Refuge Page 5

  After dinner, Don Arturo continued her education as they strolled through the park across the street from the pink house. The two of them conversed like a bachelor uncle and his niece, or the way she might have talked with her father, had he had Don Arturo’s advantages. Had he lived long enough to see her grown.

  “En mercado hay muchos esqueletos,” she said one evening. “¿Por qué?”

  “En vente,” he said. “It is more correct to say, ¿Porque había muchos esqueletos en vente? But I don’t think you mean human skeletons,” he continued. “Or perhaps you do? It is true the skulls of the nameless dead can be purchased at the market, but whole skeletons, too?”

  She laughed. “No, not real bones. Little effigies. Skeletons playing guitars, dancing, and drinking. And skulls too. Candy skulls, decorated with coloured icing.”

  “Ah, not esqueletos, then — calaveras. In a few days, we will celebrate El Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. In English countries it is called All-Souls, I believe. Here, the dead are always among us, but once a year, we honour them especially. We welcome the souls of our loved ones home.”

  I should leave now, she thought at the end of the second week. While she was still something of a turista, a traveller. While she could still hear Helen’s windswept words as she stood in her greatcoat on the steps of the nurse’s residence. Of course I’ll write to you. And we’ll see each other again. A promise is a promise.

  But suddenly, the markets were blooming with orange and yellow marigolds that she brought home in armloads to Adela, who hung a curtain woven in the same bright colours across one corner of the sala. Ramón moved a table in front of the drapery, set a wooden box on top and a trunk at the foot, creating three tiers that Adela covered with a white linen cloth, setting bouquets of marigolds and thick cream-coloured candles on each tier, filling the spaces between with trays heaped with fruit and nuts and the calaveras they bought at the stalls. A skeleton riding a horse. Another with a baby in its arms.

  Ramón brought a box of fresh cigars and a silver dish of cigarettes. A bottle of cognac. A cut-glass flask of perfume. Adela opened a small wooden chest and lifted out a slender brass telescope. She centred a silver coffer between two photographs in polished wood frames.

  “La ofrenda,” Adela said, stepping back to survey her work. When she was satisfied everything was in its place, she tore petals from a nosegay of marigolds and sprinkled a trail from the ofrenda through the courtyard to the tall portal and out onto the sidewalk.

  Adela motioned to her to do the same, pointing up to her rooms, then to the front doors, with a worried look on her face.

  “Así que los muertos pueden encontrar su camino,” she said. So the dead can find their way.

  ~

  “My mother, Señora Gloria Navarre Alves dos Santos.”

  Don Arturo had slipped up behind her as she gazed at the ofrenda. He was pointing past her shoulder to the portraits on the second tier. “My grandmother, Constanza, and her first husband, Sylvestre. In the middle, my great-grandfather, Arcadio Martín. The patriarch of this house.” He raised his hand to the pair of framed photographs at the top of the altar. In one, a woman with dark, upswept hair leaned on a pillar, a mischievous smile on her lips. The other was much younger, plainer. She stared with dark eyes at the camera, defiant, demanding to be let loose.

  “My wife, Doña Beatriz. And my daughter, Silvia.” His smile was so faint it failed to part his lips. “Now you have met them all.”

  She started to speak, to ask him about this wife and daughter he had never once hinted at, not in all these weeks of conversation, when she had told him everything.

  He held up his hand against her words. He would take luncheon alone in his rooms, he said. He would see her for the evening celebrations.

  “¿Con su permiso?” he said, bowing.

  He left as abruptly as he had appeared, a wind that rose out of nowhere and swept through the room, disrupting everything.

  The screen door is slapping against the frame.

  The girl looks at me oddly. I must have drifted off. Not a good thing, under the circumstances. Under any circumstance.

  Sleep attacks, we used to call them, although it goes by a fancier name now. But this isn’t narcolepsy. I’m just tired. Old and tired. Provoked by this girl into going where I don’t want to go. She’ll learn soon enough: the past is a dangerous place, to be visited with caution. Left to myself, I keep to the present, to the necessities of getting from one moment to the next.

