The house was unfurnished except for a double mattress that Juan gave them. They waxed the wooden floors and scrubbed. They bought china, cooking utensils, a small table, two straight-backed chairs, a high chair, and a crib at a thrift store. They installed a phone. Rosa bought yards of white muslin material to make curtains.
At the Seven Seas, Antonio met Hugo Gutierrez, who was remodeling his house on Strawberry Ridge, and Antonio began working with him. He earned about one hundred and forty dollars a week.
Hugo Gutierrez was an Argentinian in his late sixties. He was a short, wiry man with a calm manner. Antonio liked being with him and liked speaking Spanish with him.
Hugo was building an extension onto his house. He and Antonio tore out an outside wall and replaced it temporarily with a black plastic cloth. They laid a concrete foundation. Antonio hauled away debris in his truck to the dump. He dug in the ground, measured, sawed, and nailed studs. He exulted in the work. At last he was learning how to build. From the house the Bay was visible, as well as the hills of Tiburon. Antonio could see boats moored in the harbor from where he stood on the ladder. To the west were brown grass-covered hills that stretched towards Bolinas. A wind blew through his hair, chilled him through his sweater. He hammered in nail after nail, stud after stud to form the framework. He was tired and damp with perspiration. The sound of the hammer was unpleasantly loud, as if it were drilling into his ears.
Hugo, who was framing a window space, paused and lit a cigarette.
“Take a break, Antonio!” he shouted in Spanish.
Antonio shrugged and kept on working. He wanted to show that he was an exceptionally hard worker, despite the fact that he was often late to work in the morning. He wanted to stay with Hugo long enough to learn how to build a house from the ground. Then he and Rosa could buy a lot and build their own house.
At five o’clock when the sun began to set, they put away their tools for the day. Hugo invited him into the kitchen for a beer.
In the kitchen was Hugo’s wife, who seemed a placid woman. She got out two cans of Budweiser, glasses, a plate of pretzels, and then vanished.
They sat down at the table.
“This is a fascist country,” said Antonio.
“How so?” asked Hugo.
“It’s only a false democracy. The individual really has no choice in the government. We’re controlled by corporations.”
“You have a point,” said Hugo with increased interest. He spoke a cultivated Spanish. “Before I retired, I worked for General Motors. I was the one who designed the electrical circuits on new cars. I remember how involved the chief executives were. They were involved with big legislation.”
Antonio and Hugo talked on about General Motors, about the Perón dictatorship. Hugo described how he had left Argentina as a young engineer, before Perón ascended to power, and about the fear he felt among his relatives when he returned to visit.
Antonio drank his third can of beer. Hugo was still on his first. Antonio’s voice grew louder and more excited, without his realizing it. A sense of urgency came over him and a sense of panic as he talked, and the tension kept increasing. He could perceive the Argentinian inwardly shrinking, even slightly averting his eyes, indicating that it was time for Antonio to leave.
As he drove down the hill in his truck which sputtered, he felt alienated from everyone. South Americans changed when they lived in this country a long time, and he could no longer relate to them in the same way. The foundation that lay beneath people’s interactions was subtly altered in this country, and it was as if he were swimming in the midst of a treacherous undertow. There was no one who would even make an attempt to understand him, no one who could alleviate the unbearable tension that was always under his skin, that caused him to try to dull the ache any way he could, with alcohol, with sleep, with forgetting.
He drove the truck along Bridgeway until he found a parking space near the No Name Bar with its plain brown wooden placard above the door. It had comfortable wicker chairs with cushions. You could sit all day here with a pitcher of beer or a newspaper or book and be undisturbed, while if you wanted a game of chess or conversation, there were always people around. Here he practiced his English.
Here, too, he could indulge in melancolía. He sipped his beer. Melancholy. An English word. While at school with the Jesuits, he had read a book called The Anatomy of Melancholy in translation.
Melancolía swirled through his head and body, but the beer relaxed him. Comforting sounds of voices, of a Bach cantata.
