Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

  34

  Translating the Relics

  translate, verb: 1. trans. To bear, convey, or remove from one person, place, or condition to another; to transfer, transport; spec. to remove a bishop from one see to another, or a bishop's seat from one place to another [...] also, to remove the dead body or remains [relics] of a saint, or by extension, a hero or great man, from one place to another.

  —Oxford English Dictionary, volume XI, 1933 edition

  LALO IS STANDING IN the hallway outside Ezra's room. He is fresh as a daisy. There are no cobwebs gathered round him.

  "He's better," I tell him.

  "I've been praying to Tía Tata."

  "You told me dengue goes away on its own."

  "I am very fond of Ezra, so I am seeking insurance." He smiles and touches my cheek. Don't melt, I tell myself.

  "You didn't know those gringos before, did you?" I ask.

  Lalo says, "No. Isn't it extraordinary about them knowing Waldo's family? What a coincidence!"

  "I thought you didn't believe in coincidences."

  His eyes puzzle up.

  "Why are they here? Really."

  "Lovely Alice, is something wrong?" The tips of his ears are reddening. He strokes my forearm with his fingertip. This should not be allowed. This undoes every rational thought in my head.

  "Why should something be wrong? Other than the hurricane, the damnificados, and Ezra, what could be wrong?"

  "You seem agitated. Your cheeks are blotched."

  "Blotched? Please don't tell me my cheeks are blotched. It sounds like the plague."

  "I only mean—"

  "I know what you mean." I am resisting with all my might. I whisper, "Could you give me a hug? Not here, obviously. Just in my room. Just a hug."

  Across the threshold and behind the closed door of my room, and my temple rests against his chest. There is a world of difference between Lalo naked and horizontal, and Lalo clothed and vertical.

  "Alice, Alice, Alice." It sounds new and wonderful on his lips.

  "Now I can tell you." My mouth is pressed directly into the moist fabric of his shirt, and the warmth of his chest.

  "Tell me what?"

  "You don't know who this Edith Dilly is?"

  "Are you referring to her unfortunate religious affiliation?"

  "No."

  "Please tell, dear Alice. I am not a mind reader."

  "Waldo knew her. I mean, he knew her. They had an affair. While we were married. Around when Henry was born. I don't know her, but I hate her guts."

  "This is terrible," Lalo says. His arms loosen their grip on me, and I tighten mine on him.

  "I know."

  "Hate is a poisonous emotion."

  "Please, Lalo!"

  "You need to keep your thoughts pure, your mind clear as spring water. I know you are like spring water."

  "More like a mud puddle. Lalo! I shouldn't have told you. People don't like to know these things because they are so—so muddy."

  "And she has dengue fever," Lalo says.

  "I don't want Ezra to see her."

  He is about to say something (the thing I want, I need, to hear) when Olga appears from behind the thrust-open door.

  "I knew it," she says. I jump away from Lalo and his warm chest. My fingers cramp into claws. I am guilty, guilty, guilty.

  "No, Olga," I start.

  Lalo says, "Olga knows everything before it happens. What's the hurry, Olguitita?"

  "Everything. The telephones are working and La Prensa called to ask what we think about La Matilda's ridiculous corpse. That's one thing. The other is that the back storeroom flooded—"

  "Why should it flood now? The rain has stopped."

  "A drain clogged. A dragon spit. A lizard fell asleep."

  Lalo says to me, "She can make sense when she wants to."

  "The suitcase. Paris 1912. You should consider translating the relics. Moving them. Pronto."

  "I am going down now," Lalo says. "To rescue them."

  "¿Y los gringos?" Olga says.

  "You can have the gringos for now."

  "Alice wants nothing to do with them," Olga says.

  I want to shout, Stop! Olga knows everything before it can happen.

  I forcibly straighten my gnarled fingers with the stiffened fingers of the other hand.

  "You heard about La Matilda?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you know how many saints' bodies are incorrupt? How many smell like flowers?"

  "No."

  "They are legion. All the sweet-smelling dead scaring the living into devotion. They could populate a small country. A banana republic." She laughs.

