The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  * * *

  As Javier tended to Maya’s right hand, it occurred to Saul that he had been around Maya’s age when he had taken the long transatlantic flight with his grandfather to Chicago. Like Maya, he was an immigrant. He wondered if she saw her new country as he had seen it, under a glaring unfamiliar light, everything preceding her arrival fading to a daydream. In fact, she might not remember anything at all or, like him, images of her previous life might slip through when she least expected it, images of high plateaus and endless markets and pleasant courtyards and colonial ruins, while closing her eyes on a train platform or gazing at a summery dusk, during a thirty-minute lunch break at her work desk or, like her father, while wandering a foreign city like a sleepwalker under petrified yellow dust clouds.

  * * *

  Afterward, they walked back to Javier’s house and watched episode after episode of a cartoon about a type of postapocalyptic Candyland, until sometime later Marina came home from work. She was wearing light blue scrubs and when she saw Saul she smiled and hugged him. While Javier prepared dinner, tamales in banana leaves and roasted chicken in red mole sauce, Marina put Maya to bed. For a few minutes, Saul could hear Marina reading Maya a lyrical children’s book about a 17th century winged-man who flew like a bird from the top of Galata Tower in Constantinople to Doˇgancılar Square in Üsküdar, only to be exiled to Algeria by the fearful Sultan Murad Khan.

  During dinner they talked about Maxwell Moreau, about his status as a genius or a madman, about the innumerable gaps in his biography. Then Javier asked Saul to tell Marina and him, chapter by chapter, the plot of Lost City, something he was, of course, happy to do.

  * * *

  When Saul finished, Javier said, damn, pana, and Marina said, que a toda madre. Then she paused, finished off her drink, and added that something in the story, something like a sense of departure of the self or maybe an extirpation of the other, in any case, a sense of those who leave and those who stay behind had reminded her of her childhood home, a village on the coast near the city of San Pedro Pochutla. Bizarrely enough, even the “immense creature with a sword-like beak and black wings,” as Saul had put it, had reminded her of something that had happened to Javier and her during their honeymoon there. Then she went on to explain: Javier and I got married in Mexico City at my uncle’s house under the cover of night, as people used to say during confession, after we had known each other for only two months. Not many of my friends or family had even met Javier, not even my mother, which is why the following morning we borrowed a car from my uncle, a green 1986 Volvo, I can see it perfectly right now, and left for my childhood home, a village that had once existed but due to NAFTA didn’t exist anymore, even if my mother still insisted on living there. Anyway, we left Mexico City in that battered tank of a car first thing in the morning and drove thirteen hours straight to San Pedro Pochutla.

  For the entire trip a terrible notion ran through my head, the notion of filicide. I knew that my mother would take one good look at my new husband, an Ecuadorian gringo, and just kill me because what sinvergüenza daughter of mine marries a man after just two months. But here’s the kicker, after thirteen hours in that battered tank, my mom wasn’t even home. So, all we could do was wait in her house, a small, humid, and airy house which had a ghost-like quality about it, not haunted in the supernatural sense, I don’t believe in those things, but memory-haunted, as if its floors and walls and altars and shelves full of figurines and letters of those who had left contained the entire memory of the abandoned village.

  But that was only half-true. My husband, as you know, Saul, is prone to journalistic suspense. Yes, it’s true that there are people from that village who died, and my mother spent some years collecting mementos of them. All that explains the ghost-like quality of the house. But there are many others who are still alive and who have ended up in other places, especially the United States. When there are people like that, said Marina, when there are refugees, because that’s what they truly are, refugees not illegals, like everybody in this country obsessed with barbarism says, when there are refugees there are disseminated memories, tendrils of memories like octopus ink, orphaned memories, fragments of memories like pages of a half-burned book. All of those memories are still living.

  Anyway, in the end, we decided to wait for her in the house, too exhausted to do much of anything besides cook a small meal, beans and fish, before going to bed.