In November when the heavy rains began, Hugo laid Antonio off. “Stay away from drinking, promise me,” Hugo pleaded. “The drinking will destroy you.”
Hugo had not been completely honest. Insulation as well as sheetrock had been applied to the new room. Hugo had done the electric wiring. But the outer shingling (which could be done in the rain) as well as the painting of the inner walls remained to be done. Fuck Hugo. Fuck self-righteous bastards like Hugo. He, Antonio, had worked his ass off. Hadn’t Hugo complimented him on the quality of his work and on how hard he had worked? Why then had Hugo laid him off?
He bore down on the gas pedal.
“Antonio, go slower!” cried Rosa.
He kept on at the same speed and then went even a little faster, although the road was steep and winding. It was a grey cloudy day. They were on their way to Stinson Beach to walk and to picnic. He wanted to tell Hugo about the tension that drove him to drink, that when the pain became unendurable he drank to dull the pain. He was on an electric shock wave twenty-four hours a day. His dreams were a series of murders, losses, thefts, maimings.
“Please go slower!” Rosa cried. Instead he speeded up. She knew in a flash that they were about to have an accident. A fraction of a second before he swerved into the right shoulder of the road a voice inside told her clearly—as it had before Isabel’s birth—exactly how she must hold Isabel. Crouch down, the voice said, crouch down beneath the windshield.
They crashed into a tree, just as her hand reached around the baby’s skull to protect it, just as she dug the baby against her belly. Her own head hit the bottom ledge and her heels jammed against the floorboards. The edge of her hand hit a metal ridge.
Isabel began to scream. Rosa held her breath, trying to soothe her, praying the baby had not been hurt. “There, there, it’s all right, it’s all right,” she crooned, trying to heal whatever needed to be healed with the vibrations of her voice.
Antonio got out of the truck and examined the damage to the front end. They rode back inside the tow truck and left their truck at the garage, because it would not start.
The next day Rosa took Isabel to a pediatrician to have him look at the lump on the baby’s forehead that had risen after Rosa’s hand hit the ledge. The doctor assured her that no lasting damage had been done.
The ever-present fear that underlay everything with Rosa increased. She could not trust Antonio at all.
Antonio worried about money. After he paid for the truck repairs, not very much remained from Aaron’s thousand dollar gift. Rosa’s inheritance was nearly spent.
“But Rosa’s parents are rich. Her grandmother is a millionairess,” he told companions at the No Name Bar. “They’ll set me up in business. They care about their grandchild, even if I am only a poor son-of-a-bitch.”
The black guitar singer from Brazil grinned. The blonde girl sitting next to him, however, seemed to disapprove.
He glanced around. Most of the men and women were good-looking, dressed in sweaters and pants, as it was chilly outside. They were fairly young, although a few were middle-aged. There were no smiles of recognition from the women, although he knew half of them. A few of the men nodded. There was something terribly different about American women. In France he had been called, without irony, “le charmant.” In France and in South America women responded to his galanteries, to his sexual acknowledgment of them. They responded with a certain freedom and joyousness, as if they were receiving homage due them. B
ut here in the United States there was something hard and closed-off about the women. They seemed affronted by him. Only Mimosa in the far corner of the room, a small plump Jewish woman from New Orleans who read Tarot cards for a living, gave him a tender smile.
He became aware that there was grey in his hair, wrinkles in his face, that he was poor, and that he was no longer in the best of health. In Europe and in Santiago his charm overrode all this. But with these women his charm seemed to have lost its strength.
Antonio and Rosa had only fifteen hundred dollars left of the entire amount she had inherited. “Then we’ll be down to rock bottom,” she said with a certain joy.
“What will we do then?” he asked.
“We’ll see.”
“It’s no small responsibility with a baby to take care of,” he said. He wondered at her foolhardiness. “Your parents should send us some money. They have plenty.”
“I don’t want to ask them for anything.” She shook her head. Her black hair flew over her face.
