Heartland

by Ana Simo

  At seven o’clock I went to see how Rafael was doing. The kitchen had a door that opened to the outside, and another opening onto a covered hallway leading to the cellar and the garage. The maid’s room could only be reached through the garage. It was unlikely that any noise in that room would be heard in the house. McCabe would never know we were not alone. On the other hand, Rafael could be screaming his head off in there without me hearing anything from the house. The boy I had grown up with would never go mad or kill himself. But the man with the Patek Philippe watch who talked about coups and containers was more opaque. I rapped softly on his door. When he did not answer, I went in. I did not see him at first. The room was in shadows. He had moved the chest of drawers away from the door and the only window, and was writing on it by the light of the table lamp, his back against the wall. That might prolong his life by ten seconds if his presumed killers came through the door, twenty if through the window, provided they did not first throw in a grenade, as they always do in the movies. He did not lift his head from the notebook or stop his hand, which was flying over the paper. I envied him. I wished it were my hand on that paper. But I had been marooned on a white sheet of paper for a long time, long before the loss of nouns and verbs made denial impossible, marooned from the moment “Benbassa” had won me that Blue Ribbon almost forty years ago. Perhaps it was Benbassa’s curse that had shaped my life, the punishment for pretending to be a writer. Benbassa’s curse, and not McCabe, even if I sensed an undercurrent between the two.

  Sitting on the maid’s bed, I watched the shadows cast by Rafael’s hand flit over the paper, left right, left right, a squadron of black moths taking off one after the other and disappearing into the night sky. Turgenev would have heard the scratching of pen on paper. I had to content myself with what my eyes saw, unconfirmed by my ears. Pens glided silently these days. Technology worked hard to silence our little helpers, while cacophony swamped the world. I envied Rafael his writing, as I envied McCabe sauntering up and down the stairs when my bandaged feet kept me tied to bed. And I envied him his tale, particularly if it was a paranoid mirage: then it would be tragedy instead of political drama. Above all, I envied him his readers, the daughter and the son, and their descendants, who would turn his tale into an immortal myth. I wished I were Rafael, even if a death squad was on its way. I had my own coming, anyway. I wished I were him, but without leaving my body. I could not conceive of myself inside a male body. And look what I inhabit now: a carcass, a shell. At least I don’t have a dick. Watching Rafael’s hand I soon began to feel his words flow in my mind. His hand and my mind were synchronized as if he was taking my dictation. My rhythm, intonations, hesitations, commas, and periods were all there in his hand. I never read Rafael’s letter to his children, that is, the one he recorded on paper, but I remember every word I dictated to him. It went like this:

  “Dear beloved children:

  “I’ll be dead in a few hours. You’re going to hear many bad things about me. Don’t believe any. The worst that can be said about me is that I was mad with love of country. Falling in love is a kind of madness. When the love object is a person, sanity eventually returns. When it is your country, or an ideal, you become increasingly delirious and infect all those who surround you. I was mad until a particularly horrible event suddenly cured me a few days ago. My eyes are now wide open. Many terrible crimes have been committed before this even more terrible crime. I’m responsible for them. Not because I committed them myself, or even knew about them, or approved them, but because they may not have happened if I had not thrown the dice. Mad love of country was my motivation, but I do not absolve myself with it.

  “I wanted you to begin life freer than I did. That is why I never told you much about my parents—your grandparents whose names you bear, Genoveva and Ezequiel—or the place where I grew up. The past can nail you down. I’ve been trying to remove the nails since I was born. I kept of the past only what I could bear. I thought I would tell you the whole story later, when it could do you no harm, when you were my age and had your own children. Don’t think I was covering up some big family secret. Ours was an ordinary story about ordinary people. It is just that, until recently, these two places were my black holes: La Esperanza, the sugar mill town where my parents came from, and Shangri-La, the fetid subdivision where I was born and grew up. You have never heard those two names; neither has your mother. The ‘Elmira, a small town in the heartland’ listed as my birthplace in my official bio means nothing to me. My parents, your grandparents, are buried in Shangri-La, an orphan settlement straddling the border between Elmira town and county, and forgotten by both. Go visit your grandparents’ grave when you are older and can travel alone. Do not bring anyone else with you, not even your mother. Go to La Esperanza, too. Maybe I have a double there! I wish I could go myself.

