The Party Wall

by Catherine Leroux

  Treading up and down the uniform aisles of fake gold and sculpted glass, she thinks about Simon far more than all the parents who deserted her. It’s been a month since the funeral, and still no news from him. Her messages and emails have remained unanswered, and when she does manage to catch him at home he stays distant, like a vague acquaintance bumped into at the supermarket who just mouths a few tired greetings while eyeing the frozen products. What the posthumous letter changed has nothing to do with Carmen’s origins and everything to do with her brother.

  She finally comes to Magenta’s niche. It gleams; there are no fingerprints marring its polished gold surface. This absence of life saddens Carmen, and she promptly brushes her thumb over it to spread a little dirt, a trace of smog, of humidity, of the salt air and the bustle of the outside world. The inscription on the urn is Magenta Lopez, 1943–1966.

  Without warning, a thick lump rises from her chest to her throat, a warm, invasive surge. The tears take her unawares; until a few seconds ago nothing in this whole affair had managed to move her. But now, those two dates—1943–1966—tell her something she had not contemplated: Magenta died at the age of twenty-three. “I’m older than my mother,” she murmurs, with her reflection rippling on the glossy surfaces in front of her. She cannot explain why, but she is shaken by this realization. Her mother was just a young woman when she died. Now Carmen meets her and she is almost twice her mother’s age. There is something unbearable about this role reversal.

  As she tries to regain her composure, Carmen searches in her pocket and pulls out a sheet of paper. She rolls it up like a miniature parchment and affixes it to Magenta’s niche. The last page of Neruda’s Odas elementales. How else could she pay tribute to a woman she knows only through a deceased poet?

  For the last few minutes she has not been alone in this aisle of the columbarium. Behind her, someone else is weeping in short bursts of muffled sobs. Gradually, this sound, so very alive, draws her away from the dead. She turns around and finds herself facing a man in his early sixties, hair turning white, proffering a tissue as though he had been just waiting for the opportunity.

  “Paying a visit to one of your relatives?”

  Carmen nods.

  “Me, it’s my children,” the man says pointing to two urns graced by faded colour photographs and fresh flowers.

  “They died young,” Carmen remarks.

  “Yes, seven and nine. It seems like only yesterday.”

  Unable to cut short the conversation, Carmen positions herself in front of the pictures and studies the round faces of the two kids, one on a blue bicycle, the other holding on to a swing. The odour of incense comes out of nowhere and, as is the case whenever she smells it, Carmen feels an invisible foot treading on her chest.

  “I’m Marcus,” the man says.

  “That’s funny. I met a Marcus once in similar circumstances.”

  Not knowing why, she starts to cry again, and, like a giant sweeping over acres of land, Marcus places his hand on her back. The columbarium comes alive, as if thousands of urns were suddenly spreading their dove-like wings.

  The telephone rings at around 4 p.m.; he is in the depths of sleep and his formless, aimless dreams coil around him like a boa constrictor. He grunts a little by way of answering, hangs up, and staggers over to his daughter’s bedroom. She is out but her things are there. The blinds, as always, are down and he gropes around nervously in the dark. In her backpack is a binder, a Bret Easton Ellis novel, and an astonishing number of pencil drawings haphazardly jammed into the pocket. No sign of his daughter’s wallet.

  His colleague called after the investigation unit had shared its leads with the city’s precincts; nine wallets were found amid a pile of clothes at the Sutro Baths. Their owners are to be summoned to the police station for fingerprinting. The prints will be compared to those collected at similar gatherings, because the nighttime bathers are suspected of belonging to a group that entered the prison at Alcatraz as well as a military bunker and a few other off-limits locations. While this appears to be a minor offence, the media focus on these characters’ stunts may give rise to exemplary penalties.

  Growing more and more anxious, Simon hunts so frantically through every unwashed article of clothing, ever piece of paper in the hope of digging up Jessica’s wallet, that he doesn’t hear her come in. She clears her throat to interrupt his search.

  In her left hand she waves a tiny red purse.

