The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  It had all happened so quickly. Alex knew that people lived with MS for years, into old age even, half of them probably total defeatists, with none of Esther’s determination and spunk. And yet the illness had ridden roughshod over her as if her will had counted for nothing.

  When she’d gone back into hospital after her terrible week home she had told him she wanted to die.

  “It’s like the old Esther’s gone,” she said, holding back tears, and he could almost see it before his eyes, the Esther who was bent on fighting, who would walk again, who would never give in, taking flight. “Is that awful, to want to die? Am I awful?”

  “It’s not awful.” She had reached the moment he’d dreaded, when there was nothing before her but the truth. “It’s hard right now, that’s all. In a week you’ll feel differently.”

  She didn’t let on that she didn’t believe him. It occurred to him that she might actually be asking something of him, to help her along when the moment came, to pull the plug, but he wouldn’t get into that.

  “Would you hold my hand?” she’d said. “Would that be all right?”

  And he had sat there, holding her hand in both of his until she passed into sleep. It had still been supple then, warm and soft and alive; he could feel it even now, sitting next to her while she slept again. Her life in his hands.

  They had reached the moment, surely, when plugs should be pulled, if one had a mind to. He watched the monitor flicker, down a tenth, up again, but couldn’t believe that turning it off would make much of a difference, except in some long, drawn-out way. It remained to the Great Bastard in the sky to shut the machines down, if he had the heart to.

  Back when she was still talking, she’d told him a dream she’d had.

  “I dreamed I went to heaven,” she’d said, “and everybody liked me.”

  Alex’s copy of Les Misérables was still sitting on Esther’s bedside table. He had taken to reading to her from it during his visits, choosing it because it was long and because he remembered the readings his Grade 8 teacher, Mrs. Jackson, had done from it, making them lay their heads on their desks like Grade 1’s and teasing out the last languid hour of the afternoon with it. “This is so great of you,” Esther kept saying, in her hoarse whisper, “it’s so great,” though the opening chapters were so leisurely and long-winded that Alex was afraid this would just turn into another of his failed enthusiasms. But then they came at last to Jean Valjean, and there was no turning back.

  The story seemed to bring out the same wonder in Esther at the world’s outrageousness as it had in Alex back in Grade 8.

  “Was it really like that back then? Just for stealing a loaf of bread? We’re so lucky to live when we do.”

  For a few weeks the readings became the highlight of Alex’s day. He would sit there at Esther’s bedside with the guilty afternoon light slanting in through the window, the light of sick days and special reprieves, and be back again with his head on his desk in Mrs. Jackson’s classroom. The story drew him on like a drug. It was the worst sort of philistinism in his circles to care about something as barbarous as plot, yet for the first time in months or even years Alex felt himself taken over again by a book. The story was as pumped up as an opera, the penitent prostitute, the innocent child, the good-hearted criminal who couldn’t escape his past, and yet it had such a scope to it, was so full of twists and new beginnings, that it seemed to carry a kind of Scheherazadian hopefulness.

  He looked over once, and Esther was crying.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Her voice was the barest rustling by then. “It’s just the story. It’s so beautiful. It’s sad, but it’s beautiful.”

  Occasionally Esther’s sister would come, or her mother or Molly, and they would sit and listen with her until the window had grown dark and there was only the glow of the bedside lamp. Alex would have the feeling he had in airplanes sometimes, of not wanting to land. What was it, this power stories had, that moved Esther to tears, that he had forgotten? They might have been cave dwellers then, gathering around the fire. Come, I will tell you things, I will hold back the dark.

