"You really should get these transcribed, typed up, and put them on a CD. We shouldn't be touching them. Our fingers have oils that are treacherous to old paper."
Lalo wraps his fingers around my left wrist and brings my fingertips to his lips. When he starts sucking the tip of my index finger I almost jump from my seat.
"You have no idea where those fingers have been," I say.
"I can imagine," Lalo says.
"Every minute I learn something new," I tell him. This minute I am learning how his earlobes attach to his cheeks, and when he sucks my finger the movement of his jaw engages the cheeks, and the cheeks pull the earlobes ever so slightly. His ears wiggle when he sucks my finger. The question is: Is this normal? Or is this a Lalo Llobet specialty, like Waldo's limericks, and the late Three's ability to balance a spoon on his nose and recite the Lord's Prayer at the same time?
"Your finger has a hint of chili, and the sweetness of miel de abeja. Do you care to explain?"
"I care," I say. "I just care."
"One of the few things the Jesuits did not teach us was the miracle of sexual love. And its manifestations."
"Like finger sucking?"
"Exactly."
"What did they teach you?"
"Everything else," Lalo says.
This is nerve-racking. "Did you know that about your Tía Tata?"
"Know what?"
"That she wasn't a hagiographer? That she considered the saints a distraction?" Lalo releases my finger and holds both my hands on his lap, in bondage. I am beside myself with delight.
"That's only what Padre Oscar said. He is not wholly reliable."
"Shouldn't we keep reading?"
"I thought you found them boring," Lalo says.
"The sooner you get them read, the sooner we can—"
"Further our cause?"
I want to let my head drift onto his lap and nestle in there. I want to wake and sleep and wake and sleep, and never leave his lap.
He smoothes another letter and reads, "'It wasn't only the high and mighty who were married and holy. I almost forgot about Isidore's wife, Maria Torribia. She was very humble, and you are not very humble. You are in the sky above me. They had a child before they took that strange step that so many others took. How do I know it is strange? Because I wake every morning with your name on my lips where your lips should be.' "
"Strange step? What strange step? Are we finally getting racy here?"
"They swore a vow of chastity."
"Oh, that," I say.
Lalo keeps reading, but suddenly, in the midst of a letter, it occurs to me how easily I could tell George Glass about Waldo and Edith. I could let it slip. There are a thousand ways I could drop the bomb. With reminiscences of Bug Harbor, a day on the bay, or an oblique reference to Three's health and death, I could ruin everything for Edith. For Edith, with her new proselytizing husband. Her saintly Saint Joseph of a husband. She had just handed that to me. Handed me that power on a chased-silver platter. On a silver trophy for the yacht club's midsummer series championships. On a silver bowl for the biennial commodore's cup.
Was Edith looking to be a martyr?
"So. What do you think about the gringos?" I say.
"Not very much."
"I wish they had never come."
"But this way you can see Edith Dilly at last, and you can lay it to rest."
"Lay it to rest? I don't lay things to rest. I am a wretch that way."
"Waldo once told me that you were a bundle of contradictions," Lalo says.
"Waldo said that? When did he tell you that? I think if anything I am highly consistent."
"It was ages ago. Because of your Spanish mother and Welsh father."
"I fail to see what that has to do with anything." I jump up from the trunk and stand before him with my hands on my hips. It's a histrionic pose remembered from some melodrama, stored up all this time.
Lalo says, "Shall we read some more? Before I have to go and face the ... the inevitable."
"Read away."
"I wish he had dated things. We had to date everything. The Jesuits were sticklers for record-keeping. I wonder where Padre Oscar went to seminary. I hate to think."
"Are you by any chance being a snob?"
"Most certainly. In this matter I am a snob. My standards are of the highest, beloved Alice." And then he reads from the multiply folded yellow sheet: "'I never met a matador like you. Yes, I know what you will say. I have never met any matador at all. I want to tell you that your secret is safe with me. I saw four hummingbirds this morning at the house of Doña Mirela. She wanted me to bless her pregnant dog. My mother said that keeping secrets was naughty and nasty, and she would beat them out of me. But your secret is lovely. Like you.'"
