The first day, her awareness still kept pace with her. Carmen let herself take in the landscape, the taiga and its thorns, the earth smothered beneath the snow, the stigmata of petroleum leaking from a pipeline. She still had the luxury of being attentive to trifles like the torn skin of her heels, her toe turned blue, and the burning sensation that had overwhelmed her lungs during the first hours. At kilometre forty-two, the distance of a marathon, she began to regret not having chosen the 565-kilometre run rather than the 160-kilometre run. At kilometre fifty-four she wondered what sort of mental illness had prompted her—who had never experienced real winter weather—to enter this insane race in the middle of February in the heart of the Yukon. At the next rest stop she was told there was only one woman ahead of her, which spurred her into returning to the trail as soon as she’d had her portion of stew. Four kilometres later she collapsed and a patroller had to help her put her tent up for the night.
Now she is soaring. The race no longer matters and her thoughts wander as in the moments before dreaming, that minute just before one tumbles toward sleep. Her mind is filled not with her worries, her projects, the peaks and troughs of her personal life, but with insignificant fragments of her daily existence: the broken window pane in the dining room, the sumac sucker that she’ll have to burn when she gets back, the flock of small birds of prey on the hills around the house. Snapshots that remind her she is human and has a life, before she dives back into the great white emptiness of the race.
Although she had signed up months before Frannie’s death, the fact of taking part in an event dubbed the “Death Race” hardly seems trivial. As she packed her bags, scarcely a week after the burial, she recalled Simon’s terse remark the day of the funeral: “We’re next.” She had brushed this off with a joke before heading off to mythical Whitehorse, ready to run as long as necessary to ascertain that she was very much alive and Frannie would not be coming back from the dead.
Just fifty kilometres left, a distance she has covered hundreds of times, sometimes without giving it any thought, occasionally in utter pain. A distance long enough to reawaken interior struggles, especially after two days of contending with arctic temperatures. Night falls. Running at a steady pace, Carmen hauls her gear without feeling the weight of the sled or the icy cramps gnawing at her muscles. In the fading light she passes the last heated rest stop but the thought of pausing there does not cross her mind. She leaves the open stretch and plunges once more into the forest, determined to run through the night, to stop only after crossing a finish line, something intelligible in the wild arctic winter.
A name. Now he’s got his hands on a name, unspoken at first, written down in Frannie’s arthritic script and then his own clearer, more regular handwriting, a name he has copied dozens of time. Roberto Aurellano. It took three days before he could bring himself to say it out loud. As soon as he felt up to it, he burned the letter, hoping to break the spell cast the night of Frannie’s death by her innocent messenger, whose only means of defence was a cat’s tail and the two copies of the letter. He wonders if Carmen has kept hers.
So Frannie had no intention of leaving this world without enlightening her children as to their origins. She simply wanted them to learn the truth without her. Which is why she went to the trouble of drafting her explanations in a tone as dry as her life had been and then of entrusting them to the young student who did double duty as her nurse and her maid.
While it is practically impossible to get over the death of your mother, no matter how irresponsible she may have been, Frannie’s death is nothing compared to what she hid from them. During that night of tremors and departures, Simon lost more than his mother; his sister was taken away from him. He had always envisioned undertaking the quest for the father alongside Carmen, and now he was left on his own. Still today, ensconced in the driver’s seat of the patrol car washed by the downpour, the clamour of that solitude continues to deafen him, to trumpet the great turning point of his existence.
His partner scurries back to the car balancing a tray of coffee and muffins on one hand. The other hand holds a bouquet of balloons, which he unceremoniously stuffs in the rear of the car, where there should be one or two sinister-looking criminals. A green balloon bursts, giving Simon a start.
“It’s my daughter’s birthday. Six years old,” the policeman explains sitting down beside Simon.
“Which leaves you seven more years of happiness. Enjoy them,” Simon grumbles as he grabs a coffee.
The rain drives the vagrants out of the streets, making it easy to carry out today’s orders, which are to keep them far away from the hotel where some dignitaries are gathering. The fog rolls in from the Pacific and envelopes the hall in a bluish filter that snags the thoughts of the few passersby.
