The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  “No, you owe him a lot, Dennis,” Sarah said.

  “No, I owe Zwicker a lot. He’s giving me a rather decent salary, he’s given me a job that some people might consider cushy, even prestigious, so the fact is that—”

  “No, it’s terrific, Dennis. Look. He sent you to San Francisco, he’s going to send you to London. And we would never in a million years be here if it weren’t for—”

  Etc., etc., as I remember. But somewhere around that ridiculous point I slightly crumpled up a bit. Heat, and actually I don’t think either of us is exactly used to the altitude yet, either. And then Sarah was really very sweet for a long, long time. And afterward she seemed quite pleased. But the strange thing about sex (tho. maybe it’s different for a woman) is that if you start off feeling a little bad sometimes, sometimes when it’s over, you can really feel awful.

  El Lomito Borracho. 12:00 p.m.–9:30 p.m. This cheerful steakhouse with its whitewashed walls and posters of Indians draws a young crowd, mostly Germans. The sirloin with grilled onions is probably your best bet here, but be sure to ask for your meat—as anywhere in the region—bien asada (well done).

  Thursday

  Café Bougainvillea. Hours subject to change. Juices, coffee, milk shakes, cakes. Pleasant. Hygiene questionable.

  Town at fever pitch today and yesterday. Air sharp and bright—mountains entirely revealed, like a crown tossed around us. Crowds larger, aboil. More people arriving by foot or bus to camp across from the square with their little bundles of possessions, blankets. Flowers furiously blooming. Alfombras spread out for the boot. Chilling roll of drums, sepulchral brass, sun flashing in the air like swords. This morning Christ in scarlet robes, rocking down the streets in an ocean of incense; swarms of purple-gowned Jerusalemites. Sweat pouring from the faces of men bearing the andas. McGee bobbing in and out of the crowd, snapping pictures.

  “Do you see those men in shackles, walking next to the cross?” Dot said. “Those are the thieves. Do you see? The amazing thing is, they use real criminals. Just petty thieves, probably, or poor drunks. But this afternoon, when the procession goes by the square, the whole town will sing an anthem about forgiveness, and one of the thieves will be untied and released into the crowd, just the way they did it in Jerusalem.”

  “That’s beautiful,” Sarah said.

  “Yes…” Dot said, frowning. “Oh, it’s a lovely holiday. The painted eggs, the mystery of spring, the little candies hidden on the lawn for the children. And here! My goodness. The flowers, the processions…”

  Sarah inscrutable; peering out at the procession, working away absently at a ragged nail with her teeth.

  “It’s just that they take it all so literally,” Dot said. She sighed. “Like this business with the thief. I mean, this is something that happened almost two thousand years ago—do you see what I mean? It’s a holiday. But they are so literal-minded. You’ll see. On Saturday, Sunday—nothing. No processions, no alfombras…They’re not interested in the Resurrection at all, really. Today and tomorrow are the big days. The Crucifixion is the part of it they relate to.” She nodded admonishingly at Sarah. “Martyrdom. You see, they pick so at the story—the Crucifixion, the poor, the rich. That sort of thing. The imperial authorities. The soldiers.”

  The crowd was jostling around us, Dot serenely accustomed to it—burbling on, unfazed. “We used to go out to the little villages. Santa Catarina and so on. But no more. They’ve taken the wonder right out of it, haven’t they? Of course, they are very poor—no one would deny them that. Still, it’s just tempting fate, isn’t it? To glorify it the way they do?

  “When Cliff was still with the Department of Agriculture we had a place out by the lake, and we would go to the celebrations there. The people are mostly seasonal labor on the plantations, so, as you might imagine, it’s been a fertile area for guerrilla activity; and now, of course, the people bring politics into simply everything.

  “And the priests can be just as bad. There was one, just about ten years ago, in the village across the lake from us. An American, if you please. Who should have known better. It’s a terrible story, really. It makes me sick to tell it—I’m sorry the whole thing came up. You see, it was what he allowed them to do, some of these people in his parish. He let them dress up the figures of the saints—the figures of Christ, even—as Indians.” Dot nodded as she looked from Sarah to me. “Well, not just Indians—actually as guerrillas, do you see? With the little masks and so forth? And they did it right in that great big church of theirs, which is practically the only real building in that town. Father Tobin thought he could get away with it, I suppose, because he was American. But he might have stopped to think how he was endangering his parishioners. What sort of priest is that, I ask you? His parishioners were disappearing by the score.”

