Love Enough

by Dionne Brand

  Lia and Germain had come one right after the other and so they were practically like twins, and like ghosts. “Where’s your ghost?” Mercede would ask if one of them was out playing and the other one inside. And then if she found one at one foster care and couldn’t find the other, “Where’s Ghost?” she would ask Lia. “Where’s Ghost?” she would ask Germain. Lia didn’t like turning into someone else, or turning into nothing, she hated that word. Germain took it as his real name.

  When they were nine and ten, Mercede took them to Renata, their nonna, and Joe, their nonno. Lia recalls they stayed there for two relatively peaceful summers until the fights between Nonno and Mercede, each time she visited, became screaming and violent. Mercede said Renata and Joe were trying to steal her children from her. When Mercede visited, Nonno changed from a quiet gruff man into a lump of red charcoal. This is when Lia decided she had to outlast Mercede and everyone else. The boisterous cursing fights when Nonno called Mercede prostituta and Nonna called Mercede demone and Lia watched them while Germain watched the television. Then is when she decided that you had to keep the noise of other people out of you. This is when she knew the only recourse was to watch and wait. Wait, because you can’t change people, you can only change yourself. And pray to God to get to sixteen and declare yourself an adult. Lia had done this at last, three years ago. Mercede read the court papers with sadness, relief and admiration.

  It seemed to Lia that she saw Mercede between bruisings. Mercede was beautiful and each set of bruises strangely accentuated the beautiful part of her like an accusation. How come she was ruining it, the beautiful part said; how come she allowed it to be ruined, it cried. Mercede chose lovers who could ruin the beautiful. She walked right into them like walking into a wall or like walking into speeding traffic. All of Mercede’s men punished her for being beautiful, in the end. And all of Mercede’s men punished her in the end for choosing them. These men did not know what to do with beauty; at first they thought it was good luck and were surprised, and then they thought it was bad luck and hated it. The thing is, they expected wealth to come along with beauty. When wealth didn’t come along after Mercede, they asked her why; if they had beauty why didn’t they have wealth too? These were poor men and even though they thought beauty would be enough, it wasn’t enough. Wealth did not follow beauty. Mercede caused jealousy and her men loved that, but when it ran out, they blamed Mercede, accusing her of sharing their beauty and squandering their luck. But what about me, Mercede yelled at them, what does this beauty bring me, assholes!?

  Mercede never mentioned Lia and Germain’s father, who was one of these men, except to say that he had gone to Alberta to find his luck all over again. He had left a small wound, a leaf-shaped scar, a gingko tree leaf on the forearm she’d raised to protect her face. Lia and Germain don’t remember him. When they think of him, because of Mercede’s story, a map of Alberta appears.

  Where Lia had decided to simply wait out her time with Mercede, Germain wanted to stay in that time until Mercede was perfect for him. The perfect mother. In the end he had the same kind of unassuageable love hunger as Mercede had. The same kind of burning love hollow. And of course Mercede never satisfied it. So it turned into a war of love between them. That meant volatile days, up and down days. They see-sawed, both of them. When he behaved like a good boy Mercede took off with a new love. And when Mercede was straight and sober, he broke bad, bringing the police to the door for shoplifting, for threatening, for spray-painting, for smoking dope. Lia got out of the way of that war at sixteen. She’d spent the last year of high school in a group home, and found a job in a laundromat, then in a No Frills, then in a Wendy’s, then as a telemarketer, then in a mall kiosk selling phone covers, then in a dollar store and finally in a TV packaging plant in Etobicoke. She moved almost every month over two years until she rented that room next to Jasmeet’s on the second floor of Mrs. Cho’s.

  And Lia doesn’t miss them. Not the way you miss people and want to have them with you. If she misses them, it’s the way you miss the skin where you burned yourself and there’s a scar now. She doesn’t miss the noise of them, the clanging unpeaceful noise. Not a bit.