  * * *

  The next morning, Marina continued, we woke early, cooked breakfast, and sat outside on my mother’s little porch, which had a view of the Pacific Ocean. Since I was sure that my mother wouldn’t be coming home that morning, we went to the beach to watch the black-eyed turtles, which arrived every month by the thousands to lay their eggs. As we walked along the beach, careful not to step on the turtles, I told Javier how the turtles were hunted, their eggs collected and sold, and how the federal government had recently passed laws to protect them. Many locals, including my mother, were angry about the laws and had started a black market for turtles and turtle eggs.

  I was right in the middle of telling Javier the history of the turtles when a gap in the beach opened up, a gap that suddenly revealed an immense creature with a sword-like beak and black wings the size of a small plane, just like in the Dominicana’s story. At first, we had no idea what we were looking at. We just stared dumbstruck at the immense, terrifying creature about to take flight.

  After overcoming the initial shock, we realized it was only a replica, if a rather imposing and impressive one, so we walked closer and saw a short man in a Panama hat waving at me. He walked right up to me and said, “You’re Juana’s daughter, right?” and I nodded. Then he grinned and told me that Juana was a good woman. “She’s a one-woman rebellion,” he said. Then he asked us if we liked the Quetzalcoatlus. That’s the word he used to describe the creature, Quetzalcoatlus, after the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. We said we did and that for a split second we had thought it was real.

  He began to talk with fondness about the prehistoric creature’s feeding habits, its terrestrial habits, its sleeping patterns, its ability to fly thousands of miles all over the planet, its ability to obscure the sun when in flight, like an eclipse, a nerve-wracking experience for any creatures below, especially, for example, newly hatched turtles like the ones under their feet, and, finally, he added with the melancholy of a time-traveling Don Quixote, its eventual extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period.

  But, said Marina, he refused to answer any of our questions about how or why he had built the replica of the Quetzalcoatlus in the first place, because it was entirely clear to us by then that he had built it. Instead, he just smiled and explained that there was nothing else like it in the world and that it didn’t matter why he had built it, in fact, he hardly knew himself, the only thing that mattered was that it existed again.

  * * *

  And what about your mom, asked Saul, did she return, did she want to kill you? Yes, said Marina, she returned the following morning, and, yes, after meeting Javier, she really did want to kill me. In fact, she refused to talk to us for three days. It was the worst thing ever, even if I had in some ways anticipated my mother’s silence and the silence of that house, which, when I walked from room to room, felt like I was walking through a cemetery at night. But then, on the morning of the fourth day Javier went into the kitchen where my mother was silently preparing breakfast and he handed her a perfectly white turtle egg and said, señora, you don’t have to say one word to me, but I want you to teach me how to cook breakfast for your daughter. My mother took the turtle egg and turned it over and over in her hands. Then she smiled, like she had just received the prized possession of the town idiot, and said, mírame. For the next three days, they barely left the kitchen, she said, and Saul and Javier laughed.

  * * *

  Some weeks later, in early July, Saul went to his grandfather’s two-story greystone on Humboldt Boulevard to finish packing. T
he second-to-last things he packed were his grandfather’s historical artifacts: a railroad spike, a 17th century Spanish map of the New World, the single leather shoe of someone who had been killed (or so his grandfather had once casually remarked) during the Haymarket riot, the letters and diaries of WWII soldiers and nurses, a melodramatic and kitsch Cold War propaganda poster of an atomic blast, among many others. The manuscript of A Model Earth, he thought with some curiosity, was in all likelihood just another one of his grandfather’s artifacts, each one of which formed an infinite and unmappable branching of causality. How could anyone even be a historian? he thought as he packed. These artifacts were only a tiny fragment of the lives, thoughts, and actions of real people, living or now dead and inexorably forgotten. It was a losing battle. But, still, he couldn’t help but wonder, how had his grandfather gotten a hold of the manuscript in the first place? And, along with Lost City, had it somehow consoled him during his final days? Of course, Saul had no way of knowing these things, even if he was still responsible for delivering the manuscript. After packing his grandfather’s artifacts, he labeled each box Future History, a reference, he thought with a sad smile, to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which he had read with his grandfather as a child.

