by Héctor Tobar
* * *
KAREN THOMAS was the first of many intelligent, strong and rebellious women Joe Sanderson fell in love with, pined for and admired during his eventful life. Most were avid readers, like him. Some were armed with automatic rifles and construction hammers, and others with a deep understanding of Asian history, European literature and other essential elements of human knowledge.
* * *
JOE SAT WITH KAREN in the front seat of his Chevy on a country road; at the drive-in, where the movie on the screen never mattered; and by a patch of woods on the edge of town. His intentions were always pure, most pure with Karen above all. Or rather, he was lustfully chaste. On a day of Indian summer, in the fall of 1959, when they had finished talking for an hour about the future of mankind and their favorite ice cream flavors, Karen gave him one last, slow, full-lipped kiss, and then she did something she had never done before. She brought the tips of her fingers to his cheeks and stroked them slowly and softly, and then she stopped, and simply held his face with her hands, as if she were trying to pass a thought to him through the whorls and loops of her fingerprints. Karen looked into his eyes, and at his forehead, his gelled hair, his sideburns. She was reading him as if he were a text. As if she saw a scroll of paper behind his eyes, an inky waterfall of cursive letters telling the story of Joe. Karen saw him as he truly was, all that was imperfect, admirable, odd and noble, and Joe understood that this knowledge drew her to him and made her want to stay there, holding him. She kissed him once more, and finally she lowered her eyelids and rested her forehead against his, and he closed his eyes too. In this state of shared darkness and silence Joe was at peace. And then the quiet between them, and the way she seemed to know him frightened Joe, because it felt like an end instead of a beginning.
“Is something wrong, Joe?”
* * *
IT WAS THEIR SENIOR YEAR, and Joe and Karen and most of the members of the class of 1960 would soon be living in the future their parents were always talking about. Some of them were already on the cusp of greatness, like Roger Ebert, who’d been elected senior class president and who’d told Joe he was thinking of going to Harvard. In January, Joe stepped out the front steps of Urbana High to find his old neighbor standing atop the Lincoln the Lawyer statue in the park across the street. The officers of the senior class were having their portrait taken for the school yearbook, and three of them were up there on the pedestal with the bronze Lincoln. Joe walked up behind the photographer and waved and made a silly face, and then flipped them the bird, which caused President Ebert and all the officers to laugh. At that moment, the photographer tripped the shutter.
Joe and his friend Jim Adams were not athletes, or brainiacs or members of the school’s Sagamore honor society. Nor were they delinquents or beatniks. Jim wanted to fly crop dusters: he thought of this as a romantic life filled with aerial roller-coaster drops over fields of soy and corn, followed by a landing at the Champaign airport and dinner at home every night. Joe was going to college, to the University of Florida, where he imagined he would be closer to the tropical entrails of the earth. He could hitchhike across Florida to Miami, and sail to the islands of the Caribbean on freighters.
But first, Joe dreamed up one last, great high school prank. He convinced Jim to help him cover the campus with painted Playboy rabbits; the famous stylized bunny with the bow tie, one of his ears in a jaunty tilt. But why not something grander. All of Urbana. Champaign too. A big, citywide gesture. Like the French Resistance in an old film, they would paint their symbol on walls across the city—and disappear into the night. “We’re going to need a lot of paint,” he told Jim.1
They ended up at the unlocked lot behind the Champaign Public Works Department. Joe found a single five-gallon paint container labeled TRAFFIC YELLOW. Joe and Jim lifted the barrel into the trunk of Joe’s Chevy, placing it next to their brushes and the stencils they’d fashioned from cardboard. First they drove to the Georgian revival mansion where the president of the University of Illinois lived, and stenciled a rabbit on the asphalt of his U-shaped driveway. The symbol of smoking-jacket-wearing lotharios and naked centerfolds. Masturbators of the world, unite! Another four on Florida Avenue, which was empty of automobiles because it was three in the morning and it was Urbana. They painted more rabbits in front of the U of I’s slumbering sororities and the fraternity houses with their feckless “brothers,” none of whom had enough character to be up late on a bender. Next, a solitary rabbit on the door of the faux pioneer cabin in the Illini Grove, and then Joe looked at the nearby water tower, perhaps ten stories up, and gave Jim a big grin.
