The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  An FMLN organizer who was based in Copenhagen came through in the winter and gave a talk at a Guanarock night. He spoke forcefully and with an easy fluency, but had the stylish, well-fed look of someone who had long been out of the trenches, wearing his hair in a ponytail like the Latino street musicians you saw on Prince Arthur.

  Afterward he picked Alex out of the crowd and made him his special friend.

  “Gringo! So how do you like our Salvadoran rock?”

  He plied Alex with beers at the bar, talking the movement up. Fernando, he went by. No surname, as if to make clear he was undercover.

  “You know, it’s not just about some bit of land you give to people to shut them up. People say negotiation, but what does it mean? You have to change the way people think. We go into towns, the first thing we do is education.”

  It made Alex uncomfortable to be singled out like that. He asked about Copenhagen, trying to steer the conversation to more neutral ground, but Fernando wasn’t interested.

  “You know where most of our money comes from? From Americans. Millions of dollars they send us, just people like you, and then their government talks about Russia. The Russians give us nothing. Sometimes I have to carry it in a big suitcase like that, five, ten million at once. It’s a joke, isn’t it? The right hand doesn’t know about the left one. Then we can’t even say anything, or Reagan will stop it. Anyhow it’s better for us—the Americans are the enemy. No enemy, no war.”

  At the end of the night Fernando took a group of them to an Italian restaurant nearby, a big barn of a place decked out with fake grapevines and old wine presses. An accordion player went around doing old standards like “Santa Lucia” at people’s tables, though when he came to theirs, Fernando, busy holding court, waved him off. There wasn’t a single woman in the group. Alex was glad that Miguel had stuck with him, shadowing him like a bodyguard the whole time he’d been with Fernando.

  “So I leave them at the airport in West Berlin and send them off to Managua,” Fernando was saying, telling how he’d got a group of European journalists into one of the guerilla camps, “but who’s there to meet them in Managua when they get to their hotel? I am. After that I make the arrangements to go into El Salvador and I put them on the plane. Adiós, it’s too dangerous for me, I say, I’m staying behind. Then they get to the camp, and who’s the first person to see them? It’s me. You should have seen their faces, like it was magic. Bombs falling everywhere, borders closed, soldiers stopping every fucking peasant, and I move around like it’s nothing. We wanted them to see that, you know, that we could go where we wanted. That we were in control.”

  There was an appreciative silence.

  “So how did you do it?” Alex said, not sure if he was needling him or just playing the straight man. “How did you get into the country?”

  Fernando took a sip of his wine.

  “That, my friend,” he said predictably, with a satisfied grin, “I cannot tell you.” And he got his laugh.

  Fernando picked up the check, peeling a wad of bills from his wallet. There had been several courses, half a dozen bottles of wine—it all must have run to a good three or four hundred dollars, probably more than the night’s fund-raiser had taken in.

  “Muchas gracias,” some of the men mumbled.

  It was only when they were on the sidewalk that Fernando finally asked Miguel who he was, as if he were merely some servant who’d been attending to them.

  His face darkened at Miguel’s response.

  “El hermano de María?”

  Miguel didn’t flinch.

  “Sí,” he said. “Es mi hermana.”

  All Fernando’s expansiveness seemed to leave him. At the curb, climbing into the cab he’d hailed, he said to Alex, his voice low, “That boy is your friend?”

  “Yes,” Alex said, though it might have been the first time he had ever admitted this.

  “Be careful, gringo. You don’t understand our politics. Things are not black and white the way you think.”

  All this had been months ago, but that parting shot still rankled with Alex. Asshole was what he’d thought at the time, puffed-up power monger, using the war to stroke his own ego, and yet he hadn’t been able to put the exchange from his mind. For one thing, it had seemed to justify all his unease over Miguel, whom even María had abandoned by then to move in with a fellow Salvadoreña. What kept coming back to him, though, was how Miguel had looked the man straight in the eye as if he saw right through him. She is my sister, he’d said simply. There had been something so undiluted in that, something that stood outside all the politicking.

  He and María were waiting for the elevator. María was a little ahead of him and he had to stop himself from staring down at her nether parts.

  “So you kept seeing her?” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “She never mentioned it.”

  “You know all her friends?”

  “Pretty much, yes,” he said tersely. “Or so I thought.”

  The elevator doors finally opened in front of them.

  “Now you see she has secrets,” María said. “Like everyone.”

  They were packed into the elevator like sardines by the time they got to the lobby. María, inevitably, had drifted away from him and he had got trapped behind an old geezer trailing his IV on a stand, a flash of pasty inner thigh showing through the slit in his hospital gown. Probably off to have a cigarette, Alex thought.

  He glanced at his watch: only ten minutes before his session.

  “We must be quick,” María said. “I haven’t so much time.”

  They grabbed a coffee at the dingy snack shop still operating down the hall. When they were seated María said, without preliminaries, “In three days I will return to El Salvador.”

  Alex was floored. Miguel had said nothing of this. She was landed here now, her claim had gone through; she had her café job, her work at the sweatshop.

  “Is that wise? Is it safe?”

  She shrugged.

