A Private Sorcery (31 page)

“Something like that.”

“That story has bothered me ever since. The idea that certain people are too emotional to be heard. I've always thought it was a failure of nerve on my part not to do it.”

“Not only is Saul not discouraging Rena, he wants me to go with her. To help out since I speak Spanish.”

I laugh. I wait for Lil to join me. There's a tapping sound. Her fingers on the bedside table?

My sister clears her throat. I clutch the receiver.

“Do it, Lenny. You should do it.”

Part Three

EL HOYO

12
Rena

Driving north from La Aurora, the airport set smack in the center of the city, past the
BEBA COCA-COLA
billboards, past the workers' residences built after the 1976 earthquake, the sun beating like Hades on the black roof of the taxi, her nostrils inflamed from the smell of garbage, Rena thinks: it's like walking into someone else's nightmare.

At the airport information center, she'd heard Leonard's careful Spanish, the
r
's rolling cautiously off his tongue, as he talked with a woman in a plum blouse under whose unbreathing fabric the skin must be hot and wet as spilt tea. Slowly, the woman telephoned hotels in search of a room, finding two, she said,
imposible
. Rena had held herself back from insisting that a shared room was out of the question, afraid of both insulting Leonard and dissolving the already feeble commitment the woman had to assisting them, her anxiety not so much about physical privacy (Leonard had spent the night at her apartment, seen her in pajamas) but about how she would manage without a respite from conversation.

The rearview mirror rattles with dangling crosses, miniature dolls, Christmas tinsel. At the
posada
on the outskirts of Zona Uno, Leonard pays the driver from the wad of quetzals she handed him after exchanging money at the airport, a compromise, Leonard having wanted to pay his own way and Rena having wanted to pay for them both: he would handle his airline ticket, she would do the rest. (“Are you sure you can manage?” he'd asked, tempting her to reveal the money from Reed, but she'd held firm to her resolve that if she were going to keep it, she could not put anyone in the position of knowing about it.)

The driver hands Leonard their bags, one filled with papers from the State Department documenting her designation as guardian of Bernardo's remains. Dressed in his khaki fisherman's vest and leather sandals, Leonard looks younger and somehow taller, as if leaving New Jersey
has let him finally stretch his limbs. Rena raps the brass knocker on the door of the
posada
and turns the handle. They enter a dark anteroom with a mahogany counter and a row of plastic chairs. An archway leads to a corridor opening into the courtyard. On the wall, there's a bulletin board with photos of Anglo couples holding Indian babies. A notice covered with cellophane describes in English the
posada
policies:

1. Every room with crib and baby bathtub.

2. Stove in kitchen for warming bottles.

3. Use bins in refrigerator. Each one marked with room number.
DO NOT KEEP FOODS IN ROOM
.

While Leonard fills out their registration forms, Rena investigates the courtyard. Chipped bricks, a dilapidated palm tree, a fountain drizzling green water, but also a wall brilliant with bougainvillea, beds of geraniums, a miniature orange tree. In the distance, she can see the tops of a few higher buildings. Her throat is scratchy and her eyes burn. Ozone? “Guatemala City is the ozone capital of Central America,” Saul had written in the notebook,
One Hundred Facts about Guatemala, Useful and Otherwise
, he'd sent her before she left.

A white woman with frizzy black hair and a long cotton skirt steps out from a room across the courtyard. She's holding a brown baby dressed in a diaper and pink top. She squints in the sunlight. A balding man follows with a baby carrier strapped around his middle. He pulls a key from a pocket in the hem of his shorts and begins to do battle with the lock.

The woman spots Rena. As she approaches, the gray at her temples becomes visible and Rena can hear the baby's whimpering. Cover her head, Rena wants to say. The midday sun, the heat.

“Hi. I'm Sonia. And that's Hank over there, trying to lock that damn door.” The baby kicks the hot air, attempting to move from the squished position in which it's stuck. Sonia makes clucking sounds. “Poor thing. I know your tummy hurts. A parasite. They finally diagnosed it, thank God, but the medicine makes it hurt even more for the first week or two. You're not here for a baby, are you?”

Rena's head throbs from the heat. “Excuse me?”

