I laughed with him. He could be very charming when he had a mind to be.
He withdrew an envelope from his inside jacket pocket. “I have to go away.” He placed the letter on the table. “I need you to take care of some things while I’m gone.”
I stammered. The Eye laughed and ordered more drinks.
I opened the envelope. It contained a key, a slip of paper bearing an address, and a check from the Bank of Barcelona for a hundred thousand pesetas—more than a whole year of my teaching salary. I placed them back in the envelope and set it between us on the café table.
Questions filled my head, and my mouth could not catch up. “Why? Why me? Where are you going?” I held up the envelope. “What is all this shit?”
“Money for you. An address and key to my apartment,” he said. “I do not know how long I will be gone, and I’ve made arrangements for my rent to be paid for a long while. All of my books and papers are there and need some organization. You can leave them as they are, if you wish. But, should you have an urge to tidy up or—”
“Where the fuck—” I realized I had raised my voice. I lowered it, leaning closer into the table, palms flat on the surface. “Where the fuck are you going?” I whispered.
“Where do you think?” He withdrew a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and threw it on the table. I unfolded it and picked it up. It read -19.5967, -70.2123. The scrawl of a woman’s name in pencil. Nivia.
“What is this?” I asked, but I already knew, just as I had always known where he was going. It was a simple enough cypher. Longitude and latitude.
He was going back to Magera.
3
He tells me about a letter arriving from Santaverde, a slip of paper within, and the name of his ex-wife at the bottom. No message, no plea for help. The Eye did not know who had sent the numbers and did not think anyone in Magera even knew he was still alive, though he had never tried to hide it. However, he had not published anything since Pávez’s fall.
“Poetry’s been burned from me. You need two eyes for that,” he said.
“You can’t go back to Magera,” I said. “You will be shot. Vidal is a beast now that Los Diablos’s assassination attempt failed. He won’t have forgotten you.”
“I was never a friend to Marxists,” he said.
“But you were friends with Pávez. And look what happened to him. Do you think anyone there makes such distinctions?”
“Still. I must go. I am old and have nothing to lose,” he said. His brow furrowed, a craggy landscape. Thoughts crossed his features, like the surface of a dark, silted river, hiding danger beneath. “My daughter is there. She would be grown now. She might still be. And I fled. At some point every exile must return home.”
“Not every exile,” I said. They had jailed my mother when I was eight. She held meetings in our little house in Coronada, and later, when we moved to Santaverde. Fiery meetings with many young, unshaven men carrying books and smoking. The soldiers came and arrested everyone in our house. Mama locked herself in a bathroom and put me out a window before they took her, and I ran to the home of Puella, our kind neighbor who would give me milk. Mama never came home. When my father returned, haggard and bearing wounds all over his body, he spent the following years drinking himself to death from anger and guilt. And fear. Fear they would take him again and do whatever ANI—the secret police—did. When I enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires, I think he decided to die. A week after matriculation, he emptied a handful of painkillers into a bottle of vodka.
I would never go back; there was nothing there to bind me.
Avendaño sighed, looked pained, as if a great, invisible yoke pressed down on him. “At the end, there were things that—”
“That what?”
“Defied comprehension. Or my attempts at it,” he said.
He pushed the envelope at me. I pushed it back.
“What is the location on the paper?”
“It’s an area on the coast in the northern part of the country. Past Cachopo.”
“That’s nowhere and nothing,” I said, using his own words. A game we played. Saying thing back to the other.
He shrugged. “It’s not nothing.” He pushed the envelope at me once more.
I racked my memory. A barren area, even on the shore—blue salt to the west, brown scree and sharp hills to the east. They mine things up there, in that barren land. I looked at The Eye closely, trying to penetrate him as if by force of my gaze alone. His ever-present and indolent mirth failed. Something in his demeanor changed. The ease and arrogance, like a pattern of light on a bedroom wall at night, became the figure of a real man, made of pain, and a history of suffering. The rumors that surrounded Avendaño were simply a cloak he pulled about himself. He might have been the rake, the sot, the womanizer, but that was when he had two eyes.
