The Party Wall

by Catherine Leroux

  When he reaches number 11 his heart begins to thump. At number 13 his hands go from damp to dripping wet. At number 17 he walks back and forth a few times before acknowledging the facts: the addresses jump from 13 to 17, skipping over 15. And yet on the other side of the street, 16 follows 14, which comes obediently after 12. In disbelief, Simon walks up and down in front of the houses searching for an explanation.

  In the front yard of number 13 an old woman has been watching him for some time while stirring what could be either laundry or food in a basin. Simon approaches her and inquires about the absence of number 15.

  “15 doesn’t exist,” the lady replies.

  “Why?”

  She shrugs:

  “Because we were in a hurry to get to 17.”

  Annoyed by the townspeople’s penchant for the oracular, Simon feels around in his pocket and pulls out the photo.

  “I’m looking for this man. He used to live here. Roberto Aurellano. Do you know him?”

  One look is enough for the old lady to conclude, “Your father.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because of the resemblance. But I’ve never seen him, and I’ve lived in this town for seventy years.”

  Refusing to be discouraged by this verdict, Simon spends another hour interrogating the neighbours, waving the photo to prove he is not insane. At first indifferent, the townspeople gradually take an interest in his story, put forward theories, take him to the adjacent streets in search of number 15. Each time, Simon meets with the same disappointing results. The whole town seems to have banished “15” from its buildings.

  Toward four o’clock, tired and thirsty, he begins to accept the truth. His father never lived here. No one knows his name or recognizes his face. On the other hand, many have noticed the family resemblance—a sliver of certitude in the mist of his story. Catching sight of a shop, Simon goes in to buy a soda and enjoy the imperfect but still welcome air conditioning. The cashier is scratching a lottery ticket with a frown on his face, and Simon wonders whether he is looking for number 15. Outside, a tall man as dry-looking as a piece of deadwood is walking in circles while casting inquisitive glances inside.

  As soon as Simon steps out again into the swelter of the valley, the stranger accosts him:

  “The man you’re looking for—I know where he’s gone.”

  On the way back, Carmen dared not ask Marcus about his reaction to the wolverine. In fact, even though they spent half the trip reviewing their three hikes in the valley, at no time did they make any mention of their encounter with the beast. Marcus appears calm as they approach the Bay, but Carmen is reluctant to drop him off at his house as planned. At the very last minute she suggests he come along to her place.

  They end up squatting in the garden gathering up eggplants and cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce. The soil is warm and soft and wafts enticing fragrances in their direction, distracting Marcus from his chore while Carmen persists in picking the slugs off the young shoots one by one.

  “The trick is to trap them with beer,” Marcus advises.

  Carmen shakes her head. She has tried everything: beer, coffee grounds, egg shells. West Coast invertebrates are endowed with a vitality inherited from the settlers who, ever since the Conquista, have vied relentlessly for its land, and it takes more than a few table scraps to intimidate them.

  “It’s slower by hand, but more effective.”

  “You’re quite fond of long-term projects, aren’t you?”

  Carmen smiles.

  Coming from a girlfriend this kind of remark would have annoyed her; she would have seen it as an attempt to label her, to foist a theme on her personality. Which is what most people who enter into a relationship do after reaching a certain age. Put people in boxes. She has often told herself that this was the reason she was incapable anymore of such a commitment: she has reached the stage where women her age no longer believe it possible to be surprised, thereby destroying a form of freedom that Carmen refuses to give up. Coming from Marcus, however, the comment sounds rather charming.

  “Yes. That’s why I take you hiking,” she retorts.

  With a flick of her finger she sends the last slug flying into the pail, which she then sets down on the other side of a brook cutting through her property. Marcus waits for her in the middle of the garden with an armload of vegetables, gazing at the hills.

  “You’re lucky. Living here isn’t cheap.”

  Given her modest income as a park patroller, Carmen never considered herself privileged. It was when she dropped Marcus off in front of his run-down building that she was forced to face facts: she lives in one of the fanciest counties in California. For a split second she considers asking him to move in with her.

  “I owe it to my brief carrier as a star athlete. I received a sponsorship that enabled me to live here,” she explains while leading her guest toward the house.

  While they putter around the kitchen, Marcus takes a deep breath and then raises the issue that Carmen cannot elude.

  “Why did you throw everything away at the Atlanta games?”

  Carmen sighs. Coming from Marcus the question does not vex her as much as usual, and she decides to take the trouble to answer for once. She sits down on a stool and pours herself some ice coffee.

  “The day of the race I’d already won my medal for the 10K and I felt more confident than ever. The starter’s pistol rang out. I worked my way up through the pack focussing on my strides and my breathing. Then, after about 1500 metres… it’s hard to explain, but something inside me whispered that that’s not what I was running for, that I wasn’t there to cross finish lines, to beat records, to pit myself against other people. I tried to keep on but couldn’t manage it. My heart wasn’t in it. And in long-distance running it’s the heart that decides. Always. At the first intersection, almost without thinking, I turned left. But I didn’t stop. I kept running, it didn’t matter where, on the sidewalks, along expressways… I must have chalked up sixty kilometres that day. But they weren’t the right ones.”

