Borderline

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Trog appeared to be bearing up very well in the teeth of staggering assaults on the hegemony of reason. “And this one?” he asked, pulling another clipping from the folder. “What about this one?”

  There was a medium-size headline: In chaos, businessman finds stability. The byline was San Salvador.

  Despite the troubles, this is as good a time as any to make money in El Salvador, businessman Eduardo Esfinge says.

  It isn’t always easy, however. Four years ago, Esfinge was sitting in his office in a large Salvadoran bank when government troops stormed in, bearing rifles and the curt message that the bank now belonged to the state. His stock holdings in the bank would be converted to government bonds, he was told, like it or not.

  Two years later, Esfinge received another rude visit at the showroom of Secretosaal, a retail sewing-machine business that he had started after his banking career was so unceremoniously ended. A troop of young toughs, saying they were Marxist rebels, invaded the store, held a gun at his head and, after examining his account books, requested a “donation” of 20,000 colones — about $5000 at today’s rate of exchange.

  But Esfinge sees profit where others see bullets and danger. Other sewing-machine sales companies have abandoned their markets in areas of the country where the guerrillas and the Salvadoran army are in daily fights for territorial advantage.

  Secretosaal, which Esfinge started in 1979, leaped into the breach. “We know when we load up a truck with sewing machines, we could have problems. The guerrillas could burn it, the army could requisition it, anything could happen, and we’d lose our butts,” he said.

  But Esfinge, who holds a business degree from the University of California at Los Angeles, does not let this worry him too much. Scattered through El Salvador, he says, are a lot of tiny tailor shops, clothesmakers, shoemakers and repair people who need sewing machines, war or not.

  “I went out east into the troubled areas and people said, ‘From day to day we don’t know who’ll be in charge — the guerrillas or the army — but we still have to make a living. Life goes on.’ ”

  Last week Esfinge’s sales manager ran into one of the hazards of travelling El Salvador’s roads. He was stopped by a band of armed rebels who demanded money for their cause. “There was no problem,” Esfinge said. “You pay the 10 colones and go on your way. We do the same when the army stops us.”

  Esfinge’s biggest problem is employee absenteeism. People are always getting killed or “disappeared”. “Every week, someone joins los desaparecidos (the disappeared ones),” he says. “It’s a constant problem.”

  Is it the army or the guerrillas who “disappear” his workers?

  “I do not ask,” he says.

  Though a nuisance, the problem is not insurmountable. There are always people waiting for jobs.

  Last week he opened a second distributorship in the beleaguered provincial capital of San Miguel — which was without electricity most of last year. His company slogan, “One stitch at a time”, is painted across the bullet-pocked front of his warehouse, a building he was able to buy cheaply after it was abandoned by its previous tenants, who lost it in a shootout that left eight dead. The tenants were apparently Marxist rebels using the building as a hideout; although some neighbours claim that the building was a private arsenal of several army officers and that guerrilla cadres carried out a successful raid on it.

  “Either way, it doesn’t matter to me,” Mr Esfinge says cheerfully. “The sewing-machine business is booming. Both sides have to wear clothes,” he points out, “and I am very optimistic about the future.”

  “So,” Trog said. “You’re not political.”

  “Did you read this?” Felicity asked him.

  “Naturally I read it. And with very great interest in your motives for clipping it.”

  “But surely you can see? For the same reasons. Language itself has become absurd.”

  “Oh it has, has it?” Trog pushed his tongue into his cheek in a parody of patience. “And of course you are completely ignorant of the fact that this man’s son lives in Boston? That we know perfectly well he smuggles in cheap labour for his parts factory in Medford?”

  Felicity leaned toward Trog and asked with an intense curiosity: “Does any of this seem real to you?”

  Trog floundered momentarily in her eyes. For the space of several seconds he was taken aback. Sounds full of bronchial irritation quarrelled in his throat. He blew his nose.