  SEVEN

  It’s difficult to say anything conclusive about love, but June once travelled on the back of a motorcycle for it. They left Toronto in early August on a humid day. In August, always, there are days of stifling humidity, as if the lake is boiling over. That year the atmosphere was claustrophobic. That was when she had the Chilean lover. It was in the time of Pinochet, and the Chilean had arrived in the city, fleeing. A journalist and a musician, the Chilean was guilty of all the things the regime said he was guilty of. Canada was the only way to avoid jail or death. June was on several solidarity committees for revolutions around the world. Chileno Solidaridad was one, and she had offered to put the Chilean journalist up for a while. This is how things were in 1975 through to the late 80s. This is how you fell in love. You would offer to put someone up, someone fleeing persecution or terror, and the next thing was, you were, euphemistically, sleeping with them. This is how love was then. They say these situations happen in war, when you are afraid—it affects some people this way. Like the way plants flower when they’re in peril. Plants flower, people copulate. June wasn’t in peril, not actually, but she felt in peril. Everyone felt imperilled at the time. The world was in peril. It still is, but not everyone feels that now. The Chilean was in trouble and June became caught up in the thrill of his endangerment and then one thing led to an inevitable other.

  It was the summer too. All June’s summers were explosive back then. Vital. She woke up each morning, her brain luminescent. So much to do, so much to think, she put on phosphorous clothing to go out. She misses that. Those wonderful sleepless nights with stunning arguments and dazzling theories and finally falling into bed breathless with fucking, exhausted and drunk on visions about a coming world. Then she felt at the vertex of mind and body.

  The Chilean was exciting but not very good at English so June had to learn some Spanish. She liked the sound of the language. And his name in it: Isador. It sounded like “adore.” The whole language seemed so … urgent.

  Sex didn’t need English, of course, but love did. And so June couldn’t say for certain that she loved the Chilean. Revolutions were so wonderful for sex. Okay, it wasn’t that love needed English, per se, but at the time June determined that it needed a common language that wasn’t sex. And as much as people might think otherwise, sex is a limited idiom, not a whole language—it gets exhausted. Like a conversation that peters out into what we don’t know and can’t express. No doubt there are bursts of eloquence, but the prosody isn’t always affective. And sometimes, just sometimes, the sex becomes less and less compelling like a stilted idiolect.

  Not that June was sentimental or needed or even wanted a sentimental kind of love. In fact, she was a solitary person and Isador’s presence in her apartment after a time became tiresome. For example, he hummed when he ate and this was innocent enough and even interesting for June from an anthropological view. She was taking a minor in anthropology and surmised that the origin of this humming might well be found in hunter/gatherer peoples. But that thought and fascination was temporary, as temporary as sex, so the habit began to annoy her after a brief while. And Isador never washed a dish. He smiled his most charming while saying to June, “Pero mujer, soy un hombre,” to which, when she could, in Spanish, June said, “Pero hombre, no soy tu madre.”

  After the initial weeks, when Isador’s endangered status was the leaven in the relationship, and after a few more weeks when June felt embarrassed that she was growing tired of him, not as a revolutionary but as a person, she began staying out late. Mostly she was at the Sigmund Samuel Library at the university, sitting in the stacks, reading a fluorescent book, Being and Nothingness or One-Dimensional Man or Return to the Source. She was at the University of Toronto at the time doing a degree in political science. The ordinariness of the domestic with Isador dimmed an elem
ent of her she wanted to keep, namely a sharpness, a solitary intelligence.

  Isador was quite popular—he was not the only revolutionary in town, but he was both dangerous and brilliant. June had hoped to see this side of him more often, but understandably, who can keep that up twenty-four hours a day? Most of us have a public self that may well be sexy and daring and then we go home and flop down on the sofa and retreat into our dimwitted vestigial selves. It is no insult to say that the care and feeding, the upkeep of the human body, the physical self, is not unlike the task that zookeepers have each day. So much forensic effort is necessary to keep this animal at bay—toilets, mirrors, soap and water. One comes upon this presence abruptly when sex wanes or falls away. Especially in a relationship of short duration where one hasn’t had the time or compassion to forgive the inconvenient animal in us all.