“We saw you get out of the cab. You can tell by the number of suitcases. You should have seen us. What with the diapers and the clothes and the bottles and the formula, we had nine bags.”

Leonard comes into the courtyard as Hank turns from the door. Hank's T-shirt clings to his stomach in a large, wet oval. He pulls at the waistband of the baby carrier.

“Great vest,” Hank says to Leonard. “A thief would need a crowbar to get into that.”

“Thanks. My wife found it in a catalog.”

“Maybe you could give me the name,” Hank says to Rena.

Rena glances at Leonard, who looks at his feet. “This is my father-in-law, Leonard, Dr. Dubinsky.” She pauses, afraid the
Dr.
sounds pompous.

“And you're …”

“Rena. I'm sorry, I'm confused. What kind of hotel is this?”

Sonia laughs. “It's what they call an adoption hotel—for people who come to spend the six weeks you need to stay in the country before you can take a baby back. The agencies all know about this place. There's a second one, too, run by the owner's sister in Zona Nueve. That one's really nice, but expensive. We've been here four weeks. We timed it for the summer so Hank, he's a university professor, could come.”

The baby's fussing escalates to a cry. “Time for el snuggly,” Sonia says.

Rena imagines the baby sunk inside the pouch and then strapped against Hank's hot chest. She reaches out her arms. “Can I hold her?”

“Him. The pink shirt is a hand-me-down from my sister.” Sonia gives Rena the baby. “For how many hours? This kid needs to be held round the clock. I'm not joking. He must sleep with one eye open, because he starts to scream if we even
try
to put him down.”

Rena lifts the baby onto her shoulder. He molds himself against her breastbone and breathes into the hollow in her neck. “How old is he?”

“Eight weeks. Well, he was three weeks premature, so he's really like five weeks old.”

Rena makes little circles on the baby's back. Slowly his breathing steadies and his cries abate. He burps. “Oh, you needed a little burpy, huh?” she coos.

“You look like you have kids,” Sonia says.

“No. But I helped raise my half brother. I was fifteen when he was born.”

“It's great to have a doctor in the house,” Sonia says, touching Leonard's arm. “You can tell us what this medicine is they have us giving him. He screams bloody murder for an hour afterwards. I keep thinking it's turpentine or something barbaric like that.”

“You're probably more up to date than I am. I teach the history of medicine and haven't seen patients in almost forty years. But you can sign me up for the baby-holding brigade. That, I remember.”

The baby's limbs grow limp and heavy. Twisting her head, Rena sees his eyes beginning to close. She inhales the baby smell: potpourri of sour milk, talcum powder and perspiration. “What's his name?”

“Carlos,” Sonia says. “After William Carlos Williams.”

“He's so precious,” Rena says.

Sonia's eyes fill with tears. “You think so? When you're down here with no one else to fuss over the baby, you can't help wondering. I know it's awful to say, but you don't think his nose is too wide, do you?”

“No, he's sweet sweet sweet.” Rena kisses the top of the baby's head. It scratches as though his hair had been shaved.

“Sweet sweet sweet,” Sonia echoes. She reaches out her arms for the sleeping baby. “Like Williams' plums.”

T
HEY EAT IN A
little restaurant with oilcloth on the tables and the owners' children playing in the corner. Rena studies the menu, settling finally on eggs and beans. When the eggs come, they're too runny, the yolks like melted sherbet. The juice is so thick with sugar, it's almost gritty. She eats the tortillas, drinks some bottled water.

It's a relief to find that Leonard is at ease with silence. The human voice, Saul told her a supervisor of his had once admonished, is a musical
instrument, not a noisemaker. With Beersden, she'd incorrectly assumed that as a musician he would naturally understand that silences are simply part of the flow of being with someone else. “The rest in music,” Beersden countered, “is the most meaningful part of the phrase, where the tension resides.” Indeed, his own sullen silences had been downright noisy in their accusation of her distance and slights.