  “A few years in this business,” he said harshly, “and you’ve seen and heard everything. Nothing surprises me. Nothing. I don’t even think about what seems real and what doesn’t. I’ve seen a slip of a girl, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and she hacked up her boyfriend into little pieces.” He was moving toward the door, his body providing a curious subtext of angry twitches and comments. “You think it would surprise me that someone in Highbrow Art is into political murder? That someone who looks like … looks like …” — but here words failed him. “No, ma’am. Nothing surprises me.” He seemed to blame her for this — either for being capable of butchery, or for being incapable of surprising him. He glared. A vibration passed through him like ripples surrounding some core of disturbance. At the door he paused: “You’re under surveillance, but you can go now. Your car is impounded for forensic testing. You can’t leave town without my permission.”

  Taxi drivers, who must themselves be subject to a thousand natural daily shocks, can rarely be counted on to treat us with great sensitivity in times of stress. At a red light, in heavy traffic, Felicity’s driver swivelled and bellowed into the back of his cab: “If you don’t tell me where the hell you want to go, you can get out right now. Right now, lady!”

  Apparently he had already asked her several times for a destination. Apparently she had not answered.

  She watched his face with interest as it mutated through a spectrum of reds. A fleck of spittle hung in his moustache like a Christmas decoration and the hairs of his eyebrows were so long and wiry that they climbed toward his hairline in winged and matted ladders. She thought: Seymour would love that face.

  “Out!” screamed the taxi driver. “Out!”

  She obeyed him meekly, picking her way through traffic like a child of the May through daffodils. Car horns flocked around her like geese rising. But when she paused to look uncertainly through the windshield at a driver, he let his engine stall and got out of his car and offered his arm with a charmingly archaic flourish. She smiled at him and he sucked in his stomach and led her to the curb. When he asked if he could take her somewhere for coffee, however, she looked sadly into his eyes and sighed and regretted that she had an appointment.

  Not that she could remember what it was.

  But she was disconcerted by the frequency with which these invitations to intimacy mushroomed around her. The earlier she politely extricated herself, the better; complications set in so quickly.

  She moved along with the hubbub of pedestrians, noticing every few minutes people she thought she knew. She had constantly to try to match up the two columns in her mind, to find out if she was in the right country, the right segment of her life, for that person. Mostly she would have to conclude: No, no, it couldn’t be; that was someone I met in Italy when I was working on the Tintoretto exhibition; or else: that was someone I knew as a child, someone in Australia.

  Her feet began to ache. Luckily, a restaurant detached itself from the city backdrop and waited conveniently in front of her. She thought, though she was not certain, that she had seen the restaurant before. Perhaps she had even eaten there on one or more occasions. Obediently, she followed a waitress who was weaving between tables of worn golden oak. The place was full of potted azaleas and weeping figs and the smell of dark roast coffee. She found peaceful harbour in a corner screened by greenery and ordered espresso.

  Perhaps she was still on her first cup of coffee, perhaps her second, when someone parted the curtain of benjaminas and asked if he could join her.

  “Uh
, well,” she said, dismayed. “Actually, I’d rather …”

  But he had already sat down opposite her. This time she was sure it was someone she knew, though a name and context would not reveal themselves. But yes, definitely. From the recent past, she was sure. In a minute she would place him.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me,” he said. “Of course, I was following you. But not for the reasons you think.”

  She smiled non-committally, waiting for further clues, but he seemed tongue-tied and nervous. He ordered coffee. He adjusted the position of his chair several times. He stacked the table’s supply of sugar packets into an unsteady tower. When the tower collapsed, he began again. It was as though he would not be able to speak until his tower reached a certain height — if indeed he had anything to say.

  “What fascinates me,” he blurted suddenly, “is the different ways people behave under interrogation.”

  Click. Three things fell into place simultaneously: he was Hunter; she should have been back at the gallery; La Magdalena had been murdered. It was as though a big cat had pounced. She could feel the renewed frenzy of the trapped birds, a wild pulse against the membrane of her body. Within minutes the cage would break open from the pressure. Bruises would flower darkly on her face and arms.

  “I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone quite like you,” he said. “Such extraordinary calm. It makes you seem almost … not quite human.”