"Now that's exciting," I say. "A secret."
"It's probably nothing. I suspect this Padre Oscar liked a little drama in his life. Even to the point of creating the drama. And you, Alice, do you like drama?"
"I like you," I say. "Drama scares me."
Lalo reads more letters and I listen intermittently. I watch his lips. Are lips unique to their bearer, like fingerprints and retinas?
Ta-da! Olga appears, with flashing eyes and bits of hair sticking out from her head. "I consider them your problem," she says.
Lalo looks at her tenderly. "The letters or the gringos?"
"The gringos."
"Have they done anything wrong? Broken any pottery?"
"Pottery I can fix," Olga says.
Lalo says to me, "Olga is a genius with glue and epoxy."
"That's nice."
"How is the patient?" he asks.
"She is still sick. I looked into her room. She couldn't see me."
"Is that what you came about?"
"Of course not. Your friend Hubert is on the telephone. He acted as if he knew me. I don't know him."
"I'll go," Lalo says.
"Don't bother! We were cut off!" When she gets excited, Olga holds up her hands and shakes them. Her loose black sleeve slides down to her elbow, and the raw, salt-bruised skin of her forearm is exposed. "Do you know what I would do, if it were up to me?"
"No."
"I would burn them. But I would save the ashes."
"Why would you save the ashes?"
"Ash Wednesday," she says.
"I don't understand," I say. "I have to go see Ezra."
"Carmen and Ezra are playing that game. Though I doubt that he can ever win."
"What game?"
"Not Ping-Pong," Olga says. "Not ing-Pay ong-Pay."
Have we just discovered that Tía Tristána was not a virgin? After everything, is that what we have learned here? And was her non-virginity thanks to a consecrated priest, a priest of humble origins to be sure, but still a priest? Does that put my fornicating with Lalo into some kind of perspective?
I need to start answering questions.
It is only Scrabble. Carmen has set up the board on a small table by Ezra's bed and they are only playing Scrabble. Lovely, benign Scrabble.
"Carmen's ahead," Ezra says. "She got dazzle on the triple-word score."
"But there is only one z."
"She used a blank," Ezra tells me.
"Ezra has a marvelous vocabulary," Carmen says. "Look at this board. He made scrofula and playwright."
They're a mutual admiration society. They're a team of two.
"Who made rivett?" I ask.
"I did," replies Ezra.
"It only has one t."
"I was afraid of that."
"Well, it's too late to change anything now," Carmen says sweetly.
"Let me just take your temp, Ez."
"Don't worry. Carmen did. I'm fine. Getting better by the minute. She says that tomorrow I can have gallo pinto for breakfast and ride up the volcano."
"That seems awfully adventurous."
"He is better, and now that Edith is worse. Odilia said she was vomiting."
"Shouldn't someone call the doctor?" I ask.<
br />
"I did. Fernando says that of course it is dengue, because dengue is everywhere. He was not very worried. He has other things to be worried about. As do we all."
"But she's probably miserable."
"You can be sure of that," Carmen says.
(I suddenly picture Waldo and Carmen, standing side by side in an airport, an old airport, before security checkpoints and casual attire. A wizened redcap is hunched over with the weight of their three enormous Louis Vuitton suitcases.)
I am not eavesdropping. I can't help it if I can hear the cooing of George Glass, the saintly husband.
"Hello there!" he greets me loudly at the door. I exhale.
"I thought I'd check in on the patient."
"Come in! Come in! Nothing would please her more than to see you, a familiar face!" George shouts. I suspect he is one of those people who have difficulty modulating their volume.
"I'm not familiar."
Edith's face is small and ashen on the pillow. Gone are the red cheeks of fever.
"Poor Edith. She never complains. But I know that deep down she would always rather be in Maine."
