The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  Later, in silence and exhaustion, they sat in the back seat of a taxi that smelled of disinfectant and coconut and dirt, a thick smell which almost put Saul to sleep, but he couldn’t sleep, he was either too tired or too excited, the taxi hurrying through the steel and cement labyrinth of the city, and then they were there, late in the evening, standing in silence and exhaustion on a stern and quiet boulevard with tall trees and streetlights that gave out a dingy, cone-shaped alien light, a dog barking from a nearby alley, his grandfather leading him toward a tall iron gate in front of a large brick house, a careful hand on his trembling bony right shoulder, a little after midnight on June 15th, 1978.

  * * *

  His grandfather’s two-story greystone had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a large living room connected to a box-like dining room through a short hallway, a kitchen with square windows, a large office in a converted second-story space with a desk, a black typewriter (later, a black computer), a cheap Turkish rug, numerous historical artifacts, and windows that faced east toward a flat ocean of rooftops. The front of the office had bookshelves crammed with books of a historical nature—books that had meant as much to his grandfather as people, but he never minded lending them out, either. During occasional insomniac nights as a teenager, Saul would browse through those books and he still remembered some of the names of their authors: Garcilaso de la Vega, Fernand Braudel, John Henrik Clarke, Studs Terkel, William T. Vollmann, Dorothy Porter Wesley, John Hope Franklin, Charlotte J. Erickson, Eduardo Galeano, and Howard Zinn. In addition to this collection, his grandfather had boxes of cassette tapes full of thousands of hours of interviews he had conducted through the years and ten history books with his name, Benjamin Drower, on the cover, an Americanized name that, at the age of twelve, in 1933, he had started using instead of his birth name, Benjaminas Druer. In any case, these books were seamless, unstoppable monologues and a few had even accumulated a devoted, if somewhat underground, readership. In no particular order, they were about the Atlantic Ocean from 1491 to 1945 in two volumes, the October Russian Revolution, Archimedes, a short history of neoliberalism and Milton Friedman (an economist from the University of Chicago, who, as of note, his grandfather reviled), the collected dreams and nightmares of WWII soldiers and nurses in two volumes, Ben Reitman (an anarchist and physician to the poor, who, as of note, he adored), an oral history of Chicago from 1929 to 1945, and the Maxwell Street Market.

  Although seemingly erratic in subject and nature, it could be said that these ten books constituted one single enterprise and belief, which was that history and truth had nothing to do with each other. The back of the office was dusty and cavernous and had bookshelves crammed with books of a more speculative and unreal nature. These were the books that Saul had devoured during his childhood, books written (to name a few) by H. G. Wells, E. E. “Doc” Smith, Isaac Asimov, Jorge Luis Borges, Arthur C. Clarke, Stanisław Lem, Robert Heinlein, Octavia E. Butler, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Pauline Hopkins, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert, and Samuel R. Delany. To Saul, the authors of these books were pariahs among pariahs. Sometimes, as a kid, while his grandfather worked at the other end of that large office, he would lovingly arrange these books according to the decade they were written or according to science fiction subgenres, sometimes following Asimov’s strict guidelines and other times making up his own, for example, by mixing cyberpunk with space operas in an attempt to find an accord between the interior and the exterior or by giving slipstream its own bookshelf in order to think about which books could exist in the same reality, if any. The back of the office also had a large oval window that overlooked a backyard and a garage. In the summer, ivy grew on the garage and sometimes his grandfather would talk about how to grow ivy with neighbors or strangers passing through the back alley. It seemed fairly likely to Saul that his grandfather had spent the vast majority of his life happily talking to strangers. If he had to pinpoint any reasons why, he would say that his grandfather loved listening to most anybody who had a story to tell and that almost everybody loves a person who listens. He had a black gas grill and new plastic lawn chairs he had bought the summer before his death. In the winter, the backyard was often covered in a thin layer of vaguely glimmering snow. The tall iron gate surrounded the house and its lock sometimes froze over in the winter and when it did Saul had trouble getting inside, but it wasn’t frozen that Sunday afternoon.