  Felicity stared at him in amazement. So he knew nothing about the panic, was deaf to the trapped birds. Realizing this, she found it easier to will them to stillness.

  “Of course the whole thing is a ghastly mistake,” he said. “A nightmare coincidence. We realize that, or you couldn’t stay so unperturbed. Just the same, most people would go to pieces. There’s something about you … Unless, of course, you are guilty. One of those psychotics, no conscience at all. But I don’t think so, no, I think probably …” and his voice trailed on and on, curling like cigarette smoke around her ears. “ … what you really know about Dolores Marquez. You needn’t be afraid, you’ll find me very understanding. Whenever you’re ready, there’s no hurry, except that it is crucial we know exactly where …”

  Her eyes were stinging. Coffee scalded her throat. She almost gagged. What she was trying to swallow was a bitter indigestible fact: the murder of La Magdalena (La Salvadora. Dolores Marquez). She saw again the stricken eyes, the torn dress: black ciphers. She considered the meaning of randomness: If she had not felt a compulsion to run from Aaron that very weekend? If she had crossed the border half an hour earlier or half an hour later? If she had stopped to think soberly before rash action? If she had taken stock when her car ran off the road? If they had bundled the woman — exhaustion, injury, and all — into the car and taken her to L’Ascension? If she had peered beyond impulse and seen murder, where would she have acted differently?

  The fog of talk that rose from Mr Hunter drifted around her, muddled with caffeine, opaque. Here and there, single beads of words were becoming visible in the mist: “tranquillity”, “irresistible”, “erotic”. Now, accidentally making contact, he was tracing something on her wrist with one finger. These were hieroglyphs she knew. Comfort and protection in many forms were being suggested. She watched his eyes for a specific translation.

  “Seizing the moment,” he said, “especially two people whose inner vibrations,” et cetera, “and so deeply attracted …”

  Felicity winced. An ongoing puzzle: why men always assumed that attraction was reciprocal. And why so many, on no discernible evidence, convinced themselves that she had mysteriously summoned them, felt themselves impelled to present what she thought of as the Galahad face: devout, confessional, confident of intense consummation, embarrassing.

  And yet, at this moment, she was tempted. Partly because once a certain point was reached, it was simpler to get away afterwards than to extricate oneself before.

  (In heat, so Felicity tells me, men are afflicted with a loss of decent embarrassment, with intemperance, and with tenacity; they cling closer than limpets. Afterwards, like fat cats, they roll over into temporary oblivion.

  Thanks for telling me, I said.

  Oh Jean-Marc, she said, I don’t mean men like you.

  Thanks a lot, I said, not pursuing it.)

  So Felicity thought it would be simpler, but there were other temptations as well: the promise of a respite from thought; the possibility of swamping all questions, however fleetingly, in physical sensation. And then there was his size and strength and the potent identification tag in his coat pocket. When he turned to get the attention of the waitress, she saw beneath his jacket the gun in its holster, tumescent against his thigh, a seductive organ. She felt aroused yet drugged, as though she had readily consented to hypnotism. She was surprised by primitive instincts.

  I am capable of the commonest kind of lust, she thought with interest. The sordid garden-variety kind. And the realization was obscurely comforting, an indicator of coarse-grained solidity and ordinariness, the mark of someone to whom phantasmagoric things did not happen, of someone not responsible for a murder.

  Mr Hunter believed that something had been decided. Perhaps he had believed this from the moment he sat down at her table. Or from even earlier: when he produced the folder of newspaper clippings and she had looked at him; or perhaps from when he had first walked into her office at the gallery, thousands of hours ago. And perhaps something had indeed been set in motion far back. Certainly their fingers were already intimate. His hand had trailed declarations of passion back and forth, back and forth; and her forearm — its soft blue-veined inner skin — had not resisted. Leaning toward each other to speak — as they now seemed to be doing — they tasted each other in the air between.

  “Let’s go then,” he said.

