Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  “Hello.” She was at the door, dressed up and ready, blocking the entrance, as though not wishing me to linger and see who else was inside, or the sorry condition of the interior.

  Looking past her, I could see the backs of three heads, two women and a man laughing, watching a rerun of The Golden Girls, too absorbed to notice me. Kitchen help from Arcadia, Angela explained, whispering their Brazilian names.

  “I don’t want them to know that I see you.” She sighed. “I don’t want to make a problem.”

  “I understand.”

  “Nice coche,” she said, buckling herself into my old Jeep. “Good for where I live—good for bad roads.” She meant her home in Mexico.

  This was what I wanted to hear. I saw myself driving down a rutted country road in a sunny valley, Angela by my side, clinging to the handle on the dashboard, leaving a cloud of dust behind.

  “Where is your village?”

  “In Chiapas—so far away.”

  “Not far,” I said. “I was there not long ago, in a place near Ocosingo.”

  “That’s nice. You went to San Cristóbal? You see the churches?”

  “I loved the churches. I loved the mountains and the Río Jataté.” She smiled hearing the familiar name. “We can drive there, four or five days to Texas, then the frontera.”

  “Ha,” she said, like a throat-clearing, without mirth, staring straight ahead.

  “I’m serious. We could go anytime.”

  Angela said, “And who take care you mother?”

  My giddiness abated. Angela was young, but she was practical. Perhaps if the other Angela, Mother’s adored child, had not died but had grown and matured, she would have been the same: sensible, devoted to Mother, not susceptible to a man’s idle promises. I knew from traveling in hungry, hard-up countries that the poor grew up fast, were burdened early in their lives, had children when they were young, saw starvation in laziness, pounced on opportunities. Frivolity was a trap. Hungry, like prey animals—and who could blame them?—they never ceased to be alert.

  “I never see this road before.”

  I had taken a detour from the Mid-Cape Highway, through Yarmouth and by back roads to Hyannis.

  “It’s the quick way.”

  “I have no coche.”

  And then we were at Cholo’s Cantina, quiet on a weekday evening, and walking up the ramp under the awning, I met the gaze of a woman smoking, her arms crossed. After rapid scrutiny of Angela she frowned at me, having decided that I was an old pig. What was I doing with this young attractive woman? I had to be exploiting her. The woman kept looking with scorn as we entered the restaurant, and my nerve failed me: perhaps I was the pig she took me to be.

  “What this place?” Angela was compact and watchful after we were shown to a booth.

  “Mexican food.”

  Angela smiled at the illustrated menu. “Maybe this is food. But this not Mexican.”

  “No tamales chiapaneca,” I said, and she smiled. “We can leave.”

  She shrugged. Her shrug said, “It doesn’t matter,” and now I concluded, from her hesitation on the phone, from her talk, from these twitches in her posture, that she was a skeptic, the natural reaction of someone who is used to being cheated, underpaid, lied to, and used.

  She was right to be on her guard. She didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know what I wanted. But I thought, there and then: Do I want to be here with her? Yes.

  With distaste, she opened her napkin and scrubbed the tines of her fork, then polished the knife and spoon, saying “Sucio.”

  After the waitress’s “Get you guys a beverage?,” after the complimentary chips and salsa, after the ritual of ordering and eating, after my mariscos and Angela’s pollo, after she repeated “This not Mexican,” I said, “Tell me about your village.”

  “You no want to hear about you mother?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said in a panic, as if she’d caught me in a ruse. “Tell me, how is she?”

  “She very nice,” Angela said, dabbing sauce from her lips. “She like creamy soup. She no want crunchy—hard to eat. She always smile to me, and say thank you, and I do nothing, just my work.”

  “My mother used to be so fierce,” I said. “Fuerte.”

  “Feroz,” Angela said, lightly correcting me.

  “Very tough. Very hard.” With facial expressions and gestures I described Mother as she had been for so long: a tyrant, a dragon, an intimidator. But Angela simply stared at me, said nothing, scowled. “She was impatient and unpredictable—you understand?”

