"Lucky him," Ezra says.
Then we climb again and in a moment we are behind living fences and flowering hedges, we are climbing out of the SUV and standing breathless beneath the porte-cochère of a vast wooden finca house whose ends—like Patagonia—we cannot even see. Two seconds ago heat lightning splintered the sky. The heavy doors are carved with scenes of coffee pickers balancing canastas on their heads. I will never see a picker carrying a basket, or anything else, atop his head.
"So here we are," Lalo says. "I hope you will not find it boring."
"Even to say you are bored means you have no Inner Resources," Ezra says. He thinks he is quoting Mr. Cicero.
"I simply mean that we lead a very simple life here, growing coffee, among only family, talking coffee ... you understand."
"Except your aunt," I say. "You talk about her."
"Yes, that is our great exception."
She emerges from the shadowy interior, a shape and then a slender vision in white, a tall woman with cascades of black hair, shocking green eyes, and cheekbones that announce themselves. Her cigarette pants and linen blouse are white, very white; her jewelry is gold, very gold. She walks effortlessly, on pointed and very skinny high heels, also white. How shabby do I feel in a skirt and Birkenstocks? Very shabby. Why did I give up high heels? Let me count the whys. Ezra gazes at the vision with what appears to be love.
Abelardo introduces us to his sister, the wonder in white, who is Carmen.
"I always liked Waldo so much," she tells us. "That northern sense of humor is charming. And so handsome."
I sneeze. Something is making me sneeze, twice.
"Salud," interjects Abelardo.
"You have your father's eyes," Carmen says to Ezra. "Don't you think so, Lalo?"
Normally Ezra would reply to this phrase with something along the lines of No, I have my own eyes. But this time, in Las Brisas, León, Nicaragua, he says nothing of the sort.
Carmen slides her arm through mine and leads me down the corridor that extends along this vast horseshoe that is almost a courtyard. We climb up broad, dark wooden steps that require an odd gait; the risers are uncomfortably short and it seems awkwardly ceremonial to be ascending arm in arm. She leads us to side-by-side bedrooms, cool dim rooms with dark wooden ceiling beams. In each one a woven and tasseled hammock hangs across the farthest corner. "My brother has told you everything about our Tía Tata?"
"Not everything. I'm sure everything would be impossible."
"He is obsessed. Now more than ever. You are kindness itself to come down here, but in reality I doubt anything will be accomplished." Carmen pushes a rogue strand of hair away from her face, then tilts her head slightly forward and with all of her hand sweeps her black mane up and back. "Reality? That is a lot to ask of my family. And Lalo is so brilliant. But so stuck on this."
"Where is your family?" Ezra asks.
"They are all here. Somewhere."
"Are they all like you?"
"No. I am unique."
"Technically, we are all unique," he says.
"Technically," Carmen says, "miracles are an impossibility."
"I meant like DNA," Ezra says.
"Aha." We must be visibly exhausted. I speak for myself. Carmen glides off, past the dark and mottled door. She says, "It's too bad about León. But the winds are bad now and the rain will get worse. In which case ... Have you noticed how we always get too much or too little rain these days? It wasn't always this way." Carmen silently shuts the door behind her.
And now, before dropping off, I read in my guidebook that in León one can visit the home of Rubén Darío, the great poet who wrote an ode to a young Margarita Debayle, who would one day be aunt to the yet unborn dictator Anastasio Somoza, who, in retaliation for the city's rebellious behavior, would firebomb León's central market. While I'm asleep, a spider walks across my face.
Ezra pushes open my door. "We have to call Dad right away," he says.
"They're hunting fossils," I say to Ezra. I open my eyes. The guidebook is still open on the damp sheet.
"I have an idea for an invention." Ezra is wearing his bush poplin convertible pants, the ones with a zipper just above the knee to allow instant transformation to travel shorts. Ezra's pair has no fewer than seven pockets, in assorted sizes and shapes. The pants are held up at his waist with a canvas belt, because he read somewhere that bees and other insects find leather objectionable. His pale blue button-down shirt has two breast pockets and ventilation panels under the arms. Several of his pockets are already bulging with treasures and supplies.
