With the letter in Laura’s hands, Jonah took the ferry across the Río de la Plata. The great avenues of Buenos Aires looked like nothing so much as Paris. Proud, lively, officiously pretentious. From a cheap hostel in San Telmo he went searching for good bookstores in Recoleta. Everyone claimed there were excellent bookstores there. But it wasn’t true. Not on the calle Borges and not anywhere else. Palermo Hollywood was teeming with young Americans. He got roped into a conversation with some earnest, bright-eyed banker types. They demanded he talk sports. Then proceeded to enlighten him about the terrific opportunities of sovereign debt. There was no place they could fail to presume they should get what they wanted.
He ditched them and plunged onward, losing his way in the labyrinth of the city. Groaning buses filled the air with diesel fumes. Women with tinted shades pranced through the soot clutching monogrammed bags. Finally, he found a bookstore in the city center. The cool air-conditioning and the quiet were a relief and he idled in the aisles. The shopkeeper, a potbellied man in a gray sweater, came over twice to ask him if he needed help before huffing off again. Jonah decided on a copy of Los poemas de Sidney West by Juan Gelman. The bookseller practically snatched the money from him while muttering something he assumed the gringo wouldn’t understand. But Jonah did understand. There was no such thing as a good black person in Buenos Aires.
Large demonstrations against the government were taking place on the Plaza de Mayo. Mothers with gray hair tucked into their scarves carried signs demanding knowledge of the fate of their children. They were the mothers of the “disappeared.” Over coffee, Jonah deciphered the headlines in the leading daily. The generals said they were sorry, but that they had done nothing wrong. They were following orders. What was done had been necessary to rid the nation of Marxist terrorists.
Back at the hostel, the lady who did the housekeeping and tended the entryway noticed Jonah’s book of poetry while he was reading it alone in the common room. She asked him if he liked poetry very much. Yes, he said. She asked if he knew what they had done to Juan Gelman’s son. No, he said. They impaled him, she said. Impale meant to stick a rod up through the anus into the stomach so you bleed to death very slowly. They sent his pregnant girlfriend to a detention center in Uruguay. No one ever saw her again. He was twenty-four. She was twenty-three. So many young people, she said. All of us will take this stain with us to our graves. Every day, I ask myself, how could this have happened? Where are you from? America, he said. Why didn’t anyone in your country speak out and try to stop it? Because we supported it, he said. I know, she said, I know, but why? He tried to think of an answer. He thought of Katrina. He thought of how many images of disaster, torture, and death he had consumed in the relatively few years of his conscious life. I suppose it’s because we don’t care, he said. No, I mean, we do care, but only about money. Yes, she said, it’s the same here. Well, in a way, we are everywhere, he said. It was Burson-Marsteller that made so much money by lying about it. Who are they? She wanted to know. Advertisers, Jonah said. The best in the world. Then advertisers are the greatest criminals of our age, she said. How could they? Our mothers only ask for justice, peace, answers! And they get silence, threats, and lies. All of Argentina is built on unspeakable crimes and indifference. And nothing changes. The people are still in poverty. The same forty families own all the land. The Yankees, the military men, the bureaucrats, they are still our masters. My country is built on lies too, Jonah said. Terrible crimes, even worse. Yes, she said. Yes, of course, it’s very true. I suppose that’s what we have in common. It was impossible to sleep in Buenos Aires.
Without a plan, Jonah went to Constitución Station and studied the timetables. Finally, he settled on a late departure, a night train heading south to Bahía Blanca. The train went over the sweetgrasses of the Pampas in total darkness under the stars. The conductor wore a green bow tie and drank yerba maté to keep himself awake. Jonah tried to write, but the janky tracks made it impossible and he gave up. In the morning they passed an overturned Range Rover at a rail crossing. The conductor clicked his pen and made a note. At Bahía Blanca Jonah bought a sandwich then boarded the connecting bus for Viedma. As the landmass of the continent narrowed so did his options. At Viedma he saw nothing worth the price of staying a night, so he waited for another bus, this one nearly empty, that took him farther south again to Puerto Madryn, a town that promised whale-watching tours. The town turned out to be only a Potemkin village set up by the tour operators to greet visitors and ferry them out to the whales. After the hours on the road, he gulped in the oceanic air. It tasted like release.
