A Private Sorcery (39 page)

When Sammy finally let her look in the mirror, Rena didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Platinum corkscrew curls sprang from her head. The next day, Sammy took Rena to Alil's.

“This is my cousin Jane from Barena. She needs a job.”

“She has papers?”

“You have papers?”

Alil looked at Rena. Hanging on the wall behind him were black-and-white photos of girls dancing topless in glass enclosures like circus cages. “She is so ignorant, she does not even understand that I am from the royal Iranian family. My father is third cousin to the Shah and my mother is aunt to the sister-in-law of his wife. Before Khomeini, we lived in a palace with three swimming pools and our own heliport.”

Rena nodded. Sammy rolled her eyes. Alil wore a starched white shirt with the sleeves folded up to his elbows. Fine black hair lay over his slender forearms. Narrowing his eyes, he studied Rena's chest.

“She's a kid,” Sammy said. “Front room only.”

“Turn her around.”

Rena could feel Sammy touching her shoulder, pushing her gently. Dark flecks danced before her. Like a windup doll perched on a wedding cake, she pivoted around.

In the front room, the girls wore white satin hot pants, a black leotard and platform shoes. They served drinks, sandwiches and bowls of salty chips that made people drink more. The albino bartender poured the drinks strong, and after two or three most of the men dug into their wallets for the twenty-five-dollar admission to the back room. In the back, there were five glass cages where Sammy and the other girls danced in G-strings and spangled pasties. Passing through to pick up her kitchen orders, Rena would imagine the dancers were fish in an aquarium; the men who pressed their crotches against the glass, schoolchildren come to view the tropical specimens.

After Rena got her first paycheck, she moved out of the Alta Hotel into a share apartment she'd found from a card posted in a health food store: “Seeking nonsmoking roommate for meatless household committed to mind alteration without the use of substances. Large room
three blocks from beach.” Reed, returned to his moving company job after three months at the Mountain House detox center, was one of her two roommates. She bought a pot of geraniums for her windowsill and a Mexican blanket to cover the bed. When her day off fell at a time when Joe was on the road, she'd take the bus to visit her mother, whom she'd told she was working in a restaurant, and Gene, who cried the first time he saw her unfamiliar hair.

Afraid of her mind deteriorating, she ordered a subscription for the
New York Times.
She got a library card at the Tenderloin Branch near Alil's, where the reading room stank with the smell of the unwashed men who slept in the chairs but left the books untouched. She began with the A's and worked her way through the alphabet, picking authors either Reed recommended or she remembered from one of her English classes: Anderson, Brontë, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Ellison, Fitzgerald, Gissing, Hardy, Isherwood, James, Kipling, Lessing, Melville, Nabokov.

S
HE SPENDS THE DAY
visiting Lake Amitalán on the outskirts of the city. The lake is disappointingly ugly, with a power plant on the eastern edge and a string of decrepit vacation homes along the shore. Posted on the beaches are signs indicating that the water is
peligro por contaminación
.

All day, Sonia's words—
my baby
—ring in her ears. Once, while Eleanor was living in Eureka with the roll-towel salesman, drinking with him every night, and Gene was with Rena in New Haven, Eleanor said, “You think you're the mother, don't you? That you're better than me.” Rena knew it was the scotch talking over the phone, but still she couldn't shake the feeling that she had stolen her mother's child. After Gene returned to Novato, she felt self-conscious about their closeness, about the way three years of living together, just the two of them, left them able to finish one another's sentences. Although she's explained to herself the distance she's kept ever since as due to Gene's need for more privacy now that he's older, she sees now how, in fact, she'd removed herself for Eleanor's sake.

She skips dinner, bringing a banana and some crackers back to her
room. It's the last night before Leonard's return and she eats in bed, reading from a copy of
The Age of Innocence
she'd packed in her suitcase. She hates the Countess Olenska for in the end honoring convention, wonders if this is how Sonia sees her: priggish and moralizing.

