They heard Paolina whimper through the wall. Jonah decided to give the lovers some space and went inside to check on her. Later, when he overheard the muffled sounds of their lovemaking, he realized, to his surprise, that he didn’t mind. He was happy for them. What kept him awake was not the grating loneliness of hearing others consumed in pleasure, but the deepening shadow of self-doubt. He thought of Nathaniel’s words, and Isaac’s, and he knew he had no better answers to any of the points they had made. And he knew moreover that he would have to leave his present situation, and soon. That he was not really doing anything, despite the fact that everything in the world was seemingly free for him to choose or take, most of all the freedom itself, which was in the scheme of history both an incredible accident and a miracle, but which he had, to his mind, so little to show for.
When they got back to the city, Jonah told Octavio that he was leaving Porto Alegre, that he wanted to see Montevideo and Buenos Aires, that there was no reason for him to stay any longer. He asked Octavio whether he wanted to join him or stay and explore his budding relationship with Francesca. Octavio asked for the night to think it over.
Jonah was packing and nervous about missing his overnight bus to Uruguay the next day when Octavio showed up.
“I’m staying,” said Octavio. “Actually, I’m going to stay with Euclides for a while in Alvorada, and then we’re heading back up into the mountains with Francesca and Paolina, possibly for a week or more. You’re invited, of course, if you want to postpone that bus ticket.”
“I’m good,” replied Jonah. “You go have fun. Where’s Francesca?”
“She’s still packing. I came to get my stuff.”
“I left you my portion for the Rialto,” said Jonah.
“Cool, you’ll keep in touch? Maybe if I can swing it, Francesca and I will come find you later on.”
“Yeah, I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of each other.”
“I’m sure we haven’t,” said Octavio. “Sin duda. You take care of yourself.”
“I will, compañero, I will. And listen, man. Whatever the case, be good to Francesca. Do right by her, if you can.”
On this unexpected and yet vaguely anticipated comment, Octavio reflected solemnly but gave no immediate response. “We’ll go with you to the bus station when you’re ready.”
At the bus terminal where they had disembarked, it now seemed, so long ago, the two friends embraced. Francesca was more emotional than Jonah had expected, and he felt almost immediately regretful that he was leaving. Francesca explained that she had a gift for him and extracted from her bag a little blue journal and a book of poems by Mário Quintana. Inside she had inscribed three words to him: Sul. Sorte. Saudade. “If never I see you again,” she said, carefully, as she handed it to him. He thought she misspoke and meant to say, “I hope to see you again.” But she shook her head and said it again in her own language using the word he knew meant what it did, but not what it would always mean to her. And when she tried again very softly, almost without sound, it was: “If I hope then never I will see you again.” He knew that it was true. She put her arms out and they embraced. Then he stepped up into the idling bus, giving a faint wave through the bubble of glass as he found his way to an empty seat. He held close the gifts he had received as the rumbling behemoth lurched forward and pulled away.