  "I know about incorrupt bodies," I say.

  "Have you ever read the Thousand and One Nights?"

  "As in Scheherezade? No, actually not."

  "But you know how the story goes?"

  "Of course."

  "Then you know what I mean," she says.

  "No. I don't."

  "The story that won't die. Think about it."

  "I thought it was that the storyteller would not die so long as the story went on," I say.

  "Rubén Darío understood."

  "I know who Rubén Darío is," I say.

  Olga says, "If you followed the Incorrupt News, you would think that perfumed corpses were the standard."

  "I should probably get back to Ezra."

  "If I thought for one minute that my body would not disintegrate and that it would stay around past its usefulness to smell like a French whore, well, I would die," she says.

  "Olga, can I ask you something?"

  "You are asking me something."

  "What do you think about Ezra? He's going to be fine, isn't he?"

  "Ezra is fine. Ezra has never been the problem. He has never been other than fine. Are you by any chance worried about Carmen?"

  This is what happened in 1912: In order to please Doña Lili, his beloved inscrutable wife, Don Abelardo Llobet Uterbia ordered from the renowned house of Louis Vuitton the most expensive and complete set of luggage possible. The set included, but was not limited to, steamer trunks of various sizes, suitcases of various sizes, cosmetic cases, hatboxes, and a custom-made travel writing desk. The leather was pale and soft. Every hinge, rivet, and nail head was of polished brass. The handles were carved from a single mahogany tree felled in the forests of Las Brisas. Inscribed on a golden plate were her initials: L. O. DE LL.

  (Ah, the sad irony of luggage that no longer lugs in this brave new world of wheels and backpacks! And ah, what should have been obvious all along: in the rainforest, leather grows hallucinogenic mold, and brass discolors.)

  Soon afterward, while the Liberals were still in power, Don Abelardo delivered two suitcases full of American dollars to the president, and when the railroad was built from the Pacific to the Atlantic, there was a spur right past the beneficio of Las Brisas, which meant that the Llobet coffee could be delivered with the greatest of ease to ships heading for the Port of New Orleans. The suitcases were part of Doña Lili's set.

  This is what happened in 1982: Immediately after Tía Tristána died, quietly, in her humble bed, beneath her humble but colorful blankets, before rigor mortis set in, and before the doctor got there, her nieces Alicia and Isabella (Llobet cousins of Lalo's father; Alicia is now dead, and the senile Isabella passes her days as a guest of the Sisters of the Sad Redemption) entered her room and removed her bed sheets, her hairbrush, and almost all the clothes she was wearing. They knew exactly in which drawer to find her letters, neatly stacked and labeled by year, and also her diaries, kept in school composition books. Everything they gathered up easily fit inside two of the Louis Vuitton suitcases with their Grandmother Lili's initials. Unaware that the set had already been irrevocably broken up, that two pieces were mildewing in the old presidential palace, they called Hector, the gardener, to take the suitcases back to the main house and replace them in the back room in exactly the same position in which they had been stored for decades n
ow. Isabella, who had been waiting a long time for this moment, said something about translating the relics. But Alicia smacked her forehead with the palm of her hand and muttered, "We are such idiots. We should have taken photographs. Who will believe us?"

  Isabella did not answer. She was happily imagining the moment when she would kiss the pope's ring and he would congratulate her in perfect Spanish for having so wisely saved the holy relics of her newly beatified aunt.

  And this is what happened in 1993: Waldo Fairweather III went into the hospital one day for a gallbladder operation, and while he was there his doctor and friend discovered that his body was riddled—as they bizarrely say—with cancer. Cancer was general throughout Three. The doctors sewed him up, and Three came home to die in his own bed with its view of the enormous white pine that had been struck by lightning the week his oldest son was born. I was pregnant with Henry, very pregnant. My ankles were very fat and swollen. Ezra was discovering his dreams. Waldo went alone to visit his ailing father. He sat by his bedside and played chess with him. When Three was well enough to walk, they strolled down to the harbor. One day, on the sidewalk in front of the hardware store, Waldo encountered an old family friend, a sailing companion and sometime tennis partner named Edith Dilly. He had not seen her in years. Her mother had died the year before, and the sympathy she offered him — for his father's imminent death—was perfect in every way. He fell in love. Just like that? Perhaps it took more than the week he was up there, but he made it sound pretty instantaneous.

