Still, it might not have lasted. She had, in fact, been considering returning to Paris and would have if she hadn’t entered one night into a tavern called El Vasco for a late meal. “That was where I met him,” she said. Salvador Aussaresses. When she took a table, he was already quietly dining by himself. He was at first glance fairly ordinary in appearance, though she could tell from his brightly colored scarf that he liked to dress. When her food arrived, he rose in a grand manner and approached her without an invitation. “Forgive me, but a woman should never dine alone,” he said, in Spanish, and she knew immediately from his accent that he was Argentine. His attitude was off-putting, but charming enough that she felt it unnecessary to dress him down. He ordered more wine for the table and introduced himself as a successful local painter. He was disappointed that this information left her unimpressed. But when he learned that she was from Paris the conversation lit up. He knew it well. Had many gallerists who carried his work there over the years. Had not been back for at least a decade but had an undying admiration and love for the French and their art. He was a man who had been very handsome once, even if something had worn in the better features she could tell he had once possessed. When the proposition that she pose for him came, there was no naivete in her casual affirmation that she would consider it. “Come for a session,” Salvador insisted. “If you don’t like the experience, you can leave,” he added, and slipped her his card. He paid for her meal.
When she decided, two days later, to go and see his address, Salvador seemed to anticipate her arrival. Before she had a chance to decide whether she would ring he had sprung outside coming into the street to greet her. Solemnly, he ushered her inside for tea. The house was large and well appointed. Salvador’s taste in beautiful things was refined and one could tell that he took pride in their display. They took tea in the kitchen, which was tiled with smooth warm-colored tomettes like those she had loved as a child in her grandparents’ house. Afterward, he took her to his studio. It was a beautiful open space, with old windows facing the inner courtyard. At first, she was very stiff. But the sound of the charcoal became soothing and after a time she got used to it. When the session ended, he pressed a pile of bills into her hand. It turned out to be an extraordinary sum, so much so that her worry about ulterior expectations nearly brought things to a halt. But the experience had not displeased her, and there was something about Salvador that she found unexpectedly attractive, she said. So, she returned. By the third week, she was posing entirely nude. At the conclusion of a long evening session, when he made a proposition, it was not the one she had prepared herself to answer. Salvador said that he was going to be away in Argentina for several weeks, that if she wished she could stay at his place. He would leave money and keys and she would agree to care for the house until his return.
That was how it began, she said. Having such a beautiful place to herself for long stretches of time, totally independent and with no concern for money, meant she could try something she had been thinking about all through her depression: the idea of writing. Now she had the means and a place to do so untroubled, in a city that she had fallen, however oddly, in love with. Salvador was aloof, an aesthete, but mostly harmless. Besides, he would regularly go away for weeks at a time, and when he came home, all he would ask of her was to sit for him so he could paint. She had so much time to herself. In the courtyard she could sit by the lemon tree in the sunlight and read books for hours without hearing a word or a sound besides the chittering of the birds and the lives of the insects. Salvador was often her only regular companion. Despite passing time together, she was never sure she knew him well. She had worried that he would ask her for sex. But he didn’t, and after a while she stopped worrying that he would. Sometimes he had other models come to the studio, always young women, sometimes young in a way that made her uncomfortable. But artists are wont to surround themselves with the beautiful. The girls who came to the studio were certainly that. She knew he liked to gaze. Sometimes she would catch Salvador watching her from another room. One time over coffee, he said that she had a mannish quality to her face, that she reminded him of a close friend whom he had lost in the Falklands. She wanted to ask more about it, but the way Salvador spoke she thought it better not to.
Her writing continued to fill up her journals, she said, and the time of the world slipped away. Everything would have been perfect if it hadn’t been for the nightmares. They were always similar and very regular now. It started with a conviction that Salvador was at the door watching her sleep. She would feel a deep powerlessness, her body paralyzed, and then wake up in a cold sweat. She always checked to see if Salvador was in the room or lurking outsider her door. But he never was. Outwardly, there was nothing wrong, as far as she could tell. But increasingly, she noticed that people fell silent around Salvador in a manner she had not noticed before. Worse, she said, sometimes she found herself doing the same thing, as though merely being in his presence made her lose her voice. Or she would become uncertain as to whether or not she had spoken. And she began to get visits at night from a tall blue bird. It would land on her head and grip her skull with its talons. She would stay very still and beg that it go away. But the sharp talons dug in. Just when she thought she couldn’t take it anymore the bird would take off with a clapping thunder like the sound of a helicopter, and sometimes she was convinced it was a helicopter, or a great plane passing low overhead and moving out to sea. Then she would wake. People looked at her funny in the street, she said. As if they knew something about her, as if she was guilty of something terrible. “But all I’m guilty of is wanting time,” she said. “Of needing space. Does anyone know how hard it is, even in this day and age, for a woman to live free of any attachments? Free of the need to work? To have a good place to live and write and not owe a man anything, not money, not sex, not the raising of children, nothing!”
