(I was there just weeks ago, sniffing into every cranny of the disappearance. I feel an urge to interject with fresh-picked facts. Hear now the voice of the piano tuner turned interpolator, tourist guide, and stage manager.
Oh Jean-Marc, Felicity will laugh, you’re having another didactic attack.)
Nevertheless …
Though Central Square is only a mile or so from Harvard Square, it is not part of the same world. The latter is bohemian, intellectual, and affluent. Its students may dress shabbily, but their style is expensively shabby. Rumpled chic. Harvard Square may be dirty, but the dirt has panache.
And Central Square? Neighbour and poor relation, it is nothing but asphalt, tawdriness, and poverty. It is crowded with the unemployed and the unemployable. Grittiness is pervasive. There is nothing picturesque about the dirt in Central Square; it is simply filth. And yet it is more cosmopolitan than its neighbour; of the faces in the street, white ones would barely make a majority. For the rest, human confetti: black, Hispanic, Vietnamese, Chinese, and the unidentifiable.
Because of her gallery, Felicity knew Harvard Square like the back of her hand. But it was years since she had had any reason to go one subway stop east, years since she had been at such close quarters to squalor. Woolworth’s is Woolworth’s anywhere, she thought, except in such places as Central Square, where it is more so. A stink of oil eddied rancidly from a grubby-looking popcorn machine. Everywhere the din of traffic and transistor radios. Cheap sneakers hung like bunches of vinyl-scented bananas in dime-store lobbies. Clutter was aspired to: as though consolation could be found in the sheer quantity of shoddy goods. On the leeward sides of telegraph poles, torn fragments of inflammatory pamphlets whispered among themselves, little covens of conspirators.
Felicity had thought that a cotton skirt and blouse would be sufficiently unremarkable — an assumption worthy of the aunts in its benign ignorance. Now she saw that she was marked. Conspicuously alien. This was far more than a matter of her clothing, though her clothing was noticeable enough. It had also to do with the condition of her hair, her teeth, her skin. On all sides she saw evidence that dental care is by no means universal in America. Every step advertised her foreignness. A woman on welfare walks differently from a woman with an earned income.
(End of mise-en-scène.
Jean-Marc effaces himself.)
A cat among birds, conspicuous, her footsteps delicate, Felicity tried to slink along Massachusetts Avenue looking for Number 136. Numbers were not easy to find. Storekeepers worked on the principle that the mailman and anyone who needed to know already knew where they were. She found 132 and she found 140. Between the two was a sliver of building occupied, at the street level, by a record store whose entryway made up the entire frontage. It was one of those places that is locked up by means of a folding steel curtain. She could not see a number. Only a sign hand-painted in lurid pink letters: Scoop’s Poopdeck.
The store, about the width of a wide hallway, was a two-aisled supermarket of sound with a horse trough of rock records down the middle and a welter of every kind of disc stacked like tattered wallpaper on either side. There were two turnstiles, one in, one out. Having been catapulted in, Felicity had to follow the first half of the alphabet of rock down a long, tubal passage to the Ks at the U-turn, and then back through L to Z toward the cash register by the exit. Every few feet she had to suck herself in to get by a gyrating automaton wearing headphones plugged into the wall. Wired for sound, these robots snapped their fingers, moved their hips, sometimes sang along much too loudly with the private pipeline of music.
“Hey!” called one black teenager, removing his headphones. “Hey Leon! Look at this!”
Leon pushed his headset back like a visor and flicked his dreadlocks off his shoulders. Both young men watched Felicity’s progress around the tubal U with gleeful curiosity. She might have been Mother Goose in a crinoline. Certainly, as she smiled with shy politeness, she felt encumbered by something not unlike miles of petticoat. The two young men shook with laughter. They made deep sardonic bows.
Felicity blushed and hurried on past W, X, Y, and Z to the cage-enclosed cash register. Cigarette smoke hung in clouds. Two men, one black, one white, were dimly visible through the fog. Felicity wondered how they could see. Her own eyes were stinging and watering.
“Hey, Scoop!” yelled Leon, from reggae section D-E-F. “You’re keeping the Duchess waiting.”