* * *
—
He found himself heading out on a skiff with a young German couple from Würzburg. They spoke excellent English and insisted Jonah must visit their town. The most authentically German town, with the nicest people, the man said. Despite what happened during the war, and the heavy price they paid, the woman said. Jonah was relieved that the ocean was relatively calm. They bobbed about in the hot sun. When the breach came it was so sudden they almost missed it. A terrific snort followed by a slapping slurp in the marbled froth. Then another smaller hump just behind, a hillock soon dissolved. The boatman said it was a female, probably with a young one in tow. The Bavarians shared laconic exclamations as they watched the trail of spume unspool. They all waited, scanning the rolling swells intently in the hopes of another salutation. None came. Still. He had seen it. The Leviathan. Her lungs the size of Volkswagens, hot blood coursing through arteries thick as his thorax, perhaps dim awareness of her fingerbones. The biggest mother out there. Concentrating in her body the inspired will to dive, to undertake those long hours of nightwork in the deep trenches, bathed in sound, seeking out that nourishment so needful for ascension. Why should her mere proximity cause such emotion? Was it a sign? A hopeful nod that he was on the right path? Or a signal that he was deceived? In Milton’s poem, mistaking the whale for an island got one dragged down to hell. Was that his trouble? That he could not tell the difference between signs of hope and signs of hopelessness? Or was it that all along he had assumed there was a problem? Believed, even before Phineas had made him self-conscious of a desire to pursue it, that he had some mission to fulfill, some heroic effort to discover, when the truth of his condition was that he was the lucky survivor of a wreck, an Ishmael, whose isolated life was defined by the privilege of floating safely shoreward on the tides, a blessing of the gods, a stroke of dumb luck, a fortune inherited precisely because the defining moments of death and destruction had already taken place. What if there was nothing left to do other than tell the story? Nothing to accomplish other than continued survival and a contemplative retelling of the ruinous past? Had he come to the far end of the world in order to learn something that was the biggest nothing of all? These black thoughts? Convinced he was going one way, was he, all along, going the other? It would be in keeping with everything else. The rotten purposelessness of the age. The mindlessness swallowing everything into itself without any possibility of resistance, only horrific jests. Neither progress, nor regression. Only this holding pattern, this undertow of disorientation. The fear of revisiting the past and the fear of the annihilating future holding everything and everyone in a nihilistic torpor, sending out fluxing lines that sparked all manner of derangement and decadence. Including his own. Yet was this anything the old folks didn’t already know? Wasn’t this what, in their own way, they had always tried to tell him? That it would come down to making a way out of no way, creating a future over and against its absence? Wasn’t it ingrained in his impulses, this reflex to run away in order to live? But the North Star in the age of the satellite is everywhere and nowhere. There would be no outrunning in this brave new world; whatever you had, whatever you could hold onto, you would have to make into a home. And he understood that he was looking at what he could not see before. The circumference of his errant life, his ceaseless fugitivity. A line without relief.
* * *
—
The next morning, he was on a bus crossing the Andes along the snow line. On the way down out of the mountains and into Chile, the snow gave way to green pastures, farms, and rows of poplars lining glittering streams. On the outskirts of Puerto Montt new housing developments, still wrapped in Tyvek, were marooned in barren lots. Volcanoes towered in distant otherworldliness. At the ferry dock, he decided to drink to take the edge off. This was a mistake. Later, on the crossing, he thought he saw the Devil or a troll-like person watching him. And he remembered what Orígenes had said, that even the Devil would be saved.
