The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  * * *

  A cacerolazo, said Javier some seconds later, is a sound. Let me put it another way, pana. To understand a cacerolazo, don’t read about one. No, there are never enough words to tell the whole story. And don’t look at photographs or watch a broadcast of one on a news channel. Images lie by what they omit: protestors being dragged away like pigs by riot police, even as they chant we are not animals, or lying on their backs in the street with blood pooling in their mouths, ears, and eye sockets, a burning car in the street, banners with red paint reading NO CAEMOS, NOS LEVANTAMOS, a small anemic sun made anemic by yellow-black smoke and acrid tear gas.

  So, yes, pana, a cacerolazo is not a half-told story or a false image or a five-second news clip, which will only disappear in the audience’s mind ten seconds after they have been entertained with visions of joy or violence, but rather a city-resounding sound. It is the rock-soft sound of hooves on streets when there are police horses and the crunching roll of tires when there are armored vehicles. It is the heavy thud of stone hitting bank doors, riot shields, jaws. The flushing sound of water hoses like shitting leviathans, the hypnotic blades of helicopters, hellish sirens, the crackle of blazing tires and effigies burning to ash, the violent cartoonish pop emitted from tear gas guns and the screeching tear gas canisters arcing the yellow-white sky. The weeping of a father, who, during those nightmarish years of the Dirty War, lost his only child. Rubber bullets hitting soft flesh with a terrible thump. The sad crack of a police club on a skull. The thunderous voices of those singing the “Internationale.” Feverish footsteps, the drum of running away. The sickly scraping sound of metal barricades and raw skin being dragged against hot asphalt. The primordial rawness of a scream.

  But finally, pana, through it all, the heart of the cacerolazo itself, thousands of pots and pans banging.

  * * *

  I took the pot and the large wooden spoon and joined the cacerolazo instead of following it from a short distance like I normally would, after which Alejandro just looked at me and said, “¿Vale la pena?” Then he smiled and started chanting with others.

  Some minutes later, we reached Plaza de Mayo and saw the May Pyramid and the Casa Rosada, where De la Rúa, according to our mutual friend at Clarín, was busy watching “fucking cartoons,” maybe, I thought with disdain, Bugs Bunny or Popeye.

  At some point, a line of police advanced toward a jagged crowd of protestors. Some of the police were holding wooden truncheons, others carried tear gas guns. A few were on horseback. To my right were forceful chants of the whole world is watching, yet, I thought with gut-wrenching sadness, just months after the events of September 11th it was, in fact, very doubtful that the world would be watching.

  Despite the tear gas, the protestors advanced against the police. To my surprise, Alejandro took off his shirt, wrapped it on his face, and joined the protestors. My eyes were burning with tear gas and my ears rang with the noises of the cacerolazo now beating steadily. Alejandro’s face was one of hallucinatory calm. There were a few seconds when I could’ve saved him and didn’t, pana. Some yards away, several more tear gas rounds fell.

  * * *

  Later that night, continued Javier, when I didn’t yet know that Alejandro would die, I sat in a waiting room in Hospital J. M. Ramos Mejía watching a television clip of De la Rúa escaping the Casa Rosada by helicopter.

  Other looped images followed: cheering crowds in Plaza de Mayo, a bloody fat shirtless man being dragged down a street, the burned husk of a neoclassical building, men and women dancing in the streets—disjointed and juxtaposed images that would only lie to millions of viewers, that would only show them a fraction of the story. But I didn’t give a flying shit, pana. None of it mattered to me then. How could I report any of it? What was the point? Just one hour earlier a tired-looking doctor told me that Alejandro had suffered an acute subdural hematoma, in all likelihood due to a police truncheon striking the side of his head. He was in a coma.

  “I’m so sorry,” the doctor said. “I know he’s a friend of yours.” He rested a hand on my shoulder then added: “He’s not the only one like that tonight.”