  “I still have it, don’t worry.”

  “How did you know what I was looking for?”

  “Nine of my friends have just been arrested. News travels fast.”

  She gracefully flicks on the ceiling light and begins to sort out the mess caused by Simon’s digging. She is beautiful and he is nearly taken aback by this realization. He so seldom looks at her.

  “Why did you do that? Why did it bother you so much that we spent the night at the baths?”

  “It was dangerous. The pools are unsanitary.”

  “Oh, bullshit!”

  Simon sits down on the single bed populated with intertwined unicorns. For some reason, Jessica never expressed the wish to get rid of her childhood sheets, even though she in many ways leads an adult life, with all the attendant furtiveness.

  “I’m quite willing to discuss it, but you have to enlighten me about the group you belong to.”

  “Are you going to talk to Mom about it?”

  He thinks about this briefly.

  “It didn’t cross my mind. Why?”

  “Because she’s too dumb to understand.”

  Simon’s cheeks flush and he averts his gaze so his daughter won’t detect the petty pleasure he derives from her statement. Jessica sits down in an armchair shaped like a huge open hand, and mechanically grabs a pen to scribble with. Keeping her eyes down, she explains:

  “We revive the past. The idea is to occupy deserted or misused historical sites and bring them back to life.”

  “Why go to all that trouble?”

  “Why do hundreds of morons get together each year at Gettysburg to recreate the same battle? History shouldn’t be confined to books; it has to live, breathe. Bleed.”

  While Jessica’s pen produces oddly shaped figures, Simon stares at his feet. He feels ashamed. His daughter finally lifts her head toward him.

  “What about you? What’s your excuse?”

  “I was doing my job.”

  “No, not for the other night. For why you stay with mom even though you know very well she’s cheating on you.”

  Simon winces, averts his eyes again, and refrains from asking her how she knows this. He realizes how alike they are. Taciturn but observant. Through the wall from the adjoining room come volleys of Japanese speech. Alan has come back from school and resumed his never-ending marathon of anime, to which Jessica is wholly impervious. The mutual indifference manifested by his son and daughter never ceases to amaze him.

  “Is that why you brought out the heavy artillery at the Sutro Baths? That’s where you went on your first date, Mom and you. You were angry?”

  Once again Simon finds nothing to say. Jessica’s perceptiveness is hard to bear, but knowing she watches him so closely warms his heart.

  The next morning when he comes home from work he discovers an envelope under his pillow. I found this in grandma’s apartment. Your turn to make the past come alive. Inside is a photo of a handsome, dark-complexioned man standing in front of a small house painted green. Written on the back in faded ink are an address and the name of a Mexican city. And the inscription, la casa de Roberto. Simon shakes his head in disbelief; the outlines of the picture seem to quiver. As if his father was waving to him from the last millennium.

  It’s impossible this morning to tell the sky and mountains apart. The clouds perfectly imitate the hazy crest of the Sierra Nevada so that everything is confused. Were they pioneers worried ab
out getting to the cordillera before nightfall, Carmen muses, they would find it hard to estimate the remaining distance to the foothills. She has always tended instinctively to see her country’s geography through the eyes of the first ones to have crossed it, whether on foot or horseback, in heroic circumstances.

  Beside her, Marcus is snoozing, as he does each time he sits down in the passenger seat. When a bluish snoring fills the car, Carmen turns down the piano filtering out through the speakers. Her companion’s purring guides her through the hairpin turns that lead to Yosemite Park.

  Since they first met at the columbarium, they have frequently gotten together. If she had to explain this new friendship to someone, she wouldn’t know how. As luck would have it, she is enough of a loner to be spared that task. Marcus invites her to the restaurant, she suggests outdoor expeditions, they stop for lunch in cafés so out of the way that no chain has managed yet to hang its logo on them. With Marcus, everything seems to belong to another world, another period, where the wheels turn more slowly, the floors creak, and the dust settles in swirls that the cleverest folks decipher the way others read tea leaves. His hands tremble constantly and behind the thick, foggy lenses of his glasses he seems to scan the landscape as though looking for the key to it, the vanishing point.