  The last things Saul packed were the books his grandfather had written. Once, when he was twelve or maybe thirteen, a graduate student in the University of Chicago’s Department of History, who was corresponding with his grandfather for his thesis, came to dinner and asked his grandfather if he considered the books he wrote “a connecting thread between the living and the dead.” The academic was serious, thin, and in his early twenties. Maybe too serious and too young to study history or to have lost any loved ones in his life, thought Saul. Maybe not. In any case, his grandfather had liked the young academic, even if Saul could tell he didn’t like his question. He responded, “History books are not a connecting thread between the living and the dead, but they coax us into thinking they are because the dead are already us and we are already them.”

  At that time, while sitting at that dinner table, Saul hadn’t fully understood what his grandfather had told the young academic, who, to give him a little credit, had then nodded seriously in agreement. But then, years later, when he was eighteen, Saul understood those words more clearly when he read them word for word in his grandfather’s book October Rising, a type of historical narrative that follows the lives of seven people during the Russian Revolution, including the life of his own father, a translator and tailor from Vitebsk who Saul was named after. History, like fiction, was illusory, if not an outright lie, but we still existed because of it and it existed because of us.

  * * *

  The U-Haul truck moved through the dense traffic on North Sacramento Avenue in starts and stops. At some point Javier rolled down the passenger’s-side window and located the cause of the traffic. A group of people in black T-shirts with the words NO MORE DEAD was walking down Division Street. They held posters that read: WE CAN END GUN VIOLENCE. And: STOP POLICE BRUTALITY. One man moved between the protesters, playing a sad song on a cuatro, paying no mind to anyone else, as if adrift in a somber ocean. A group of policemen watched the protest from under the shade of a green ash tree.

  With a quick nod to Saul, Javier got out of the U-Haul truck, and approached a woman and a man, a couple in their fifties, and talked to them briefly before they rejoined the others. Once he was back in the U-Haul truck, Javier explained that the protest was to demand transparency in the investigation of a thirteen-year-old boy who had been shot and killed by the police. Some minutes later, the traffic started moving and they set off west down Division Street toward the direction of the self-storage facility, even as Javier continued to watch the protestors in the rearview mirror as they marched east, toward their uncertain refuge.

  * * *

  They were unloading boxes into the self-storage unit when Saul remembered something Javier had said to him about protests once. He had called from Buenos Aires one late December night in 2001, when he was reporting on the Argentine Great Depression.

  I joined a street demonstration that the Argentines call a cacerolazo and it turned brutal, pana, Javier had said. I joined the demonstration, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to, maybe because I have never really fought for anything in my life, at least not like you, pana. Saul’s immediate thought that night was that Javier was confessing something between the lines but he wasn’t sure what. Something more had happened, something unpleasant or something he couldn’t mention on the phone during that volatile time in Buenos Aires. But Saul didn’t press him further.

  After Javier’s half confession, their conversation began to flag and he didn’t say anything else about the matter. Some minutes later, they made tentative plans to talk again in a few weeks and hung up. The next day, Saul read Javier’s report on foreignpolicy.com about the clashes between demonstrators and police in the Plaza de Mayo. Several people had died. Had he witnessed those deaths? To what extent then had Javier been involved? Saul asked himself.

  Something even more puzzling had stood out during that phone call: Namely, what had Javier meant when he said, “I have never really fought for anything in my life, at least not like you, pana”? What the hell does he think I’ve fought for in my life? he thought with a slight shock. To rid myself of the stench of orphanhood? To be an American? A life just inside the margins? Endless time to wait for those who would never return, for those irreplaceables who only remained on this Earth as five photographs wrapped in scraps of black Egyptian linen?

