NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  “It was time,” he said vaguely. “It was time. Am I interrupting anything?”

  I introduced him to Julio, whose English was not good, and over a bottle of dark Mexican beer he explained to us leisurely that it was hotter than the hinges of hell in Brooklyn, that his poker partner Oscar (“You remember Oscar, Charley boy?”), with whom he had planned to go on a cruise, had died, and that he had simply closed the office and started driving.

  “I may just keep right on going to Guatemala, if my tires and my spirits hold up,” he said, smiling.

  But I knew that wasn’t so. I felt that he had come to see me, although I wasn’t sure why, and I observed that beneath the heartiness his skin was worse than white; it was yellowed and greasy.

  “I hear there’s some nice ruins around here,” he said. “I’ll just go on inside and check in—figured I’d stay for a couple days?” His voice went up on the last words, as though he feared that I might discourage him or indicate my unwillingness to have him around.

  “I live out of town a ways,” I said, “and it’s just a dump, or I’d invite you to stay with me.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean—”

  “But I’ll be happy to take you to Mitla and Monte Alban, and any place else that appeals to you. I’m not very busy these days.”

  “Me either, Charley boy.” Uncle Dan flashed the old smile as he arose. “Nice to have met you, Julio.”

  When we drove out to the great ruins in Uncle Dan’s air-conditioned monster the following morning, I began to think that perhaps I had been reading things into his appearance that weren’t there. He poked around dutifully, asked me to photograph him blinking in the bright sun with his arms around a pair of ragged Indian kids, and haggled over some fake Mixtec relics with the women who peddled them in baskets outside the church at Mitla; but he said nothing to indicate that he wanted anything other than this.

  What was more, he displayed no curiosity about my personal situation, after he had made sure that he wouldn’t be putting me out by making me his guide. We did not talk about our relatives, as we used to occasionally when I was a boy, except that in the town of Mitla he did shop for rebozos. “I’ve got to bring something home for your aunts. Let’s pick out a couple nice quiet ones, not too loud.”

  In the home of a family of weavers, standing spread-legged on the dirt floor with his cigar stuck in his mouth, trying out his Brooklyn Spanish on an old crone and a mostly naked youngster, Uncle Dan pointed at a small placard tacked to the door, below a faded movie poster of Cantinflas as a comic bullfighter.

  “Say, Charley boy, translate this for me, would you?”

  “This is a Catholic home,” I read. “Protestant propaganda is inadmissible and unwelcome here.”

  “I’ll be damned.” He thought for a while. “All my life I lived in New York, and I never once saw a sign like that.”

  The next day Uncle Dan asked, almost shyly, if it would be possible for me to drive to the coast with him. I suppose the fact that I was somewhat taken aback must have shown in my face.

  “Not Acapulco,” he added hastily. “Too far. Besides, everybody says it’s Miami all over again. I was thinking, it would be fun to see an unspoiled place before it gets taken over. Someone told me Puerto Angel is like that, not like Coney, just a quiet beach, with palm trees and tropical fruits, and hardly anybody there. We could make it in less than a day from Oaxaca, they say.”

  “I’ve never been, myself.” I paused and stared at him, but he looked back at me blandly, expectantly. “Sure, let’s go.”

  We made it to Pachutla in something like five hours in that monstrous car, with me driving and Uncle Dan relaxing, ignoring the hairpin turns and enjoying the wild landscape, the ravines and chasms that gaped on either hand. From Pachutla we had maybe another half hour to reach the Pacific, and I hesitated to press on to Puerto Angel, filled suddenly with a queer foreboding.

  But Uncle Dan was a good traveling companion, uncomplaining about discomforts that he had surely never been exposed to in all his life. He ate wretched food and red-hot food, filthy chicken wings and ulcerating tacos, he laughed at indescribably dirty toilets and no toilets at all, he didn’t mind the heat that boiled up as we descended, for he was eager to get to the sea. So we jounced over the potholed road that was an insult even to jeeps, and at last we swung round the last bend and beheld the blue body of the Pacific.

