Left at the Mango Tree (11 page)

Cougar laughed. Such a child she was still, he thought to himself. A sweet child. He turned to look at her and, laughing, put his arm around her shoulders as they continued on, past the market and the bank and the grimy-windowed office of the
Morning Crier
. Tucked under his arm, Edda turned her head to meet his eyes and his laughter, and the meeting left Cougar chilled, as if a breath had blown on the warm, musky sweat that till then rested shiny and ignored on his neck and his dark brown arms, on his dark brown arm wrapped around Edda’s dark brown shoulders.

Odd, this.

Cougar pulled himself away. He looked all around him, expecting to observe the source of the breath that had kissed his skin, but there was nothing to see. Nothing except the wet mark on Edda’s back that still betrayed the sweaty trespassing of Cougar’s skin on hers. Surely it hadn’t been Edda who provoked such a reaction in him? She was just a child, he told himself, Raoul’s child no less, and even Cougar, who was fond of a fresh can of worms now and then, knew better than to stick his hand in this one. He was mistaken about the breeze that Edda’s body had blown through him. He must have been, for he thought he still felt it now, though their bodies no longer touched.

Perhaps it was just the clever wind.

So you wait for some light in your head.

As Edda and Cougar neared the Crater, the landscape steepened and the path became more rocky. Cougar sent Edda ahead of him, so that he could catch her should her dainty feet find difficulty navigating the path. But the path was short, if sharp, and it wasn’t long before Edda reached the low summit and stopped to peer down at the lake in front of her. The sun, hanging midway between zenith and horizon, transformed the lake’s blues into flickering diamonds of silver, white, and purple, against the background of which Edda was an aubergine cut-out, flat and curved at once. Cougar, following behind, admired the silhouette that lay decidedly at the end of his path. The feline princess warrior had not only turned into a girl, but one whose outlines harbingered the woman deep inside.

He joined her at the Crater’s edge and they made their way to a shaded spot nearby. In the diamond light of the lake they ate, tuna, capers, pear, peach, Cougar all the while tossed by Edda’s (or someone’s) invisible breeze. He noticed parts of her he had never noticed before, her ankle, her heels, her calf, her wrist, the pink moons on her even pinker round fingernails. To her remarks about Tripper’s recipes, the capers, the cream, he nodded and emitted gentle grunts, avoiding her glance and wondering if from this harbinger girl yet flowed a woman’s blood. It wasn’t a question he could pose to Raoul, and why exactly he wished to know he couldn’t decide.

Who knows what goes on in the night?

“Mr. Zanne? Do you want another?” a waitress asked, tossing him suddenly from the edge of the Crater to the heart of the Belly. “Mr. Zanne?”

“Cougar! Hey! Don’t you hear your waitress talking to you?” Nat jabbed his elbow into Cougar’s ribcage. “He’ll have another and I will, too, if you don’t mind. How about you, Raoul? Another beer?”

“Thanks,” Raoul said.

The girl busied herself behind the bar and the men resumed their silence.

Figures, Bang’s on stage when you need him, Nat thought to himself. He’d have some nonsense or other to tell Raoul right about now. Some story about a lucky trumpet or a daft old relative of his. What could Nat possibly say to make him feel better? Nat had never owned a lucky charm in his life, and he had no family left. What little of it preceded him had used up the family fortunes and fables, leaving Nat empty-handed. Raoul already knew that story anyway. He could tell Raoul about the lady with the hazelnuts in her suitcase, but unusual as that was, it wouldn’t do to cheer him up proper.

You try to see but you’ve lost your sight,

Why was Raoul so stubborn anyway? Other people managed to get the flies out of their heads. Why couldn’t he? Wasn’t Almondine all that mattered? She looked to be doing well enough. Nat had been one of the first to visit Edda’s house after the birth. (He brought her roasted corncobs, and for me, a rattle shaped like a butterfly.) He didn’t know firsthand what new mothers said or did, but Edda seemed to know. Nat had never seen her so happy. Not on her wedding day, or after her wedding night. A daughter’s happiness was all that a father should care about, wasn’t it? If Nat could figure out that much, than certainly so should Raoul.