  Montero Baet was his last name and he had worked for La Prensa as a freelancer. He was also coincidentally a musician in the university café life in Santiago at the time. The former played only a minor role in the full indictment against him: the truth is, everyone with even the vaguest association with democracy was in trouble with the Pinochet dictatorship and its American friends. It was his singing that got him into trouble, and his guitar. Isador sang songs to friends who had been arrested and disappeared. And when this criminal side of him emerged—he laughed when he said that—people at the university café and the newspaper were detained. He got away.

  All this led to June and Isador riding the Trans-Canada Highway on a motorcycle in the summer of ’75 on a political tour. Some who know nothing about South America might say Isador was pretending to be Che. At any rate, June discovered she didn’t like the wind in her face as much as she had imagined she would. Nor the intimacy of holding Isador around his waist for hours on end. There is intimacy and then there is intimacy. The intimacy of trusting someone with your life on a motorcycle is different from the intimacy of having them enter you, strange as that may seem. And love, love as they knew it, love as she knew it, was dwindling.

  They were between Regina and Saskatoon. June saw a horse. She looked back until it was out of sight, though in that terrain nothing seemed to go out of sight. The sky was big and the land went on forever—you could be standing in one spot the whole time. When the horse disappeared June saw a sign saying “Blackstrap” and said to Isador, “Stop.” June got off in the middle of nowhere, took her backpack off the bike and said goodbye to the Chilean.

  It was a passionate goodbye but she simply had to return to the serious work of finding a job in order to keep the apartment in Toronto and to carry on welcoming refugees from political terror from all over the world. She was never one for small dirty rooms, and the bar life the Chilean seemed to love just turned her off. Isador understood, he too was growing a little tired of this ball-busting morena. He set off to write his own diaries, heading west. She waited on the side of the road for a Greyhound. It didn’t come but she’d seen the horse. Soon enough the obligatory pick-up came down the road. By ways and means, June passed through Bladworth and Davidson and Craik and Bethune and finally Regina where she took the Greyhound and slept intermittently until Toronto. Between Regina and Toronto there are long monotonous stretches of road, and she would disembark into whatever town or city along the way, buy coffee and get back on to the bus heading east.

  Back in the city, from time to time she heard from Isador who had kept going till he came to Vancouver. There he had met another June or perhaps Julia and settled in. Over the years she learned that they had moved to Victoria and had children. What an escape, June thought.

  June worked El Salvador and Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe, then Nicaragua, putting up one revolutionary after another and getting rid of them by all sorts of means. She was, in this way, in terms of love, in terms of sex, indiscriminate. The Nicaraguan, for example, was a cigarette-voiced clandestina from Estelí. June was electrified as Beatriz gave an intense speech in a church hall on Bloor Street. Everything about Beatriz was covert, esoteric and riven with intrigue—the way her gaze summed June up in the fifth row and settled somewhere around June’s lips before moving off again. June was jealous when Beatriz’s eyes moved on and settled on someone else. But they returned and stroked June’s throat. Beatriz’s voice was like sandpaper and after that occult interrogation the whole speech was merely a love letter to their impending affair. This was a woman who woke up with a start at one a.m. every night searching for a revolver. Or at June’s neck hoarsely asking, “Quien te mandó y que quieres de mi?” Who sent you to me, indeed.

