by Lisa Gornick
Señor Padillo smiles and folds his chubby hands. “How like you our city?”
“Very much, thank you,” Rena says slowly.
Señor Padillo beams at her. “My English not good. You pardon me.”
Rena catches Leonard’s eye. “I speak Spanish,” he says. “I could translate if you’d like.”
The man gestures to the ceiling, outside, to himself. His cheeks flush. “La señora, it not sad her if yes?”
They wait while he reads the papers Rena has brought from the embassy. His lips form every word. A day in prison, Saul has told her, is a day spent waiting in lines: lines for the toilet, lines for the cafeteria, lines for the telephone. “A prescription for violence. All these hotheaded kids set to simmer hour after hour after hour. A way of telling us over and over that we’re just lumps of flesh. You never think about it when you have control over your time, but time, even more than money, is the ultimate status symbol. That’s what you buy with money—not having to wait.”
“How do you keep from losing it?” she’d asked.
“I’m ruthless about what I’ll do to occupy myself. I used to be appalled when I’d see people bend the corner of a page in a book. Now I rip the pages out and clip them into packets I can fold in a pocket. My father sends me foam earplugs, and I keep them in whenever I’m not talking with someone. All day long, I read my way through the lines.”
Señor Padillo scratches his chin. His nails are meticulously manicured. Rena pictures a tiny woman with dark lashes applying a silver file to Señor Padillo’s broad white nails. He speaks in Spanish to Leonard. The words move back and forth like a shuttlecock over a net.
Eventually, Leonard and Señor Padillo begin making little nodding gestures. “He says it’s out of his jurisdiction to release the body,” Leonard tells Rena. “Only the minister of police, Señor Perez, can do that, and he’s at the coast until Monday.”
She sees dark spots before her eyes. The fan overhead pushes the hot air around the room. She cannot imagine spending six more days in this city. She cannot imagine sharing the room at La Posada de las Madres with Leonard for six more nights. “Tell him he has to do something. That we cannot wait that long.”
Leonard and the undersecretary resume their volley of words. From Señor Padillo’s excessively polite tone, Rena can tell that any attempt to decrease their ration of waiting will be futile. Leonard turns back to her. “He says that if this were a domestic affair, he might be able to handle it himself but not an international matter.”
She thinks of Saul’s definition of a bureaucracy: actions pronounced as possible or impossible as though they were laws of nature rather than arbitrary rules. “Ask him if he could contact his boss by telephone.”
Leonard translates. Señor Padillo laughs and then Leonard smiles. She has the distinct impression that there is some sort of man-to-man banter that Leonard is leaving untranslated, something along the lines of how the undersecretary does not want to lose his balls and that is what would happen were he to disturb the minister of police on his vacation.
Señor Padillo pushes back his chair. Standing, he shakes Leonard’s hand, bows slightly to Rena. “Lunes, a las nueve.” Monday, nine o’clock.
IT’S PAST FOUR by the time they leave the police station. Leonard takes her arm. “In the morning, we’ll go back to the embassy and see what they can do to intervene.”
“Yes,” Rena says, but already she knows that nothing will happen, that they can spend two days going back and forth between the assistant to the assistant ambassador and the undersecretary to the minister of police, and even if they’re able to jump this up to the assistant ambassador himself, all that will happen will be more apologies for their having to wait.
The day feels topsy-turvy. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner—that old unsettled feeling from childhood when there’d never been regular meals or regular bedtimes, when Eleanor, having eaten at work, would forget that Rena had not. In the cab back to the hotel, Leonard rubs his eyes.
“Why don’t you lie down when we get back? You could take a nap before we go for dinner.”
Leonard covers his mouth as he yawns. “If you don’t mind, I think I will.”
While he naps, Rena reads in the courtyard on a wobbly wrought-iron chair under a palm tree. It’s a pitiful specimen with withered brown leaves that bring to mind a passage Saul had shown her on the occasion of their trip to St. John, a scalding commentary by a heat-addled nineteenth-century traveler on the depravity of the palm tree: “An overrated atrocity of a weed with revolting leaves and a scaly trunk.”
