next president of the country.”

The man’s name was faintly familiar and it took a few seconds to realize why. I had heard him speak the previous Sunday. Marco had awakened me early that morning, sent up by his mother with an invitation to join them at mass at the cathedral. I declined groggily, pulling the pillow over my head.

“Okay,” said Marco. “But what shall I tell her royal highness?”

“Tell her I’m an unreconstructed post-modern skeptic,” I muttered. He said he hadn’t heard of a church like that around here.

When he left, I got up anyway, disgruntled and thoroughly awake, and dialed the radio in search of a little music. I got a woman vocalist with a wonderful hot momma style, singing what sounded like a Latinized Negro spiritual. She was followed instantly by this guy Elizondo, who was introduced just as Zondo. I understood little of what he said, and wasn’t interested. He was followed by another speaker, a man who seemed to be offering a corrective to the first guy. What got my attention was the one part of his name I caught, López. Coincidentally, my best friend as a kid back in the village was named Luis López, a Mayan boy, nine years old when I saw him last. López was a common name, and I couldn’t translate what he was saying, anyway. He had a strong accent. I preferred the torchy singer, but she didn’t return.

I put all that down in journal notes and the next afternoon started to convey it to Catherine. She stopped me as soon as she heard the word guerra, as I thought she would. “You know we can’t talk about the war.”

“The war. So there is one.”

“Change the topic. Ahora, ya.”

I obliged, with the subject next on my canary pad, the “coincidencia” of bumping into the man named Elizondo twice within a few hours.

“Zondo, huh? Pues.” She looked amused. “That was hardly a coincidence. The man is ubicuo.”

Ubiquitous? I hadn’t noticed. She said we couldn’t talk about him either, because that was politics, too.

Fine with me, I said. I’d much rather talk about the difference between Corona and Gallo.

At one point early in the third week, as I was blundering along with a reading, I became aware of a silence across the table. I looked up at Catherine from my notebook, thinking for an instant that she had fallen asleep. She was awake all right, but had drifted off to some other location. “Teacher, teacher,” I said, thrusting my hand in the air. She snapped back and apologized, but it happened again, several times. I finally asked her if something was wrong. It was the first hint I had gotten yet, or the first I took, that something could be wrong.

She was just tired, she said. She had spent all weekend trying to do an errand in the capital, but had been blocked by detours for a city-wide festival. “A wretched saint’s day,” she said. “The assumption of our lady into heaven.” She winced.

“Big deal,” I said. “Today happens to be the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death.”

I’m happy to say that changed her mood. She laughed, that fascinating sound from somewhere inside. Then I told her he died on a toilet. It was my turn to wince. She laughed again. In fact, this time she guffawed, then covered her mouth. “Oh, poor Elvis,” she whispered.

We went right back to work, but part of my brain was focused on this new piece of her. Maybe, I fancied, like the two Antiguas, there were two Catherines. But how would I know? You’d think you couldn’t help get to know someone you spent six hours a day with, five days a week. But I didn’t know her, and she didn’t know me.

I had enough to occupy my attention. With only a week to go before classes ended, I was facing a jumble of substantives and cognates, and every kind of verb, regular and irregular, present indicative, subjunctive, pretérito, imperfecto. Then there was that whole matter of “you” that I couldn’t keep straight, when to use usted, “you” with a formal distance, and vos and tú, “you” with shades of familiarity. To use any of them inappropriately could be received as an insult, Catherine insisted. The default position in Guatemala or any Spanish speaking country, was usted. Women were careful to use it with men. I’d noticed that Catherine always used usted in talking to me. Tú was the sticky one, in its various forms, tú, te, ti. But actually, vos could be even more informal and chummy than “tú.” Children used it with each other (yes, I remembered), and guys on athletic teams. To make matters worse, it was also a throwaway word, like “you know,” or “yeah, man.”

“Just stay clear of tú,” said Catherine. “Too familiar. Easily misread.”

That was a microcosm of a larger subtext, the use of a language that made you a member. It was not a technique you could learn in three weeks, I knew now, or one you could return to quickly after more than thirty years of neglect, in spite of Catherine’s assurances. With time and room for error, I could piece together almost anything I wanted to say, and patient speakers could usually make themselves clear to me, but it was all still mechanical and clumsy.

In the parts of the Popul Vuh I’d been reading—the sacred stories of the K’iché culture—the gods, the great crafters, sought repeatedly to create beings who could hear and speak, who would talk to the gods and understand who they were. The gods had experimented first with creatures made from clay and then from wood, a gross mistake in each case, for though the carvings managed to reproduce themselves in some way that strained credulity, their hearts were empty. Next the gods tried monkeys. That was disappointing, as well, and at long last they created humans from corn. That worked. Corn connected. But I was not corn.