Читать книгу The Risk of Returning, Second Edition - Shirley Nelson - Страница 9

For a long time as a kid I used to think I could make my father reappear. If I got the equation just right, the right location or the right minute, the right thing to tell or ask him, a door would suddenly open and he would be there, looking just as I remembered him. I hadn’t engaged in that fantasy for a long time, and I would never have admitted that I chose the Pan American Hotel with that intention, but it did happen to be the last place I’d seen him in happy circumstances.

He had brought me to the Capital on my seventh birthday for a gift of priority time, just the two of us. The hotel was meant as part of the treat, but the gentility of it, with its glossy terrazzo floors and bowing staff, only befuddled me. I liked things better outdoors. We poked our way through the intersecting streets and avenues, calles and avenidas, now efficiently numbered, but once with strange names, Street of Solitude, Street of Sorrows.

My father kept asking me what I would like to do most. All I wanted was to be in his presence, if I’d known how to tell him that. He had been away from home a lot in the previous months. I didn’t care what we did, but buy bubble gum was what I finally said, and off we went on the quest. We found it in the underground Central Market, literally under the ground. I studied the word on the colored wrapper: Dubble Bubble. Was that Spanish or English, I wondered, or both, like Chiclets.

We sat on a bench in the public plaza fronting the wide National Palace, while he taught me how to blow bubbles. He had grown a droopy mustache in the time since I’d seen him last, and for the rest of the day it held specks of pink. The mustache was gray, and it made him look older, though his hair was still blond. There was something else. His stature had somehow diminished. He was tall, a towering person, and his clothes had always seemed a little too small for him. Now they looked too big and they were the same clothes I’d seen him in hundreds of times.

“What are you staring at, raggmunk?” he asked. That was his Swedish name for me. It meant “potato pancake.” In Spanish I was apt to be an elote, an ear of corn.

“That dumb mustache,” I answered, and then we arm-wrestled, there on a bench in the sunny plaza. He won, of course. He had big hands. Both of mine could have fit into one of his. I never thought he threw a match just to make me feel good, though he hammed up the process, and this time he went into full-bodied contortions that collapsed me in laughter.

That was at the end of January in 1954. This August evening, thirty-three years later, and I now older than he was at the time, the memory surprised me with what it brought to the surface. Maybe I wasn’t ready after all. Maybe never.

After registering, I went directly to my room on the second floor. A long night’s sleep was what I thought I needed, but the traffic outside my windows was so clamorous I gave that up. I went down to the dining room for a glass of scotch and was informed apologetically by the waiter that there was no scotch, nor any other alcoholic drink, because the hotel owner was a teetotaler himself—“a follower of Riosmont.” That’s how I heard it, as one word. It sounded like the name of a cult.

“What’s that?” I asked.

He spelled it, politely. “M-o-n-t-t. General Efraín Ríos Montt. Vos?”

“Oh, sure.” I said. Never heard of the man. I settled for a coke and retreated to a divan on the mezzanine. In the lobby below, among the twenty-foot potted palms, a four-man marimba band began vamping with studied lethargy. I listened for a while as they wandered from one song to another. When they launched into a slow rendition of I’m in the Mood for Love, I went back to my room.

The traffic noise had not abated, but I slipped gratefully between the sheets, then watched sleep instantly lift away, like an airborne package. So I resorted to an old crutch, the baseball alphabet routine, this time with second basemen as the subheading. I had gotten all the way through G, skipping E, which was usually hard—Roberto Alomar, Marty Barrett, Pete Coscarart, then Bobby Doerr, Nelly Fox and Joe Gordon—and was groping for an H when I fell asleep.

In what seemed like minutes I sat up, startled out of a dream. Someone had unlocked the door to the room and come in, I was sure. I fumbled for the bedside lamp. No one was there. My surroundings suggested only civility and good will, the slightly worn furnishings, the ceiling fan noiselessly turning, a decanter of agua pura on the table covered by a starched white napkin, next to my money belt. I checked the contents. Nothing had been touched, passport, wallet, letter. The French doors that served as a window were shut, as I had left them. It was 4:00 A.M. and still dark outside. Both the rain and the traffic had stopped.

Half-awake in the early morning silence, I returned to the search for an H. And who should appear but Miss Heifferston, like a joke my brain was playing on itself. It had been many years since I had given Miss H a thought. Some of the kids had called her “the heifer,” and she was indeed bovine, but her voice was sweet and high, like a little girl’s. “Guess what, children,” she announced, standing with me at the front of the first grade classroom, her hand tightly clasping my elbow. “A new friend is joining us today. His name is Teddy Peterson, and he comes to us from far, far away in a land where people are very different than we are. So he is going to tell us something about it, aren’t you, Teddy?”

I could see myself now, that boy, up there in front of twenty-five staring faces, too tall already, taller than anyone else in the class. He was not supposed to talk about it, where they used to live, and he couldn’t talk anyway. It was as if he suddenly had no language at all, though he knew three, and one of them was English. He couldn’t even breathe, and something screwy was going on down around his legs. Like a streak, he was out of the room and the school and ran all the way home without his jacket, a good half mile in the frigid Rhode Island air, his pants and socks wet and crappy.

