There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  “I say, that’s rather a size,” the father says, picking up a wizard. “Do you think it would fit in your bedroom?”

  Pepe stands next to them, tactfully not hovering, although Amelia imagines he’s worried about what would happen if the wizard, priced at 250 euros, fell out of the father’s hand onto the tile floor.

  The little boy starts hopping up and down; Amelia wonders if he needs to use the bathroom.

  “Please, Daddy, please, I want it more than anything. I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my entire life.”

  The father hands the wizard to his son and makes a gesture of helplessness, his palms raised toward the ceiling.

  “I suppose you’ll have to have the dragon, too.”

  “Oh, Daddy, it would make me ever so happy. Happier than anything.”

  “Well, then, it’s settled,” he says to Pepe. “Wrap them up, if you please, safe for travel. We’re back off to home today.”

  “They will be, as you say in your country, safe as houses.”

  “Your English is very good,” the father says.

  And Pepe tells them about his years in Brighton, and the father recounts seaside holidays and wonders if he’s ever eaten in Pepe’s parents’ restaurant. “I’m sure you haven’t,” Pepe says. “You would remember our wonderful calamari. But next time, you must go and tell my parents you were in Altea, and they will treat you like one of the royal family.”

  “Oh, can we go, Daddy, can we go?”

  “You never know what will be in the cards, Simon.”

  They’re very happy, the three of them: Simon, his father, and Pepe, and Amelia is ashamed of her own unhappiness. When they leave the store, Pepe runs from behind the counter, lifts Amelia in the air, spins her around, and kisses her.

  “A wonderful sale. I think it was because you were here, you brought me luck. We will go out to a very special place tonight for a very special dinner. This is a great success. Jorgé, my supplier, was right: wizards and dragons are very big now, very big.”

  “That’s wonderful, Pepe,” Amelia says, but his hands on her shoulders don’t arouse her as they did the night before.

  “I’ve drawn a map for you. It’s not difficult, but you should give yourself time. I’ll pick you up at your hotel at nine—unless, of course, you’ll want to be spending time with your relative.”

  —

  She walks down the steep hill, enjoying the austere white walls, the grey cobblestones, the invasions of color: the well-cared-for flowers in pots or trained on trellises. She has to acknowledge how much of her decision to come here has been fueled by fantasy. But for an American thinking of Europe, fantasies are superabundant: bad movies, great novels, spreads in cookbooks or fashion magazines. Meeting Pepe and his grandmother, the warm sea, the warm breeze, the waitress who treated her as an old friend, all these seemed to suggest that the fantasies were not junk food but the necessary nourishment for an unusual but sound decision, an adventure, a rescue. But now she’s feeling only disappointment. Pepe is a nice man, an attractive man: she enjoyed kissing him. But there was too much he didn’t understand. That the past had marked his grandmother indelibly. That it wasn’t all right to make a kiddy show out of the annihilation of a people. That you mustn’t add to the ugliness of the world by how you make your living. She knows it isn’t his fault. Altea endures through tourism, and to survive in the tourist trade, you have to cater to the taste of tourists. She wonders if she’d like Pepe more if he knows the things are ugly and cynically sells them, or if he thinks they’re just fine.

  But none of this is important. The time for fantasy is over. The person she will meet is not a figment of her imagination. He is Meme’s son.

  She stops at her hotel to dress. She looks at herself closely in the mirror, regretting that she hasn’t brought the right clothes. She should have something like what her mother habitually wears to work: a pantsuit, at least something with a jacket. She needs to be more like her mother now, certain that what she’s doing is right, that there is one right thing, only one, whose claims entirely drown out whatever might be its opposite. She thinks of her gentle father, who died too soon.