Scoop, the white keeper of the till, leaned forward in his cage and breathed fetid air over Felicity. Discreetly, she leaned away. Not wise. Scoop’s face, a violent relief map of acne, twisted with hostility. A slow lava of blood and mucus seeped from the scratched peaks of his malady into craters on his cheeks.
“Yes, your ladyship?” he asked, picking a scab on his chin with leering pleasure. “What can I do you for?”
“I’m looking for Number 136 Mass Ave,” Felicity said. “I was wondering if you could —”
“Well you ain’t found it,” Scoop said. “So why don’t you bugger off?”
“What number are you? I couldn’t see any —”
“Why?”
“Pardon?”
“Why d’ya wanna know our number?”
“Well, because it would help me find 136 if I …”
Scoop’s black partner, who must have played basketball on many a back-street lot, leaned out over the top of the cage and said thickly: “Lissen, candy-cunt, bugger off before we do a little number on you ourselves.”
This remark was a huge success. Way to go, Big Ben! several customers called. Laughter scudded towards the turnstiles like gases escaping from something noxious trapped in the elbow joint at K. Felicity was only too eager to bugger off, but Scoop and his gargantuan sidekick instituted a game. A switch had been tripped, the exit turnstile locked.
For several seconds, mortified by her own ineptness, Felicity pushed at the bars which refused to turn, the back of her head pelted with catcalls and mock encouragement. She could feel colour spreading out from her neck like a rash. Quite suddenly, Scoop flicked the switch again and she hurtled into the street. Laughter splattered on the pavement around her like broken glass.
Head high, cheeks flaming, she walked away. Anywhere, any direction. And quickly. In a sheltered doorway, she stopped for breath.
Perhaps I have muddled up the digits, she thought. Perhaps it is 316 or 163 that I should be looking for. But neither number helped: 316 was a crack between Papa’s Pizza and a used book store; 163 was part of a gas station labelled over its office door — black decals on the glass fanlight — as 161–169.
Perhaps there are several sequences of numbers, she thought. Perhaps I am in the wrong part of Central Square. She walked east along Mass Ave almost as far as MIT, but no new sequence of numbering began. She walked west toward Harvard Square. Nothing.
Then it must be next to the record place, she decided. I must have missed a doorway.
As frustrated and determined as she was nervous, she went back to Number 132, a Vietnamese restaurant. She walked slowly past its doorway, monitoring every inch of frontage. Its cast wall was flat up against the K to Z of rock and reggae. Eyes down, heart pounding, she crossed this danger zone quickly. And now she was in front of Number 140,an unbelievably dingy cubbyhole with “Central Square Watch Clinic” painted across its grubby plate-glass window.
Felicity went inside. Watches, hundreds of them, from fobs on chains to Timex specials, hung in bunches from hooks. Every inch of the walls was covered. She thought of satellite moons, so many tiny white faces. They seemed to multiply before her eyes like pale mushrooms under ferns. Perhaps this explained the dank vegetable smell. Tufts of Timex sprouted from the counter, copulating perhaps in the gloom.
“Can I help you?”
Felicity squeezed her eyes tightly shut in an attempt to adjust them for twilight. When she looked again, he was perfectly visible: a gnome-like man on a stool behind the counter. A jeweller’s monocle was growing from one of his eyes.
Oh, she thought, with involuntary fascination. This I have to describe for Seymour. The man wore a circlet of silvery hair. A tonsure. His skin was as pale as the dials of his myriad watches, but seemed faintly luminous, as though it had been long deprived of sun and had evolved a capacity to provide its own light. Entranced, Felicity quite forgot why she was there.
“Of course,” the little man said (it was either his voice, dry and faint, or the ticking of a thousand wrist watches), “I have all the time in Central Square, if not in the world. But the question is, do you?”
He laughed at his own joke and she saw the flash of gold in his teeth. On the counter a gold watch lay in sections, its wheels kicking feebly. She thought irrationally: Perhaps he runs a gold scrap service for a dentist.
“Take your time, take your time,” the man chuckled. “Or take some of mine, as you prefer; it’s a wide selection. There’s a time to pick and a time to choose.”
