by Tom Epperson
“Of course you don’t mean that.”
“But of course I do.”
Ricardo takes a gloomy gulp of Roberto’s father’s fine scotch whiskey.
“I’ve been thinking about the San José de Ariporo massacre,” he says.
Roberto’s very familiar with it. He and Daniel went to San José de Ariporo the day after it happened. Daniel got a great picture of an old woman and her little granddaughter on their knees scrubbing the blood off the floor of a beauty shop.
“I spent several days there interviewing witnesses,” Ricardo says. “I’m an aficionado of old colonial churches, and they have a small but very charming one there. One afternoon I went to the church and was taking pictures when the priest came up. He suggested I might want to go up in the bell tower. He said the bell was five centuries old and had been brought over from Spain. He said the church had been destroyed four times, twice by fire and twice by earthquake, but the bell had survived and would probably survive another five centuries. So I climbed up in the tower to take a look at the bell. It was a big bronze brute of a bell, it seemed too big for the little church, it was scorched and scuffed and gashed. Inside it was an engraving in Latin: Vivos voco. Mortuos plango. I call the living. I mourn the dead.
“I squatted by the bell and looked out over the town. It seemed very peaceful. I suppose most towns seem peaceful after half their population has been suddenly subtracted by death. And I remember wishing that I could just stay up here with the bell as it called the living and mourned the dead, century after century after century. I’m beginning to believe in God a little again, Roberto. Because I can no longer believe in man. I believe we are powerless to save ourselves from ourselves.”
Some woman Roberto has never met comes over and starts talking in tedious detail about her vacation in Greece. He leaves her with Ricardo and drifts over to the bar to get another drink.
He seems to smell her and feel her heat before he actually hears or sees her.
“I’d like a drink, Roberto.”
“Sure, what do you want?”
“What you have looks intriguing.”
Roberto asks the bartender, a red-haired man lost in the contemplation of Clara’s cleavage, to prepare another Gray Goose tonic.
Dressing and undressing, dressing and undressing, he remembers. She’s wearing a clingy black dress with a low-cut top and a slit up the left leg. High black heels. An antique diamond and ruby necklace.
“Are you having a terrible time?” she asks. “Are you already bored to tears with all of us?”
“No, only with that woman talking to Ricardo.”
Clara glances over at them. “I doubt that Ricardo finds her boring. He’s having an affair with her.”
“How do you always know who’s sleeping with whom?”
“Just a sixth sense, I guess.”
The bartender presents her with her drink. She lifts her glass. “What shall we drink to?”
“Your book.”
She beams. “My book!”
He clinks glasses with Clara. Her book is called Goodbye, Stork! It’s a kind of humorous handbook for young girls about the facts of life. It’s her first book, and it’s selling so well her publisher has given her a contract for another.
“Thanks for all you did,” she says. “I won’t forget it.”
She asked him to read the first draft. He was expecting the worst but was relieved to find the writing bright and fresh and funny. He saw ways to improve it though, and gave her a lengthy list of suggestions; she assiduously followed every one of them.
“I didn’t do much,” he says, “but I was glad to help. So what’s the next one going to be about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably something along the same lines. They say you should always repeat yourself if you want to be successful.”
Clara, in her own dark brown-eyed way, is just about as beautiful as Caroline. She’s only a little older than Roberto. She was a receptionist in his father’s office. He surmises the affair began not long after she started working there, though a couple of years passed before his father asked his mother for a divorce. His mother was shocked (as was Roberto) because it was not the first affair his father had had and previously their marriage had weathered them all, but this time it was different; his father said he was in love with his receptionist and intended to be with her no matter what, so his mother took a sizeable chunk of his father’s money and decamped for Spain. Initially Roberto saw Clara the way Caroline still does, as a wily seductress, a greedy beguiler, but four years into their marriage his view has changed. His father has always been a naturally happy man, but Roberto likes the way that Clara has clearly made him even happier. Roberto likes in fact just about everything about Clara. The one thing about her he doesn’t like is how whenever he talks to her he begins to feel an (under the circumstances) inappropriate tingling in his dick.
“Come, Roberto,” she says, suddenly grabbing his hand and pulling him away from the bar.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to show you something.”
They move across the room. His father is still talking to Willie Rivera. He looks their way curiously.
“Clara,” he calls, “where are you dragging Roberto off to?”
“I’m going to show him my anniversary present to you.”
His father laughs, showing his shining even teeth (veneers, he’s just spent a small fortune on them). “Oh, it’s splendid, Roberto! Just splendid!”
Clara continues to hold on to Roberto’s hand as if he’s some small child that needs to be led around. They walk down a hallway till they reach his father’s office. She opens the door and they go through.
“What do you think?” she says.
He looks around, a bit blankly. Clara’s amused.
“Men are so oblivious. A bomb could go off and destroy a room and you still wouldn’t notice anything different. Your father’s desk and chair, Roberto! I totally redid them!”
“Oh, I see.”