  She looks through her makeup and decides that nothing she has will endow her with the authority she craves, and she doesn’t think it’s the right time for experimentation. So she thinks of her father, and how he prized simplicity and plainness. She knows she isn’t plain. She knows she has, for all of her life, been called pretty. And it has helped her, she knows, being a pretty girl, the kind of pretty that doesn’t seem to exert pressure. She can’t make herself over in the half hour before she enters her uncle’s showroom. She’ll try to use the gifts she has; she’ll approach him as a simple, pretty girl on an errand of mercy. What could be simpler? She’ll present herself, and then simply speak the simple truth.

  —

  The showroom is on the busiest street in the town. Cars whiz by her in a way that she hasn’t experienced since she’s been in Altea. She pulls open the heavy door; it seems to resist her and makes a whooshing sound, ushering her into a new climatic zone. The air-conditioning is on too high; she feels goose bumps prickling her skin, and she’s worried that this will compromise her small store of authority.

  Nothing in the overlarge room seems ever to have been alive. The tones are metallic. Silver grey predominates: the deliberately industrial ceiling lights; the chrome desk fixtures; the floor, nearly without color, polished so highly that for a moment she thinks it might be a large mirror. The cars are larger than any she has seen on the streets here; the room is larger than any she has been in; the temperature is lower; and the music, piped from somewhere, is untraceable to any time or place. She feels as if she’s stepped out of her spaceship into a new planet, inhospitable to any life she’s known.

  A young man in a grey suit, white shirt, black tie, is sitting behind a desk. Suddenly, Amelia is frightened. Suppose Ignacio isn’t here. Suppose he’s on vacation. Why hadn’t she thought of that? Well, it’s too late for her now. She must be her mother: just do what needs to be done. Or her grandmother: jump right into the ocean, you’ll be glad you did.

  She asks for Ignacio Ortiz. The young man asks if she has an appointment. She speaks a sentence that she knows is a bald irrelevance but thinks might carry, because it might suggest the press and weight of dollars.

  “I’ve come from America.”

  The sentence works. The young man nods. “But you speak Spanish. Your accent is very good.” He enters an office, then returns to his desk. A few seconds later, another man approaches, his hand extended, a look on his face meant to be both welcoming and quizzical.

  He doesn’t look the way she had imagined. The first word that comes to her mind when she sees him: fleshy.

  He is around her height, five seven, short for a man, she thinks, and his shoulders are broad: they are the only thing about him that suggests hardness. Everything else about him is soft, not a pillowy softness, a confectionary softness, coated with a hard sugar shell of inarticulate demands. On the pinkie of his left hand, he wears a silver ring with a dark blue stone. His tie is silvery, his lips are very full. His hair has been moussed or gelled into a cap of luxuriant curls; it matches, she can see, his tie. His eyes are dark and large; they look as if, at any moment, they might spill over into tears.

  He shows her into his office.

  “How can I help you, young lady? Let me see if I can guess: you are relocating here. This is the town of your dreams. You have met someone and fallen in love. You need a car that will make you feel safe and happy.”

  She sits in the chair across from his wide, silver desk and gathers her skirts around her. She pulls her pashmina closer around her shoulders. She smiles the smile that, for all her life, has made people want to give her things.

  “Actually, I’m not in the market for a car. I’m sorry if I suggested that. I’m actually here because we’re related.”

  The liquidity in his brown eyes hardens, freezes, not into
ice but into a kind of lusterless metal. “That is impossible,” he says. “I’m sorry, young lady, but you are mistaken.”

  His hardening creates a reciprocal hardness in her. “I am not mistaken,” she says. “I’m your niece. Your mother is my grandmother.”

  “My mother died when I was very young.”

  “I think, sir, that what you say isn’t true,” Amelia says, her hands trembling so hard that she grips the edges of her seat. “My grandmother is Marian Taylor, an American who lived here from 1938 till 1953. She was married to your father, who died before you were born. She lived with you and your grandparents until she left for America; I understand that you were quite young.”

  “You understand nothing.”

  “She’s very old now,” Amelia goes on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “She’s dying. I thought perhaps that you would like to see her.”

  “You thought incorrectly, miss. My mother died to me when she left, when she left me, her only child, and the family who had sheltered her in a time of desperate need.”