  “Like stout Cortez, that’s how I feel,” laughed Uncle Dan, patting his belly. “Just like stout Cortez.”

  “Except that it was really Balboa.”

  “Well, whoever. You know something, Charley boy? I never saw the Pacific Ocean before. Come on, let’s hit the beach.”

  But when we got there I could have wept for my Uncle Dan. His tropical paradise consisted of a modern school, a few stone buildings, and for the rest a row of wobbling wooden shacks tenanted not only by human beings but cats, dogs, chickens, and pigs. The beach was strewn with refuse, alive with litters of squealing piglets slithering back and forth, and black with their excrement. And the heat fell on us as though it had been waiting, venomous and smothering, for us to emerge from the air-cooled car.

  “Buck up, Charley boy.” Uncle Dan rapped me lightly on the biceps. “Don’t feel guilty. Imagine how I feel, dragging you off to this.”

  We made our way around a corner of the village and cut across a dried-up stream and a bend of hill to what had looked from the distance like a mirage but turned out to be exquisitely real. A heavenly beach, curving away from the midden of the village, where we undressed and lay on our backs, utterly alone, with our feet in the bluest, most caressing water anywhere in the world. We were wary, paddling through the water, of sting rays, and an occasional shark, but no matter. There were no pigs, there were no people. We might have been the first human beings ever to trace our toeprints in that crystalline sand.

  “I want to tell you something, Charley boy,” my uncle said at last. “I imagine that when you were a kid, you used to envy me.”

  “Well, I admired you. You were good to me.”

  “But I wasn’t to myself. I should have married, I should have—oh, done any number of things. We’re all cowards in one way or another. And then, you know, these last few years, after all the old urgencies were burned out, the chasing after women, running to make a buck, wishing for things that weren’t going to be, like eminence in the profession or adventures away from home, I found that just being alive was like finding a treasure every morning.”

  He rolled over on his big stomach and spoke with his mouth inches from the fine white sand. “The trouble was that just when I thought I had it made, a new fear came at me—the fear of death, something I’d never understood in all my years of practice. You remember, when you were a little boy I told you that you were immortal… well, I never really believed it myself, maybe because I wasn’t a small-town kid and I’d never tasted of the tree of life the way you did. Or maybe because when you grow up in New York there’s no innocence for you to lose.”

  He paused. I said, as casually as I could, “And now?”

  Uncle Dan startled me with his loud, almost raucous laugh. “I’m glad I came down here, that’s all. I got caught up a little. You can’t have everything, but what a shame if you never get to reach for it! That’s the only thing I’d regret. There’s really nothing to be afraid of in the reaching, you know? You strain your engine to reach paradise, and when you get there, all sweaty and out of breath, you find that the little piggies have beaten you to the beach. And there isn’t a damn thing wrong with that—it’s all part of the game. Don’t you think it’s worth a lot to find that out? Life is great, and you’ve got to grab for it every morning. But what good would it be if you knew it was going to be yours forever?”

  Next morning, after a crazy night barricaded against the invading pigs in a cubicle of one of the beachfront shacks that called itself a hotel, Uncle Dan and I crawled into his car and headed back for Oaxaca. We drove in silence all the way, both of us star
ing into the green depths of the ravines and breathing more deeply as we climbed into the pure mountain air. I knew that my uncle was dying, but I wasn’t sure that he had come, as he had claimed on the beach at Puerto Angel, just to find out certain things for himself.

  Now that he is gone, though, I feel fairly certain—even though he never asked me about myself, either to commiserate or to condemn—that Uncle Dan made his last trip as much to communicate with me one last time, to show me another path, as to please himself or to assuage his own yearning heart.

  Shortly after he drove away, leaving me to stare at myself in the cracked mirror of my Mexican lodging place, I threw off my self-pity as you would cast away a soiled and worn-out coat, and returned to the United States, to a better and more reasoned kind of life. And when I visited his resting place in a crowded and unlovely corner of a Queens cemetery—for one morning before my return Uncle Dan had died quietly in his office, without making any particular fuss—I took along a small arborvitae, and when no one was looking I planted the tree of life quickly and gently on his grave.