  Though generally reserved, Carmen turns into a bona fide motormouth in Marcus’s company. First she holds forth on neutral topics: the importance of fire for the reproduction of sequoias, gardening in a Mediterranean environment, the training of marathon runners, the life of John Muir, in whose honour the trail running along the crest of the mountain range was named. But soon she finds herself baring her soul to him as she has rarely done, even with her lovers. Only Simon knows as much about her, because he alone has witnessed everything.

  And so she confides to her new friend the truth about her ill-fated love affairs, and the story of the other Marcus, Marcus Wilson, the father that Frannie concocted for them. She relates Frannie’s death, the discovery of her birth mother’s identity, Pablo Neruda, and Simon’s silence, since he apparently decided he is no longer her brother. Like a hollow tree trunk into which one’s secrets are whispered, Marcus gently receives these confidences. He, on the other hand, is not forthcoming with the details of his own life. Nevertheless, Carmen manages to establish a timeline, one that was shattered at its midpoint. From the bits of information provided by Marcus she has gathered that he lost his wife and two children in a brutal accident. His career in computer engineering nosedived in the aftermath and never entirely recovered. Marcus then went from job to job, drained and worn out, under the orders of contractors who would meet him on the roadside with a handful of labourers, hence his smattering of Spanish. That is why he can make sense of Neruda’s poems, which he reads aloud with a tolerable accent. No one has ever recited poems to Carmen. The old-fashioned romanticism of the gesture is not lost on her. Nothing, however, in the old man’s behaviour suggests anything beyond innocent affection, beyond the joy of still being able, at the age of despair, to find a soul mate.

  Yosemite Valley gradually unfolds with the twists and turns in the road, starting with its prow, El Capitan, the majestic granite rock formation that dozens of climbers grapple with every day. As they round the peak, Carmen sniffs the air, convinced as she has been from a very young age that she can detect the unique scent of the stone and of the thousands of hands that have bequeathed their sweat and blood to it, suspended halfway between the sky and death. Marcus rouses, his eyes blinking in the shadow of the cliffs. Carmen parks the car near the perfectly round mouth of a trail wreathed in dense foliage. She shoulders the heaviest knapsack, the one with water and the compressed biscuits that Marcus had her buy “for survival,” and they set out.

  The road ascends in tight loops; Marcus keeps up despite his raspy breathing, about which he never complains. From time to time, the splash of falling water and his hard breathing overlap. The forest teems with hidden microcosms. When they reach a promontory with a lookout the old man points to the far side of the valley: a rock shoulder spiked with fragile conifers, its summit like a hat with a massive brim.

  “When I was young we would go up there on a small road—it doesn’t exist anymore—that ran along the scarp. When we reached the top we waited until nightfall, then we lit fires. Once there were enough embers, we would pitch the burning chunks of wood into the air and whack them with a baseball bat. The embers would explode into a thousand pieces and tumble all the way to the bottom of the valley. Below, the campers would watch the show. We called it ‘making shooting stars.’”

  Carmen peers at the rocky crest and imagines the hot brands plunging a thousand metres, an incandescent snowfall attesting to the mighty strength of boys who still have their whole lives ahead of them. Each time Marcus harks back to his youth she is engulfed by a nostalgia that does not belong to her, a vision of what a man is before life dismantles him, of what remains of him afterwards.

  They reach the upper limit of the trail at dusk, and like all mountain climbers who go up to those bald, windswept heights, they sit down and peel off layer by layer the weariness that the climb has deposited on them.

  “I’ve always enjoyed getting to the end of a road at nightfall,” Carmen says. “Finding myself in the remotest place just as the shift happens, when one world tips over into the other.”