  He rises from his chair and walks toward her. She tells herself there’s nothing he can do to her: they’re in a public place; three salesmen, two customers are in the outer office. She understands that he would harm her if he could. But he can’t make her leave without some show of physical force, in which, as there are customers in the showroom, she imagines he’ll be reluctant to indulge.

  “She’s dying, Señor Ortiz. Your mother is dying.”

  “My mother has long been dead. She died of the disease of her perverse beliefs. She was poisoned by the filthy ideas of the communism she put above everything. She was poisoned and became diseased. This country was too strong for her, too healthy; she had to go back to America, where she could breathe the air that nurtured her disease.”

  “My grandmother isn’t a communist,” Amelia says, not knowing why this is the idea she’s landed on. “She never has been.”

  “You can’t believe anything they say. They are children of lies. They all lie to better spread their poison.”

  “My grandmother is a good woman. She has done great good in the world.” How, she wonders, could she talk about Meme’s work for the environment, the preservation of wetlands, the creation of public gardens, transportation for the elderly? How puny that all sounds, pathetic, even. How can she tell him that her grandmother has loved her in a way that made her feel safe in a world that, she now understands more than ever, has never been a place of safety?

  “She was a diseased creature that spread her disease. The disease that eventually infected this country, that has turned it from one of the healthy spots on a dangerous earth to just another disease-ridden outpost of error and perversion. Oh, she would be happy in the current Spain, where everything goes, everything is allowed, now we are a culture of pornography and drugs and divorce and homosexuality and abortion. Where we were once the crown of virtue.”

  Amelia knows that, for the first time in her life, she is truly angry. Furiously angry. The sensation is so foreign to her that she thinks she may be having a seizure. This heat in her face, this racing of her pulse…perhaps it’s a fever, the highest fever she has ever had. Perhaps it’s feverish delirium that allows her to rise to her feet, stand face-to-face with Ignacio Ortiz, pull herself up to her full height so she is actually the taller, move closer to him than good manners would permit.

  “My grandmother was right. She said you were born a fascist and you would always be one.”

  “I suppose you think that is an insult. For me, it is an honor.”

  “An honor? To be associated with people who violated the freedom of millions? Who executed millions in the name of order?”

  “Order, yes, but, most importantly, truth and honor. You understand nothing of truth and honor. You Americans, you can only speak in small words, written in small letters.”

  She has never been even remotely patriotic, but now she is determined to defend America.

  “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They are not small words.”

  “Pursuit of happiness? Compared to a devotion to truth and honor? You speak of happiness. As an idea it is nothing but paltry, lukewarm, mediocre. Pursuit of happiness. These words do not speak to the blood. Which is why, in the end, we will triumph.”

  “Well, you won’t triumph, but you will shed blood. Much more blood has been shed in the name of honor than in the name of happiness. And life and liberty: liberty is nothing to you, and you don’t love life; it’s death you love.”

  “Yes, thank God, we are not afraid of death. As I imagine your precious grandmother, who was, after all, baptized in the faith but renounced her faith for the poison faith of communism, is facing it now with terror.”

  “You couldn’t be more wrong,” she says, but his words frighten her. She has never asked her grandmother if she is afraid of dying.

  “Leave these premises or I will call the police.”

  “And say what? That they should arrest me for introducing myself to my uncle? But I’m happy to leave. I don’t want to breathe the same air as you any longer than I have to,” she says, flinging her shawl over her shoulders, enjoying the cliché.

  —

  If with Ignacio she felt for the first time the seizure of anger, running down the streets she feels for the first time what it must be to be insane. She sees herself running, her hair falling out of her clip, hears the flap flap flap of her sandals’ leather soles, but she sees and hears from a distance, as if she were on a high place, what might be called an observatory. Her face is flushed; sweat is pouring down her back, she feels the stream of it traveling down her spine. She has only one thought: she has to get out of here, she has to be home. With her grandmother, who may be afraid of dying.

