by Miriam Toews
The other day I went out to buy some avocados and I took a different route to the store. I noticed a building with a sign on it that said Citlaltépetl Refuge House. There was a white poster in the window at the front of the building and there were black words on it that said, When I came to Mexico City, I was dead. And here I started to live again. There was a small open archway at the front of the building that led into a quiet courtyard. I walked inside and stood next to a wall with photographs on it. A woman came out of a little office and asked me if she could help me with anything and I told her I had seen the white poster in the window and it had made me curious about the building.
What happens here? I asked her.
We are a refuge for exiled writers, she said. The words on the poster are a quote from the Kosovar poet Xhevdet Bajraj.
Oh, I said.
Where are you from? she asked me.
From here, I said. I’m Mexican. I live a few blocks from here.
We have a few apartments for writers who are forced to leave their own countries, she said. And a small bookstore and library and a little café, as you can see. We have readings here sometimes and different types of events. Music, drama. We’ve tried to create a comforting and stimulating environment. She pointed at the tables set up in the courtyard.
Why are they forced to leave their own countries? I said.
For various reasons, said the woman. She explained some of those reasons to me and I nodded.
How do they leave? I said.
In different ways, she said. But always with unfinished business and a broken heart. Freedom has its price.
Where is he now? I said.
Who? she said.
The poet.
He lives nearby, she said. Here in La Condesa.
Well, I said. I didn’t know what else to say. Then I thought of something. I have to go buy avocados, I said.
The woman said she understood. She loved them too. She thanked me for visiting and told me to keep one eye open for future events.
Last night Aggie agreed to guard Ximena, as she puts it, and I went out for a beer with Noehmi at a place called Tinto’s which is sort of a halfway mark between her neighbourhood of Tacubaya and my neighbourhood of La Condesa. We sat across from each other in a red booth and she told me about the play she’s working on.
It’s a one-man show, she said. It takes place in total darkness until the very end. The audience hears voices and sounds but they don’t see anything. She explained to me that at first the audience will hear the voice of a man, obviously suffering in some way. Then we’ll hear the voice of a woman talking to a different man, then other voices, of kids, older people, a teacher. Gradually we’ll realize that this man, the first man, is stuck in an air duct in the attic of a pawnshop that he’s trying to rob so that he can buy drugs. It’s his friend’s pawnshop. The woman is his girlfriend and she’s in the shop asking his friend if he’s seen her boyfriend. He’s been missing for days. His friend says he hasn’t and starts flirting a bit with the woman. The man in the duct can hear all of this and it’s killing him. But he’s dying anyway. He’s been there for a couple of days and he’s dying of thirst. We realize that the other voices are the voices of the people he’s remembering, the people in his life, his parents and his brother and his high school teacher. They are the voices of the people he is leaving behind as he dies. At the end of the play the lights come on for the first time and we see a man in a glass duct on the stage. That’s all. There’s no sound. No more voices. His face is pressed against the glass and he is dead. People don’t know if it’s over. They don’t know if they should leave. Then, eventually, everyone does leave. They figure out that the play is over.
What do you think? said Noehmi. Do you think it’ll work?
Definitely, I said.
Dupont is making the duct right now at his mother’s apartment.
I’d like to see it, I said.
Actually, said Noehmi, I was wondering if you would provide one of the voices. It would just be a recording. But obviously the voices are really important because there’s nothing else. I have to get them right.
I’d be one of the man’s memories? I said.
Yeah, said Noehmi. I think your voice would be good for his second grade teacher. When he remembers her telling him that he can accomplish anything in life if he works hard and wants it badly enough.
I don’t speak Spanish very well, I said.
Yeah you do, said Noehmi. You have an interesting accent and that’s why your voice will be cool in the play. It’ll stand out a bit from the others so that when your voice is heard the audience will be able to differentiate it more easily from the other female voices. You know what I mean?
I guess, I said.
He really likes her sandals and wants to marry her, said Noehmi. They’re white and red and have three straps on them that cross the foot and a wedge heel. He starts putting on a bolo tie when he goes to school and slicking his hair over to one side to impress her.
The teacher?
Yeah, said Noehmi. And once, in the hallway after recess, he asks her to dance and that makes her laugh.
Does she dance with him? I asked. I thought about Jorge trying to teach me that dance, how I had failed him so spectacularly.
Well, I’m not sure if that will be explained, said Noehmi. I’d say no, she doesn’t, so he dances alone in the hallway. But he doesn’t mind because he knows that he’s impressed her and made her laugh.
Ah, I said. I smiled. For some reason, I don’t know which one, I remembered my missionary aunt explaining to me in great detail how the jungle tribes of Ecuador used hot rocks to shrink heads. The features of the shrunken face remained exactly the same as they had been normally, except they were much smaller.
So? said Noehmi. Will you do it?
Of course, I said.
The next day I went for a walk, late in the day, before dinner. I took X. with me because Aggie was busy being taught skateboard tricks by Israel and I didn’t want to go through fathoms of grief asking her to babysit. I had an uneasy feeling in my gut. I was a little nervous. There’s a word in Low German for the way I felt but translated it means on top of and below a runaway horse which … well, I don’t really know how to describe what I was feeling. It was too complicated and I was too stupid to unravel it all.