During the funeral, a ceremony infused with a flamboyant Catholicism that Frannie had never been seen practising in the past, Simon scanned the crowd. Any strangers over the age of sixty-five were subjected to his discreet scrutiny. To prevent any potential fathers from slipping out he came up behind them and whispered, “Roberto?” None of the five men ambushed in this way answered to the name. If his father was still alive he had not bothered to come say farewell to the woman who had borne his son. As the coffin was being wheeled out of the church, Simon’s heart almost stopped: he could have sworn he’d heard someone knocking inside the casket. He slowed his pace for a few instants to regain his composure and then continued on through a shower of religious hymns.
Carmen wept a little after the mass, when a few rare individuals still attached to Frannie gathered around a tasteless buffet, and for the first time Simon felt distant from her distress. Claire and Alan were showing signs of impatience, unaffected by the death of a woman they had not appreciated when she was alive, while Jessica tried to conceal the enormous camera with which she was photographing the event—inconspicuously, she believed—as though it was a county fair. Exasperated by his family’s behaviour, Simon left the lunch without saying goodbye to the guests.
Ever since then something has been brewing inside him. When he quarrels with Claire she ascribes everything to a midlife crisis, a vague and stupid notion far removed from what he is actually going through. Simon has no wish to seduce other women or buy a convertible or Botox the frown lines on his forehead. What he wants is to find a cave, seclude himself in it, and huddle far away from the light of day and shouting voices. He wants to taste the magmatic solitude of geological faults. His crisis has nothing to do with life’s high noon; it is a Cyclops, a yeti, a cave painting.
The receiver sputters the report of a hold-up a few blocks from the intersection where Simon and his partner are wolfing down their muffins. They switch on the siren, utter some numbered codes for the dispatcher, and the car pulls out cutting through some giant puddles. But not even speeding up hills or running red lights can stir Simon’s blood anymore. As he presses down on the gas pedal, all he can think of is burying himself in rock and chewing on stones. A way to be completely alone.
During all those years Carmen never once touched that orange coat, still abundant but transformed by the absence of life. The pliant fur lets itself be stroked without reacting, without standing on end or secreting the invisible oils animals drape themselves in to neutralize human petting. It is nonetheless a pleasant, even soothing gesture, and Carmen has come to understand what for so long she took to be a compulsion of Frannie’s.
For three days now she has been looking for an appropriate spot for Bastard the cat, which she has inherited along with a pile of knickknacks. When she came home from the Yukon she found in her hallway three boxes containing what was apparently her share of Frannie’s things. Simon no doubt deposited them there after his wife had retrieved from the deceased’s apartment the few rare items of any value. Carmen wonders who bothered to reattach the stuffed cat’s head after it had been separated. Simon, maybe, out of a sense of guilt for having dashed it against the hospital wall? The q
uestion is added to the list of things she would like to ask him, which she patiently enumerates in his voicemail in the hope of getting an answer, now more and more belated.
Meanwhile she has tried everything: the living-room coffee table, the bookshelf lined with detective novels whose edges have been chewed up by bathtub readings, the window sill, among the lush green plants… It turns out to be terribly difficult to fit a stuffed cat into one’s decor, especially when it was loved to the point where parts of its coat have been worn thin by petting.
The remainder of the boxes’ contents leaves her just as baffled. What is she supposed to do with a hair-straightener from the sixties, a collection of dried out lipstick and hardened blush, a guitar-shaped cookie box adorned with rust spots, and a rabbit’s foot dyed pink? The dead woman left behind a strange hodgepodge of objects, the absurdity of things that have survived but which, taken together, never account for the life lived.
When she finally reaches the bottom of the last box she discovers a collection of poems by Pablo Neruda. She grasps it in disbelief; she never saw Frannie read anything but the TV guide. The book bears its original Spanish title: Odas elementales. Inside, in the top right corner of the first page, is an inscription in black ink: Magenta, 1963. A shiver takes hold of Carmen and she forces herself to lay the volume down on the floor.