  “My dear, beloved children: I was not gifted for fatherhood. Every time you asked me to play with you I was scared. Even before you learned to speak, you seemed to have things in mind that I could not begin to imagine. I felt shy in front of you, so discipline was my only language. At least I never hit you, but I know I bored you with my lectures. I want you to know that your father is dying an honorable man. I am not hiding behind anyone. I am not saying that I just obeyed orders. I was mad, blind, wrong. I’m sorry.

  “Your loving father,

  “Rafael Jacinto Cohen Martínez”

  That was the end of my dictation. I do not know the names of Rafael’s wife or children, but I distinctly felt his hand writing “Genoveva and Ezequiel.” The florid, Esperanza-style signature, with full surname and both of his parents’ names was, in my opinion, a childish affectation. It was bound to confuse the twins and become fodder for the Aztlán fundamentalists, whom Rafael reviled. Maybe he was just trying to be intimate, maybe his public name, Rafael J. Cohen, was too intertwined with “National Security Advisor” to be a father’s name. Rafael’s hand stopped. He had filled the entire notebook with his large handwriting. The last half was the letter that I “dictated” to him. The first half he had done before I came into the room. Was it a letter to his wife? A last-minute will? I say quote-unquote “dictated” to stress that I knew, and know, in spite of my present diminished circumstances, the difference between the literal and the truthful. My dictation was truthful, but not literal, as in facts happening in the physical world. Hence the quotation marks. The difference between one and the other should be evident to you, dear listener, without me pointing it out at every turn of my account. Rafael put the notebook inside a manila envelope. I noticed an incipient bald spot on top of his head. “Give this to my kids, but don’t read it, please. It’s kind of embarrassing,” he said, acknowledging my presence. I later wrapped the envelope in plastic and hid it in the safest place I could think of: in the cellar behind the old boiler, which was no longer in use. It must be there still.

  Rafael was suddenly cheerful. He jumped and clicked his heels in the air, sideways, like he used to when he finished his homework. That was his only physical trick and he did it amazingly well even now, when he was at least thirty pounds heavier. Rafael had always been chatty. I didn’t like to talk. So we got along fine. He wasn’t just chatty anymore. Words poured out of him now in every direction, frivolous and hectoring, indignant and lyrical. One moment he launched a vitriolic diatribe against Aztlán fundamentalists: “They’ve repackaged the old Aztlán tripe. They’re selling it as ersatz identity for the identity-deprived white masses. I mean, how cynical can you get?” he said, gasping angrily in between words, and giving himself a burst from an asthma inhaler that he pulled out of his pants pocket. The next moment he exulted in remembering a heavenly Sachertorte he had tasted last month at the Café Demel in Vienna, neither of which would have existed had the Caliphate not been savagely repelled there a generation ago. The possibility of loss increased his gustatory pleasure, he said, words desperately pouring out until he checked his watch. “It’s halfway there, already. Even in rough seas.” He fell silent and slu
mped in bed, his eyes half closed. His face was more revealing then than when he was talking. I would have learned to read it if he had stayed for a while. “They must be burning my library by now,” he mumbled, his eyes now fully closed.

  Rafael seemed to be dozing. It was time for me to check on the venison. When I was at the door he suddenly said, “Do you ever hear from Glorita?” I shook my head. “Me neither,” he said. Why would he, anyway? He hardly knew her. Was this just gossipy intrusion, or vampirism? Some people live to suck the memories of others.

