“Because I was the one with the big mouth.”
“Who did this?” she asked.
“Who knows? Could have been the guerrillas because we were pro-America. Could have been the army because we talked reform. They didn’t say, we didn’t ask.”
“You can apply for refugee status,” Felicity said. “It’s a clear-cut —”
“Did apply. Didn’t get it. No hard evidence of risk, they said. That’s when I went black instead of trying for Canada. I take one day at a time. Sometimes I take calculated risks, like talking to you.”
“I can give you my word —”
“You’re a calculated risk,” he said. “But we scavenge for ports in a storm.”
Felicity felt weighted with lead. She had a sensation of burning faggots being piled high around her chair. Whatever he’s going to ask, she thought, I won’t be able to say no, and I’ll be afraid to say yes. She said morosely, “I wish I hadn’t crossed the border when I did.”
“Oh borders,” he said savagely. And then: “Look, I’m not going to twist your arm. I don’t think I’m going to ask anything at all. You’ve already saved a life. Well, prolonged it anyway. Everything’s temporary.”
“I was going to notify the authorities,” Felicity faltered. “I do believe they would have been humane. But I’m relieved she’s safe.”
“No one’s safe. ORDEN is active and so are extremists on the left. Everywhere.”
“Orden?”
“Paramilitary. Ultra right-wing. They have ties with a number of US groups. They stalk us here, and send death threats to the remnants of our families back home. So does the left.”
“It’s difficult to believe,” Felicity said.
“I expect so,” he said coldly.
“I’m frightened,” she said, “because you knew how to contact me. I’m frightened of Hunter.”
“We shouldn’t have contacted you. We only do it because we’re desperate. I won’t ask anything. You’ve done enough.”
“Who is Hunter?”
“We’re not sure,” he said. “Possibly CIA. Possibly ORDEN — one of their local links, the vigilante type, the kind of right-wing zealot who … And then again, possibly he’s a thug for the left, they have their own kind of fanatic.” He drained his beer mug as though imbibing recklessness. “I’ve been trying to decide whether it’s crueller to tell you or not to tell you … ”
A whirlpool sucked at Felicity. She felt dizzy, and drank quickly to steady herself. Against her will, she pressed: “To tell me or not to tell me what?”
“The extent,” he sighed, and trailed off. He rolled another cigarette and signalled for a jug of beer. She waited, afraid he would finish his sentence, afraid he would not. When the jug came, he filled their glasses, raised his in a sardonic toast. “You won the lottery,” he said. “You’re a VIP. From your point of view, you saved the wrong person. Everyone’s after Dolores Marquez.”
Felicity closed her eyes and saw the flame trees, the twitching cow, the crow flying off with its eyes. I was marked from birth, she thought helplessly. But the crow demon has choked, said her ayah, and has fallen to earth like a stone. You turned away too soon.
You are a teller of tales, Felicity accused. And a dreamer of dreams. And my father was a madman to leave me alone in the world.
You are possibly right, he called from his fishing boat. I accuse myself of madness and arrogance. And yet I don’t know how I could have done differently.
You’ve tainted me, she wept. I’m marked.
Angelo waited. Felicity felt infinitely weary. She seemed to be reading lines for a part she had been trying to refuse all her life. “Why is everyone after Dolores Marquez?” she asked.
“Her husband joined the guerrillas. But the guerrillas believed he was a government spy and shot him. Both sides seem to think she knows too much. Some say she’s a guerrilla commando in her own right, others say she’s an army informer.”
“And is she?”
Angelo shrugged. “I won’t swear to anything. I’ve been told she sends back reports to the army on all of us. I’ve been told she’ll betray me to the left. Who knows? Somebody sent my mother a death threat, somebody sent la migra to my door. It could have been anyone.” He raised his beer again, in a mock salute. To insanity, perhaps. “The thing is, I met Dolores on the back roads, we hid in ditches together from army bombings, we bribed border guards together, she fucked them to get us both through. Doesn’t necessarily prove anything. Probably she doesn’t trust me either. But I’m a gambler, why not? My bet is she has only two allegiances: to her children and to survival.”