Felicity remembered why she had come in. “Actually, I just wanted to ask directions. I’m looking for Number 136 Mass Ave, but it doesn’t seem to exist.”
“Ahh,” he said. And the search took on metaphysical weight merely from the inflection of his voice. “All conceptions exist. Perhaps you want Mass Ave in Harvard Square.”
“No. Central Square. Definitely. That’s what I was told.”
“Then perhaps it would be better if you told me who or what you are looking for.”
“Yes, of course. Silly of me. It’s a place called El Centro Salvadore.”
“Ah,” said the man, squinting through his monocle. He poked at the insect insides of a watch. It lay on its back, helpless, its cogs flinching from his metal probe as he pushed into cavities here and there. Perhaps he runs a dental practice himself, on the side, Felicity thought. He seemed to have forgotten her, and she, watching him, forgot she was waiting for an answer. There was something mesmeric about the delicate way he nudged at the fly wheels, touching nerves, setting off spasms of movement, putting a gentle stop to flickering activity. She leaned closer and into the pale emanation that seemed to come from his face, and then she saw the numbers tattooed on his forearm: 000136.
Without lifting his head, the watch repairer raised his unmonocled eye and they stared at each other from almost point-blank range.
“Which side are you on?” he asked quietly.
“Side?” she faltered.
“Why did you help her?”
Riveted to his one eye, Felicity felt the throb of strain on the nerves of her own eye sockets. She was aware of a tic that was beginning to swallow up one side of her face. He could be mad, she thought. Or he could — impossible though it seems — be talking about Dolores Marquez. Or he could be responding out of another language, another story altogether, and it happens that our syntax and chapters coincide.
“I don’t know why,” she said. “It was instinctive. Anyone would have done it.”
The answer seemed to please him. He smiled and nodded over his work, but said, “Not everyone. Strange, isn’t it?”
He had taken up the most delicate of tapered, silken-haired brushes, and was removing dust from a watch, dust that could not be seen by the unaided eye.
“There is a barber shop,” he said without looking up, “on Milk Street.”
His silence, and his attention to the watch, went on for so long that at last Felicity prompted, “A barber shop?”
He blew gently on the watch and picked up another tool. “Do you know Mr Scoop?” he asked.
“Pardon?”
“He’s watching us.”
Startled, she turned and saw Scoop’s grotesquely pustuled face pressed against the grimy window.
“Who is he?” she asked nervously.
“My neighbour.”
“Yes, but I mean …”
“All finished,” he said. “Just needed cleaning.” He lifted the instrument from its vice, clicked on its case, attached a blue ribbon band, and placed it in her palm. “As promised,” he said. “To be delivered to the barber shop today.” He nodded in dismissal. When she reached the sidewalk, Scoop was already back inside his teller’s cage in the record shop.
Felicity walked east and asked the first policeman she saw where Milk Street was. Not far, he told her. Turn left into Compson, then left again, then right. It’s just a lane, really.
She found it without difficulty — an area of unmitigated asphalt where the summer heat crouched like a lion, snarling, waiting. Walls rotted, paint peeled, buildings bulged with tenants, dandelions — the only green and living things — flourished in sidewalk cracks, while sad parodies of gardens rampaged in a brown and weedy neglect. Noise triumphed. An eerie and invisible noise: for though practically every sound of urban living could be made out in the cacophony, the street and its parking lots were weirdly vacant. She had the sense of being in a rowdy ghost town. Each house was a pressure cooker, seething and shaking and boiling and threatening to blow its lid off.
There were babies crying, mothers yelling, ghetto blasters blasting, children and teenagers shrieking, playing, fighting. And from a barber shop, the most astonishing barber shop Felicity had ever seen, came a babel of high-decibel Spanish folk music that threw everything else into background sound. A concerto for barber shop, with orchestral slum.
The shop itself was bright orange except for a pulsing neon barber pole. Over its door (closed, but bidding bienvenido on a cardboard sign) a mounted speaker hurled music out to the city.