  Then suddenly it was over. Esther got a cold, from him, maybe, and was put on a new round of drugs that drained the life from her. She never really recovered after that. He kept doing his readings for a while, but she’d fall asleep in a matter of minutes or would seem to grow irritable in a way that was completely unlike her, wincing at the light or shrugging away from him suddenly as if something unpleasant had touched her. For a couple of weeks now, he hadn’t read to her at all—they’d managed to get to the midpoint, as far as Little Gavroche, thanks to a few judicious excisions, but Alex hadn’t the heart to go on again. Maybe it was the same with her as it was with people in comas, that you ought to keep speaking to them in some normal way, but all he could think of was this new wincing impatience in her, this twisting from him as if to say, Can’t you see that I’m dying? So he sat silent, mostly. If she was awake he would take her claw hand and mumble awkward niceties, trying to hold her eyes, to make a connection there, which happened sometimes, for seconds or minutes, longer than he could bear, really, and sometimes not. That was worse: she would look at him, and see him, and turn away. Not as if she hadn’t recognized him, but as if she couldn’t be bothered. Let me be. Let me sleep. It surprised him how much this cut him—he was her hero, her champion, her star. He could do no wrong. She was utterly mistaken in him, of course; God knew, he had tried to make her see that. Yet it seemed that if he lost her good opinion of him, if it was not something unshakable and eternal in her, he would somehow lose the possibility of ever becoming that better person.

  Esther’s sister Rachel appeared at the door.

  “Oh! Alex.” She looked flustered. Seeing that Esther was asleep, she dropped her voice to a whisper. “You’re not usually here now.”

  “I can leave if you want. I mean, I have an appointment to go to.”

  He regretted at once having mentioned the appointment.

  “No, no. She wouldn’t want you to leave. I was going to wash her, but she’s asleep. I’ll just go to the lobby and do my homework for a while.”

  She was gone before he could stop her. It seemed odd at first, but then it dawned on him that they actually kept track somehow of his comings and goings, that all this time they’d been working around him, giving him his place. Giving Esther her time with him.

  There was another sister whom Alex hadn’t known about. Maybe Esther had mentioned her in the beginning, back when a lot had got past him, but afterward, when he’d become the family mascot, he would surely have noticed if she had come up. Then one night Lenny had invited him back to the house from the hospital. It was the first time he had been there. He had always thought of Côte St. Luc as a distant suburb, but it was tucked just north of NDG, not fifteen minutes from downtown. They passed under a railway bridge into a neighborhood of modest bungalows faced with siding or brick.

  “We moved here from Park Extension,” Lenny said. “I never liked it here because of the tracks. All those trains passing at night.”

  The tracks ran right behind the house, not twenty yards from the back fence. Alex could see them from the window of Esther’s old room. Esther had mentioned them too, but differently: she had liked the trains, the sound of them passing, going somewhere. It was what she had wanted, to go.

  The tracks bounded the whole of the neighborhood, no way in or out without crossing them.

  “It just always seemed spooky or something,” Lenny said. “Closed in.”

  Esther’s room was used by Rachel now. The walls held a couple of laminated posters, a Reubens and a Monet, but were otherwise bare.

  “It hasn’t changed much, if you can believe it,” Lenny said. “Those were her posters, from when she went to New York once in high school.”

  The house was a modest split-level, with the bedrooms upstairs and then a living and dining room covered in hourglass wallpaper and below that a den that th
eir father had built, with a fireplace and birch paneling. Alex could have been in one of his cousin’s homes in the subdivisions around Leamington, the same heavy furnishings, the china cabinet full of mementos and the good dishes, the ceramic tile in the kitchen and hall.

  It was late, past nine, though Esther’s father had stayed behind with Esther.

  “You haven’t eaten yet?” the mother said, like a reprimand.

  “No, not really. No.”

  “Then you’ll eat with us.”

  There was a family portrait over the dining table, everyone in over-tight seventies dress, and he noticed the extra sibling. He was afraid to ask, in case some other tragedy lurked.

  “It’s Sarah,” Lenny said. “You wouldn’t have met her. She lives in Israel.”

  The mention of her seemed to change the room’s mood.

  “Does she ever come home?”

  “We don’t see her so much,” their mother said heavily. “She has her life there.”

  And the subject seemed closed.