PART FOUR
I run, but time’s
Abreast with me
—COUNTEE CULLEN
A letter to you from home. I’m resting for a few days. Came down with one of these flu things. Got it on the plane, I think. The delightful side of this is that now I have an excuse to lie around in bed catching up on my reading and writing to you! I suppose the first thing to tell you is that Mariam and I are now officially “on a break.” We’re still texting, but I know inside that it’s probably over. I’m unhappy with myself for not handling it better. The fact that she’s in London right now is probably for the best. But I miss her terribly. What if I’ve screwed up a relationship with the one person who could make me happy? How do you ever know for sure if a relationship is the one? I think I wanted so much to fall in love, to be in love, that I panicked when it felt like it might really be happening. The smallest things seem to make all the difference, the slightest alteration of a day’s plan and entire stories we might have lived just evaporate or materialize out of the void. For at least a week, I had this notion in my head that we would get married. We could go to Amsterdam, or Brussels, where it’s legal, and be part of this beautiful new era that’s opening before us. I sometimes have to stop and think about how extraordinary it is, what a time to be alive. All these new freedoms for love and acceptance expanding the picture of what a life could look like, what my life could be. The chance to be part of a historic moment. But I’m clearly not ready yet. Isn’t it strange? It’s like everything is possible now, there’s never been a better time, there’s never been so much hope, it’s never been so easy to communicate and travel, to have fun and meet people from everywhere. And yet, I still feel somehow trapped. More unsure and frustrated than ever, more afraid that things aren’t adding up toward something that will last. I secretly worry whether what I’m doing will be worthy of everything my parents and their parents did for me. Maybe there will never be an answer. It does feel good to be able to write to you about all this, though, because I know you’ll read this and smile when you think of me, so serious and philosophical-like, laid up in my bed with all these balls of tissue and my endless cups of tisane, writing feverishly to you while the dreary rain taps on my window. I suppose if all else fails, the one thing I can say is at least I have you. In our own way, at least we’ve had each other.
—A
18
Jonah stared out at the trucks passing by on the broiling highway. Little dust tornados swirled over the copper-colored land. Then, abruptly, grayish-green fields of corn or maize sprouted out of the baked earth. Occasionally they passed low gray factory complexes with corporate names stenciled on windowless facades. They slowed to a stop next to a truck-servicing station. From his window, Jonah watched sex workers in nylon shorts take languid steps back from the asphalt as the bus passed them by. The driver loudly announced “Trinta minutos” and stepped off. In the convenience area, there were various food stalls and aisles of packaged snacks, all with unfamiliar designs and names. Jonah picked up a bag of Yokitos and stared at the alligator apparently wearing a ball cap made from a leg of ham. The thought of ham-flavored potato chips made him slightly nauseous. He felt homesick. For New York. For Paris. For familiarity of any kind. His heart rose when the cashier told him where to find a computer with internet. He quickly checked his email. Arna had not written him back, and he wondered if something he said in his last email had put her off. He wrote a short note to Nathaniel Archimbald.
Dear Nate,
I know this will seem kind of random, but I’m writing you from a service area not far from the Brazilian/Uruguayan border. Rio was crazy, amazing, dangerous. My friend Octavio who was traveling with me fell in love in Porto Alegre, a city in the South, and now I’m continuing solo toward Montevideo, a bit of a relief as I have a stronger grasp of Spanish than Portuguese. Listen, man, I still have your letter to Laura, but I don’t know what to do with it. You and I both know the chances of me finding Laura are as likely as finding a lost penny on the beach. I don’t even know what she looks like, you know? Anyway, this next phase of my travels could be pretty unpredictable, and I don’t want anything to happen to the letter, so if you remind me of your address, I’d be happy to send it back.
Un abrazo from a lost brother,
Jonah
Back on the bus, Jonah’s window was now dark with night. He tried once again to sleep, and this time he succeeded. He dreamt that he was in Paris, in the projection booth. Yellowed movie posters floated in the darkness. The actors and actresses with their beautiful teeth no longer stared
at each other full of rapture; they were staring at him, like a circle of mute lawyers. The Kinoton and its black snake whirred to life. A stock of silvery, crackling light wobbled against the screen, patiently clearing into the shape of Phineas sitting with his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette.
“Where am I going?” Jonah asked him.
Phineas took a drag but did not respond.
“What happened to you? Why did it all go south?”
Phineas looked out to a point in the near distance.
“It’s all in the way it bends,” he said. “It bends toward the heart, always.”
“But how do I know…how do I find it?”
“The ear bends to the heart, brother, when you play everything rightly.”
“Just play it right?”
“Play all the notes…Don’t skip none now…You gotta let each one know they already there…show they was ready to begin with…the thing is…if I messed up it wasn’t cause I didn’t love the music…my spirit was always right with the music…whatever I got to answer for…please let them know brother…that every note I played…I did my best to play it rightly.”