The Christmas before Mitch jumped in front of the train, Saul had broached the subject of their trying to get pregnant in the new year. They'd been married for two years. She was almost thirty-three. She'd put him off: she wasn't ready, she was traveling too much for her job. Could it be, he gently inquired, that with only Eleanor as an example she feared what kind of mother she'd be? “I took Gene,” she retorted. “I took care of him.” Perhaps, it occurs to her now, this is precisely the problem. Having taken Gene, she'd felt the edict was no more.

In her sleep, she listens for Carlos' cries. By morning, she knows they are gone. “They checked out yesterday,” the manager tells her in his clipped accent. Rena rents their room. She moves her things across the courtyard, leaving Leonard the room they'd shared.

L
EONARD RETURNS IN HIGH SPIRITS
. He shows her postcards of Panajachel, the square in Chichicastenango, a panorama of the mountains with a waterfall trickling down the left quadrant. When he inquires about Sonia and Hank, she says only that they seem to have changed hotels.

On Monday, they return to the police station. Señor Padillo smiles broadly at them.
“Un minuto.”
They wait in the anteroom to Señor Perez's office. Rena watches a woman bring in a tray of coffee. A boy delivers a stack of newspapers. The phone rings and a toilet flushes. Leonard leaves to use a rest room. While he is gone, she hears a rattling sound which she imagines to be a dolly moving a casket. When she'd first received the letter from the State Department, she'd assumed that what had been found were bones identified as Bernardo's. Since meeting Prankle, though, she's envisioned a corpse soaking in formaldehyde in a basement room far below.

After an hour, the woman who brought the coffee motions for them to follow her into the office. Señor Perez stands behind his desk in a
khaki uniform with green satin stripes. He extends a thin hand, a ring with a blue sapphire on his index finger. A scar runs down the middle of his left eyebrow, creating a ravine through the black hairs. The remains, he promises, will be turned over to them on Wednesday. Señor Padillo, he tells them, will handle the final paperwork. He bows slightly, the meeting they have waited six days for terminated in three minutes' time.

They spend the afternoon at the National Museum. Rena walks through the musty corridors hardly looking. On Tuesday morning, they go to the Central Market to buy presents: a blanket for Klara, a tablecloth for Ruth and Maggie, a carved wooden box for Marc and Susan. Not until they are back at the
posada
does it occur to her that they have bought nothing for Saul.

She cannot sleep. At five, she rises and dresses. Sitting in the courtyard in the hazy morning light, she wishes she had thought to bring something of Santiago's to have cremated with Bernardo. What would Santiago have wanted to go with his son? A copy of
Das Kapital
? A cross? A photograph of Bernardo with his parents? In the end, she takes a postcard of a quetzal bird and carefully prints: “Your parents loved you. May you rest with them now in peace.”

O
N THE BUS TO
the police station, Rena tells Leonard what Prankle told her about Bernardo. Leonard looks down at his feet. “I'm not surprised.”

The truck for the cremation company is parked in front of the police station. Two men lean against the back grille, smoking and drinking cans of soda. A guard escorts them to a small windowless room at the rear of the building. A few minutes later, Padillo appears. There are more papers to sign. More papers to be stamped. Afterwards, he speaks in Spanish to Leonard, who translates for Rena: “He wants to know if we want to walk with the casket from the building to the truck.”

Rena looks at Leonard, but other than his slow recognition of what must be the alarm on her face, he does not seem taken aback that they will not see the body. Is it possible that this was not understood? She
stands, her chair toppling as she rises. Her heart is beating so fast, she feels like she's being shaken. She imagines a casket filled with a sack of potatoes. “I have to see the body.”

Leonard rights her chair. She is grateful that he does not question her. He speaks slowly and calmly to Padillo. Padillo reddens. “Señora,” he says to Rena. “Please.” He taps a nostril. “The nose,
cómo se dice, el olor
?” He continues in Spanish to Leonard, glancing every few seconds at Rena. Leonard does not translate their exchange. She hears
el embajador
. She sees Leonard point to a paragraph in one of the documents they have signed. Padillo shakes his head and then leaves the room.

“He says he will have to speak to Señor Perez. Apparently, the casket has already been closed.” Nearly an hour passes before Padillo returns. Arrangements will have to be made. Workmen must be found. The earliest they can view the remains is after the siesta.
A la tres y media
.