"Can she eat anything? Or drink anything?" I ask George.
"I can't keep it down," she answers.
"My son was like that. Everything came back up."
"Ezra. You must be so pleased he is better," George says.
"We heard that Ezra is delightful," Edith says.
"Yes," I say. I don't want his name pronounced in this room, by these people. There is a limit.
They both smile, George transparently, Edith wanly.
"Where is your friend with the dog?"
"They went into the village to do something about the jeep. We got terribly stuck in the mud, you know. And then they were going to head over to the hills where the worst mudslide was. Sometimes it takes Sam a few days to get comfortable in his new surroundings. He's a terrifically sensitive dog. But you probably guessed that." George keeps his hands jammed into the pockets of his khakis, as if they need to be restrained from ecstatic gesticulation.
"I've never met a corpse-sniffing dog before," I say. "Are there many?"
"Dogs' olfactory senses are forty to fifty times greater than ours," George says.
"I know." Henry told me that, among many other facts concerning the wondrous abilities of dogs.
"George and I are here for the living," Edith whispers. "The survivors and the grief-stricken."
"They call them damnificados."
"We know," George says. "They are our mission."
"You could spend your whole life in Catamunk and never hear the word damnificados," I say. "I don't even know if Waldo has ever heard it. Damnificados."
Lalo would be so right to ask what I was doing, here, visiting with Edith. Lalo would be completely meet and right to demand an explanation, and I would be at a loss. Except that it feels right.
36
A Dime a Dozen
It must be frankly admitted that the virgin martyr St Febronia is in all probability a purely fictitious personage, but she is venerated by all the churches of the East.
—Alban Butler, "St Febronia," Butler's Lives of the Saints
DOñA ODILIA MADE something special tonight," Olga announces.
"We have been blessed with her fine cooking for these many decades." Don Abelardo weeps into his soup. While smoking a cigarette. Not a simple conjunction of tasks.
"You mustn't mind his crying," Doña Luisa tells me.
"I had a stroke."
"She knows, Papa," Emilia says. I haven't seen her in days. I had forgotten about her.
"Hello, Emilia," I say.
"Where have you been?" Lalo demands of her. "Not...?"
"I resent that," Emilia says.
"Where is Carmen?" Don Abelardo asks of the table at large. "Carmen has such a way with soup."
Across from me sits Edward Flanz and next to him is Olga. Don Abelardo regards his food with suspicion after praising it so highly. Lalo looks much like his father. They share the shape of their faces, their eyelashes, and their cheekbones. Don Abelardo's lips are thinner than Lalo's. I heard somewhere that lips thin and even disappear with age. Our parentage is inescapable, and just now the right side of Don Abelardo's face is drooping like an El Greco saint's. I look sideways at Lalo to reassure myself that his right side is intact.
Edward Flanz was probably a very unpopular boy. He grips his spoon with his entire fist and then ladles in the soup frantically, like one whose train is leaving in two minutes but who's determined to finish what he's paid for.
Olga stares. She spoons her soup and then dribbles it back into the bowl in a circular pattern. She says, "I met your dog in the kitchen. Did he find any corpses today?"
Reluctantly Edward Flanz stops inhaling his soup. "Today he, we, explored the area, we went to the village, yes, the village, we went there. We went to the village to see. We always do that first."
"Have you always done this?"
"This? Oh, I don't know. I don't know what you mean."
"Looked for corpses with your dog," Olga says. "I've never met anyone before who does that. Maybe there are thousands of you out there, but here, there is only you."
"I've always liked dogs, if that's what you mean. And dogs, well, they seem to like me. Sam, he was a police dog, but he ate too much, so they gave him to me."
"What does he do if a corpse smells like a flower?" Olga asks.
"Olga, Olga, Olga!" Doña Luisa cries out in consternation.