A baby starts to scream. A hunger scream. Although there are five other couples here with infants, she knows it’s Carlos. The door to Hank and Sonia’s room swings opens, and Hank bolts past her on legs that drop clumsily one in front of another. “The bottle. I have to get the bottle from the kitchen.” Sonia follows with the screaming Carlos, his face and neck splotched with red. “All right, all right,” Sonia says. “It’s coming. Hold your britches.”
Rena stands to give Sonia her shaded chair. Sonia flops down. She’s barefoot, and one strap of her sundress has fallen off her shoulder. She leans back so her neck rests on the top of the chair and her short freckled legs stretch in front. In the one piece of frivolity Rena can detect about her, her toenails are painted gold.
“Here, I’ll take him for you,” Rena says, reaching for Carlos.
“Be my guest. It’s like holding a car alarm.”
Rena presses the baby’s abdomen against her chest. She bounces him up and down as she walks back and forth. “Your baba’s coming,” she whispers. “Yes, yes, you’ll get your baba.”
Hank returns, face and neck wet with sweat. “I can’t get this thing screwed in right.”
Sonia examines the nipple and bottle. “This nipple isn’t ours. Ours are the clear ones in the Ziploc on the shelf.”
“Shit.” Hank races back toward the kitchen. Sonia rolls her eyes.
“I can’t blame it on his sex. He’s equally useless with a car. And don’t even think about tools. Thank God he can do theoretical physics. Otherwise, he’d have to be on welfare.”
Rena can feel Carlos trying to suck on her neck. As a baby, Gene would make sucking motions while he slept. What are you dreaming about, she’d murmur into his crib. Warm milk going down your gullet?
When the bottle arrives, Sonia takes Carlos. He drinks avidly, his hands lovingly fingering the plastic. As he relaxes, so does Sonia. “Imagine what he’d be like with a boob.” She kisses the top of his head. “A little lady-killer.”
THE FOUR OF THEM, five including Carlos asleep in the baby carrier, go to a Chinese restaurant Sonia and Hank were told about by the social worker from the adoption agency.
“What a stitch!” Sonia exclaims as they’re seated. The room is decorated with red and green Christmas tree lights and yellow paper lanterns, and the menu features chop sue and eg rol. Sonia orders bottles of the local beer for everyone. “No teetotalers,” she announces. As expected, the food is ghastly, with everything sunk in an orange sweet and sour sauce. Sonia, on her third beer, twirls a pineapple chunk on the tip of a chopstick, close, Rena fears, to degenerating to child’s food play.
Neither Hank nor Sonia is particularly curious about Leonard and her, or why they are here. They ask no questions beyond where they each live. When Rena says Manhattan, Sonia commences a story about her years at Barnard and the apartment she shared with four other girls above the Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee shop. Only on the subject of Leonard and Rena’s travel plans do Sonia and Hank seem interested. “You absolutely cannot stay here,” Sonia declares. “That would be like coming to the U.S. and visiting only Pittsburgh.”
Sonia’s voice shifts to a podium register. “This is a land of waterfalls and conifers and wildflowers in lavenders and crimsons you’ve only seen on silks. There are seventeen languages spoken in the Highlands. The people, despite the massacres they have endured from their government, maintain a way of
life that centers on the earth, on what they create with their hands. If there is a God and he respires, the mists that cross the peaks in the early mornings are his breath. Antigua, Atitlán, the ruins at Tikal: these are sites of wonder. This place”—Sonia sweeps a hand over the vinyl booth and the plastic packets of soy sauce—“is a shit hole.”
• • •
AFTER DINNER, HANK escorts Leonard to the Guatel office so Leonard can telephone Klara. Rena, carrying Carlos (Hank has transferred the baby carrier to her due to Sonia’s delicate back), walks with Sonia back to the posada. The air has cooled with the setting sun. Rena drapes her cotton sweater over the carrier. Sonia tucks the sweater around Carlos’ feet.
