Refuge Page 6

  Every spring, a different set of rooms, although there was a sameness to them all: a daybed in one corner, a long flight of stairs, water close at hand. In Mexico, it was the canals of Xochimilco. In New York, that wide-open passage to the sea. In Montreal, rooms within blocks of a river that narrowed to a sluggish channel thick with barges and flatboats.

  And always a darkroom: pans of chemicals set out in one closet or another, walls hung with the close-ups of unfamiliar faces whose expressions she studied in the morning as she chewed on her baguette and again at night as she sipped her last coffee before bed.

  She didn’t follow any rules. She lifted the camera to her eye and scanned a crowd through the lens, bringing one face into focus, then another, until something inside her said, Choose this, and she did.

  ~

  “Please, a photograph.” The woman was insistent, a neighbour she met every morning on her way into San Patricio from Carlos’s house on the beach. Long after Montreal; long after Carlos was gone.

  “¿Ahora?”

  “Sí, if it is possible, now would be best.” So polite, always polite, despite the urgency in the woman’s eyes.

  A child was laid on a table in a courtyard behind the small, whitewashed house.

  “¡Pero, es muerto!”

  “A portrait,” the woman said. “Por favor. For the mother.”

  After that, she saw all the dead children of San Patricio and those in the villages up and down that sweep of coast. The boys the sea handed back. The little girls bloated with worms. Babies who looked like posters for infant good health and tiny malformed creatures, doomed before they drew their first breath.

  The children were laid on tables in kitchens and front salas and courtyards, sometimes shaded under a palapa, sometimes under the cleansing sun, always on a white sheet. Dressed in their Sunday best or in a robe sewn in stiff new fabric, star-spangled capes tied around their shoulders, their feet slipped into gold-paper huaraches, a wreath of white flowers in their hair. Faces and hands faintly green with decomposition, which set in quickly in that heat. Damp rags laid across swollen bellies to keep the bodies cool through the wake. Orange blossoms, roses, and angel’s trumpets banked around the child to smother the smell of death. By their faces, they seemed almost to sleep, but the hands gave them away: fingers like small roots torn violently from the earth, twining around each other or around the stem of a single calla lily.

  She came to it late, but Carlos was right. The face was not always enough.

  She took pictures of the child alone on its bier, of the mother and father, the brothers and sisters, various groupings with the corpse. Close-ups for herself too: smooth brows unmarked by life, lips in full repose. The mothers were solemn, the fathers awkward in their Sunday clothes, the children wide-eyed with wonder.

  “Why does no one weep?” she asked.

  “Because the babies die innocent,” the neighbour said. “They have not yet learned the use of reason, and so they pass straight into Paradise. They are los angelitos. Who would weep at such a fate?”

  ~

  In the ruby darkroom above the bakery, Carlos as close as breath, her own face came clear in the chemical bath.

  In the background, the floating gardens of Xochimilco, the rented boat pulled up among the tule grass that grew high as walls, the blanket where they made love in the flickering sunlight before he rolled away to set the Graflex on its tripod. She was as eager as he was to bare the length of her body to his lens, stretched out on the coarsely woven blanket, her back arched, the darkness of her pubic mound drawing in the sun. He handed her a pair of long, wide leaves pulled from a wild banana tree, and she stood.

  “What should I do?”

  “Move,” he said. “Dance.” His face disappeared behind the camera. His fingers jittered like spiders along the rim. “Make a story.”

  She waved the leaves around, unsure what to do with the weight of them, the sticky sap that oozed into her palms. She tried several poses and finally shoved the leaves out of sight behind her back.

  “Good! Keep going!”

  She felt the roughness of the leaves against her shoulder blades and she held them higher, away from her skin. As the image came clear in the tiny studio, she saw the love in her face as she stared into the camera, looking at Carlos looking at her. The innocence.

  But there was more. Those wings rising from her body, that small chest thrust forward, as if to take flight.

