“Have you seen any of Jack’s paintings?” Hetty leaned toward me, during dinner. She was flushed and exalted through every course, none of which had goat. Jack has really stirred something up in them. Among them. They’ve always been mistrustful of the ones who work alone.
I said that I hadn’t, and said nothing further so that I could hear the others. Konrad was in a rare mood and talking of Les Milles. This had mother nervous, because no one at the table had an idea how this would go. Konrad has to be very drunk or very proud to talk about the internment camp, and it rarely ends well. But this night, he had that shine about him, was sitting very straight. Wearing his great poncho, the red one with the yellow and blue stripes that my mother had had made for him; a pattern that matched up with his birth sign in the Chinese zodiac.
“Like here,” he laughed, brandishing the fish speared on his fork, “only better food.”
Everyone laughed. I laughed. Although it made me feel funny to laugh at something that wasn’t.
“Many men of letters,” Konrad continued. “Many lettered men. We had musicians too, and scientists. We could use a little of that here. Don’t you all miss music?”
“Plenty of music,” Jack said, “if you wake up with the grooms.”
“I hear them from my bedroom!” C. added. “God, it’s just divine.”
“They scorn us, though. They do,” went Konrad. “They think us spoiled fools. That we’ve never known a hardship.” He darkened. “They have no idea.”
Konrad looked down at the table and my chest went tight. I watched my mother swallow.
“Well!” said Mumma. “It’s true you only have to go out on the balcony to hear their lovely songs. They drift up to us, it’s charming, isn’t it? Like . . . like . . .”
“Like songs,” said Konrad, darkening after all.
“What I want to know,” said Jack, in a light voice, “is what will become of our dear Lara.” He gave a wink to me. “And the proper answer, Lara, is engineer. An academic, if you must! Anything, anything, except one of our wrecks.”
“She’s quite good at painting,” said C., smiling a smile she uses just at night. At the other end of the table, I felt my mother’s lips close. “And a lovely little illustrator,” C. continued. “So charming. And naive.”
“Is that right?” Jack asked, because the table had gone quiet. “Good God, you don’t want to be an artist, do you?”
“No, no,” I answered quickly. “It’s just a way of passing time.”
Mother tented fingers over her big plate. “When we get through this war business,” she said, “I’m going to organize a gallery show. Of child artists! Calaway Jeune,” she giggled. “There’s another boy, Lucian—his sketches, what a genius! You should see his faces, inscrutable, like charcoal lumps. But such a style about him. He’s really quite inimitable, and at only twelve!”
That tightening in my chest again. How mother was incapable, or unwilling, to ever speak of me.
Most went back to eating, but Jack’s face still held light.
“Intermission, I think, no? Lara, you partake?” he asked, holding up a pouch of what I assumed to be tobacco.
I blushed. “Oh, no, I’ll just . . .”
“You know about the comb jellies?” Jack stood. And reached his hand out, all the way there at the table’s end, and everybody watched. “Come.”
I suppose the others realized they were making up for an insult and sat tightly, but what a miracle that my mother didn’t rise. She can’t stand to share her guests, especially the new ones. And usually, she doesn’t recognize she’s hurt me, so it couldn’t have been that.
We walked out of the vast palapa, past the pool where Ferdinand had put a candle in between each of his small rocks. We walked to the corner where the main house started, the hot air like an exhale that wouldn’t ever move. Jack was pinching tobacco into paper, intent on this one task, and he didn’t embarrass me further by asking if I intended to smoke.
I felt very nervous. It wasn’t clear if he would ask about my art or say something of my mother; both options felt equally horrifying at the time. I’m sure that C. meant “naive” as a compliment, because it is a word the loonies use; the highest praise, really, when art is childlike. But I am too young to be naive in an interesting manner. My paintings are naive because I’m not any good at it, or not good yet. I keep trying to have my work be loose and strange, but I gather that you have to be a draftsman before you can take everything apart.