  The fragrance of rosemary, thyme, and wild meat basted in red wine filled the kitchen. The venison was almost done. I stuck a fork in a tiny roasted potato. Still a little hard; they needed a few more minutes. The Pennsylvania butcher said you could keep them warm in the oven for a couple of hours after cooking without the venison drying out, or the potatoes getting mushy. Just make sure to baste the venison from time to time. Do not touch the potatoes! Set your oven at the lowest possible temperature. Some newer state-of-the-art ovens had a warming function, specially designed for that situation. I inspected Mrs. Wilkerson’s oven closely, oven manual in hand, but did not find that function. When the time came, I just set the oven slightly above zero, keeping my ear on its door until I heard the gas swoosh on.

  Snowflakes swirled under the garden lamp. Soon they thickened into a light snowfall, enough to add a picturesque touch without disturbing traffic. The Celestial Designer was still on my side. McCabe was not being driven from the airport: she was driving herself. Why didn’t I think about this before? It’s always slower when you drive yourself instead of having a local driver who knows the roads. She had certainly rented a car at the airport. Add fifteen minutes for pickup, at least. Add another, say, half hour, to look at a map, hesitate while approaching an exit, even take the wrong one. What kind of a driver was McCabe? I had never seen her drive. One summer she drove a rust bucket from Bangor to British Columbia to work in a fish-canning factory, she told me. She was fifteen. That was about twenty-five years ago, at the tail end of the Great Hunger, but driving is an indestructible skill. McCabe’s wealth dated from a little over a decade ago, as far as I or anyone else knew. What had she done in the fifteen years between the fish-canning factory and SoHo? Where had she been? “It was brutal,” was all she would say. Driving cars likely figured in her years of wandering through the desert before arriving in Manhattan, where you did not need a car, and a great many people never learned to drive.

  McCabe’s life had been harder than mine. I never worked in a factory. I managed to survive on my wits and America’s ebbing guilt toward my kind. McCabe had not gotten a break. She deserved every penny she had.

  Rafael feared a marriage of convenience between the Aztlán fanatics and the Caliphate. “They’ve been secretly courting each other for a while,” he had said. Both abhorred the mixing of races and civilizations. The Caliphate would gain credibility and a new, multicultural fifth column, the Aztlanites, access to the Caliphate’s Swiss bank accounts, recruiting wizardry, and fat VIP rolodexes. When Rafael talked shop, his face would begin to blur before my eyes. The familiar traits would become unfamiliar: the nose too small or large to be his, the ears too high up or low, the Adam’s apple less visible than I remembered. I would no longer recognize this compact man with the large gestures. Then he would fall silent, and it was again him.

  McCabe had no gurus. She would never fall for Aztlán and their ilk. She was serene in her non-identity. I worshipped her supreme blankness. Rafael must not see McCabe. He was not as perceptive as I was with the particular and the unique—a weakness of theoreticians—but McCabe’s glow was hard to miss. He might kidnap her, intellectually speaking, and use her in a new ideological stew. McCabe could be a powerful weapon in the hands of a philosopher-turned-advisor to the prince. I even had a name for it: supra-essentialism. An old idea stolen from Leibniz by each succeeding generation. Rafael could re-brand it. In an accidental world, McCabe was pure essence. It’s not an identity that you need, but an essence, he could tell the identity-deprived white masses that were imperiling the stability of the Republic. McCabe will give it to you. She will restore purity and glow to America. That’s how Rafael could snatch the white masses from the lusting Aztlán viper. A delirious scenario? Maybe, but no less so than Rafael’s NAR, or such archaisms as neoconservatism, Islamic fundamentalism, neo-nativism, Communism, and the homebred thicket of Christian heresies from the Reconstructionists to the rapturous, all of which became the truth du jour at some point, with the revolting consequences we all know.

  I did not give a rat’s ass about America. There was no such place. It had been a postprandial dream of the Enlightenment, kept artificially alive by the feeding tubes of self-interest through the end of the twentieth century, until its fat throat was slit in the Jacobean gore of 2008. Mrs. Crandall was all that was left of America, the Accidental. She was the healthy limb, heavy with fruits. The tree was rotten. The limb would one day wither. In the meantime, it was the most sumptuous of meals. Poor Rafael, had he tasted Mrs. Crandall as I had (an impossibility), he would not be fretting now about the clueless white masses. They could always sing “Aracnida, the Beautiful.”