"Now?" If I squint, I can read again about Rubén Darío's humble home on Calle Once, about wide wooden floors, and the santos in the corner. My ear is itching from a spider bite.
Ezra whips a mechanical pencil and an index card from his left breast pocket. He pats his right rear pocket reassuringly. "It's an instant anti-claustrophobia device."
"Can it wait?"
"He'll want to know," Ezra says. "Don't you want to know? I haven't worked it all out, but it gives you the illusion of space ... you know, lots of room. Because if claustrophobia exists in the mind, then it must be combated in the mind. So this is virtual roominess."
"It sounds brilliant, but it'll have to wait," I say. "They won't be home. And I think I may have been drugged, this sleep is so ... so perfectly sleepy." I want to roll over. I want to shut my eyes. I am very heavy and also I am surrounded by a heaviness that wants to sink into the mattress. Ezra needs me, I think. "We'll have to ask your father, but if something is virtual, can it also be a device? Are they contradictory concepts?"
"I'm starving."
"Go find Carmen, and I'll be out soon. I don't know what's come over me."
27
The Saltcellar
There is little in the recorded history of Christina of Brusthem to make us think she was other than a pathological case.
—Alban Butler, "St Christina the Astonishing," Butler's Lives of the Saints
LATER, OR THE NEXT DAY, it is dinner. Beneath the seductive rotations of this fan, we listen. Mostly, we listen. The mahogany, so highly polished, reflects the gleaming silver. Stray beads of water or wine wick off its surface.
It is a story that has been told countless times before. It is a story being honed and polished and shaped with each telling. It is a weighted story. It carries the weight of all the Llobet longings for immortality and justification and sanctity. It is a story well known to all its other tellers at the table. They too listen carefully for some nuance unheard in previous tellings that in a new light will make everything clear. They listen for the clinching detail that, forwarded immediately to the Vatican, will seal their case.
They are practicing for the real thing, for that moment when they face the grand papal inquisitor, that lean and beaky éminence grise in ecclesiastic robes of purple and gold, and with a kissable ring.
Meanwhile the eerily silent servants with broad Mayan features place gold-rimmed china bowls in front of the tiny and heavily sedated Doña Luisa, then me, then the sisters, Carmen, Emilia, and Olga. They serve Don Abelardo; and our host of hypothermic history, Lalo; and the son-in-law, Raimundo Vasquez de Soltera; and Ezra. Lalo's father is a large man, tall and barrel-chested. The painful incongruity of seeing him next to his diminutive wife with her bird bones and powdered cheeks is mitigated by his hands. Don Abelardo has the hands of a concert pianist or a courtesan, long, slender, and silken.
Tristána Catalina was born in 1896, the daughter and last child of Abelardo Llobet Uterbia and Doña Lili Otanguez de Llobet, younger sister to Rafael, Fabio, Martin, Esteban, and Juan. She would become aunt to Esteban, Abelardo, Alicia, Gertrudis, and about twelve more, and from then on be called Tía Tata by all. Later, she would be great-aunt to Abelardo; to Carmen, so beautiful in white and gold; to Emilia, Olga, and thirty-nine others. Tristána rejected five offers of marriage, not one of them from a mental defective, all of them from the cream of Nicaraguan society. Two in particular
her father implored her to accept. First there was Carlos Chamaco, an amateur poet and brilliant coffee farmer. By the age of twenty-five he knew more about coffee varieties and advanced theories of cross-pollination than anyone in the country. He was particularly interested in taking the classic arabica Bourbon variety and injecting it with some of the hardier characteristics of the Brazilian. (This would prove impossible, and frustrating to the point of madness, but that is not our story.) He announced himself ready to commission a chapel on his finca to be dedicated to any saint Tristána cared to name. She cared to name not one. She told him he would do better to dedicate himself to saving his soul.
Olga, the youngest, asks me to pass her the salt. Her beauty is unlike Carmen's, perhaps because of the asymmetry of her face and her darting eyes. Her skin too is white, snow white, and her lips are red, ruby red.
Just like the fairy tale, if you believe in fairy tales. Which I do. What if Waldo is not my Prince Charming? I don't go to that place.
