A Private Sorcery

by Lisa Gornick

  I don’t recall hearing the bell chime four o’clock, so it must have been somewhere around then that I fell back asleep. I wake with a dream clearly in mind. Your mother and I are at a party, and I have somehow lost one of my shoes. Maria is there too, dressed as I’d first seen her in a tight red skirt and a wide black belt that set off what was above and below. As I stare at Maria’s chest, the buttons begin popping off her blouse. She rushes to hold the blouse together, but I can still see the milky tops of her breasts.

  More than Maria, what strikes me about the dream is your mother. In the dream, she is as she was when we first met: not Klara with her bunioned toes, but Klara with hair sleek as a ferret’s. Four decades later, I can see that it was not simply alcohol that drew me to her that first night. No, there was behind all her arrogance something sexual, a sexual hunger, so that I wonder, now, if it was not only anger and alienation that made me grow averse to touching her but also my fear of her appetites. If, on her part, the hypochon-driasis (forgive my waxing a bit clinical here) was her conjuring—the pain my rejection must have caused her moved to stomach and back, the celibacy made her own.

  I SPEND THE MORNING WALKING. I’d like to say hiking, but with my lack of equipment or experience I confine myself to well-cleared trails. Around me are green hills: a patchwork of plots that took someone’s lifetime to cultivate, and then, farther up, forested land with, at the top, rough white stones poking through like bald spots.

  At noon, I stop under a tree enveloped from the lowest branches to the roots with vines. I have my lunch of tortillas and cheese and water. Afterwards, I stretch out with my folded vest as a pillow. A rooster crows to a chorus of birds and insects, and the next thing I know my eyes are opening. I inhale the air spiced with white orchids and wild thyme. All these years of resisting afternoon sleep, of fearing that it would lead me down some slippery slope into a state of complete lassitude when, clearly, it is built into the bones that men of my age who have lost youth’s hearty sleep, who sleep more like babies with our early morning risings, need this midday rest to maintain our vigor.

  Vigor. A man of vigor. That’s how I’d always thought of my Uncle Jack, who my sisters joked would be still shtupping when he could no longer walk. His afternoon naps at his dress factory (he confided in me my fourteenth summer when I first worked there, the force of his personality blinding me to the fact that I already towered above him) followed by a press on the buzzer for the red-haired shiksa bookkeeper who, on his instructions, locked the door behind her. “Every day, boy,” he told me, “you eat, you sleep, you crap, you fuck. This is what the body requires. This is how we are made.” My cheeks turned red. That’s if you are an animal, I’d wanted to say with the full force of my adolescent indignation. What about Beethoven’s Ninth? Michelangelo’s David? I searched my fourteen-year-old store of knowledge. What about Jane Addams? Thomas Jefferson. Joan of Arc. But I’d kept my mouth shut. Afraid of my uncle’s taunts. Stupid kid. You got any hair down there?

  Only once do I recall my mother uttering a critical word about Jack. “Crude,” she said. “He’s a crude man.” Years later, Lil would tell me that she had come home one day unexpectedly early to find Jack pawing our mother on the sofa. The top two buttons of her dress were open and he was panting, my sister reported. At the time, I assumed Lil had saved my mother from Jack’s predations, though now, thinking how my mother would have been widowed several years by then, I can permit other scenarios.

  The top two buttons. Had Lil been that specific? I think about last night’s dream—Maria with her buttons popping open. “Maria, Schmaria,” Merckin had said. “None of this has to do with Maria. You condemned and feared your Uncle Jack because he reminded you of yourself. You, your mother’s baby, her only son.”

  When you told me you wanted to go to medical school and asked why I’d given up practicing medicine, I said simply that I’d learned I wasn’t cut out to be a psychiatrist and there had been no other branch of medicine that interested me. Later, when you decided to pursue psychiatry, you asked what I meant by wasn’t cut out, and I said something about being unable to endure the sense of responsibility I felt for other people, afraid of the impact I might have on them.

  “What do you mean?” you asked. You were twentyfour. Still boyish with thin shoulders and a concave chest.