The island of Chiloé was on the Pacific. In Ancud penguin tours were heavily advertised. But when he inquired at the tourist office, Jonah was told the seas were too rough that day to see any penguins unless he were willing to pay a good deal more for a bigger boat. The hills around Ancud were the color of avocados. Large black birds sailed overhead, great black crosses. He was informed that they were condors, a type of vulture. The tourist office turned out to have a selection of books by and about Chileans, their culture and history. He bought a copy of Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor. He left Ancud penguinless, but on his way found a newly opened sushi restaurant. No one there was Japanese. But they had chopsticks and the fish was fine. Jonah read from Altazor and took comfort in its charm. “I love the night,” sang the poet, “the hat of every day.”
From Chiloé he traveled again, this time straight north up the spine of Chile to Santiago. In the capital he checked into the Villa Gramaldi, the American youth hostel. There was a terrible smell in the bathrooms. Someone said it was something in the drains, an ineradicable stench. Jonah quickly headed out to explore the city but there was very little to see in terms of sights, and he ended up drifting through residential neighborhoods with no distinctive character. He thought of Salvador Aussaresses. He could have lived comfortably on any of these neat tree-lined blocks. In the roundabouts there were bustling traffic and signs for an upcoming concert by Shakira. She was performing at the Estadio Nacional, the stadium where Pinochet had set up his open-air detention center and tortured people in the locker rooms. As far as he could see, there were no black people anywhere at all.
He would later reflect that the end decisively came into view in the cubicles of that sad locutorio in Santiago. He had joined the others plugged in at the long bank of numbered computers with their telemarketer headsets. He gazed into the screen with placid relief, allowing random media to wash over him as he clicked. He had no real desire to check his email. What he wanted was the feeling of being online itself, the narcotic, effortless involvement in the hive mind. Soon enough, however, he had scrolled through all of the homepages for websites that he could think of. He ran a search for massages in Santiago. That led to more links for sensual massages. Cascades of glossy thumbnails, unlikely names, and numbers. He stared at them quizzically, then abjectly. He jotted a few down in his notebook. Downstairs, he used a phone booth to make the calls. The first one was so confusing and aggressive that he hung up right away. The second was a soothing, laughing voice. He asked for directions. He went back upstairs to check the address. It was in a suburb to the north of the city. He went back down and hailed a taxi that took off speeding along curvilinear avenues leading out to the north of the city. They pulled up to a corner in what appeared to be an affluent neighborhood. He rang the intercom in the entry hall of a residential tower. A young woman’s voice buzzed him in. It was not the voice he had heard on the phone. A dark-skinned woman opened the door. Venezuelan, maybe. She was in her underwear, a green G-string and a black padded bra. She had a sweet smile and very distant eyes. Her thighs were striated in cream-colored marks. She took Jonah by the hand and led him into a living room. A large black leather couch dominated the room. Facing it was a coffee table with a shallow dish full of candies and a large flat-screen television. An episode of The Cosby Show dubbed in Spanish was playing at very low volume. She sat him down on the couch and asked how long he wanted to stay. He said he wanted whatever the usual was. She chuckled and put her hand on his groin. She told him to relax. She kissed him on the cheek and told him to put the money on the coffee table. She was going to freshen up and would be back in a moment. He heard her go upstairs and close a door. The Huxtables were revolving around the studio set warbling in Spanish. He looked around the room. There was a faint breeze coming through the bars of a window full of boxed begonias. He looked at the pile of bills on the table. He heard a sink faucet running upstairs. Then he was up and making his way to the door, to the hall, down a flight of stairs. Outside, he started flat-out running. He ran as fast as he could, until he got back to the large avenue where the taxi had dropped him off. Across the avenue, there was a park with a large public fountain. He stood at the edge of the fountain facing the water. The jet of water clapped and splattered in his ears. The spray beaded in the sun and he put his hands into the fuming iridescence.