An hour later the sunlight strikes the hills. Carmen grabs a dust frame with a picture of her when she was twenty taken after her first marathon. It was during that race that Carmen first encountered “the wall,” the stage of paralyzing exhaustion that sometimes occurs at the midpoint of the race. Inexperienced and stubborn, she reacted by stepping up her pace, with the result that she was forced to walk the last stretch. In the picture, her smile cannot hide the humiliation she had felt at having to cross the finish line walking.
After dusting the frame she carefully places it on the mantelshelf next to her trophies and medals. Among all these testimonies to her resilience, she places Bastard the cat. Satisfied, she steps back to contemplate her work steeped in the light of the setting sun. Then, on an impulse, she buries her hand in the earth of a ficus and closes her fist. She would so much like to grasp something—a root or mislaid pirates’ gold.
The angst that has Simon in its grip has grown to such proportions that it now seems hard for him to move about the house, as if the air has been thickened with invisible plaster. Claire’s evenings are increasingly devoted to so-called yoga lessons, Alan lives in his room, and Jessica comes back to the nest only to sleep and shower. The infrequent family gatherings are so fraught with tension that Simon has accepted a night shift to avoid them.
The term “graveyard shift” is perfectly apt: the darkness and silence of a cemetery always mask a ghostly existence, the invisible dramas of the dead and their mourners. He patrols solo from midnight to eight in the morning. The hour of knives and black stones, the hour when parties explode in a huge viscous uproar, and wrecks rise to the surface again. It’s in such moments that Simon truly feels he is keeping watch over the city, when he gets out of his car and listens to a vagrant wheezing in his sleep, or when he observes from a distance a young woman finding her way back home on foot, torn between fear and intoxication.
At six o’clock he buys a last cup of coffee to wash away the sand from behind his eyelids. For a brief quarter hour he shuts off the dispatcher’s gravelly voice and lights a cigarette. He restricts himself to just one a day, and it must be mooched from a stranger. A drunk, a bouncer, a jaded hooker, a bewildered teenager—any Joe Blow will do, so long as Simon doesn’t know him.
One night, as he is about to light the unfiltered cigarette given him by a French tourist, the dispatcher’s weary voice jingles out on the radio. Some passersby noticed suspicious goings-on at the Sutro Baths on the seashore. Nothing but ruins are left of the old swimming pool complex, whose heyday had passed in the early twentieth century, but the place continues to attract curious visitors and carousers. Simon puts away his cigarette and heads off toward the ocean.
As soon as he meets the scent of iodine and stale water, it comes back to him. This is where he and Claire ended up on their first date, walking among the half-empty pools and contemplating the remnants of an opulence that still made its presence felt between tides. They kissed inside a small tunnel in the rocky cliffs, and Simon did not dare touch the breasts of this woman too beautiful, too smart for him. Pulling over at some distance from the baths, he takes a swig of cold coffee to flush out the chalky taste that has spread over his tongue.
He leaves his headlights off for about ten minutes, long enough to see what is happening. Very quickly he concludes there is more going on here than a mere teenagers’ party. Torches placed at regular intervals are lighting a gathering, which even from afar appears calmer and more orderly than the groups that usually take over the beaches at this time of day. Here and there he can make out bodies diving headfirst into the abandoned pools.
The first glow of dawn will appear in less than a quarter hour. Not much time left to take advantage of the element of surprise; he radioes in a request for the backup of two more patrol cars. The move is motivated not so much by the urgency of the situation as by Simon’s curiosity. While waiting for reinforcements, he sneaks closer.
There must be about thirty of them. Those who aren’t wearing bathing suits are dressed in period costumes: long white dresses, top hats, tailcoats. Some are sipping luminescent drinks from wide-mouth cups, while others wave fans in front of their faces. From the pool, the bathers call out to the strollers and laugh as they splash them. Simon finds it hard to understand why anyone would willingly dive into the muddy and probably icy water. But the swimmers’ demeanour appears absolutely natural, as if this were a Sunday like any other in 1906.