  At the fish-canning factory, McCabe had started on the assembly line, and ended as a class “A” forklift operator. Those were the biggest forklifts, used to carry heavy loads to the waiting container ships. The factory had its own docks in the back. McCabe said it was hard not to run over the seagulls when you put the forklift in reverse to disengage from the load. Seagulls swarmed over the dock day and, she discovered, night. She had chosen the night shift thinking that there would be fewer of them. But there were just as many. “The floodlights were very bright. They thought it was sunlight,” she said. An ornithologist from a nearby college stopped by one night to take Polaroids of the seagulls on the dock. He told her that lack of sleep might render them infertile after a couple of generations. He was chased away by security before he could answer her question: Were seagulls throwing themselves in front of the forklifts on purpose? This was the only time when I felt a bodily impulse toward McCabe. I could have lifted her in the air, held her tight against my chest, and put her safely in my pocket, if any of that had been physically, or morally, possible. The sea was never far from McCabe in her early years. Saltwater, fish, and birds were in every story she told me about herself. They weren’t actually stories, but snippets, flashing images. The only full story she ever told me was the one of the Spanish sailors burning corpses in the Biloxi Marsh in the seventeenth century.

  McCabe would come. Mrs. Crandall was in town. I considered going to see her after everything was over; she would not say no to me. Bebe existed somewhere, eternally, promising the rapture like a careless, provocative god. Only Glorita was truly absent. I fought the impulse to fall on my knees and beg for her to be alive. No matter how old, sick, or unlike Glorita she was. Please let her be alive. Lucky Petrona, who had my legs to grab, and my pants to smear with snot. I had only the venison, visible through the oven’s glass window. I am an egoist, I told the venison. I declared Glorita dead because time had gone by, yet I did not sign my own death certificate. If I am the same now as I was then, more or less, why wouldn’t Glorita still be my Glorita? The venison sneered. I lowered the oven temperature a bit more. Then I put on a pair of McCabe’s surgical gloves and went to inspect Rafael’s car.

  It did not take long. The inside was impeccably clean. It smelled of rug shampoo and leather-nourishing cream. The glove compartment held only the car manual. The flashlight revealed no signs of the mud that covered Rafael’s shoes and clothes when he arrived. The trunk was empty and equally antiseptic. I lifted the trunk rug, but there was nothing underneath apart from the new spare and a gleaming jack. The undercarriage was mud-free. The tailpipe shone. The chassis had been recently washed and waxed. It was a high-quality detailing done by hand—I could tell because there was no wax residue on the windshield. How could a car this clean have been warehoused for years in
a crummy Salva garage, and then driven 1,033 miles from D.C. to Elmira? Unless Rafael stopped nearby and got it cleaned. If he did, his coup yarn was undoubtedly a lie. I closed the car doors carefully, so he would not hear me. I found no traces of old McCabe in the car. Yet, the more I shone the flashlight on the blue sedan, the more it looked like the same car that had picked her up that night.

  Back in the kitchen, I turned on the clock radio. A golden retriever was lost along Elmira County Route 24. The President had spent Christmas with her parents in her hometown of Laredo. She was expected to tour a war orphanage tomorrow. Servicewomen and men abroad had made a record 11,375,086 Christmas calls home. I gagged. Print, TV, radio, and Internet so-called news had a vomitive effect on me. They were a wad of lies, half-lies, and quarter-lies (the latter now anointed as truths by professional skeptics). I had avoided them for years, for health reasons. I did not realize it then, but it was a sign of incipient panic on my part to think I might be able to deduce truth by comparing the radio version of the world to Rafael’s. They were so far apart that only faith, in one version or the other, was possible. That was, after all, why I had stopped consuming “news” in the first place.