In Olga, the eyes seem an afterthought above her elegant broad cheekbones. The black neckline of her black dress incises a shocking V upon her chest. It is a low neckline but her breasts must be even lower because there is no visible cleavage.
The salt grains are fairly large. Were they gathered in the Salar de Uyuni, or from the Dead Sea? They cluster like miniature white boulders in a crystal dish fitted into a silver dish with four feline feet. I pass the dish down the table.
Carmen's look could bore a hole in Olga's wide forehead. Olga takes a heaping spoonful of salt with a tiny spoon just like the spoons that cocaine users dangle from golden chains around their necks. Olga creates a perfect white hillock on the rim of her plate, just inside the gold border. She takes a pinch between her thumb and index finger, sprinkles the salt on her left forearm, and rubs it into her skin in concentric circles. She rubs and she rubs, harder and harder.
It must be something they do in the tropics.
Months after Carlos Chamaco was refused, Tristána's father, Don Abelardo, lobbied for another suitor, Lorenzo Beckworth. When he wasn't tending his cattle or his vast holdings of sugar cane, Lorenzo traveled to distant bodies of water in search of the best deep-sea fishing. Tristána's father compared him to another fisherman, a fisher of men. Tristána said she would never again eat fish, flesh, or fowl. Nor would she marry. There were others, all summarily refused. Tristána told one and all that her body, along with her soul, belonged to Christ.
Carmen says, "I have always struggled with the bride-of-Christ concept." She looks directly at Ezra.
Olga smiles. "She always says that."
"My dear Olga." Carmen theatrically raises the three middle fingers of her right hand to her lips.
"If your struggle were doctrinal, I might understand."
"It's a contradiction. If the whole point is to be chaste and unmarried, to forgo the pleasures of the flesh and domestic life, then why even use the terminology of marriage? I would hope for irony, but I know how devoid of irony is the Mother Church."
"The church may be without irony, but that does not mean that its members in the Mystical Body of Christ are not ironical, even paradoxical." Lalo flutters his long lashes in all directions, but especially mine.
Carmen says, "As with Theresa of Ávila, who had sexual fantasies about Jesus. He pierces her with His burning lance." Carmen holds her knife aloft in her right hand.
"Why do you always insist upon misreading the nature of mystical experiences?"
Their mother, tiny Doña Luisa, interjects, "My family, on my mother's side, descends from poor dear Saint Theresa. The Cepeda-Ahumadas. We get our eyebrows from them. Strong, dark eyebrows. Fierce but elegant eyebrows."
"No one is descended from Saint Theresa," Lalo points out. "She was a bride of Christ. Even Carmen will tell you that."
"Pruning techniques for blueberries and coffee are not unalike," says Don Abelardo, the father. "Are you a proponent of poda total or poda por mata?"
The son-in-law says, "He's not coming tomorrow. Did I tell you? There was some mishap in Guatemala."
"Who's not coming?" Carmen says.
"The pruning consultant."
Doña Luisa says, "From one of her brothers. Her brothers came to Nicaragua, as you know. With the Virgin of El Viejo."
"That is very disputed, Mama," Carmen says.
"It is not disputed in my family."
Olga sits suddenly very straight. "No one ever told me we share DNA with Santa Theresa. That changes everything."
Emilia, who is beautiful in a wide-eyed, frightened sort of way, and almost never speaks, not even to her husband, Raimundo, makes a strange choking sound. She is much darker than the others and she has the square flattish features of las indígenas, except for her nose, which is petite and, as it happens, reconstructed. She and Raimundo also live at Las Brisas. Raimundo's face is sunburned.
"It changes nothing," Abelardo says.
"How can you say that?"
"Because it's probably not true."
"No one ever listens to me," his mother, tiny Doña Luisa, says sorrowfully.
Carmen says to Ezra, "It's true. No one listens to her."
Ezra says, "My mother would be very upset if we never listened to her."
There is a subtle vibration at this table. Naturally the first thing I consider is an earthquake. But that is not what is happening. For one thing, the vibration appears to be located only at this table. It is limited to Abelardo. Abelardo must be tapping his foot quickly and ferociously.
Abelardo is eager to get on with the story of Tía Tristána.