  Why, why did she always end up with some frightened person in her bed? June had decided not to think too deeply about that. After all, sex was just sex and there was no need to double think it unless you were Catholic or born-again Christian, and June despised these ideologies. If not for the paranoia, and perhaps because of it, Beatriz was the only one June considered keepable. Beatriz had her own life and her own thoughts and wanted nothing from her. Assigned to international work, the Sandinistas called her “undisciplined in the field.” The fifteen thousand bombed by Somoza in Estelí had turned Beatriz’s blood to adrenaline. That would drive anyone mad, June reasoned. She was so fierce she had become a liability to Ortega. She had been decommissioned to diplomacy. Beatriz disappeared, naturally, leaving cigarette burns on the floor beside the bed. She was going to finish the Somocistas off, she said. Quien, Quien te mandó? Who sent you to me?

  When Pinochet was eventually deposed, and this was seventeen years later, Isador appeared on her doorstep. He arrived at the Women’s History Archive where June worked, and she did not recognise him. He looked like a placid man, his cheeks had puffed out, his mouth opened to an avuncular smile. Not the half smile he’d had to the dangerous left side of his face, not the tight jeans or the tight body. Maybe that was all fear back then. It makes some people skinny, the nerves eat away at fat then at muscle. This Isador looked well-fed and happy, content. He said he was going back to Chile, taking his children to see where he was born. He hoped it hadn’t changed and he hoped that it had changed. He came with a little bunch of roses. How sentimental, June thought, then restrained that bitter side of her and thanked him. And why did you find me, she wanted to ask, and what on earth would we have to talk about now?

  June, despite what she thought of herself, was simply utilitarian. She could not understand the finer sentiments of regular people or a concept like friendship. And so, especially when she’d had sex with someone, the warm seconds of human understanding that the other person may have added up, the tiny affections for inclined heads and dimples, the expressions of love, these nostalgias escaped her. So when Isador referred to their time together, which did indeed amount to seven months, and his gratitude to her for helping him through the first months of his life in the country, June was embarrassed. She would never have taken her Chilean for this kind of man.

  “I wanted to see you before going back to Santiago. To thank you.”

  “No need, Isador … it was the struggle … you know, la lucha continual.” June tried to laugh it off but Isador persisted. Obviously he had created a story where she, June, was some kind of heroine.

  “Pero June,” he said, still pronouncing June with an “h” sound at the beginning, “Pero June … you saved my life … I loved you.” In the face of this declaration, what could June do? She thanked him kindly. There was another uncomfortable moment when she did not follow her gratitude with a reciprocal declaration of love. Even love past. His love hung in the archive. June didn’t know what to do with it.

  It was not that June was not a warm person, or a generous person, or a kind person. Her love was simply bigger than the personal. It was bigger than the love individuals have for each other. Not to put too fine a point on it, if she did love Isador, it was not Isador personally but the revolution Isador represented that she loved. She loved the idea of people rising up against injustice and political terror, and insofar as Isador did this, she loved him ent
irely. This impersonal love, this political love was for June a deeper love, a more democratic love, the ethical love.

  “La idea es, June,” he added, and she recalled learning this from him. “La idea es …” meaning anyway, whatever. “Would you like to come to Chile with us? You are my family too.” June had to put an end to this. He was going too far. Imagine she, his wife and children going to Santiago together—how awkward. Ridiculous. Not because there was anything between them, but on the contrary, they were strangers.

  “Isador,” she said, “my work here is very important,” sweeping her arm in a gesture that took in the shabby office of the Women’s History Archive. “I cannot leave it, we have a crucial campaign coming up.” She said this to be kind to Isador and because his request had made her remember why she had taken him in, apart from the sex. Of course there was no campaign, June’s political actions had become smaller and more personal. Her only activity now save working at the archive was a youth Drop-in, in what they called an at-risk neighbourhood. Maybe, she’d thought, maybe with kids, she could begin the process of human liberation sooner. Though actually kids did not need liberating except from normative training. So it was an anti-colonial project of a sort to defend children from the state. The state was merely a dominating machine, anathema to the whole idea of a liberatory life. So Emma Goldman had said, and June was reading Emma Goldman’s Living My Life, more closely now.