  * * *

  He picked up a book written by his grandfather titled The Mathematician and the War. The book was about Archimedes, and while sitting on the cheap Turkish rug and thumbing through its pages, Saul keenly remembered the first time his grandfather had mentioned the Greek mathematician to him. He’d been eight or nine, walking with his grandfather at Montrose Beach, when for some reason or another he picked up a stick, squatted, and started drawing geometric diagrams in the sand. There was a white sun and a white fog over the lake that day, so the city and what it contained—its green and steel colors, its penury and opulence, its skyscrapers of frantic people, in short, its complete geometry—was invisible. At some point, his grandfather, who rarely spoke to Saul like he was a child, told him that in Syracuse in 212 BCE Archimedes had been drawing geometric diagrams in the sand just before a Roman soldier under the invading forces of General Marcus Claudius Marcellus had killed him. Then he burst out laughing, a type of prolonged loving rumble, picked up a stick, squatted near Saul, and started to draw circles in the sand for Saul. According to some, he explained, Archimedes’ last words were: do not disturb my circles. And yet here they are, he said to Saul, in the sand and fog, more than two thousand years later, undisturbed.

  Since the life of Archimedes was relatively unknown, The Mathematician and the War was really about Archimedes’ inventions—the Archimedes’ screw, the immense catapults, the horrific giant crane-like claw called “the ship shaker” which could lift a ship out of the water, possibly sinking it—and the Second Punic War. But what had surprised Saul the most about The Mathematician and the War was not the relatively unknown life of Archimedes or even his absurd, luminous inventions, but rather his grandfather’s final, sympathetic portrayal of the nameless Roman soldier who had killed Archimedes, a sorrowful and vengeful Roman soldier who in all likelihood had lost compatriots and friends to the catapults and Titan-like claws dreamed up by that squatting mathematician and who, his grandfather had written in the epilogue, “in a sad kind of way had resisted history, but, in the end, still found himself entrapped by it.”

  * * *

  The next day, during a lull in work or during a type of daydream, Saul drew the Archimedes’ circles on a pad of paper with The Atlas logo.

  What the hell are these? asked Romário, later, after discovering the pad of paper with Archimedes’ circles on the front desk, then, while examining them more closely, shook his head to convey to Saul that he suddenly understood everything at once, adding, I once knew a guy who walked and walked in circles like this around Plaza Vieja in Havana, yelling at the top of his lungs, “Señores, listen to me, madness is contagious,” but, of course, nobody listened, they were already mad.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, indistinguishable weeks filled with the same endless ash-colored snow clouds, Saul was in his kitchen reading The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov when he heard the doorbell ring. At first, he just sat there, transfixed by the cough-like echo of the doorbell, thinking it might be a Jehovah’s Witness or some kid selling magazine subscriptions, but after it rang again and again, he put the book down and went to the door.

  Through the open doorway Saul saw his friend Javier Silva or a man who might be Javier Silva standing on the porch. He was thin and had tousled, black curly hair and a two-months-old beard, sprinkled with gray at the chin, which somehow only underscored his otherwise youthful, itinerant appearance. He wore a dark green winter coat, gray trousers, a black T-shirt, and in his right hand he held a small black and gray backpack. When he saw Saul, he hugged h
im.

  Saul, pana, it’s been a while, cómo andas?

  Javier explained that he had boarded a last-minute flight from Mexico City to Chicago the previous evening and would be home for a few days, at which point Saul realized that it really was Javier Silva and not a man who might be Javier Silva, a doppelgänger, for example, who had come all this way to replace him.