  “I still remember it. It touched me to see this girl, in the middle of the most important race of her life, decide to head off somewhere else. To free herself from her fate, you might say.”

  “Not everyone found it moving. My trainer ditched me the very same night, and my sponsors all pulled the plug. When I got back here I was a pariah.”

  “No regrets?”

  Carmen douses the eggplant with olive oil.

  “None. I’m a hundred times happier trotting over the trails of Muir Woods than training like an animal. And whenever I have run in a race it was for the right reasons.”

  “And what might those good reasons be?”

  “I don’t know. Feeling the ground under my feet. Not having to think. Not having to count. Just listening to the rhythm of my strides, the vibration of each impact. Letting the soles of my shoes give something back to the earth.”

  Marcus nods with a suddenly solemn expression. Carmen would like to talk about the wolverine, still convinced that episode conceals an important truth, but all she does is invite him to take a seat. They eat without speaking and, enfolded by the fragrances rising from the earth, from the honeysuckle opening its flowers to the night birds, they watch the sun sink behind the hills and the phantoms come up from the ocean. Although they drink nothing but spring water, at the end of the meal Carmen feels drunk. She offers to put Marcus up for the night; he declines. Too exhausted to make the trip to Oakland, she calls a taxi and insists on paying the fare. Waiting for the cab, both of them rock from one foot to the other in the cool onshore wind, all at once silent and chilled to bone. When the taxi honks from the road, Carmen, seized by an inexplicable urge, steps up to her friend and, closing her eyes, gently kisses his worn lips. She keeps her eyes shut as he moves off toward the car and in that interval sees herself again fifteen years earlier leaving behin
d the throng of runners and the chance of a lifetime, to roam the streets of a city in thrall to sports. An impulse that did not change the face of Olympism, but which reshuffled the order of her existence like a providential earthquake.

  The tall, thin man sits beside him impassively. Simon has been a policeman long enough to know this kind of situation can be the starting point of the ugliest incidents, especially since the cartels have changed the roads of northern Mexico into veritable cutthroat zones: murders and kidnappings are commonplace, and some of the victims are not even connected to the drug trade. Still, from the moment the man spoke to him in the doorway of the grocery store, he had just one thought in mind: leave with him and drive until the truth was laid at his feet. With a loaded pistol concealed under his shirt, Simon invited the stranger to take a seat in his car.

  “My name is Pablo,” he says, looking out the window at a gaggle of kids chasing a puppy.

  “What do you want from me, Pablo?” Simon asks.

  “Nothing. I don’t want money. I just want to tell you one or two things.” Pablo points north and Simon is not bothered by the vagueness of the signal. The car starts away in a cloud of heat that blurs the horizon behind it. The air conditioning is mercilessly lacking. Simon punches the dashboard a few times in the vain hope of reviving the faulty system.

  “You were born up there?” Pablo asks.

  Up there: a term used by some to refer to the state located literally above theirs on the map; a phrase that sometimes seems to denote an elusive beyond. Simon nods, surprised as ever by how easily Mexicans can spot those who have never experienced life in Mexico. It’s not a matter of accent or appearance so much as a way of being—this is how it’s been explained to him. It galls him, this inability to blend in with those whose complexion he shares, after all, while it is enough to mark him out as an outsider in the eyes of all Americans.

  “And you’re a cop?” the passenger adds.

  Once again, Simon nods without asking how he guessed his profession. Cops, for some people, are even easier to recognize than second-generation immigrants.

  “How do you come to know my father?”

  “I don’t know him personally. But I know where he’s gone.”

  They drive for almost an hour on the road to Tijuana, where white students daring to venture south of their usual playground cross paths with workers going to work their shifts in the city’s bars, discothèques, and brothels. Pablo asks Simon to turn off toward a suburb and takes him down an almost deserted dirty road. Exactly the sort of place where hundreds of people have met their deaths. Simon squeezes his arm against his side to feel the weapon tucked over his ribs.

  The heat thickens like a garment saturated with dirt, and even the wind rushing in through the open windows is insufficient to cool them off. And yet the passenger is not sweating at all. “Maybe he’s a ghost,” Simon muses, giddy from the sun.

  After half an hour, a hazy structure finally appears on the horizon, giving the lie to the theory that has been growing steadily in Simon’s mind, to the effect that the car would soon reach the end of the world and drop into the void. Little by little, the building comes into focus, an immense, uniform shape, a factory or possibly a prison. The frontage is topped with barbed wire.

  Gradually, however, the breadth of the building negates all such suppositions. As the car draws nearer, the building’s extremities retreat beyond what can be grasped, vanishing beyond the limits of what can be seen. A wall.

  “The wall,” the passenger confirms.