"It's a problem we are having in Nicaragua," Olga explains to Edward. "But the pope would tell you it's a worldwide phenomenon. The pope doesn't give much thought to the need for bio-degradability. So I must worry about such things. The incorruptibles. All these saints who smell like flowers when they should be turning to ashes and dust."
Lalo returns from the telephone in the hall. "That was Fred Chavez at La Barricada. He wants to know if we plan to dig up Tía Tata."
"¡Que barbaridad!" Doña Luisa murmurs.
"Since you ask, that is, the question about the corpses." Edward's words come out in spurts, like a faucet coming to life after a long winter. "Sam, my dog, Sam, he doesn't care much about flowers, or so it seems. So it seems. He might not even find, wouldn't find it interesting, a body that smelled, that is, smelled like a flower. You could say, now, that depends on what flower, but I would say, any flower. Any flower at all."
Olga says to Lalo, "What did you tell him?"
Don Abelardo is weeping again. "Poor Tía Tata. She was so beautiful. And now they want to mummify her. How very sad."
"I told him I'd heard his sister Zoila was having an affair with Daniel Ortega. I asked him whether he was to be congratulated or offered condolences."
"Lalo! What is wrong with my children today?" hoarsely cries tiny Doña Luisa. "That is cruel. Everyone knows Zoila doesn't like men."
"He said nothing of the kind." It is Carmen waltzing in. On her, even the narrowest pants flow and waft in the breezes of her making.
Lalo says, "Carmencita, where have you been? We have been fractured without you."
"Fissured, crackered," Olga says.
"Ezra wanted to tell me his dream. Otherwise I would have come earlier. I wrote it down for him."
"Ezra told you his dream?" I say before I can stop myself, before I can imagine my way to masking the dismay in my voice.
"I will read it to all of you. He said he'd like me to, that it would be his contribution to our conversation."
"Ezra is an absolutely charming boy," Lalo says. He mouths, And his mother.
Carmen removes a lined sheet of paper from her sleeve, and reads aloud. " 'My English teacher told us we were going to have to do a project on a saint, so I started to get irritated. I started a rebellion against my English teacher. We locked the basement door and formed a plan to get more people inside, and it involved a Lego robot, a ski helmet, and a lot of danger on my part. Then the door banged open and my English teacher and the kids who suppo
rted her came in. They ran up the stairs and started jabbing us with spears. I jumped from the balcony and grabbed my teacher's spear in midair. Around that time all the kids who were on my side changed to her side. She sent us to the principal's office and I admitted that the rebellion was my fault.' "
"That poor boy, all that violence," says Don Abelardo.
"That poor boy, with saints on the brain," Carmen says.
Emilia pipes up. "Don't get him started. Papa! It was a dream! Only a dream!"
"The worst kind," he says.
"I can't abide other people's dreams," says Doña Luisa, huskily.
Carmen snaps, "Not even Ezra's?"
"I never dream. Why should I listen to someone else's?"
I say nothing. A thousand and one times I've had this conversation with people who say they never dream. Of course they dream. If they didn't dream they would die. I am not inclined to contradict Doña Luisa tonight. This is not Dream Radio. This is a tiny country far from home, and I want Ezra to tell his dreams to only me.
Odilia taps Lalo on the shoulder and he gets up again.
I miss The Dream Radio Show, WBLT, 98.6 on your dial. I miss the early-morning commute, in darkness or dawning light. I miss the quiet energy of Grand Central Station at that hour, before volubility and panic set in. I miss the regular callers, the ones who believe in their dreams, the ones who believe that just putting a dream into words will get them over the hump of terror when it seems that morning will never be real. I miss the onetime callers who are so astounded by what their own minds have conjured up that the only thing they can do is call me, host of The Dream Radio Show, and tell our listeners in the tri-state area. I miss the lack of commentary, the pure narrative.
"I heard that there is a dengue epidemic in Boaca," Olga says. I don't know how she managed it, but all the knives, from all our places, are lined up horizontally in front of her plate.
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