The Noise of Infinite Longing (28 page)

family, mother would add unnecessarily. This news came in bits and pieces. Details were left out or unknown. But I knew Angeles and Guillermo lived in an old colonial apartment in Monterrey—I had a picture of the two of them, handsome in wire-rimmed dark glasses, as if they had just signed a film contract, her chin turned up, her eye- brow raised, posing in front of door No. 4, a picture I so loved I had it blown up poster size and framed.Their marriage came eventually. She was in no hurry, and the piece of paper meant nothing, a for- mality.

Y

ou can only think about her as if she were broken-up lines of poetry, I told myself.

She was dressed in a white silk suit Guillermo had designed. A thigh-length, embroidered formfitting jacket, flowing sleeves, flow- ing pants, her hair, long, dark, and straight, fell along the contours of her face, framing it. Her eyes, lined in soft black, had a far depth in them in which you could read anything—sorrow, longing, serenity, only she could know—and in her hands, between her palms, between her bare fingers, she held a long red rose.

She was getting married. My father held her elbow as they walked into the room. He walked an inch or two behind her, very straight, almost trim in a tuxedo he had bought for the occasion, his face set in a stare, neither smiling nor frowning, but commanding, as if he were walking down the nave of a great church. But this was mother’s house in Abilene, Texas, not a church, and we were gath- ered in a small group, family mostly. Even Amaury came, left what- ever he was doing (in California? in San Juan?), his mustache plucked, his long hair trimmed, his rock ’n’ roll days already fading, his leg yet to be crushed in his car wreck.

Angeles was twenty-six years old, the first of us to marry.

Mother, who would have liked a big wedding, organ music, and ush- ers and flower girls, stood on the other side of Angeles, as it seemed only right, puckered up in her heels, exquisite in her short beige sheath. Was she not always exquisite? She was fifty-two but no one would have guessed that, her face too young to be the face of the mother of the bride. Her hem came just above the knees, revealing legs more shapely—firm calves, trim ankles—than any of ours. But she had worried about it for hours, that a small bandage on her right knee, where she had hit the corner of a chair, spoiled the picture. I watched her to catch her the minute the tears started flowing. But she was smiling, no dabbing at the eyes. She was giving flashbulb smiles, moving her body to best advantage, coquettishly whispering to Guillermo’s older brother, the one with the self-satisfied look on his face that said he thought he was lord of the manor. And he was in Guillermo’s family.

When Guillermo took her hand in front of the judge, in mother’s living room that last day of January 1970, he seemed every inch the prince, rolling waves of thick dark hair barely brushing the back of his gray coat, a face so Roman, so aristocratic (ah, the aristocracy of Latin America, the power that is built into bones and flesh, that sur- vives, even thrives, in the squalor around it). I could only think of portraits in dim galleries, somber portraits byVelázquez. He had that sculpted face, that baronial posture, but he glanced at her like any man, adoring her.

They looked like movie stars.

We got drunk that night, and I remember nothing else about Angeles’s wedding.

A

fter their wedding, they got into their new MG and flew up the icy roads from Texas to New York. They lived in Chelsea, and

spent hours in museums and galleries, and visiting the offices of the great architects. Philip Johnson! Paul Rudolph! They lasted less than a year in NewYork. Nine months.

They had been offered work, presumably good jobs, drafting and copying drawings, working in large offices filled with other archi- tects bent over drawing tables, doing nothing that was their own, living in tiny apartments, spending every cent to keep afloat in Man- hattan.They wanted none of it, and Angeles hated the cold (she was cold even in June).We can’t live like this, she said to him one day in Central Park. He agreed. He wanted to go home, to Honduras, and she didn’t care. She just wanted to leave New York; she wanted to leave the United States. They packed up, and on their way to Tegu- cigalpa, they came to see me in North Carolina. I was working at the newspaper in Charlotte, and had just bought a house, a small Tudor-style cottage that needed some work but had a fireplace, a yard of trees, and a lot of light.

How do you stand it here, she said, it’s so quiet. She didn’t say it to offend me. She had a way of asking a question that left you no choice but to answer it. She didn’t push, she didn’t dare. She simply intoned it, gently, like plucking a petal. It wasn’t the first thing she said.The first thing she said was, It’s so pretty, putting the cushion first, letting me relax before wondering, ever so slightly, how I could stand the quiet, the fact that nothing really happened in Charlotte, North Carolina.