  The girl is staring at me as if I were a strange animal. I stare back, unblinking, as if to catch her in my lens. I am curious; she is on the prowl.

  “So you say you are a journalist. Do you have any pictures with you?”

  “Many picture. Soldier. Student. Protest.”

  She sits very straight in the old pressed-back chair, a bearing that in a man I might call military. Disciplined. There’s a controlled grace to her movements as she tips the teacup to her lips, every muscle performing exactly as instructed. No expression at all to her face. She hardly blinks. It all seems effortless, as if she has practised this for a very long time. Even so, there is something around her eyes, something not quite held in. A cunning, perhaps. A hunger.

  Now the girl is heaving her backpack onto the table. She looks up at me from under heavy eyelids. “Picture no name.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I go prison.”

  I nod, forewarned. But without her name on the photographs, what’s the point? They won’t prove a thing.

  She works the zipper slowly over the crush of whatever is inside. I grip the arm of my chair as she reaches in, bracing myself for what she means to show me. Images of crushed skulls, burning babies, men with guns. Or worse: the thing she has brought to me, the thing that proves she is who she says.

  I close my eyes, the darkness a welcome distance. I am not ready for this.

  When I open them, she is holding out her hand. A laugh explodes before I can stop it.

  “A present,” the girl says. “Burma is Gold Land. For temple. Also, mango.” Her smile, now that it has finally come, is almost impish. “English peoples like mango, yes?”

  I take the fruit, lift it to my nose. I haven’t seen a mango in years. Hanson’s grocery in Newbliss extends itself to green grapes, unhappy shrivelled things, but otherwise its offerings are limited to apples, oranges, and bananas; strawberries and pears in season, if you get there fast enough.

  “I used to eat mangoes in Mexico,” I tell her. But she already knows that. She found me at Galería Imago, didn’t she? And what visitor to Mexico isn’t forever cursed with a longing for mango?

  “In my country, mango mean life. Mango tree, make wish.”

  “And what is your wish?” I say, handing back the fruit.

  She looks at the mango, then up at me. With her fingers, she makes a cutting motion across the fruit.

  “Easy wishes are sure to come true,” I say.

  It is almost noon. I rummage in the cupboard and find an unopened package of water biscuits. A boy brings groceries from Hanson’s on Saturdays and this is Thursday. Pickings are slim, but they’re sparse at the best of times. I don’t eat much and I don’t like to cook. I was a nurse for too long to be attracted to meat, no matter how the joint is carved up, so I live mostly on vegetables. I retrieve a couple of carrots from the crisper and put out the jar of peanut butter. I hand her a paring knife and a plate for the mango. I could do eggs, but that would involve a frying pan, butter, salt and pepper, knives and forks. I don’t want her to think of this as a proper meal. I am not offering that much.

  We settle to our meagre lunch, a brief hiatus. I’ve barely started with my questions. I’m warming up to the important ones, giving her time to show herself. We still have the whole afternoon. The bus doesn’t stop in front of Hanson’s until six.

  “How did you get here? To Canada, I mean.”

  “I refu
gee. Thailand. Man in camp say, come Canada. I no paper, he fix. Bus Bangkok. Boat Manila, Vancouver.”

  The most words out of her mouth yet.

  “How long were you in Vancouver?”

  She looks at me sideways. We both know the questions I’m not asking. She withholds the answers too.

  “Long,” she says. Then, “Maybe not long.”

  The heat put her in a stupor. Or maybe it was the comfort of her rooms, the attentions of Don Arturo, who listened to her with such interest, who told her things she had never imagined, who made her feel like the girl she’d once been, standing on the butter box within reach of some great discovery.

  Another week slid by. Now and then she felt an urge to write to Helen, a sharp stab of a thought. Twice she searched out a pen and paper, but when she sat at the table in her room over the aviaries, she couldn’t think what to say or where to start. She told herself there was no hurry. She would set a new date for her departure, then write. She’d do that tomorrow, or the day after, on the weekend at the latest. Helen would understand: Helen was that kind of friend.

