by George Rosen
Benson told Otto what he had eaten the day before and on what streets the restaurants were located. He then suggested, though from the look on his tutor’s face, he might have commanded, that they take a walk. They both donned sunglasses and stepped back through the front door into the splendid light and heat of mid-morning.
As they walked, Benson pointed at whatever things occurred to him—dwarf cacti under nets on the sidewalk; sugar-cane skeletons in the shops; the machines, which looked like farm well pumps, used to grind nuts and twigs into chocolate—and Otto, after instants of what seemed, cyclically, distraction or thought or panic, would supply their names. Then Benson formed questions around the names, diligently cloaking his bursts of curiosity in the grammar from his textbook.
“Why, a cactus, does it need for itself protection with a net?” he asked.
Otto swung his head from side to side. At the middle of its arc it dipped low enough so that Benson could see, over Otto’s sunglasses, the tutor’s lids flickering. “I don’t know. Perhaps they have,” Benson thought the word he heard was “enemies.”
Benson racked his brains to conceive of a suitable enemy for a cactus. He wanted to ask if there were raccoons in Oaxaca, but he didn’t know how to say raccoon. Instead, he asked “Do rats eat cactus?” correctly using a reflexive construction of the passive voice, which was optional under the circumstances, but elegant, and which pleased him immensely, although even before Otto shrugged in response, Benson realized that any rat that could eat a cactus could eat through a net.
“Birds, I think.” Otto waved his arm in that way he had—a scarecrow flopping a straw-filled limb—to indicate a whole sad world aswarm with aggressive flying things.
Benson lifted his eyes to the park canopy above him where clouds of sparrow-like creatures settled then fled, from jacaranda to jacaranda, in a rainshower beating of wings. “Do you know what they’re called?”
Otto shook his head. “Ni una jota,” he said. Not a jot. The tutor looked down at his hands. He extended his fingers, held them out for an instant in the gesture of a magician, then pulled a flask from the pocket of his trousers. He offered it to Benson, which the younger man—Benson felt sure he must be younger—offended, declined. The teacher and student sat on the bench and watched the birds infiltrate the maze of topiary, each of the nameless creatures devouring a wealth of tiny berries the color of blood.
At the Casa Reynaldo, the tall woman who had checked in during breakfast sat beside him at the table for luncheon. Reynaldo’s granddaughter brought them plates of spaghetti with a thin red sauce.
“You’re American?” he asked.
“Very,” she said.
“And the woman you’re traveling with is . . .?”
“My mother.” She said it with some finality. “She knows all about Mexico.” The woman paused, the fork halfway to her mouth. “I mean, she wrote a book, All About Mexico. In 1938, for Americans who were interested in the Revolution. You know, Cárdenas. Land for the poor. Folk-dancing? But she hasn’t been back since they shot the students.” The woman saw Benson’s ping of confusion. “In 1968, before the Olympics. But things are better now, she thinks. So she tells me. I’ve never been here before.”
The tall woman stopped to chew. “This is very good,” she said, still munching. “But there’s hardly any sauce and it’s not at all spicy. Isn’t that”—she leaned forward and wiggled her fingers—“uncharacteristic? Non-Mexican?”
Benson was happy with a chance to be knowledgeable for a woman he thought beautiful. He studied her dark, soft hair, the green eyes with the creases of his own age at their corners when she smiled. “It’s a sopa seca. They call a course like that a ‘dry soup.’ Rice, too.”
“Is that a joke?”
“No, it’s just a different view of soup.”
The green-eyed woman considered this, then continued on her own track. “Because sometimes their names for food are jokes. In Mexico City my mother and I had manchamanteles, ‘tablecloth stainer,’ all these drippy fruits and juicy meats in a stew? It was wonderful. You hardly knew where you ended and it started.” The woman rested her chin on her hands and gazed out in remembered contentment. “And then in English there’s ‘hot dog.’ If that’s not a joke, what is it?” Suddenly, it seemed to Benson almost angrily, she pushed her plate away from her and poured herself a cup of coffee from the covered enamel pitcher that stood on the table’s corner closest to the kitchen.
