A Scarcity of Condors

by Suanne Laqueur

  “Why don’t Val and I go there and get a table,” Alex said. “Since you’re ringing the bell unannounced. Best keep the party small.”

  Not only was the party small, it was short. The owners were away and had rented the house to an American couple for the week. They apologized, saying they didn’t feel comfortable letting people onto the property, as it wasn’t theirs. The Tholets didn’t press it. They were tired after the morning’s events. The husband went inside to get the owners’ business card. Cleon pocketed it, thanked them, and he and Penny peeked at what they could through the wrought iron gates.

  “It’s not a functioning nursery anymore,” he said. “Just a house with a beautiful garden.”

  “Nothing just about that,” Penny said.

  They laughed at having to look both ways before crossing the street to the café, where Alex and Val had taken seats outside.

  “Look at these tables,” Val said. “Didn’t you say your friend was a mason?”

  All the café’s tables were made from big slabs of marble and granite, mounted on iron stands. Some had lines chiseled along the edges or motifs in the corners.

  “Would you look at that?” Cleon said, running his fingers along the unfinished designs.

  “The stone is everywhere,” Tej said. “Look at the pavers on the patio.”

  “Look what’s between them,” Jude said, pointing out the tiny chips of white, gray and pink. “I wonder if this was all Ysidro’s leftover stock. Left behind.”

  “Buenas tardes.” A burly, mustached man in a long apron came out and began tossing napkins down on the table.

  “Are you the owner?” Cleon asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How long?”

  “Took over from my father about five years ago.”

  “When did he open this place?”

  Penny smiled, softening the interrogation. “We used to live across the street.”

  “No kidding? My dad opened in nineteen eighty-eight. This lot was abandoned, the building falling down. It used to be a… what do you call it? A place that makes gravestones.”

  “That’s right.” Cleon ran a hand along the tabletop. “Did you make the tables from what was left behind?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it, señor. The lot was a jungle of weeds and vines, with a bloody fortune of stone hiding underneath. We’re talking mausoleum-grade granite. Unfinished headstones and statuary, left behind and abandoned. We couldn’t believe it hadn’t been scavenged off.”

  “You didn’t happen to know the man who worked here?” Penny asked. “He was called Ysidro Sepúlveda?”

  “The family were all memorial masons,” Cleon said.

  The owner thought a moment, then shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “No matter, hueón.”

  He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “So. Hungry? What can I get you?”

  “What’s good?” Tej said, a marketplace gleam in his eye.

  The owner matched it. “Everything.”

  “Then bring us that.”

  He brought ice-cold beers, appetizers of tomato, avocado and corn kernels piled on sopaipillas. Grilled eggplant on toasted bread. Skewers of beef and sausage. The good food filled up the emptiness inside Jude. The beers and the sun overhead made his eyes prickle with fatigue. All around the table, yawns were being stifled.

  “I think I for to take leetle nap,” Val said, sinking her cheek onto a hand.

  “I take big nap,” Cleon said.

  As they left the café, Tej bent and picked up some chips of granite from in between the paver stones.

  “Souvenir,” he said to Jude, pocketing them.

  It was good to stumble into the air-conditioned hotel room and fall onto the crisp, tight bed. Tej pulled the drapes shut and took his clothes off, which was good, too. He took Jude’s clothes off, which was even better. They took each other, giving their best, and a while later, when Jude curled around Tej’s big, warm body and drifted off, he was out of superlatives.

  The next morning, Alex and Val went off on their own to see Alex’s old apartment. The Tholets took the car and drove northwest to Recoleta and the Cementerio Israelita.

  “I’ve wanted to do this for years,” Cleon said as they walked into the cemetery’s little outbuilding. “I should have. It’s long overdue.”

  Penny took his hand. “It’s time.”

  “Buenos días,” the man behind the desk said. “¿Puedo ayudarle?”

  Cleon took off his panama hat. “I’m looking for my uncle’s plot. Louis Tholet. Died November twenty-fifth, nineteen seventy-three.”