“Comb jellies,” Jack said, staring at the sea. “You see them? Glowing?”
It’s always made me nervous, looking for something that someone already sees. It’s like you have to find it quickly, lest they think you foolish, and there is that odd sensation while they are waiting for your eyes to capture what theirs have already seized.
The night was so warm, and the strange insects were all humming. But I saw the glow. Almost turquoise, off to the right in the black and moving waters. Then gone. Then there again; more pure blue this time.
“They’re predators,” Jack said, putting away his pouch. “Not too many know that. Huge, gigantic mouths.” He crossed his arms with a shrug. “You know why it is they glow?”
I got that feeling that I always do, as if I’m going to cry. It is so rare that someone talks to only me!
“I don’t know anything,” I said.
“Well, that isn’t true, now. You’ve made it all the way to Mexico with a ship of fools and you still have your head facing the right way. That isn’t nothing, you know.”
He took a draw of what he’d rolled.
“They light their tentacles up as decoys,” he said. “When the prey comes, they cover their victims in a bioluminescent slime. They let them swim around like that, shining their whereabouts for everyone to see. No rush for them, really. When the glow starts to fade, they eat. Shows you what you get for following something beautiful.” He shrugged again.
“Is it true that you don’t paint anymore?” I shouldn’t have spoken so quickly, but I had that pressured feeling again, as if he were going to leave.
“Is it true that you want to be an artist?”
I was able to look at him, this time. He was very tall against the darkness.
“I would like to be something good.”
I watched him take a breath. He contemplated the whole of me. I even felt my toes pressing against the edge of my cloth shoes.
“Shall we go back?”
I never get to stay in conversations for as long as I would like.
Viernes
Many days have passed and the heat is intolerable and Jack has not come back. It should have rained by now, it should be pouring, but the rain doesn’t come and the heat doesn’t break and the trees are all there, waiting.
All the artists feel it, and no one is doing the right work. Even C. is raised shoulders and pinched mouth, stomping up and down the dirt driveway too many times a day, embarrassed that we’re seeing her, that we see that she’s not writing.
Only Hetty’s working well, because of course she revels in others’ misery, has to come out “on top.” Mother is listless and wants another party; she’s been walking round the house with her peacock scepter, sighing about the news.
Jose Luis came back from Zapata with the two telegrams mother had prepared: one for the shipping company and one for my father, neither of which were sent. The man who runs the telegram went to Guadalajara and won’t be back for a long time. My mother asked for specifics, how much of a long time, and Jose Luis said that no one there could say.
Hetty said the boat has surely sunk by now; it’s been over three weeks. As for me, of course it would be ghastly if it had sunk, but I can’t imagine Occidente holding more people than it does already. I hate sharing the bathroom. Even though he’s nice enough, Ferdinand always takes a long time there, and Caspar leaves a menacing smell in every room he exits, like a carpet that won’t dry.
I imagine my brother Stephan seeing soldiers from his mountain.
I imagine father not seeing them because he’s trying to write. I imagine father struggling over paper while the soldiers charge up the mountain and into the small house. I imagine swimming with my entire body as one gelatinous glow, like a sack I can’t get out of, swimming and swimming among the predators, not knowing when I’ll sink.
I started painting jellyfish. But what do I know of the real sea? Been in only to my ankles, never dared go out myself. It’s a good thing that I’m pretty; what else is there to hold? In any case, Mum’s proud of my “fetchingness”; there’s no getting around that. I asked her to take me to Teopa today, to see if there were turtles, but she said she was in too much of a state about the telegrams. That she had to nap. Sometimes it feels that mother would sleep herself into a world away from me, if she could. That she would sleep into a place where I would be the one to wake her, stroke her cheek and call her pretty, fall down near her ear coil and whisper which dress I like best.
My dear, dear, dear Elisabeth,
It’s funny to write someone when you don’t know whether the letter will get to where they are, but I suppose I can practice here until I know if you’re in England.