I walked past the bookseller in the park. Then I walked past him again. And one more time until I worked up the nerve to stop and say hello. The bookseller asked me if we had met once before and I said yes and that he had given me a book which I hadn’t paid for. I handed him some money and he said thank you and asked me if I wanted another book and I said yes, but now I had no more money.
Again! Credit, he said, to keep you coming back. He smiled at me and I looked at the trees. He asked me if Spanish was my mother tongue and I said no. He said then what is? English?
No, I said. German. He rummaged around in his pile of books and gave me a copy of a book called Jakob von Gunten. It was written by Robert Walser, in German, a long time ago, around the turn of the last century. The bookseller told me that he kept books in different languages for tourists who happened to wander past looking for something to read. Robert Walser liked to walk around a lot, he said. He lived in a mental asylum for twenty years and somebody asked him if he was there to write and he said no, I’m here to be mad, and then one day he went for a long walk and lay down under a tree and died, said the bookseller. That’s all I know about him. I hope you like the book. I thanked him and said goodbye. Then he asked me what my name was and I said Irma Voth.
What’s yours? And he said it was Pushkin. But that I could call him Asher.
I stared at my new book. I flipped it over and flipped it over. What’s it about? he said. I think it’s about a boy who goes to servant school, I said. And then at the end he and the principal walk off into the desert.
All right, said Asher. Is that your baby? he said. Yes and no, I said. She’s my sister actually. Asher waved at Ximen
a who stared at him soulfully. Natalie had bought a stroller for her and sometimes when she was in it she became curiously reflective. Asher handed X. a cardboard baby book and she took it and put it in her mouth and gnawed at it with a terrible hunger. Then she flung it so that it barely missed Asher’s head and it fell onto the ground. He picked it up and gave it back to her.
Ximena and I kept walking. I pushed the stroller down the sidewalk towards the house of refuge for exiled writers. There were posters on the windows advertising different types of classes available to the general public.
The Bubbling Phenomena and Non-Compactness.
The “Almost Nothing” Precariousness in Art Since the 60s.
Taming Complexity.
Did Homer Describe an Eclipse in the Odyssey?
I read these posters and said the words out loud to Ximena. What do you think? I asked her. Did he or didn’t he? She craned her head around and up to glare at me while I read. She had black rings of dirt around her neck. She wanted to keep moving.
When we got back home Aggie was alone and lying on the bed on her back. She told me she had something to show me and then she lifted her sweatshirt and showed me her belly button. There was jewellery stuck to it. I had it pierced, she said. Israel paid for it with his allowance. There was a tiny blue heart on a silver ring.
Does it hurt? I asked her.
Of course! she said. But I’ve got stuff to keep it clean.
Ximena had fallen asleep in her stroller so I left her there and lay down on the bed next to Aggie and closed my eyes. She asked me what was wrong and I said I didn’t know. I was tired. I told her that I had used expensive perfume to kill some ants in a guest’s room instead of going to the supply bin in the cellar to get the real bug killer because I didn’t feel like going all that way. Then I panicked because the room smelled like perfume and I was sure that the guest would tell Hubertus or Natalie that I had used some of it for myself. So I lit a match to get rid of the perfume smell and then the room smelled like sulphur. I tried to turn the overhead fan on but the guest had hung wet clothing on it to dry and it was so heavy that the fan didn’t spin very well and then stopped altogether and started to smell a bit like smoke. So then I opened the window to get rid of the sulphur smell and the smoke smell and the perfume smell but the screen was missing so a zillion flies flew into the room. Then I had to spend the next twenty minutes killing them and cleaning their bodies off the various surfaces and the whole time I was sweating like a horse because I was so afraid that the guest would come back to her room.
Did she? said Aggie.
No, I said.
What kind of perfume was it? she said. Poison?
Is that a kind? I said.
Yeah, said Aggie. Christian Dior.
What do you mean? I said.
Christian Dior is the name of the designer who makes the perfume, said Aggie.
How do you know that? I said.
Me and Israel get samples for his mom, she said.
I told Aggie that all the noise and confusion on the streets was overwhelming me a little bit. I told her that I missed the stars in Chihuahua and the sound of the wind rustling the corn.
Me encanta este lugar, said Aggie.
I know, I said. She was speaking mostly Spanish these days. She had told me that she liked it here.
I asked Aggie to tell me about her day in Plattdeutsch.
Why? she said. It was boring.
No, I mean just talk to me about anything in Plattdeutsch, I said.
She told me that she had gone to the museum of anthropology that day with her class and that she had really wanted to steal a tiny little artifact, a charm or something, that had once belonged to an Aztec warrior.
But you didn’t, did you? I said.
Of course not, she said, you can’t. They’re under glass.
Oh, I said. But you wouldn’t have anyway, would you? I said.
I don’t know, she said. I might have if I thought I wouldn’t be caught.
You would? I said.
Maybe, she said.
Don’t, I said.