Then there was Cougar. What about him in all this? Why should Nat assume the burden of breaking the silence or not, of comforting Raoul or reprimanding him. Why was Cougar so distracted this evening? Maybe Nat would tell Raoul about the hazelnuts after all.

Until dawn and then you look around,

Little did Nat know, as he debated about Edda and about the Belgian woman’s baggage, that Bang’s song had triggered in Cougar reminiscences he was loath to renounce. Cougar was stuck in the Crater. Stuck on the checkered tablecloth that Tripper had packed for a blanket, stuck on the grassy shores of the lake that sparkled white behind Edda’s now sitting silhouette, stuck on a sunny Saturday afternoon a long long time ago, with Edda, the daughter of his very best friend.

But Nat was firmly at the Belly, where he could bear his friend’s silence no longer. He took a deep breath, and before he could change his mind about opening his mouth, exhaled “Raoul, guess who I picked up today?”

“Who?”

“A lady from Belgium, with a suitcase full of hazelnuts. She’s staying right here at the Sincero, too. What do you suppose she plans to do with them?”

“With what?”

“With the nuts? What do you think she’ll do with all those nuts?”

Raoul took a long, slow drink of his beer, and Nat elbowed Cougar again, his jabs saying, See? He’s thinking about nuts now, which is better than thinking about babies and ads.

“I don’t know,” Raoul finally said. “I don’t know what she’ll do with all those nuts.” But after that he said nothing more, so Cougar jabbed Nat to say, The nuts just weren’t enough.

Indeed they weren’t. As Nat had suspected, it wasn’t a cheer-up proper, and it wasn’t the reassurance that Raoul had hoped for. But it helped, if only a little. Raoul knew what Nat was trying to do and it helped.

And you see the tracks betrayed by the ground.

Raoul sat, silent, at the bar. He faced forward and watched his reflection in the glass he held. He could feel people staring at him, could almost hear their whispers. He knew they were laughing at him, and at his ad, but he was confident something would come of it. There was an explanation for everything on Oh, and, that being the case, Raoul had no intention of renouncing the one for his granddaughter’s Vilder looks. It was Almondine he thought of, Almondine for whom he sought the truth. What almond could flower on uncertain roots?

And you see the tracks betrayed by the ground.

“If Gustave won’t explain it, then maybe the ad will tell us all how Edda got pregnant,” Raoul muttered to himself. And Bang sang.

7

A
t the Pritchard T. Lullo Public Library, Raoul once read a book about dangling dead bodies that oozed a deadly poison. He read about a man who loved sheep, girls who hid in cupboards, and a country where everything broke. He read about cheaters, gardeners, pilots and poets, and a nun who collected clocks. He read thousand-page books by a doctor, and short ones by a preacher named Glen. Raoul read about whales and rain forests, about dinosaurs, engines, and pumps, and lands where it always snowed. He read about stomachache, heartbreak, and lust. And sometimes he read about joy.

Raoul was always delighted to stumble into a joyful book, for he had a nasty habit of pretending that he was every character he read about. And while it was thrilling to find a dinosaur bone in the dust or invent a pump that could take water to a village atop a hill, collecting clocks and swinging limp from a tree were no fun to imagine at all. But any time, after pages of suffered black-and-white meanderings, Raoul realized he was in for a happy ending (requited love, retrieved treasures, a truth like a nose on a face), well, it was all he could do to keep himself from skipping right to the very last page. Not that he ever did, of course. Raoul had long learned the lesson of anticipation’s sweetness.

Raoul’s favorite book was a joyful book, and one that was to become very important in his search for my true identity. It was a book about a man who woke up one day and didn’t know who he was. He knew his name, of course, that’s not what I mean. He was Mr. Stan Kalpi, mathematics teacher at the Sacred Heart School for Boys. He liked to drink beer on hot days (they were all hot where Mr. Stan Kalpi lived), ate meat almost every night, played golf when he could afford the visitor’s fee at the club, and was learning to play an instrument he had fashioned himself, not quite guitar but more than mandolin. This so that he might serenade his bride, if and when he found her. The book said Mr. Stan Kalpi had brown eyes, brown eyes that looked green if he tilted his head toward the sun in the late afternoon. Raoul thought maybe the author was wrong about that; surely, Mr. Stan Kalpi’s eyes were black.