Her children.
Oh unfair, Felicity thought. Below the belt. I don’t want to know about her children. Felicity knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to wake up into last week. Before Friday, before the border. All this, she wanted to convince herself, is about a painting. About a dream about a painting. About Perugino’s way with expressive eyes. She looked around her: an ordinary smoky tavern halfway between Harvard Square and Central Square. Student couples discussing love and summer school. Obviously nothing irregular could happen, nothing fantastic. She had stumbled into someone else’s nightmare, that was all.
Angelo’s face was green and bearded with smoke. His dreadlocks twitched about his shoulders like snakes. He was talking, talking, words dribbled from his mouth like bile, he had no right. He took out black pictures as though the dark made them safe. Flash cards, all dirty, flouting the obscenity laws. They’re all done in invisible ink, he said; they disappear in the clean, clean light of America.
You have no right, Felicity said. I don’t want to hear. But his voice and his visions surged on in antiphonal chant, piling up bodies in ditches and garbage dumps, telling of mutilations.
Really, Felicity, a chorus of voices reminded. Really, what will …?
These things are excessive and hallucinatory, she said. They cannot be real. They are in such bad taste.
Oh definitely, agreed Angelo. In very bad taste. There’s a cauldron in my mind full of toads. Once in a while, he said, I lift the lid and let a memory or two escape. Because they vanish in American air. They’re invisible here.
Felicity watched one of his memories spill out and disperse itself.
A raggle-taggle group is walking along an unpaved road. When the A-37s fly over, swooping low and dropping bombs, the people dive into ditches and under bushes for cover. When the planes fly on, they straggle back along the road. There are a lot of children, little ones, who are hungry and tired, but no one can stop. They have to reach Tenango by nightfall. An A-37 flies over. In the ditch there is a woman on top of Angelo and she is moaning in labour. The plane moves on, Angelo helps the woman back onto the road. She gives a cry and leans against him, he is supporting her by the armpits, she is squatting, moaning. She gives birth, he severs the cord with a sharp stone, she picks up the baby, they move on. Angelo asks her name and she says Dolores Marquez.
“I can’t listen to this,” Felicity said. “Stop it.”
Angelo did not hear or could not stop. “The baby was dead before the next morning,” he said. “We didn’t have time to bury it. We left it under a tree and covered it with some branches but I looked back and saw the vultures and crows before we’d gone a hundred feet.”
“Stop it,” Felicity begged, protecting her eyes with her hands.
“But she has two other children,” Angelo said. “They’re with her mother in a village near Copapayo. At least … we hope so.”
Felicity was rocking her head in her hands, exorcizing visions. Really, Felicity, whispered the aunts.
“It isn’t possible,” she said. “It isn’t possible to give birth like that.”
“None of it’s possible,” said Angelo. “None of it’s real. But it happens.”
He was moving his beer mug in circles, creating a whirlpool, and she saw that it was full of blood. He drank it calmly. I’m going to wake up now, she said. I’m going to leave. I’m going to get out of bed and make
coffee. These are sticky nightmares, Angelo warned. It’s harder than you think to escape. But no one would blame you. Go quickly, while there’s time.
“Damn you,” she said. “Damn you.” She could not move.
Angelo’s hand reached out of the dream with a memento from the other side. A photograph.
“These are her children,” he said. “And her mother. This was her talisman. We all need a piece of magic to keep going.
“The thing is,” he said, “there’s no telling what bitterness will require. We become the puppets of our personal wounds. Maybe her bitterness will require her to turn me in: to la migra, to the army, to the left. Maybe for her I have the face of Judas, maybe I smell of the man who shot her husband, who knows?” He shrugged. “If she has to, she has to. But I’ll take my chances.”