  Sometime later, I saw Edin and who I assumed correctly to be Sol Marías, a thin, elegant woman with bird-like shoulders and sharp gray curls, like someone fleetingly imagined by Luis Buñuel, talking to the same doctor at the end of the hallway, a hallway, I remember thinking, like an underground tunnel dissolving inch by inch into nothing. As Edin listened to the doctor’s words, she stood motionless with her arms folded, staring at something directly over the doctor’s right shoulder, her big green eyes frozen in disbelief. At some point, Sol stopped listening. She sank into a nearby chair and without saying anything to the doctor or her daughter-in-law began to weep. Afterward, I left the hospital and walked to a small bar on Avenida Belgrano, where I called you, pana, but you already know that part.

  * * *

  And telling you all of this finally, pana, I can’t help but now think: What had Sol Marías escaped when she decided to stop being a poet at ESMA? What lives had she inextricably erased with that decision, including her own son’s? Pana, let me ask you of all people: On how many Earths is Sol Marías an exiled revolutionary, a corpse, a madwoman, a teacher, an accomplished busy poet who visits Nicanor Parra every spring in Valparaíso? On how many Earths had the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla been murdered in his sleep or disappeared into a bloodless sea? On how many Earths, pana, had he, as an ugly gangling boy, secretly admired the dissident authors of the German Exilliteratur instead of Hitler? On how many Earths had he rejected instead of embraced Plan Condor and Nixon and Kissinger’s violent clandestine warfare on Latin American people? On which Earth—if there could be at least one—had Jorge Rafael Videla tripped on a sidewalk crack and fallen headfirst into a streetlight, turning him into a happy idiot savant (and Sol Marías into a happy poet) who drew skillful and obscene cartoons in small notebooks instead of a murderous general who disappeared thirty thousand political enemies?

  But, pana, I also can’t help but wonder: What the hell is the point in thinking about all those other Jorges or Sols? On this Earth, the only Earth you or I will ever know, Sol Marías is a former poet who was cruelly blacklisted and tortured at ESMA. That simple fact determined her. It silenced her. It left her wordless. To think of all those other Sols on Earths we can never see is to relinquish her history, no matter how terrible. It denies her existence on this Earth. It erases her and also the memory of her son.

  * * *

  In a fit of grief, continued Javier, I spent an entire week looking for her lost poems. I searched online, rifled through countless bookstores, visited dozens of those newspaper stands that still sold books of poetry. But I never found anything. In truth, Sol Marías and Alejandro have already been erased off the face of this Earth. Javier shrugged miserably, yawned, then glanced at the two air mattresses on the floor of their small, sad, clean room, before saying, in any case, you’re right, pana, there’s nothing here at all for us, tomorrow we should go home.

  * * *

  The following morning, since they didn’t have anything to do except make final arrangements to return to Chicago, they decided to check in on Aaron Douglas. The front door was wide open, so they stood carefully on the dilapidated porch and called his name into the dark, gloomy house. A few moments later, an older woman came to the threshold. Her curly dark hair was gray at the roots and pulled loosely behind a half-mask respirator, which only accentuated her postapocalyptic appearance.

  You must be Eulalie, said Javier. Yes, she said as she pulled the respirator down, and you two must be those boys from Chicago my husband was telling me about. Javier and Saul nodded, both smiling somewhat self-consciously at her use of the term boys. He’s out scavenging some lunch, she said, but should be back in a bit.

  Then she explained that her husband had already talked to her about the matter of the missing theoretical physicist and that she did, in fact, know hi
m in passing. Is there anything else you can tell us about him? Saul asked. He’s easy to spot from far away since he’s very tall, she said, like a trombonist I used to go with before Aaron. She laughed and the respirator trembled like a necklace. But what I want to say, she then said, was that I told a good friend of mine about the matter too, a bookseller in the Marigny who’s known by everybody’s mom and them as Ms. Zora, and she told me that she’d seen him just the other day.

  * * *

  Saul and Javier drove to the address Eulalie had given them, a large yellow shotgun house in the Marigny neighborhood just outside the French Quarter. A small wooden sign on the front door read: New Orleans Rare Book Center. They were received by a thin, upright boy no older than thirteen or fourteen by the name of Junior. When he disappeared into a back room, presumably to get Ms. Zora, it occurred to Saul that he might be the youngest person in the city. As they waited they looked at framed photographs on the wall, the meticulously organized bookcases, and the elegant mirrors that seemed to reflect the bookshelves endlessly. But Saul and Javier were much more interested in the photographs, which were all of writers standing with a beautiful and modern woman at various ages of her life.