I have much to tell you, and much I’d like to ask! If only you were here with me, it would be so different. I know you’ve seen the sea already but here it’s filled with whales. There are also crocodiles and flamingos that are white.
When you have a lot of time for thinking, you tend to think of the odd things. There are so many people here who are really excellent at something, it makes me long for the things I’ve never tried. For example, how do I know that I’m not a brilliant swimmer, as I’ve never been allowed? Maybe you’re an archer, Miss Elisabeth D. Canton, and not a future nurse! You’ve just never held a bow!
What I am thinking (in this incessant heat—however many days without rain, and three horses escaped!) is that I am destined for a destiny I haven’t had the chance to meet. I am sure that if we had stayed longer in one of the many places where we lived, I would have met it. Perhaps I was meant to be a sheepherder, like those hardy men in England. I’m nothing if not patient. Or a pastry chef! No, not a pastry chef, I don’t love sweets as you do, but surely you understand what I’m pointing to. How was it that you were able so early and so quickly to fall into what you love? I’m sure that I’d be a more “realized” person if I could have stayed in school!
For example, poetry. I quite liked studying that, you know. Maybe there is a poet inside of me who only needed a little bit more time before she understood the whole of everything, like when to move from one line to the next.
Or maybe I’m meant to be a mother, a better one than mine. Oh, I know you think she’s dashing, but sometimes I want to feel her instead of see her moving in her silly hats. You know, to feel that she is listening, instead of shut up in her bedroom or collapsed hysterically with Antoine Legrand. I want to be bright and know things, I just want to know things! Instead I’m excelling at staying silent during conversation and sweating through my clothes. An instrument, at least, but we don’t have our good piano yet—it’s somewhere in between the two of us (if you’re still in Hertfordshire!), floating on the sea. Maybe there will be a tutor for me on the art boat, smuggled after all. (You could hide there also—wouldn’t that be fun? Or wouldn’t it be fun once you arrived?) I’m eager also to learn Spanish, but I’m embarrassed to ask the cook here, and in any case, there are always things to cook.
So it’s hopeless, you can see. Nothing for me to be enterprising over, and of course everyone is old. Sometimes I think that the best course of action would be to walk out into the ocean and politely drown. Not that being a great artist is so wonderful, not like you would think it; you should see the faces here! You’ll remember Charlotte Hartsworth? The one who rode without a saddle? She wrapped her manuscript in palm leaves and asked the cook to burn it, but Maria (she’s the cook and she is lovely) seems to know how feverishly minds change here, so she didn’t, and I was in the kitchen when C. came back for it; she had tears when she saw that she still could.
I will tell you one thing, though, that’s different than at home. I might have an amigo, as they say! Not like that, of course, everyone is ancient, but what I mean is there’s finally an artist who’s not fiddling with my hair or looking at me like I’m a weeping donkey of some kind. His name is Jack Klinger and I don’t have many details because I’m only just aware of him and you don’t go up haranguing people you’ve just met. He used to be part of the “Dada” scene, I gather, and lived with Mum in Vienna, by which I mean “among” her crowd. I don’t think they were together, although as I’m writing this, I realize I don’t know for sure, but he strikes me as a little too sensible for her, actually, so I probably can say that. He lives out on a ranch here, and has little time or interest in us although we can’t say the same. (You remember silly Hetty, don’t you, Hetty of the rashers? You should see her blush when Jack’s around!)
Everything’s been quite glum since he last visited for dinner, and I’m thinking that I might go after him to see what his own home is like, or perhaps that I will paint it. He’s a “Herr” by the way, older even than Mum is, but it’s hard to tell an age with Germans, don’t you think? Konrad’s the same way, really, he looks old and young at the same time. Although he lost a lot of weight in the internment camp, so even though the artists are in awe of him, he isn’t what he was.