  She can’t imagine why she was ever so foolish as to undertake this errand. Why she thought she could simply arrive and say to someone, “Your mother, who abandoned you while you were still a child, is dying. She doesn’t know I’m here to find you, but if you will just come with me, I can bring you to her.”

  Shame sluices her being as streams of sweat sluice her skin. You are a fool; you are a ridiculous person, she says to the reflection in the mirror. She throws her clothes into her suitcase, not stopping to fold them. Briefly, she contemplates leaving a message for Pepe. But there is nothing to say.

  She checks out of the hotel and asks them to call her a cab. The woman at the desk tells Amelia it will cost a hundred euros. She agrees. She knows she couldn’t have done what she’s doing before the age of credit cards.

  She has no idea when the next plane to Madrid might be, or, after that, the next plane to New York. It doesn’t matter; she doesn’t mind spending the night in the airport as long as she’s out of this town.

  The old Amelia would have felt it necessary to make some excuse to the hotel owners. But not the new Amelia. The old Amelia would not have run away. The intermediate Amelia, who came into being when she hatched this plan, the Amelia who lied: she would have made up a story. But the Amelia she is now feels no need to make an explanation. None at all.

  —

  There is a plane to Madrid an hour and a half after she arrives at the airport, a seat if the señorita is willing to go first class. The señorita is. There is a way of getting to New York tonight if she is willing to fly through Oslo. It will take thirteen hours. She agrees.

  All she wants to do is sleep, not to be conscious until she arrives in America. There are too many things to understand. Too much has happened. There is too much for her to know about herself; how can she be both the person she was only a few days ago and the person she now knows herself to be? It’s as if she is a nursling and, because of extraordinary circumstances, has been abruptly and rudely weaned. And the necessity of the weaning has forced her suddenly to grow teeth. She feels it in her mouth: the new sharpness, the cutting through the pink tender gums. This is who I am now, she thinks. I am grateful for everything that happened, everything I saw.

  For the first
time, she knows exactly who she is. She is a person who will refuse some things. Will refuse to allow them to go by while she keeps silence. The sense she always had of floating above her life has disappeared. Because she knows she will refuse lies—and she knows it because she has refused lies about someone she loves, about ideas she didn’t even know she believed in. And so I must, she wants to tell her grandmother, be a person of faith. To be a person of faith means to be willing to say yes and to be willing to say no, not counting the cost. She did this in the cold room with the man who spoke words that were evil. Was he evil himself? He frightened her, but she said no. She loved her grandmother, and to what her grandmother’s life meant, she said yes.

  —

  She rents a car in New York and drives the three hours to Avondale. Exhausted, she stops for a coffee near New Haven and gulps it down with a McDonald’s hamburger, which she is ashamed to admit she enjoys. She adds an order of fries, which she enjoys even more.

  She passes the great houses of Watch Hill, built by millionaires, probably including her great-grandfather, whose existence, only weeks ago, she couldn’t have imagined. She drives up the dirt road to Meme’s house.

  She opens the door quietly in case her grandmother is sleeping. But she isn’t sleeping. Amelia hears her voice; she’s speaking on the phone. “I know you were interested in opposing the swan-egg-addling program. We weren’t able to make our case a few months ago, but we’re trying again. We’re going to meet and marshal our facts and be sure we have a well-articulated argument. They thought it was all over. But there’s another spring coming just around the corner. We need to get organized now.”

  And then she hears Helga’s voice. “They don’t know who they’re dealing with, but they’ll know soon enough, by God.”

  And now Rosa is saying, “You shouldn’t sound so angry. You don’t want to appear rude.”

  “We won’t give up without a fight,” Marian says. “They don’t know who they’re dealing with. They don’t begin to understand who we are.”

  —

  “My darling Meme,” Amelia, standing in the hall, says to no one who can hear her. “I think I begin to understand, I think I have at least begun to understand who you are. And now I must begin to understand who I am. I must begin to understand how to live a life.”