  My grandmother, Afraa Laguerre, knew all the writers who passed through this city some way or another, said Ms. Zora, and they all loved and respected her, even if a few of them mistakenly felt as if she broke their hearts into a thousand and one glass shards.

  Ms. Zora wore a floral blouse and a black skirt. She bore a striking resemblance to the woman in the photographs. So, she continued, gesturing toward the wall, here we have Eudora Welty with my grandmother, William Faulkner with my grandmother, Nelson Algren with my grandmother (whose heart she really did break), Tennessee Williams with my grandmother, Arna Bontemps with my grandmother, Andrei Codrescu with my grandmother (very near the end of her life), William Burroughs with my grandmother, Lillian Hellman with my grandmother, Daniel F. Galouye with my grandmother, Alice Dunbar-Nelson with my grandmother (very near the end of Alice’s life), Shirley Ann Grau with my grandmother, and Jean Toomer and Nina Pinchback (his wife of some years, a New Orleans native) with my grandmother. Saul didn’t see any photographs of the only writer from New Orleans that really mattered to him.

  Are there any photos of Adana Moreau? he asked.

  Ms. Zora shook her head. But I know of her well, she said, my grandmother and Adana were close friends, if briefly, and she spoke of her more than a few times when I was a kid. She told me about a lot of the writer friends she made through the years. To her, they were all companions in one long, thrilling, and happy journey. From somewhere in the house came the muted strains of a reggaetón song. Then they talked about Afraa Laguerre and Adana Moreau in what might be called abstract terms, speculations on the nature of their lives and close friendship that, according to Ms. Zora, inevitably led to Lost City, Afraa’s exodus from Port-au-Prince as a young woman, Adana’s exodus from Santo Domingo as a teenager, Afraa’s flight from New Orleans to San Francisco during the Great Depression and her return some long years later to open the New Orleans Rare Book Center, and, finally, Adana Moreau’s death in 1930, an untimely death, according to Ms. Zora, that could still sink her (a reader before anything else) into a deep sense of melancholy. What if, what if, what if, she said with a sigh. The Great Depression, like this Storm, she said, was a rupture in time and we’ll never know what we’ve lost. She looked at them and smiled. But, she said, I understand you’re looking for her son.

  * * *

  They drove west on River Road, an empty prehighway connection to Baton Rouge that wound along the Gorgon-like tail of the Mississippi River. They passed antebellum plantation houses and battered cottages with rusted tin roofs that, according to Javier, were reminiscent of those found in Ecuadorian villages tunneled out of the tropics. There were also some fields with rows of sugarcane that reached ten feet and swayed in the wind, filling the air with the smell of molasses. A daytime moon, nearly full, silhouetted the blue sky, an orphan moon, according to Ms. Zora, since only orphans looked up during the day.

  While they drove, Ms. Zora and her son talked to Javier about life after the Storm, a type of survivors’ carnival, Sisyphean and tragic, exemplified for them by the apoplectic voices and weeping they heard from their front porch at night. Saul half listened, preoccupied not only with the box containing the manuscript of A Model Earth resting on his lap and the unaccustomed sense of autonomy he felt as they drove through that remote place, but also with the paralyzing horror that came over him when confronted with the traces of destruction reaching far back into the centuries that were evident in those antebellum plantations and sugarcane fields, overshadowed only for seconds at a time by the encroaching insensate petrochemical and oil refineries on the banks of the river.

  Sometime later, as Saul was lost in these thoughts and others too, thoughts of the science fiction novel Neuromancer and its toxic Sprawl and the unfamiliar smell of burning sugarcane, of burning oil, of metal dissolving into the thick air, of a remote place that produced a sense of pyromania and unease, the black Cadillac pulled into the parking lot of a Quality Suites motel.

  * * *

  A lot of people came here after the Storm, said Ms. Zora, nodding at the busy courtyard of the motel where a group of teenagers stood talking and laughing. Junior joined them. We came just three days ago when we found out that a few of Junior’s friends had made it out okay and were staying here. They spend their days and nights exchanging survivor stories and searching for lost friends and family members online. That’s how we ran into Maxwell.