It’s a good job, I have this house, I tried to explain, sounding hol- low even to myself. But I don’t plan to stay here ...I didn’t wonder why she was moving toTegucigalpa.To me it was clear. She was Latin American, she had to be in Latin America. And she was married to a Honduran.

So you are writing, she said, going directly to the point.You were going to write, she said, you were going to write books.

What happened? I wondered myself. She believed that writing was what I had to do, one reason I was here on earth. I said,The job keeps me busy, there’s not much of a market for bad poetry, for books, you know. Can’t make money that way, and I like it here, I’m doing fine, have friends.

She gave me a look, that look of hers, like mother’s, the way she arched that eyebrow.Why I had stopped writing? Fear, I thought, but I didn’t say that. She knew. She didn’t pry, she knew when to stop, but I saw the doubt, and worse, her disappointment. She had expected me someday to be on the cover of
Time
magazine. So she said once, in Mexico, when I went to see her in Monterrey. She said it during one of our late-night incantations—lighting candles for each other—when I told her she was the brightest of us all, I had such faith in her, and she threw that back at me—No, it’s you, you will do it, not me.

But now I was working in North Carolina of all places (they were not looking for Radcliffe graduates). I was laying out pages and mak- ing marks on other people’s stories, telling myself that this was important, that it mattered if the headline was 24 points or 36 points.

I had gone as far from writing as I could go, had not lifted the cover of my typewriter at home for a long time, not since the day I had torn up the pages of poetry that I, melodramatic to the end, had titled “The Hours of Glass.”

Angeles and Guillermo stayed several days, fixing dinner, insist- ing on doing everything, rearranging the furniture, hanging up my
New Yorker
posters, patiently putting coat after coat of varnish on bookshelves, redesigning the kitchen. We spent hours on the back porch—Needs new screens, Angeles said. The house was too hot in August. Nothing seemed to bore them, and they would even sit

through evenings with my friends, people whom they invariably described as “nice.”

One day, when we were alone, just she and I,Angeles said, Louise is very kind, very nice. Louise had just arrived from a trip out of town, and now Angeles had met her. It was a meeting I dreaded. But Louise, who could make anyone feel at home—coffee, wine, coq au vin, a shoulder to cry on—had taken Angeles in, my flesh and blood. Almost me. Angeles saw that.

She’s good for you, she said, a question. I said nothing. She’s a bet- ter artist than that girl in NewYork, Angeles said. She’s serious.

We could hear Louise in the basement, rolling the ink-soaked squeegee over the silk screen she had stretched over wooden frames she had sawed and nailed. She was doing a poster of Virginia Woolf for me. She disappeared into the basement for days, with her inks and tubes of paint, pots and silk screens, her long hair musky from the basement’s stale air and turpentine fumes, her face colorless and dry, aging quickly, lines deepening around the palest blue eyes, a face that reminded me of Edna St.Vincent Millay.

Yes, she’s good for me, peaceful, you know, I finally said. But I thought, I no longer love her. I said, blurted out, I’m having an affair with a man at the office. He’s married, now he wants to leave his wife. I told him, no, can’t see breaking up his marriage, he’s got kids. Angeles looked stunned. A man? Married? You keep going back and forth, she said, shaking her head. She wasn’t making one of her defin- itive judgments, I knew, but she was puzzled. Like me, puzzled, per- plexed, how could I love men and women?

What am I going to do about Louise? I wondered, asking not her but myself. She won’t leave no matter what I do.

Be kind to her, Angeles said, turning off the conversation. She didn’t indulge me in my affairs; she really didn’t want to know the details. Like mother, who didn’t bring up the subject though she had

finally stopped asking me when was I going to get married.

Their visit was over too quickly, as usual. Just as suddenly as they had arrived in Charlotte, they were off, on the long trip to Hon- duras. They were driving all the way.

M

ountains shield the valley where Tegucigalpa lies, the capital a crumble of old buildings and narrow streets, and new build-

ings rising oddly over terra-cotta roofs here and there, glass and steel coming out of the earth like huge exclamation points. Airplanes fly in over the mountains and then, suddenly, without the ease of the landing slide, drop down into the valley in one stomach-turning jolt. Tegucigalpa, at the end of the world.