“Take the envelope,” he said. “I need your help.”
“I don’t want you to go,” I said. A hard thing for me to admit. The movies, the walks in the Parque de Huelin, the long discussion of Magera and poets and the meaning of art—he had filled a part of my life I did not even know I had been missing. “Who will teach me about luchadores and buy me dinners?”
He smiled and took my hand in his large warm one and squeezed. Then he pressed the envelope in them.
I kept it, though it was difficult.
* * *
The Eye flew from Málaga to Barcelona the next day, and from there to Paris and then west, across the Atlantic to Buenos Aires. He told me he would rent a Jeep and drive across Argentina to Magera because he wanted to check in with some of his ex-wife’s family in Córdoba and in order to avoid any trouble with Vidal’s men at the Santaverde airport. I wished him well and told him I would make sure no thieves pilfered his papers, and that, as they say, was that. The next day, after I was through with classes, I went to his apartment.
Opening the door, I found a note left in the small atrium. There is a cat, for your protection. Feed him. He had signed off with a rudimentary drawing of an eye.
It was a spacious if cluttered three-room affair stuffed to brimming with books and papers. It possessed a well-appointed kitchen and even-better-appointed bar, but the most striking part of the whole area was that every counter doubled as a workspace. Three typewriters—an Underwood, an Olivetti, and an IBM Selectric—sat in a jumbled palaver on a dining room table as if communing with one another, stones standing in a tide of loose paper, ribbons, pencils, and notebooks. Each typewriter had unfinished writing in carriage and under platen. In the Underwood, a segment of a long blank verse poem about, surprisingly, a subject that was either a young woman or a hoary old tomcat. It was hard to tell. I enjoyed it more than most of his earlier work. In the Olivetti, a letter to the Mageran Minister of Workforce and Social Security, asking if the minister or any of his agents might have record of Bella Avendaño, who might be living under the name of Isabella Avendaño, or even Isabella Campos, which I assumed was his ex-wife’s family name. I couldn’t help but connect the similarities between his daughter’s name and my own. In the Selectric, typed notes accompanied a sheaf of distressed and rumpled photographs of a pamphlet in Latin that, from all appearances, was titled Opusculus Noctis, and seemed quite gruesome. Having studied Latin intensively in my Catholic youth and roseate stained-glass undergraduate years, I could see quite a few errors in his translation, but it was done well enough that I knew I didn’t want to read more.
There were books, though not as many academic volumes as one would think, for a lettered man his age. The Eye’s tastes ran toward fiction rather than poetry, and he enjoyed thrillers and crime more than stories of a “literary bent.” There were bestsellers sandwiched among esoteric novels by writers I had never heard of before. Kilgore Trout stood near Archemboldi. A Spanish copy of The Osterman Weekend (El Caos Omega) leaned into to an English copy of Seamus Cullen’s Walk Away Slowly. Many dictionaries—Spanish, Portuguese, and English—and a Latin grammar book ostensibly for his efforts a
t translation. Among his shelves, he reserved a single full one for his own books of poetry. All slim volumes—La Orilla Verde (The Verdant Shore), Sobre las mujeres y sus virtudes (On Women and Their Virtues), La carne de Huasos (The Meat of Huasos), Cabeza, corazón, hígado (Head, Heart, Liver), La indiferencia del gobierno (The Indifference of Government), Nubes oscuras sobre Santaverde (Dark Clouds Over Santaverde), El Mapocho Negro (The Black Mapocho), Fantasma de Pizzaro (Pizzaro’s Ghost)—and many dissimilar-size literary magazines and collections of poetry from regional and communal competitions that, with their different and irregular dimensions and standing sideways to my perspective, looked like a wild thatch of hay.
I withdrew The Indifference of Government and flipped randomly to a page.
I dreamed the earth was finished, cinders and ash, and the only
man left was a man who had not loved dogs. He had kicked them
when they begged, ignored them on the streets.
But now, his wife and child lay dead and great brooding clouds loomed
overhead, noxious mushrooms fruiting on the rot of land. He walked
the streets, calling ¡Quinque! ¡Quinque!