  “Safe, no. But that is my country. Now they talk peace, the Americans make them talk, so there’s a chance.”

  “You trust the Americans?”

  “It’s not a question to trust. They do what’s the best for them. Maybe peace is the best.”

  They were still fishing bodies out of the garbage dumps in San Salvador, women who’d been impaled on broomsticks, men who’d been eviscerated or cut in half. He didn’t know what María had done, she had never talked of it except in the vaguest terms, but he knew how little it took.

  “Look, it’s none of my business,” he started. “I don’t know, it seems stupid to me. It seems pigheaded.”

  Already he had lost his cool. She hadn’t the right to saddle him with the thought of a broomstick up her, of her tossed out like nothing. It seemed to make a mockery of him, of his little life. It made a mockery of everything. People went along, they went to work, they did their groceries, they watched TV, and in a flash it was all beside the point.

  “Maybe so,” María said. “Maybe stupid. But there’s no choice for me, to stay here.”

  She had a look on her that he’d never seen, that might have been fear.

  “What was it you did? At least tell me that.”

  “It’s not what you do. It’s what they think.”

  It was all just evasion, this sort of sermonizing, though it had taken him a while to see that. Instead of pushing her, he waited.

  “There was a boy who was killed,” she said finally. “How do you say it. My fiancé. He was working with them in the city, with the guerillas, getting the guns. There were many like that. Secret people. They did the normal things in the day and then at night they helped the guerillas.”

  It had cost her an effort to get it out. In a minute she’d said more to him that was real than in all the months they’d spent together.

  “So the army found out,” he said carefully. “The death squads.”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “And you th
ought they’d come after you.”

  She played with her cup.

  “There was a letter,” she said. “It told me to go or to die. So I’m here.”

  That was it, then. It wasn’t some vague threat, the whole union business she’d tried to put him off with. She was a target.

  “Then how can you go back? It’s just crazy.”

  “Things have changed now. It’s not so dangerous.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “There are ways to be sure.”

  Her moment of candor had passed.

  “There are things you don’t know,” she said finally. “It’s not so simple, our politics.”

  The same old line.

  “I’m not an idiot.”

  But the subject was closed. María stared down at the table.

  “You will look after my brother, I think.”

  He had the sense, from the shift in her tone, that this was where she’d been headed all along, was what she had traded for. Great, he thought. Now he’d be truly saddled with Miguel. Es mi hermano.

  “He’s a big boy. He can look after himself.”

  María ignored this.

  “He’s like you,” she said.

  He wasn’t sure if this was another of her Delphic pronouncements.

  “You mean he likes me.”

  “Yes. Also that.”

  Fuck it, he thought. All along he had imagined that Miguel was the one who had been wooing him for María’s sake when it had been the other way around. He felt past caring. If he had never met María, none of this would ever have touched him. All those bodies piling up down there, how much difference would another one make?

  María glanced at her watch.

  “Alex,” she said, “you will tell Esther? You’ll give her the rosary?”

  “Of course I will.”

  Her voice had gone uncharacteristically tentative.

  “You mustn’t think,” she began. “You mustn’t blame her. I was the one to make the secret about us. To ask her not to say.”

  It was what he’d suspected. To avoid him. To keep clear of his stinky gringo flesh.

  “Thanks for saying so, at least.”

  “It wasn’t for you. Not because of our problem. It was only to be with her. I can’t say so well in English what I mean. To be with someone like this. Someone with God, maybe to say, but you don’t believe it.”

  He couldn’t quite bring himself to admit to her that he understood. He didn’t know what she’d taken from Esther, what wisdom or solace, but he could see at once that he would only have been an impediment.

  “You will give her the rosary?” she said again.

  It was her way of letting Esther know she was off the hook, he saw now, by giving him this commission.

  “Yes, of course.”

  She had stood. He imagined her as if she were just some new refugee girl walking into his class at St. Bart’s for the first time, dark-skinned and smallish, after all, with callused fingers and a bit of down on her upper lip. He had the sense he had seen her only in bits and pieces until then, never whole, as somehow more and less than she was.

  “What will you do there, in El Salvador?”

  “I am a teacher. I will teach.”

  He couldn’t muster the courage to hug her and only kissed her cheeks, which felt hopelessly inadequate.

  “I think you are a good man, Mr. Alex,” she said. “You don’t believe it, but it’s so.”

  The benediction took away some of the sting of the many months he had felt like such a non-entity in her eyes. It was what he would have to settle for. Good. Nice. It was maybe what he wanted.

  He was late for his session now, but had been holding his pee ever since the emergency room and felt ready to burst. He slipped into the bathroom off the lobby, but before he could get a stream going a grizzled lug with liver-colored tattoos running all along his arms stepped up to the urinal next to him. Fuck. It was hopeless now; he couldn’t pee in company. One of the workers from the lobby, it looked like, draining off the coffee they spent the day drinking instead of working, the piss kept cascading out of him like Montmorency Falls.

  Alex flushed to cover his failure. It was pathetic, this little problem of his. He couldn’t help seeing it as some sort of manhood issue, like impotence or premature ejaculation. Back in the animal days of staking territory he would have been doomed, he and his kids would have starved, because he couldn’t get up the piddle to claim his patch.

