His smile enlarged and became impish. "There's just one problem: we have no twilight in the tropics, as you must know. As I know very well. So how can I remember it? No, there are two problems. Of all the people to tell in the country, why tell Carolina, who is part of a movement to push aside the claims and miracles of Tía Tata in favor of ... of her own relative, of La Matilda? Those are my problems."
"She is opposed to your sainted aunt? Does she know something? Why?"
"Why? How absurd this all is. And I mean no offense, not to you. It is simply that no Nicaraguan—planter, poet, or pauper—could ever ask such a foolish question."
"Most of us are not Nicaraguan."
"Of this I am well aware. So of course you do not know that the beautiful Carolina Felicita de la Rosa Oberon—who was runner-up in the Miss Nicaragua pageant and would have won if it were not for corruption, which surprises no one—that Carolina is laterally descended from La Matilda Vargas de la Rosa. And in my country, especially in Granada, and especially among the de la Rosas, there is a belief that La Matilda should be canonized and preferably before Tía Tristána. They are wrong and deluded, of course, because Tristána led a profoundly more saintly life in the classic mold of virgin saints, as my research among the hallowed stacks of the Hagiographers Club would have shown, will show."
Now, at last, his breathing became shallow and labored. Those final passionate words were pulled from his throat by a thin thread, stretched to its limit.
"Don't think that I'm not dying to know about this rival saint in your country, but you seem wiped out. And I bet visiting hours are over." I stood up to leave. "Can I get you anything before I go?"
"When you return you must bring my clothes," he said. "And my suitcase. Please zip it shut and do not look inside."
"Of course. No problem. I can't believe I didn't think to bring your clothes before."
"I agree."
"Good night, Abelardo."
"When you return, you must call me Lalo."
The glow-in-the-dark green hat was still pulled down over his head.
Then I heard, we heard, "Yo soy Nicaragüense." It was not Abelardo. The voice came from behind the blue curtain.
"What's that?" I said.
"He said he was Nicaraguan. He is my compatriot," Abelardo said. "¿Verdad?" And then to me, "Alice, please open the curtain on your way out."
I did. His roommate, he of hesitant groans and rustling sheets, was a young Hispanic man with straight black hair that cleaved to his skull, and wide Mayan cheekbones; half his face was hidden beneath gauze pads and bandages, in a way that made it very clear why he spoke with difficulty, why I had trouble understanding him. His eyes were watery and sad. Compared with Abelardo he looked tiny and childlike in the hospital bed.
"Adios, Alice," Abelardo said. There was nothing else to do, so I left. Though I was terribly curious. True, there were many recent emigrants from Central and South America in nearby Thumbtown, and no landscaping company or tree company or construction firm could manage without them. It seemed quite reasonable that there would be Nicaraguans among their numbers, but remarkable that one should find his way into the very same room with Abelardo Llobet, also of Nicaragua. Unless the hospital did such things on purpose.
I stood for a while outside the room, out of sight (not that it mattered much in Abelardo's case) but not out of earshot. I listened and was rewarded; I heard Abelardo say, in his crisp, elegant Spanish: "¿De donde vienes? ¿Para donde vas? ¿Como te llamas y que tal estas?" What? He had not mentioned he was a poet; nor had Waldo. Had this facility for easy rhyming forged a bond between the two Harvard boys? Was this one of the million things they had not told me, as opposed to the three and a half things they had? Was there a Spanish equivalent of a limerick? There were so many questions I still had for Mami.
Two chubby nurses wheeled past with a Huge One. To justify my presence, I pulled out and studied a list that had long resided in the bowels of my handbag: milk, TP, vanilla, some kind of meat, OJ with no pulp, bread, olives, 100-watt light bulbs.
The man in the other bed, the sad bandaged man, replied, "De arriba vengo, para abajo voy, Rubén me llamo, y muy mal estoy."
This was too much. Both poets! Both rhymesters!
In the hallway and the elevator and the lobby I averted my eyes from the other patients and kept them focused on my feet inside their mukluks. The sky was black and twinkling, and cold was everywhere.
I found my car behind a grittifying snow pile in the parking lot, and went home. In the snow, off I go, blow, throw, crow. No, it wasn't working. The gift was in making it seem easy, and that I could never do.
I walked over to Susie's, each step making a crater in the snow as I sank to my crotch, climbed out, then descended again. In my parka pocket I carried a bottle of wine, a jar of tapénade, and a box of stoned wheat thins. It was slow going. I imagined myself in Lapland, doomed to survive on dried reindeer meat.
"You shouldn't have," Susie said when I came in, leaving my snow-filled boots to puddle by the door.
"I have a question for you," I said. "What do you know about chicken sexing?"
Susie looked suddenly radiant. She was sitting in a modern leather armchair, a famous chair, or at least one that I'd seen in magazines; it had a curvaceous wooden frame and it swiveled. All of which was a good thing if you had just had your knee replaced and were stuck indoors. She was wearing a body-hugging pink sweater and baggy sweatpants. Her hair, as usual, fell behind her in a long brown braid, thick as a rope that could tether an ocean liner. "How could you possibly have known that I actually know something about chicken sexing? I do now, anyway. You really are uncanny, Alice," she said. "Except when you're not."
