Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF AUGUST 14 Richard felt restless. After his family left for the beach he walked to Main Street. The bar was open, and all the regulars were there. The bartender and his son had attached tan and peach crepe paper streamers to the center of the ceiling. Then they had twisted the streamers and tacked their ends high on the walls. The carnival effect was spoiled by the lingerie hues. “All the red, white, and blue ones were sold,” the bartender explained. Some of the streamers had become dislodged and hung down like flypaper. The place grew more and more packed. Seven or eight people crowded into each booth. The lively women had already installed themselves in the back of the room. They had acquired some men—a couple of officers and a fellow with a dog collar. Mrs. Hazelton was not among the party.

  The air was stifling. Richard took his glass to the doorway, but the frequent comings and goings jostled him, so he went onto the street with his drink—another illegality. A sailor was openly fondling a woman’s breasts. Three of his companions were sharing a bottle on a bench. They were committing this breach right in front of the public library, diagonally across the street from Richard. On the third floor of the Woolworth building—the only building in town even to have a third floor—figures bobbed about at the windows, throwing confetti. The card shop was full of boisterous customers. The tobacco shop, the drugstore …

  Someone, somewhere, set off a firecracker, then a string of them. Meanwhile the noise in the bar behind him had become a steady roar. “Victory!” he heard. “Defeat!” he heard. “Surrender!” Laughter thickened. Church bells began to ring—from the Episcopalians at one end of town and from the Congregationalists at the other. Automobiles blared their horns, though there were no automobiles moving on the street, since the street was filling with people—all sizes and ages of people, all shades of clothing and hair; people singing, shouting, hugging, crying, dancing alone and in pairs and in threes and in groups. Someone was playing an accordion. Someone was blowing a trumpet. An army truck poked its nose into the street from a side road, backed up, disappeared. Then a squad of soldiers arrived, not to contain the revelry but to join it, for this was the end of the war, and everyone was part of the glory. A small boy all by himself wandered crying into Richard’s view and then was snatched up by someone, presumably his mother. Were the police opening the jails? Was that the meaning of the latest siren? He leaned against the window of the bar and noticed that he still held his half-full glass. He undid one of the lower buttons of his shirt and poured the beer into his garments. It spread onto his stomach. Some of it dripped below his loose waistband and cooled his abdomen, failing to quench the fire within, but diminishing it a little bit, for a little while. He threw the glass into a trash barrel.

  From the grocery on the other side of the street came shouts and cheers. From the barbershop, from the dentist’s office. Someone was running along the library path, past the three sailors on the bench—but there were twenty people on the bench by now, there were thirty! She raced slantwise toward him, crossing the street without seeing its inebriates. Her hair streamed backward like a figurehead’s.

  He saw that she was not laughing, not crying, not shouting, not delirious with delight. She was raging. Her fury was finally unleashed. He caught her as she tried to run past. She gasped, tensed, raised her fists. Then she recognized him, and threw herself moaning into his embrace. They stood like tens of thousands of celebrants across their mad nation, locked in victory. He felt his dying staunched by her wrath, her passionate unsubmissiveness. It was as if she were a savage new drug, untried, unproven: a last desperate chance. She arched her back and gazed at him for a moment, the blue flames of her eyes seeming to lick his forehead, his nose, his chin, his forehead again—though perhaps she was merely avoiding looking anywhere else, down at his soggy trousers, for instance, whose wetness she could surely feel through her own. Then she turned her head rapidly from side to side, making her hair shake with the force of the refusal. He released her. She flew into their bar. He slogged toward home, drenched but not defeated, not yet defeated, not yet.

  VAQUITA

  “SOMEDAY,” SAID THE MINISTER OF HEALTH to her deputy assistant, “you must fly me to one of those resort towns on the edge of the lake. Set me up in a striped tent. Send in kids who need booster shots. The mayor and I will split a bottle of cold Spanish wine; then we will blow up the last storehouse of canned milk …”

  The minister paused. Caroline, the deputy, was looking tired. “Lina, what godforsaken place am I visiting tomorrow?” the minister asked.

