Norte

by Edmundo Paz Soldán

  A huge American flag swayed in the wind high above the rotunda at the center of campus. I was like a spy sussing out suspicious faces in a neighborhood I had once belonged to, homing in on any expression of annoyance at being required to get out of bed and go to class. But no, not here. You’d be hard-pressed to find any sign of skepticism in this place. They all had the same hopeful air. No dazed passengers in this boat. Same as me back in the day, until crisis struck and I decided to jump off the deep end.

  But that wasn’t the only reason, and I knew it. It wasn’t only because classes at the university had seemed like a long parenthesis in my life, as though I wasn’t really living in the “real world.” The only good thing to come of the two years working on my master’s degree was being forced to reconsider the doctorate. I was racked with doubts and felt compelled to create something of my own. Always talking about other people’s creativity bored me. It came down to one basic truth: this wasn’t my world, I didn’t belong.

  I yawned. I hadn’t slept well. My cell phone had startled me awake at five a.m. It was my dad, sloshed, telling me how much he loved me, asking when was I going to visit, maybe I’d never see him again, he wanted to join the struggle for Santa Cruz’s independence from Bolivia. From the fog of my dreams, I asked him what on earth he would do there. Who is going to hire you at your age? You only have a few friends left there anyway. I poked fun, calling him Pedro and saying he was like that little shepherd boy who cried wolf so many times nobody believed him anymore. He hung up on me.

  I took the elevator to the fourth floor of Gwain Hall. I knew Sam would be in class, I’d calculated the time of my visit to avoid running into him; he would have asked me what I was doing, and I would have said that I’d come to pick up my mail, then he would ask why I hadn’t just asked him to pick it up for me, why go to so much hassle? With Sam, everything was complicated.

  The secretary, Martina, stood up to greet me. “Our missing person!” She gave me a kiss: “So are you reconsidering? We’re holding out for you to change your mind.”

  The chair, a medievalist who had dedicated his life to drawing a topographic map of the books he taught—Amadís de Gaula, The Poem of the Cid—had told me the door was still open if I wanted to return. All I had to do was let him know a semester in advance. That was eight months ago. My renunciation of the program had been registered as a “temporary absence.” Their attention made me feel appreciated, even important, but I knew I was never going to take them up on the offer.

  I said goodbye to Martina and grabbed the mail from the box: subscription renewals for MLA, book offers from the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. As I contemplated the mug shots of the new doctoral students in the hallway, arranged beside their standard-issue descriptions—“she discovered Latin American literature as an adolescent while reading Cien años de soledad during a trip to Mexico,” and “reading the classics allows her to better understand the present; Don Quixote is the first ‘postmo’ novel ever written”—it occurred to me that Samantha had run away from her own world and come to earth, where a family of gravediggers living beside a cemetery adopted her. She had enjoyed a quiet and uneventful childhood until she realized that people from her own planet had begun infiltrating Earth, taking the forms of its ghastly myths: vampires, zombies, and the bogeyman.

  That will be my character’s mythical origin. Neil Gaiman by way of the Transformers. It’s a meta-comic, in fact. Just the type of comic strip an ex-doctoral candidate would come up with.

  The doors to the professors’ offices were closed. Mina Swanson, the Renaissance expert who attracted students to her classes through audacious titles (“Sex, Lies and No Videotapes Whatsoever: La Celestina”); Joan Barral, the fervent Catalanist who used his articles to crusade against Catalan writers who expressed themselves in Castilian; Tadeo Konwicki, the Pole who analyzed Elmer Mendoza according to Žižek and Jean-Luc Nancy; or Ruth Camacho-Stokes, the expert in Latin American literature who was preparing a study about how Chicano art influences contemporary narrative. Taped to her door was a poster advertising next year’s exhibit centered on the work of Martín Ramírez, the recently canonized self-taught midcentury artist. The poster was a reproduction of one of his images: a train coming out of a tunnel through hills formed by wavy lines. I didn’t find it particularly interesting. I wasn’t into the naive style.