  She embraced the rituals of Don Arturo’s household. She gave up tea for the thick, sugary coffee that appeared in a silver pot on a tray outside her door each morning. She adjusted to the spare breakfast of hard rolls, the extended courses of the comida, the light supper served long after dusk. She adopted the habit of the siesta, stretching out on her bed with the shutters drawn for an hour in the afternoons, thinking how lucky she was, how smart she had been to see the promise in Don Arturo’s invitation.

  ~

  On the Day of the Dead, Ramón moved the table into the sala; Adela laid it for eight.

  “Who is coming?”

  “Sólo miembros de la familia,” Adela said gently, naming the places: Don Arturo’s wife and daughter, his mother, his grandmother and her second husband, his great-grandfather, Don Arturo and herself, the stray gringa he’d taken in.

  She sat at the opposite end of the table from Don Arturo, the surface between them covered with steaming dishes that Adela carried in one after the other: spiny fish smothered in small tomatoes, red-skinned fish swimming in bright green sauce; plates of beef stew wafting strange, aromatic spices; saucers of mashed beans and fried rice; trays of tamales, enchiladas, empanadas, and flautas, tortillas rolled and filled and sauced in myriad, marvellous ways. Before she left for her graveside vigil, Adela set out a platter of sliced fruits arranged in delicate designs, dotted with dates and nuts and the candied petals of flowers. And a plate fanned with thinly sliced pan de muerto, wreathed in skulls she had decorated with their names. Cassandra. Arturo.

  Don Arturo picked a sugar skull from the plate. He had changed from the black suit he wore to the hospital into white linen. His jacket hung off the back of the chair and his shirt was open at the neck. A white shirt, like the one her father saved for weddings and funerals.

  “Adela insists on making the altar, with ofrendas that grow in number every year. To remember, she says.” He put the skull to his lips and sucked on it sharply. “As if it were possible to forget.”

  He angled his knife and fork neatly across his empty plate and pushed it aside, then he lined up three small glasses and filled them with tequila that he tossed back quickly, one after another.

  “When I was a boy, I roamed the Sierra Madre and the dry riverbeds on my white pony, my sketchbook always on the saddle horn. I would draw the old-man cactus, the agave that grew sharp as an unkind word. I carried watercolours in my saddlebags to paint the pale purple flowers of the desert willow, the red blooms of the candlewood. Our hacienda was in Durango, near the border with Chihuahua, where the mountains rise up like fists. The wind is always dry and hot, as if it blows across the sun to your face. The sky in those days was dark with birds — falcons, buzzards, flocks of doves — and the tumbleweed was always shifting, barring the way one minute, rolling aside the next. You have to look hard to see beauty in such a place, but it is there.”

  He lifted the cognac from the ofrenda and moved into the courtyard, beckoning her to follow. Ramón had repositioned the small tiled table where they took their breakfast, so that now, as they sat in the cooling garden, they could see the family altar, framed in the archway of the sala.

  “Forgive me,” he said, circling his glass in his hand, staring at the amber liquid. “I speak too much of myself. But this is a night for remembering. And you appreciate my stories, yes?”

  There had been so few. Whenever she asked a question, he would turn it back to her or retreat into silence. In the days since Adela and Ramón had built the altar, she’d stopped often before the pictures of Don Arturo’s wife and daughter, trying to imagine what might have happened to them: an illness like her father’s or an automobile accident. A fire.

  “Please,” she said, “I want to hear them all.”

  “Not all, perhaps, but for tonight, one. We lost everything in the Revolution. The word sounds glamorous, yes? That was what the foreign press called it. But there was never just one Revolution. For us, it was las revoluciones, one struggle after another. Landowners against peasants. Businessmen against the military. Vaqueros against city clerks. And for what? So the workers could leave the haciendas, to starve on promises. So the cattle could become a banquet for the buzzards. And it isn’t over yet. Rebellions develop a certain momentum. Once begun, they spin off in directions all their own.”

