FSF, May-June 2010

by Spilogale Authors

  * * * *

  He wanted to tell Maria the truth: that he had in fact left his home in America fleeing a sense of inadequacy and prodded by a vague desire to become an adventurer. Arthur wanted a pith helmet and touchy negotiations with cannibals, and a beautiful native girl who knew the lay of the land but had yet to learn the nature of her heart. He wanted exotic and forbidding ruins, and something mysterious worth risking his life for. When he'd arrived in Caracol years before, he thought he had sensed in the town's easy lassitude a latency, something behind, below, just always on the edge of vision. If he had known what it was, he would have continued on. Mystified, he stayed. Observations of Caracol's day-to-day life told Arthur nothing about the mystery he sought, perhaps because there were no mysteries in its day-to-day life. He was looking in the wrong places, as it seemed to him he always had. The friends he made—acquaintances, really—in the shops and bars and hotels, they had nothing to contribute to his quest. Arthur blamed them for this, but knew that this was unfair because they did not know, any more than he did, what he was really after. Adventure is hard to find when you go looking for it. What you more often get, Arthur Lindsay discovered, is a different kind of disillusionment.

  Maria Rios, or his imagined version of her, kept him going. She was desirable, which Arthur automatically assumed meant inaccessible to the likes of him: older, Anglo, an interloper. When he caught her eye on the street, no matter what she did he felt unfulfilled. Confiding in a prematurely aged drunk named Isaac, Arthur suggested that his love for Maria was the result of some flaw in himself. “If I was happy,” he said, “I wouldn't give a shit about her."

  "Big news,” Isaac said. “What happy man gives a shit about a woman he doesn't have?"

  The inarguable logic of this, or perhaps the tautology of it, kept Arthur interested in the problem while he worked on shoring up his shattered home. Something about Caracol made him want to stay. He had known this before he had known of the existence of Maria Rios. Therefore, thought Arthur Lindsay with impeccable logic, Maria Rios had nothing to do with his desire to uncover whatever secrets Caracol kept hidden away in its jungle-shrouded adobe fastness.

  Isaac had his own contribution to Arthur's ill-considered obsession. “Out there,” he said of the jungle, “there are things no man has ever lived to tell about."

  "Then how do you know about them?” Arthur wanted to know.

  "Stories survive,” Isaac said. “Even when the people who are supposed to tell them don't."

  This was the beginning of Arthur's project of cultivating the drunks of Caracol, to see what they knew and what they thought they knew, what they believed and what they found worthy of agave-fueled derision. He canvassed them, compiled his findings informally during insomniac wanderings, and realized shortly after the earthquake that there was something about the mansions of the blood that demanded his attention.

  Nobody would admit to having been there. Nobody could give him directions. Nobody knew what function they served, who had built them, or what importance they still held outside of stories told to get another drink. Everyone took their existence for granted. This was an investigation Arthur Lindsay could get behind.

  Isaac scoffed. “You don't want to know what they are,” he said when Arthur asked him again. “You want to know what you can do with them."

  "No, no,” Arthur said. He explained, he hoped patiently, that he wanted to know everything there was to know about the mansions. “How long have I been here?” he asked Isaac. “Am I the kind of man who would use this? I want to know."

  Isaac drank, and ignored him. But it was a clue.

  * * * *

  His search for correspondences did not end with the dream-dog. Omens appeared in the clusters of spiders that built webs in abandoned doorways, and vanished by the next morning; in the distant rumble of masonry as a building fatally weakened by the earthquake teetered and collapsed, perhaps at the exact moment Arthur was trying to shore up a doorway in his own home. The morning after a dream in which the dog had bitten him on the thumb and refused to come out of the mailbox, Arthur was cleaning debris from his bedroom and remonstrating himself for his impulse to light a match and make the problem go away when he heard a knock from the direction of the front door. He emerged covered in dust and splinters, carrying an armload of broken lumber and drywall, to find Maria Rios a step inside his living room. “You shouldn't stay here,” she said. “What if there's an aftershock?"

  There had been, dozens in fact. Each of them seemed to have squeezed Arthur's house a little more tightly together, and he was certain—while aware that it was dumb to be certain about something like this—that the building was stronger now than it had been right after the first quake. Not wanting to sound like an idiot in front of Maria Rios, however, he did not express this belief. Instead he said, “It's been five days. Probably won't be any more aftershocks, right?"

  Maria looked unconvinced. In fact, Arthur thought as he threw the load of junk through his front window into the street, she looked nervous and sad, but also resolute. For no good reason he decided to attribute these feelings, if they existed, to her trepidation about speaking to him, and that trepidation he in turn attributed to her being secretly in love with him, as he was with her.

  * * * *

  He was half-right, as Maria Rios might have told him if he'd asked. What she was really after, following a sixth night of her dream-tournament in which German and Miguel had fought a tense semifinal, was certainty. Her dead possible suitors were eliminating themselves, and she had taken it upon herself to whittle down the ranks of their living counterparts. Arthur Lindsay was by far the oldest of these, and she passed his house on the way to work every day, so he was first on the list of cuts.

