A Private Sorcery

by Lisa Gornick

  “What’s he so angry about?”

  “The same thing as Santiago’s daughter. He blames me for what happened to his mother.”

  Rena drinks a cup of tea in the visitors’ cafeteria while Leonard visits with Saul. Afterwards, they switch. Saul is chipper, joking about his ex-wife and his father becoming buddies.

  “I told my mother about you,” Rena says. “Your being here.” He looks at her curiously, and she realizes it had not occurred to him that she would not have told Eleanor long before. “She’s been very sweet and attentive, calling me every few days. She told Gene, and he called me and we talked about it. When I said I didn’t want him worrying about me, he said, look, Sis, I’m not a kid anymore, I’m twenty. Which, of course, I knew, but it still surprised me.”

  “Ditto with your mother. You’ve always felt like she was a kid.” “True.”

  “Nothing like having your husband go to jail to put you on the right track.”

  AS RENA COMES in the door, Pedro waves a certified letter addressed to Santiago (for which he unthinkingly signed) under her nose.

  She takes the letter to the marble bench, where Santiago used to rest summer evenings in his black glasses and black beret. She studies the envelope and the State Department seal on the front. Carefully, she opens the letter and reads the three typed paragraphs. She feels lightheaded, as if ether is being released from the paper. When she looks up, Pedro is tugging on his jacket sleeve. She reads the letter through again.

  “They’ve found the remains of a body they think is Santiago’s son. They say it matches the dental records they have on file. They’re writing to say that Mr. Domengo or his delegated representative can claim the body.”

  Pedro crosses himself. “Fifteen years he waits for this, and then it happens three months after he dies.”

  She sends a copy of the letter to Flora with a note clipped to the top: “I understand that you have not wanted to be bothered with your father’s correspondence, but I thought you would most certainly want to see this. Kindly call me collect to acknowledge receipt.”

  Two weeks later, Pedro hands the letter back to her. She waits until she’s upstairs, seated at her kitchen table with a cup of tea and the phone in front of her, before she examines the envelope. It’s covered with Arabic postmarks over which is stamped a red finger and the words MOVED. NO FORWARDING ADDRESS.

  She picks up the phone. It takes three operators to reach someone who can give her the number for the American embassy in Riyadh, four transfers to find anyone who knew Flora Fahrsi.

  “She never worked for us. Her husband ran a concession stand here up until last month. End of the month, he came in and said he wasn’t going to renew.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Oh, I just assumed he moved on. There’s a lot of turnover.”

  “Is there a forwarding address for him?”

  “We don’t keep that kind of information on people who have contracts with us.”

  Rena’s eyes feel dry from fatigue. She presses her fingertips against the lids. “It’s an urgent family matter. Wouldn’t the embassy be able to help in some way?”

  “I’m sorry. If she were a tourist here, we’d be able to look into it. Otherwise, no.”

  “Perhaps there’s a number for him in the phone book? Maybe they’re still in Riyadh.”

  “There are thousands of persons with the last name Fahrsi in Saudi Arabia. If you need further assistance, miss, you will need to contact the State Department.”

  With the miss, Rena hears that she has lost the sympathy of this woman six thousand miles away. She looks at her watch. It’s almost five o’clock in Riyadh. Closing time.

  She reads the letter again: Remains of a person identified from dental records to be Bernardo Domengo … found in a formaldehyde vat in the basement of the district morgue for the village of Nebaj and brought to a police morgue in Guatemala City. … Since the incident was classified as a hostile action against a United States citizen, the State Department will arrange for the return of the remains following claim in person by the next of kin or their designated representative.

  Bernardo, Santiago had told her, had been doing his dissertation research on the atonal music of the Queche people near Nebaj. At first he’d rented a room in the pensión, but after his recording equipment was stolen, he moved into the barn of a family of weavers who lived outside the village.

