Out There: a novel

by Sarah Stark

  “I am Jefferson Long Soldier, and I am doing my best to be a good American.”

  39

  As he flew back home across the Atlantic, Jefferson had known it was the end for him, even though the war soldiered on. There would be no third tour. He had not been home in three and a half years, so long in such foreignness that he could not imagine his grandmother’s face. He remembered that his cousin was very large, with a good smile and an infectious laugh, but he couldn’t remember how Nigel spent his time. He was pretty sure his cousin didn’t have a job.

  In the bulbous clouds surrounding the plane, Jefferson had tried to see if the rain hitting the wings and thickening in the sky was in fact a rain of yellow flowers, the welcome-home carpet that Jefferson half expected to accompany soldiers everywhere as they returned from war. For the soldiers in García Márquez’s world, the yellow flowers had followed the conclusion of twenty years of war, creating a carpet so thick that it had to be cleared with shovels and rakes. And though something told Jefferson there would be no yellow flowers on the ground in Santa Fe, still he looked for them out the window. He could hear that beautiful hallelujah song playing in his head, and the shafts of light through the dark clouds were particularly bright, like from movie camera lights. Colonel Aureliano Buendía had deserved a light-filled, flower-drowned sort of homecoming. He had, after all, devoted almost a quarter century to his cause, whereas soldiers like Jefferson had only missed a few years of what would have been college or a first real job. Maybe it was fair. There was the miraculous thing with his eyes and ears, and if he had to choose, he wouldn’t have traded that gift for flowers.

  He had closed his eyes as the plane cruised on, 33,000 feet above the black water, trying to dream of the young man he guessed he was supposed to be, now that he was going home. He squeezed his eyelids tight and tried to think of a simple list of qualities about himself. The effort was immediately unsuccessful. He needed to recall the outline of his own face and the shape and color of his own eyes, Jefferson decided, before he could think about internal things. He was fairly certain he had a warm smile, like Esco’s, but were his eyes blue or brown?

  40

  He rode all night through the city’s sprawl, on toward the core. The going was slow, for there was so much humanity to see, and he stopped a few times to rest, to drink some water, to witness the life of a stranger. Curious and full of questions he found himself, only some of them having to do with his search for GGM.

  Have you ever been a soldier?

  What is your mother like? Do you know your father?

  What’s your idea of a miracle?

  He made sure he was he headed toward downtown, el centro. And more specifically, he made sure he was headed toward Zócalo, the neighborhood a nice woman had mentioned as a possible good place to begin his search. The woman was a housekeeper, she told him, and had once been employed by a diplomat’s family there.

  By four in the morning, through the growing light and mid-rises, he began to see patches of green grass. Here poverty was hardly visible, only an occasional lonely wanderer like himself, and there were no more cardboard shacks or free-roaming roosters. There were trees and lawns and buildings designed by architects. Bright umbrellas were being set upon street corners for lattes and, later, lunch.

  By mid-morning, after several consultations with snack stand operators, he became fairly certain he’d arrived in either the place called Zócalo or the place called El Distrito Federal. He left the motorbike chained to a pole, whistled for the pup to follow, and together they continued on foot. Five-star hotels and shopping. Beautiful men and women walking with iPhones, parking BMW motorcycles, and getting out of dark sedans.

  It was unexpected to him, and posh, and none of it seemed right. Try as he might, Jefferson could not imagine the old writer, that man with the famous wiry eyebrows from the back cover of his paperback, living near any of this hubbub. There were swanky residential side streets, to be sure, all stacked with high-rises. Maybe when García Márquez had been younger, he would have had an apartment in a high-rise to entertain his intellectual friends, but he was an old guy now, and—Jefferson couldn’t help it—he didn’t believe old guys who wrote novels lived in high-rises.