“No,” Jim said. “That’s too high.”
“It’ll be a cinch.”
They drove to the base of the tower and found a waiting ladder, unlocked and inviting. Joe dipped two brushes in paint and tied them to his belt using Jim’s shoelaces, along with a stencil, so that his hands would be free for climbing. He moved up the zinc rungs with a quick bounding. To Jim, from below, Joe resembled a lumberjack with the frenetic legs of a squirrel. The higher Joe got the smaller he became, and Jim remembered the boy Joe he first met in grade school, climbing a jungle gym, lifting himself up into a tree branch. If Joe’s mother had been there, she would have remembered the purposeful strides of the five-year-old she saw marching across her father’s land in Kansas, following the one-hundred-yard line of a plow. He reached the platform at the base of the big tank, waved to Jim and quickly painted two bunnies. When he finished he grabbed hold of the railing, and took in the lights of predawn Urbana and the university, the bottled radiance of ten thousand ant-size fires burning inside glass. This is the way a writer sees a city. I am the omniscient narrator of a novel. All-seeing, perched above the flight paths of the bumblebees and the crows. Down there, in that village, my parents and Steve asleep, Karen tucked inside layers of cotton clothing and sheets. He saw the arched metal roof of the Stock Pavilion; a cow there, university owned, with a copper-lined porthole in its stomach so that veterinary students and kindergartners could study its digesting innards. The Natural History Building, with its many gables and pitched roofs: he had gone there once with Jim to see the cadavers stored in its top floor, stiff hobos sealed in steel boxes. His butterflies and snakes stored in cabinets; and the edge of the city swallowed by the black, unilluminated fields that surrounded it. His whole Champaign-Urbana universe was visible from this one fixed point, a settlement that was a small stain on the surface of the globe.
I’ll be ready to leave here soon.
“Joe! Let’s go!”
The next morning, Urbana awoke to a bunny explosion. No one could say who the vandals were. The News-Gazette wrote a small item about it—“Mystery Rabbits Cover City”—and quoted the head of the Department of Public Works lamenting these miscreants and their very poor sense of humor. In the days that followed, nearly all the immoral bunnies were scrubbed off or painted over, and the city forgot the Great Playboy Bunny Caper, and what Joe remembered most vividly about the days that followed was the way Karen held his hand and looked at the yellow flecks attached to his skin and scratched at them with her fingernails. She said nothing, which was odd and slightly distressing, the way the unspoken secret floated between them.
That summer he traveled to Mexico City with his parents. Since he had just turned eighteen, Virginia and Milt had agreed that he could return home alone without them, traveling back from that Spanish-speaking country on his own.
* * *
EVERYONE IN MEXICO CITY bragged about the new skyscraper, a phallic construction of blue glass called La Torre Latinoamericana; it rose incongruously above the old white marble box of the Palace of Fine Arts and the bronze egg of its dome. El Distrito Federal, as the city was also known, was filled with stone churches and cotton candy and cobblestone, and ladies in handwoven wool and cat’s-eye sunglasses. It had wide avenues where buses ran drawing current from hanging wires. Joe walked with his parents on the vast, black stone plaza of the Zócalo, and after five days
Milt and Virginia said goodbye at the hotel, and his mother gave him a long, serious look and told him to be safe. Joe was alone.2
Ten minutes later the skies opened in a torrential downpour and Joe watched from the window of his room as vendors ran laughing in the park called the Alameda Central. They vainly sought shelter in the narrow marble arches of the monument to Benito Juárez, while fat raindrops and then pellets of hail bounced off the old president’s marble head. The storm stopped in an instant, and Joe went out into the Alameda with hailstones crunching under his shoes and watched as two boys gathered the icy pebbles into rocky, black snowballs and threw them at each other.