“It’s like being on a roller coaster,” Sonia says. “There are moments of bliss. Then there are times, in the heat of the day, when he cries and cries and I think this is a living hell.”
“It gets better. It’s all about the digestive system. Once that matures, they settle down.”
“I know—the proverbial settled baby. Only I think that assumes a different kind of mother.”
Rena feels Carlos stirring from sleep.
“I’m forty-four years old. I’ve published some two hundred poems. I have a secure teaching position. We tried for two years to conceive—I’ll spare you the boring details—until finally an endocrinologist told me she was going to talk straight with me: we could spend fifty thousand dollars we don’t have and another two years hyperstimulating my ovaries and our chances would still be only fifteen percent. She said she wouldn’t talk to me like this except that she’d read my poems, had her residents read my poem about watching your eggs drop, month after month, an inheritance dwindling. Afterwards, I cried. I cried for most of two days. People read my work and they think I’m a different person than who I am, that I’m some sort of Amazonian. But I knew she was right. Hank knew she was right. She was talking his lingua franca: probability. We can’t wager all our money, he said, and one-twentieth of our remaining years on a fifteen-percent shot. We stayed up drinking Dewars straight from the bottle until the newspaper boy came and the dogs started barking. In the morning we called the agency that brought us here. That was last fall.”
Rena touches Sonia’s elbow. They’re at the intersection for the small street that houses the posada. Like Saul, Sonia follows her without even looking at the sign.
“What never occurred to me was that we lose our fertility for a reason. That it’s not just an artifact of evolution. That we’re born with all our eggs and that the time when the good ones run out is not simply random—that it wasn’t simply my body that was too old to have a baby.” Sonia hugs her arms. In the dusk, she looks younger, her skin airbrushed by the waning light. “No, it’s my psyche too. For twentyfive years, I’ve woken every day to absolute quiet. It’s been the foundation of my day. I’ve lain in bed and thought about my dreams and then padded to the kitchen to turn on the coffee and then to the bathroom to pee and wash my face and brush my teeth and then I’ve sat down with a pencil and paper. Sometimes, if we’ve been away or it’s a day I have to teach, I may have only twenty minutes, but for me those twenty minutes are the difference between feeling alive or like an automaton.”
They’re in front of the posada. Sonia stops as if what she has to say cannot be said inside. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I thought I’d still be able to do that. Get up before the baby. Let Hank get up with him. But I can’t. First, I’m so exhausted, I sleep to the very last minute. Then, when Carlos gets up, I can’t just leave him to Hank. I feel like I have to check in with him. See how he is. Only that goes on all day. I keep saying, it’s just for now, when we get back to Boston I’ll be able to have my morning time. But it’s been four weeks and I’m going crazy.”
The bass has disappeared from Sonia’s voice. Tears balance on the rims of her eyes. “I feel like I’ve lost my mind. I’ve stopped dreaming. Or when I do, the dreams are wiped out immediately since I wake up all night to Carlos’ cries. Only once have I woken on my own, not to his crying. It’s the only dream I can recall since we’ve had him. The only line I’ve written. Seven syllables.”
Sonia reaches out her hands and grasps Rena’s arms. She’s laughing through her tears, a kind of hysterical hilarity. “Guess what I was dreaming? That Carlos was crying. I was dreaming that he was crying, and when I woke up there was absolute quiet and I took a pen and wrote on my palm: ‘Silence, sugar of the soul.’”
AT THREE, RENA bolts awake. At first, she thinks it’s the sound of a baby crying, or parents half asleep, stumbling and muttering as they make bottles, change diapers, but all she hears is the call of an animal, high-pitched and distant.
Afraid of disturbing Leonard, she refrains from turning on the light to read and instead lies listening to his breathing, insufficiently staccato to qualify as a snore but too loud to permit an easy return to sleep. She can detect his scent, heavier and more pungent than Saul’s.
Over dinner, she could feel a tension rising between them—the excess politeness, the absence of any joking. She’d been relieved when Hank volunteered to go with Leonard to the Guatel office—relieved to have the time apart.