“My mother is forgetting things now. Pretty much everything, in fact. She wanted to come back here because she was forgetting”—the woman pursed her lips and outlined the words—“all about Mexico.”
“Does she eat?” Benson immediately felt a flush of embarrassment and floundered to recover. “I mean, in public?” he said, though this was worse yet. She had just told him about the dinner in Mexico City. He had come to Mexico, in part, for exactly this reason, that the sentences in his own language were finishing more badly as he got older, his words throwing out wildly inappropriate threads leading to unintended locations. He scanned the woman’s face for offense taken, but saw only her own understandably self-absorbed anxiety.
In a flush, Benson felt an overwhelming wave of sympathy. His own parents had both died in the prime of life—if such a thing were possible—but Alzheimer’s, the blank plague! He had a friend at home whose father was the only banker in a small Iowa farm town. He had all the records strewn about his office yet he remembered nothing. No one in the town knew who owed whom what. Principal, interest, mortgages, responsibility—all were torn to strips in the brain’s shredder, a bank president’s jubilee-year socialism of precisely located memory loss. The townspeople would call the child in Des Moines when the parent went missing, and the son would find his father miles from the bank, asleep in a cornfield, healthy as a horse, his mind vacant, barely remembering the laces on his shoes.
“In the room. She’d rather.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t misunderstand me. She’s not, you know, a vegetable, or anything. She just likes to eat by herself. She nearly always has. I’ll bring her something.” The woman searched the table for a sugar bowl, and quickly added four spoonfuls to her coffee. “I’m sorry. A bad habit.” Then she placed the spoon carefully down beside her cup and extended her hand. “I’m Maria. The Mexican influence.”
Benson stood up, his hand holding hers. “Albert,” he said, “the Swiss influence,” then sat down again, mortified as he had been all his life at the garbled forms sexual attraction took in him. Beneath his shirt, the flush from his face spread to his shoulders.
“I’m a teacher.” Both her hands now cradled her cup. “I teach history in Maryland.”
“So do I.” Benson gave a laugh that to him sounded unhinged, but that he sensed was emerging into the world as the pleasant chuckle of a man who has escaped the bonds of any consequence to his actions. Whatever he said now was going to be the sheerest fabrication. “I mean not history in Maryland. I teach Business English. At a community college. To foreign people.”
“Business English?”
“Yeah, there are things you don’t need to say, when you have a specific goal. In business.” Benson stared straight ahead, avoiding her eyes. “And there are things—and words—that you need. You don’t need to say, I mean you don’t need to know how to say, for example, ‘I remember the first summer of peacetime,’ but you need to say, ‘We can come to terms’—which by the words alone, if you don’t know much English, makes absolutely no sense at all.” Benson put his hands to his face and pressed his fingertips against his lids, astounded.
“I gouge, you gouge, we gouge?”
“Well, maybe. It’s more functional English as opposed to imaginative English. ‘Gouge’ is sort of in the middle. Emotional English.” The woman was looking at him, he thought, not unkindly. He smiled back winningly, he hoped.
Two blocks down from the Casa Reynaldo was a postage-stamp park. Set in a notch, before a yellow wall, under a ye
llow tree, there was a small statue of a short man in a waistcoat and tails. The birds, whom Benson had started to think of as the cactivores, puddled at the statue’s base, pecking at unseen grain. He leaned to the worn bronze of the nameplate.
Ingeniero Hernando Elote, it read.
Benson stood back. Engineer Herman Corn. It seemed to him an odd name for a person, at least a Spanish or Mexican person. Not that there weren’t Corns in America or England. Or Cornwall, certainly. Kornfelds, which was clearly cornfields, or Kerns. Was Kern corn? Old words flowed in his mind. You are the promised breath of springtime that trembles on the brink of a lovely star. Or was it a kiss of springtime, a lonely star? And was there something in between?
Benson sat down on the wrought-iron bench, pulled his straw hat over his face and began, since he was in a foreign country with no one looking over his shoulder or making judgments or, if they were making judgments, they were probably just classifying him as an inexplicable foreigner, to hum the song softly, the way he remembered it.
