NOTHING TO DECLARE

by Mary Morris

  I made him a drink and he raised his glass. "To peace and happiness. To staying cool."

  Trevor and Eleanore arrived at nine, also apologizing. "You know, no phone. No way to let you know."

  Eleanore was blond and studying painting at an art school in town. She brought me a small statue of a donkey and Trevor brought me a bottle of tequila with a worm in it. I thanked them for the gifts.

  I had made chicken, rice, beans, and a salad. I had scrupulously washed each leaf of lettuce in halazone, but Eleanore wouldn't touch the salad. Jerry kept putting his hands on me and finally I asked him not to. He said, "You're so uptight, baby. This is Mexico. Cool out," and he raised his glass. "Peace, happiness."

  He put his arm around me again and I said, "I can't eat with your arm around me."

  Then Jerry announced, "I'm a good judge of people and Mary is a real New Yorker."

  "I come from Illinois," I said.

  "Well," he said smugly, "you're sure different from the down-home folks here."

  I said, "I just don't like to be touched by people I don't know."

  And he said, "Look, I'm simple, I'm not complicated. I just put my arms on you to comfort you. You need comforting."

  He was going to drive me nuts. "If I need comforting," I said, "I'll ask for it."

  "You know what," Eleanore said, "apropos of nothing, I come from Medicine Hat, Canada. Do you know the entire population of Medicine Hat is equal to the population of Mississippi?" I stared at her blankly.

  Trevor turned to me. "Isn't that incredible?"

  I was bored so I offered to read their palms, something I can do, though I don't like to waste or abuse my powers. I saw that Jerry was going nowhere fast and probably didn't have long to live, but I told him he would publish one of his manuscripts, which he did. Eleanore would leave Mexico soon and I told her that. Trevor was a mean, dangerous person, someone to stay away from, but he would be successful in his career, and I told him that.

  Then I began to grow serious and I told them other things. I told Jerry he had been married briefly years before and his wife had been untrue. He had never told this to anyone and he had never fully recovered. I told Eleanore her parents' divorce had broken her heart. I told Trevor he had a teen-age son with whom he was out of touch and that this had bothered him lately. As I spoke, the flame in the fireplace dwindled and we finished off the wine. I couldn't believe my accuracy. They sat back, amazed.

  La Fragua is the Ritz Bar of San Miguel. The next evening I met Trevor, Eleanore, and Jerry there. They introduced me to Cory, the woman who had been raped by the Mexicans. It is a rather nice bar in an open courtyard, where musicians tinker at the piano and alcoholic Americans show up in various states of disintegration.

  Trevor was telling some horrible story about his friend T.C., a black guy living in San Miguel, who had gotten branded, literally branded with a branding iron, on his arm in a fight after a soccer game. Jerry was furious because I hadn't spent the night with him, and wouldn't talk with me. Then Eleanore and Trevor suddenly began having a fight. Eleanore kept saying, "So go back to Texas, I don't care." And he kept saying, "All you care about is the way you look." I wondered why I was seeing these people again, but loneliness makes you do strange things.

  Cory was a quiet blond girl with a dour look. So, I thought to myself, this is what a woman who has been tied to a bed and raped looks like. When I got up to go to the bathroom, Cory followed me. As we were combing our hair in front of the mirror, she said, "So who gave you the shiner?"

  My hand went instinctively to my face. I hadn't thought it could still be seen. "Oh, it's almost gone," she said, "but I'm sort of an expert in that kind of thing."

  I looked in the mirror and saw a darkened line beneath my left eye. "I got it at a softball game," giving my usual line.

  "Mexican or American?"

  "American," I said with a laugh.

  Cory said, "They're all the same. I guess you've heard the rumor about me being raped."

  I stopped combing my hair.

  "I wasn't raped," she said. "I'd been dating this Mexican cab driver." She was unbuttoning her blouse. "Look what he did to me." She undid her blouse and displayed her breasts. Her nipples were completely swollen; her breasts were black and blue all the way to the armpits. "He twisted them," she said. "He twisted them till they turned black and blue." Then she said softly, "I thought you'd like to see what we have in common."