  I stopped at the door just beside the elevator. Calvin & Hobbes comic strips were taped to the frosted window. It seemed as if nothing had changed.

  The light was on. I knocked at the door. Footsteps. The door opened and a bald man’s pate poked out. His eyes were devoid of emotion when he saw me.

  “Hey, what a surprise. Come in, come on in.”

  He left the door open a sliver and invited me to have a seat. His white shirt was wrinkled, and the seat of his corduroy pants drooped a little—the typical absent-minded professor look. I asked how he was doing.

  “Having authority issues, as usual. I was the type of kid who bit his teachers. And the deans are full of shit. You can’t imagine how much they’re fucking things over.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I prefer not to talk about it; it puts me in a bad mood. I’ll let you know some other time.”

  There was a calendar on his desk showing Vasto, the Abruzzo town where the Colamarino family came from. Fabián used to spend summers in Vasto; he said it was the perfect spot for writing since it was isolated, had an incredible beach and great ice cream and pizza (“an oasis of peace amidst a hell of boredom”). He had promised to take me with him sometime, and I’d believed him. That was before I learned how short-lived his promises were.

  The table was crammed with books and manuscripts.

  “They write more than what we can read, you know. How are you going to get by?”

  “Honestly, I read fewer and fewer novels. I read less in general. They publish so much crap these days!” He waved his hand at a pile of books with a gesture of contempt. “Go ahead, take anything you’d like, take it all.”

  I remembered the staggering clarity of his ideas. I took his seminar during my second semester and experienced those flashes of epiphany in his class. I took furious notes and wanted to be just like Fabián Colamarino: a literature professor who could dazzle students using Ángel Rama’s ideas to renovate nineteenth-century literature. What was his secret? He tackled cutting-edge ideas without reading from notes, took off on the craziest, most imaginative flights of fancy, and always managed to land safely, a little worse for the wear maybe, but safely nonetheless. This seduction of the mind landed me in his bed by the third semester. For three months I fell prey to his competitive angst, his ability to work into the wee hours, the traumas and fears that cut him to the quick, the escape valve of alcohol and drug abuse to cope with being hailed as one of his generation’s most brilliant scholars. There were fabulous days, but I still haven’t gotten over my sudden change of heart.

  I picked up the novel of an Ecuadoran writer and asked myself where Fabián’s bitterness was coming from. He often complained about “the lack of poetry in life,” but his enthusiasm for books, music, film, ideas usually overcame the muck he saw everywhere, threatening to suck us all in.

  “I haven’t been reading much lately either,” I said. “Novels, I mean.”

  “But you left the department for a reason, didn’t you? How’s the drawing coming along?”

  “The ideas are there. But it’s not enough. You need discipline and patience, and I don’t know if I have that.”

  “The learning curve is long. You’ll do fine.”

  I smiled: that’s how he won me over. My dad had laughed at me when I told him I wanted to study to become a video-game designer. When I was fourteen, a high school teacher in Santa Cruz found one of my illustrated notebooks and communicated her concern over seeing me squandering my talent. My brother Toño’s favorite sport was making fun of my superhero stories. Everyone told me how ridiculous I was to take my calling s
eriously. It was barely even a hobby.

  When I thought we were familiar enough, I showed Fabián some of my short stories and a notebook with storyboards. He criticized them ruthlessly, told me they were rehashes of Borges and Philip K. Dick, but he also encouraged me: there was talent here, the drawings were good and I didn’t lack imagination; it was a matter of perseverance, hard work. They were my first words of encouragement; he made me take myself seriously. Believe in myself. For a while I thought they would forever bind me to Fabián. For someone whose family background wasn’t conducive to becoming an artist, getting that kind of approval was intoxicating.

  “The important thing is that I’m drawing,” I said. “Honestly, I think the days for literature as we know it are numbered. It’s the century of the graphic novel, the vooks, digital novels hooked up to Wikipedia and YouTube.”

  “Yet another voice trying to kill off literature. Get in line.”