  At last Angela shook her head, not in disagreement but in a pained wince of sympathy, as though witnessing my obvious mistake, or worse, my stupidity.

  “You mother,” she said. “Seven children, big and small. Maybe sometimes little money. Always tired, from work, from making food.”

  Angela’s certainty annoyed me. I said, “You know that?”

  “Yes, I know that,” she said. “I know when I see her.” Angela used her fingers to dramatize the way she’d seen Mother, like a sorceress gesturing to her flashing eyes.

  “What else do you know?” I asked.

  If this meal had started with the promise, however slight, of romance or any flirtation, that promise had faded. I resented the turn this discussion had taken, the knowingness of someone whose experience of Mother was limited to a matter of months. But Angela was undaunted.

  “I know you mother had a hard life,” she said softly, nodding again.

  I had no answer to that: she was right. I had never spent any time reflecting on Mother’s upbringing, thinking only of my own. In her straightforward declaration, Angela explained Mother—who she was, who she’d been, why she was the person she’d become. A hard life was part of it.

  “That’s true.”

  And Angela didn’t know the rest. Two world wars, the Great Depression, Dad’s business failures, the disruptions of moving from the small, overcrowded bungalow to the large, drafty house that resembled a cereal box. The strange season of Mr. Bones, the frugality and false economy, a scrimping life of hand-me-downs and dented cans, the precarious belief in a life based on faith: that we’d be safe, that things would work out, all the time law-abiding, tax-paying, churchgoing, determined to be respectable and decent. Mother’s century, as Gilbert had described it at Mother’s hundredth.

  Without knowing any of the details, Angela divined this, as if her own hard upbringing had given her insights and an enlarged awareness of motherhood.

  “How old are you?”

  She smiled. “Not a good question.”

  I took this to mean older than I guessed. I said, “It’s a compliment. You’re young but you are wise. You know? Intelligente—sabia.”

  “Sabia—no. But I have a mother also.”

  “And father?”

  “He is dead, from making an accident.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “So long ago, when I was a small girl,” she said. “My mother has three children. I have to help. That is why I come here—to send money.”

  “Your mother, is she in Chiapas?”

  “Yes. In a small village in the countryside.”

  “I like those words. A small village in the countryside.”

  Angela smiled at last. “Yes. I miss my home. I want to be there sometimes. But is necessary to be here, for work. For money.”

  “You have chickens?”

  “You are funny. Yes, chickens. Ducks in the pool by the river. Pigs also. Gardens. A maize field. A bean field.”

  And I saw it, the small village in the river valley, perhaps not far from where I’d spent a happy week near La Soledad, a cluster of houses in a grove of trees, at the end of a rutted road, chickens pecking in the dooryard, ducks gliding in the pool, a pig tottering in the distance. The deep green foliage on the slope of the sierra beyond the field of corn, the high Mexican sky, a vagrant mariachi sound—guitar, accordion, violin, the plonking accompaniment to this pastoral vision.

&nbs
p; I easily found a place for myself in it, from what I’d discovered on my Mexican journey, the abandoned B. Traven piece—on a chair on the veranda or in a hammock strung between trees. I had idealized the anonymity of Traven, the solitary wanderings of Ambrose Bierce, the mule rides of Graham Greene.

  “Your village, is it near San Cristóbal?”

  “No, far from the city. But there is a bus from Las Angostura.”

  Malcolm Lowry drinking himself silly in Veracruz, Trotsky the refugee in Coyoacán. D. H. Lawrence griping in Oaxaca.

  Mexico, a country that was kind to exiles, had a place for me, something secure and remote, where I could support myself on my monthly Social Security check, eating the food I loved, living in the bosom of a little family, a real family.

  “It is a poor village,” Angela said. She was shrewd: she knew from my silence that I was lost in a pastoral reverie.

  “How poor?”