  Later, after they locked up the storage unit and dropped off the U-Haul, they walked east down Division Street, just as they had done as teenagers, talking nonstop about the cuatro player, exoplanets, Simón Bolivar’s once-stolen and later-returned sword, the laying of fiber-optic cables under the Atlantic seabed.

  * * *

  One night in August, Javier invited Saul to his house for drinks. Saul hadn’t heard from him in a few weeks since he had been in Mexico City tying up loose ends with work and the move to Chicago, so his call had been a little unexpected. Bring the manuscript, he said, Marina is working a night shift and Maya is already in bed, so I got nothing else going on tonight.

  Some hours later, after Saul had finished telling Javier the plot to Part I of A Model Earth, he yawned and said, it’s late, we should stop here. But Javier said, absolutely not, pana, I want to hear more, keep going, I’ll make us a strong pot of Cuban coffee, adding some seconds later as he took out a canister of expresso grounds, anyway, if you stop now, pana, you will never finish.

  * * *

  At the end of Part II, Javier went to the refrigerator, took out a carton of eggs, and cracked some into a pan. For some reason, pana, he said, while you were telling me that last part, especially the part about the resistance fighters on a parallel Earth, I remembered something your grandfather said to me once, “Every telling of an event is a portrait of the teller and not the event itself.” Saul thought that Javier might say more, but he didn’t. He poked the eggs with a spatula. He’s remembering something, thought Saul. And he’s unsure how to proceed.

  I’m not sure I understand you, said Saul, when did he say that to you, when was the last time you spoke to him? Then he thought too that Javier’s voice had unexpectedly taken on a more gravel-like and reflective tone, very much like his grandfather’s. I think what your grandfather meant, continued Javier, was that each witness gives a unique account of an event, but more than anything that account is a self-portrait. It’s not a document: it’s an image of the person doing the telling. Then Javier plated the eggs.

  Your grandfather’s history books present portraits of people rather than accounts of events, said Javier. What do people think? What makes them happy? What do they fear? What stays in their memory? What is lost or concealed just beneath the surface? It was, I think, his greatest strength as a historian and, at the same time, his greatest flaw. Javier handed him a pla
te. But I’m talking too much, he said. Let’s continue, pana. Tell me more.

  * * *

  Saul’s grandfather too had always been insistent about hearing more. To him, a narrative path was to be followed even if it split off into another path and then another. After all, each path carried the probability of all the others. It was an Old World Jewish trait, thought Saul, in which survival depended on navigating forking or converging paths adeptly. His grandfather could be assertive, even a little pushy. He would raise his hand and say, “Don’t stop, go on, there’s always more, what else happened to you, Saul?” and yet at other times he would be uncomplaining and calm. “Don’t rush it, Saul, gather your thoughts, the past or a version of the past will all catch up to you, let’s wait here until it does.” Two months before his grandfather’s death and just before he stopped recognizing himself, both in mirrors and in his own thoughts, Saul spent an afternoon with him helping sort through boxes of small cassettes that contained thousands of hours of interviews with politicians, entertainers, surgeons, teachers, factory workers, and activists that he had conducted over his career. Even more abundant were the impromptu interviews he recorded with strangers in grocers, bars, currency exchanges, department stores, parks, backyards, alleys, and rooftops, interviews that he had collectively called “Vox Humana,” the human voice, and in which he had—for the most part—remained silent but in which Saul could still occasionally hear his grandfather’s gravel-like voice behind the clamor of an L train or the white noise of a bar: “Talk more about that year, do you think it could happen again, yes, yes, I remember that summer night in 1968, how did the strike end, why do you think they lied to you, why do you think they let him suffer, who else did she love, what else do you remember about that day, that night, that year, that decade now almost forgotten, what else, what else can you tell me?”