  “It’s not like fixing bones,” I said. “Not to minimize fixing bones, but with fixing bones it’s more focused what one worries about: the technique, did you set the bone correctly, place the pins in the right spot. With psychiatry, the patient reacts to things you never do, things that have nothing to do with you. Then there are the things you feel—the patient responds to that, too. All before you’ve said a word. That’s the intrigue of it: the many layers of causation. But it’s also what troubled me, the sense that even with the best intentions I couldn’t be sure that my impact would be benign.”

  I don’t think I said more than this. Certainly, I never mentioned any particular patient. But I wonder what you sensed, my feelings seeping out, past my own skin, past Maria, into you.

  THE BUS LEAVES Todos Santos at four in the morning. I pack my things and lie on the cot fully dressed with the three blankets over me. There are no baby cries tonight, and I wonder if this is a good sign or bad. At three, I give up on sleep and make my way down the stairs. I urinate in the field behind the pensión, splash cold water from the courtyard pump onto my face.

  The bus arrives twenty minutes early. Again, the driver shoos the people seated behind him to the back so I can sit in what I now understand must be the seat for anyone well-off enough to own shoes. Leaving the town, everything except the swatch of rutted earth lit by the headlights disappears so that the only way I can sense the road is by the groaning of the axle and brakes. I keep my eyes bolted to the windshield, terrified of the sheer drop to my right. Around me, a cacophony of snores as chins drop forward and back. Twice, the bus stops for someone standing by the side of the road. Twice, the driver descends to hoist baskets onto the rack on the roof.

  In the dark, I return to the question of two afternoons ago: how could Carmelita have been murdered without anyone in the jail hearing her screams? On the one occasion Maria had talked with me about the encyclopedia salesman, she’d told me he’d held a pillow over her face. “I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “I was sure he was going to kill me.”

  Nausea rises from my stomach to my throat. Of course. How could I have not seen it before? Carmelita was suffocated to death.

  The sky begins to lighten. Ink to slate to pearl until I can see the shapes of things. A golden glow forms at the horizon and then a band of orange. Looking down, I see a shimmering opalescence. We are driving right through the clouds. I open my window and inhale. I am breathing clouds.

  It’s fully light by the time we reach the lowlands and the highway that leads to the capital. I am exhausted. An exhaustion beyond lack of sleep. My eyes close and I do arithmetic in my head. Fifty-nine. Maria would be fifty-nine.

  14 Rena

  Tony Prankle with a “k,” Rena realizes, is going nowhere. “I come here to get the Central American news bulletins. The guy who owns the newsstand carries them under the counter. The deal is, I buy a copy of every local and English-language paper he has on hand and he sticks what’s under the counter in the stack.”

  “They’re illegal?”

  “Not technically. But they’re not the sort of thing anyone wants to be known to carry. Nothing I don’t know, but I like to keep up on what they’re publishing in El Norte.” He grins, revealing a brown incisor. He’s good-looking in an ugly sort of way: a face with each feature flawed but somehow pleasing when pieced together on his large head. “The competition.”

  Prankle takes Rena’s elbow and guides her to the street. He points toward an old convertible Morris Minor double-parked in front. Two street urchins are leaning on the hood. “My parking attendants.” He hands them each a coin. “Where are you headed?”

  Not wanting to reveal h
er aimlessness, she says the first thing that pops into mind. “The Museo Ixchel.”

  “That’s near where I live. I’ll give you a lift.”

  Prankle opens the door and Rena climbs inside. She can feel the heat of the seat through her dress, can smell the old leather cured, it seems, with tobacco.

  “Are you into textiles?” Prankle asks.

  “Not particularly.”

  “Well, that’s about all you’ll see there. But they’re pretty amazing. Geometrics that give Escher a run for his money.”

  She recognizes La Avenida de la Reforma, sees the American embassy on the left.

  “It’s a God-awful city. But there are a few hidden treasures. Over there, at the Miga Deli, you can get a decent bagel. The only one in the country. And the Botanical Gardens,” Prankle points to the right, “are worth a look. Skip the museum. A lot of dusty taxidermy. But don’t miss the Popol Vuh. It’s one room with nothing marked, so you have to guess what you’re seeing, but my archaeologist buddy says it has some of the best Mayan artifacts anywhere.”