Until the incident with the portrait by Sorolla, Don Abelardo, Tristána's father, was universally regarded as a strong-willed man just barely on the acceptable side of tyrant. Until Tristána's adamant insistence on virginity. "What portrait?" Ezra asks.
"You must be joking," Carmen says.
Ezra said cheerily, "I would love to tell you a joke, but I have to check my notebook."
"You didn't tell her about the Sorolla? Lalo?"
"Perhaps not."
"That's a pretty serious omission," says Carmen. "Even for you."
"But he did," I say. I feel compelled to defend Lalo, though I have no idea what they are talking about. What makes me think he needs a defender? And if he does, couldn't he do better than me? Maybe he did tell me about Sorolla—whoever—and I wasn't paying proper attention. Maybe I was distracted by Dandy while he was distracted by the snow while we were both distracted by each other. This quickly gets complicated.
No one hears me. That seems a good thing.
The ferocious foot tapping ceases. Abelardo relates how Don Abelardo, his great-grandfather, lost his appetite, sat in a rocking chair on the veranda at Las Brisas overlooking the coffee trees, and murmured over and over to himself the tongue twisters he had learned from the Jesuits thirty-five years earlier. In Don Abelardo's youth all the best colegios for boys were Jesuit schools, and the Jesuits loved tongue twisters and riddles. They used them as mnemonics. Then in 1881 President Zavala banished the Society of Jesus from Nicaragua. The Jesuits returned early in the next century, but their stranglehold on the collective psyche of the country's elite young men had been shaken. Other orders (the Dominicans, the Salesians, the Ransomites) were ready and willing to fill the gap left by the evicted Jesuits. Like nature, religious education abhors a vacuum.
Emilia coughs and whispers that Tía Tata was trained by the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin of Saragossa, who, both individually and as an order, opposed meter and rhyme.
"What portrait?" Ezra asks.
Olga says, "Señorita T. Sorolla considered it his masterpiece. But that's because he fell in love with her."
"And Sorolla is?"
"The Spanish Sargent," says Don Abelardo. He exhales a perfectly cylindrical plume of smoke.
Carmen clarifies: "A Spanish impressionist: Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida. They called him the master of the impasto pigment."
"Who did?" Smoke still stream
s from Don Abelardo's mouth.
She does not deign to answer. "In 1912 Sorolla went to the States to paint commissions. He even went to Buffalo because there were many great ladies there; there were many fortunes made on the Great Lakes. But it was brutally cold, and Sorolla was not a native. He also knew Don Urbano Casares from Guatemala, a great coffee planter but, I am sad to say, a man of wicked impulses."
"He has nothing to do with this, Carmen."
"Don Urbano invited Sorolla to Antigua to paint his very, very young wife, and that led to more commissions. Sorolla was not reluctant to leave the city of snow."
"I love snow," Ezra says.
Abelardo shivers and pulls on his earlobe while the tip of his index finger strokes the outer edge of his left eye.
"Sledding is one of my five favorite things."
"Enough, Ezra. Not here," Carmen says. "So it happened that our great-grandfather heard—"
"Great-great," Doña Luisa corrects.
"He heard of Sorolla and invited him to Nicaragua to paint his daughter Tristána, known for her remarkable beauty. Then the trouble started."
"You mustn't say that," Emilia whispers.
"You mustn't say what I mustn't say," says Carmen. "Tristána had no interest in being painted. But her father was determined. Finally she agreed, but only if she could be painted in the habit of a Cistercian monk. Her father was enraged. There were no Cistercians in the family, none in all of Nicaragua, and it was a male order. At least a Carmelite would have made a tiny bit of sense, since there was a family tradition of unmarried ladies spending their dotage at the Convent of the Five Wounds in León."
Olga looks up from her salt pile. "Is that your plan, Carmencita?"
"I have not taken leave of my faculties. I have other plans entirely," she replies.
Their mother says huskily, "It's the loveliest convent in Nicaragua. They have a weeping virgin and several first-rate reliquaries."
"So how was she painted?" Ezra asks. His hands have been below the table for quite a while now, and there is no dog here, not that I have seen, not in this dining room.
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