Two days later, as he strolled by the Palace of Fine Arts he was approached by a thin young man of about his own age, in gray slacks and sunglasses. With gestures, because the young man did not speak English and Joe didn’t speak much Spanish, he asked Joe to take his picture before the white building, and Joe obliged. The young man said, “Gracias. Soy de Guatemala. Es la primera vez que viajo fuera de mi país,” and Joe nodded and smiled, even though he understood only that the young man was thankful, and that he was from Guatemala, and nothing else.
“De nada,” Joe said. “Yo soy americano. De Illinois.” The skinny young Guatemalan nodded, and they shook hands. These words and gestures constituted Joe’s first independent conversation in Spanish, and they left him grinning, and eager to practice more. He saw another young man on the Alameda carrying a thick book, and they began talking in the Spanish phrases Joe could muster, and the little English the young man spoke. Mi casa, Illinois. Estados Unidos. Tu casa, Mexico. My name Francisco. Yo soy estudiante. Me study, yes. You? Sí. Francisco was carrying a geometry textbook, and Joe had a Spanish-English dictionary, and they exchanged these books and perused them, and then they walked toward the Zócalo.
One thousand years of human history was buried under their feet and arranged in stone before their eyes. “Palacio Nacional,” Francisco said, pointing at one building. “Catedral,” pointing at another. “Bandera,” pointing at the flagpole in its center. The cathedral had been built four centuries ago by Aztec workers with stones from the pyramids the Spanish ordered demolished, and under the building foundations there were still-buried images of beaked and plumed deities, waiting for archaeologists to uncover them. To Joe the ancientness was plain to see on the surface of the plaza, in the Indian faces of the vendors and their wares, which included odd candies that were made of jellied fruits, and wooden toy buses. They walked through the cloud of smoke and ash created by a taco vendor’s charcoal stove, and stepped into the path of another vendor, who offered postcards for sale, black-and-white images depicting corpses of men and horses covering the Zócalo after some historic battle or massacre, and others of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata grinning as they sat in the president’s chair at the National Palace. Francisco led them back to the Alameda Central, where an itinerant and semi-mad preacher was proselytizing. The preacher stared at Joe and stopped his rambling sermon midsentence at the sight of Joe’s blue eyes, which reminded him of the Spanish priests of the Holy Inquisition, burning heretics alive at that very spot, hundreds of years ago. The preacher began to scream, “¡Los quemaron! ¡Vivos!” Next, Joe and Francisco walked down a street where they saw a hammer and sickle painted in dripping red on a stone wall, at the spot where the famous communist leader Julio Antonio Mella had been assassinated many years earlier. To Joe the hammer and sickle were like images from a horror movie. Commies, in Mexico, I didn’t know. Wait till Steve hears this. A block later, after Joe looked up lunch in his dictionary, they entered an otherwise nondescript restaurant called the Café La Habana. Fidel Castro, then an exiled revolutionary, had planned his invasion of Cuba in this café just a few years earlier, sipping espresso at a table by the window with his brother Raúl and an Argentine doctor named Ernesto Guevara. Castro was now the new ruler of Cuba. Francisco overheard a waitress discussing Castro with a customer, but didn’t bother to translate for Joe as they ate their tortas.
When Joe and Francisco parted company, Joe promised to show him the sights of Urbana should he ever visit the University of Illinois. “I guess it’s not as interesting as Mexico City,” Joe said in English. “But it’s got its charms.” He looked up the word that explained what that place looked like: plano; n. flat.
On his last full day in Mexico City, Joe took a twilight walk through the city, beginning in the Alameda across the street from his hotel. He sat on a cast-iron bench in the park, at the spot where the pyres of the Inquisition had burned, sending screams and ashes climbing toward the hail-filled clouds above, and wrote a letter home to his family. Really everything has gone along fine, though the first couple of days alone were a little lonely … Hey Pop, you’ll be proud of your old son because Saturday I talked very intelligently in my broken Spanish with a Mexican boy for about an hour and a half. He described the drunken revelry of the American tourists in his hotel—hell raising, pardon me, Granny—and the inevitable arrival of the police who took away a Harvard man in handcuffs, and other events that he summarized with the words Much fun! Finally, he signed off with the signature José.