His story goes something like this. One morning dressed up like every other morning (cloudless blue sky, matins and coffee-steam wafting from next-door Betty’s), Mr. Stan Kalpi awoke and decided there must be more to him than long-division and his penchant for pork and for ale. Who was he really? More than maths teacher. Not quite musician. He was like the polynomials he taught his students at school, a string of undefined variables that together equaled himself. That’s a good start, he thought, perhaps more maths teacher than he was willing to admit. Now it was just a matter of defining the variables, of assigning a value to each and adding them up.

His mother would be a variable, and his father, too, but those were dead ends, for both mother and father were dead. He remembered what his mother looked like, at least he was pretty sure he did, but when he tried to picture his father, the face that showed itself to his mind was that of a kindly old man he often spotted smoking
in front of the station. Mr. Stan Kalpi could not be blamed for his faulty recollections. Adult inaccuracies in the telling of a child’s story must be forgiven, and especially in his case. He spent just a few sparse years with his parents, who had little money, little food, and little time to devote to their toddler. Only work was granted them in abundance, blistered hands and stringy muscle under sun-hardened skin.

When their son was five years old, the parents of the dark, skinny youth who would grow to be Mr. Stan Kalpi sent their son away. On a cool night, with his newest shoes and the still, dark sky for a cloak, their burden and their hope was led off by the richer and more capable hand of a city-dwelling aunt. In her house Mr. Stan Kalpi grew tall and immune to the marvels that he surveyed from her windows, tallish buildings and taxicabs that his parents would never know the likes of. He wore clean clothes and attended school, where he displayed an early aptitude for maths, fond of the absolutes that governed geometrical shapes and soothed by the precision of deductive algebraic processes. It made perfect sense to Raoul that Mr. Stan Kalpi should harbor such inclinations toward order, product of the disordered infancy that he was, but whether Mr. Stan Kalpi himself saw it like this, the author doesn’t say.

A teaching position at the local school for boys and a small house purchased largely by his aunt completed Mr. Stan Kalpi’s formal education. He was on his own now, to make of life what he would. Though he didn’t seem able to find himself a wife, he did work hard, gaining the respect of his superiors and his students alike, and he carefully managed his money, allowing himself, in addition to fresh meat daily and the occasional round of golf, a once-a-month trip to the cinema. This too made perfect sense to Raoul, that a man who was careful with his money should allow
himself such an indulgence, for my grandfather was a bit of a cinema buff himself and not a little annoyed that on a certain Tuesday to which we will soon return, he was researching magic instead of perusing the library’s newly-arrived
New Modern History of the Silent Stage
.

But back to Raoul’s favorite book.

Despite his job and his balanced accounts and his monthly movies, Mr. Stan Kalpi experienced moments of puzzlement and unease. Sometimes a sound (the crackle of a fire, a snippet of song on the wind) or a smell (oniony stew; the dusty, wet leather of his sandals when he wore them in the rain) would jar him and he didn’t know why. As if the crackles and snippets and the onions and the shoes wished to remind him of something, a person, a place, a time that he hadn’t ever really known well enough to recall. The only people, places, and times he couldn’t recall were those of his early childhood. So these, too, he deduced, must be undefined variables in the polynomial that was he. Mr. Stan Kalpi could smell and hear his past, or at least the echoes of it, but the time had come to see it.

From his rich and capable aunt he learned the name of the village he left that night with his new shoes and his dark-sky cloak. She reminded him of his parents’ names (Isla and Matik) and told him that these would be a sufficient means of identifying himself to the villagers once he arrived (everyone in Mr. Stan Kalpi’s native village was known as the son—or the daughter—of someone). The aunt hadn’t been to the village since that same night, so her memory of the road that would take him there was sketchy. But this didn’t worry Mr. Stan. He was at least a mathematics teacher and almost a musician, and was confident that he could find his way. He thanked the aunt for her help and renewed his gratitude
for the love and resources she had invested in his upbringing. Then he wrote a letter to the headmaster. He was very sorry, it said, but he must take a leave to attend to his past.

One morning like every other morning, then, cloudless blue sky, more matins and coffee-steam wafting from next-door Betty’s, Mr. Stan Kalpi locked up his small house and set off.

“Take care, Betty. I may be away for a while.”