There was a momentary quiet. By now the few other diners had long gone. Miguel was standing at his lectern nearby, but Jonah couldn’t tell if he had he been listening. Oscar was somewhere in the kitchen, presumably washing up.
Laura was looking directly at Jonah. Their eyes lingered on one another’s.
“I’m sorry if I’ve frightened you,” she said after a moment.
“No, not at all.”
“I thought, I don’t know, there’s something about you. I think you remind me of a friend I once knew, a dear friend from long ago. I hope you won’t mind me saying this. But I almost never see black people here, you know.”
“I can imagine.”
“Please, I know it’s sudden, but would you come to see me before you leave?”
“I will if you want me to.”
“I do. Come see me tomorrow. I will introduce you to Salvador. I think he may like to meet you.”
She asked Miguel for a menu and, to the maître d’s obvious displeasure, wrote down her address on the back with a rough little map to show him.
“I will see you tomorrow, won’t I?”
“Yes, I’ll be around,” Jonah said.
Satisfied, she left. Jonah immediately ordered another drink. But the bitter sea air in its bite was not enough. The winds had crossed him with Nathaniel’s Laura. There could be no doubt. Indeed, he didn’t dare doubt it, because it was already as if he had spoken too loudly and been overheard. And now the infinity of the world was answering his rudderless drift by crashing him into the rocks.
20
Jonah spent the next morning anxiously going over the whole thing in his mind. On the one hand, he thought of heading immediately to the internet café to send a message to Nate. On the other, he thought about what the meeting Laura had demanded might promise—what was unspoken but powerfully felt in the way she had looked at him. The thought of her desiring him was troubling in the best and the worst way. Telling Nate would have the effect of collapsing the possible future course of his actions. Postponing that revelation would allow him to make discoveries, to inquire more a
bout Salvador, for instance, which might be important in any report he sent back. But he was sufficiently torn that he made his way to Ciudad Vieja to check his email anyway and at least consider sending a note.
He looked first to see if there was any news from Arna, but there was none. On the other hand, there were several emails from Isaac, one being a short letter and the others containing links to news reports from different outlets. Isaac sounded characteristically grim, but there was a hint of anxiety in his tone that was even more alarming to Jonah than the aggressive graphics in the news clips.
There had been another ugly police shooting, this time in Brooklyn. In fact, it was only seven or eight blocks away from the apartment on St. Johns and Underhill. A team of undercover officers had come up to a young couple leaving their wedding party at a club and for reasons that still remained unclear had shot them as they were getting into their car to leave. The number of shots fired was incredible. As Isaac put it, “They just lit the car up like they were at a shooting gallery, for no reason.” The head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association had put out a statement to the effect that no investigation would be necessary, it was a tragic incident of mistaken identity, the couple had acted suspiciously and failed to comply with police demands. The man was a local party promoter and the woman a nurse at Woodhull Medical Center. They were both pronounced dead at the scene, but there was additional controversy over whether or not the officers who riddled their bodies with bullets had bothered to call in a timely manner for an ambulance, with some reports indicating that the ambulance had actually responded to calls from others in the wedding party who were in the parking lot and witnessed the shooting. Three of the officers involved were white and a fourth was Hispanic.
There was already a fury in the streets because of the intensification of a campaign to randomly stop and frisk anyone coming in and out of the projects, and the city was now on edge as calls for revenge on the police were being circulated online and peaceful demonstrations in the neighborhood were overtaken by increasingly violent clashes. The police were responding with more brutality, more tear gas, and mass arrests. The images were out of a dystopian nightmare. Phalanxes of cops in military-grade body armor, mounted officers raising batons and smashing their shields into faces in the crowds on the dark streets of Brooklyn. Hundreds had already been arrested, the president had given a speech calling on “the better angels.” But the raw anger in the streets and the grotesque disproportion of the police response were feeding a hopeless downward spiral. Isaac was still supposed to go to work and teach his third graders, but many parents were refusing to even let their kids leave the house as long as the threat of a wider riot was still heavy in the air.
By the time he had digested the news and realized he would have to compose some kind of note to Isaac, Jonah was utterly demoralized. What was there to say? Telling him about his adventures and discovery of Laura in Montevideo seemed somehow both unseemly and vaguely unkind. He wrote and deleted and rewrote several times what amounted to only a three- or four-line email, with banal phrases telling his friend to “stay safe” and “stay strong.” Any thought of writing to Nate evaporated. He couldn’t think straight, and besides, it wasn’t the right time. But when would the right time be?