  It was late morning when he came to the bookstore owned by an American named Fernanda, who was obsessed with Latin American literature and who had moved to Mexico City from Brooklyn after 9/11. Fifty-two years old with tight eyes, this Fernanda was nothing like Fernanda del Carpio, the most beautiful of the five thousand most beautiful women in the land, the woman conceived by García Márquez, the Fernanda Jefferson thought of as the real Fernanda. The Fernanda of the bookstore had hair of no true hue, and in the end she proved unable to guide him. She smirked and crossed her arms and warned Jefferson about disappointment. Didn’t he know? He’d be lucky to get within a city block of García Márquez. Didn’t he know? The old writer did not talk to anyone.

  But Jefferson’s hope had reached a great height, for it was the hope that comes at the end of a long race. So he thanked the bookstore owner for listening to his story and left her with a smile, practicing a short handstand outside the front door to shake off any negativity that might have attached itself to him because of her lack of faith. Then he made his way to a bench in a nearby plaza. It was a Saturday, early December, and it was raining, and he could think of nothing better than to wait to see who might approach and offer to help him.

  He spent the afternoon on the bench watching a photographer snap candids of nearby lovers. He saw a multitude of people pass by, and several times he thought he had identified a person who could help, each time asking the critical question, in his best mix of Spanish and English. “Perdón. Dónde vive el gran autor, Gabo? Mucho famoso?” He began with the name he now understood might be the writer’s most familiar nickname, Gabo, and only if that name received a shrug did he move on to the more formal “Dónde está Gabriel García Márquez?”—a sentence that Jefferson knew translated literally to “Where is Gabriel García Márquez?” If the names Gabo and García Márquez got no response, Jefferson did his best to ask where the rich people lived, and the artists. Several times he held out his street map to a kind-looking man or woman, raised his eyebrows, said, “Los ricos?” or “Los artistas?” and hoped for a miracle. After two hours and twenty-three minutes and a lot of sweating, the most common response he had received was still “Who?”

  It was getting on toward evening, and he was sure he was as close as he had ever been to GGM. He walked on his hands for a while up and down the sidewalk, Remedios yipping at his side, trying as always to generate some good energy. He trimmed a few stray shoots off the trunks of several lime trees and then returned to his bench, a place he felt sure would eventually attract the right person.

  The sun was beginning to set when the old woman arrived, stooped against her cane in front of his bench, her head wrapped in a green towel as if she’d just washed her hair. Jefferson was ready. Here she was, his helper. He could see a shimmer around the outline of her small frame, and the refrain from the hallelujah song began to play way back in his ears. She looked at him, and he spoke the question, slowly, as best he could. “Por favor.” Please. “Dónde está Gabriel García Márquez?” Where is Gabriel García Márquez?

  The woman looked at Jefferson and paused, peering up through the branches of the almond trees above, up to the high-rise balconies. She looked behind her with a stern brow, and then she looked ahead, to the left, and to the right, and finally she placed her forehead down into the pocket of her hand as it lay open and propped against her cane. She seemed to be navigating the tangled streets of the metropolis, retracing her steps to a place she had visited long ago. Jefferson waited, hopeful.

  When the old woman returned from her mental wanderings, she waved her one free hand in a new direction, what Jefferson guessed was eastward. She spoke in a fierce Spanish he could not follow, but from the vigorous thrashing of her left wrist, he guessed he must still be many miles away fro
m the right neighborhood. As best he could, Jefferson asked her to confirm this fact and she nodded, Sí, and thrashed her hand and wrist again in what he interpreted to mean Get going! He was thanking her and standing then, preparing to retrieve the Kawasaki and head off in this new direction, when the old woman’s language became intelligible, as if she had finally found the words for which she had been searching, nodding and smiling. “San Ángel. San Ángel! No, El Zócalo! San Ángel, señor! Sí, señor.”