  “Water from the river—not a clean river. No electric. The road very bad. The bus only go to Las Angostura.”

  “What’s the name of your village?”

  “Villaflores.”

  “A village called Villaflores cannot be bad. And it’s home.”

  She said, “Where is your mother, is always home.”

  Perhaps she thought she was deflating my vision by calling the village poor. But no, after what I’d seen of the wealthy world, a poor village was where I wished to be.

  Where’s Jay? I imagined people saying—editors, other writers, readers, people to whom I owed money. He’s gone to Mexico. He’s in some village—no one knows where.

  My magazine assignment had been a rehearsal for this. Did I really want to vanish, or was it a bid for attention? It didn’t matter. It was a cure for my rancorous family, and Angela might be part of the plan. And I thought, If no one knew where I was, I would remain myself, intact.

  “Now we go,” she said.

  In the Jeep, I drove up-Cape, toward Centerville, on back roads.

  “This is different,” Angela said, leaning forward, straining against her seat belt to see better. “This is not the same way.”

  “It’s quicker,” I said. But she shook her head. She’d remembered the route we’d taken, and this was not it. “Don’t worry.”

  She said, “When people say ‘Don’t worry,’ that is when I worry.”

  I liked that. Even her doubt, her harsh and humorless scrutiny, her unforgiving memory, impressed me, because they were clear signs of intelligence and her experience of the world. She’s right, I thought, why didn’t it occur to me? Mother had a hard life.

  Out of the blue, just before the Centerville turnoff, she said, “You brothers and you sisters visit the mother. They stay for some few minutes, then they leave. And for hours and hours mother is alone, calling ‘Angela.’”

  “Why don’t they stay longer?” I asked, to test her.

  “They just want to see, ‘Is she alive?’ ‘Yes, she is alive. Now we go.’”

  I had come to a stop, deliberately parking under a streetlight so she wouldn’t feel threatened.

  “What is this place?”

  “My house.”

  She sighed. “No. Please. Take me to my house.”

  I almost said, Don’t worry, but thought better of it, fearing it would frighten her. I said, “I want to show you where I live. If you see this, you will know me better.” I took her by the hand. “I want you to know me better. I want to know you. Maybe we can be friends. Maybe I’ll call you Angelita.”

  “Angelita,” she said quietly. “It is the name we give to the dead child.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  I slipped out of the Jeep and went to my front door, reached in, and switched on the lights, including the lantern on the post by the sidewalk. And then I waited.

  At last Angela followed, looking from side to side, her animal alertness giving her an intense gaze and an efficient way of walking, slightly crouched, seeming smaller in her watchfulness, prepared to flee.

  She hesitated by the front door, then stepped aside. I saw it all with her eyes: the big worn sofa and the footstool piled with old newspapers, the cream-colored lampshade, brown in spots from the scorch marks of hot bulbs, the stacks of books on the floor, some of them open, and the kitchen table—my notebooks, my pens, my laptop on the side—it all looked messy, secondhand, temporary, and the house a brown-shingled box.

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  She shook her head, then shrugged.

  “I’m a writer,” I said. “This is what a writer’s house looks like.”

  “Like my house,” she said.

  “We can go now,” I said, but the front door was still open.

  I wanted to show her that I had no money, I was not a rich American, my Jeep was old, I lived in a nest of papers and books. It was no good telling her that I was hard up; she needed to see it. This messy house, this table of notebooks and pens—this is who I am.

  My mention of leaving seemed to give her confidence. She moved away from me, entered the house, took a turn around the living room, peered into the kitchen, glanced at the bedroom. I liked her courage, her curiosity, her scrutiny.

  Back in the Jeep I said, “What do you think?”

  She considered the question, sighed a little in a way that I was now used to, and then, “You have no picture of mother in your house.”