  “I was seventy-eight when my son disappeared. The American embassy sent one of their investigators, but he brought back nothing of use. Rumors that the guerrillas killed him because they thought he was a spy, rumors that he used to wander alone in the woods and had been eaten by wolves. They never thought I would go myself to try and find him.”

  Santiago held his head very still. “I cannot say what happened. Only that I know the army was involved. There was a journalist I met in Guatemala City who told me that the Guatemalan government kept track of every American living there and that the United States government let them see the FBI files. When we came back, we petitioned for Bernardo’s FBI file. My son, who was never interested in politics, whose entire life was about music, who loved the music of daily life, songs never notated—the government of the country he was born in was keeping a file on him. Right on the top, first sentence, it said, Father: Cuban Communist. There were lists of the magazines my son subscribed to and the courses he took in college. An entire page on my contacts with Fidel Castro, all of it lies. So it was a farce, my asking the embassy to help me find Bernardo. They were in—how do you call it here—in bed with the killers.”

  MONK PICKS UP on the first ring. He is silent as she tells him about Santiago and the State Department letter and how she cannot find Flora Fahrsi to let her know about Bernardo’s body.

  “Okay,” he says when she reaches the end. “You’re hitting me with a lot at once for nine-fifteen in the morning. The body they found of the boy in Guatemala is the brother of the woman in Saudi Arabia?”

  “Yes. Well, actually, it’s her half brother.”

  Monk makes a little whistle. “Let’s slow down here. It’s very nice of you to try and find this lady, but you don’t stand a chance of getting the State Department involved. It would be one thing if she’d said she wanted her father’s mail, but she didn’t.”

  “Don’t they want someone to claim the body?”

  “There’s no they. It’s just one more task some low-level functionary has been assigned. He, or I guess it could be a she, doesn’t give a damn about the Domengos. He just wants to be sure that everyone above him thinks he’s doing a good job.”

  “Managing the disposal of dead bodies?”

  He sighs. What was it that Ruth’s sister had said about Monk’s older brother? That he’d gone to Vietnam and come back without an arm? Or was it without his mind? She waits for Monk to say something biting like Don’t go getting sappy and sixtyish on me; go find some deadbeat hippie publication and send them a letter about the inhumanity of the war machine, but all he says is “Yes. That’s about the long and short of it.”

  “And what if you were to contact the embassy? Maybe they’d be more helpful if they knew a lawyer was involved.”

  Rena can hear him pushing his chair back from the desk, the squeak of the rollers on the plastic pad. She imagines his wrestler’s legs, tendons like cables, being hefted up to the desk. “What makes you think the sister, half sister, whatever the hell she is, wants to claim this decomposed corpse?”

  Rena thinks of Santiago and the way the lids were puffy over his eyes. “I’ll pay you for your time.”

  Immediately, she fears that she has insulted him.

  “It’s not my business to waste people’s money.”

  “For me, it’s not a waste.”

  “I’ll give it two days. Call me Thursday.”

  She recounts the money in the file cabinet: eleven thousand eight hundred dollars. Outside her window someone is doing trick turns in a speedboat, and for a moment she imagines it’s Reed s
ending her a coded message. You’re flipping out, she tells herself. Next thing, you’ll be thinking the radio is broadcasting special messages to you.

  “NO GO,” MONK SAYS. “I went through all the brass in Riyadh and then to the State Department. They can’t justify a search for Flora Fahrsi since there’s no evidence that she’s missing. She’s what they call absent—someone who has removed themselves from communication.”

  “You told them why? About Bernardo’s body needing to be claimed?”

  “I tried the ‘one hand washing the other’ routine—that this was their affair in Guatemala that they could clean up if they’d put in the legwork in Riyadh, but they didn’t bite. The only thing they said they could do was to allow an exception to the rules of claim.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If it could be documented that Flora Fahrsi is the sole living relative and that she cannot be reached, friends of the deceased or of the family would be permitted to claim the body.” Monk snorts. “After a truckload of notarized triple-stamped paperwork.”

  She pulls a chair out from the kitchen table, holds herself back from saying she’s glad he is getting such a chuckle out of all this.