Jonah awoke with a start. He was in another country.
* * *
The trees were snowing in Montevideo. A dandruff of silky pollen came off the branches along the avenues, along all the hushed boulevards running down to the ocean. Jonah advanced in a daze, happy just to be off the bus. A bright pan of sunlight rinsed over the squat buildings that lined the boulevards, its warmth cut by the icy quills of the Southern Ocean. He leaned into the wind and the tumbling tufts of pollen flew in his eyes.
To Jonah the trees felt oddly familiar, their arrangement and disposition, the personality of their crowns. They looked just like French plane trees, and in fact the whole city seemed carved out of some idea of Paris in the late nineteenth century, as though a fragment had set sail and washed ashore at the mouth of the Río de la Plata. Like the French, the Uruguayans were fond of their cafés and bookstores, tons of them it seemed, especially for a country that was probably by population about the size of Queens. Inside a librería in the Ciudad Vieja he quickly discovered they were proud of their poets too. Perhaps the trees were a token of gratitude on the part of the French, in exchange for all the morose and maleficent Uruguayan exiles and dandies who pollinated their poetry—Lautréamont, Supervielle, Laforgue—who tasted the ozone of these austral latitudes.
Not far from the Rambla he entered an empty tavern where the bartenders looked like toughs from a Jean-Pierre Melville flick. The local whiskey seemed to be the thing. It went down fiery and marine. When he eventually stumbled out again, he was filled with hunger. In his sullen march for food and lodging he passed through the Parque Rodó.
The grounds of the park were impeccably kept and desolate. Making his way under the tall green palms, Jonah arrived before a huge obelisk done in Eurofascist thirties-style concrete. It was dedicated to Uruguayan writers and artists, and to the youth of Latin America. Dusk was enclosing the greenery around him in a canopy of chittering twilight. He turned from the monument in a mummified stupor. He was trying to gauge the quickest path back to the street, but he couldn’t make it out. He felt like a feral spirit stranded on an island in someone else’s world. And for a flickering moment, he was certain some oppressive force would try to keep him there, holding him in a state of wild captivity, solitary and enslaved, a native hypnotized into submission by a colonial magician. But the queasiness passed, and he eventually made his way down along a lake lined with eucalyptus trees, before finding his way out onto yet another avenue that abutted the park. A few streets farther on, he turned and came upon a catacombic alley illuminated by a single bulb of light. Jonah followed it like a beacon and came to a small pensión where the words EL VASCO had been lettered in green and red on the window. Without so much as a glance at the menu, he walked in.
Behind a lectern stood a man dressed in a frumpy tan jacket and drooping bowtie, his hair slicked back, his thin moustache regularly agitated by a twitch in one eye. The impression was of a slightly shabby and possibly shifty variation on the standard model.
“Hola,” said Jonah. “Por favor, quiero una mesa para cena y una cama para la noche. Es posible?”
The man did not reply but instead looked around the room then up the stairs behind him. The tiny restaurant only had four tables. They were all empty. Four keys hung from hooks untaken by guests. He turned back to Jonah with a strained look, as if he were trying to dislodge a crumb scratching in his throat.
“All our tables and rooms are booked this evening,” he said in unmoved Oxfordian English.
“Okay, so…” Jonah switched to English while steadying himself against the implication he was beginning to recognize. “Well, look, can I at least eat? I can be quick if the reservations aren’t until later. Or…is there a problem here?”
The maître d’ shook his head, expressionless. “The chef has not yet started to cook. By the time he begins, the guests with reserved tables will have arrived.” He raised his hands in a slight shrug. “I’m afraid you will have to find somewhere else to eat.”
The maître d’ was now staring at him coldly, as if he were trying to glare him out the door. Jonah was trying to make up his mind on how far to take it. He was hungry, and now he was pissed too. On the other hand, he was a stranger in a strange land a million miles from home, and it was probably not the best time to test out the response time of the local cops.