One week in, it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen the goose. He asked the woman who he assumed was Reynaldo’s wife, Margarita (a new annex of rooms was sublabelled the Fonda Margarita), about the bird from the website, about Andrés.
Margarita—if that were who she was—ran a hand through her thick black hair and smiled broadly. “He is dead. But he is disecado.”
“Disecado?”
“Yes, he is disecado in the back.” She pointed behind the mahogany portal that led from the reception area to an inner office.
Benson didn’t have a clue as to what disecado meant, although to Margarita the word seemed delightful as a rainbow. Why did this keep happening? To understand nearly everything should count for something, should be something, but it was to understand nothing if one linguistic black hole remained. Benson felt as if he were constantly looking up to see his whole sky of meaning sucked into such emptiness.
“But we are getting a new goose soon. Come tomorrow and I will show you.” Then, although Benson had not shown the slightest motion of leaving, she waved a small goodbye.
Benson turned. Reentering the courtyard, he circled the twin cages where Miguel and Portero, two brilliant, eternally whistling parrots, lived. Then, in the corner, past the Caribbean-blue jeroboams of purified water and the barrel where they put the table-soiled napkins, he walked up the stairs to the balcony. Why, he wondered, was climbing a public staircase a joyous adventure here, but at home nothing? Benson suddenly remembered his Midwestern high-school stairwell, the fear and the completely unadventurous certainty of what he’d find, bigger older kids coming ceaselessly down, an insect horde.
But here, without effort, in what had become second nature in only a few days, yet without losing the conscious and exotic pulse of ritual, he could mount the narrow concrete steps, sun-warmed even through the foliage, push through the vines that coated the side wall, and reaching the top, cross the small enshrubbed patio on the office roof—with its generous Mesoamerican view stretching even to the lopped-off hilltop where the Zapotecs, themselves conscious of the grave pleasures of mounting steps, had built their pyramids—and let himself into his room. He hunted for his dictionary, which was under something or gone—Reynaldo’s daughters cleaned pitilessly—and grabbed a pen from his suitcase. In his notebook of Spanish, he wrote down the single mysterious word, disecado. Then Benson added in English the words he had understood. In the back. Disecado in the back.
“Stuffed.”
Otto broke his Spanish-only rule. This was clearly something he could not mime. Then he reverted to Castilian. “Like a fish in a bar. Or a deer,” the tutor put his hands on either side of his sad Baroque face—the face, Benson thought, of a saint being tormented under layers of dark paint—and crooked his fingers arthritically, “on the wall of a hunter.”
Andrés was stuffed. In the back, forever. The mystery was solved. Tomorrow there would be a new goose.
“La taxidermia,” added Otto after the fact, realizing late that there had been a simpler way out all along. “Now,” he said, slowly pushing himself up from the formica table, “we go outside?”
In the market, in the butchers’ quadrant, the whole under a vast corrugated roof, Benson navigated through the sectioned hogs and the tripe barrels. Watered-down blood pooled in the plastic tarps that underlay the tables. Cathedrals of dirty ice tumbled about him, with faint emissions of steam. The smells, real and imagined, of animal sweat twisting in the air made Benson feel as if he were trapped in a locker room, stripping down with a hundred head of cattle. He peered for reassurance down the long corridor of meat, to the sunlight of the street entrance where he could just see Otto, leaning against a brick pillar, pulling on a cigarette.
“I don’t go inside,” Otto had told him. “But you can come out to me with questions. It is not far, though you can be lost.” Perdido, he had said, like Sarah Vaughan, though with more despair.
“You have agoraphobia?” Benson had asked, not unsympathetically. Remembering taxidermia, he plopped the Greek in more or less whole, but took a stab with one of the little tics of accentuation that seemed to work to let words like béisbol and fútbol get by. He wondered if one could be agoraphobic—in English? in Spanish?—about an indoor as well as an outdoor marketplace.
“Un poquito.” A small little. The tutor spoke the words with such intense sadness that Benson half expected to be handed a ball of twine, so as not to lose himself in the labyrinth.
“Well then, I’ll come back. Whenever I need help.” Benson looked for a response, but got none. He turned to walk into the dark gauntlet of stalls.