  “It’s scholars like you who kill it off a little bit every day: theory as an end in itself, books that can only be read by other academics.”

  There was a pregnant pause. I hadn’t gone there to reveal how angry I was, but it slipped out. I tried to change the subject.

  “How’s your never-ending project coming along?”

  “More and more like Macedonio’s narrating machine. The stories proliferate, but without a common thread tying them together.”

  “Maybe you should respect that chaos.”

  “You should respect it in life, not in literature.”

  The framed cover of Fabián’s book on Modernism hung on the wall. It had recently been translated into English. What must it have felt like to be published so quickly, I wondered, not even three years into assistant professorship; his work was now required reading, praised by everyone. At first I had admired the book, but now it almost seemed like a shameless confession. It was hardly coincidental that Fabián chose that period of time in which the turn-of-the-century poets rejected the new society of the “bourgeois king” (to use Rubén Darío’s expression) and instead locked themselves away in what the Uruguayan poet Herrera y Reissig called the Torre de los Panoramas. It was hardly a coincidence that this ivory tower had become the ideal metaphor for Fabián to develop his own argument: Latin American literature seemed to make social and political themes central, but in truth the writer, the artist, was alienated from that world and far more concerned with trying to build a refuge from the bustle and vulgarity of modern life. That was Fabián to me.

  “You should let me read something.”

  “I’m the only one who can understand what I have so far.”

  “Well, at least you’re writing.”

  “I write and I write. And dream that I write that I’m writing.”

  He brushed one of his manuscripts with his fingers. Is that what he’s working on now? A Unified Theory Capable of Explaining the Totality of Latin American Literature. A wild, feverish, neurotic project that had consumed him over a number of years: he stopped publishing, stopped going to meetings. When I met him he had just gotten tenure, but the irony was that in his quest for some rigorous order in literature, his life had fallen into complete chaos. Mayra, his wife—a Dominican woman who worked in the university library—had disappeared one day, leaving a note that announced her return to Santo Domingo and warned that he’d better not come looking for her. He started canceling more classes than he gave, and his addictions were getting the best of him.

  He coughed. I looked at the books on the shelves. Bhabha, Derrida, Sarlo, García Canclini, Culler, Spivak. I gathered up my nerve.

  “This isn’t what I came here for. You can read and write whatever you damn well please. Like you always have. It’s just that—I don’t know, I guess I’d just like to understand what happened.”

  The muscles in his face tensed up immediately, he opened his eyes wider, his jaw stiffened, he became more alert.

  “I was straight with you from the get-go, niña, and you agreed. Everything was just fine, until . . . Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame you. I suppose it’s inevitable. One thing always leads to another, and suddenly what began as a roll in the hay ends up at the altar.”

  “What if we gave it another try? I’m willing to accept the conditions.”

  “I don’t know, honestly, I just don’t. I mean, what’s done is done, right?”

  He turned around and went back to his computer and started writing again, as if I didn’t exist. That was his way of dismissing me.

  He told me one time that I’d never be able to understand his despair after Mayra left him. I’d never met her myself; she left a year before I came into the picture. He said he finally resigned himself to the fact that she was gone, and could almost empathize with her. He’s so edgy, and his heart is autistic; he lost his way somewhere in the confines of his own closed world and had forgotten about her. It had clearly been a traumatic experience: Mayra was always on his mind, and he wasn’t truly over her yet. I figured the reason he avoided becoming involved in another stable relationship was for fear that I might take off one night, just as she had. He couldn’t face losing someone else that way again. He preferred to anticipate the risk, control any possible futures that could get out of hand. But now there I was, the one who really didn’t know how to live with losing someone. In spite of myself, I had become just like him, someone who couldn’t suffer a broken heart.

  Yes, I fully understood his despair. But he didn’t understand mine.

  I could hear voices and footsteps in the hallway. I stood up, turning my back to the door to hide my face. I grabbed a book by an Ecuadoran writer from his desk.

  “How is this one?”