From the kitchen came a sudden and loud clatter of pots and pans along with a shout of “Maldita!” The kitchen doors opened and a man with a chef’s hat emerged, the cap ill-suited to his rather enormous head. The maître d’ rushed over to him, initiating a ping-ponging of excited Spanish between them. Then the chef looked over at Jonah. His countenance changed from one of annoyance to glee.
“Miguel!” he said, slapping the maître d’ on the chest. “No me dijiste que teníamos un invitado!”
Jonah couldn’t understand what the chef was so happy about, but he sensed that his luck was about to turn.
“Muchacho! Estas aquí para cenar?”
“Sí.”
“Sí, cómo no!”
The chef shook his head at the maître d’ and they exchanged a few more agitated words that Jonah couldn’t make out, but he gathered by the chef’s hand gestures toward the upstairs and back to the restaurant tables that he was arguing for Jonah to remain as a guest. Finally, the chef approached him, flashing a grin.
“Perdónanos. El restaurante no está abierto aún para la cena. Pero Miguel lo llevará a una habitación en la planta superior donde puede ducharse y cambiarse sus camisas. Alguna comida y bebida le estarán esperando cuando baja.”
Jonah was lost in the chef’s flurry of Spanish.
“Lo siento, pero mi español es muy pobre.”
The chef slightly raised his eyebrows. “Qué idioma hablas? Your language?”
“English or French.”
“Ah, bueno. Where you from?” the chef asked. “New York.”
“New York? New York! Newww Yawk Citayyyy! Qué suerte! Do you remember when we went to New York, Miguel? And now, New York, she has come to us! Welcome to Montevideo, Yankee! My name is Oscar, and this is my pareja, Miguel. I was saying to you that we are not yet open for the evening. But it’s okay. Miguel will take you to a room while I begin preparations for the dinner. After you shower and change your clothes, you will come back here, and there will be a table with food and drink waiting for you.”
“Que bueno. Gracias, Oscar.”
Oscar disappeared into the kitchen; with a lethargic flick of the wrist, Miguel gestured for Jonah to follow him upstairs.
Oscar’s partner had not entirely warmed to Jonah, but he was more welcoming after Jonah spruced himself up. They had laid out for him a platter of meats, cheeses, and bread, along with a glass of wine. Miguel left Jona
h alone to eat, but he was prompt in suggesting and pouring more red. There was only one other diner in the room: a woman, who sat facing away from him. She and Miguel periodically exchanged chitchat, laughing under their breath. Only when Oscar himself came to check on Jonah’s satisfaction with the food did the woman turn to look at him. From her glance, he was able to discern that she was she was a little older than him, with features that lent her an enigmatic, foreign flair. From the kitchen doorway, Oscar appeared, and with a loud exclamation, greeted the woman, kissing both cheeks and exchanging pleasantries. Oscar asked if Jonah wanted anything further, but Jonah, apologetically declined, citing his exhaustion.
“Then tomorrow, we shall have a bigger meal. Something special for our Yankee friend.”
Jonah slept fitfully. He seemed to be the only guest and sat alone with a breakfast of toast, jam, and coffee, served by Miguel, who said that Oscar had departed early to get to the seafood markets. Jonah observed Miguel at his lectern, seemingly waiting for guests that showed no signs of coming. Other than the maître d’s distaste for colored folks, he wondered what it was about this particular pensión that caused people to avoid it. Certainly, in a city as generally pale-faced as Montevideo, his attitude wouldn’t be the problem. Besides, the place wasn’t without its old-timey charms. Jonah’s eyes settled on the photographs that littered the wall, pictures of fútbol players and local celebrities from bygone eras. He noticed a newspaper photograph of what appeared to be Fidel Castro wearing a blue suit and being served food at an expensive restaurant. He thought he recognized the waiter, and, giving him a closer look, realized it was none other than Miguel. When he came to clear Jonah’s plate, he asked about it.
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