  In the car, driving Alex home, Lenny said, “Don’t mind Mom. She’s a little funny about Sarah. She feels like she deserted us.”

  “Didn’t they get along?”

  “It was more Esther, really, to tell you the truth. I guess Sarah always felt she was in her shadow or something, even though she was a bit older. Esther left home, so she had to stay. Esther dropped out of school, so she had to finish. Then one day she just left, right after Esther got sick. She became a citizen over there, she did her army service, she joined a kibbutz, the whole experience. It’s like she turned into Esther. I’ve been to see her and she seems pretty happy, really. She’s even got a kid, a little boy. But the whole thing drives my mother nuts. She refuses to go over there.”

  “Does she know how sick Esther is?”

  “More or less.” He was silent a moment. “Families, eh? What a nightmare.”

  He thought of Sarah as a sort of mirror planet whose orbit had kept her always hidden. Behind Esther there was this alternate in his mind now, this different version, someone she might have been, someone more like himself, in fact. He wondered if Sarah would come, how the boy figured in, if the father was still in the picture. In the family portrait, Sarah was dark and wary-eyed and lean.

  So tell me, Alex, how does a good Roman Catholic boy end up living on a kibbutz in the West Bank, of all places?

  Up a tenth, down again. Esther stirred and turned in his direction, her eyes drifting open and then closed again. It was hard to know anymore how well she saw things. Sometimes her vision blacked out or grew hopelessly blurred, depending on what meteor storm happened to be raging against her optic nerve.

  She seemed to mouth something in her sleep, but whatever it was was lost.

  “Time to turn.” One of the nurses had come in, the stocky one, who had all the finesse of a bouncer at the bad end of St. Catherine. “We don’t want those bed sores festering.”

  She had already muscled past Alex.

  “She’s asleep. I think her sister’s coming to wash her.”

  The woman seemed to take this as license for special aggression, grabbing Esther by an arm and a leg to pull her toward her and then flipping her onto her belly like a slab of meat. Esther grumbled and twitched in her sleep, hunching away from her.

  The nurse straightened the sheet with a sharp tug.

  “Her sister will have to change the dressings. I hope she knows that.”

  There didn’t seem much hope of a connection today. Esther had curled up under her sheet like a slug, shrugging the world off. Let me be. He wished Rachel would come. He wished Esther’s sister Sarah would. Sarah, who had been the one to stay home, doing her math, while Esther had gone out with her friends to the Orange Julep. Who had saved her money. Who resented how Esther said out loud the things she only thought.

  Now Esther was paying for it.

  “There were so many places I wanted to visit,” she’d told him. Apart from New York, the only big trip of her youth had been to Spain with a friend when she was twenty. “So many places.”

  Blip. Blip. For an instant the monitor dipped an entire degree, then righted itself.

  She wouldn’t have been Sarah, not really, or at least not the phantom adventurer Sarah he had imagined. In Spain, she had told him, she had stayed in the nicest hotels, had gone shopping, had met Spanish boys in the tapas bars. Not for her the rough-and-tumble of backpacks and roadsides, of crowded local buses leading off to mud villages. She had gone on a holiday, that was all. It had taken her two years at Jean Junction to save for the trip. In Montreal she had put in her hours at the shop, had spent the nights on Crescent Street, had dated this one or that. No plans. She might have gone on like this, become a manager, perhaps, married a Jewish boy and moved back to Côte St. Luc. Might have been unremarkable. Maybe it was just a way of wringing hope from despair to think this way, that it was her illness that had marked her, that had made her stand out, as if it were a gift.

  For Alex’s money, she would have been better off marrying the Jewish boy.

  There was a sound at the door. He turned, expecting Rachel, but instead felt a flash of disorientation like a whack to the head.

  “Alex. It’s you.”

  It was María.

