The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Afterward, I sat cross-legged on the bed and arrayed the photos and translations of A Little Night Work all around me, hoping the sight of them might keep my mind occupied, or, failing that, send me back into a slumber. I wanted some vodka but knew that would be hard to come by at this time of the morning. Other travelers, more prepared travelers, would have a flask or have taken some of the tiny airplane bottles in preparation for this. I had not. I contented myself with tobacco.

  The phone rang, extremely loud in the quiet of the room. I jerked, turning to look at the phone as if it were a rattling snake.

  I stretched out my hand, twitching when it rang again.

  I picked up the receiver and placed it to my ear.

  “Hello?” I said.

  Silence except for crackling. It sounded like the hiss and noise of an album once it has wound down, needle plowing through the uncharted inner center of vinyl.

  “Hello?” I said again. “Avendaño? Is that you?”

  Nothing.

  Feeling foolish and ignoring all the hairs standing up on my arm, I hung up the phone. A wrong number. It was a new hotel, and the switchboards were automated, I thought. A misfire of electrical impulses, triggering the ringer, dead air on the receiver. Simple.

  I spent the rest of the morning at the window, watching for the first light of dawn.

  * * *

  It was a 1981 Yamaha 465 Y2, orange with a blue seat. Racks and webbing for baggage, extra fuel canisters. New, knobby tires and no headlight. An American had ridden it from Southern California to Santo Isodoro in a sort of motorized South American ramble. The salesman—a tall, stubbled man with deep-set eyes and what I had come to think of as a Flock of Seagulls hairdo—wore a nametag that read duque and was ebullient about the machine.

  “You know how to ride?” he asked, shifting his weight back and forth. Maybe he had bad feet. Maybe he had too much energy. “Pretty big bike for someone your size.”

  “I used to ride when I was in—” I started. Stopped. Considered. “A long time ago. I’ll need to get back into the hang of it.”

  “Maybe you’d like to try out this Honda? Or the Suzuki over there? They’re smaller and you should have no trouble handling them.”

  “No,” I said. This was the same motorcycle that Marcia taught me to ride right here in Buenos Aires, when I was getting my doctorate. I could, I thought, abandon all of this. Go to the shore, toss the photographs of Opusculus Noctis into the sea, and go find Marcia on this motorcycle, and we could ride north, or south. I had money. Anywhere but west. Anywhere but Magera.

  “This is the one,” I said.

  After a short test ride, we struck a bargain. It took almost half of my money (which was a considerable amount, indeed), but in the end he included a black futuristic, aerodynamic helmet that would totally obscure my face, two extra canisters of gasoline for cross-country travel, some heavy-duty riding gloves, and knee-high black motorcycle boots that had once belonged to a fourteen-year-old competitive rider until he hit puberty and outgrew them. It was cool here in Buenos Aires, and once I was on the road with the wind hitting me, it would be even colder. I pulled on the gloves, zipped up my leather jacket to my throat, and mounted the machine. With the blackout helmet on, and the motorcycle beneath me, I felt the urgency of what I was doing. You can walk through life not thinking about your decisions, moving forward down a path and never considering the different forks and choosing that got you to where you are at any point.

  But I was about to very deliberately choose a path.

  One that led to a place I both longed and was loath to go.

  But I was here for Avendaño.

  I kicked the machine to life and moved into traffic.

  I rode out, through the winding streets of the city, a single ink stroke moving through a Clorindo Testa rendering into rough drawings of Spanish civil engineers and back again, letting the machine remind me of the shifting of gears, the throttle and brake, as I passed the soaring, elegant fronts of granite buildings, down long plazas and impossibly wide boulevards, past parks and gardens, now brilliantly colored with the change of season, until the motorcycle didn’t buck and hitch with every gear change. It moved smoothly under me.