  Something about the earthquake had gotten into her head. She thought of herself as a post-disaster landscape, rearranged and transformed by the magnitude of the event. Every day she walked to work in the office of a lawyer named Chago Batista, who had not tried a case in a year. He made advances, in a self-effacing and humorous way. She rejected them, and they went about their day. Maria returned folders that for no discernible reason had emerged from filing cabinets to fan themselves across the lawyer's desk.

  * * * *

  Arthur and Maria were creatures of a system, a self-created architecture of meaning and implication. To whatever extent either of them knew it, this fact made no difference in their everyday lives. They believed what they believed in the way it made sense to them to believe it. This was enough. Their systems conflicted in fundamental ways, and the unfolding of their story—each of them believed—would be a validation either of those conflicts or of one of the systems. In other words, Maria Rios and Arthur Lindsay both believed that something about the other would prove them right. The only thing thus proved was that nobody knows anything about love, and of course this was the last thing either of them would have been permitted by their systems to admit.

  "She's crazy,” Batista said to Arthur in his office late one afternoon. Arthur had waited until Maria went home, then presented himself to Batista under the pretext of needing to resolve a question about the deed to his crumbling house. Batista offered Arthur a cigar. As he puffed it into life, Arthur said, “Who's crazy?"

  "Maria,” Batista said. “You think I don't know why you're here?"

  "Crazy how?” Arthur asked.

  "She thinks every dead boy in Caracol might have been her lover. She thinks they fight to the death in the mansions over the right to have her when she dies."

  The cigar gave Arthur a powerful head rush. His lips got a little numb. “Mansions,” he repeated.

  "The mansions of the blood,” Batista said. “You don't know anything if you don't know that every dead dreamer in Caracol goes to the mansions until the rest of us stop dreaming about him. And that whole time, they're all trying like hell to get out and come back. Thing is, if they do, and they find you while you're dreaming about them, both of you get what you want.” Batista burst out laugh
ing. “Know what I mean?"

  "So you believe it too,” Arthur said.

  "Sure,” Batista said. “The mansions are out there. But I dreamed about my wife for fifteen years after she died, and she never came to get me. Women are fickle."

  Through his nicotine haze, Arthur considered this. “How does this make Maria crazy?” he said when he'd gotten his thoughts together.

  Batista quit laughing. “That's between you and her,” he said.

  * * * *

  Arthur dreamed of himself, seven years old, writing down his dreams. A house that flew, and pursued him down a dim street, with his father and brother already in the car not knowing or caring that he had not caught up. A basement room, stacked to the ceiling with dormant zombies that awoke when he entered. A subterranean complex full of monsters that could be navigated only in the company of cartoon characters remembered from Arthur's childhood. “You ever see Charlie Brown?” he asked Isaac one night. “Linus is in my dreams. Monsters chase us."

  "What's that supposed to mean?” Isaac said.

  What it means, Arthur thought, is that you never get away. What you start with is what you end with. When you love, you want beginning and ending, and you want to know both before you get either. You want to know what kind of chocolate she likes, how she's going to react when something gets stained in the laundry. You imagine what the children would look like, and who they would love more. You lie awake at night itemizing an imagined roster of previous lovers whose existence you will never verify. You want to know why she chose you when she could have chosen someone else. You want to know why she did choose someone else before, and how she feels about the choice. You want to know the identity of the one man she wishes had been hers forever before she met you. You want to know everything. Even the mornings when she woke up consumed by shame and self-loathing, and what she did the night before. It will destroy you, this knowledge, implacably and by degrees, but you want to know. This is the vanishing edge between love and obsession, or perhaps between loving obsession and the kind that the lover indulges in order to sublimate and destroy a passion that cannot be survived.

  This was the kind of passion Arthur felt for Maria, and he could never have killed Otro Gringo without it.

  * * * *

  He started frequenting Bananana because that was where Maria's other suitors gathered to commiserate over the hopelessness of the cause. From a safe distance he observed them like a bank robber sizing up security. When he had learned all about their weaknesses, he would, by the process of elimination, hit upon the exact way to pursue his suit with Maria. Once, after an evening of observations, he mentioned the mansions of the blood to Isaac. Isaac, after a brief period of what looked like consideration, hawked up and spat something that looked like a brain into the curbside mire. “The mansions,” Isaac repeated, his eyes watering. “Six of them I have seen. Not in forty years, though."

  "Where?” Arthur asked, on the off chance that he might get a straight answer.

  "That's the thing,” Isaac said. “You find the mansions in relation to where you are. Problem is, most people don't know where they are. Figure that out, the rest of the pattern is like the veins on the back of your hand. You'll know it when you see it."

  They sat on the porch of Bananana, watching the stars wheel over the line of hills to the east of Caracol. “You bullshitting me?” Arthur said when it was time to either leave or buy Isaac another drink.

  "Nope,” Isaac said. Arthur believed him. Isaac made an effort to tell a good story when he was bullshitting. When he was melancholy and self-absorbed, as tonight, odds were good that he was telling as much of the truth as he knew. Arthur went and got him another drink. As he took it, Isaac said, “What men like us understand is that there is no limit to the number of times the heart can be broken. And that each time it happens, there is no use doing anything but going on to see if it will happen again."