  “Campo del Norte,” came the answer. “Water adequate, sewage okay, no cholera, frequent dysentery …”

  Señora Marta Perera de Lefkowitz, minister of health, listened and memorized. Her chin was slightly raised, her eyelids half lowered over pale eyes. This was the pose that the newspapers caricatured most often. Pro-government papers did it more or less lovingly—in their cartoons the minister resembled an inquisitive cow. Opposition newspapers accentuated the lines under Señora Perera’s eyes and adorned her mouth with a cigarette, and never omitted the famous spray of diamonds on her lapel.

  “There has been some unrest,” Caroline went on.

  Señora Perera dragged on a cigarette—the fourth of her daily five. She usually smoked it at this late-afternoon hour, in Caroline’s soothing presence. The ministerial office was large and white, with beautifully carved walls. Gray oblongs indicated the recent presence of paintings. The draperies looked like a collection of ribbons.

  “What kind of unrest?” the señora asked.

  “A family was exiled.”

  “For which foolishness?”

  The deputy consulted her notes. “They gave information to an Australian writing an exposé of smuggling in Latin America.”

  “Horrifying. Soon someone will suggest that New York launders our money. Please continue.”

  “Otherwise, the usual. Undernourishment. Malnourishment. Crop failures. Over-fecundity.”

  Señora Perera let her eyelids drop all the way. Lactation had controlled fertility for centuries, had kept population numbers steady. In a single generation the formula industry had changed everything; now there was a new baby in every wretched family every year. She opened her eyes. “Television?”

  “No. A few radios. Seventy kilometers away there’s a town with a movie house.”

  Golden dreams. “The infirmary—what does it need?”

  Again a shuffling of papers. “Needles, gloves, dehydration kits, tetanus vaccines, cigarettes—”

  A trumpet of gunfire interrupted the list.

  The minister and her deputy exchanged a glance and stopped talking for a minute. The gunshots were not repeated.

  “They will deport me soon,” Señora Perera remarked.

  “You could leave of your own accord,” Caroline said softly.

  “That idea stinks of cow shit,” Señora Perera said, but she said it in Polish. Caroline waited. “I’m not finished meddling,” the señora added, in an inaudible conflation of the languages. “They’ll boot me to Miami,” she continued in an ordinary tone, now using only Spanish. “The rest of the government is already there, except for Perez, who I think is dead. They’ll want my flat, too. Will you rescue Gidalya?” Gidalya was the minister’s parrot. “And while you’re at it, Lina, rescue this department. They’ll ask you to run the health services, whichever putz they call minister. They’ll appreciate that only you can do it—you with principles, but no politics. So do it.”

  “Take my bird, take my desk, take my job …” Caroline sighed.

  “Then that’s settled.”

  They went on to talk of departmental matters—the medical students’ rebellion in the western city; the girl born with no hands who had been found in a squatters’ camp, worshipped as a saint. Then they rose.

  Caroline said, “Tomorrow morning Luis will call for you at five.”

  “Luis? Where is Diego?”

  “Diego has defected.”

  “The scamp. B
ut Luis, that garlic breath—spare me.”

  “An escort is customary,” Caroline reminded her.

  “This escort may bring handcuffs.”

  The two women kissed formally; all at once they embraced. Then they left the cool, almost-empty ministry by different exits. Caroline ran down to the rear door; her little car was parked in back. Señora Perera took the grand staircase that curved into the tiled reception hall. Her footsteps echoed. The guard tugged at the massive oak door until it opened. He pushed back the iron gate. He bowed. “Good evening, Señora Ministra.”

  She waited at the bus stop—a small, elderly woman with dyed red hair. She wore one of the dark, straight-skirted suits that, whatever the year, passed for last season’s fashion. The diamonds glinted on its lapel.