  * * *

  Saul hadn’t seen Javier in the flesh since he moved to Quito, Ecuador, some ten years earlier. Occasionally, they’d write short emails in which each took great pains to inform the other that not much had changed in his life, even if a lot had changed in Javier’s life and only a little in Saul’s. Or every few months Javier would call from places like Lago Agrio or Arequipa or Buenos Aires since his work as a freelance foreign correspondent kept him on a manic schedule. During those years, Saul often felt a vicarious and melancholy thrill when he thought of Javier’s assignments, each marked by a small inky dot on an imaginary map in his mind. Every place Javier went, thought Saul, he left something of himself, however small or intangible, and those small dots coalesced, particle-like, into letters, then words, then pages in a newspaper or magazine that Saul then read as if reading the work of a stranger.

  Sometimes, over their infrequent calls, Javier told Saul that talking to him about his work was a type of catharsis. Once, during a particularly difficult period in 2000 in Ecuador when one of Javier’s fixers from the Oriente had been jailed, Javier admitted to Saul that maybe he had made a mistake in choosing “this shit box of a dying career,” that, at first, he had just wanted to travel through Latin America to see massive celebrations and natural disasters and political upheavals, but that had been naïve. He learned, soon enough, that the experience of those things had no essential value beyond itself.

  During another call, after one of his stories about student protests in Chile had been dropped by an editor, he told Saul that sometimes he didn’t see the point of journalism, that “people have an extraordinary talent for convincing themselves that what happens only happens to other people or that what doesn’t exist, in fact, does exist.” Still, it was apparent to Saul and to others that Javier was very good at what he did. In 2001, Javier was awarded a Maria Moors Cabot Prize special citation for investigative stories on Texaco oil spills in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the class-action lawsuit filed in a US federal court by a group of indigenous citizens in the Oriente. In 2002, he received an honorable mention for the Hillman Prize for coverage of the Argentine Great Depression. And yet, at other times, especially during those long silences between emails or calls, Saul only felt the rift of their friendship grow larger and larger.

  Once, during an assignment covering shadow markets in Mexico City’s Tepito neighborhood, a type of immense bazaar nicknamed Barrio Bravo, Javier met a woman named Marina Fuentes, a medical student who gave free medical treatment to street kids and workers. Afterward, Javier had gone around the city with his heart and foot in his mouth, like an “idiotic monk on a pilgrimage to Babel,” until he had gathered the gall to propose. Two years after that, Javier emailed him a blurry photograph of a squirming, newborn baby girl. The subject of the email was “my beautiful daughter, Maya.” Eventually, the rift of their friendship, a rift of time and space, took on the architecture and contours of an impassable wormhole.

  * * *

  Still, Saul sometimes told himself after those conversations on the phone, everybody who leaves eventually returns, in some form or another. Like a relentless episode of Doctor Who, on one side of that wormhole was Saul and Javier’s shared adolescence and on the other was Javier Silva on his porch with a two-month beard and a travel backpack. Seconds or years had passed.

  The first time Saul and Javier saw each other was during the first week of 7th grade in an alley near their school, which Saul routinely took to get home. They were standing in a clumsy semicircle with four or five other kids who were all sharing a joint. While they smoked, Javier, who was wiry, with boundless energy, talked nonstop about his great-uncle, Medardo Ángel Silva, a famous poet in Ecuador from a literary group called La Generación Decapitada, who had “written a bunch of weird shit about cemeteries and hunters and puppets” and who had killed himself just before his twenty-first birthday by accident or because of a girl or because of madness, nobody really knew. There was even a rumor that there might be a lost notebook or two of his poetry floating around somewhere in Guayaquil, poetry that drove its readers mad, like in a horror film.

  At some point, Saul interrupted him. What does La Gen-erac-ión de-capit-ada mean?

  La Generación Decapitada? said Javier with a smirk. It means the Decapitated Generation, pana. Then everyone standing in the clumsy semicircle laughed, except Saul.