He squashed out his cigarette butt into a jar lid on the tiny wooden table they ate at in the kitchen.
“Your father is a salaud.”
“Aaron is a man of his word. He gave you the car money in Plainville, even though he didn’t want to.”
“A salaud.”
The money Aaron had given him seemed cursed. The truck still did not run right. The engine was no good, said the mechanics at the garage. Everything that came from Aaron was cursed by the man’s evil emanations.
“He fucked you up,” said Antonio. “He’s responsible for the mess you were in when I met you.”
The more unhappy Antonio grew with himself and with the surrounding circumstances, the more Aaron preyed on his mind, and the more he hated the man. As for Eleanor, sometimes he hated her, too, while at times he declared to Rosa that Eleanor was worth more than the whole lot of them put together—a grand soul who had been fucked over by life, who had somehow failed to flow into life with the right rhythm.
In Juan’s sunny house high up on the hill with its view of trees and roofs and water, everything had seemed possible. He envisioned their son, who would have Isabel’s coloring. He envisioned Vanidades perversos d’un pasajero in print, translated into many languages.
However, in this house, dank and chill, with its dark wooden floors, dirty walls, and ineradicable smell of mildew, he seemed to be slipping downwards out of his own grasp.
Almost every night he suffered nightmares. Rosa told him he moaned and talked aloud in his sleep. In some dreams he was drowning. In others he was trying to climb up a slippery mountain covered with snow, or up a rocky ledge. In some dreams he was being pursued by a man or a woman intent on killing him, or by a wild beast. At times he did not remember the dreams at all but awoke in a sweat in the early hours of the morning, pulling the sheet away from Rosa and twisting it around his body. In several dreams the baby kept screaming and would not stop until he suffocated her with his large hands around her throat.
“Your parents have a responsibility. They’ve fucked you up. We’ve given them the most marvelous child they ever saw. Never in your miserable Jewish family has there been such a child, as bright, as beautiful as Isabel.”
Rosa flinched as though he had struck her. “What is this anti-Semitism? Jewish this and Jewish that?”
“Miserable Jews! Full of complexes. But you don’t understand . . . I love the Jews. My father’s grandfather was named Rosenburg.”
“I know. So you’re partly a Jew.”
“My mother hated the Jews.”
“So she hated your father?”
“Yes.” He spit on the floor. “He was too good for her. Miserable woman. She has a small heart. It’s too small to hold any love in it at all. When she dies, I’ll dance on her grave!” He lifted his can of beer high up in the air, swallowed a great gulp, and then spit some out into the jar lid which served as an ashtray. “It makes me want to vomit just to think about her.
“Petite, your parents are rich. Your mother is rich. And your father’s parents are rich. They can send us money to buy a house. I’ll get a new truck, not this piece of junk I have. I can start some kind of a business. You can go back to school. They should send you money for a babysitter while you learn a profession. You can be anything you want to be . . . a hairdresser, a lawyer, even a doctor.”
She shook her head. She was wearing a light-colored quilted robe. It was almost midnight. He had just come home from the bars, the smell of liquor strong on his breath, with the set of mind that too much alcohol induced, and at times like this she was the most frightened of him because it seemed his rage was at the breaking point.
“You will write them a letter,” he said, his voice cold with rage. “Get a pen. Some paper.” His words cut against her like steel.
“No.”
He grabbed her wrists and shouted close into her ear. “You will write a letter!”
The violence of his emotions overwhelmed her. Her own mind grew confused under the impact of something too insistent, too agonized, too frenzied to argue against. She went into the bedroom and got out a yellow lined notepad and a pen from the top drawer of the bureau.
He dictated. She wanted to scream. Her nerves were wearing down. No longer did she have the self-possession she’d had when they first came to Sausalito, when her life seemed to begin anew.
Everything made her feel jumpy. She cringed when he raised his hand as if he were about to strike her. Several times in the last week he had hit her, and each time the fear of it was worse than the actual hitting.