  Her bus riding was considered an affectation. In fact it was an indulgence. In the back of an official limousine she felt like a corpse. But on the bus she became again a young medical student in Prague, her hair in a single red braid. Sixty years ago she had taken trams everywhere—to cafés; to the apartment of her lover; to her Czech tutor, who became a second lover. In her own room she kept a sweet songbird. At the opera she wept at Smetana. She wrote to her parents in Kraków whenever she needed money. All that was before the Nazis, before the war, before the partisans; before the year hiding out in a peasant’s barn, her only company a cow; before liberation, DP camp, and the ship that had sailed west to the New World.

  Anyone who cared could learn her history. At least once a year somebody interviewed her on radio or television. But the citizens were interested mainly in her life with the cow. “Those months in the barn—what did you think about?” She was always asked that question. “Everything,” she sometimes said. “Nothing,” she said, sometimes. “Breast-feeding,” she barked, unsmiling, during the failed campaign against the formula companies. They called her La Vaca—The Cow.

  The bus today was late but not yet very late, considering that a revolution was again in progress. So many revolutions had erupted since she arrived in this plateau of a capital, her mother gasping at her side. The Coffee War first, then the Colonels’ Revolt, then the … Here was the bus, half full. She grasped its doorpost and, grunting, hauled herself aboard. The driver, his eyes on the diamonds, waved her on; no need to show her pass.

  The air swam with heat. All the windows were closed against stray bullets. Señora Perera pushed her own window open. The other passengers made no protest. And so, on the ride home, the minister, leaning on her hand, was free to smell the diesel odor of the center of the city, the eucalyptus of the park, the fetidness of the river, the thick citrus stink of the remains of that day’s open market, and finally the hibiscus scent of the low hills. No gunshots disturbed the journey. She closed the window before getting off the bus and nodded at the five people who were left.

  In the apartment, Gidalya was sulking. New visitors always wondered at a pet so uncolorful—Gidalya was mostly brown. “I was attracted by his clever rabbinic stare,” she’d explain. Gidalya had not mastered even the usual dirty words; he merely squawked, expressing a feeble rage. “Hola,” Señora Perera said to him now. He gave her a resentful look. She opened his cage, but he remained on his perch, picking at his breast feathers.

  She toasted two pieces of bread and sliced some papaya and poured a glass of wine and put everything on a tray. She took the tray out onto the patio and, eating and smoking, watched the curfewed city below. She could see a bit of the river, with its Second Empire bridge and ornamental stanchions. Half a mile north was the plaza, where the cathedral of white volcanic stone was whitened further by flood lamps; this pale light fizzed through the leafy surround. Bells rang faintly. Ten o’clock.

  Señora Perera carried her empty tray back into the kitchen. She turned out the lights in the living room and flung a scarf over Gidalya’s cage. “Good night, possibly for the last time,” she said, first in Spanish and then in Polish. In her bedroom, she removed the diamonds from her lapel and fastened them onto the jacket she would wear in the morning. She got ready for bed, got into bed, and fell instantly asleep.

  SOME BITS of this notable widow’s biography were not granted to interviewers. She might reminisce about her early days here—the resumption of medical studies and the work for the new small party on the left—but she never mentioned the expensive abortion paid for by her rich, married lover. She spoke of the young Federico Perera, of their courtship, of his growing prominence in the legal profession, of her party’s increasing strength and its association with various coalitions. She did not refer to Federico’s infidelities, though she knew their enemies made coarse jokes about the jewelry he gave her whenever he took a new mistress. Except for the diamonds, all the stuff was fake.

  In her fifties she had served as minister of culture; under her warm attention both the national orchestra and the national theater thrived. She was proud of that, she told interviewers. She was proud, too, of her friendship with the soprano Olivia Valdez, star of light opera, now retired and living in Jerusalem; but she never spoke of Olivia. She spoke instead of her husband’s merry North American nieces, who had often flown down from Texas. She did not divulge that the young Jewish hidalgos she presented to these girls found them uncultivated. She did not mention her own child-lessness. She made few pronouncements about her adopted country; the famous quip that revolution was its national pastime continued to embarrass her. The year with the cow? I thought about everything. I thought about nothing.

  What kind of cow was it?