  The next time they saw each other was a few days later in gym class, when, during a stifling game of baseball, Javier came up to him, apologized for being such a dick, and then started telling him about his summer trip to Quito, a city of volcanoes, and how his cousins got him drunk every night and drove him around in an old jeep. For some reason, Saul told Javier that he had been born in Israel, and Javier said, that’s cool, pana, even though it was clear he didn’t even know anything about Israel.

  After that they became indivisible friends. In short, they were newly minted Americans who saw in each other an inviolable and welcomed otherness. In 8th grade, Javier came to live with Saul and his grandfather for a few months after his parents divorced and his dad moved back to Quito for a short period of time. Later, as teenagers, they spent long hours together wandering through train yards or abandoned buildings, the deep cold fossilizing their steps in the snow. In the summers, often after work, they went to basement punk rock shows in Pilsen or rooftop parties with sandy-haired Ukrainian girls or they met up in old air-conditioned diners to eat fat pancakes or even fatter burritos or they walked block after block in the unshakable heat while Saul told Javier about the plots of the science fiction novels he was reading, novels Saul knew Javier would never read, so that, by the end of those long walks, Saul’s telling of the novel was the novel.

  Saul also remembered how, after they had both been caught ditching school for a week straight, his grandfather, who was otherwise furious, had endearingly called Javier a luftmensch, a Yiddish phrase that loosely meant someone who exists in a cloud of possibility and he remembered the icy-cold feeling of repulsion that had seized him one night at a rooftop party in the South Loop when Javier told him that he had “accidentally” fucked the girl Saul loved, or rather, the girl whom he had conceivably loved from a distance, and the six months of impenetrable silence between them that followed.

  But, overall, when he thought of Javier, he thought of what his grandfather had first recognized in him, the notion of (luftmensch) possibility. Javier had pined for possibility in the cracks and basements and alleys and rooftops and, yes, clouds of that invisible city, and it was this notion more than anything else that had helped Saul, an interstellar exile from Israel, form a connection between his solitary life and the world.

  Still, at some point, possibility in Chicago wasn’t quite enough for Javier. At twenty-one, the same age his great-uncle, the poet Medardo Ángel Silva, committed suicide, Javier, the only real friend Saul had ever had, abruptly packed up and left for Quito.

  * * *

  The last time Saul saw Javier was in October of 1994. They were in the Golden Nugget Pancake House on Western Avenue at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., stoned and eating fat pancakes, bacon, and scrambled eggs. Javier was thin then too and cleanly shaven. He wore a cheap black rain jacket with the hood up and next to him on the diner booth he had a large green and black backpack which he had packed for his flight to Quito in the morning. There was a bizarre mid-fall storm, and through the diner windows the city looked like something out of a Samuel Delany novel, which is to say a dark rainy streak, an amalgamation, a feral puzzle. When they were done eating, they ordered coffee and Saul listened as Javier told him, apropos
of nothing, how he had recently run into one of his father’s coworkers on Wabash Avenue, a jewelry caster like his father, a recent Salvadoran immigrant who had escaped the civil war in San Salvador in 1989. The Salvadoran was happy that he had run into Javier because his father had once mentioned that his son might be interested in some of his sketches. So, of course, he asked, what sketches? To which the Salvadoran replied that he had sketches, blueprints really, of Salvadoran prisons and then he told Javier that he had spent time in five different prisons, each one like a hornet’s nest inside of a hellhole, from 1984 to 1989. I didn’t do anything, he said, I helped a few farmers is all, nada más, nada más, if nothing can ever really be nothing.

  Then, to Javier’s surprise, the jeweler took out his wallet and started handing over the sketches, five sheets of yellowed notebook paper, each tightly folded into another like bills from a long-forgotten country. At first, Javier just shook his head and said, señor, I can’t take these, but the Salvadoran either pretended not to hear him or didn’t care. Por favor tómelos, tómelos, he said and so Javier had no choice but to take the sketches, even though he knew he couldn’t look at them standing on the street, at least not in front of the Salvadoran, which would be like staring directly at someone’s scars.