  Simon parks the car about thirty metres away and both of them get out. Although he has often seen it on TV and had enough time to be outraged and then to put it out of his mind, Simon has to admit the structure is impressive.

  “And my father?”

  Pablo looks at him sternly.

  “Each year, millions of people try to climb over this wall. They’re caught on the other side by civilian patrols, self-appointed protectors of America, or they’re hunted down in the desert by coyotes—that’s if the psychopaths that hang out on either side of the border don’t eat them alive first. You think your father was an exception to the rule? If he had a kid in the United States it’s certain he tried to cross over.”

  “I’m not sure he was so intent on finding me.”

  Pablo obstinately shakes his head.

  “I’m telling you. The people who leave something behind on the other side are the worst. They spend their whole lives trying to go back. Like deranged pigeons.”

  Feeling bitter and frustrated, Simon does not have the strength to explain to his companion that his father never showed any interest in the family, which he had engendered probably by accident. He places his hand on the wall, the way that pilgrims and travellers at the end of their rope do.

  “What about you? You don’t go across?” he asks.

  “Me, I cross whenever I like,” Pablo replies. “I go through walls.”

  An unimaginable fatigue settles on Simon’s shoulders. Suddenly there is only one thing he yearns for: the coolness of San Francisco summers, and the sea breeze. He walks back to the car.

  “Where can I drop you off?”

  Eyeing the barbed wire glinting at the top of the wall, Pablo declines with a wave of his hand.

  “You go on alone. I think I’ll stay here for a while.”

  Simon gets back into the car, which reeks of overheated plastic. He turns on the ignition, giving the silence a slap, and does a U-turn on the powdery road used only by clandestine migrants. The man soon becomes a threadlike detail in his rear-view mirror, a burning mirage. Simon’s right hand presses against his left side where the pistol is cradled against his skin, the ultra-smooth metal and the bullets nested in the barrel like so many possible deaths. At sunset he stops at the beach in Tijuana, the most northerly in Mexico, where, in close proximity to the bathers and sand castle builders, the wall stretches into the sea. A barrier five metres high, which at this time of day casts an even longer shadow, and yet could readily be skirted by a good swimmer or a sufficiently cunning sea monster.

  It wasn’t what she was looking for. The article came out of almost nowhere while she was searching the Internet for Marcus’s date of birth. He had declined to tell her the exact day, but knowing his Zodiac sign was Cancer, she had seen an opportunity to surprise him. Then a series of links popped up about a dramatic event going back some fifteen years but still alive in the strands of the web, where nothing is forgotten.

  Contrary to what Marcus had led her to believe, his family did not die in an accident. While Marcus was away on a business trip his wife killed their two children before taking her own life. According to newspaper reports at the time, she had found out her husband was cheating on her. Carmen immediately thinks of Simon. She can’t shake off the urge to call him, to leave yet another message in his voice mail and hear the chemical silence at the other end.

  When he learned of the death of the three people he cherished most in the world Marcus tried to end his own life in the hospital but was thwarted by a male nurse. The follow-up articles recount the father’s descent into hell, his struggle with alcoholism, his confinement to a psychiatric hospital, and so on. Choking back her sobs, Carmen charges out of her house and sets off on a run that takes her into the night. When she returns, the computer has shut down and the house is dark. She keeps the lights off and goes to bed with her clothes on and her eyes open, as if the ceiling had just disappeared and she were looking directly at the sky.

  The next day, holding an armload of daffodils, she knocks on Marcus’s door at the same time as the rising sun. True to his habit each time she comes to visit, Marcus questions her before opening. He always needs a few moments to acknowledge the possibility of her presence.

  “Who’s there?” he asks.

  “It’s me, Carmen.”

  “Carmen who?”

  “Lopez.�
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  Nothing can be heard on the other side of the door. Marcus is weighing the chances that this is really and truly she. Carmen considers the door and thinks how easily a simple peephole could alleviate her friend’s fears. Unable to wait for him to make up his mind, she speaks up.

  “Marcus, I’ve come to tell you something important. I’ve found out how your children died. I learned this by chance, I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to dig up your secret, I just stumbled on it. Yesterday I ran fifty kilometres for them.”

  There is still no sound from inside Marcus’s apartment. Not even a slight cough.

  “Marcus? Are you there?”

  She can feel something vibrating against the door panel. It takes her a few seconds to realized it’s Marcus’s trembling body. Then she hears his voice, so dry one might think he had swallowed sand.

  “I gave everything away, afterward. It’s what they would have wanted, even her. It’s my one consolation. A part of them goes on living in a dozen bodies spread around the world. Their flawless little hearts. My daughter’s beautiful green eyes. My boy’s lungs—the kid could run like the wind! And her, even her. Her kidneys saved some poor slob somewhere. Someone who has no idea he owes his life to a monster. It’s the best thing anyone could get out of her.”

  Carmen has sunk down on the doorstep, dropping her flowers, leaning her head back against the door. Her legs are numb. Marcus is still shaking on the other side. The day is breaking.