  I haul myself up a little straighter in my chair. “Go close that screen properly. Leave the cabin door open, we can use the breeze. I need a cup of coffee. Do you want one?”

  “Tea. Please.”

  I might have known. Myself, I’ve never given up on coffee, even though my stomach counsels against it. My only concession is that I have switched to decaffeinated beans, which I roast in the oven to bring out some decent flavour.

  “I don’t drink tea. There’s mint just outside the door, if you want that. Go pick yourself some. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  As I push my chair deeper into the kitchen, she lunges forward.

  “I help?”

  “I’m old, not incompetent. Go get your mint.”

  She crosses the verandah, walks down the path a bit, then squats exactly where the mint is growing. When she returns, she carefully latches the screen. She seems to understand everything I say. She’s probably lived in Vancouver all her life, this pidgin English an act to fool an old woman.

  I manoeuvre myself over to the tap that sticks out of the kitchen wall like a garden faucet and fill the kettle that I keep in a box under my seat. A few years ago, after a couple of minor falls, I got Bryan to screw casters into the bottom of each leg of this old Mission chair. He takes forever to get around to helping me, even though I sold him the farm for a song, but he does a decent job of things once he puts his mind to it. I had him cut one arm off the chair and attach a wooden tray to the other. The whole contraption looks a bit like an old-fashioned school desk, only bigger and more comfortable, with cushions under my gluteus maximus and at my lumbar spine. The box under my seat holds most of what I need in a day. It took me a while to find the right shoes, but these thick crepe soles give me the purchase I need to catapult myself around the cabin. And I can walk if I have to; I just don’t want to fall and break a hip. I know where that leads. First pneumonia, then a pine box.

  I plug the kettle into the power bar Bryan clipped to one side of the chair tray and plug the bar into the wall socket above the tap. Not a set-up any building inspector would pass, but it works for me. Coffee, cinnamon, mugs are on a shelf within reach. It takes some effort, but I finally find a teapot that I fill with hot water. When she comes in with her handful of leaves, I nod to the pot.

  “Milk’s in the fridge, sugar in that tall canister on the counter. Help yourself.”

  She heaps sugar into the cup I set out for her and brings it to the table.

  “Sit,” I say, waving my arm in the general direction of the kitchen chairs, every one of which is mounded with papers: newspapers and magazines I intend to clip, letters that need answering or filing away, advertising flyers for things I can’t decide whether or not I want. The girl lifts a pile and looks for a place to put it, finally setting it down on a square of empty floor.

  “That’ll be in my way.”

  I don’t mean to be so snippy. The truth is, I’m embarrassed. The place has got away from me. The sala and the kitchen are both knee-deep in cartons I brought back from Mexico, some filled with Helen’s things and his too; things I’ve been meaning to sort. May’s knick-knacks and family pictures that I intend to pack up and send to the nieces, although I doubt they care. What with all these worldly goods, the kitchen isn’t much more than a galley that leads from the verandah to the sala, where the path continues through the mess to the small back room where I sleep
on a single bed beside my father’s old bookcase, for the convenience of it, and for the comfort too, I suppose.

  “Put those papers on the table,” I say at last, sweeping what’s already there into a steeper, more precarious mound.

  I wheel my coffee and the teapot over to the table. Such a fuss, having someone in the house. We pour and stir and sip, the noises of our forced congeniality grating the air.

  “So.” Somebody has to get this started. The girl obviously won’t. She is intent on her teacup, one of May’s that supposedly belonged to our mother.

  “So you come from Burma.”

  She looks up. The eyes aren’t blue so much as indigo. A deep pond in a dark wood. Probably contact lenses: nobody’s eyes are the colour they seem to be.

  “Burma, yes. Now must say Myanmar, Miss Cassandra MacCallum.”

  “That’s a mouthful. Call me C.”

  “Miss C?”

  “That’ll do.” Anything to avoid the string of tortured syllables that is my name in her mouth. “What sort of work did you do in Burma — sorry, Myanmar?”