Hypnotized by the faux flâneurs strolling up and down, Simon forgets the officers he has called for, just as he forgot to ask them to be unobtrusive. When the wailing sirens disrupt the oceanic silence, the bathers react more quickly than he does. In no time, the pools empty out and the crowd disperses. Simon collects his wits, flicks on his flashlight, and runs after the delinquents. Soon joined by his colleagues, he signals to them to intercept the suspects who have fled along the road while he pursues those going down the beach. He knows it’s too late but he does what cowboys do. Chase after the Indians.
His flashlight sweeps the ground in time with his strides. The tracks of the runaways show the shape of their toes, the impact of their heels on the ground, and their feet seem too tiny for this sort of sprint. Simon gradually closes in on the silhouettes scattered over the damp sand. A few metres ahead of him a man in a jacket and a woman in a bathrobe are running hand in hand. “Stop! Police!” Simon orders. In response to his shouting the woman briefly turns her head without breaking stride. Simon stops dead. In spite of the half-light he recognized his daughter.
The raid is poorly organized and not very successful. Only two people are arrested and a few objects are collected around the pools. A team from the day shift has been dispatched to comb the beach. The mandatory report will run to many pages. A huge task, it seems, for such a frivolous misdemeanour, and the officers give Simon dirty looks. The lieutenant, on the other hand, is delighted: the reporters are going to love this weird story and he’ll be able to spin the incident so as to make his unit shine. Walking out of the police station, Simon pauses on the sidewalk and fingers his telephone, itching to hear Carmen’s voice. His hands fumble in his pocket and he pulls out the cigarette he stashed away there a few hours earlier. The lighter snaps, the cigarette starts to burn, and Simon takes a long, salty drag. He puts the phone back in its case. The night is over.
Nothing breathes in a columbarium. The boxes are insultingly small and appear altogether unsuited to holding an entire being, albeit in the form of ashes. Their volume is barely enough for a rosebud, a letter, or a square of silk. The layout of the wall adds to the atmosphere of coldness; one might just as
well be in a bank vault lined with safety deposit boxes. Except that here, the boxes will never be opened; these bodies reduced to dust will never again experience the open air and its untameable winds, nor will they be able to transform into something, to blend with the earth and nourish wild flowers and ideas. How can anyone choose to spend eternity here, Carmen wonders as she walks through the hushed aisles looking for the number marked on the back of her hand.
She is in no hurry to find the niche of Magenta Lopez. In her pocket the sloppily folded piece of paper makes a deafening noise as it crinkles with each of her steps. It is from this document that she learned the truth: her mother was not Frannie. Of course there is no gentle way to impart this sort of news. The way Frannie had chosen was the most brutal: a letter in two copies that looked more like a shopping list than the confession of a lifetime. Each line contained a piece of their family puzzle. First line: Roberto Aurellano, the name of Simon’s father. Second line: Magenta Lopez, the name of Carmen’s birth mother. A quick inquiry among relatives revealed that she was a cousin of Frannie’s who had died when Carmen was still an infant. Frannie, who was already pregnant, agreed to take care of her. In Carmen’s eyes this act of generosity was the most baffling part of the story. She came to the conclusion the family had paid Frannie to adopt the child; nothing else could account for this decision, made by a woman with just enough maternal instinct to take care of an alley cat.
Whereas Simon was entitled to a complete name by way of a father, all Carmen had to chew on was the word “Hector.” A nearly senile aunt told her that not much was known about the man who had “put Magenta in the family way,” except that he was a not very “respectable” person, who was coerced into marrying her and absconded immediately after the wedding night. While her brother began a nation-wide search for Roberto Aurellano, Carmen gave up all hope of finding either one of her biological parents alive. Curiously, however, she was none the worse for it. Having refused from a very young age to define herself as Frannie’s daughter, she had abandoned the idea of having parents. That they were dead or gone missing for good made little difference to her; she was done with grieving, and it was only out of some automatic compulsion that she had decided to visit the ashes of Magenta Lopez.
The Party Wall Page 19