The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (63 page)

“Well, who knows, really,” Jean said. She and Leo always referred to Schacht as “the Nazi,” but his hand, as it clung to hers in greeting, was the hand of any old man—tremulous and age-spotted. “Actually, though, it’s interesting—there’s a place here, in town. Run by an Austrian family. And all the old Germans and Austrians in the area sit around shoveling down great slabs of swine and what-not, that’s cooked and served by Mexicans. And they’re all schmoozing away in German. Pretending, believe it or not, that they were born in Mexico, or that they were in this or that resistance. Oh, I mean there are bound to be a few old Jews, and a few old déclassé aristos from one side of the fence or the other, and maybe one or two of them really did hold a match to party headquarters at Berchtesgaden or whatever. But that was simply not the story with most of them, obviously—the place is swarming with fake passports and fake histories. But whoever those people were once, they’re all sitting together now, missing the same real pastries, the same real streets…”

Mark nodded. “Oh, strangeness,” he said. “Opacity.”

As he and Jean raised their glasses to one another she saw a little heap—translucent, gelatinous, torn things. Memories, discarded by the barbed wire under a tiny, oil-colored sun. A little heap, growing on the icy soil as a shivering procession filed, naked and desperate as angels, past the guard post, where meaningless new memories were being issued. “Anyhow.” Jean closed her eyes. “Pardon me, but another burning question—what’s brought you down?”

“Oh, me.” Mark shook his head. “Well, me. All right, let’s—So who am I, what am I doing here, what—hmm. Okay, I was studying. Engineering, which is not such a ridiculous…But then I was finished, and I realized, my God, you know. This is my
life
, which I sort of hadn’t grasped until then. And also at the same time, more or less, my father died. And I realized I hadn’t known too much about him. And everything that I didn’t know actually didn’t
exist
any longer. And what did still exist was any little thing I did happen to know…And everything was just
flying
off the face of the earth, just flying
off
…But I didn’t know how to…But anything less just seemed pointless. So I began to just sort of rush around, I guess. For a while I was catching salmon. For big companies off the coast of Alaska.” He looked at her. “It’s amazingly hard.”

She nodded.

“And then I was working in the oil fields. Along the Amazon. Which isn’t so easy either, in fact.” He stared at the little stone carving on the table. “Anyhow, my Spanish isn’t that bad. So.” He looked out the doors again, voyaging.

“Where did you stay last night?” Jean asked quietly.

He sighed hugely, coming to rest. “Oh, I’ve put myself at El Parque. It’s kind of a splurge. I mean, the room is fairly primitive—except for the bugs. Those bugs—wow,
advanced.
But I’ve got a view. I look right out onto the square, you know? So this morning I ran out to the market for oranges and bread, and then I came back and had breakfast on my balcony.”

Jean leaned back and smiled.

“That square,” he said. “It’s really…”

“Hypnotizing,” she said. “I know. And the incredible thing is, it simply never changes. It’s absolutely eternal. Every day, decade after decade. The children, the old people, the band in the bandshell, the flowers, the fountains…Except that the children are always new children and the old people are always new old people and the flowers are always new flowers…The sun comes up, the sun goes down—all these years, and we’ve never gotten tired of it…”

“How many years?” Mark leaned forward. “Incidentally.”

Jean regarded her glass—the answer seemed to be sleeping, deliciously, at the bottom of her drink. “Well,” she said, slowly, “the fact is. We came down in the fifties.”

“Mm,” he said, with tact so inept that she laughed out loud.

“Yes, hundreds of—”

“Not at—”

“Anyhow,” she said, “a lot of us came down then. Terrible things were going on in the States. Comparatively subtle, but nonetheless…”

“Oh, right,” he said. “My mom and dad used to tell me. How everyone had to look exactly alike, and everyone had to be completely happy…”

“Yes…” she said. “Well, listen, Mark. You probably don’t know much about it, but there were these sort of mild purges…You know, nobody was going around killing anybody, so it was all very vague and insidious. It was sort of a warning, really. Later everyone laughed about how absurd it all was, but I tell you, Mark, people just kept on being very, very careful. In their actions and in their thoughts, without actually remembering, or even knowing, exactly why.”