  The pavement swiped briefly up at me, and I reached out to steady myself against Dot’s arm. “No hat?” Dot said. She gave me a penetrating look, and steered us through the crowd to a shady spot. “Reckless creature. Anyhow, it made us just as mad as anything. But of course I’m not Catholic myself, so to my mind the whole thing is a bit—there, look! Executioners!”

  Group filed by dressed in black, black conical hats, but faces eerily covered by flaps of white fabric with holes cut out for the eyes. Saw a Pontius Pilate—pointed him out to Sarah: “Do you see the sign he’s carrying? It says, ‘I wash my hands of the blood of this innocent man.’”

  “This is just the sort of thing I mean,” Dot said.

  “What’s what sort of thing?” Sarah said. But Dot was gazing out with dis pleasure.

  Felt unaccountably nervous—started chattering at Sarah: “Well, it’s complex, isn’t it? Because the thing is that the local people said to Pilate, ‘Look. You’ve got to get rid of this fellow Jesus. He’s got this whole mob of crazy hillbillies behind him, and they’re saying his claims supersede the claims of Rome.’ And Pilate said, ‘Well, I don’t happen to think Jesus is guilty of anything, but I can’t stop you from doing whatever you want to him, can I? Because I can’t intervene in local affairs.’ So who knows who was using who? After all, you could say that it was very much in Pilate’s interest, as well as the interest of the local authorities, that Jesus be killed, because, after all, Jesus was certainly fomenting unrest in Pilate’s province.”

  Sarah turned to me. “So you mean the guy with the sign—”

  “Well, no,” I said. “I’m just trying to point out various ironies of the situation…And it’s interesting to remember that that’s where those phrases come from. You know: ‘I wash my hands of it.’ ‘My hands are clean.’ And so on. They come from the Bible.”

  “As do so many,” Dot said vaguely. “Oh, there he is—” She waved as McGee appeared from the crowd, coughing from incense. “I thought we were going to have to send out the Romans! Did you get some good ones?”

  “Indeed I did,” McGee said. “Ought to have some beauties.”

  “Clifford left the lens cap on last year,” Dot explained. “By the way,” Sarah said to her. “What happened to the priest?”

  “Excuse me?” Dot said.

  “The priest in the village near the lake,” Sarah said.

  “Well,” Dot said. “Do you mean—I mean, no one knows, exactly, do they? That is, they came in a van, as usual. But the windows were smoked glass, of course, and they weren’t wearing uniforms. The van slid up behind him, they say. Just the way those vans do. I’m afraid they got him just outside the church.” Dot shook her head. “You can still see the bullet holes. And it took quite some time to scrub down the wall and the street, we were told…Well. But no one recognized them. No one knows who they were.”

  Friday

  Sabor de China and Giuseppe’s both awful. Best to skip.

  Last night, after all the wooden shutters were closed and the town was quiet, Sarah and I went out. Above the encircling mountains the sky was bright with stars; down on the ground the night was pouring back and forth, glistening over the cobblestones an
d churches. Sarah and I walked around for a bit, then sat down in the square next to a pale-trunked palm.

  Was terribly aware how quickly it would be over, sitting with her there in the fragrant night. Thought of her ten years hence: a dinner party, high over some sparkling city, Sarah in a wonderful little dress, more beautiful, even, than now. Gazing out the window, next to someone—a colleague, an admirer…

  Could feel the future forming in embryo—the sort of longing that sleeps watchfully in one’s body through time and separation. Could imagine so clearly—Sarah at this future party, confiding to this admirer: Her first involvement with a mature man, her introduction to so much that was new…No, she and I won’t have meant nothing to each other…

  The shine of her hair like a little light around her as she absorbed the night, breathing it into her memory for that moment in the future. Raised her hand and stroked it, spreading out the fingers; kissed her palm. Asked what she was thinking.

  “I’m thinking, Thank God we’re rid of the McGees for once.” She laughed.

  I looked down at her hand.