  “Spell the last name for me?”

  Penny’s heart beat fast as the attendant tapped on his computer. For an anxious moment, she was positive the name wouldn’t be found. Louis wasn’t here after all.

  Ysidro promised, she thought. But was he able to arrange it? Did he and Tatán flee before he could make Louis a stone?

  The man clicked the end of his pen and drew a pad of paper close. “Section nine,” he said. “Row fourteen. Plot number sixty-two.”

  “Oh my God,” Penny said, relief now running warm and wet down her face. She turned back to Tej and Jude, waving fingertips at her streaming eyes. “Look at me.”

  “Were you worried?” Jude said.

  “Yes, but I didn’t know how much until now.”

  In his backpack, Jude carried some supplies he’d picked up at an art store—rice paper and thick black crayons and masking tape, so they could make a rubbing of Louis’s stone. The cemetery had no benches, but the attendant offered two compact, folding camp chairs.

  They walked outside, eyes screwing up at the bright light. It was another hot, bluebird sky day. The sun beat down on the rows of gravestones, stretching in long, bleached white rows.

  “It has a weird uniformity,” Tej said as they walked along the narrow path between markers. “I mean how the stones are different heights and widths, but they’re all squared off and minimalist. You look at it as a whole and it’s like a piece of modern art. Cubism or something.”

  Penny’s heart had kicked up again. Her eyes swept along Hebrew lettering. Stars of David. Clusters of pebbles along the tops of the stones, showing visitors had been there.

  “Aquí está,” Cleon said under his breath.

  LOUIS JACOB THOLET

  03. 08. 1916.

  25. 11. 1973.

  Yesterday, Cleon had coasted above the intense emotion at the Villa Grimaldi. Today, the enormity sucked him down into the maelstrom. Or perhaps he sank willingly, for this had been a long time coming. His face crumpled and the look in his eyes could only be described as shame. He was late. Terribly late.

  It happened quickly. A keening moan rumbled in his chest. His hat fell one way, his cane the other. His hands came to his face, shoulders shaking, legs swaying. Tej popped open one of the camp chairs, set it close to the headstone. Jude helped Cleon into it.

  “It’s all right, Papi.”

  Cleon wept. His face leaned against the white marble, the fingers of one hand digging into the chiseled letters. The other arm hooked around, palm spread on the stone’s top, as if cradling a head to his shoulder.

  Tej backed away and went invisible. Jude broke open the other chair but Penny ignored it. She knelt by Cleon’s feet, put arms around him and buried her face in his neck. She rocked him through the storm, her own tears wetting down his collar. Pressed beneath grief that had waited thirty-seven years for them. Humbled in the presence of a promise kept. Reduced to a jumble of memory and adjectives, Louis’s face winking in and out of blurred vision. Dear, dear, darling man. Courageous and resilient and gentle and haunted and lovely, the loveliest man…

  “Oh my God,” Cleon said thickly.

  Penny handed him a hunk of tissues. He mopped his eyes and nose. Laughed a little an
d looked up at the stone. Sank his face into a palm again. “Por Dios, tío, lo siento.”

  “Shh, he loved you.”

  “It took so long.”

  “It was time. This is the time. It’s not too late, it’s never too late.”

  Penny reached fingers now to trace the letters, chiseled straight and true and precise. The star of David crowning Louis’s name. The border of thin, precise lines outlining the inscription.

  Thank you, she thought simply.

  The boys came back, pulling bottles of cold water out of Jude’s backpack. When Cleon was calmed down and dried up, he inched his chair back so they could get to work. They taped the paper carefully to the stone. Each took a turn with the crayon, rubbing it sideways to bring out the engraving. When it was done, Jude rolled up the paper carefully and taped it. “We’ll find an office store and have it shipped home in a tube,” he said. “Or get the concierge to do it.”

  “We need to leave stones,” Penny said, looking around the paths.