But his dog would not come. It had died when he was a boy.
There was more like that, but I did not pursue it any further. I had remembered him from my undergraduate years being more jovial in his verse, and this was darker than I recalled, however shallow and poorly executed. Behind his books, I noticed a curl of yellowed paper. I pushed the books aside and withdrew it. A manuscript, dated 1979. Written during the first decade of his exile. I withdrew the brittle rubber band that encircled it and read the title. Below, Behind, Beneath, Between: Being an Account of the Circumstance of My Torture and Transformation by Rafael Avendaño. It was not thick, maybe thirty or forty pages. And as I riffled through the curled stack, at first blush it seemed deeply personal and intimate, and I think I wasn’t ready for that sort of closeness—letting his words inside my head. I’d been resistant to them even before I knew him.
I set the manuscript aside and continued to examine The Eye’s apartment. From the small balcony, a glimpse of the Alboran shone sparkling and I was elated with the knowledge that as the line of sight flew, there stood northern Africa in the dark distance: Morocco. The lights of ships winked and flickered on the water. The breeze was cool and fresh. I estimated the apartment’s rent—it had to be at least ten to fifteen times mine. The Eye’s kitchen alone was bigger than my own meager dwelling.
There were two more rooms off the kitchen and dining area, one with a large bed with many pillows, decorated in what Avendaño obviously considered a “Moorish” style—tapestries and walls festooned with gauzy fabrics, candles and teardrop-shaped hanging lanterns, ottomans and curving and mosque-shaped electric lamps draped with more fabric—surely the man was entranced with legends of Sir Richard Burton (not the actor married to Elizabeth Taylor, but the discoverer of the headwaters of the Nile) and Saladin, and the mystique of perfumed lovemaking among Arabic geometries and expensive tiles. It was the bedroom of a man forty years his junior. A man with a high estimation of his own sexual prowess. He might be old, he might have lost his eye, but he was not dead. Or so the room seemed to be screaming at me.
The other bedroom was full of boxes—books, trinkets, papers, old clothing, a toaster, a radio, what looked like a black-and-white television. Under the boxes, a single bed. I saw no cats, anywhere.
I poured myself a brandy from his bar, sat on the balcony’s single chair, and watched the ships sail in and out of the Málaga harbor. The Eye had left no instructions as to the apartment’s upkeep other than to tidy up his books if I felt like it. I didn’t. I finished my drink and went home.
* * *
It was almost two weeks later before I returned. I’d been seeing a teacher’s assistant fresh out of university in Madrid and after one of our dates (when she asked how I could afford the meal—wine, frutti di mare, chocolate y churros) I hesitantly told her of The Eye and our agreement. Claudia insisted she see the “famous poet’s” apartment and after a walk on the beach, I took her there.
A pile of mail awaited me just inside the door.
“Oh my,” Claudia whispered, looking about. She walked farther into the space. “This is amazing.”
“What, the books?” I said, flipping through the envelopes.
No bills. Various correspondences from far-flung postmarks—two letters from America, one from France, two from Germany, three from the UK. There were two from Magera. Those were addressed to Rafe Daño, which made some sense, though I got the impression from everything I knew about Avendaño that it was an uneven and one-sided subterfuge. The Eye was a man too proud of himself to hide behind an alias. I was tempted to open them—to pilfer his private life—but I already felt somewhat intrusive being in his apartment, despite the fact I obviously was enjoying the money he’d already paid me to be there. Sometimes I make less sense than the greater world around me.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Claudia stage-whispered.
I looked up from the letters, half expecting her to be holding some rare book, or piece of ancient pornography. Instead I found her opening the dry bar and withdrawing a bottle of tequila.
The next morning, I had a more intimate understanding of The Eye and his world view.
I woke up in his bed, with Claudia beside me. Head pounding. It was a very nice bed, and the sheets felt luxurious just to the touch. The Moroccan tile was both more and less pleasing to me from that vantage. Claudia (who had been vigorous and receptive by turns and all at once and more than I can express with any clarity, since my memories of the night before were brilliantly muddy and opaquely full of pleasure) did not stir when I rose and went to find coffee.