  – 3 –

  Alex hadn’t exchanged more than half a dozen words with María since their ill-fated dinner at his apartment. He had seen her often enough, across crowded rooms or through the window of the café where she worked on St. Lawrence; he had even got her on the phone once or twice when he was calling Miguel, back when they were still living together. But since the dinner it had seemed understood that there wasn’t much point, really, in their continuing to have anything to do with each other. For some stupid reason he had kept following Miguel around to Salvadoran fund-raisers and solidarity nights, maybe to prove to María that his intentions had been honorable, but if he actually saw her at any of these he would just smile stiffly from across the room or turn his back to her, pretending to interest himself in Miguel’s inscrutable friends.

  At the sight of her in Esther’s doorway he rose up so abruptly he practically knocked his chair over.

  “María!”

  “So you are here,” she said, without batting an eye, as if running into someone expected but disappointing.

  It was a moment before Alex was able to gather his faculties. She must be visiting a friend, he thought, a sweatshop colleague who’d lost a finger to some machine or maybe a wounded guerilla who’d been medevacked here by supporters of the cause.

  “Are you looking for someone?”

  “Not looking, no.” She was dressed in tight black pants that held her backside like a taunt. “I am come to see Esther.”

  “You mean—Esther? This Esther?”

  “You can remember, no? It was in your house that I met her.”

  Of course he fucking remembered. The image was etched in his mind like a woodcut, of the strange triumvirate she and Amanda and Esther had formed in his living room. But he had had no idea they had ever set eyes on each other again.

  “It’s just—she’s sleeping,” he stammered.

  “I will sit with her. You don’t mind?”

  Without waiting for anything like permission, she took the chair he had vacated and started pulling things from her purse, a Bible, then a rosary, setting them in her lap like an old village woman come to say her novenas.

  All this had the air of established routine.

  “Have you been coming here? Have you come before?”

  María put a finger to her lips.

  “Shh. She’s sleeping.”

  He was stuck standing there at the foot of the bed while María fingered her beads and mumbled her prayers. It was too strange, all of this, that she was here at all, that she was whispering her Jesus prayers over this Jew as if in some death-bed conversion. He hoped Rachel didn’t walk in. It was hard to believe he had ever pursued this woman—she seemed so alien all of a sudden, from a diffe
rent century.

  “You must give this to her from me,” she said when she’d done, setting her rosary on the bedside table. “To remember me.”

  It took him an instant to process this.

  “Are you going somewhere?”

  She put a finger to her lips again.

  “Come. We will take a coffee.”

  He had thought of María differently since their dinner. Less charitably, mainly—it might have been simply her dismissal of him or the dark screen Amanda’s death had placed in front of everything, but more and more he’d felt that she and her people were just spinning their wheels, that even those freedom fighters down in Chalatenango or wherever, the men he didn’t measure up to, were just boys with big toys. That might have been the real reason he kept going to those fundraisers, merely to feed his own cynicism, to get some sort of bitter revenge. María, he began to notice, now that the fog of infatuation had lifted, wasn’t quite so above it all as he’d first imagined—she had her enemies, her detractors, her cliques. He could see the battle lines now at these events, the slow drifting to one side of the room or the other, the huddled groups, the burst of laughter in a corner at which a head would turn in the corner opposite. The big earthquake in San Salvador in the fall had brought people together, but after a few weeks of stoic solidarity all the old controversies had surfaced again.

  There was a big split between those who favored negotiation and those who opposed it. María, Alex knew, he had his informants now, was a negotiationist, which put her at odds with a lot of the men, so that almost by default it was to the men’s side of the room that Alex gravitated, wanting María to see him there amongst the enemy yet feeling like a fraud. He would sit listening for the umpteenth time as the world was divided neatly into peasants and imperialists, the vocabulary so familiar by now he didn’t need a translation, and the whole while he’d be hearing a little voice at the back of his head saying, Bollocks. It was the voice of Desmond: more and more now, in fact, Alex found himself infected by these Desmond-like epithets. Evolution, not revolution. Down with the dialectic. Make the genes pay.