“It’s all the buying and the selling,” Otto had said, with that same flamenco sadness, and waved his scarecrow wave.
Now back among the dead animals, Benson looked to the outer rim of the market where everything sold was Chinese: sacks of fat plastic twine and, to stuff in them, shirts, pants, and hose, shiny and synthetic, all woven of hard-edged distinct threads. Taut Indian faces poked out in the midst of t-shirts, of red and aquamarine dresses.
He saw Maria and her mother, tall and short, trolling through the cloth like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and he waded toward them, stepping on the sheen of blood and water, meeting where the fish blended to textiles.
Maria seemed to smile brightly at seeing him, and left her mother, gabbling fluently amid piles of soft cloth, a few paces behind.
“She eats this stuff up, loves it. She won’t speak to anyone new in English, but every time she says something in Spanish, it’s an accomplishment. She remembers the words. Do you want to walk?” Not waiting for an answer, Maria leaned toward her mother across the sea of fabrics, miming above the noise, then stepped back to Benson and took his arm.
“She says it’s all right.”
“In Spanish?”
“Yes, actually. She absolutely adores markets, always has.”
“I’d think it would make her uneasy, with all the confusion.” Benson stopped, unsure which aisle to make for, then headed for a row of stalls stacked high with mezcal bottles.
“You just don’t like chaos. For Mom, this isn’t all that different from regular life. She likes accumulation, and in a market, you always go out with more stuff than you had coming in. It makes her feel good. How do you choose?” She gestured toward the shelves of bottles—a multitude of ambers—both with and without worms.
Benson, in his most recent Spanish, selected one with a distinctive label, twelve years old, dark amber, con gusano. A worm curled like a dry leaf at the bottom. “It’s really only a caterpillar, you know. It’s just the same word.”
“I do know. Why is that better?”
Benson had never asked himself the question. “I think because worms live in the dirt and caterpillars move on top of it.” He handed the bottle to Maria to consider the creature. “Is there a right answer?”
“Not really.” She turned it in her hands. “Of course, caterpillars become butterflies.”
“Moth
s, I think, in this case.”
“Same difference. And worms don’t. Caterpillars are only temporarily worms. They’re not locked into it. That, on the other hand, is decidedly untemporary.” She pointed toward an outcrop of the butchers’ section on their left, where a row of pig’s heads on spikes reared above a bed of bloody ice. “They used to do that to the heads of traitors along London Bridge. A reminder to us all.”
Maria suddenly returned the mezcal bottle to Benson and spun him toward the southeast and the candy quadrant. Again she mimed her intentions to her mother, now twenty yards behind them, still happily talking to Indians amidst the cloth. Benson could feel her hand on his back, pushing. “Now,” she said, “I think you need chocolate.”
Two weeks in, Benson awoke near midnight with the certainty, unverified by anything except inner panic, that he was running out of money. From the bottom of his toilet kit he scrabbled behind the toothpaste, removed the thinned sheaf of cash and his hologrammed bank card, and went out looking for an ATM.
There was always so much new magic. Twenty years before, every bank transaction had been an effortful dance of documents: travelers’ cheques, passports, tourist cards, receipts; the thumping of murky purple stamps, the shuffling of inky fingers, a line for the paperwork, a window for the cash. Now under the blackness so different from home—the stars with their separate colors—the chiclet sellers sat on the sidewalk before Cirrus and Plus logos, the ATMs humming softly behind. Still, as he stood in the arcade cubicle at the edge of the zócalo, he couldn’t get his account balance, but only a heap of Mexican notes and a profound sense of poverty.
False poverty, of course, Benson told himself, stuffing the new money into his pocket. His poverty was nothing compared with that of the chiclet seller, a woman with a black band of cloth across her forehead who sat impassively, unpassably, on a low stool in the middle of the doorway, her wild-haired child twirling in orbit around the spread folds of her skirt. Between the boxes of pink candy and the careening infant, it was impossible to get cash without an invoice of guilt. Nevertheless, he had, what—a week’s? ten days’ worth?—of bed, board, and Otto’s fees before he would have to return to the blank slate of home.