He squinted at her, as though he could extract her meaning by looking. “Yes,” he said. “Oh, actually, you know, I had a cousin, or something. No. My mom’s uncle, Frank, she told me. She was still absolutely furious. The FBI came to the house, and Frank lost his job. But”—Mark looked at Jean with surprise, as though it were he who was hearing the story for the first time—“he wasn’t a
Com
munist. He was an ichthyologist.”

Jean looked at him. “Oh, yeah. Well. Anyhow, Mexico had a lot of glamour at that time. You know, that luster that moves around from place to place. Jesus, Mexico City—You can’t—So jaunty. And pretty and chic. And the whole, strange, gorgeous country. The way those names sounded to us—Chiapas, Cuilapan, Pátzcuaro, Tepotzlan, Ixtlán del Rio…Imagine how that felt—going where words like that were still alive! And all these fresh memories of bandit-saints and campesino intellectuals and painter-revolutionaries. And wild people from simply everywhere, those people who always go places to start things new…There was this one woman—a sort of Russian Gypsy Jew, truly stunning. She’d arrive on horseback. All this
red
hair. Men were simply shooting each other by the score…”

Mark nodded respectfully.

“Boring, boring,” Jean said. “I know. Jesus Christ, we don’t even get
movies
anymore. The currency’s so fucking rotten they can’t even import movies.” She rested her fingertips against her eyes; if she could only keep herself from
talking
, maybe he’d…

“Mexico City—” But there was his voice again. Soft, relentless. “Mexico City’s gotten pretty difficult, I guess.”

“The thing is—” Jean looked at him. “She
died
a week or so ago. Someone happened to tell us. We only heard by chance. She drank. I mean, she was old—considerably older than, than we are—But, I mean, she fell. She fell down the fucking
stairs.
”

Mark reddened. “Wow, that’s—”

“Isn’t it just,” Jean said. “Anyhow, difficult, difficult. Yes, difficult, now, Mexico City. We all started off there, of course. Then most of our friends just went back up, but some stayed, and we came down here. For a long time we lived right in town. Our friend Corrigan—the mask guy?—lived right next door to us. Then he moved out here, long before we did. Now he lives way off in hell-and-gone by himself. Well, not by himself in his opinion—he’s got one of those hateful little, those dogs. An esquintle, it’s called.”

“Oh, yes,” Mark said. “One of those—”

“It’s Aztec, he says, so he speaks to it in Nahuatl.”

“Oh.” Mark frowned. “That’s funny.”

“Funny,” Jean agreed. “So, Mark. I’m having another of those delicious—How about you? More yum-yum Sprite?”

“Well. Don’t mind if I—” He handed her his glass and wiggled his eyebrows elaborately.

“Such talent,” she said. “It’s actually been a couple of years, now, since we’ve seen him. I mean, I’m sure he’s fine. Always up to his…In fact, we heard he was trying to generate his own electricity. Out of old socks, you may be sure, or something.”

For a moment her voice split into harmonics, exposing a chord of other voices, crowding the room. Then a blinding sheet of desert light fell, and against its silence the tiny, distant figure of Corrigan was walking, walking…Jean closed her eyes. “The last time we saw him, he was teaching it Mixtec, too.”

“Pardon?” Mark said.

Jean shook her head.

“Those stars…” He stood and went to the French doors.

There was no haze at all, Jean saw, or softness in the air. The stars snapped brilliantly against flat black, as if this were to be their final appearance.

“Strange,” he said. “That people would get it into their heads that those things determined what went on down here.”

“That anything determined what went on down here,” Jean said.

He stood, looking out at the night. “Who are the women in red?” he asked.

Jean stood in alarm. “The women—”

“No, sorry,” he said. “Not—”

“Oh—” She flopped back down.

“Not here. I meant the women in the square who wear those long red—”

“Yes, yes—” She’d known just who he meant. But for an instant she’d thought he was
seeing
them; that they’d come up here for some reason. For her.

“No, sorry, just—I watched them all day. The way they glide. Up and down in the square. I couldn’t imagine who—”

“Yes,” she said. “Indians. I mean, obviously.”