  41

  It was raining again, and Jefferson’s thoughts had turned to literature and its embrace, a good story’s ability to guide the reader to a better life, to help him to know himself more fully. Iraq seemed so far away. Though he continued to kneel every morning and read the list, seeing each of those names and faces as clearly as he had ever seen them, Jefferson could no longer smell the acrid aftermath of each unique explosion. Try as he might to remember that smell, to recall the singe of his nostrils, the sensation had fallen into a new category of memory, the memory recalled with effort rather than the memory that shrieks in the dark of night.

  He had spent the morning walking in the rain and asking many people the same question—Where is San Ángel? Nearby, yes? He continued to trust the words of the old stooped woman, who had seemed so certain that this was the neighborhood Jefferson sought. He had left Remedios the Pup with a kind shopkeeper who said she loved the name Remedios and loved One Hundred Years of Solitude, but had had no idea that García Márquez lived in Mexico. Wasn’t he Colombian? Still, Jefferson continued to have great faith in the act of asking for help. So far, it had led him right.

  Again, most people shrugged at his question, or appeared unwilling to stop and talk because of the rain, but there were three who tried their best. A middle-aged woman with a very large bottom shoved into a tight black skirt seemed to want to help, but she also seemed confused, pointing down one street, giving him directions in an English-Spanish hodgepodge, then pausing and pointing in the opposite direction, down a different street. A teenage boy carrying a boom box said he’d played with Gabriel García Márquez’s grandsons when they were young—yes, he knew where the boys had lived—but he’d never met the writer, had only heard his grandmother speak of him. Did Jefferson want him to show him where the grandsons, those little boys, had lived all those years ago? A delivery guy unloading several cases of soda for a snack shop was pretty sure about Miércoles Street, or somewhere near that.

  In this way, the blind leading the blind, the curious helping the curious, the trustworthy aiding the trustworthy, Jefferson ended up in the place called San Ángel, the place he believed he had been looking for. From a brochure in the lobby of a small inn, he read that it had been an ancient settlement long since enveloped by the metropolis. He sat on the curb across the street from a snack shop and a park, and he waited for what would happen.

  It was quiet, a kind of quiet he had not yet experienced in Mexico City, and something about this quiet made him believe he must be in the right place. This was the enclave within the stormy chaos that Jefferson imagined that writers everywhere might seek. It had the feel of gravity and of slow, fluid thinking. It had the feeling of refuge.

  He sat on the curb, drinking Cokes and eating peanuts, pretending he belonged and waiting for something to happen. Occasionally he took out the collage and worked on it a little.

  At the end of the day a woman and her two young daughters walked to the park from an opposite side street and began playing a game of tag on the small green patch of grass, near a swing and slide. Jefferson watched the children play and enjoyed their quiet company, having no intention of asking the woman for help. She was obviously from this part of the city, a local in this quaint neighborhood; she had packed a snack for her girls in her satchel, and she said a number of times that it would soon be time to go home for dinner.

  It was she who spoke to Jefferson, smiling. Was he visiting San Ángel?

  Jefferson, tired, told the truth. “I’m trying to find Gabriel García Márquez,” he said. “He saved my life, you know?”

  She wanted the whole story. What had happened to Jefferson? How had he come to know of the writer? Was he American?

  And so he told her. Beginning with Ms. Tolan and Honors English 4 and including the list of losses and ending with the Forty-One All-Time Best Quotes and Nigel’s Kawasaki and his great fortune with the bergamot woman and, really, just about everyone he’d met along the way.

  “I’ve got to find him,” he said finally. “I’ve got to tell him.”

  The woman seemed surprised, as if she’d learned something new about a story she’d thought was already finished.

  It turned out that she’d known Gabriel García Márquez since she was a little girl. She’d grown up next door to him, and her parents were friends of his and his wife’s. They’d shared meals, celebrated holidays, alternated between homes. Lots of people love him, she said. Lots of people dream of meeting him.