Outside in the cool breeze, he walked along watching the people of Uruguay go about their tranquil lives. How different it would be to live in some small country like this—with its own complicated history, no doubt, but where, at least at present, one might grow up without ever really thinking that anything one’s country did or failed to do mattered, apart from occasionally making it to the World Cup finals. No foreign wars. No racial conflict spilling into the streets every day, no mass shootings, no sudden world-altering terrorist attacks would come screaming across the sky. Also, no black people. Which meant no place he could ever really be. Well, almost none. Once Jonah saw a glimpse of what appeared to be a drumline parading down one of the avenues. It was brief. He came around a corner and saw in the far distance a group of black men, one of them waving an albiceleste flag with a black diagonal stripe. But they were walking away from him and the music faded. He had asked Oscar about it, and had learned that there was in fact a small community of blacks in Uruguay, the descendants of slaves who had escaped south from Brazil, where emancipation didn’t come until 1888, a full sixty years after the Uruguayans had fought their way to independence from the Portuguese Empire. The diaspora was always larger than one imagined. But whatever the situation of the black folk in Montevideo—and he guessed it probably wasn’t magnificent—could it be as bad as Brownsville? As the bloody streets of Baltimore? He walked in a daze of muted anger. At what, he didn’t know exactly, mostly at himself. He felt guilty and stupid for being where he was. For having it so easy, but also for not having an answer, something that would justify his trajectory. While in this state of agitation he found himself, having wandered a good deal farther to the north than he had anticipated, standing outside the green entrance of the colonial solare that Laura had described to him. It was late in the afternoon by the time he arrived on the beautiful, tree-lined street, which showed no signs of life other than the occasional car or small truck thudding along under a light load.
Laura met him at the door and led him in through cool dim hallways to a spare living room. A neoclassical mold stood in one corner, a large palm by the window fronded a passage to an inner courtyard, and in the middle of the room a long, heavily worn-in couch, dark and sea green, faced a small fireplace flanked on both sides by towering bookcases. Glancing over them, he noted artist monographs, old volumes of classical literature in Spanish, and moderns like Borges alongside names that Jonah didn’t recognize, that he guessed were Argentine or Uruguayan writers of decades past.
As he was taking in the room, Laura brought a bottle and two glasses in from the kitchen.
“Will you drink with me?” she asked.
“Avec plaisir.”
“Ah, tant mieux. I’ve been waiting for an occasion to have someone to drink wine with—you know they love their whiskey here. I hope you will be pleased with the vin de maison—naturally it’s Argentinian.”
“Honestly, I’m not picky. Besides, I think I can trust your taste.”
She uncorked and poured them each a glass, then turned to him again.
“Do you mind if I ask how old you are? You look…very young, you know.”
“Old enough.”
She smiled at this. “Ah! Well, cheers to that. I enjoyed our talk. I realize I did most of the talking. But you put me at ease in a way I haven’t felt in so long. I think I told you…you remind me…”
“Of someone you knew, someone from years ago in Paris…a black man.”
“Did I say all that? Well, it’s true enough. He was special to me…Something about him was different from all the others.”
“And I remind you of him?”
“In some ways, yes.”
He was very conscious now of controlling his voice, every intonation, of the way his hands were placed and more still of how her eyes fell on them at times as though quietly imbibing something there at the surface that she wanted to keep for a later time.
“Do I make you nervous?” she asked.
“No, only a little, maybe.”
“I hope you don’t mind if I say this. I can’t help it, I’m always very direct. But you have the air of a young man who doesn’t stay anywhere for too long, or with anyone for too long. Are you still planning on leaving Montevideo very soon?”
“Yes, I can’t stay much longer…I think I’ve started to realize that there are a number of things back home that I really need to get back to.”
“A girlfriend perhaps.”
“No, actually. Not that.”
“Are you sure? I would be surprised if there wasn’t more than one you might have left behind.”
“You seem to see more in me than others. I wish it wer
e true in a way, but it isn’t.”
“Well, I feel lucky then to have caught your eye while you were passing through.”
“Did you catch me? I feel like it’s more that I’ve…found you.”
“You’ve found me at an interesting time. I feel more myself now than I’ve felt in years, almost as if I’m coming out of a deep sleep.”
“Tell me, what was he like?”
“Who?”
“The man you knew in Paris.”
“He was a beautiful man. Handsome, athletic, darker than you—very intelligent and kind. He knew how to make love in all the ways that matter. What about you? I think you are probably too young to have such experience.”
“I haven’t got as much as experience as I would like.”
“You wish you had more?”
“Yes. If I were with someone who wanted to give me the chance, then yes.”
Instead of responding to this directly, Laura rose from her end of the couch and walked into an adjoining hall. He heard the creak of a faucet. A moment later, she reappeared in the living room, lifted her drink, and took a sip while looking upon him, and sat down again.
“I’m going to take a bath. Would you care to join me?”
Her gaze was steady, and he met it as he thought carefully about his answer. She was older, of course, and rounder and heavier than in the picture Nate had sent along. In the picture she still had a girlish prettiness, but also a blankness to her features. Now she was a woman, her body thicker and more attractive, her face more expressive, beautiful in a way that the image he had seen was not. She had grown her hair out very long, and now as she waited for his reply, she had taken some of it in her hands.
“I think I will, yes. If that’s all right with you.”
“Good. I would like that.”
She put down her drink and moved across the couch, leaning in over him so that her hair was falling over his arm.
The Fugitivities Page 23