The next morning, he headed northward.
* * *
JOE TOOK A GEAR-GRINDING third-class bus, traveling with people who were carrying baskets and burlap sacks. After the bus left Mexico City it entered a bright and blue-skied savanna, and men boarded the bus wearing straw hats, and the women wore big, unadorned dresses that looked rugged and timeworn. The passengers got on and off at villages where all the streets and roads that led from the highway were unpaved, and where the churches and the walls were made of adobe brick, or at crossroads where there was little else besides yellow grass and lonely elm and oak trees. Each time the bus stopped, the air filled with the scent of cooked corn, burning charcoal and overripe fruit.
When the bus reached San Luis Potosí, Joe took a room in a cheap hotel, and the next day he changed direction and headed east, for the Atlantic coast, and then took another third-class bus up into mountains that were lush and forested. He lost track of where he was, and where he was going, and finally he stopped in a village where there were stalls that catered to tourists, and he learned that there was a waterfall nearby.3
Joe followed a path down the hillside that led to the waterfall, and a boy trailed after him, and ran ahead, and looked back, as if he were showing Joe the way. They reached a pool of bluish-green water, and the spray curtain of the waterfall. The boy pointed at these natural wonders and held out his palm. Joe gave the boy a coin and the boy set off running with it. Vendors approached him, holding whistles and flutes for him to look at, and said “bonito,” which he knew meant pretty.
A girl stared at him. She was about fifteen years old, he guessed. Long-limbed and smooth-skinned, with a mischievous and curious air.
“Hola,” Joe said to her. She took two steps to leave, then turned on her heels and walked toward him.
“Las otras cataratas son más lindas,” she said.
“No entiendo,” Joe answered.
“Venga. Conmigo.”
She gestured for him to follow her. And since she was womanly and beautiful he did so. She led him up a path, and he understood that this was something very bold for a girl from a Mexican village to do, as it would have been for a girl from Urbana. “Where are we going?” When he slowed down, she took his hand in hers, and they walked through a dense forest and reached a waterfall that filled a limestone bowl with unnaturally blue water and a dreamy mist. The girl let go of his hand, and made a sweeping gesture, as if she had gifted him this paradise in miniature.
“Bonito,” Joe said, because he could think of no other Spanish word to say.
Her name was Juana, and she wanted Joe to see the water here because it was the same color as his eyes.
Joe heard giggles coming from the trees. Juana ran toward the laughter, and from the forest six heads of children popped up, boys and girls, and those boys and girls started running away, and t
he girl trailed after them, and Joe understood that these boys and girls had been following them, and that it had all been a game. The girl had taken his hand on a dare.
She turned and shouted: “¡Sólo quería enseñárselo! ¡El agua es el mismo color que sus ojos!”
“¡No hablo español!” Joe shouted back. The girl took a few long, light and springy strides, and she was gone, and Joe realized he would never see her again and never understand what she had said. Afterward, when he sat down to write this episode into his journal, he felt strangely powerless, deprived of the essential information at the end of the story. He was certain there was some deeper message in these last words of hers, something he badly needed to know.
No one in the world knows I exist. Something has to change.
—Emmanuel Carrère, Limonov
II
The Part About the World: Pax Americana
6
Gainesville, Florida. Hanover, Indiana
ON THE DAY HE LEFT FOR COLLEGE, Joe was seven inches taller than his mother. He carried a hard-shell suitcase into the Champaign train station, and she followed behind him, into the station portico, alongside Milt. When they reached the platform, she gave Joe a motherly once-over and an unshowy smile of approval. “Well, this is it now,” she said. “Off to be a student.”
Virginia Colman had reached the end of the boyhoods in her life.