  “What’s the matter, Dennis?” she said.

  Said I was sorry about the McGees. Sorrow, in fact, had fallen over me like a gentle net. “They really are idiots.”

  “Well, they’re not idiots,” Sarah said.

  I looked at her. “That was your word,” I said.

  “Yes? Well, I was wrong, then,” Sarah said. “Wasn’t I.”

  Across from us the people in the shelter of the porticoed municipal building slept, cradling the town in the mesh of their breathing.

  “‘Tainted,’” Sarah said. “I mean, Jesus.”

  Noticed that the people in front of the municipal building were stirring, rousing themselves in a dreamlike way, rolling back the blanket of sleep, sitting up—first one or two, then several more, shaking others gently by the shoulder until, soon, they were all awake, getting to their feet, smoothing out their rumpled clothing.

  In moments they were in the square with us, talking in low, eager voices. Some were speaking Spanish, some were speaking languages I’d never heard. Were paying no attention to us at all; leaned over the basin of the fountain to splash themselves or their babies with water, or to reach up with tin cups for its less polluted streams.

  But then—as unexpectedly as they’d appeared in the square, they filed out again. Absolutely weird. Sarah and I paused a moment, then followed. Soon we were in a part of town we’d never seen before. Lanterns swaying from stone arches, heavy shutters swinging open as we passed by—behind them women in black staring out at us from candlelit rooms or patios.

  Crowd led us to a churchyard dense with people, tiny stands selling food, wooden toys, shiny whirling things. No tourists, no wealthy Ladinos, none of the Europeans who keep houses here in town. All the people ragged and thin—surroundings incredibly festive, but their faces, as they milled about, were serious. Abstracted.

  The sky was scattered with stars, balloons, plumes of incense. Above a long flight of wide, shallow steps a scrolled church (such delicate adornments! carved fruit, carved vines) floated like a dove, pale pink in the moonlight. Candles alight everywhere, flickering, converging into a flickering river at the huge, open church doors.

  Tantalizing aromas: food frying in vats or simmering in huge kettles or roasting on sticks over fires. Sarah pulling me from one culinary spectacle to another in an agony of cupidity. “Look, Dennis—can you believe it? There’s real food in this country!”

  “Don’t even think of it,” I said.

  “Please,” she said. People were eating patiently, without greed, as though they were preparing themselves for something. Men were so thin it was hard not to watch them as they ate—so frail. Several had what looked like a band of hair shaved from the top of their heads—worn away from hauling loads by a strap, I suppose. Sarah hovered longingly by a woman frying huge disks of tortilla, then using them to scoop up a bright, chunky sauce. “I can’t stand it!”

  “Out of the question,” I said. At our feet a flock of tiny children chewed solemnly at the dirty treat. “Do you imagine I’d let you do something like that to yourself? But listen. The minute we get home I’m taking you to the Red Fox Inn for a decent meal.”

  “Do you promise?” Sarah said as the crowd carried us with them into the floating church. Was just making me swear it, but then she gasped and took my arm.

  We were at the front of the crowd—the entire floor between us and the altar was a picture, a picture carpet, made of flower petals, like the alfombras, but vast: Jesus, all of flowers, white-robed on a mountaintop with waves of power radiating from his raised hands. And beneath him, pouring out toward us, becoming us, a flower multitude—the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry, the pure in heart, the persecuted…

  Behind us, people were pushing their way forward. I glanced back and saw that the crowd was not flowerlike at all, but thin and dry as tinder, their eyes alight with a fanatical, incendiary ecstasy of poverty.

  My God. Who were these people? Their legs were ulcerated, their feet were bare and thickened, their backs were bent from hauling wood or fruit or coffee, but what act of madness might they not be capable of? The guerrillas in the neighboring villages dozing tensely under the dark trees, the children who work the raging fields, the maids, the porters, the farmers, curled up on their beds or straw mats, alert in their sleep, dreaming their dangerous dreams. People who can’t afford a newspaper. People in whose languages no paper will ever be printed, people who couldn’t read one if one were printed in their languages—these people who don’t even know there’s a world out there, it’s these people who could burn the world to the ground. Stunted and sloe-eyed, with the delicate, slanting planes of their faces, their brilliant clothing, their ancient, outlandish languages, they seem like strange, magical creatures. But, no! These people have lives that go from one end of the day to the other. They eat or go hungry. They have conversations behind closed doors—

  As Sarah and I were thrust out the side door we saw a small knot of soldiers dispersing in the courtyard below us, blending into the crowd. My hands felt weak again, and damp. Tainted, I thought; tainted. Next to me Sarah picked up a wobbly child who was steadying himself against her knees, and nuzzled his soft, black baby hair, through which I could absolutely see the columns of lice tramping. But when I opened my mouth to warn Sarah I could hardly croak.