  Buenos Aires went on interminably, building stacked on building; the farther I rode, the more destitute and desperate those I passed seemed. Neighborhoods became disordered. Shantytowns and tenements loomed, brightly painted despite their inhabitants’ impoverishment, frilled with clothes on laundry lines strung from balcony to balcony. On the sidewalks, plump women in calico dresses dandled infants on their hips, ignoring the traffic passing so close to where they lived out great swaths of their lives. Their older children loitering on trash-littered stoops, or rampant in filthy, packed-dirt lots kicking footballs, smoking, fighting, cursing. All the fret and decrepit pomp of poverty, flashing by.

  The city passed away, the bay far behind me, the Río de la Plata, a forgotten memory.

  North and west, through farmlands still lush, seething and green, fed by Rio Paraná. Combines and harvesters worked fields near mules and sturdy Argentinian ponies. Tawny wheat, green cotton, brilliant sunflower pocked by seed-oil refineries, dense sugarcane drenched in muddy river water. Boundaryless towns flashed by as the sun raced before me, falling westward. A police car followed me at Campana, a single bubble of blue flashing behind me; a small-town officer. I paid his bribe without even removing my helmet and drove on. I had no headlight, so when the pink-and-orange dusk spread itself against the sky, I stopped, spending the night in a picturesque, if decrepit, motel in a town called Cañada de Gómez that had no secure place to store my bike. I waited until no one seemed to be watching and managed to fit the motorcycle through the room’s door to sit, still hot and ticking, filling the space with the scent of four-cylinder exhaust. Still vibrating—an invisible quiver thrumming through my calves, my thighs, my hands, my ass—I ate at the local café, receiving strange looks from the patrons, and quickly retired to my room.

  When the telephone rang, I did not answer it. I simply let it ring in the stillness of the room and examined one of the photographs—La dulce bruma del dolor. The Sweet Miasma of Pain. Cleave had read Avendaño’s translation aloud to The Eye when they first met. It held significance for him. Would there be a voice on the other line if I answered the phone? Would it be Avendaño? Or would it be someone else? Someone speaking in a perfectly cultured Spanish?

  I left at dawn, rolling the Yamaha tail-first out into the blue half-light of morning. I felt as if there was some great reservoir of pressure building behind me, waiting to spew forth into the world. Full of questions and disassociated fear, I could not fix on any one thing. When I gassed up the motorcycle (I didn’t want to deplete my extra canisters while on the road) I noticed a van that seemed familiar from yesterday’s drive passing very slowly in front of the motel and wondered if I was being too paranoid. Cañada de Gómez was a farming town, far from the teeming bustle of Buenos Aires and Córdoba, and an unmarked maroon van shouldn’t be reason for suspicion.

  Yet . . .

  I was dissatisfied. So I took alleys and many turnings down packed-dirt streets to find myself riding, full-bore, on roads rimmed with irrigation ditches and furiously rutted with mud. If someone watched from the town, I would simply be a rising plume of dust, a spray of muddy water in a rooster’s tail, a buzzing sound diminishing in the distance.

  In the helmet, the Yamaha’s body trapped between my thighs, cocooned in droning sound, I felt as though the white noise took shape around me, a trail, a universal vibration, a cascading particle wave, coterminous with the limits of my perception and the forward motion of the motorcycle. I thought I could feel what Avendaño meant when he described the miasma, but this was possibly its opposite—the movement of the world toward fulfillment, toward healing itself. The inertia of exaltation.

  Possibly it was just the joy of machinery and movement. Of progress.

  I don’t know.

  Never having been
there before, I seriously misjudged the size of Córdoba. I thought it would be a remote hamlet, agricultural, some industry. Instead, I found a warren of buildings and what seemed hundreds of thousands of people. I located a cervecería, ordered beer and tortas fritas, and borrowed the bartender’s phone book. It being midday and the place being empty, he placed the house phone on the bar and retreated to the far end to smoke and read a tattered paperback on a barstool in the light streaming in from outside.

  There was no Nivia Campos listed, but I hadn’t really expected that. Avendaño had said in his letter she had never returned. There were hundreds of Camposes, however. So I picked the first and called.

  “Hello,” a man answered.