  “Myanmar government name. Burma true name.” She looks at me as though I’m supposed to know all this. “I journalist. Take picture. Same like you.”

  “I am not a journalist. Or a photographer. I’m not anything now. I used to be a nurse.”

  Stop being so difficult, I scold myself. But if I wasn’t tough, someone would have hauled me off this island a long time ago.

  “On internet. Galería Imago.” She pauses before offering each word, determined to argue her point. “Picture. You take. Yes?”

  “That was years and years ago.” It was all years ago. The present is given over to survival, the days wrestled into submission, one at a time.

  A life for the living, a life worth recording — that’s a thing of the past.

  “Don’t photograph anything that doesn’t speak to you.”

  Carlos pulled the camera from his vest pocket. Such a handsome man. Tall for a Mexican, and that strange red hair.

  He held the camera out to her. His little traveller, he called it. “It’s yours.”

  “You can’t buy me off just like that. Where have you been?”

  “Later,” he said, shushing her with a kiss. “First, take pictures.”

  With the camera in her hands, she couldn’t hold on to her anger. She slid the latch open, feeling something give inside her, even before she saw the key propped in the folds of the bellows.

  “For my studio. So you can make your pictures when I am gone.”

  She lifted the camera to her eye. It was like looking through a microscope, the way the world fell away, leaving only what she set within the squared-off circle of her lens.

  She practised on the monkeys in the Chapultepec zoo, spider monkeys no bigger than dogs, with tails they used like a fifth limb. At first, she took the pictures Carlos would have taken: a mother preening her young, males leaping through the trees, threatening each other with sticks. But when a young animal with budding breasts leaned against the fence, she wound the focus in close, so that all she saw was the owl-like round of the monkey’s face, the black pleading eyes.

  In his studio, she screwed the lens closer yet: a drop of saline as it slid down a needle, the muscular twist of a bloodied bandage.

  “Such cojones! It’s like these pictures were taken by a man,” Carlos said, and when he saw the look on her face, “That’s a good thing, querida.”

  But the objects didn’t speak to her the way the monkey’s face did: the eyes so human, so like the ones that followed her movements on the ward.

  She took the little camera into the street, intending to take pictures of the people passing by. She’d step out of the flow, lean back in doorways, but even in the shadows, she couldn’t bring herself to lift the viewfinder to her eye.

  How she envied his boldness! He’d see a mother sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk and he’d move in, clicking the shutter, kneeling in front of her, mouthing his seductions. “Don’t look at me. Keep doing what you are doing. You are so beautiful.” Or, “You’re angry. Let me see it. I’ll to show it to the world.”

  Everywhere they went, he took pictures. Not of castles or churches. Only people. And not the pale-skinned, fine-featured descendants of Cortez and his Spanish wife. The men and women he photographed were the colour of Cortez’s Mayan lover. “The children of Malinche,” Carlos called them. “True Mexicanos. Like me.”

  The walls of his studio, even the sloped ceiling above his bed, were papered with his pictures. A young man of the street, a callejero, gazing at the spiralling smoke from his cigarette as if it were spun from pearls. A beggar woman with her baby, holding the child’s mangled arm up for view. A sidewalk vendor, his face contorted with rage — not the anger of the helpless and hopeless, but the righteous fury of the undermined, the overlooked.

  He lived in an attic above the Pastelería Ideal. To get to the stairs, they had to walk the aisle between pillars of cake, the aroma of chocolate, almond, and mango trailing after them, so that even the narrow pallet on the floor where they made love seemed suffused with sweetness. When she turned her face away from his, her eyes met those of the poor, the dispossessed, faces like those she’d ministered to in her first months in the city, the ones Don Arturo warned her to shun.

  In Carlos’s hands, they were reborn.

  “No,” he said slowly. “In my pictures, they are most truly themselves. Kissing. Fighting. Weeping. One person alone is nothing. But put a man and a woman together, or a man carrying a load of mesquite bigger than himself, a woman grieving over a child because she has no food to give him — that’s a story.”

