* * *
—
The first thing Jonah did when he arrived in Buenos Aires was to email Octavio to tell him that he was going back to Paris. To his surprise, Octavio responded immediately, telling him to wait, insisting he needed to come down to BA anyway and that he would arrive in time to see him off. Jonah agreed to the plan and booked a plane ticket for the coming weekend. There were even more tourists than he remembered in San Telmo. He watched tango dancers performing to the music from The Godfather. He found a low-key bar where he could drink and generally keep to himself. He was done. He was ready to be home, to get back on his feet, to start over.
But then it was all undone. It was terribly wrong. The day before he was to leave, he learned that something had happened to Arna. He was getting a flood of emails about it now. The actual accident had happened several days before. He had sets of forwarded emails, and updated notes from his mother. Basically, they all told the same story. A bad collision, heavy impact and trauma. She had been stabilized but they needed to operate again. Her parents were insisting they bring her to the American Hospital in Neuilly where they had specialists.
Jonah tried to find out something more. But naturally there was nothing really to be gained by it. He circled the block. All day he was in and out of the cybercafé checking the emails again. Updates. No updates. The time he had paid for was up. He felt drained and consumed with rage all at once. The faces of perfectly ordinary people looked hideous, detestable. He tried to gather his thoughts rationally and calm himself. Of course, she would pull through this. But constantly the awful sense of falling backward returned. Arna dying was impossible. The universe would never allow something so grotesquely unfair to happen. For some inexplicable reason it seemed to him important to think it aloud. So, he said it, even as he grasped feverishly at images, memories, words.
Octavio showed up the next day as he had promised. They met in a café in San Telmo. There was just enough time to have a coffee before Jonah had to head out to the airport. Octavio was looking great. He was animated as usual, and he had a healthy glow about him. Immediately, he was catching Jonah up about his time with Francesca. They were really clicking, it seemed. And Jonah asked him if he thought it would last. Octavio shrugged it off. Who knows? Probably not, in the long run, he said. But this was about the present, the extraordinary intensity of all that he had been learning from her about how to be a dad. Not for real, of course. But it was wonderful in ways he hadn’t thought of, and Jonah could see that he really meant it. If they could figure out the visas, Francesca might try to bring Paolina to visit him in New York one day. Jonah was overjoyed to see Octavio. But he was embarrassed at how hard it was for him to make that even somewhat apparent to his friend. He found it hard to talk. He kept trying to think of a way to tell him everything about Arna, but for some reason he couldn’t bring myself to. “What’s next for you, caballero?” Octavio wanted to know. He evaded the question.
Now he suddenly wished that he hadn’t waited for Octavio. It was so good to see him, but it also felt like somehow his being there was making things worse. He had botched everything, even his own departure. They tried a neutral gear, talking sports, and Octavio noted that his beloved Vasco was performing horribly this year and was in danger of being knocked out of the Brazilian Série A altogether. They tried to talk about New York, but the news about the aftermath of the riots there really didn’t help. Actually, it made things worse and Jonah started to feel slightly ill. He had to get to his flight. Octavio helped carry his bags up the Avenida 9 de Julio. There was sadness in his eyes. Jonah felt stupid for not thinking of something better to have done with their brief time together. But then a cab pulled up and Octavio was yelling at the driver in Spanish, beaming with his usual fire. Jonah got in and Octavio came over to the window and they clasped hands. Jonah was mumbling something about seeing him around, but Octavio with great dignity and noblesse, cut him off. “Avant tout, la liberté!” He was still shouting in his awkward French and making grandiloquent waves as the taxi pulled out into the main lanes and Jonah lost sight of him in the heavy traffic.
23
While he had been away nothing had changed, but now everything was different. The first decade of the new millennium was winding down and headed into troubled waters. The television screens in the waiting area of the baggage claim oscillated between coverage of a potentially historic American election and an economic crisis of devastating proportions. But the anxious hope and breathless panic saturating the airwaves went beyond the question of financial catastrophe or politics. It seemed to encompass a whole new way of being in the world, as if everyone had stopped to peer collectively over a cliff, allowing the new normal to momentarily come into view, or at least the outlines of its major patterns, which promised to be glittering, swift, and cruel. The France Jonah had left behind was doing its best to keep apace of the times. At the airport all the business-class types were following the bad news on their new portable screens.
What chance did Nate’s injunction to do good, or the work of a few teachers at a high school, or Uncle Vernon’s hope for him to do something righteous have against all that?