  Now I evaluated everything I did and said from Angela’s point of view. In the past, for years, I saw my actions from the perspective of my brothers and sisters, and I felt I was no worse than they were—often I felt superior. With Angela’s scrutiny things were different. I saw how little I gave to Mother, how I was without sentiment, how it was all a competition with my siblings, my reacting to them. I recalled how, after the clambake, Angela wheeled Mother back to her apartment while the siblings quarreled and were easily mistaken for senile residents of Arcadia.

  In the following days and weeks I saw Mother more often. I saw Angela too, both at Arcadia and on the nights when she was free. After the first few nights she seemed to feel safe with me, and she grew bold enough to poke me in the chest to make a point. Now and then I held her hand or took her by the waist. We did not go back to Cholo’s Cantina, but we found other congenial places—a sushi restaurant, a bar overlooking Hyannis’s inner harbor, a pizza joint in Centerville.

  On one of my visits to Arcadia Mother said, as Angela was leaving the room, “You should find someone like her.” This was the old assertive Mother, issuing a directive, tapping an insistent finger.

  I said, “I’ve already found her.”

  When I mentioned this to Angela later, she said, “You want me?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  She said, “You know me?”

  This was by the back door at Arcadia, where I’d found her, in her green scrubs, holding a heart-rate monitor, a stethoscope, a Velcro sleeve, a gauge, and I was impressed that she had some nursing skills.

  I did not crowd her. She had said that she didn’t want the people at Arcadia to know we were seeing each other. Anyone happening by would have concluded that here was the son of a resident inquiring about his mother from one of the staff. All this was conducted in whispers.

  “I don’t know you,” I said.

  She smiled. She had made her point.

  “But I want to know you,” I said quickly as she hurried away. It had been a hot whisper; I was not sure that she heard me.

  All that in about three weeks—winter weeks of early darkness, of fat white snowflakes, of dirty snow and yellow ice by the roadside. No wonder when we met that I fantasized about the green sunlit valleys of Chiapas, the wheel tracks through the dusty woods, and me swinging in a hammock, the life I had imagined on my previous visit, improbably with Luma.

  Angela’s work at Arcadia—her busy days and few free evenings—reminded me of how idle I was. I had not retired; if you didn’t have a job in the first place, how could you retire? But the day was mine to use as I wished. I wrote
every morning, but if I had a productive morning, I spent the rest of the day reading, running errands, or walking along Dowses Beach, anything, provided there was no chance of running into my brothers or sisters. That also meant studying the parking lot at Arcadia, to make sure I was alone with Mother.

  I told this to Angela, the part about her being busy and my being free to do as I wished.

  She had a way of sizing me up. I knew she was thinking hard, not about what I’d told her, but the implications of it, weighing them with her skeptical mind.

  She said, “If you have so much time, why you no visit you mother?”

  “Yes, I should go more often.”

  “Yes.”

  I saw what she wanted from me—proof of my virtue, evidence of my loyalty, making an effort to see Mother. It was the only way she could know who I was. Angela had never mentioned my age, or the difference in our ages. She had a single imperative: she wanted someone who was true. It was no good my making promises or telling her who I was. She needed to see me in action, being a loving son to this old woman.

  I went there the next day. I brought a bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates.

  “What’s that?”

  “Flowers.”

  “Put them over there,” she said, not looking at them.

  “How are you, Ma?”

  “No complaints.”

  Then she stared past me, her eyes clouded. I wanted to leave this stillness, Mother’s hands folded on her lap on the open newspaper, on the table the jar of peanut butter, the alarm clock, a bird carving, the day’s menu printed on a sheet of paper, a check mark next to Meatloaf.

  I forced myself to stay and hoped somehow that Angela would notice. I would do this every day if need be; I wanted to convince her of my worth. And, sitting before Mother—who said nothing, who seemed to see nothing, who was like a masterpiece of human taxidermy—I saw a loveliness in her, all her furious selves burned away. What remained was the essence of the woman, the essential Mother. The fight had left her, and the residue was sweetness, fragility, and grace—and acceptance; she wanted nothing. There was nothing I could do for her, nothing she needed, nothing I could bring, except myself.