  “Here,” Tej said, digging in his pocket. “I picked these up yesterday. At the café.” He held out a palm and showed some chips of granite. Remnants from Ysidro’s workshop. “It seems kind of appropriate.”

  “It’s perfect,” Penny said, taking one.

  They met Alex and Val at a restaurant near the hotel. From their faces, it was clear they hadn’t had a sob-less morning either.

  “It was unbelievable,” Val said.

  “The family who lives there was incredible,” Alex said. “I can’t get over it. I thought it would be a hello, goodbye, a quick look around, thank you so much. They made a…a thing of it. They were waiting in the lobby with flowers.”

  Val showed the bouquet of roses peeking out of her shoulder bag. “We went upstairs and they’d made breakfast for us. Homemade chocolate empanadas. The best cup of coffee I had in my life.”

  “Show them the other thing. Check this out.”

  From her bag, Val drew a piece of honey-colored wood. Two inches wide by six inches long. She passed it around.

  “What is it?” Tej asked.

  “It’s a piece of the floor,” Alex said. “From inside the bedroom closet, where I hid after my parents were arrested.”

  “Shut up,” Jude said, taking it.

  “Can you believe it? They pulled out a piece of the closet floor to give to me.”

  “Who does that?” Tej said.

  “I cried my face off,” Alex said. “It was ridiculous.”

  Jude unrolled the rubbing from the cemetery and showed it off. A round of pisco sours was delivered. They toasted and drank.

  “These are different,” Val said to Tej. “Did they put ginger in? Do you taste it?”

  “I do, it’s a nice twist.”

  By now they were used to Tej finding the best things on the menu. The waitress put down a huge cast-iron bowl, filled with vegetables and seafood.

  “Po, bonita familia,” the waitress said, setting down a stack of plates by Penny’s elbow. “Are these all your children?”

  Penny started to explain who was who, then stopped. “Yes,” she said, looking around the table. “All mine.”

  After lunch they went to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. Tej paused by the walkway to the outdoor amphitheater, struck by one half of a giant pair of glasses, the lens shattered.

  “What does this mean?” he asked Cleon.

  “They symbolize Salvador Allende’s glasses. They were found in the wreckage after Pinochet’s men bombed La Moneda. One of the lenses shattered. Just like this. They found his shoes, too. The blast blew them right off his feet.”

  As with the Villa Grimaldi, their group split up and rejoined through the exhibits, broke apart and then wandered back to find each other. “Come see this,” they said. “Come over here and look at this.”

  Penny stood a long time before a giant map of Chile, marked with hundreds of dots where atrocities took place. Her brow knitted tight as she read how Pinochet used the country’s diverse geography to his cruel advantage. Prisoners were tortured with the heat in the Atacama Desert, and with the cold in Antarctic Patagonia. Chile’s miles and miles of coastline was a convenient graveyard where thousands were disappeared.

  Alex was fascinated with an exhibit showing the seahorse as a symbol of Chilean resistance. When museum founders began collecting artifacts and testimonials of the coup, they continually came across the image of the seahorse. They found it in drawings, letters, carvings on cell walls.

  “It was the drains,” Alex said. “Most of the drains in Chile were covered with a metal grille with a seahorse in the middle.”

  “That’s right,” Cleon said. “Of course.”

  “The prisoners were blindfolded all the time. They could only look down under the bottom edge and see a bit of the floor. And when they were taken to bathrooms, they saw the drains. It became a symbol.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “I had no idea,” Alex said. “I’ve never heard of this before.”

  Val put her chin on her husband’s shoulder. “Sounds like someone’s getting a new tattoo soon.”

  Looking thoughtful, Cleon pulled at his chin. “I may join you.”

  They finished at the Estadio Nacional, surreptitiously tagging onto a guided tour. They walked through Escotilla Número 8, where male prisoners were kept. People leaned toward the walls, squinting, deciphering the writings and carvings left in the concrete. They moved down a long corridor connecting the locker rooms, the walls hung with photographs and testimony. Graphic depiction after graphic depiction piling up until all at once, Cleon stopped. The crowd moved around him as he looked down at Penny.