"All things being equal, who else would I ask about chicken sexing?"
"Bogumila, all things being equal," Susie said.
"You know perfectly well I wouldn't ask her. Not if I had to say the sex word. So tell me what you know."
"Why do you want to know? Chickens have not been on your most-favored-nations list."
"It'll take a while to explain," I said, and went into the kitchen for a corkscrew, wineglasses, a plate, and a knife. The kitchen was spotless; every surface, including the inside of the sink, gleamed, unsullied by crumbs or smears. Either Susie was not eating or she was doing a bang-up job of cleaning while on crutches.
"What's with the kitchen?" I asked.
"Herc came over. He can't help himself."
"Really? How exciting," I said.
"As regards cleanliness," she stressed. "He's fanatical. So I let him."
"Oh." We both drank our wine. "How's the knee?"
"Before or after the pain meds?"
"That doesn't sound good."
"I like this wine. So explain."
I told Susie that, per her instructions, I'd gone to see Abelardo at the hospital and told her what had transpired. I did not mention the vision of his Aunt Tata as a chicken with a blue aura.
"It's actually quite an art, is chicken sexing," Susie said.
"And?"
"Of course, you can just wait until the chicks grow up and develop secondary sex characteristics, as in having wattles or laying eggs; and it's also possible to breed chickens to have different wing patterns depending on their sex, to make them instantly recognizable. But I doubt that's what you're asking about. What you want to know about is vent sexing."
"I do?"
"I have no doubt. And it's just as well you didn't ask your Latin friend. You would have both been terribly embarrassed. Whereas..."
I laughed. "Whereas between us, nothing is embarrassing and all is fair game."
"Until it's not," Susie said. She was not laughing.
"So tell me. About vent sexing," I said.
"It's not for the squeamish."
"Since when have I been squeamish?" I was getting impatient. I had the oddest sense that we were in a French farce and there was a lover hidden in the draperies. But there were no draperies. Only Roman shade
s.
"Fine. First thing you need to know is that chicken genitalia are internal. Not available to the naked eye. Basically, you squeeze the shit out of the newborn chicks so you can look up their asshole and see if there is a bump or not. A bump means a male. It's called a 'male process.' I'll have you know that vent sexing is considered an art. There were these two Japanese guys in the thirties who figured out how to do it, and they compared it to playing chess."
"You're kidding."
"I couldn't make this up."
I said, "Well, thank goodness chickens are vegetarians."
"They're not anything when they get sexed. They're just hatched."
"Fine, but at least they haven't been eating hamburgers. That would be revolting."
"More revolting," Susie said. "And you know this how?"
"The same way I know anything. I read it in a book. About raising chickens. Raising Chickens for Dummies—my bible."
"Will you have to do this?"
"First I have to get the chicken coop, and then the chickens. And then hens have to lay eggs and then they have to hatch. Then I consider whether to try vent sexing or not. And I certainly could try it, and as long as I don't kill the chicks then no harm is done and it may turn out that I have a gift for it."
"This has been very helpful," I said. "How can I thank you?"
"You can't. You've already made my day. But you can take out the garbage on your way back."
"Consider it done," I said.
Later that night, while Dandy and Flirt slept silently beneath our bed, I lay alone between the flannel sheets and felt at the epicenter of some seismic gratitude for Susie's next-door knowledge. It didn't entirely wipe out all the guilt for Abelardo's madness in the snow, but it made me feel pretty good, a kind of all's-right-with-the-world, or all-would-be-right-if-Waldo-and-the-boys-were-home-and-Abelardo-were-safely-in-Nicaragua.
It should not have mattered that there was no one who wanted to hear my dream the next morning. In my dream Mami was alive. The report of her death had been a terrible mistake and she stood on the beach in Goleta, shivering a bit, dripping, while we all stood in a semicircle and examined a severed arm and clucked over the telltale shark-tooth markings. She was horrified that we had identified it as her arm. She was indignant that we had thought her arm looked like the arm in front of us, which was flabby and mottled, nothing like Mami's long, muscled arm, an enviable arm. We were all so glad she was alive, but she remained annoyed that we had made such an egregious mistake.
It was not the first time I'd dreamed that Mami was alive and that a mistake had been made, but this one was especially vivid, and called for an audience. What it called for was The Dream Radio Show. Was it possible that not only did I no longer host the show but no one hosted Dream Radio? The show no longer existed. Every single person in the tri-state area with a dream to tell was up a creek without a paddle.
For five minutes that morning it snowed again, fat luscious flurries that fell leisurely to the ground, that flitted in the air like showoffs, that took all the time in the world to display their infinite eternally dissimilar patterns. I thought, Enough is enough. I also thought that Abelardo would never get back to Nicaragua if it snowed again, and then what would we do? But after five minutes the snow stopped: bored, indifferent, its gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.