  “They say he’s the best thing to emerge from Ecuador. I wouldn’t expect a whole lot, though. It’s like saying a soccer player is great because he has the most goals in the Albanian league.”

  I walked out of his office without saying goodbye.

  2

  Stockton, 1931–1948

  The ward where Martín had been assigned a bed was overcrowded. There were cots arranged in row after and row like soldiers’ barracks in times of war. Could this place be set up for prisoners of war? People doubled up in spaces usually allotted for a single person, or took the floor, and if they were lucky they got a blanket, maybe a pillow. Some fancied sleeping underneath the beds. Men and women in white uniforms came and went at all hours, and some of the old folks spent all night just staring at the wall. Others urinated wherever and whenever they felt the need. The violent patients were the worst, they attacked their companions for any reason at all. Martín learned from the start not to look others straight in the eye.

  The windows near the beds were protected by mesh screens that allowed glimpses of the trees and shrubs in the yard outside, the stone archway where carriages came in, the waves of golden hills in the distance, the train that passed by regularly at noon and again at sundown. The tracks skirted a side of the building where the yard ended, separated by a row of trees and a brick wall.

  The sign atop the main entrance read STOCKTON STATE HOSPITAL.

  His ward mates’ heads were shaved just like his. Their cheeks were pale and they had a vacant, muddled look in their eyes. Several were missing teeth; others had a flattened skull or swollen lips or a neck that was a little too long. Their bodies made a constant racket: they hiccupped or belched or squealed or hollered or bawled. At night he would hear moans that sounded like those of a dying dog, wails that made his soul shudder, kept him alert.

  What kind of fuss did he make? Aaaaaahhh. Aaahhhh. Eeeeeaaaaa.

  Nothing too alarming, he reckoned.

  All sorts of things came out those bodies. First were all the noises, but then there were liquids and solids too. Puke and mucus at the tables. Piss and shit in the hallways. Diarrhea and pus in the beds. Blood and tears in the bathrooms. The smell was hard to take at the beginning. The stench of ammonia hit him hard in the nostrils the first time he got there, and overpowered everything. But the ammonia bl
ended with other odors too, like feces. Eventually he grew accustomed, though.

  What sorts of things came out of him? Germs, lots of germs every time he had a coughing spell. Saliva would coat his lips and a trickle of drool would hang from the edge of his mouth.

  They bathed him and shaved him nice and smooth. Most people were kind enough to him, though there was one orderly who never smiled, who was always cross and called him a “filthy Mexican.” He recognized the second word but not the first. Filti? Filti? The bathroom was chock-full of bottles and towels and bandages and rubber tubes, and there was a metal shelf with trays and little balls of cotton. He knew how to shower by himself, but he let them do it since they offered to, why not? He liked when the water was so hot his skin turned red and even hurt a little, as if a thousand needles were poking his body.

  He closed his eyes in the bathtub and the nurses disappeared. Once in a while one of them figured out a way to sneak in there behind his pupils. Eh, what do you think you’re doing there? He felt like shoving them out, making them leave that place. Why can’t they just let him be, leave him to enjoy the black night and twinkling stars of that dark world behind his eyes? But he always ended up feeling like a wretch, so he opened his eyes and brought them back again. There they were, smiling at him, so happy, happy. Pobres idiotas. They’re lucky he decided to let them stay for now. But if they make any trouble, there will be consequences. It was easy to get irritated. To want payback for the awful things they put him through. How proud María Santa Ana would be if she saw him now. A prisoner who endured, who didn’t surrender. A prisoner capable of bringing his enemies to their knees. They thought they had him under arrest, but they were sadly mistaken, it was the other way around, he had arrested them. The war was raging, but here he was way up north keeping the enemy from going off to fight in his country. He kept them distracted taking care of him. All of this was buying time for María Santa Ana. He knew for sure she was no turncoat. She was putting on an act just like he was doing here, pretending to be a prisoner, preparing the way for liberation. The churches will be reborn. What was destroyed will be undestroyed. What was burned will be unburned. Viva Cristo Rey!