  He pulls in front of the Ixchel, looks at the clock on the dash. “It’ll take me maybe three hours to get my story written and filed, but I could give you my infamous fifty-nine-minute tour after that. Say, four-thirty?”

  Prankle writes down the address of La Posada de las Madres. Inside the museum, Rena sits on a bench and watches the few visitors diligently examine the weavings. With Leonard here, she’d been desperate to be alone. Or maybe it wasn’t alone but unobserved. With Prankle, it’s like being alone but with company. She could be anybody, any woman with a reasonably attractive face.

  SHE WALKS BACK to the hotel. Sweating through his shirt, Hank paces in the courtyard, jiggling a whimpering Carlos.

  “Where’s Sonia?”

  “Trying to get some sleep.”

  “It looks like he has some heat rash.”

  Hank peers down at the pink bumps on the baby’s face.

  “I’ll get you a cool cloth.” Rena unlocks her door and puts her bag on what had been Leonard’s bed. Emptied of Leonard, the room feels different: calmer and cooler. She listens to the sounds embedded in the quiet—the hum from the wiring in the walls, a drip from the shower—and, for a moment, she regrets her offer to take Carlos for the night. Being with an infant, though, she reminds herself, is not the same. A baby’s consciousness does not assert itself. Simply its demands: feed me, change me, hold me.

  Rena wets a washcloth. She squeezes out the excess water, folds it in quarters lengthwise, brings the cool, wet cloth outside. Taking the baby from Hank, she dabs his blotchy forehead and cheeks. The whimpers stop and Carlos curls into her breast.

  “You go rest,” Rena says. “He can sleep on Leonard’s bed. I’ll bring him over after he wakes up.”

  Inside, she lays a clean white T-shirt atop the bed so the spread won’t irritate Carlos’ skin. Even though the baby’s too young to roll over, she surrounds him with pillows before lying down herself to sleep.

  When she wakes, Carlos is staring up at the ceiling. He’s wiggling his fingers and toes, looking, it seems, at a wavering band of dark, a shadow from the blinds. Scooping him up, she heads over to Sonia and Hank’s room.

  Sonia opens the door, the freckled top of one breast visible at the neckline of her canary yellow robe. “You’re an angel.”

  “All I did was lay him on the bed and take a nap. When I woke up, he was watching the shadows on the ceiling.”

  “You’re kidding! He didn’t scream?”

  “Not a peep. I’m going out for a couple of hours, but I’ll take him as soon as I get back.”

  PRANKLE’S TOUR IS heavily weighted toward churches. He begins with the Catedral Metropolitana, one of the oldest buildings in Guatemala City, spared from earthquakes—according to local lore—by a deal the Holy Virgin Mary, patron saint of the city, made with Santa Teresa. Next they visit La Merced, where Prankle points out the unusual organ and the colonial altar moved from a church in Antigua. Back in the car, they head up a small hill to La Ermita del Carmen. He has a smoke in the garden while Rena goes inside.

  From a back pew, she studies the gold-and-mahogany altar. Shortly after they got married, Saul had gone through a cathedral phase, wanting her to accompany him as he visited every cathedral within a few hours drive of the city. He toyed with writing an article on the cathedral as an expression of man’s narcissism, not the contemporary narcissism of self-absorption but the narcissism of grandiosity—a noble narcissism, Saul claimed. At the time, she had attributed this obsession to Saul’s disappointment with his work, the way he felt himself to be a cog in what he called the psychosis gin: the circuit whereby families turn over their psychotics to the state, which then pays the pharmaceutical companies to wipe out their hallucinations like so many roaches nested in a wall. Now, though, she wonders if there’d been something more at stake, a questioning on Saul’s part about the limitations of his and Leonard’s (and, she supposes, despite her mother’s vestigial Catholicism, her, too) ingrained secularism.

  The last church on Prankle’s tour is the Capilla de Yurrita, a Russian Orthodox structure built at the turn of the century by a rich religious fanatic. Prankle leaves the car running while Rena walks around the exterior of twisted pillars and onion domes, all proportioned so they look more like caricatures of themselves than themselves. Heading south, they pass the Terminal Market, where contraband monkeys and parrots are sold. Prankle ends the tour with a spin through the Aurora park, a misnomer, he tells her, since it houses an airport, a military base and a sad zoo.