Rena refuses to leave. If she leaves, she fears, the body will be whisked away. Padillo points Leonard in the direction of the street where he can purchase sandwiches. Leonard returns with cans of juice, cheese sandwiches on hard rolls and newspapers. Rena drinks the juice. She breaks the sandwich in half but cannot bite into it.

She sits in that room for seven hours. Once, she goes out to use the restroom. Twice, Leonard leaves to get fresh air. It is after four by the time Padillo returns. He beckons for them to follow. They walk down a long corridor at the end of which is a staircase blocked by a gate bearing a sign:
NO PERMITIDO
. Keys jangle as Padillo searches through the ring on his belt for the one that will open the gate. They follow him down a steep flight of stairs into the basement. Señor Perez and three uniformed men stand by a door marked with a skull and crossbones. In the dim light, the scar on Perez's eyebrow shines like something that has ossified. One of the uniformed men wears a hunter green beret. The other two have white surgical masks over their mouths and noses. The two with the masks peel off to flank Leonard. Perez and the man with the beret move toward Rena.

Padillo unlocks the door. Rena reels from the smell. Perez and the
man with the beret have taken her elbows and are pushing her forward. It's pitch black and she fears she will scream. She can hear the heels of Padillo's shoes on the concrete floor and then a click as he flips on a surgical lamp. In the middle of the room is a metal table with a casket on top. The lid is swung so that she cannot see inside.

Perez guides her to the foot of the table. It is not clear if she is standing or being held upright. Sweat pours from her armpits, and her mouth and lungs fill with the taste of formaldehyde. Her eyes have clenched tight.
Look
, she says. She does not know if she has said this out loud or in her head.
Look
.

Inside the casket, gray strands like tangled seaweed jut from the head. There is no face. Only eye sockets and a bit of flesh on top of the cheekbones. A shroud is draped over the torso. What flesh remains on the limbs has turned yellow, like chicken meat gone bad. The hands folded over the shroud are only bones. One foot has a toenail grown wild. “Bernardo,” she whispers, and then she hears a shuffling as Leonard's knees buckle and he is steadied by the two men at his sides.

A wedge of light cuts the floor as Leonard is taken outside. Rena does not move. She tries to plaster the photos she has seen of Bernardo onto the corpse.

Perez loosens his grip on her elbow, and the man with the beret moves to the side of the casket.
“La señorita ha terminado?”
Perez asks with no more expression than a waiter inquiring if she has finished her soup.

Rena nods. The man with the beret lowers the casket lid. He fastens the six latches. Rena crosses herself the way she recalls her mother doing when they'd see a hearse on the street.

In the hallway outside, someone has brought a chair for Leonard, who is sitting with his head against the wall. The men from the cremation company swing their black moving straps. Padillo leads them into the room. A few minutes later, they emerge hunched over with the casket strapped to their backs. The two men who'd worn the surgical masks help lift the casket up the steep stairs.

A
T NIGHT, SHE
screams so loudly that Leonard hears her across the courtyard. He bangs on her door to waken her and then holds her while she heaves and weeps.

“I forgot to put the note in the casket,” she gurgles into his chest.

Leonard strokes her hair. “We'll tape it to the urn.”

He guides her back to the bed. She does not know if she would have been able to ask. She only knows how grateful she feels when he pulls up the armchair where Sonia had sat rocking Carlos and is still there, asleep, when she sees the first morning light.

Part Four

A BODY RISING

15
Leonard

I pull into our driveway before six. I am thinking about Mrs. Smiley, trying to recall what I used to pay her. Opening the kitchen door, I hear footsteps in the basement. I call out a hello to Mrs. Smiley, only to hear your mother's voice in response. Racing downstairs, I imagine the disasters that have befallen Mrs. Smiley leading to your mother's departure from bed, but instead of calamity there is your mother, cheerfully folding towels.

“What happened to Mrs. Smiley?”

“Oh, I let her go. It was so annoying to have her here, puttering around.” She rolls her eyes. “Good Lord, to think of all those years when she washed our underwear and poked around in our closets.”