  Saul and Javier followed her up a staircase, ducking under clotheslines. They passed people fidgeting with cigarettes and cell phones, and motel room windows taped over with graded homework and crayon drawings of prehistoric creatures and rescue boats crammed with stick figure people, and submerged houses, where still other stick figure people stood on rooftops. From behind a closed door, Saul could hear the faint sound of laughter. From behind another, he heard the sounds of a trumpet, sometimes louder and sometimes softer, like an exchange of faraway shouts, not of sorrow or joy, but of pure self-consuming energy. Ms. Zora stopped at Room 307 and said, right here. For a few seconds Saul didn’t move. He stood there, breathing deeply, his right hand clenched in a fist inches from the motel door. He glanced at Javier, who shrugged and said, all you, pana, and then Saul knocked.

  FROM VITEBSK

  July 1933–October 1933

  Long after the white beam of the flashlight had faded and died, Maxwell lay on the floor of the boxcar, half-asleep, sweating in the claustrophobic heat and gazing into a type of darkness that both aggravated his sense of fatalism and fear, but also, at the same time, induced a happy dream in which he found a book covered in moss in an Isleño shack, a book written in Spanish that for some strange reason he couldn’t read, but which he still thumbed through slowly, page after unintelligible page, until, at some point, he heard someone pounding on the boxcar door and then a voice.

  Maxwell stood up, a little shaky, and yelled back. Then he heard the door unlocking and sliding away.

  “How long you been in here, kid?” a bullman asked.

  Maxwell rubbed his eyes and then looked up at the hazy, dark sky, the pale half-moon, and the burning lights of the city just beyond the train yard. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “That goddamn piece of shit Friedrich could’ve killed you,” said the bullman. Then he gave a long sigh and told Maxwell to leave the train yard, no other questions asked.

  Maxwell followed a street bordered by warehouses and factories and smokestacks. He walked by pawnshops and hotels and late-night diners and tattoo parlors and theaters that lit up the street. On one of those theaters was a painted mural of a man holding a sledgehammer in one hand and the Earth in his other. Some minutes later, he found himself in a neighborhood full of tenement buildings, where people walked up and down the sidewalks in constant motion. Avoi
ding their wary gazes, he walked through an empty alley. Under the lonely light of a single dim light bulb, he pissed and thought about his dream.

  * * *

  The following morning, first thing, he went to a Sinclair gas station to ask for directions to the Jonava. He chose the Sinclair gas station over others because out front on a thin strip of dying grass was a green model Brontosaurus, maybe six feet by ten feet, and it fondly reminded him of the library book Dinosaurs and Flying Reptiles of the Jurassic and Cretaceous Eras that his father had once read to him when he was a child.

  Inside the gas station, an attendant with dirty-blond hair and owl-rimmed glasses told Maxwell that a map of the city was a nickel. Maxwell eyed the brightly colored maps near the cash register, then he turned to leave.

  “Wait,” said the attendant, “where are you going?”

  “The Jonava.”

  “The Jonava? In Jewtown?”

  “I think so,” he said, “I don’t know.”

  “Some people call it that,” said the attendant, by way of explanation, “some people call it Maxwell Street Market. Regardless, it’s my old stomping grounds. I’m a Jew on my mother’s side, which means I’m bona fide, but don’t tell the bonehead owners outside. They think I’m Catholic, which, for them, is a small step up and better for business. I’m like a false medieval convert. A modern-day Marrano. Don’t tell them, and I’ll give you a map. Deal?”

  “Okay,” said Maxwell, nodding, a little confused, but still taking the name of the market as another good sign.

  * * *

  At the Jonava—a cramped four-story brick building near the center of an open-air market crammed with pushcarts, kosher meat stands, bakeries, and shops—a febrile, green-eyed, and overwhelmed hotel clerk told Maxwell that he wasn’t allowed to say one way or another who was staying at the hotel. Maxwell took a deep breath and explained that he had come all the way from New Orleans to meet his father, Titus Moreau, who had written him a letter telling him to meet there in July. All he needed was a room number, nothing more, after which the hotel clerk said there was no one staying in the hotel with that name. He would’ve remembered a name that ridiculous.