  “The only thing we missed is Kaminal Juyu, the Mayan burial ruins west of here, but there’s nothing to see from the outside and you’re not going to catch me dead, pardon the pun, crawling around in those tunnels.” He looks at his watch. “How’s a beer and a steak in an air-conditioned room sound? I know a place where the meat’s more or less maggot-free.”

  THE STEAK HOUSE, it turns out, is in the posh section of Zona Diez, not far from the American embassy. It’s softly lit and very cool. The bartender waves at Prankle. Two bottles of beer appear.

  A waiter in a pressed white shirt approaches with menus. Prankle holds up a hand. He speaks in rapid Spanish. The waiter nods and does an about-face.

  “I nixed the salads. The lettuce is an invitation for the runs.”

  Rolled rellenos arrive and Prankle opens them to spread hot sauce inside. Hot chilies burst inside Rena’s mouth and her eyes tear. She rinses her mouth with beer.

  “Sorry. I forget that other people’s taste buds haven’t been destroyed like mine.” When the steaks are brought sizzling on metal platters, he reaches over to cut hers down the middle. “Bueno,” he says to the waiter. “You don’t want them rare here. Save that for Peter Luger’s.”

  Prankle polishes off half his steak in two minutes’ time and orders more beers. He lights a cigarette and angles his body so the smoke blows away from her. “So, we journalists are all part detective. I thought maybe if I got two beers in you, you’d tell me why you’re here.”

  Her stomach clutches as she sees that she’s underestimated Prankle, assuming that he would, like Sonia, be content to have her serve as his audience. “What do you mean?”

  “No one comes to Guatemala to stay in the capital. The old guy.”

  She scurries to construct an answer, then stops herself. This is irrational, she tells herself; her claim to Bernardo’s remains has been sanctioned by two governments.

  To her surprise, Prankle knows all about Bernardo. “The story broke the first time I lived here, 1976 to 1977. I wrote maybe half a dozen pieces about it for the San Francisco Chronicle. The wire services picked up a couple of them. It was right before the Carter administration halted support for the Guatemalan government. It was all a sham because once official support was withdrawn, the CIA simply had freer reign to do their dirty business.”

  “Did you meet the father?”

  “A couple of times. They were here for a few months. S
taying in an apartment in Zona Cuatro. I remember him telling me that Castro had been his student—and a lousy one at that. The mother was a reddiaper baby. A pianist, I think.”

  “Opera singer.”

  Prankle laughs. “Not too subtle, I’d say. Finding the body right after the father kicks the bucket. They must have assumed there was no one else who still gave a damn. Probably no one except the father had said boo about the corpse in ten years. So they figure once he’s gone, they can close out the case, clear the shelf space.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Bingo, babe. That’s the million-dollar question around here. You answer that one and you’ll get the Pulitzer. Don’t worry. I’m not going to scoop you. Not because I’m chivalrous, but I couldn’t sell it. A body in formaldehyde doesn’t make good copy. You need fresh blood.”

  WITH CARLOS AS A reason for making it an early night, Rena declines Prankle’s suggestion that they move on for drinks at one of the expat bars.

  “Well, baby-sitting’s a nobler cause than baiting the spooks, which is what I’ll end up doing with my pals at El Establo. The bartender there makes sport out of tripping them up on their covers. But if you want to understand the adoption thing and see what this city is really about, you should come with me tomorrow to El Hoyo.” El Hoyo, Prankle explains, means the hole: the place where the street children—beggars, prostitutes, addicts—live. “The reporting’s done, and I’ve got a photographer lined up to do the shoot late in the day when the light’s best.”

  Prankle pulls in front of La Posada de las Madres. Rena hops out before he can reach for her. “Five. Here in front.”

  She nods, unsure whether she’s assenting out of hope that there’s more she can learn about what happened to Bernardo or out of fear of insulting Prankle. She knocks on Sonia and Hank’s door. Hank lets her in. Sonia is sitting on the bed, giving Carlos a bottle. Her hair looks wild. Carlos grips the sides of the bottle, eyes closed, as he gulps the milk.