True North

by Jim Harrison

  Roberto picks me up at ten. He prefers “Bob” as a jaunty man of the world who speaks laconic Texan. He rolls his cigarettes in a moment and spits thinly and well. I don’t tell him that I talked to Jesse on the phone. We drive south along the coast toward Alvarado where Vera might be staying with an aunt. Bob says she is angry with her father because she wants to marry a schoolteacher and Jesse wants her to marry a coffee farmer. I’m still relaxed and quite happy with the scenery. Now I remember when Jesse and my father bought a coffee farm and Jesse came back to Marquette with a cloth sack of coffee beans and my mother ground them fresh in the morning. The coffee this morning had the same thick smell, not acidic. Jesse told me that when he was a boy he worked on a coffee plantation for twenty cents a day. On our left are wild lumpy dunes forming a barrier to the Caribbean which can have wild, preposterous storms in the fall just like those off Lake Superior now mostly under a tight lid of ice. Bob says his brother died in a fishing boat one autumn.

  Alvarado is of surpassing beauty, a fishing village on a riverine inlet, maybe a thousand people living in pastel houses of pink, pale blue, even faded orange, with fishing boats tied up along a small road encircling the village. I would come here to hide if anyone were looking for me. We walk through a miniature cathedral and out the back door, down a cobbled street. Bob knocks on a door and a middle-aged woman answers. She looks over Bob’s shoulder at me with penetrating eyes that are incredibly unfriendly. No, Vera hasn’t been here for nearly a month. I am suspicious and ask Bob why he didn’t call. She has no phone, he says. We stop at a tiny restaurant and I eat a bowl of chopped-up octopus pickled in lime. A man rows across the estuary, narrow at the mouth but expanding inland farther than I could see. We share a fried snook the waiter says was caught this morning, “over there.” I want to row and when the man ties up Bob makes the deal. Some fishermen are amused that I don’t want a motor boat. Off I go to the west, rowing so hard that soon I am soaked with sweat. I weep for one minute and then I think fuck the past that isn’t really past and am suffused with the beauty of the place. The woman at the door looked like she must be Jesse’s sister. Behind her was a small courtyard full of flowers. She was dressed nicely. On the way back to the wharf the tide begins slipping toward the neck of the estuary, which in the distance is rumpled with a rip current with wind from the east. I can see I’m not going to make it but will be swept under the highway bridge and out into the Caribbean. I like the idea but a man comes in a motorboat and tows me in.

  On the way back to the city of Veracruz we stop at a stand and I buy one each of thirty-one kinds of fruit, the only one I recognize being a banana. In my room I arrange them on a table and stare at the fruit while I drink a large glass of rum. Bob has gone off to cook at a restaurant in Boca Rio, a fancy area we passed through on our way south. Well-heeled Mexican tourists come there but not Americans who prefer the Pacific coast. Tomorrow we’ll drive north to Jalapa to look for Vera. I’m placid because I’m going to stay here until I find her or die trying. I am quickly drunk on the rum which the bottle says is fifty years old and from Havana, Cuba.

  I wake up in the early-evening dark and follow a trail of music to the zócalo downtown, passing a crippled man who reminds me of Polly’s father. He’s playing a marimba and I impulsively put the equivalent of five dollars in his collection basket. Maybe he worked in a mine. In the city square about a hundred old couples are dancing to a uniformed orchestra. I read about this “danzon” in a hotel brochure which Jesse and Vera also demonstrated so long ago. There are many spectators including the adult children of the dancers and also grandchildren. Some of the old women hold fans. It is lovely until I think that my old parents will never dance. I turn back to the hotel and within a block of the Emporio a young prostitute asks me if I wish company. I say no but when I reach the hotel entrance I turn around and retrace my steps but she is gone.