  Henry was born, big and beautiful. My ankles recovered their former shape. Waldo kept returning to Catamunk to visit Three. Three was doing just fine.

  One night while Henry slept between feedings, Waldo told me about Edith, how he had re-met her and fallen in love. He couldn't help it. He still loved me too. The sex was great, he said. He didn't need to tell me that, but, he said, he couldn't help but tell me everything because I was his best friend. And I needn't worry that he'd be making any new babies anytime soon, he told me, because Edith was as fond of back-door sex as he was.

  Afterward, I would ask myself what I hated most about his affair with Edith. Was it that she was born to sailing and tennis and Maine, and I was not? Was it the sex? Was it that it had happened when I was fat and pregnant? Was it all the lies he'd told? I began to have terrible jealous fantasies about how miserable Edith would one day be, as miserable as I was then with Waldo's heart elsewhere.

  Years later, in one of our pillow-revelation marathons, Waldo told me he was attracted to motherless women. There was something about a woman with no mother, or a dead mother, that he found sexy.

  He'd said, "I just thought you'd like to know. It's probably meaningless."

  Nothing about Waldo was meaningless, as far as I was concerned.

  Three lived another four years. Henry got a chance to know his Fairweather grandfather.

  This armoire is big enough for three people. But no one is inside. My clothes are folded on shelves, hanging on hangers. My sneakers and flats are lined up below my suspended linen dress and jacket.

  "I didn't hear you come in."

  "I wasn't trying to be quiet," Lalo says.

  Then I notice his feet. He has that toe fungus they advertise cures for late at night. So you know they don't work.

  "I've been looking in on Edith Dilly-Glass."

  "I thought you were translating the relics. Into Esperanto? I should be with Ezra this very minute," I say.

  "She is practically hiding under the bed sheets."

  "Where is her devoted husband?"

  "I think he went off with the other man and Sam, the dog. I have a feeling she will be very nice when she is no longer sick."

  "Are you saying that to upset me? Do you think I care if she is nice? I'm not nice! Why should she get to be nice?"

  "I don't need you to be nice," Lalo says. "I don't even want you to be nice."

  He wraps those long simian arms around me and I am lost, acquiescent to everything. Then the siren at the beneficio goes off and I jump and hit my head on his jaw and he slams his teeth shut on his tongue. Blood dribbles from the corner of his mouth.

  "I'm so sorry, so sorry," I say. Do I kiss him? Do I attempt to lick away the blood?

  "Don't worry, beloved," he says around his instantly swollen tongue. "That's the first time in three days we've heard that. It is a good thing."

  "Your poor tongue."

  He says, "I came to tell you about Tía Tata's letters. They are all wet and bleeding."

  "Like your tongue."

  "We have to dry them out. I thought we might read them together. This business with La Matilda's body is a terrible dilemma for us. Incorruptibility is not a miracle I place much faith in, but for many it's still a miracle."

  "A miracle is a miracle is a miracle?"

  "Please, Alice."

  "I'm so sorry, Lalo. About your tongue, about everything."

  He sticks his tongue out in order to view the damage. The bleeding has already stopped.

  "I wish I could get Hubert to come down here and weigh in on the matter of miracles."

  "I thought you wanted Waldo and Henry to come," Lalo says.

  "I did," I say. When did I change my mind? "I do." But there is at least one and possibly two excellent reasons for me to no longer crave Waldo's presence in Nicaragua. "But Waldo doesn't know anything about miracles."

  Lalo's hands are underneath my shirt, an ordinary polo shirt, formerly red, now faded to pink, a comfortable shirt with only one small tear at the left edge. His fingertips are cool. I tighten my stomach muscles and hope that he doesn't notice the excess avoirdupois. His hands move back and forth, but always north, until they are cupped beneath my armpits and he lifts me slightly off the floor. "Levitation can be a miracle," he says. "Except when it's a hallucination."