Impervious to this tumult, plaster saints — decidedly tropical in hue, large as life — crowded into a narrow display box behind the plate-glass window. Jesus, fuchsia-robed, bared his Sacred Heart; a sticker beside the wound on his delicate left hand said $25. As Infant of Prague he cost a little more, but came in gold-sprayed and glitter-dusted tulle and satin brocade. For $18.95 St Francis would preach a technicolour sermon to pets in any apartment. Come unto me, said Our Lady of Guadaloupe — patron saint of primary colour, $32.50 — all ye who pine for bougainvillea and the bright song of sunwashed adobe, and I will give you a warm memory of your mothers and grandmothers, vividly swathed.
Felicity pressed her nose to the window, overcome with a sharp longing for the loud, gaudy courtyards of temples, for the extravagant fragrance and colour of Brisbane gardens, for her ayah, for her father, for her grandparents, for Hester, for the sun at its arrogant and undiluted nearest. Who knows how long she stood there with her nose pressed against the past? When the barber shop window swam back into focus, she noted its pièce de résistance, a thing of wonder.
For sheerly exuberant tastelessness and tropical excess, she could think of nothing to rival it: a hand with a thirty-inch span, in the palest of rosebud flesh tones, dripping red paint from the wound in its palm. This was not all. From each fingertip and from the pad of the thumb sprouted a saint as long as a finger joint and flashier than papal finery. Saints Peter and Paul in lapis and indigo; our multicoloured Lady on the middle finger; St Anne bluely indexed; and on the thumb, like a triumphantly juicy cherry, the Sacred Heart itself. An expensive hand, this. A tag dangling from the knuckle of the pinky demanded $49.95 of the devoutly undiscriminating.
Felicity pushed open the door and went in, blinking against the dark, conscious of the abrupt cessation of talk and laughter. Her eyes adjusted. She saw the barber chair and its occupant, the barber, and four other men, presumably waiting their turn. All were staring at her as if she had horns.
She said nervously, “I’m looking for El Centro Salvadore.”
There was a stirring of feet, but otherwise no response.
She produced the watch. “I was asked to deliver this.”
“Ah,” the barber said, and pocketed it. “Gracias.”
The men continued to stare at her, uneasy, perhaps hostile. The barber had a comb in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other and his fingers worked the scissors open and shut, open and shut, as though his hand were slowly digesting the inexplicable fact of her presence.
&n
bsp; “I was told you might be able to help,” Felicity persisted.
“No speak English,” the barber said decisively. It worked as a cue. He turned back to the business of the haircut and the men who were waiting their turn picked up torn and much-thumbed Spanish magazines and read them studiously. Felicity felt ridiculous, standing there; but she also felt irrationally afraid of walking out of the shop and making her way back down Milk Street. She knew she would feel the men’s scrutiny, perhaps their catcalls, falling on her back like long shadows.
Stubbornly she said: “Does El Centro Salvadore exist? I was told 136 Massachusetts Avenue and the watch repairman sent me here.”
“Ah,” the barber said, cautiously courteous. “Mass Ave, sí, sí. Pedro will show.”
Rapid Spanish on the wing. A man, presumably Pedro, was given instructions. He motioned to Felicity to follow: back down the raucously vacant dandelion trail of Milk Street, back along the side streets to the corner of Massachusetts Avenue. Then he pointed in the direction of the now familiar cluster of shops. “Mass Ave,” he said, nodding sombrely and repeatedly.
“But I’ve been there,” Felicity complained, “and I was sent to you.”
“Sí, sí,” he said. “You go.” And he turned on his heel.
She felt giddy with frustration. The barber shop is El Centro Salvadore, she decided, but something has gone wrong. Or else I’m being very rigourously screened. Or perhaps someone is playing an elabourate and horrible game with me. Or then again, the entire thing could be meaningless coincidence. Deduction roulette. Pick an interpretation and impose.
The acquisition of knowledge, she thought, is like water over sand. She knew — or thought she knew — that she had lifted a woman from a carcass of beef; that the woman’s blood had stained a bed in her cottage; that a man calling himself Hunter had followed her; that he knew about the woman at the border, La Desconocida, the unknown one, whose name may or may not have been Dolores Marquez, who may or may not have been murdered. She knew that an unknown woman had telephoned her, had spoken of La Desconocida, had known about Trog and Hunter, had sent her into a hall of mirrors.
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