  “It’s in the faces,” she said.

  “And in the hands. In the spine. In the heap of cactus paddles in her lap. It is everywhere, mi amor.”

  She gave herself up to it, to the art and science of pinning a split second in its place. She collected lenses and filters and backdrop cloths and bought a second nurse’s bag to hold it all. Both bags stood beside the door of her room, and in the morning, she would grab one or the other and spend her days staring either through a lens or at her patients, her focus set so close she never had to look at anything else.

  ~

  Everywhere the faces, always the faces.

  In Mexico, and later in New York, at the Polish Hall and Peekskill. Later yet in Montreal, when she could stare as long as she wanted — that was her job. Newborns flown in from Quebec City, Lac Saint-Jean, the Beauce to the preemie intensive care unit, tiny bodies lighter in her arms than a pound of butter. Some so small she could cup them in one hand, their skin blue and transparent as a bird’s fallen from its nest. Older babies limp with fever, blocked bowels, disorders of the organs, the blood, the brain, the spinal column, and most puzzling of all, what was called, for lack of any clear symptoms, a failure to thrive.

  Their tiny faces drew her to work every morning and held her there long past the end of her shift. When she felt brave enough, she sneaked her camera onto the ward. She’d done it before, in New York, slipping the old vest-pocket Kodak into Brodie’s lab late one night, letting one of the little rhesus monkeys out of its cage and following it as it roamed among the benches, clicking the shutter when the monkey picked up a needle, again when it poked its arm. I shouldn’t be doing this, she told herself, but she’d done it anyway, advancing roll after roll of film as the monkey wandered where it pleased. She thought she’d have only to coo in that certain way and the animal would jump into her arms, but it grew feral with freedom, scampering across the benches, scattering instruments and notes, jumping up to the round metal light fixtures and hanging there, defecating down on her, howling at her shrieks. She cornered the creature at last, crouched behind a cabinet, and although she spent most of the night setting the lab right, still she developed the film the minute she got to her room, sitting in a slant of early light
, jotting words on scraps of paper that she pinned to the pictures. Fear. Joy. Pain.

  “Look at their faces.”

  “You’re nuts,” the other nurses said. “An infant’s nervous system isn’t developed. Babies don’t feel a thing.”

  Her little Kodak was her only ally.

  With her camera, she shadowed the nurses, catching the way the infant faces smoothed when the child was cradled, the way their features crumpled at the prick of the needle. The nurses humoured her, holding the babies close to the window where the light was better, pulling aside the swaddling blankets to give her a better look.

  Three sessions she managed before the supervisor called her up on report, but by then she had what she wanted. For the rest of that winter, she spent every spare minute in her closet darkroom, enlarging the infant portraits, isolating one part of the face, then another, a mosaic of noses and lips and brows, the squared mouth of pain, the knit brow of fear — her first lessons in a language she was learning, a language without words.

  ~

  Older faces too. The ones she found amid the jumble of textile mills and grain elevators, in lower Montreal, where the streets narrowed to furrows scraped between the buildings, crisscrossed with railway tracks that funnelled toward the centre of the city, leaving their soot and fumes to swirl in the blind alleys of the bottomland of Saint-Henri.

  Young women, their cheeks rouged and lips reddened, hips swaying to some rhythm no one else could hear. Young men with chests pumped out and hair slicked back, cigarettes clenched between their lips like teats, as if smoke could satisfy their longings. Ragtag children playing in the tattered shreds of snow of Place Saint-Henri. And in the streets behind the station, closer to the Lachine Canal, old women sitting on doorsteps in pale shafts of slanting light, babies propped between their shins, while old men gathered like buzzards in front of the taverns and tabagies. A persistent breeze carried the smell of tobacco up from the cigarette factories, mixing it with the ripeness of the stockyards, the bitter whiff of hot paint from the dockyards, and the stench of chemicals from the tanneries, a pungent stew that caught in her throat.