  And then she wrote down the famous writer’s address—on Calle Miércoles—and a few particulars about his compound on a piece of paper from her purse. He had done most of his own gardening until he grew too ill, she said. Perhaps the old man might have changed his habits, but if it were her, she’d wait on the south side of the wall, just outside the old turquoise garden gate with the symbols of the cosmos carved into its wood. In the past he’d liked to pick up his newspaper there. She knew because as a teen she’d had trouble sleeping, and sometimes she’d sat on the curb outside her compound and visited with him in the wee hours. “He’s an insomniac—or used to be,” she said.

  It was a good bet, she said, though he was older now, and he’d been very sick with cancer for a long time. Though he’d survived, his mind wasn’t what it once was. Jefferson could try, though, the woman said. He’d need a miracle, but why not try?

  42

  In all, it rained four days, three hours, two minutes, and a handful of seconds. During that time Jefferson buttressed his courage in the covered walkways and narrow alleyways of San Ángel, Remedios the Pup by his side.

  And then the sun came out, and Jefferson followed the woman’s instructions to the end of the little street behind the public garden, where it became a cobbled lane. The wall that stood before him, she had explained, would look like posole, a deep ivory with flecks of brown and rust, and it would be draped with a tangled mess of trumpet and wisteria vines. From the other side he would likely hear peacocks screaming. Occasionally one of the more skilled flyers among them might leap momentarily to the top of the wall, just long enough to gawk at the outside world before falling backward into the old man’s garden. He loves his peacocks, the woman had said.

  When Jefferson arrived, all of the woman’s words proved true save the peacock teetering on the wall. Here was the posole-colored wall hung with vines. Here were the proud yelps of birds from the other side. Jefferson wasn’t certain, but he guessed they were decades-old almond trees standing in a long line. Spreading out tall and wide and dense, the line of trees said No to the heat and to the sun and to anything else that might threaten a man’s solitude. On the other side of the narrow cobbled way came the scratch-scratch-scratching of chickens and the intermittent calls of what he guessed must be a lone peacock.

  He felt ready to get his bearings, to watch the compound gates, to see the cars pass by, the neighbors walk past and wonder, but nothing else. Now that he stood so near, Jefferson was sure he was not ready to knock on the front door.

  He turned to the left and walked until he reached the end of what he believed to be García Márquez’s wall and the beginning of the next property, about fifty yards down, and then he turned around and continued back in the other direction. He passed the front entrance, rough-hewn double pine doors with a tarnished lion’s-head knocker, and went on until the wall rounded the corner of the modest street, and followed a smaller brick lane until he was out of sight behind fruited trees and overhanging vines. The wall reached another corner at the end of another hundred yar
ds, and around it the lane turned into a two-rutted grass and dirt alleyway.

  Jefferson followed the alley as far as his eyes could manage, down into the greenness. In front of him, just before the corner, stood a wooden door, a single wooden door stained turquoise, raised several inches above a bed of fine gravel and carved with the moon and the stars. Just in sight of the main entrance with its driveway, this one looked to be the portal for a housekeeper, a gardener, anyone taking out the trash. It was here, at this spot near the back corner of the property, that Jefferson decided to camp out for the evening. It was possible someone would see him, think he was a bum, ask him to leave, but Jefferson believed in the power of his intentions, and he believed this was the spot where he’d wait until morning.

  He had some confidence to build and some remembering to do: Why had he come down here again? And besides all that, a whole lot of reading.

  At some point in the trip, somewhere between San Miguel and Querétaro, Jefferson had realized with great disbelief he that he had never actually read One Hundred Years of Solitude in its entirety. Not from beginning to end. If someone had asked him his favorite scene or favorite line, Jefferson would not have paused, for those were questions with lots of easy answers. True, one’s favorite line, one’s favorite scene even, might change from day to day, but he’d always have an answer ready for a question like that. So many favorite scenes. So many three-page sentences. But if someone had taken him for an expert, if someone had asked him what the novel was about, its themes, even its plot, Jefferson would have crossed his eyes and mumbled. The truth was, he had not once read the whole story.