  Jalapa, March 4. We’ve come here on what I detect is a back road that takes hours longer than the possible route I studied on the map. Once more I don’t care. This charade is obviously directed by Jesse and, after all, I have the rest of my life. Of course it isn’t a charade because he might only want me to see and understand his home ground. He’s been with our family nearly thirty-five years. When we swerve around a donkey-pulled wagon full of firewood tended by two boys and I ask Bob if that’s how Jesse grew up he nods. Before we descend the mountain range we stop so that I can see Orizaba a hundred miles distant. Far down the mountain a huge bird swoops across the road. It is an eagle that feeds on the local monkeys and I remember the odor of the lovely stewardess. “Where are the jaguars?” I ask, thinking of the jaguars and snakes the stewardess also talked about. “Up there,” he says pointing northwest when we stop on a bridge over a large turbulent river. I lean against the rail and think there must be such a thing as beautiful anxiety. My brain is peeled by the gorgeous landscape as if all other considerations are deafened by the water. It is a mythical valley with a sheer mountain wall to the northeast. I wish Vernice were here. She teased me that all of human history was a slaughterhouse and that I would finally give up my obsession with greed in favor of her own aesthetic preoccupations or something similar, otherwise I would shoot myself. I didn’t tell her about my close call. She said, “Sincerity is so cheap,” whatever that meant, though I have suspicions.

  We descend until we pass shaded coffee plantations so humid that grass and plants grow in the air on telephone and electric wires. We are twenty miles or so from Jalapa and Bob still pretends that this was the only possible route and I tell him that he is full of shit. He laughs but finally admits that Jesse wanted me taken this way to show me that he came from a beautiful place. What do I think? The best, I admit. I say it is mythological and he agrees. On our descent into Jalapa which is also built on hills he swerves off to stop at a gatehouse of an imposing estate. An old man tells him that Vera was here three days ago to visit her friend. Even the gatekeeper knows that Vera is angry at Jesse about who she should marry. Bob tells me that Jesse owns a small coffee farm ten miles to the south near Coatepec which I saw on the map.

  We stop at a pleasant apartment building in a suburb of Jalapa. I lean against the car and when Bob comes out fifteen minutes later he tells me that Vera was there last night. He says he has a little business to do for Jesse for a couple of hours and perhaps we should go “home” in the morning. We find a modest hotel and then he drops me off at an archaeological museum that I must see. I’m overwarm, tired, and a little pissed at being led by the nose. I sit on a bench in a garden surrounding the museum and calm down immediately, admitting to myself that the day had beat the hell out of my nondirectional snowshoeing. The beauty took me to a peculiar unfamiliar place in my brain. An attractive girl passes me and smiles. I suddenly remember a hot day on the beach when my ankle was in the itchy cast and I was lying on my side reading Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer which a teacher insisted I’d enjoy. Vera comes out of the water and through her legs I see Picnic Rocks in Lake Superior. She sits down beside me and shakes the water out of her hair. For no reason she stands and jumps up and down. She stops and places a cool sandy foot on my stomach and slides it down my bathing trunks with a quizzical look. The arch of her foot is on my penis and I lift her foot off She flops down beside me and nibbles my ear.

  I’m not ready for this museum but then it is questionable what I’m ready for. Professor Weisinger used to lecture on “otherness,” and here we have it. Walking through the door I ache at my silly deficiencies. At the end of an early March day in the U.P. I might note down “eleven ravens, four kinglets, three chickadees” while this morning between Veracruz and Jalapa hundreds of species of birds were visible, not to speak of different sorts of wildly flowering trees. My Calvinism is possible only in a wretched climate. A one-directional mind is impossible in this climate. Professor Grabo read aloud from the Puritan bombast of Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Here his parishioners would have muttered “what a
fucking nitwit.” My brain is melting. There are so many statues and figurines of the faces of women becoming the faces of jaguars. I have no idea what this means but they definitely remind me of Cynthia. The museum isn’t large but I wander for a couple of hours with my inner being becoming absurdly liquid. I keep returning to a twenty-ton Olmec head that was dug out of a swamp near the estuarine area I visited near Alvarado. The question is how they hauled it there from the mountains four thousand years ago. There are several of these Olmec heads and none of them have the reassuring quality of Fred’s serene Buddha. The only thing I can imagine them saying is “you are born, you love, you suffer, you die.” But maybe not that much. Their answer is nothing and they make you feel foolish for asking a question.