  The baby waved his new little hands for balance—his new little enemy hands. His swimming black baby eyes reflected for an instant, in exquisite miniature, the thousand or so candles, the floating church, the thick, blest, kindled crowd. Which of the reflected men could that baby hope soon to be? Which of the frail old enemy men?

  A little girl tugged urgently at Sarah’s skirt and held out her arms to claim her brother as a noise manifested itself at a distance. The noise came toward us slowly, solid and tidal, but separated, as it approached, and we were engulfed in shouts, hoofbeats, chanting, as lanterns and torchlight wavered through smoke and incense.

  Facing us, at the head of the mob, two Roman centurions reined in their huge horses to a nervous, hobbled trot. Around them surged the Jerusalemites in their purple satin and Roman foot soldiers holding lances, as well as hundreds of town dwellers in ordinary clothing.

  A trumpet sounded, and the edgy crowd fell silent. The sky gleamed black, the moon was streaking through the clouds. Sarah’s pale face narrowed and flashed like a coin, and I had the sensation that if I concentrated I would be able to remember all the events that were to follow—every detail…

  And, yes, one of the centurions was already holding out a scroll: Jesus of Nazareth was condemned to die by crucifixion! The pronouncement rang out against the stone of the church like something being forged; its echo pulsed in a cataract of silence.

  Saturday

  Hotel Buena Vista. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner daily. The Buena Vista offers probably the best lunch deal in town. Help yourself to the unlimited buffet, complete wit
h tortillas made fresh in front of your eyes by Indian women in full dress, take a swim, and if you’ve happened to come on the right day, view a fashion show around the pool, all for about the price of a hamburger and fries back home. Exotic birds wander the grounds, and caged parrots enliven the scene, as well. The fare is standard, but the steaks are flame-grilled, and tasty.

  Clouds below us, plane not too crowded. Sarah sitting with a book on her lap, gazing out the window, at nothing.

  This morning, as we were leaving, it was just as Dot had said it would be. No alfombras, no processions, tourists thinning out. No trace whatsoever of the pilgrims in front of the municipal building. Just women in black, privately lamenting Mary’s murdered child. But yesterday—Friday—processions were volatile, grief-stricken, unrelenting: Christ in black, prepared for his death, then Christ on the cross, broken.

  Felt v. peculiar—ill-tempered, rattled—all yesterday morning. Suppose from my disorientation of Thurs. night + looming lunch with McGees.

  And then—the Buena Vista itself! ¡Dios! Curvy Ladino girls modeling hideous clothing around the pool, children streaking between them, landing in the water with loud splashes, bloodcurdling shrieks. Indian women making tortillas, watching with expressionless sentry eyes. Well-to-do visitors from the capital dispatching slender, olive-skinned sons to the parking lot with little plates of rice and beans for the maids. A species of splotchy, knobby tourists (Evangelicals, apparently; McGee says they get a big price break at the Buena Vista) sunning themselves in plastic lounge chairs, laughing loudly and nervily, as though they’d just hoodwinked their way out of prison.

  Sarah struggled with her little sink stopper of a steak for a few minutes, then got up and ambled around the lawn, looking unusually pensive. When she sat back down, she started telling the McGees about something she’d seen a few days ago. Had she mentioned it to me? Don’t think so. Said she’d seen three big guys grab a boy as he walked out of a store—nobody was paying attention except for one lady, who was yelling. Then the men bundled the boy up, put him on a truck. “I didn’t really think much about it at the time,” Sarah said. “It was like a tape playing too fast to make any sense of.” She looked from Dot to Cliff. “I suppose I just assumed it was a kid getting picked up for a robbery…”