  He washed his hands to complete the charade. On the nameplate on the hand dryer, someone had gone to great trouble to scratch out “Canada” on the company address. Probably Mr. Tattoo. By now Alex’s mood had soured completely: his bladder ached; his head had started to throb from his having missed lunch. In the lobby two workers were wheeling a cart laden with construction waste toward the service elevator, moving along at a snail’s pace, blocking everyone’s path, and Alex thought, Fucking Quebecois, though they could just as easily have been Poles or Slavs or Russian Jews, who knew in this bloody waste-bin country. Just stay home, he thought.

  As he passed the cart it suddenly veered in front of him and a jutting two-by-four jabbed his shoulder.

  “Pardon, monsieur,” one of workers mumbled, deadpan.

  Alex had an urge to grab the two-by-four and bean the two of them with it.

  “Next time watch where you’re going.”

  “Eh, buddy,” the other one said. “Fuck you.”

  – 4 –

  Up in the psych ward he headed straight for the bathroom, which was mercifully empty. The pee burned as it came out from being held in so long. At the mirrors he pulled his shirt down over his shoulder and saw the patch of blue that had started to spread under his collarbone. Assholes. The image played in his mind again of him busting the guys’ heads with a two-by-four. A couple of good wallops was all he wanted, the satisfying thunk of wood against bone.

  It was in this state of bloodlust that he arrived at Dr. Klein’s door. Recently the doctor’s pod-person neutrality at his late arrivals had started to give way to little throat clearings and grimaces that looked suspiciously like impatience. But today he actually stood, gangly and stooped, and held the door for Alex like a young loan officer hopeful of landing a client.

  He’d had a haircut, it looked like, and got a new suit, not his usual sheeny gabardine but a well-cut Sunday suit in dark wool.

  “Sorry I’m late. One of the workers in the lobby bashed into me with a two-by-four.”

  He had gotten increasingly better over time at stretching the truth. He had been sobered, briefly, by what Amanda’s therapist had said about lying, but then slowly had begun to take it as a kind of license. Everyone lied in therapy, it turned out.

  “You’re all right?” the doctor said, with such naked concern that Alex felt ashamed.

  “It’s fine. Just my shoulder.”

  Alex took off his shoes and lay down on the couch, which, as always, had the effect of instantly calming him. He felt the admonition go through him, also as always, that he should talk about something real for once. They had gotten a good couple of weeks out of Amanda’s suicide, once he’d finally admitted to it, though even that had begun to seem merely fodder after a while. Maybe what he ought to talk about was his urinary complex, there was something real. Or those two dick-heads in the lobby, and the fantasies of psychotic violence he spun with surprising frequency in the course of any given day.

  “I think we were talking about your recurring dream,” the doctor said. “About going back to high school.”

  Fucking dream work. Evasion, evasion. He started churning things out, the connections, the predictable insights—if dreams were so smart, he wondered, then why were they so obvious?—but the whole time his thoughts were elsewhere. His head was still jangling from his talk with María, which had left him with a sense of burgeoning untidiness. He could feel the clutter stretching out around him, growing more and more unruly. These sessions were merely part of the problem now
, spewing psychic debris that was just left to molder in their wake. In any event, he’d be ending them soon. Once the loose ends were tied, his apartment, his grants, the okay from Jiri—he didn’t let himself think of Esther, though she was the crux of it—he’d be gone. He relished the thought of making the announcement to Dr. Klein. I have a son, you see. Trump that.

  So on the one side, there’s your K. novel, if I can even call it a novel, but that’s another story, and I don’t mind admitting I was ready to slit my wrists when I finished reading the thing. Not exactly big on hope. But then look at your life. It’s just one damned thing after another—the Galápagos, Liz, Amanda, then this amazing woman who’s a novel in herself but who’s dying in front of your eyes and this whole other woman who suddenly picks up and heads home though she’s got a death warrant on her. And yet at the end of it: hope. This little child. This gift. It’s a bit ironic, isn’t it?

  (Sheepish) Well, Peter, I guess just because I don’t believe in hope doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

  He had fallen silent.

  “You haven’t mentioned Liz,” Dr. Klein said. “I think you met her in high school.”

  Liz. He had started with her and seemed set to end with her. Try as he might to get past their relationship, it kept coming back to torment him. Klein had stuck to it with the obstinacy of a not-very-bright dog to his bone, until Alex had actually called her to arrange a meeting, as he had long promised himself to do, in the hope of clearing her from his mind.

  Liz had immediately assumed her most bitter, take-no-prisoners tone, though he couldn’t tell if this was her official stance with him now or just an opening gambit.

  “What is it you want, exactly?”

  “I dunno. Just to talk.”

  He had known what he’d wanted, of course: exoneration, unconditional pardon, the record expunged, though he would settle for a grudging truce. Anything to escape this sense of an accuser out there on the loose, holding intact this demon version of him.

  When they met, though, at a café on Duluth, she looked merely uncertain and on edge. She was waiting for him at a little table by the window, a bottle of Perrier in front of her. The same awkwardness seemed to go through them both as he came up.