She turns onto her side and pulls the thin blanket over her shoulders. It doesn’t make any sense. Leonard has been nothing but considerate and helpful. So why does she no longer want him here?
“THEY’RE RIGHT,” RENA says over breakfast. “It’s absurd to come this far and see only this city. You should go to the Highlands.”
Leonard is cutting a tortilla covered with a fried egg. He finishes the incision and places his knife and fork parallel on the plate. “If we persist with the embassy, we might be able to get them to apply pressure and get us earlier access.”
“It’s not worth it. It’s Wednesday already. We could spend two days badgering them and maybe we’d get the body by Friday. And that’s only maybe.” She feels oddly like Sonia, talking about facing probability and letting it guide your decisions.
“So why don’t we both go? We could leave tomorrow morning. Come back on Sunday. That would give us time to visit Lake Atitlán and one or two of the mountain villages.”
From the way Leonard has an itinerary mapped out, it’s clear that he’s already thought this through, perhaps even consulted with Hank.
“I still need to arrange for the cremation, make sure everything is set for us to bring back the ashes.”
“Don’t you think we could get that all wrapped up today?”
Rena stares at a black hair afloat in her coffee. She fears she will gag. Fears what will happen if she has to putter around with Leonard until Señor Perez’s return. That the strain of the togetherness will overtake her and some undigested piece of nastiness will pop out of her mouth. Nor does she want to tell Leonard that she has promised Sonia she will take Carlos for a night, will keep the baby in her room to allow Sonia a morning to wake in silence, or that Sonia wept at the offer, her words—“You’d really do that, oh my God, if I could have one morning, maybe I could feel okay for a couple more weeks”—all a jumble.
Leonard’s eyes narrow. He has registered her wish to be alone.
Touching his wrist, she whispers, “I can’t.”
13 Leonard
I would never have agreed to go had she not made it clear that she wanted me to leave. I want to leave her phone numbers, ways of reaching me, but she waves her hand: “Leonard, I’m a big girl. I’ll never forgive myself if your trip to Guatemala is confined to this city.”
Oddly enough, other than an initial flinching, I don’t feel insulted that she would prefer to remain here where the air is so thick with grime I have to scrub my neck and wrists to remove the accumulated soot. It is so clear (I hope I am not being overly confident here) that it has nothing to do with me that what I feel is sympathy at how hard it is for her to be in someone else’s company. Were I not, after thirty-some years of solitude myself, utterly drained of that wish, it strikes me as something I might do myself. What I do feel, th
ough, is indignation on your behalf. She must have done this a thousand times with you. Yes, she insisted you see that detox doctor. Yes, she called him a couple of times after she sensed more trouble. But it didn’t go much further than that, did it?
And how was it different for you with Mom? Did you do more than go through the motions?
Of course. It takes one to know one.
Unable to make any definitive travel plans since the guidebooks warn that bus schedules for the Highlands change without notice depending on weather and the military, who have a habit of closing roads, I tell her I will be back, hell or high water, on Sunday.
Hell or high water: who do I think I am?
SHE INSISTS ON COMING with me to the bus depot, making a respectable effort at small talk on the ride there. Once we arrive, it’s hard to figure out what needs to be done. Do I buy the ticket at the window or on the bus? What time does the bus depart? All anyone will tell me is the gate number. “La cuatro. La cuatro.”
We go to the newspaper kiosk so I can get a Herald-Tribune.
“We should have asked Hank,” Rena says. She’s wearing a dress with buttons that go up the front. In the heat of the station, she’s taken off her sweater, leaving her thin arms exposed. Ahead of us is another American, purchasing copies of every available newspaper. “Excuse me,” I say as he turns to leave. “Do you know how this works? I’m trying to find the bus to Panajachel.”
He’s tall with brittle brown hair pulled back with a rubber band. I’m certain that he’s as flabby as I am, but his head is big and he carries himself in such a way that his girth under the spirit fabric shirt gives the illusion of muscle rather than fat. His eyes settle on the oval of skin between the top of Rena’s dress and the hollow of her neck.