  “Hello,” I said and gave my name. “I am looking for the family of a woman named Nivia Campos. She’s from here, though she moved to Magera when she married in—” Avendaño told me the year once, in passing, as we were drinking. I could not recall it. “The sixties.”

  “There money involved?” the man said.

  “As in, will I pay you? Um, I had not considered—”

  He hung up.

  The next listing was a young woman who knew three Nivia Camposes and their families, all under the age of twenty. The call after that got me an ancient woman whose voice sounded like rocks clattering down a hill. I asked her about Nivia Campos.

  “There’s a Nivia Alvéz on my cousin’s side,” she said. “But I know every Campos in Córdoba, smacked every bottom, dried every ear.”

  “This Nivia moved to Magera in the sixties to marry. A man named Avendaño. A Mageran poet,” I said.

  The phone disconnected.

  From across the room, the bartender said, “Avendaño? The Avendaño?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He stood, walked down the length of bar to stand in front of me. “It’ll be a tough day, getting information, then,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “He had a mouth on him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The poet Avendaño was never a friend to Argentina,” he said.

  “It’s a big country,” I said. “Surely he couldn’t have offended all of it.”

  “No,” he admitted. “But let me think. He did call it . . . what was it . . . ‘the wine-colored boil on the ass of South America.’ Also, ‘a desolate nation of whores and drunkards without enough wits to pour water from a boot with the instructions written on the heel,’ I believe.” He laughed. How many other nations had Avendaño offended? The bartender continued: “I don’t care, but a lot of folks remember something like that. And even if they don’t remember what, exactly, he said, they remember they don’t like him.”

  “It was probably after his wife had an affair,” I said. “Avendaño is always generous with his irritation and tends to overgeneralize.”

  “Is?” he said. “Sounds like you’re looking for the poet and not the woman’s family.”

  “Pardon,” I said. “Was.” I thought for a moment. “But if Avendaño was alive and had been here visiting the Campos family . . . ?”

  The bartender shrugged again, wiping the bar with a gray towel.

  I placed one hundred pesos on the bar top. It disappeared.

  “Valladolid and Zaragoza,” he said. “There’s a villa with a dead tree in the courtyard full of baby shoes hung from their laces. Take wine and Old Vesta can help you.”

  “Old Vesta?”

  “Córdoba’s grandmother,” he said.

  “The city has a grandmother?”

  “This city does.” I had a momentary flash of a crowned woman standing above a bassinet. The Poisonous Mother Assumes Power.

  I thanked him.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. My hand was on the door to leave when he said, “Do not mention me when you talk to Old Vesta.”

  I turned back to him. “Why?”

  “She doesn’t like me to begin with, and once you mention Avendaño, she’ll like me even less.”

  8

  The tree, a royal poinciana—normally a garish explosion of scarlet blooms—was most definitely dead, though it would be hard to discern its state on first glance. Miniature shoes festooned its scrabbled crescent of branches, each one painted red. Painted might not be correct—each shoe appeared as though it had been submerged in carmine paint. A plaque nailed to the trunk read Trae ofrendas a la bruja, lo que proporcionará para el futuro, which did not instill in me great confidence in either the veracity or the sanity of Old Vesta. The tiny, white stucco villa, windows clad in ironwork, showed a small hand-painted tile set in the plaster by the front door: a hand, palm out, surmounted by the stylized representation of an eye. Had I been someone prone to seeing omens in the rising of exhaust smoke, cloud formations—or signs at old lady’s doors—I would have considered the tile to be quite prophetic.

  Holding the bottle of wine I bought at a nearby market, I approached the front door and before I could knock, it opened and a voice said, “Don’t stand there waiting, come in. Come in.”

  I pushed into the darkened house and found myself standing before an apple-faced woman of such advanced age, guessing her number of years would be folly. She had merry dark eyes, rugose skin as though she had spent many years of her life outside in the wind and sun, and terrible posture from the weight of age. Her laugh lines were like arroyos carved from a river that stopped flowing a millennium ago, giving her a sort of wounded dignity. Her hair was magnificent. It was ghost-white with no hint of any other color and possessed of a volume and length equal to her age.