  "Fevers can make you hallucinate."

  "Will you come with me to see the letters?"

  "First Ezra."

  Carmen is with Ezra. She's sitting on a slipper chair upholstered in plain muslin that was not here before. Her elegant feet inside elegant white sandals are crossed at the ankles and resting upon the edge of the mattress. Ezra dozes while Carmen reads Sherlock Holmes.

  "He's ever so much better," she tells me in a voice above a whisper.

  "Thanks to you."

  "Thanks to his constitution. Did he inherit that from you or Waldo?"

  "From his grandfathers. On both sides."

  "I should have guessed," Carmen says. "Did you know that Conan Doyle believed in levitation and bilocation?"

  I whisper, "I had no idea. None."

  "He was a rabid spiritualist. But not a Catholic. That would be too much to hope for. And he was friendly with Joaquin de Sorolla y Bastida."

  "The Spanish Sargent?"

  "Exactly."

  "Does this have something to do with Tata?"

  "It's not even true. I don't know what has gotten into me."

  "Stranger things have happened," I say, softly. My arms long to stroke Ezra. My nose longs to nuzzle him, but mere minutes ago I was getting horny in the interstices of Lalo's arms. That old red tide guilt washes over me.

  What is it about Lalo? Not the eyelashes, not even his body, certainly not the Brooks Brothers pajamas. It's his capacity for belief. He believes, believes, believes. There is not a cynical bone in his body. Unlike my body.

  Carmen says, "I am so tired of Tata. I think when the roads are dry I will leave this place forever. I am thinking of moving to Budapest. Have you ever been there? I could be happy in a place of faded glory. Anything but this aching stretch for the unattainable future."

  "Don't go to Budapest," Ezra says.

  "You weren't asleep," Carmen says with mock alarm.

  "Budapest is full of Huns," Ezra says. "Goulash-eating Huns. You wouldn't like it."

  "You mustn't pay such attention to me, Ezra."

  Finally, I reach out and touch his forehead. It feels warm.

  "Do you want to t
ry drinking something?"

  "Ginger ale."

  Before I can even turn on my heels to do his bidding, Carmen has summoned Graciela, through some mysterious silent communication they have, and told her to return with ginger ale.

  Ezra sips, and does not vomit.

  Carmen says, "I hear that someone else is sick here. The gringa."

  "Who told you? What did they tell you?"

  "Papa dropped by a few minutes ago."

  "About your father," I say.

  "I know. His memory is a wreck. He forgot the name of Emilia's husband. I told him it was fine—everyone forgets his name."

  "But," I say.

  "I know. Mama told me he's forgotten the names he used to call her, when they were young and delirious with love. So she starts crying and then he starts crying, and once he has started he can't stop. It's related to his strokes. That's what they say. But he was always like that. It's easier than real emotions. For instance, you may have noticed that I never cry."

  "Never?" I ask.

  Carmen says, "Things aren't looking good for Tata."

  "You mean because of the body of La Matilda floating up? Doesn't it seem odd that her body pops out of its casket smelling sweetly while this other fellow arrives with his dog to hunt for missing corpses?"

  "Where's the dog?" Ezra asks.

  "In the kitchen. I guess."

  "What kind is it?"

  "I don't know, Ez. A hunting dog. A sniffer."

  "Flirt and Dandy are hunting dogs."

  "Only theoretically."

  "I miss them," he says. There is a funny thing about enrouged cheeks: they can be a sign of health or a sign of fever.

  "My poor Ezra," Carmen says. "As soon as you are well we can take horses and go see the high-altitude coffee."

  "I've never ridden a horse," Ezra says.

  "No problem," says Carmen. "The horses have never carried an American boy before."

  "Is the doctor ever coming? Will he be able to tell us exactly what Ezra has? We really should know. I need to know."

  "It is dengue. Dengue is endemic this week, this month. It only kills you if you're weak, or very old, or very young."