He looks at the semicircular desk and the swivel chair. They had been custom-made for his father’s father, a very successful manufacturer of household appliances. When Roberto’s grandfather died he left them to his son, who adored his father and had always cherished them.
“They were falling apart but of course your father never did anything about it,” Clara says. “I re-veneered the desk in macassar ebony, don’t worry, it’s not one of your endangered rain forest trees. And the chair was just an accident waiting to happen! I gave it new springs, new wheels, a new turning mechanism.” She walks around behind the desk. “And I replaced the old cracked leather with this velvet mohair fabric, come feel it, Roberto, it’s soft as a dream!”
She bends down and rubs her hand over the seat of the chair. He goes behind the desk and does the same. Not that he much cares about things like velvet mohair fabric.
His face is close to Clara’s. He glances up into her eyes. She is smiling. Flirting with him. As she always does.
“It’s great,” he says, as he straightens up and moves away. “The perfect gift.”
Clara comes out from behind the desk too.
“He’s actually very easy to get things for,” she says. “He likes whatever anyone gives him.”
“That’s true, he’s like that.”
She leans back against the desk, crossing her legs at the ankles, which causes one Pilates-toned leg to emerge from the slit in her dress.
“So how is Caroline?”
“She’s okay. She’s sad, because of her mother. She doesn’t think she’ll live out the year.”
“And she’s close to her mother?”
“Yes, very.”
“I envy that. My mother is such a bitch. I’d be happy to never see her again.”
He’s doing his best not to look at her leg.
“I guess we should be getting back,” he says.
But Clara doesn’t move.
“You haven’t said one word about what I
’m wearing.” She puts on a petulant look. “It’s always so hard to get a compliment out of you, it’s like pulling teeth.”
“You look amazing.”
She smiles sweetly. “Why, thank you, Roberto.”
“Clara—can I ask you a question?”
“Anything at all.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Do you really love him? You know what I mean.”
“I do love him. Yes.”
She thinks about it.
“I know what people thought about me when we got married. And maybe they weren’t entirely wrong. You see, I come from a different world than you. My father was a drunk who repaired shoes when he did anything at all. I was a girl who knew nothing and didn’t have anything going for her except she maybe had the kind of legs men like to look twice at. So to attract the attention of a powerful, accomplished man like your father, it was overwhelming to me. Maybe I didn’t really know who he was at the time, but maybe he didn’t really know who I was either. But now we do know each other. I think I’ve been good for him, and as for me, I’m a totally different person now because of him. You know how your father is, he’s like some invincible battleship, steaming through the ocean, nothing ever seems to bother him. And I used to never know where I was going, it was like a feather could knock me off my stride. Clemente has taught me to be calm and disciplined. Do you think the old Clara could have written a book and gotten it published? People from my neighborhood just didn’t do things like that.”
Roberto hears someone in the hallway, and then his father appears at the door.
“Magdalena wants you, darling,” he says to Clara. “There’s some kind of emergency in the kitchen.”
“What now?” Clara sighs, and hurries out.
He walks into the room smiling at Roberto, he’s nearly always smiling, invincible as a battleship, Clara is right about him, she really does have a way with words. He sinks down into his chair with an exaggerated sigh of contentment, swivels back and forth.
“She really outdid herself this time, Roberto.”
Roberto touches the gleaming new surface of the desk. “One of my first memories is about this desk. You took me to Grandfather’s factory, and I got scared because all the machinery was so big and loud, and I ran in Grandfather’s office and hid under his desk. You had to give me candy to get me to come out.”
His father has been nodding along and grinning and now he says delightedly, “I remember that too!”
He’s a little shorter than Roberto, with broader shoulders but the same thick head of hair. Doesn’t have Roberto’s weak eyes. Dresses in elegant suits bought at the same store on a yearly trip to London.
Now is the time to tell him. It matters to Roberto what he thinks because there are just two people in the world whom he completely trusts: his grandmother and his father (he trusts his three best friends only up to a point, for there is something weak in Andrés, something selfish in Franz, something dark and unstable in Daniel. He trusts Caroline in all important things except his heart. He does not trust her never to break his heart).
“I have something to tell you,” he says. “It’s not good news, but maybe it’s not so bad, either.”
The smile fades from his father’s face, and he becomes still and looks at Roberto.
“All right, Roberto.”
“I’m leaving the country. In a few days. I’m going to Saint Lucia to be with Caroline. I don’t know when I’ll be coming back. It might be years.”
“Why?”
“I think my life is in danger.”
“There have been threats?”
“Yes.”
“Be specific.”
“I received a phone call on Thursday morning. I was told I’d be killed in ten days if I didn’t leave the country. And then today there was an article on the website of this right-wing journalism group, and I was called a subversive. Do you remember Edgar Leonidas? I went to school with him.”
“Yes, of course. I know his parents. The poor boy.”
“A few days before he was killed, he was denounced on the same website. So I think the smart thing for me to do is go.”
For a few moments his father engages himself in removing an invisible bit of lint from his trousers; when he looks back up at Roberto, he’s surprised to see his father’s eyes are filled with tears, for he cannot remember ever having seen him cry.