  She took the bottle of wine and went to the kitchen and returned with a single ceramic cup. She sat in a dissected spill of light from the barred window, removed the cork, and poured herself a measure of wine. She stoppered the bottle and tucked it beneath her chair, easy to hand.

  “Well,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “I am looking for a woman,” I said.

  “No you’re not,” she said.

  “Well, her family,” I said.

  She took a drink and smacked her lips afterward. “Who is she, then?”

  “A woman named Nivia Campos. She would’ve been born sometime around the end of the war, early to mid-forties. She moved to Santaverde at some point to marry.”

  “And you think she might have come back home? Here?”

  “No,” I said. “But I need to find her family.”

  “What is the name of the man she married?”

  I thought for a while. Finally, seeing no reason to hide it, I said, “Avendaño.”

  Old Vesta coughed up a phlegmy laugh and jabbed a finger at my chest. “Yes, yes!” Her hands were twisted by arthritis. “I knew that already. I just wanted to hear you admit it.”

  She drank more of her wine and then looked out the window at the street beyond. It was a poor area, but clean, the houses and dwellings well tended by owners and tenants.

  “You know about the shoes, do you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t want to—”

  “I was married once. Can you believe that? Me?” she said. “Lost five children, the first to influenza, and the rest stillborn.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The wrinkles on her face took on strange contortions. Possibly she was outraged, possibly annoyed. “Why are you sorry?” she said. “You had nothing to do with it.”

  “I’m sorry that you lost someone you loved.”

  “Love,” she said, ineffably tired. “I don’t even know if I have ever loved anything. You can’t love what you’ve never held. And the babies—” She stopped. “I never held them.”

  “But the one that died of influenza?” I said. How did I get into this conversation with her? About her long-dead children? I thought.

  “I was fifteen,” she said. She waved her hand at the villa’s walls. “This city wasn’t even here then.” Another long drink, her throat working beneath wattles. She took the bottle from the floor, popped the cork, refilled her cup, stoppere
d the bottle, slipped it back under her chair. “I don’t think a fifteen-year-old can love anything but herself. I remember the image of me with the baby, like a photograph. Ernesto. I can see it in my mind, I’m outside and wearing a scarf, there’s a sugarcane field behind me. I’m squinting because the sun is bright. Tired. Very tired and look like I haven’t slept from the crying. The very picture of motherhood. But I don’t remember love,” she said. Another slurp of wine, another smacking of the lips. “This world doesn’t care for us.”

  Despite the sun, it seemed colder in the room.

  “They started bringing me shoes, shortly after. I don’t know who. To torture me, maybe. My husband beat me. I stopped going to church. Because why? Why should I pray? They started calling me ‘bruja’ and eventually, maybe, that’s what I became.” Her face settled into a mask. I saw that her laugh-lines really weren’t from laughter, after all. Her craggy lips drew back with her next swallow of wine, showing a hint of carious-black teeth. A woman who had let hate fill her as if she were an empty glass with no cracks. “They come at night when I’m sleeping, and put their children’s shoes in the tree. I take them down.” She placed both hands on the tabletop and pushed herself up, tottered over to a cabinet, opened it, and withdrew two pairs of baby shoes. “I take them down, see? Little shoes for little babies. I hold them in my hands. They have never taken a step. The babies, they cannot walk. The shoes are useless, except for fortune-telling.” A drink of wine and then smacking. “When I’m ready, I dip them in the paint and hang them back up, with a fortune inside written on a slip of paper. ‘She will marry rich,’ I say sometimes, or ‘Disease will take her.’ Sometimes I’ll write ‘He will be a disgrace, and break your heart,’ or ‘Never trust this one, the devil slipped in.’ Sometimes I’ll just write one word, like ‘Police’ or ‘Whore,’ and let them work out what it will mean. The world does not care for us. Why should I care for them?”

  Why indeed, I thought. A parent looking at a little girl, thinking they can never trust her. A boy who is always expected to do wrong. An old woman who was hurt, and tortured, and had the capacity for love burnt from her. Perhaps just as important, why should I care?