  “I’m done now,” he said. “I’ve seen enough.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “Let’s get some air.”

  They backtracked, slipped away and out to the Gradería de la Dignidad—a section of the stadium preserved as a memorial. Carefully gated off, the original wooden bleachers still intact. Here Penny and Cleon sat, staring across the turf, sharing a bottle of water and breathing.

  “There’s only so much you can take in,” Cleon said.

  “Of course. It’s been a long day.”

  “But it’s been good. I’m glad we did this. I’m glad we did it in this company.” He drew in a long breath and exhaled slow, falling a little closer to her. “I really like the idea of that seahorse. As a tattoo, I mean.”

  She gave a big sigh of her own. “I suppose you’re old enough now.”

  “Sixty-three years with no ink is a good run.”

  She leaned her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes and sing-songed, “You’re going to be a grandpa.”

  He laughed into her hair, rubbed his nose along her temple. “I know. I keep that right in my pocket.”

  “Penny?” Alex had appeared at the hatchway. “Jude wants you to see something. He says it’s important.”

  “Go,” Cleon said. “I’ll be here.”

  She went down a few steps, then turned back. “Right here?” she said, pointing to the floor.

  He put his hands atop his cane and his chin atop his hands. “This exact spot.”

  “Don’t you dare not be where you say you are.”

  “I’ll call you if I move one seat over.”

  She followed Alex back down the long corridor, past the photographs and displays, to a place where the walls were hung with hundreds of bronze plaques, each inscribed with names. Jude stood before one, arms crossed tight, eyes shining behind his glasses. When he saw Penny, he gestured toward the coppery square with his chin.

  Paloma, Arturo Velásquez

  Paloma, Cristian Andrés

  Paloma, Oliva Teresa

  “Oh God, look at that,” she whispered, taking in the names of Feño’s father, brother and sister. An eerie blank space
separated Oliva from the next name, as if a name were missing.

  “I keep reading it and reading it,” Jude said. “I don’t know why, but I feel like Feño’s name should be here with them. Is that crazy?”

  She wormed her hand into the crook of his elbow. “He was a victim of all of this, too.”

  “It’s like whoever submitted the names left a space for him.”

  “No,” Penny said slowly. “I think it was Graciela. And she left the blank line for herself.”

  Umberto is crying in your arms.

  Mario is slowly thumping his head against the wall.

  Héctor does nothing. His eyes are closed. He might be dead or asleep, you don’t know. You care, but you don’t. Your palace only has room for one.

  Your compañeros are giving up hope. You, however, are building a train station out of culled memories from your one summer in Europe, cramming it with architectural details. The oily fragrance of plasticine evokes kindergarten days. You only had primary colors back then. Now a rainbow of shades is at your disposal to create an international cadre of porters. You don’t meet your own eyes as you fashion their ties from delicate shards of mirror glass. Your gaze is fixed on the girl at the turnstile. The colored chips of her eyes spiral into stained-glass rosettes. She points toward the ceiling.

  It’s almost time to be gone.

  You nod at her, your chin brushing Umberto’s dirty hair.

  (I’ll be there soon, my love.)

  They’re calling you.

  It’s time to go.

  …

  …

  …

  And you’re gone.

  After dinner, Cleon and Penny went to their room, saying they were exhausted. Jude, Tej, Alex and Val found an outdoor bar with live music. They ordered a pitcher of sangria. Tej and Val ordered another, then got up to dance.

  Munching the alcohol-soaked fruit in his glass, Jude’s eyes roamed hungrily over his lover. The backward tilt of his head and his hips catching the beat. How the smile flashing in his beard growth was for Val, for the band, for the night. Sweat glistened in the hollow of his throat. The muscles in his back and arms bulged in and out of sight through his loose white shirt. All the women on the floor were openly ogling him.