Rosa feared for Antonio’s sanity. He spent most of the day reclining on their bed and smoking cigarettes. He would blow perfect circles up towards the ceiling, a can of beer on the floor beside him. He would watch Isabel crawl across the floor in her flannel pajamas. A few crumbs of bread had spilled which Isabel took into her mouth. The baby smiled rapturously when she saw Rosa, who swooped her up into her arms. “Ah, but you must let her crawl more,” said Antonio. “That is her work.”
“I’m worried she might hurt herself.”
“No, Petite, I am watching.”
“She hasn’t begun to walk yet. She should be walking by now. I wonder what’s wrong,” said Rosa.
“Nothing’s wrong. Crawling is her work. When she’s ready, she’ll walk. You’ll see. The more precocious the child, the later it learns.” He took Isabel from Rosa’s arms and stood the small creature on her feet. For a second she stood unsupported.
He would take her out of the playpen they had bought, saying it was better for her to range freely through the house. Rosa plugged up the electric outlets to make them safe, removed everything she could that might fall, suffered over the standing lamp in the living room.
She and Antonio were both continually on edge. They could not see clearly, could not think clearly. He would stare at the wall and talk to himself in a mixture of languages. Once when she came in, he said, “Juan is here.” She had not seen Juan or Bettina for a long time, and she was surprised.
“Really?”
“Don’t you see him? Are you blind?”
She looked around the empty bedroom. He seemed surprised that she couldn’t see him. He gestured for the imaginary Juan to sit down, and he talked in Spanish and seemed to listen to their visitor for a few minutes, until he burst at last into loud laughter. “Ha! Ha! You believe me!” he said. “I was pulling your leg as they say in English.”
She wished he would speak English with her; then he would learn the language faster. Also, it did not seem right when he spoke French to her in front of other people. It alienated the others. “But French is our private language, Petite,” he insisted.
At times when they were alone he made up fantastic stories about things that had happened to him in the past. The incidents he described seemed too bizarre, too extraordinary to have occurred. Somehow, the truth of these stories did not seem to be the issue. He was living in his mind, reliving the past, magnifying it, distorti
ng it, inventing to suit his desires. The present reality seemed to recede, pushed ever further away by a thick beer and cigarette haze.
He lost weight and scarcely ate anything at all.
All day he would listen to the rain pouring outside.
He stayed in bed with his beer, his cigarettes, his trances, and his conversations aloud. Every night, despite the heavy rains, he went to the local bars and came home very late. As often as not he would collapse on the living room floor, soaking it with rainwater. Hearing the door slam, hearing his footsteps, she would wake up and attempt to pull off his rubber parka, his boots, his wet clothes underneath, and she would half carry him to bed. Sometimes, when he did not wake up at all, she did not have the strength, and after removing the clothing, she would give up and simply cover him with blankets.
One night Antonio came in around ten o’clock. The chicken casserole she had prepared had been in the oven since seven. She had grown tired of waiting for him to come home for dinner and finally ate part of the casserole and the salad herself. Isabel had long since been put to bed.
Rosa heard the door slam while she was in the bathtub. She let the water out, dried herself, and put on her bathrobe.
“The truck is foutu!” he cried when he saw her. He opened a can of beer and threw the tab on the floor. He gulped some of it down, then tore a bite out of a chicken breast from the casserole. When he finished eating it, he threw the bone on the floor.
“It stalled on Bridgeway. I was coming home from looking at a house in Mill Valley—a man I met wants me to paint the interior—and I’d stopped at the store to get a few groceries. The oil light flashed red, and it stalled about half a kilometer past there. The engine has burned out. To get a new engine would cost more than the truck is worth.”
“Oh God! You’ve put so much money into that truck.”
“Everything bad happens to me when you’re around. You’re a witch. You don’t realize your power.” His eyes burned into hers. He had not shaven in two days. He wore a green sweater and baggy trousers.
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