To Rena's surprise, no one but Monk had tried to dissuade her from making the trip. But then, with Monk, there'd been something sexual mixed up with it, so palpable sitting across from him in the pub where he took her for corned beef and cabbage that the butterflies went berserk in her stomach and she was unable to do anything more with the fatty food than push it around on the plate. Other than his thick hand grazing her shoulder as he reached over her to push open the door, they neither touched nor talked about anything except Saul and what Monk called
this dead body insanity
. Repeating Santiago's words about a body needing a resting place, she tried to explain what she needed to do. Monk leaned back, his shoulders splayed across the cracked red leather of the booth. She could feel him studying her: her hair then in that awkward in-between stage so that she had to keep pushing it out of her eyes, the points of her clavicle evident beneath her sweater. In bed, their toes would brush if their tongues were locked. Nearly the same height, but he with twice her breadth. Inside, she laughed at the bittersweet paradox. What attracted her was the strength of Monk's convictions. Never would he breach his relationship with Saul by sleeping with her.

“Look,” he said, “I'm a Catholic. And not totally lapsed, either. We believe in last rites. No one I knew had parents who even thought about college money. But we all had our plots paid for before we finished catechism classes. The way I look at it, there's a statute of limitations on burial obligations. That corpse is fifteen years cold now. Trust me, God has moved on to other things.”

Now what she thinks about is not the need to bury Bernardo but Santiago's grief. She'd never seen grief like that. Not Ascher's grief when they had to call it quits. That had been a sweet, almost sexual pain. Not
Max when Rebecca died. That had been a deep but anticipated loss. Not Eleanor when Joe died. That had been pure rage and fear. Not Saul after Mitch jumped in front of a train. That had been the endless reverberations of guilt. No, Santiago's grief belonged to the world of begats, to the world where hair can whiten in an instant and sinners are turned to salt. A father blinded, a mother's heart stopped.

Leonard wipes his mouth with a napkin from the metal dispenser. A scrawny chicken leg and thigh float before him in a bowl of greasy broth. She notices how beautiful his table manners are, the way he navigates his knife and fork in the slippery bowl. Who taught him this? His mother? Klara? He looks at her inquisitively, as though sensing her unvoiced question. She lowers her eyes to the congealed yellow pool on her plate.

S
HE WAKES TO
the sound of a baby screaming. Short, high cries. She sits upright, her feet moving to the floor, that automatic gesture from Gene's infancy when she had started with every noise. Her thoughts gyrate, a needle wildly searching for its groove, as she tries to orient herself.
La Posada de las Madres
. Yesterday she had not understood the meaning.
Zona Uno, Guate
. There's a note propped on Leonard's bed: “Went to get coffee.” She'd not thought she'd be able to sleep in the same room as Leonard, but she has no recollections beyond the moment when she lifted from her pillow to turn off the bedside lamp.

She showers under a trickle of lukewarm water, surveying the care Leonard has taken with his things, nothing left out except for his toothbrush and toothpaste set neatly on the rickety wooden table. Shannon, her college roommate, would on occasion take the train to New York to spend the night at the Plaza with her father, in the city on business. Enviously, Rena had imagined these visits: Shannon and her father each reading in their own queen-size beds, Shannon talking to her father while he shaved at the extravagantly lit mirror.

Rena packs her tote bag with the State Department papers, a map of the city and a guidebook, and steps into the courtyard to wait for
Leonard. A blond couple passes a diaper bag, baby carrier and baby between them. The screams have stopped, but all around her she can hear little whimpers, the sounds of newborns who no more know what they want or need than the anxious parents hovering over them.

T
HEY SIT IN THE
annex to the American embassy, a concrete bunker built after the earthquake, across from the assistant to the assistant ambassador. Drops of perspiration roll down his pockmarked brow—the fact that he was appointed to this position evidence enough, Rena thinks, of what an unimportant outpost it is deemed. Alternately, he smiles and frowns as he flips through the papers she has given him. He sorts them into stacks that he then reshuffles. She tries to discern a rationale for what he is doing, but in the end all the papers end up in one pile, only out of order. He leans back in his chair to open the middle desk drawer and pulls out an ink stamp with which he smears each page. He then pushes a buzzer and speaks in Spanish over the intercom. A few minutes later, a young woman appears with a piece of paper pinched between her forefinger and thumb. He reads it slowly before handing it to Rena.