“It makes me so angry . . . the thought of these men harming you. A father is supposed to protect his child. But I can’t do anything.”
“You don’t have to worry, they’re not going to harm me. And the good thing about leaving is I’ll be finding new things to write about. I keep reporting the same stories over and over, this country never changes, it’s like a cat chasing its tail.”
His father takes the carefully folded silk handkerchief out of his coat pocket, wipes his eyes, and dabs at his nose.
“Do you think I’m doing the right thing?” Roberto asks.
“I trust your instincts, Roberto. If you think it’s time, it’s time.”
He stands up, and comes walking around the desk. The usual bounce in his step is absent.
“I don’t suppose you’ve told your grandmother yet.”
Roberto shakes his head. “I’m going to see her tomorrow.”
“It will be hard on her. Her health is really too poor for her to travel anymore and . . .” He leaves the thought unsaid: that it is unlikely Roberto will ever see her again.
He’s in front of Roberto now and he can’t stand the crushed look in his father’s eyes and he hates the men who have caused it. His father manages a smile and puts his hand on Roberto’s shoulder.
“Let’s both cheer up. Life goes on, right? Now let’s go into dinner. Clara has worked all day on it, I’m sure it’s going to be fantastic.”
* * *
“It’s delicious, Clara,” says Tomás Valdivieso; he’s a designer of women’s clothing whose name is nearly as well known in the country as Pombo’s. “Clemente says you made it yourself, according to some secret family recipe.”
“Oh no, Magdalena did most of the work,” Clara declares magnanimously. “I only helped out a little. And the only secret family recipe I know is for bootleg rum. My uncle used to put rusty nails in it to give it a nice reddish color.”
Everyone laughs, Roberto’s father loudest of all. Magdalena is the dour old cook who’s been with the family since his father was a boy. And the dish under discussion is ajiaco, a chicken and potato soup with chunks of corn on the cob in it, served in black bowls nestled in straw baskets, with sides of rice, capers, avocado, and heavy cream.
The long table is covered with a Swiss linen tablecloth. The flames of tall white candles are reflected in innumerable wine and water glasses. A pair of small brown maids in prim uniforms move around and serve the twelve at table. Roberto’s father and Clara sit at either end, while Roberto is in between Rolando, Valdivieso’s companion, a handsome young telenovela star whose many female fans would be devastated if they knew he was gay, and the woman with the fat lips who liked Pombo’s kite painting. Roberto knows there’s a reason even if he doesn’t know what it is that he’s sitting here, because Clara works out everything about their dinner parties down to the smallest detail. They’re held monthly, and he knows she has the ambition of creating a sort of salon where the most prominent and interesting people in the city come together to eat and drink and say witty provocative things to one another; she seems to be having a certain amount of success at it, judging by how coveted invitations to these dinners have become.
“Rolando,” says Pombo’s wife, “are you ever going to sleep with Eva?”
She’s talking about My Cousin Eva, the telenovela Rolando’s on.
“But it would be wrong to sleep with her,” Rolando says coyly. “She’s my cousin.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Give it up, Beatriz,” Valdivieso says. “He won�
�t even tell me what’s going to happen next. He’s sworn to secrecy. He’ll be executed at sunrise or something if he talks about it.”
“I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing the show,” Pombo says, “so I need to ask two questions. Is your character sympathetic?”
“Oh yes,” Rolando says. “Very.”
“And is Eva sympathetic?”
Rolando shrugs. “More or less.”
“Then I would say it is absolutely inevitable that Rolando will sleep with Eva. It’s what the audience wants. You cannot disappoint the audience.”
“I agree,” Clara says, who usually speaks only enough to keep the conversational ball rolling. “But how do we know that’s what the audience wants? Is there some principle involved?”
“The principle,” says Pombo, “is that we as a culture feel compelled to make up stories and then live vicariously in them. When Rolando fucks Eva, we will all be fucking Eva.”
“Speak for yourself,” says Valdivieso grumpily.
“Pombo,” says his wife, “you better not fuck Eva vicariously or you’ll find yourself sleeping on the couch!”
Everybody laughs. Clara looks pleased.
“I had a tremendous crush on my cousin when I was a boy,” says the American, Willie Rivera. “Her name was Mary Beth. She was a year older than me. She lived in Dallas, and I lived in this dusty little town in south Texas. I thought she was the most gorgeous, sophisticated girl in the world.”
“And how did Mary Beth feel about you?” asks Roberto’s father.
“Oh, I was just her dumb little cousin with the big ears. It’s been thirty years since I’ve seen her, but I still think about her from time to time.”
“Ah, first loves,” says Valdivieso. “They haunt us like ghosts.”
“Tell me, Mr. Rivera,” says Ricardo Cárdenas, “what do you Americans think of our new president?”
“Please call me Willie. He’s been getting very good marks. I even heard the secretary of state say that he seemed like one of us.”
“And he meant that as a compliment?”
Willie Rivera grins. “Oh yes. The highest.”