  “How’s your little boy?” she asks.

  “He’s fine. About to finish his first year of preschool.”

  “How old is he now?”

  “Four. Going on sixteen.” He laughs the laugh of parents dying to tell the cute stories about their kids they know better than to tell.

  “Bernardo was his only son.” It’s a low blow and she knows it. Monk makes chewing sounds. Or are they spitting sounds? Something with his mouth.

  “Who do I contact?” she asks.

  “For what?”

  “To get permission to claim the body.” She looks down at her hands. They’re shaking. This is just a piece of theater, she thinks. I’m just trying this out on Monk.

  “Christ, Rena, don’t go cracking up on me here. How many months has it been? February, March, April. Fourteen months. Look, you come down tomorrow and we’ll have lunch, okay? I’ll take you out for Irish corned beef and cabbage, and we’ll talk it over.”

  His voice has turned soft and pillowy, and she thinks how nice it would be to sit with him in a dark wood-paneled bar, drinking and saying nothing.

  “Meet me here at one.”

  She’s seen only one picture of Bernardo. Santiago had extracted a dog-eared photograph from his wallet. A thin face framed with glossy black hair. Brown eyes. A cleft in the chin. At the time, she’d wondered if Santiago had ever seen the photograph—if the little tears and creases, the scratch that ran diagonally across the face, were from his pressing it to his cheek as he did that day.

  “I have to do it,” she says. “I have no choice.”

  11 Leonard

  I believe that every life has a navel, a center point from which everything else evolves. As a teenager, you were fascinated by those fringes of physics where time is viewed as a Möbius strip curving back on itself. How can this be, I imagine you asking, that what comes after could determine what comes before? This is not, though, what I mean. Nothing mechanical, no crystal balls. Rather, we organize the stories we tell about ourselves around that navel so that what came before is seen in relation to that point as much as what comes after.

  For me, that navel is Maria. You would be confused, I know, to hear me say this—a name you have never heard me speak. But how could I have told you about her? Besides, even I can see that she is irrelevant. By this, I mean it is not the she whom I knew for only nine months and haven’t seen in thirty years—I don’t even know if she’s still alive—but the she who lived then and lives now in my mind.

  I practice this speech as I prepare for my trip to see you tomorrow, an unscheduled visit prompted by Monk’s call yesterday afternoon. “She’s losing it,” Monk said. “Your daughter-in-law. This happens. They hold on tight while it’s an emergency, and then they fall apart. She wants to claim a body from a morgue in Guatemala City. A graduate student murdered in the seventies.”

  “They found the son?”

  “You knew the neighbor?”

  “He was a teacher of Saul’s. I met him once.”

  “Right, right. I forgot about that part. Well, I thought you’d want to know.”

  For a few moments after I put the phone down, I imagine myself as the protagonist of a Mexican melodrama. Rescuing the beautiful widow of my dead younger brother. Murdered, aren’t they usually murdered? Murdered younger brother. Not imprisoned son. Then I called her. Listened while she told me about the letter from the State Department, the failed attempt to contact the ghoulish daughter.

  “I know this sounds like I’m trying to be Mother Teresa or some such thing,” she says, “but you tell me, what would you do in my shoes?”

  Nothing. Goddamn nothing.

  YOU WILL BE SURPRISED, I know, to see me on a Thursday. I’m not sure if the visit will please you. “It’s an odd kind of loneliness, here,” you’ve told me. “Surrounded always by people, so that I would give any sum of money for an hour a day of solitude, and yet completely alone.” Uncertain, I make only a cursory attempt to call you first, giving up after ten minutes of pressing the redial button. Instead, I prepare for tomorrow’s absence from your mother. Put on my old corduroy coat and drive to the A & P to buy a chicken and lettuce. Roast the chicken the way my mother did with cut-up potatoes and onions in the pan and a piece of cooking string tied in a bow around the legs. Wash the lettuce—half for tonight’s meal, half for tomorrow’s—add the garlic croutons your mother likes. Fix her dinner tray. Help her into her armchair, set up the lap desk I bought for her birthday, place the tray on top.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?” she asks.