And five minutes later I was making a sloppy three-point turn, butting up against the snowdrifts that lined our road, because I had forgotten everything: ripe fruit, clothes, the suitcase. In the fruit department, all I had in the kitchen were bananas and pears: monkey food and northern food. I would be lying if I said that I efficiently gathered up his clothes and placed them inside his suitcase and zipped it shut without a second glance. I looked.
All my life I had managed not to know Abelardo and in particular not to know anything of his quest to see his great-aunt canonized, and now, suddenly, I could not even wait until visiting hours to return to the Ginny O to see him. This had nothing to do with guilt. Who was this Carolina de la Rosa? And why did she matter to him, and now to me?
The curtain between the two beds was pulled back all the way to the wall now. When I walked in Abelardo said, "Have you met Rubén Zamora?"
"Con mucho gusto," I said to the poor man with the bandaged face. And then to Abelardo, "You sound much better this morning."
"Sounds can be very deceiving," Abelardo said. "They are open to interpretations. They are always filtered and always translated."
"Are you saying you're not really better?"
"As were her relics. Translated."
"Excuse me?"
"Tristána's things. When relics are moved from one church to another or when the body of a saint is moved, we say she has been translated. But not into a foreign language."
I thought about this. "I don't think translators get nearly enough credit for what they do. Especially poets. I'm not sure poetry can be translated. Unless by translating you mean moving the body of the poem from one place to another. Then it makes more sense." All sorts of things were beginning to make sense. They were making sense in the same way that if you took LSD, it seemed possible to solve the world's problems, write an ode, and then comprehend all of philosophy in a single night.
"Señor, por favor, dígale."
"He wants me to tell you."
From the looks of it, even to speak was painful for Rubén.
"Tell me what?"
"That he knew my Tía Tata. He is a believer."
"That's great. Kind of an incredible coincidence, though?"
"I do not credit coincidence. But if you must, the coincidence is that we share a country. Once that has occurred, I find it not at all remarkable that he knew Tía Tata."
"But isn't she dead? How long has she been dead?"
"Quite a while. Long enough. She died in 1982. Rubén was a young man then, but he remembers."
I smiled at him. But I was thinking of Henry and Ezra in the caves. This Rubén's earnestness reminded me of Ezra; even his bandage reminded me of Ezra. I wondered if he walked in his sleep. Abelardo should know.
"You said you'd tell me about your girlfriend's aunt," I said.
"She's not my girlfriend! Please don't ever say such a thing."
"Sorry. Carolina's aunt."
"Her name was Matilda Vargas de la Rosa, and she had a twin brother, Mateo. On the last day of the year of 1900, they were born at home, which is to say, in the de la Rosa mansion, catty-corner to the Cathedral of San Francisco in Granada. Someone told me that under the bed was a jar with every detached umbilical cord from every de la Rosa who had entered the world in that bed. There is no reason to believe that is not true, but I have always thought that if you counted you would not find as many umbilici as there were babies. But that is not really germane." He spoke slowly and clearly, as if I were deaf, or slightly stupid. "They say that the twins' mother, Doña Rosalinda de la Rosa Vargas, wanted them to be born on the first day of the new century, and that when the contractions started on the morning of the thirty-first, she drank herb tea and lay tilted in her bed so that her head was lower than her feet, but nothing availed. The twins were born well before midnight."
"I've never heard of tea to slow down contractions," I said.
"You will notice, my dear Alice, that the contractions did not slow down. Remember that people in my country are subject to all sorts of superstitions and beliefs."
"But not you?"
"In the matter of belief, you may say I am an omnivore. I believe many things. But I have also studied the sciences, and I know the difference. Now, my new friend here, Rubén, he believes that there are demons inside the active volcano of Masaya, and that the Virgin of Tipitapa weeps real tears every Friday, and that jaguars change into children and children into jaguars. There is a difference."
Rubén smiled when he heard his name spoken in the middle of an otherwise incomprehensible English sentence.
"So the twins?"
"From the very beginning La Matild
a was the stronger, dominant child. Did I say that she was born first? She was. She ruled Mateo, who looked nothing like her; next to her, he was so fragile, so pale. But it was not enough to rule and control, she had to contradict every little thing he said, and ruin every little thing he wanted. She was not a nice child. Not all children are nice, though parents find that hard to accept. Then, to make a long story shorter, Mateo found his true love."
"Why shorten it? Why now? I like love stories."
"Oh, Alice, Alice. The only story I will embroider and lengthen will be Tía Tata's. Surely you know that? It's remarkable that I tell you this at all. It is only for Carolina's sake, and in case you meet her."
"Meet her?"
"It is true our paths cross very rarely, usually only in the event of natural disasters or funerals. Which are not so different."
"And the true love?" I asked. What about Abelardo's true love? Where was she? I tried to recall what Waldo had told me of their roommate days, if there had been any female names. I couldn't remember any. She was probably Nicaraguan. Whoever she was. Was this all a roundabout way of telling me that this Carolina was the one? No, my instincts said she was not; if anything, she was a red herring.
"Her name was Isabel de Sola Pacheco, and she was a revelation to Mateo, who thought that finally, at last, he would be delivered from the unkind dominion of his sister."
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