Why not? said Aggie.
Because it’s stupid, I said. And you know it.
Then we started talking about Katie because I had remembered the time she’d been arrested for assaulting a police officer. She’d been walking home late from a bush party and the cop had stopped to ask her what she was doing out so late and she was kind of drunk and she kicked his car and told him it was none of his business so he drove along beside her saying stupid things and she was getting madder and madder and she threw her lip gloss at his face and so then he made the decision that it was his business after all and he stopped the car and dragged her into the back seat. She kicked and screamed and swore and that resulted in more assault charges or maybe mischief or something or other and she had to spend the night in jail.
She spent the night in jail? said Aggie.
Yeah, I said.
That’s so fucking cool! said Aggie. Nobody ever tells me anything about Katie. What kind of lip gloss was it?
I don’t know, I said. Chocolate mint.
What happened after that? said Aggie.
You don’t want to know, I said.
I do so! said Aggie. You can’t stop the story there. You don’t know what I want to know and what I don’t want to know.
Don’t you know? I said.
No, she said. How would I know?
Well, I said. How do you think someone like Dad would have felt about his daughter being arrested for assaulting a police officer when she was coming home drunk from a bush party and then spending the night in jail?
All she did was throw lip gloss at him! said Aggie.
Aggie, I said.
What? she said.
You know exactly what, I said. You don’t have to use your imagination.
After that Aggie did fun things to try to cheer me up. Sometimes she’d grab me around the waist when I wasn’t expecting it, yell surprise and throw me down on the bed. I tried to do it to her one time and she laughed but said that I had to be careful with her belly button. She made up a game she called Baby Detective. I’d be lying in bed reading my new book or sitting on the balcony tying my shoes to get ready for work and I’d feel something. I’d sense that somebody was watching me. And I’d turn to see Ximena’s big, spooky eyes. Sometimes from low down, close to the floor, and sometimes from high up, near the ceiling. Aggie would stand behind the open door and hold Ximena in different places so that only her spying little baby face poked out.
Then one afternoon when I was finished cleaning I went into our room to have a short nap. Ximena was in a playpen in the courtyard and Natalie was keeping an eye on her while she fixed up the planters. It was a very bright day and I had opened all our curtains in the morning when I went to work so that the sun would wake Aggie up for school. But when I walked into our room the curtains were closed and it was completely dark. Much darker than usual. I couldn’t see anything. And there was a strange noise. I whispered Aggie’s name and waited. I stood perfectly still for a minute trying to understand what was going on. Slowly, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I began to see little dots of silver light. At first I saw only a few but as time passed the room was filled with them and soon I was surrounded by them. I smiled. I understood. Aggie had covered the windows with thick, dark material she had found somewhere, maybe it was painted cardboard from school, and had used a pin or something tiny to prick hundreds of holes into the blackness to create sunlit stars. I took a step into the darkness and bumped into something hard. It was a floor fan, a small one, that Aggie must have tied strips of newspaper to and the fan was blowing them to make a noise like wind. I backed up a bit and felt the wall. It was cool and smooth. I carefully sat down on the floor and leaned against the door. I sat in the dark. I stared at the stars and listened to the wind.
I was still sitting there when Aggie came home from school and barged through the door and knocked me over. She switched on the ligh
ts and then said oh, you’re here! There was a gecko on the wall beside my head. Aggie put her face next to it and said hey there, little gecko boy, did you enjoy your trip to Chihuahua? I thanked her for her gift of wind and stars and she said yeah, no problem, it was easy and then she showed me a giant painting she’d done in art class. It was of Katie in jail, doing a karate kick in her cell, her braids flying straight out behind her, trying to kick out the walls.
It’s called Chocolate Mint Lip Gloss, said Aggie.
Wow, I said.
We laid it out on the bed and looked at it.
Did you ever meet her boyfriend? said Aggie.
What boyfriend? I said.
The boyfriend who hit her with his car, said Aggie.
What are you talking about? I said. I thought you said nobody ever talked to you about Katie.
I’m talking about her boyfriend who hit her with his car after their big fight, said Aggie. Mom said he couldn’t see her in the snow or whatever. What are you talking about?
I put my hands over my eyes for a second trying to see something that wasn’t there. Then I clasped my hands together so that my fingers met and formed a tiny pocket that held nothing. I looked at the wall and the gecko was gone. We had sunlight and traffic noise and breath. We had art. We had each other. We had ourselves. We had memories and we had lies. Those were the difficult-to-insure contents of our room.
What’s your problem? said Aggie. Where’s X.?
In the courtyard with Natalie, I said. In her playpen. Katie didn’t have a boyfriend.
Yeah, she did, said Aggie. Mom told me.
Well, I said, no, she didn’t have a boyfriend.
Well, said Aggie, whatever.
So, it couldn’t have been the boyfriend who accidentally hit her with his car in a blizzard after a big fight, I said.
Who hit her then? said Aggie. She got up and went into the bathroom. I could see her reflection in the mirror. She was cleaning her belly button with a Q-tip soaked in sterilizing solution, dabbing it gently over and over, thoroughly.