  Dark brown, infested with ticks, which I got, too.

  Your name for her?

  My Little Cow, in two or three tongues.

  The family who protected you?

  Righteous gentiles.

  Your parents?

  In the camps. My father died. My mother survived. I brought her to this country.

  … whose air she could never breathe. Whose slippery words she refused to learn. I myself did not need to study the language; I remembered it from a few centuries earlier, before the expulsion from Spain. Nothing lightened Mama’s mood; she wept every night until she died.

  Señora Perera kept these last gloomy facts from interviewers. “The people here—they are like family,” she occasionally said. “Stubborn as pigs,” she once added, in a cracked mutter that no one should have heard, but the woman with the microphone had swooped on the phrase as if it were an escaping kitten.

  “You love this sewer,” Olivia had shouted during her raging departure. “You have no children to love, and you have a husband not worth loving, and you don’t love me anymore because my voice is cracking and my belly sags. So you love my land, which I at least have the sense to hate. You love the oily generals. The aristocrats scratching themselves. The intellectuals snoring through concerts. The revolutionaries in undershirts. The parrots, even! You are besotted!”

  It was a farewell worthy of Olivia’s talents. Their subsequent correspondence had been affectionate. Olivia’s apartment in Israel would become Señora Perera’s final home; she’d fly straight to Jerusalem from Miami. The diamonds would support a few years of simple living. But for a little while longer she wanted to remain amid the odors, the rap blaring from pickup trucks, the dance halls, the pink evangelical churches, the blue school uniforms, the high-way’s dust, the river’s tarnish. To remain in this wayward place that was everything a barn was not.

  LUIS WAS WAITING for her at dawn, standing beside the limousine. He wore a mottled jumpsuit.

  “Much trouble last night?” she asked, peering in vain into his sunglasses while trying to avoid his corrupt breath.

  “No,” he belched, omitting her title, omitting even the honorific. This disrespect allowed her to get into the front of the car like a pal.

  At the airport they climbed the steps of a tipsy little plane. Luis stashed his Uzi in the rear next to the medical supplies. He took the copilot’s seat. Señora Perera and the nurse—a Dutch volunteer with passable Spanish—settled themselves on the
other two buckets. Señora Perera hoped to watch the land fall away, but from behind the pilot’s shoulder she could see only sky, clouds, one reeling glimpse of highway, and then the mountainside. She reconstructed the city from memory: its mosaic of dwellings enclosed in a ring of hills, its few tall structures rising in the center like an abscess. The river, the silly Parisian bridge. The plaza. People were gathering there now, she guessed, to hear today’s orations.

  The Dutch nurse was huge, a goddess. She had to hunch her shoulders and let her big hands dangle between her thighs. Some downy thatch sprouted on her jaw; what a person to spend eternity with if this light craft should go down, though there was no reason you should be stuck forever with the dullard you happened to die with. Señora Perera planned to loll on celestial pillows next to Olivia. Federico might join them every millennium or so, good old beast, and Gidalya, too, prince of rabbis released from his avian corpus, his squawks finally making sense … She offered her traveling flask to the nurse. “Dutch courage?” she said in English. The girl smiled without comprehension, but she did take a swig.

  In less than an hour they had flown around the mountain and were landing on a cracked tar field. A helicopter stood waiting. Señora Perera and the nurse used the latrine. A roll of toilet paper hung on a nail, for their sakes.

  And now they were rising in the chopper. They swung across the hide of the jungle. She looked down on trees flaming with orange flowers and trees foaming with white ones. A sudden clearing was immediately swallowed up again by squat, broad-leaved trees. Lime green parrots rose up together—Gidalya’s rich cousins.

  They landed in the middle of the town square, beside a chewed bandstand. A muscular functionary shook their hands. This was Señor Rey, she recalled from Lina’s instructions. Memory remained her friend; she could still recite the names of the cranial nerves. Decades ago, night after night, she had whispered them to the cow. She had explained the structures of various molecules. Ma Petite Vache … She had taught the cow the Four Questions.