  Out in front of the museum Bob is asleep in his car. At the hotel I call Cynthia from the desk because there are no phones in the room. She’s harsh with me and says that tomorrow at five in the afternoon Vera will meet me in front of the hotel Emporio and then I should leave Veracruz because Vera has been weeping since I got here.

  I keep this to myself and have a large glass of rum in my room. Near the hotel there is a canyon in the middle of the city and Bob pointed out the women washing clothes by hand in the river down in the canyon. I wake up in the dark when Bob knocks and we have a glass of rum and go to dinner after which we meet his girlfriend at a nightclub that has no roof and vines and flowering bushes are growing out of the walls. There are several hundred young people dancing to a fifteen-piece Cuban band which is deafening but also sensuous and melodious. A big woman in a tight green satin dress sings according to Bob’s translation, “This world is full of sharks so you must learn to swim.” Bob says most of the young people are medical students from the local university. There are no geometrical moves in their dancing. All the motions are fluid as if they were made of running water. Bob must be fifty years old and his girlfriend is a nurse in her twenties who reminds me uncomfortably of Vera. It’s hot and I drink too much rum and count thirty-seven beautiful women as if I’m counting stumps. I won’t leave until four in the morning which pleases Bob who disappears for an hour with his beloved. They return glistening with sweat. I sit there like an Olmec head until I nearly piss in my pants. I’ve watched one girl who has danced nearly two hours without stopping. When the band takes a break she continues without music. The crowd cheers her on. When I fall asleep back at the hotel I still hear the music in vivid dreams of the cold north.

  Jalapa—Veracruz —March 5. Woke up shivering with a cool north wind coming through the windows, amazed that I hadn’t vomited and rather happy still hearing last night’s music in my head. We left at midmorning after Bob did some business errands and people on the streets wore coats and sweaters though I guessed it to be in the sixties. I’m not saying I felt good only that I lacked the overall wretchedness that I expected. I had long ago guessed that my father maintained a certain level of alcohol in his system or had generally inured himself to the discomfort amateurs felt. Or maybe the semisick feeling comfortably matched the way his soul felt.

  I decided to test Bob by telling him I had managed by myself to arrange to see Vera though I didn’t say where and when. He was obviously miserable from lack of sleep and I teased him about mixing business and love. He admitted that Jesse was a hard “boss” and that he might have to give up love to keep his job of looking in on all of Jesse’s little businesses plus the coffee farm. Bob always used a diminutive to define the nature of any of Jesse’s interests. I can’t say I was very interested but I probed further as if I were only filling up our driving time. Bob was a nephew of Jesse’s by marriage. Jesse’s father had died leaving many children when Jesse was sixteen. They were poor but not “dirt poor” and Jesse had tried to assume leadership of the family but knew the only way it would work was if he went north to the U.S. He got his citizenship in World War II and became friends with a kind, wealthy man, meaning my father. In the two months he had off every year he was able to oversee “little” businesses run by extended family members. I let the subject slide away with the cool north wind that was so vigorously brushing the green landscape and whipping up dust devils in the streets of the small villages we passed through. I didn’t mentally disagree that my father could be kind having heard of his Christmas noblesse oblige in Marquette and other incidents. I had had few close male friends and couldn’t quite imagine what kind of closeness could build up during four years of World War II in the Pacific. In this remote landscape I was able to achieve a clearer view of my family so that despite the vulnerability of my hangover I didn’t feel any of the physical repercussions, the usual lump in the throat, the tingling buzz of rising blood pressure.