The ATM never lies. This one informed Jonah that his money was almost out. All those savings from Uncle Vernon’s years of patient, steadfast labor. God only knows what he had sacrificed to get those funds and keep them in his account for his family. What he refused himself. What daily humiliations he put up with. And Jonah had spent it carelessly, without anything to show for it. His head wasn’t right. Or was there still time to get it together, to do something righteous? To do justice to Nate’s vision. To connect with Isaac again. To make a work of art, to make something for Phineas. To make use of the impasse he had driven himself into. If he could just get around to really sitting down and sticking to it. If he could reach understanding of self.
If it wasn’t too late. At Santiago Central Terminal he boarded the international overnight route on the intercity bus. Destination: Buenos Aires. He felt hopeful. Rising and falling, up and over the Andes, the bus lurched and groaned along perilous roads. Jonah thought he heard each soul among them praying for the driver to stay awake, to see them through their voyage to the end of the night.
Somewhere in that night, as he lay balled up and shivering, the feverish questions came circling, wheeling shadows like the condors. What a random place to perish! And if it did happen, what could anyone say? What account could he give for his brief season on Earth? With everything given him, every chance and opportunity, every gift, what did he have to show for it? Nothing.
But it wasn’t true. There was one person who could say more than a good word and say it true. Arna, of course. And he could see her in a flash, waving to him in the rain on the rue des Écoles. Taking off her wet shoes, one foot undressing the other, and humming along to the score as Ingrid Bergman wandered through the ruins of Pompeii. Reading on the green bench with a piece of hair in her mouth. The loveliness of her forearms in the scattering sunlight at the café with the terrible omelets. Those moments and others recombine as they ride the Métro together, always to stations near the end of the line. Visit the palm trees in the greenhouses at Auteuil. The book market at the Parc Georges-Brassens. It’s summer and they walk together in the dusk as the great murmuring of the city surrounds them. They argue about poetry, about the poem of the future. He says it must be made of the best of the new and the best of the old. Arna says it will be what it always was, a form of music. And he knows she is right. That it could start right
here, at a moment like this, in the thick of the midsummer’s night when the scent of hidden blossoms pulls an arrow through the spirit and all the songs of the human past seem close, as closely held as a letter in the hand. And set deep in the grain of this poem, she says, is the map of a feeling waiting to be discovered, the keys to our own language, which are always in reality just out of reach, like the lamps of the Luxembourg Gardens after dark. And he knows then, he is certain, that Arna will write it. Her whole life she’s been wanting to write songs, not one or two, but whole albums full, with words that will catch all the music she’s always carried in her head. They go along together, passing beside an old stone wall covered in ivy. Arna fingers the leaves and they clatter softly. He remembers then that this is the wall of the cemetery, one full of the illustrious dead, where Richard Wright is buried, and one branch of Arna’s ancestors shares a dilapidated crypt. They say nothing more until they reach the halo of a subway entrance at a little tree-ringed roundabout. They stay there a moment, inhaling the rank blossoms of the giant horse chestnuts, pulping their flowery, clotted droppings underfoot. The dry five-fingered chestnut leaves form a papery darkness, a ladder of shadows leading up into the unfathomable blackness beyond reach. Let’s go home, Arna says. Yes, he says. And they drop down below, waltzing into the Metropolitan’s musty electric air.
It was dawn and the bus thrummed along, following a small stream and a rail line that ran beside it. Jonah shook himself awake. He was cold and there were specks of crystallization in the windows. Every five miles or so they passed small clusters of abandoned buildings, sheds, faint chalk marks in the wilderness. The cordillera was long behind them and they had started coming out of the ravines and into the rolling foothills. The bus continued to descend on a long sloping turn into the vineyards of Mendoza. Jonah looked back. The distant rose-tinted peaks of the Andes were glowing in the clear morning air. Then the mountains disappeared, and they followed a river that wound through the plains and larger roads that passed through vineyards and cattle ranches before merging onto the highways where they joined the dusty big rigs and the commuter traffic roaring onward toward the capital.
The Fugitivities Page 26