“They look—They don’t look—”

“No, not exactly real. A Tzotzil group, but I don’t…They’re not really from this area; they seem to be…well, ‘displaced’ is how people…God, Leo did the most marvelous paintings of them in the square at one time. I wonder—”

“I’d love to see them.” Mark squinted eagerly past the fuzzy goldish mass of light in the center of the room.

“Ah, well,” Jean said. “There aren’t any here, in any case.”

All this talk of hers, this evening; all this noise. And now she seemed to have implied this boy should come back. For more talk, more noise. “Actually, I think Leo probably threw all that stuff out when he gave up painting.”

Mark started to speak, then stopped.

Jean shrugged. “He didn’t think he would ever be good enough,” she said clearly.

After a minute Mark spoke. “That’s very courageous.”

“Is it?” Jean said. “Oh, listen. Courageous, cowardly, who knows. It actually wasn’t very painful for Leo to give it up. He just stopped, the same way I just continued. People have different ways of holding on to things. Our friend Corrigan, for example. In a sense he’s the most acquisitive person I’ve ever met. If he sees something that interests him, an unusual mask, for example, or one of those pieces like that little thing on the table, he’ll go to any lengths to get ahold of it. But then he just gives it away again as soon as he possibly can. The fact is, it makes Leo happy to give things up. It’s a kind of exercise, I suppose. He’s never so happy as when he’s giving something up, or leaving something behind.” The phrase sounded flat to Jean, as she heard herself saying it now, or sententious. Was it true, she wondered—Had it been true at some point? Or was it just something rather like the truth that she and Leo had settled on?

Mark was watching her intently. “Tell me something,” he said. “Do you ever think of going back?”

“Back,” she said. “And what would that mean, ‘back’?”

Every day, how many species was it that disappeared, now, forever? There was some horrifying statistic—it used to be four hundred a year, she had read somewhere; now it was hundreds every day. And cadres of botanists, zoologists, anthropologists, God only knew what, swarming over the globe with instruments of every sort, praying to catch sight of one rare, precious organism or another as it died. “Oh, of course it’s very nice to think—very seductive—that you have some sort of ‘home’ somewhere, that you could return to, that would make some kind of sense of your life. And Leo and I have always prided ourselves, I suppose, on resisting that. Because, a
place
—I mean, what is that? A place. What you leave, what you go to; here or there, ‘home’ or ‘foreign’—Well, it’s all based on, on the most fantastic misunderstanding, isn’t it.”

But was that true, either? Chiapas, Cuilapan, Pátzcuaro, Tepotzlan, Ixtlán del Rio—ancient fragments irradiated by an ancient light. Yes, what she and Leo had left behind vanished with their departure, and what they’d wanted here had vanished, too. Vanished, not into the past, nor into some relinquished area of fantasy, but into the future. Into the future. Evidence of a continuity, of a fugitive precision would appear without notice—a swift concentration of the afternoon into heavy, golden shapes; a face like a key, glimpsed in the market; a perfect, trembling balance in the square as seen for an instant from a balcony…promises.

The nights here still smelled like honey. Jean could still be made happy by the braying of a neighbor’s burro. Back when Mexico City had faded and they’d come out here, the nights always smelled of honey and woodsmoke, the days of chocolate and earth and peppers—rich anchos and poblanos in sacks at the market. How clean everything had been! The revolution had left the campesinos as penniless as ever, as clean as bones. They’d worn white; the coarse-loomed cloth showed up in the fields miles away. Roosters woke you, cacti bloomed in the churchyards. Toxins from new industry and traffic seeped into the earth, corroded the organs of the children. One murderous poverty replaced another. Refugees appeared, Indians, fleeing internment and slaughter in Guatemala and the secret wars up here, out in the muffled desert. Corrigan used to bring word of skirmishes. From time to time rumors would flicker through town. Alicia, who cooked for them, might let something slip, or Ramón, who brought the great jars of water. Once in a while, someone was said to disappear—someone’s cousin, someone’s son…The Tzotzil women moved back and forth across the square, in constantly changing configurations of blood red against the white walkways. They approached as you sat by the fountains, under the elegant palms. They stretched out their arms. You could hardly hear their voices. They looked past you, at something that happened in the distance. The tourists, dazzled by the beauty of their clothing and unearthly, famished faces, dropped small sums into their hands. Who were the women in red, they asked.