I had not groused through many cupboards by the time I found a tin of cheap coffee and a percolator and began brewing. Head ripped asunder. The half-empty bottle of tequila glared accusingly from atop the dry bar. I banished it below. There was a single egg in the refrigerator and cheap bagels in the rimed icebox. I put them all on the counter and then found it all too much to heat the bread or fry the egg.
I waited, grimacing, until the coffee had brewed and poured a cup; went back to the refrigerator and smelled the cream to see if it was acceptable. It was, I hoped. Once my coffee was the proper color, I slunk out to the balcony and peered out at the sea and the threatening clouds scuttling across the sky to deal with my conflicting emotions of elation and fright that Claudia was still here with me.
I could almost sense The Eye laughing at me, halfway across the world. It began to rain.
After an hour of staring at the rain-speckled sea and listening to Claudia’s faint snores, I put on clothes, found an umbrella, and left. I visited the local grocery and bought the stuff of life—butter, eggs, fresh bread, milk, jamon, pasta, rice. At the market: rosemary, thyme, garlic, onions, lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, antennae-spiked prawns, shining mackerel. Twine bound bundles of crocuses and narcissus blooms.
When I returned to Avendaño’s apartment, Claudia was still asleep. I placed the flowers in jars and pitchers I found in cupboards, placed the food in the refrigerator. There was a turntable and vinyl albums below the bookcases. The Eye seemed to favor jazz, and classical music, so I put on an ebullient Charles Trenet album at low volume and began cooking breakfast.
Claudia, when she woke, greeted me tentatively which was, as I was coming to understand, not precisely part of her makeup—timidity. Finally, she kissed me and we became distracted until it grew obvious we would have all the time we wanted for that. Our stomachs worked on different timelines.
I served her toast and butter, ham and eggs, and tomato slices with olive oil and basil. She fell to the food with much enthusiasm and we listened to Trenet’s trumpeting voice and chatted about school and the vagaries of being cogs within the great machine of trivium and quadrivium. In this I had more experience than she and offered her recommendations in ways to navigate the currents of faculty and ad
ministration. But there was something of her that reminded me of The Eye—she was so assured in her own importance and knowledge, you could not tell her anything. I sighed. She’d have to find out for herself.
Claudia rose, poured herself more coffee, and took one of Avendaño’s books of poetry down from his shelf. She moved away from the dining table—I had hastily rearranged the typewriters and shoved papers aside to make room for our breakfast—and placed herself in an overstuffed and well-used chair near the stereo. She lit a cigarette and flipped through the slim volume. I began looking through The Eye’s papers on the table.
“I like him!” she said. “He’s got a real hard-on for authority.”
“He’s a lovely old codger. But I don’t really care for his poetry,” I said. Our relationship was so newborn to be tenuous still, and I did not want to argue. But I saw no reason to lie to please her. “It’s shallow. I can’t help but think half of the poems are odes to his dick.”
“Listen to this,” she said, ignoring me, holding the book in her hands. It was Dark Clouds Over Santaverde. “It’s titled ‘We Stand Beneath an Enormous Sky,’ and begins like this: ‘You dress in a sweater against the chill, and we watch the clouds drift over the barren plain. The Atacama rusty and lifeless, abandoned by all except us. Are you hungry, I say. There is lamb. And you say, no, touching your flat belly, then your hair.’” Claudia flipped pages. “He understands subtext, at least.”
She stubbed out her cigarette and rose. She looked in the fridge. “Did you get tomato juice?” Something about the question irked me. There had been no thanks from her, for anything. The breakfast. The date. The lovemaking—not that I demand assurances. But she was ungracious.
“I think you should go,” I said. “I’ve got work to do here.”
She turned to look at me, incredulous. I ignored her, picking up the manuscript of Below, Between, Beneath, Beyond. “Okay,” she said. She disappeared into The Eye’s bedroom. When she emerged, she had her purse and was putting on her earrings. “See you at school,” she said, and left unceremoniously.
The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky Page 2