They lived on La Alhambra, on a hillside, a steep climb from the city, in a large apartment with views all around, the city appearing like a beautiful painting below, red-tile roofs, church towers, the mountain range lavender in the distance, the air crisp and clear. From their hillside, you saw only the colors of the city, the shades, the shadows, mansions scattered in other hills, and all around, flow- ers, ravines, trees.You couldn’t see, you couldn’t smell, the belly of the town, the dirt encrusted on buildings, the skeletal dogs with ooz- ing wounds, and the hovels, the children, always the children, shy, big-eyed, hands in mouths, and the laundrywomen with their elbows in tubs of water, washing Madame’s clothes, and the stink, that stink that doesn’t lift in rain or sun.

Poverty in the countries at the end of the world has a specific smell, like burning rubber and burning trash, of sewage floating in rivers, of things left to rot.

Angeles thought of little else, up there on her hill, on her pictur- esque hill. But she had a good life, anyone would agree. She had

finally talked me into taking the long flight from North Carolina and I was there for my first visit. They were starting their architecture firm, they had clients, acquaintances, relatives, connections. Nothing happens here without connections, she said, rolling her eyes. It’s like San Juan, very small. But you know me, she went on, I hate the par- ties and the showers and the weddings. Guillermo has to do some of that, it’s his family, his city, he has to show up.

Look around this town, she went on, there’s nothing here, but the rich live very well, they travel, they shop in Miami, they buy condos in Coconut Grove. She poured beer into her glass. It was night, my first night in Tegucigalpa, and the lights of the city below didn’t illu- minate the city as much as disguise it, dress it up. It looked splendid. At least it’s not as bad as Nicaragua or Salvador, she said. It’s notViet- nam, I countered.

We had arrived finally in Tegucigalpa, but I had already been in Honduras for days. I had landed in San Pedro Sula, on the Caribbean coast, a town lying prone in the heat, a commercial port town, mis- erably charmless.

I rushed down the line of passengers to the immigration counter, the clerk taking what seemed an eternity to look at my passport, study my picture, my face, glasses, shaggy long hair. At last, he stamped the page, the first stamp on my new passport.What a won- derful sound, the rubber stamp coming down on the thick leaf, the fading ink, barely readable: Aeropuerto La Mesa, Migración, Hon- duras, C.A., 1 Agosto 1972.

I was not traveling alone. Olga was with me. She had stayed with me in Charlotte that summer and was now moving to Honduras to live with Angeles. Mother had no choice but to let her go. Once Olga made up her mind about anything, she had to do it. She was seventeen but had the tenacity of two of us, and she wanted to leave Texas, to leave life with mother and Leon, not a bad life but one that was boring. Nothing

seemed as exciting to her as life with Angeles in Central America.

Angeles came toward us slowly—she never hurried—carrying her son in her arms, six months old. I held them for a long time, and then she put him in my arms, a gift. Here’s Jose, she said. She didn’t say José; she said Jose. I looked at him, his eyes, his mouth, trying to see her in him.

Isn’t he beautiful? she said, grinning at him, touching his head. Of course, I said, he is yours.

We were not going directly to Tegucigalpa, a four-hour drive away. We were on the way to Tela, to the ocean. Angeles wanted to give me the grand tour, from the Caribbean to the ruins of Copán, and days later, to Tegucigalpa. The beach house in Tela, down a dirt road in a field of banana plants, rose in a grove of coconut palms, set back from the high, voluptuous sand dunes that bordered the shore. The sun was fierce, an angry sun, pitiless. But we sat in the breezes, on the veranda, drinking lukewarm beer and milk from the coconuts that the house guard cut down for us. Angeles hovered over Jose, as if he would vanish if she didn’t keep him close to her.The maids from the village came every day and rinsed the clothes and made arroz con pollo and fried fish caught that day. At night we talked endlessly, the same conversations, circles that we made, and the cockroaches came out, overrunning the kitchen and the shower stall.

In the mornings, I walked down to the dunes and sank in the sand, bareheaded, letting the sun toast my face, looking at the Caribbean, the flat sea reaching out, if you looked north and west, to Puerto Rico. I hadn’t seen the Caribbean in years, hadn’t been in Puerto Rico since the mid-sixties, the family now dispersed, mother and the girls in Texas, Amaury here and there, in California or New York, or maybe at that minute in San Juan. Only father remained in the island, father and Tití. I didn’t want to see father, and I knew that if I went to see Tití, word would reach him, and I would have to see