But he didn’t cry. In fact, it was as if he discovered that he didn’t need to cry at all anymore, about anything, and he didn’t. He figured it out, where the boundaries were and how to stay inside them. In a remarkably short time, as I assessed it now, feeling admiration for that skinny, determined boy, he wrested himself from his past. He became a stateside kid. It was like erasing the blackboard, a reward for well-behaved students. For the moment I felt heartened, as if I had looked over the side of the hotel bed and could see my old shoes of self-management waiting to be worn.

Then I shut the boy away, gently but firmly, and took off again in search of an H. Two presented themselves directly, in a bonus of trivia riches: Billy Herman, ancient history with the Chicago Cubs and later manager of the Red Sox, and young Ken Hubbs, his promise cut short by a plane crash in 1964.

It was then that the city’s silence was broken, at first with what I heard as faint dull thuds, without resonance. These, as they grew louder, were joined by a chorus of staccato grunts, the bottom note on a hundred bass fiddles, too low to be called music. I got up and opened the French doors. They led to a narrow balcony. I stepped out into the chilly air, half-naked in sweat pants. Street-lights still burned amber through the morning mist. Closed stores lined the sidewalks, their display windows secured by steel roll-down barriers.

It seemed to me the sound was coming from the right. In that next block a dense ceiling of signs stretched across the road, as far as I could see. Some were readable through the shifting fog: TicTac Relojes, Jordache, Wrangler, Orange Crush. From under these, out of the fog, a tight rank of figures emerged, a hundred or so of them, wearing identical red shorts and berets, army boots on their feet, chanting off-pitch as they trotted. Some kind of guard, I supposed, maybe from the National Palace, three blocks away. I watched them until they turned a corner and their eerie song faded to a rumble.

I remained outside, gazing at the empty wet street while the damp air enveloped me. The benign silence had returned, the only sound the squeak of the metal signs in the breeze. The air smelled not unpleasantly of wet dust and some kind of smoke. I took note of the sky, its clouds now faintly tinged with pink. A bony dog nosed its way down the gutter. Other than that, I was alone, until my eye caught a single figure on the farther sidewalk, again to my right, a young man, maybe a boy, wearing a straw hat with the brims rolled up on the sides. He was in a hurry, walking quickly, close to the buildings, head down, shoulders heaving, as if he had been running.

I watched him for a second or two, then headed back to the room. I had crossed the threshold of the French doors when I heard the snort of car brakes and a yell and turned in time to see a white van, a Chevy, I thought (snub-nosed), which had apparently stopped in the street, gather speed and swing with a roar around the next corner. The man who had been walking was nowhere in sight.

That was it. You could say I saw nothing, or that there was nothing to see anyway, or nothing ominous. A man was walking, a vehicle came by and stopped, and the man was gone. I knew there were abductions here, everybody knew that. But it seemed hardly likely I’d witness one on my first night, as if the country had arranged it for my orientation. Nevertheless, the effect was total. I felt blind-sided, hit by a board, the sense of control, renewed just moments ago, now knocked askew. The incident had found a match in the molecules of my own inner state and linked up perfectly. I slipped back inside and sat on the bed. My breathing filled the room.

I should report it, shouldn’t I? That was the next question, a rational one, I thought. I reached for the phone. But who did I think I would call? The front desk? Police? To tell them what? For all I knew, it was a legitimate arrest. Even if not, any idea that I ought to do something about it, that I had any legitimate role, was naive. I was just an over-reacting tourist, and—I felt with deep visceral conviction—I shouldn’t be here anyway. I should leave right now, get a taxi to the airport and stand by for the first empty seat I could get to the States. I took a shower, considering that possibility, to go back. Then toweling off, I acknowledged another question. Back to what?

I dressed and went out again on the balcony. In that last quarter hour the street below had changed, bathed fully now in the rosy light, reflected in the wetness of the pavement. A bus went by, then another. There were people in the windows. They looked normal and composed. Church bells rang somewhere, clunkingly, sounding very much like a pot banged with a spoon, then others, more melodious, at a distance. Something was lying in the gutter that I hadn’t noticed before.

On the way to breakfast I detoured out to the street, past two potted fig trees and an armed guard who opened the door and wished me a buenos días. The mists had cleared and the temperature was balmy, a glorious day in promise. I crossed over. What I’d noticed from the balcony was a straw hat, upside down. I walked around the corner. Nothing there except a crushed plastic bottle and a sneaker, quite small, but a man’s, I thought. I went back to the hat, picked it up and shook it, dispensing moisture and the dirt it had collected. It was an ordinary straw hat, rolled up on the sides, and nothing inside, not even a manufacturer’s label. I put it on. It was too small and sat on the top of my head.

I should explain now that I wore that hat often in the following weeks. It was not because I expected to find the owner and return it, and I didn’t. I never saw him again and never looked for him. The hat was just a token that something, whatever it was, had actually happened.