His mother was waiting for him under the gray high arches of the terminal at Charles de Gaulle. She looked older, more delicate and frail than he had remembered. But the deepest lines in her face hadn’t changed. Not a drop of clarity was missing in her eyes. She wanted to help with the bags but he insisted he was fine. As they weaved their way through the terminal, he struggled to hear her voice over the clamor of announcements. On the RER train the fatigue caught up with him in heavy waves. They passed the suburban stations in procession. The housing projects loomed on the horizon. His mother was happy because he was home. She was talking about things that he had missed while he was away. His father’s health was worsening, she warned, worsening every day. He leaned against the window. He couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Mama, I’m no good…”
“What do you mean no good, sweetie? You’re tired, you’re jet-lagged…”
“No, no. You’re not listening. I’m no good at anything. My life hasn’t worked at all. I feel like…like all I’ve ever done is waste time.”
“You’ve been out in the world, exploring, learning, teaching. Right now, you’re hungry, you’re pooped! Look at you! You probably haven’t eaten a proper meal in days!”
“No. No, that’s not it. I feel empty inside. About everything. I hate everything, and nothing even makes sense anymore. I’m nothing. I’m nowhere.”
“Jonah, listen to me. I’m your mother, I know what I’m talking about. What happened to Arna isn’t your fault. These things just happen…they just do, and you can’t take it all upon yourself, it doesn’t mean the world is against you or hates you, it’s just that, I don’t know, it’s the way things are. But it’s going to be okay again, I promise it will.”
“Mama.”
“I’m so sorry about Arna, Jonah. I’m so sorry.”
He waved her away. He didn’t want to talk about it. The train plunged underground, racing to the platform at Gare du Nord.
“You know she sent you all these letters. Your friend Isaac forwarded them all from New York. I’ve been keeping them for you in your room. I brought them with me. I thought you might want them right away.”
The stack of envelopes was addressed in Arna’s unmistakable hand. His mother had tied the packet together carefully with string. He thumbed through them, checking the postage stamps. Arna had sent him letters from every corner of the new Europe. He took them and closed his eyes and waited for the pain to pass. It did not.
* * *
—
His room hadn’t changed. He put the letters on the bed, walked to the window, and opened the shutters. The accordion wings swung open with a dull thud. There was a gray, empty sky over Paris. The motor of a moped went snarling by. A car was honking. Downstairs on the corner of the rue
de Tocqueville, traffic was piling up. Two black men were operating a municipal truck as it lifted a green apple full of jingling recycled glass to be towed away. Jonah went back to the bed and sat down by the pile of letters. He looked up at the big map of the world on the wall. Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Porto Alegre, Santiago, Buenos Aires, New York. Places and people went spooling through the projector, their memories played to the inner eye. The distance between life and inner life, as between life and its sudden evaporation, a leap incalculable. Inside the names and the abstract points was a tangle of stories, and more than that, a string of choices that led right to his very last footsteps, to sitting on the bed, to his room with the window open onto the gray afternoon. If he were a wandering poet, perhaps he would have known to make something of it. But he had always been a terrible poet, a wannabe poet, worse than corny, a phony. He felt very small. He thought of what Isaac had said, and Nathaniel, and Uncle Vernon. And he wondered if he had done the wrong thing.
He also knew it was a stupid thought. For him everything was still possible. His privileged path and all that he might do with it was just beginning another cycle full of abundant second chances. His life was not the one that hung in the balance.
Tomorrow, he knew, would be an important day. They would move Arna into an operating room sometime after noon and then she would go into surgery. In the morning he would have breakfast, then go out to Neuilly to meet her parents who were staying overnight in the neurology unit of the American Hospital. If all went well, by midnight they would know.
He heard the muffled sound of his mother coughing in a far room. He cut the string, and Arna’s letters fanned out on the bed. He ran a thumb over the stamps, over his name in her writing. Her handwriting. Her hands. His mother was calling from the kitchen. He could hear her opening cupboards, pulling down pots and pans. She was making something to eat. He looked at the letters. No, he thought. No. Not now, not like this. It was impossible. But he didn’t know. He heard his mother coughing again, coughing, coughing. He opened the first letter and began to read.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would never have seen the light of day without the belief, courage, and brilliance of my editors Michael Barron, Julia Ringo, and Alyea Canada. A shoutout to Anitra Budd, who saw what I was trying to do and encouraged me at a crucial time. I could not write without the love of my entire family, my dear friends, and fellow travelers along the road, who inspire me always. The earliest draft of this novel was completed during an extended stay with Ingrid Formanek and Brian Puchaty in Villanueva Mesía in the spring of 2008 and I thank them for their hospitality. Special thanks to Namwali Serpell for reading the manuscript with such care and providing invaluable suggestions, to Joshua Cohen for his encouragement, support, and advice, and to Jamaica Kincaid and Teju Cole for their example and camaraderie.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jesse McCarthy is assistant professor in the departments of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His first book, Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?, a collection of essays, was published W.W. Norton & Co. in 2021. This is his first novel.
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