  Maria Rios would not break Arthur's heart. Of this he was sure. If his heart was broken because of her, Arthur believed, it would be because he had done it to himself. It was not the first time he had entertained this thought, and when he immediately understood it was a rationalization, he then also understood that this particular rationalization was so important to him that he would perform it again and again until he died. He would forget having done it before. Each time he forgave a woman beforehand for her inevitable breaking of his heart, he would pretend that he had never done it before, and he would believe in the pretense. If he had been speaking aloud, this would have been his version of what Isaac had just said. Because he was not speaking out loud, Isaac looked at him and said, “Hey. You know what I'm saying?"

  "I do,” Arthur said. Every man in Caracol was in love with Maria Rios. It made no difference.

  * * * *

  Eventually he understood that the mansions of the blood were part and parcel of what made Caracol the kind of place that would arrest his wandering. They existed insofar as Caracol itself existed, as a collective creation, a Latin-inflected hidey-hole of the mind. It was the kind of place where a lonely woman could imagine that the dead fought a tournament for her living hand. No better place existed for a gringo who wanted to disappear. Arthur did not yet understand that he too was part of a tournament. Caracol offered insight, but rarely understanding. It was a place where events occurred uncertainly, where you slogged through the swamps and found that the landscape dissembled, and an hour's work put you back in the city in the arms of your lover, you struggling free because you had just—at last—caught sight of one of the mansions of the blood and she is saying shush now, calm, it was just a dream, shush....

  There had been another aftershock in the night. He remembered it as part of one of his dreams. A swamp, at night, flashlight beams swallowed by the jungle, leeches falling from the trees. The beam of the light caught the tarnished gleam of a door handle, and Arthur opened it. Ruins of a foyer: carpet turned into a field of mildew, tapestries hanging in strips, shuffle and skitter of small creatures fleeing the flashlight. Is this what the blood has come to?

  No, Arthur said. It's a dream because it hasn't happened yet, not because it isn't real. But the girl was not Maria Rios, and he rose from her bed, feeling strained and aching in his hips and the muscles deep down in his stomach. The kind of feeling you get from trying to keep up with a girl much younger than yourself, or from slogging through a swamp and seeing—there!—at the edge of perception, at the conceptual horizon, through a braided curtain of flowering vines, the remotest mansions of the blood. He got up and walked through Caracol, taking the long way home, seeing new cracks veining previously unscathed stucco, new plumes of dust trailing from structures at last given up for dead. Overnight his building had collapsed as if bombed. This gave his dream more meaning. He picked through the rubble, at first making careful piles of everything he could save, and then gradually just wandering from street to alley, regarding the wreckage from different angles. Scrying, perhaps, as if his former home and business were a sheep's liver or the arcs of blood spraying from a decapitated chicken. When he came back out onto the street from his fifth or sixth trip back to the alley, Maria Rios was standing there.

  She was about to speak to him. With the smell of another woman on his fingers, Arthur Lindsay knew that everything he had done since he had come to Caracol was wrong. “You have to go farther than the foyer,” she said.

  "The what?” he said.

  Maria looked at him closely. He was thinned out—no home, no livelihood, no one he could count on to bury him if he died right then and there. There's been a terrible misunderstanding, she thought.

  "Excuse me,” she said. “I've made a mistake.” She had only come to him because all of her imagined lovers had disappointed her.

  Foyer.

  "No,” Arthur said. “No. I think I understand. Part of it, anyway. Will you tell me more?"

  * * * *

  Isaac's skiff ran aground, spun broadside against surprise currents, took on water. Six hours into t
heir excursion into the swamps south of the ancient lakebed, Isaac quit. “You want the mansions?” he said, letting go of the tiller. “They're not out here."

  "Where are they, then?” Arthur wanted to know.

  Isaac uncorked a bottle and took a long pull. He didn't offer Arthur a drink. “I told you,” he said. “The geography of the mansions is all related to whoever's looking for them. You don't even know where you are. How are you supposed to find them?"

  Consider Arthur Lindsay, thought Arthur Lindsay.

  He had known his divorce from his first wife was inevitable when it occurred to him that although there were a million things he would miss about their marriage, there was not one thing she wanted from him. For a while he went through the motions of daily life feeling persecuted by this realization, and then he reached a point at which he was able to separate it from the question of whether or not she loved him. She did, and he knew it. But it wasn't going to make any difference, because for her the question of love expressed itself in completely different areas from those Arthur would have considered decisive. She would miss none of the things about him that it was most important to give.

  In the nineteen years since that divorce, Arthur had gradually become convinced that he was the only person in the world who understood what was important to him. Clearly this was a failure on his part, but he could not understand how he had so completely failed to communicate it. He was thinking of how he had botched his opportunity with Maria the day before. If he had been able to respond to her in a way that had seemed genuine to her and also to him, he wouldn't have had to go drag Isaac off a barstool and demand that Isaac take him to the mansions right then, no questions asked, no demurrals brooked. So here they were, after a night spent readying the boat and sailing from the geometry of canals into the biology of swampland channels, undone an hour before dawn.