  She breathed in his words, peremptory as the gun against his thigh, and submitted with a sort of drunken willingness. Swagger bored her. But anything that might have interfered — a satiric instinct, a ripple of mockery — was rammed into a back corner of consciousness. For the moment, she wanted to settle for what he was offering: a jigger of physical comfort, a quick draft of mindlessness, cheap protection from one of the dungeon masters who just might have a key to the way out of the morning’s labyrinth.

  In his car, an unmarked one, she let his thigh press against hers and felt something warm and spicy — like an inflamed syrup of cloves — leak from between her legs. De profundis, she thought, et in extremis. She had to put a hand over her mouth to hide the smirk. One has to be grateful, she told herself, for the involuntary appetites.

  But then, as an alarm clock rips through the tissue of a dream, she took stock of where she was. He had stopped outside her own apartment, and if Felicity had any cardinal rules, this was the first of them: she never slept with a man in her own apartment. Never. How could she be certain he would leave?

  “Not here,” she said urgently. “We have to go somewhere else.”

  He was breathing into her ear, an act, she had concluded, that must have been widely advocated in high-school locker rooms as erotic. The hot buzz of his words set her follicles on edge.

  “I’m afraid there’s a wife and kids at my place,” he murmured to her earlobe.

  “Somewhere else, then.” She tried to explain that his desirability was fast ebbing away, that unless they moved to neutral ground … But he believed he knew this script.

  “Oh baby,” he moaned. “Why do you all have to go through this routine at the last minute? It wastes so much time. Especially when I knew from the moment I saw you that I could make you happy.”

  Felicity could have laughed. He might as well have thrown a bucket of iced water over her. Did men have any idea how often they used that line? But now the whole tiresome ritual of extrication had to be gone through; and she would have to acknowledge, from sheer habit and some strange inability to do otherwise, every one of the old taboos: no damaging of his esteem; no hint of sexual rejection.

  “I’m sorry,” she
said gently. “We can’t go to my apartment for the same reason we can’t go to yours. My boyfriend —”

  Hunter laughed. “You forget, baby, that I’ve already been in your apartment today. With a search warrant. Not the slightest evidence of a male about the place. That’s why you’re so hungry for it. Mmm.”

  He was breathing fumes on her ears and neck. He was expecting spontaneous combustion. She could smell stale cigarette smoke, cheap machine coffee, and slightly rancid breakfast bacon. Easing herself away, she said, “He’s married, so he’s careful not to leave evidence.”

  Hunter laughed again.“Who are you trying to fool, sweetheart?” He pushed his hand between her legs, ripped violently at her pantyhose and panties, jabbed at her, his thumb swimming through syrup, diving like a porpoise, tunnelling, cavorting. “Why is it that the more desperately a woman wants it, the more she pretends she doesn’t?” She wrenched away from him, reaching for the door handle. This excited him. He clamped her hands together and held them against his crotch. “Oh, I could tell it when I emptied your bedroom drawers,” he said. “I know everything there is to know. I sniffed all the lacy little pretties, especially the ones in the laundry basket, and they all smelled very, very hungry to me.”

  Felicity felt a chill of revulsion and of real fear.

  In spite of long odds, intelligence will often out-manoeuvre brute force. She lunged for the car horn, watched the impact of one blaring discordant note on passing drivers, and in the few seconds of his disorientation, swung herself out of the car and melted into the general bewilderment. She hailed a cab.

  This time she remembered she was going to the gallery.

  When she stepped into the sanctuary of its hollowness, she understood why even Trog and Hunter had felt constrained by deference. The world was muffled here, held at arm’s length. Such noise as there was came filtered; there was an antique, old-gold quality to it, a patina of hush. Even the footsteps of browsers were muted, more an image, a representation, of sound. Other centuries prevailed, and other modes of seeing; Chagall, for example, insisting that people floated. (Trog, at the end of a kite string, could twist in upper air currents.) In the central courtyard the tranquil faces of icons promised: time and individual disaster are nothing; from our vantage point it is difficult to tell the difference between joy and suffering. This was true.Felicity looked at the faces of saints in ecstasy and martyrs in agony. Yes, it was true, once the distance was great enough.