“It was the birth,” he said. “Being there. I feel responsible for a life. I’ll never live long enough to have a child of my own, so I …” He forgot to keep talking. He was looking at a tree under the sign of the vulture. “We all have to have an unrealistic obsession,” he said. “Something stronger than fear, something to keep us going. For her, it’s those children. For me, it’s her.” He picked up the photograph of her children and stared at it. “That’s why I paid her fare on the meat truck. One thousand dollars, and cheap at the price, since the driver got caught, poor fool.” He shrugged. “I get four dollars an hour washing dishes, all cash, no taxes. What else am I going to spend it on?”
“Trog said … About the murder … You’re sure it’s not … that she’s not …?”
“If she’d been killed, they wouldn’t be trailing you. It’s her they’re still after.”
He sipped from his tankard of blood. “What I’m asking,” he said, “the little thing I’m asking, is that you get the photograph back to her. She needs it more than food. There was a last-minute panic with the meat truck here, someone tipped off la migra, but the truck got away (or so we thought). I found the photograph after the dust had settled.”
Felicity picked up the photograph, and once she had touched it, thought: I am branded now.
“I have this impossible dream,” he said, “of keeping her alive until it’s safe to go back. This crazy beautiful dream.” He laughed. “A serviceable obsession. I’ve pencilled the Montreal contact address on the back of the photograph. Ask for Casa del Diablo, it’s a restaurant.”
“Oh no,” Felicity groaned. “What do you mean, ask for? Do you mean I have to go through another circus like today’s? Trying to find a number that doesn’t exist. Making a fool of myself, wandering from a watch clinic to a barber shop —”
“Barber shop!”
“The barber shop with the tacky religious statues in the window.”
He was startled. “You went there?”
“Wasn’t it part of the cloak-and-dagger scheme?”
“What scheme? What are you talking about? Why did you go there?”
Felicity began to feel that inner sensation of frenzied wings again. “The watch repairman sent me. Who is he?”
Angelo had the look of a man who is cornered but is planning to make a run for it, to fight to the end. “He’s our watcher, that’s all. Sympathetic. He gave Dolores a cash job, no questions asked. You should have told me he sent you there. Tell me, the statue of the hand —”
“What a dreadful piece of kitsch! Quite extraordinarily tasteless.”
He leaned across the table and grabbed her wrist. “Listen,” he said urgently. “Can you remember the arrangement of the signs on the fingertips?”
“The signs? You mean the saints?” Felicity closed her eyes, summoning up the image. “I remember that the Sacred Heart was on the thumb. And Our Lady of Guadaloupe was on the middle finger, I think …”
“That’s that, then,” Angelo said and began to laugh. He laughed till beer dribbled from his mouth and tears rolled down his cheeks, and the laughter bounced back at Felicity from every surface like ping-pong balls, like tiny skulls, like the ricocheting heads of gargoyles. Angelo rose into its deafening fog and lurched drunkenly out.
She was alone in a dingy pub with a creased Kodak snapshot of two children and an old peasant woman.
26
Euclid might be adduced: the lifelines of Felicity and Gus, having intersected once, were destined never to meet again. Does this help? Geometry as salve?
Or I could posit a sarcastic Prime Mover.
All in all, however, it might be simpler to resort to the exotic. In India, I understand, human history is seen as the lila or sport of the gods. This makes good sense. Perhaps it was this that seduced Felicity’s father: a release from the Western compulsion to find meaning. If nothing is meantto make sense, if it’s all a cosmic farce, then everything is so much more tolerable. Or at least less intolerable. So Felicity says.
In South India, she tells me, there is an inside-out version of the Sisyphus myth. Perhaps the monsoon, so essential and capricious, is conducive to stories of this kind. A man pushes the familiar rock up the same steep hill, but his purpose is not to get to the top and the story is not about futility and despair. After each hard-won morsel of climb, the rock plunges back to the bottom and the man dances and laughs and claps his hands. He puts his shoulder to the rock again, he sweats, he grunts, he gains fifty feet — for the sheer pleasure of watching that boulder get nowhere.
I like that story.