Elisabeth, what else? If only we could lie out on my balcony and look up at the sky. But we couldn’t do it as long as in England because the sun here is too hot. Speaking of great distances, I don’t have to tell you that Mumma’s in all states about her boat. She’s put all her favorite art in it to get to Mexico, but it has to cross the Atlantic and get to Florida first. You do realize what could become of us should the collection actually sink? I could come to live with you, perhaps, wherever it is you are, and we would be like sisters, like we always said. With the way Mumma would feel about the collection gone, I’d be an orphan, more or less.
(On the subject of her Great Collection: you wouldn’t believe how we were running about for it when we were back in France. Mumma had us hiding the important ones in the most rickety of barns, and then she gathered them all back up again because of rot and rain, but what with the waves and the salt, too, in the ocean, I’m not sure it wasn’t wiser to keep them in those barns!)
It’s true that it’s exciting, and I know of all you think, but if your own mother were running around talking about putting a museum in a jungle where it’s too hot to even think, I think you’d appreciate what your own is like, regardless of her shawls!
Well, I’d like to sign off by saying that I have something terrifically interesting to do, a Spanish lesson, for example, but I have nothing like that, and I lack, apparently, even the imagination to tell a pleasant lie, so I am going to go now and think about how to get this letter to you before the war arrives!
Your loving amiga,
Lara Calaway
Martes
Well you have to take things into your own hands, I guess, when it comes to diversions! I’ve started to wait for C. at the bottom of her hill. Her writing must be going terribly, for there are her footprints in the dirt: back and forth, up and down, up and down to the huge house.
The first time wasn’t on purpose, really. I’d taken Hetty’s garden book down to the bottom of the house entrance near the beginning of the jungle. Set a task for myself, actually: describe the things I saw. I wanted to use poetic language, to try and paint it on the page. I got:
A tiger behind the leaf stars (maybe! in the black)
Vines crisscrossing like fallen wires, green, deranged, engorged
That’s all I got, and I was quite taken with it, when C. came down the path. Would you know, she actually seemed relieved to have me with her. Father, too, got lonely with the writing. That’s why we had the dogs.
“Shall we walk?” she asked. We agreed to walk toward the stables, and picked up, for the both of us, great sticks, in c
ase a crocodile should slide onto the path. (This has not happened to me, but it did on one of C.’s rides when Konrad wasn’t with her. Her horse reared, of course, but she kept control of him. I trust that this is true because C. never talks about her experiences in a boastful way; she can be rather matter-of-fact about things, really.)
I am going to try to make an effort here to write down what we walked through, using Hetty’s plant book. Prickled cherimoya fruit thudding to the ground and the pinkest Mexican crow flowers arrowing between trees, the same flowers, I have learned, that Ophelia either pretended to distribute in “Hamlet” or actually, truly did. Things can feel like that in Costalegre, real and invented at the same time. As in: What are flowers doing opened up like that in the winter, anyway?
An iron ring here, one there, to tether up the horses, but just this narrow path otherwise with its canopy of cypress and its too-dry dirt. All manner of insects working back and forth across it, the names for which even Cecile Matschat, in all her horticultural wisdom, does not have the words.
“You must be terribly bored here,” C. said, as we walked. It’s so exciting, really, not knowing what someone will say to you, and then it’s said. “Or do you like the nature?”
“I do,” I said. “I’m trying to learn.” I held up the book that I was carrying, about the Mexican gardens. “It’s Hetty’s,” I said to her raised eyebrows. “Research.”
“I see.” C. smiled. “And she isn’t researching today?”
I felt the need to be protective of her, even if she is silly. Hetty had lent me the garden book, and the Spanish phrase one, after all.
“I think she’s past the research bit.”
“Of course.”
We walked on.
As I’m back at Occidente now, I can just list out the things, without trying to describe them:
Daturas
Jacaranda
Stands of chestnuts
The pinkest pepper trees
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