  He sat back, frowning into his glass. The sun had almost set. As the last light faded, it picked up the silver in his hair, so that he seemed to grow old before her eyes. Her questions pressed on her with a new urgency. Were you in the fighting? Where was your family? What happened to them? But her father’s words stopped her lips.

  Observe. Don’t force a moment in the direction of your choosing; allow it to unfold as it will. Truth is rarely extracted, only revealed.

  When Don Arturo spoke again, his voice was low.

  “The war started in the north, near our hacienda. At the first sign of trouble, I moved my family back to Mexico City to my great-grandfather’s house, where my mother was living. My father had died several years before of smallpox.

  “We thought the rebels would be content to overrun the countryside, but no, they brought their battle to the city. For ten days — La Decena Trágica — the two sides bombarded each other. Artillery shells exploded everywhere. In the streets. In the shops. The hospitals were soon full. I had trained as a doctor but never practised, so I couldn’t help on the wards, but a friend found me a position in the administration of the Cruz Roja.

  “I was at the hospital night and day. I left Beatriz and Silvia alone with my mother, here in this house. There was nowhere to flee: I had invested everything in the hacienda and it was ashes. Silvia was twenty by then. She wanted to come with me to the hospital, to help with the wounded, but I said no, she had to stay with her mother.

  “On Sunday of that terrible week, Beatriz was determined to go to mass. It was her custom and no one, she said, would keep her from it. I insisted Silvia go with her. The rebels would never attack a church, they would be safe there: these were the last words I said to them. But I was wrong. An artillery shell hit the spire and the ceiling collapsed, crushing the faithful as they prayed.”

  He stared at her through the darkness. “You look very much like Silvia,” he said softly. “Not beautiful, but strong.”

  She was about to speak when he slapped his hands on the table and stood.

  “Ah! But this is not a night for heavy hearts. Beatriz would scold me for such melancholy. Death, she would say, is not an ending, but a new beginning. To be embraced.”

  In the distance, fireworks exploded.

  He lifted his glass, first to the ofrenda, then to the shadows that had overtaken the garden, thickening the shrubbery, moving it in close. Only sound gave the darkness dimension. The uneven purr of the fountain. The soft flapping of moths close by her he
ad. Now and then, a rustle of leaves, a flutter of feathers, the churr of some small insect.

  She stood and raised her glass too.

  “To death!” he exclaimed. “Life’s great parting gift!”

  He drained the cognac quickly, picked up the bottle, and poured himself another.

  She covered her glass with her hand.

  “Ah, my dear, but you should drink. Before Pancho Villa and his men put their torches to the hacienda, they consumed everything in the storehouse. They didn’t know about the private cellar my grandfather had dug into the hills. Fourteen bottles of the finest French cognac were laid in there. My family, like everyone of their class, was in love with all things francés. I rescued these few bottles, along with Ramón and Adela. It was the best I could do.”

  He took a long, slow sip. Her questions choked her, but her father was right: the pieces of Don Arturo’s story were fitting slowly into place.

  “Every year, I drink one bottle. This is the last.”

  He paused and drank again.

  “Just as I am the last.”

  He motioned her to sit, and she did, tucking her hands under her to keep her fixed in place, waiting as long as she must.

  “In Mexico, we suffer three deaths. Did you know that? Of course not. How could a child like you?”

  He no longer seemed to care if she was listening, but she was. She noted the inflection of his words, the way he dropped them like pebbles into the shadows.

  “The first death comes when our body fails — when the heart no longer beats its steady rhythm. When the gaze grows shallow, and the world is bleached of meaning.

  “The second death waits for us by the grave, for the moment our body is returned to the earth.”

  She could no longer hold herself back. “And the third death?”