  I shake my head no, grateful that she is not one of those women who cannot bear to eat unless there is someone with them eating more heartily than they.

  She is watching a magazine show, an exposé of a car company that knew two years before five people died from locked brake rotors that there was a defect. I wait for the commercial.

  “I’m going to go see Saul tomorrow.”

  Her mouth tautens, mid-chew. Fleetingly, I entertain the idea that it is feeling for you, that she will say, I’ll come, I want to see him, but then she lifts the thighbone to her mouth and arranges it so her tongue can reach the fatty morsel wedged behind the cartilage and I know that what she is thinking about is who will make her meals and the unease that overtakes her on being alone in the house.

  “I’ll cut up the rest of the chicken so all you have to do is warm it in the microwave. And there’s washed lettuce in the vegetable crisper. I’ll be back by eight.”

  She glares at me, the thighbone midair between her glistening mouth and the plate.

  “I can ask Mrs. Smiley to come for the day.”

  She wipes her mouth with the pink cloth napkin, shakes her head with a violence intended to communicate that she’d starve to death before submitting again to Mrs. Smiley. She turns back to the television screen and for the first time in the more than twenty years since she assumed this invalid role, it strikes me as having a kind of backbone to it, some principle to which your mother is sacrificing herself, and I have to refrain from smiling at the old girl.

  YOU’RE CLEANLY SHAVEN, and there’s something different, more erect, about your posture. You stick a hand in your pocket and pull out a candy wrapped in silver foil. A chocolate toffee, the same kind I buy your mother by the bagful every week at the grocery store.

  “Here,” you say. “Mom sends them to me.”

  I look at the silver foil, confused, trying to imagine how she even got your address or the envelope or the stamps. “She’s been writing you?”

  “I guess you could call it that. She tapes the candies, two or three at a time, to a piece of pink stationery and sticks them in an envelope. They used to open each one to check if they were drugs, but the guards now know they’re the toffees from Mom. I don’t eat them. Just carry them
around to give the guys when they look like they’re going over the edge.”

  You hold the toffee between your thumb and forefinger. I watch you slip into your middle gaze, an expression that used to disarm your grade school teachers, who mistook it for insouciance.

  “It’s odd, when you think about it, how arbitrary what we call a drug is. Mom is as addicted to these candies as I ever was to my pills. The pharmacologists have all these criteria about tolerance and withdrawal that they get around when they need to by allowing for psychological dependence. But in the end what we call a drug boils down to money. Half the countries in South America, if we didn’t threaten to cut off aid, would have long ago legalized marijuana and cocaine. And their governments would be a lot better off, not just because of the tax dollars but also because of all the money lost on enforcement, all the corruption illegality breeds.”

  You tap the table and I study your hands, the way they’ve roughened from manual work. “Still working in the kitchen?” I ask, not in the mood to debate the legalization of drugs or the social structure of prohibitions.

  You look at me.

  Sorry, I want to say. I just can’t do it today.

  I think of all the betrayals we foist on those we love—of the way trust deteriorates, tooth by tooth, joint by joint. For years, I couldn’t forgive your mother for crying the day my mother died: for crying for herself and the way my mother’s death revived her feelings about her father’s death five years before, for forcing me to attend to her grief over mine. “I just can’t handle it,” she said, and I thought, no, you just won’t handle it—the perversity of our therapeutic culture where the awareness of self wipes away common decency so that your mother no longer felt obliged, even ceremonially, even on the day of my mother’s death, to let my emotions be in the foreground. I know you would consider it foolish denial to not allow that the self is the vortex of each of our universes. Isn’t that what ultimately allows for personal freedom? you would say. By placing the self center stage, we are forced to acknowledge that we are masters of our own destinies. Yes, I would counter. But does that not mean that we have the will to yield that center at times to another?