  Biting into one of his energy bars, Marcus agrees. The light sighs among the trees, ready to give birth to all manner of magical creatures, to raise the invisible worlds left behind millions of years ago by the glacier that split the mountain in half. As their vision loses its purchase on things, the sounds that come to relieve the watch are such that neither of them knows for certain which are real and which not. After almost half an hour of hovering like this between their imagination and the landscape, they perceive a stocky silhouette on the flat stretch of granite a dozen paces away from them. Marcus is the first to stand up.

  “A bear?” Carmen asks.

  “No.”

  The animal is small but sturdy looking, its sides and head streaked with white, the rest dark, almost black in colour. It is observing them with its mouth open and partially exposing fangs that illuminate the night. When its odour reaches them, powerful and pungent, Carmen understands.

  “A wolverine,” she mutters.

  “Creator of the world,” Marcus adds.

  Even the most hideous animal becomes magnificent when you realize it can kill you. With a swipe of its paw, a snap of its teeth, the beast could satiate its ravenous hunger with one of them, and there is nothing they can do to stop it. To her own surprise, Carmen feels an urge to retreat behind her companion, but she holds back. Marcus, meanwhile, takes a step forward.

  The wolverine shudders, lifts its head to scent the wind’s messages, swings its bushy tail. The night is too thick now for her to be certain, but Carmen could swear the animal has shot them each a cutting grin. Then it turns around and moves off toward the trees, where the forest is unmarked and the trails wield no authority. As soon as it has joined its fellow predators in invisibility, Marcus’s legs buckle and he drops to his knees on the stone. Carmen comes and lays her hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s okay, he’s gone. He won’t be coming back.”

  With his face screwed up, Marcus continues to peer into the darkness.

  “I wish he had eaten my heart.”

  Simon has forgotten the most important thing about Mexico: the noise. Amid the Victorian tranquility of San Francisco and its milky winds, the possibility of such a clamour is easily erased, especially when one lives with a woman like Claire. Here, even the most faraway villages are alive with the shouts of vendors, untamed motors, hammers, saws, indignant dogs, and music. The horns of some cars carry on for nearly a minute at a time, blaring out the tunes of popular songs. Even the dozing siesta sleepers raise a hellish racket, as each breath, striving to out-whistle and out-snort the previous one, escapes thro
ugh the open windows into the street. The other thing Simon has forgotten is how much easier it is to think among this profusion of sounds.

  Since Frannie’s death he has followed dozens of trails leading to dozens of Roberto Aurellanos, each of which turned out to be a dead end. He was about to call it quits when his daughter handed him the photograph. This trip is his last chance. Yet as soon as he got to Valle de las Palmas, he was struck by the absurdity of the whole undertaking. He had travelled to a godforsaken pueblo on the sole basis of the picture of someone who could just as well not be his father and of an address that kept him wondering why Roberto would have sent it to Frannie. To start with, he sits down for a meal at a taqueria counter. It’s been a long ride and on account of the hot weather he forgot to eat. As he scoffs his tacos, he puts a few questions to the old woman chopping a heap of tomatoes swarming with flies. She is uncooperative and confines herself to shaking her head at the mention of the name “Roberto Aurellano.”

  After his meal, Simon goes out to tour the few streets of Las Palmas. Tijuana is only about ten kilometres away, but nothing about the little town suggests how close it is to the vice-ridden city. Peaceful and populated with half-deaf old folks and agile youngsters, it’s the sort of place a visitor may tell himself he could spend the rest of his life in, and then move on. Possibly the sort of place where runaway fathers put an end to running.

  The street marked on the back of the photograph no longer exists, Simon soon learns. There are no more than a dozen avenues in Las Palmas, and Calle Azul is not one of them. He questions four different passersby before finally getting a guarded response: “Calle Mayor.” Without questioning the rationale behind this change of name, Simon sets out in the direction indicated to him. The street is the longest one in the village and he finds this encouraging. The number 15 is scribbled on the back of the picture; Simon puts his hope in this because he would otherwise be put off by the similarity of the little sunbaked houses, all painted more or less the same colour, all surrounded by concrete walls topped with shards of bottles to keep intruders at bay.