  I idly asked why Jesse was so obstinate against Vera marrying a schoolteacher. After all she was old enough to be entitled to freedom of choice. Bob became morose. Of the eight Sundays a year that Jesse was home the extended family gathered at the coffee farm for a generous picnic. Out of Jesse’s earshot the families referred to these days as “Sundays from hell.” Account books were opened for the dry-cleaning shop, the café, the butcher shop, taqueria, the auto bump shop, and so on. Exact plans were made. On the weekdays Jesse inspected without notice every business he owned. Anything that didn’t contribute to the family had to be corrected or expunged. Vera’s schoolteacher lover didn’t fit into the larger plan while the older man who owned an adjoining coffee farm was a positive choice. It was important that he was neither rich nor poor because the rich were untrustworthy. Naturally everyone enjoyed the prosperity but they were relieved when Jesse returned to his fine job in the north. Everyone in Veracruz knew that Jesse was money loco and that was why his wife had run off to Mexico City with another man. Jesse had then taken his daughter north where she had become regrettably pregnant. Vera was as beautiful and unstable as her mother and her son hadn’t been quite “correct” mentally since his bicycle accident. In fact he had beaten a schoolmate so severely that the boy spent a week in the hospital.

  I wasn’t sure I wished to know all of this but here it was and I reflected on how it contrasted with Clarence’s family. Jesse had turned out to be not quite benign in regard to his own people and I wondered at the complications when you lifted the lid off any particular family. When we were still short of Veracruz I asked Bob to detour so I could see in daylight where the first cattle were unloaded onto the continent. Of course someone was going to do it but the enormous consequences were intriguing. Coughlin had told me that China was now almost completely denuded of trees from logging but once had been heavily forested. I was in the anxious position of never having had to completely support myself except when I chose to out of stubbornness. Many others shared this vantage point which did not make it less questionable. Throughout history there had been economic conquistadores that made everyone nervous, even on Jesse’s minor scale. It made you wonder about the word “livelihood.”

  I sat at the window looking out at the harbor for several hours waiting for my meeting with Vera. The north wind made the harbor choppy and I could hear the waves slapping against the wharves and watched the small boats bobbing restlessly. The large ships were impervious at least within the confines of the harbor.

  I was settled into an uncomfortable “nothing” state of thinking about Vera and how her father had brought her to northern Michigan for a better life. The mother had fled. Her friendship with Cynthia. My controlled infatuation. My father raped her. She had a son. Her father trading in his probable rage for money, pure and simple, but again, what would I know about being the means of support for dozens of people? The waves I was looking at were not Lake Superior’s and I had a jolt of insufferable homesickness that was followed ironically by not wanting to go home and resume my normal life. I had used it up. I had worn it out. So much that I thought I had found in the depths had disappeared in the shallows of this trip. I had become too narrow too early. I couldn’t understand my family’s part in the whole because I didn’t have a clear enough view of the whole. I recalled somet
hing I had read where Einstein mentioned that he had no admiration for scientists who spent their lives drilling holes in a thin piece of board.

  When twenty years ago in Marquette I had resolved in one of those mockingly intense teenage rituals that I would not spend my life thinking about myself like everyone else seemed to do, I got religion. It went away or transfigured itself into a nonconvincing form, I played the fool because I was a fool. Over and over. I was a mere parody of my best intentions. How can you be both slave and captor? It’s evidently easy. Reading many of the books Vernice had insisted on had made me feel quite ordinary. I liked William Carlos Williams because I could understand him and Rainer Rilke because I couldn’t understand him. I suppose it’s better to accept the mind’s disorder rather than make a daily wild attempt to screw the lid on tight. For instance, right now down on the malecón a priest with windswept hair is gesturing and lecturing to a group of inattentive ten-year-old boys. I am convinced that Catholicism is best suited for this rather ornate culture and habitat. The next step, of course, for someone who has occasionally disappeared up his own asshole, is to wonder what sort of religion, if any, is suited to my own habitat. At this point I remember a childhood radio program starring Edgar Bergen the ventriloquist with either Charlie McCarthy or Mortimer Snerd sitting on his lap, or both. I smile thinking I am all three.