What I am groping for is something to lessen my sense of guilt — although any sane person would surely agree that it is quite irrational to feel guilt. (Would you have taken her seriously if she had called you from The Plough and Stars with such an improbable tale?) But the fact remains that if I had not been so bemused by the garbled story of a birth, if I had not on that account tuned out a thousand and one extraordinary details, if I had not interrupted, if I had given her a chance to tell me that Dolores Marquez had not after all been murdered, if I had just listened … this story might have been different. I would not feel I had aided and abetted two obsessions.
At the time, it seemed like a fantastic game. Felicity being Felicity. And Gus? Well. A philanderer’s remorse. A Catholic with guilt and visions. These can be taken seriously?
And yet, if Gus had not just left when Felicity called back again from her office; or if I had not told him that his Magdalena had been murdered; or if I had not assured Felicity that Dolores was still at her cottage … If Felicity had called me earlier than she did, if she had filed more progress reports …
“I’ve met him,” I told her. “Your insurance salesman.”
“What?” She was back in her office but still seeing the tree that grew under the sign of the vulture.
“Augustine Kelly. Likable, but a hopeless innocent.”
“You’ve met him?” Nothing makes sense, her inflection said.
“I know.” (I can answer her thoughts, we have always been this way.) “It’s a long story. But he’s been here and we’ve talked for hours.”
“I don’t want him to know,” she said urgently. “He’s too trusting, too dangerous, he’ll talk. It’s all so much worse than we could have guessed. And now the photograph. And I’ll have to get it to her.”
“Get it to who?” It’s not easy to follow her threads.
“To Dolores Marquez.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “On my tape, if I recollect rightly, she’d been murdered, you’d seen a photograph of the body, you were frightened, you were being watched —”
“I still am,” she said. “He’s out there now. I can see him from my office window. But he’s not from the FBI, and my car hasn’t been impounded, it’s in the lot, but it won’t start, it’s been tampered with. And she hasn’t been murdered, I already told you that.”
“No you didn’t.”
“I did. When I called from The Plough —”
“Well,” I said. “How relieved she must be. So when Gus keeps insisting he saw her —”
“He saw her!” There was a leap in her voice. “Is he with
you now?”
“Just left, and in appalling distress, poor fellow.” (You have to cajole Felicity out of her black moods, you have to listen to the lower currents of her words.) “The murder was the last straw, and of course I wasn’t aware it had un-happened. In his cups he has a tendency to confuse his wife and your mystery woman. Obsessed with both of them, anyway. I pointed out that he couldn’t have seen her because —”
“But he could have! Tell me, was it in a restaurant off rue Maisonneuve?”
“No, no, not in Montreal, Fliss. You fail to appreciate the symbolic scope of his vision. He saw her near the cottage. Remember that old farm on the hill?”
“When was this?” she demanded.
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“That’s strange,” she said. “Angelo gave me a Montreal —”
“The murder certainly threw him into a frenzy. He thinks he had a warning. Mind you, he’d been drunk and maudlin for hours, confessing all over my carpet. I think your Magdalena is a necessary distraction for him, an obsession to hang on to for the time being. Until his wife —”
“Near the cottage,” Felicity said again. She sighed. “Another wild-goose chase, I knew it. I have this awful premonition …” She was not entirely coherent. She spoke of Trog and Hunter and Central Square and Angelo. She spoke of her father. “That’s how it happened,” she said. “Suddenly it makes sense. He never meant to leave me like that, he got caught in a riptide, there was nothing he could do.”
“Fliss, what on earth are you talking about?”
“I think I’m caught in one,” she said.
I waited for a translation, but she had gone off into one of her brown studies. She’s given to long-distance thinking. “Fliss,” I said dryly, “this is an expensive way to say nothing.”
But all I achieved was an absently murmured, “I’ll have to get hold of Angelo again, but how …?” and then another long pause.
“Don’t you think this calls for a touch of irony?” I asked.
“Some things don’t, Jean-Marc.”
“Aha. Success. At least you’re listening to me.”
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