  I didn't want to think I had anything in common with Cory. I had been dating someone that spring and he hit me once. We had been having a stupid argument, over nothing really, and the next thing I knew he had struck me with his closed fist. No one had ever laid a hand on me before, but I had been with men who were violent with words. I had been with men who were cruel to me. But after this man struck me, something changed. I felt my life turn upon a different course.

  Cory was buttoning her blouse, looking embarrassed now. "I don't know why I did that," she said. In a matter of days she would leave for the States, and I never saw her again. "I guess I wanted to show you," she said, "that you aren't alone."

  SAN ANTONIO REACHES BACK TOWARD THE SIERRA, sloping upward from my house, and the next day I climbed farther into the district of San Antonio than I had ever climbed. I had never gone that way before, but on this day I decided to go. At first the children from my neighborhood followed as I climbed to the place where people lived not in houses but in adobe-like shacks, made of wood slats and clay, with no water or electricity. The children called out my name as they tagged along, but after a while, they began to turn back.

  I climbed to where the smell was terrible and I was surrounded by filth, droppings of all kinds—chicken, pig, goat, cow, human. I was struck by the stench of rotting meat, left out with no refrigeration, covered with maggots, the stink of rotting vegetables, of garbage, of all kinds of refuse, but I kept climbing.

  Children I'd never seen came alongside of me. These children were dirty, with snot on their faces and matted hair, and they pulled at my arms and legs. They followed me to the open sewer that separated San Miguel from the sierra. The open sewer was unbearable, and as I jumped across I was afraid that I would fall in. But the only way into the hills is to leap across it and so I leaped.

  I headed across the sierra where Trevor had told me not to go, where he said the murder of Sarah had taken place. I wasn't sure why I was going there, but I told myself it was to pick Wildflowers. In truth I had no intention of picking flowers. Something drew me to these arid hills and I knew I had to go. I tried to keep the tales from Trevor out of my mind as I climbed higher and higher into the sierra in the heat of the day, away from town.

  As I walked I passed Mexicans herding sheep, carrying dried twigs back from the hills. I saw boys kicking soccer balls and women walking with jars of water on their heads. But soon I was on a trail that followed the edge of the sierra, and there were no more people. I could hardly see the town as I climbed. I thought about Sarah having her throat sliced, and at first I was frightened.

  Then I saw the hummingbird. It was a green hummingbird, translucent, vibrant, its color that of emeralds as it hung, suspended in midflight, over the heart of a yellow cactus flower in the sun.

  I know something about hummingbirds. Their hearts beat a thousand beats per minute. They are so frail that if you hold one in your hand, it will die of fright. Theirs is one of the most delicate beauties in nature. Yet they have enormous strength. Try flying backwards or dangling in midair. It is more difficult than forward motion. I was once told that hummingbirds expend more energy for their weight than any other living creature, that if harnessed they could solve the world's energy problems.

  But to harness that beauty is to destroy it. I stood perfectly still—my own heart beating—calm and unafraid in front of a force of nature, a gemlike green bird, suspended before me, fragile yet strong.

  Then it occurred to me that I was being watched. I don't know how I knew this, but I felt eyes upon me. I didn't know fr
om where. It was just a sense that someone was out there, watching me. I climbed farther and then I stopped.

  At the mouth of a cave about a hundred yards away, an old woman stood. She wore a white shawl over her head, but I could see that her hair was jet black, even though her face was wizened and she appeared incredibly old. I waved and she extended her arms toward me, not in a welcoming gesture, really, but almost in benediction.

  I moved toward her, but she raised her palms and motioned for me to stop. I did not come closer, but I stared. I could not help feeling that I had seen her somewhere before, that I knew her, though I was sure it could not have been in this place or even in this time. I turned for an instant to look at the trail behind me, and when I looked back toward her, she was gone.

  IN MY APARTMENT IN NEW YORK I SURROUND myself with familiar things. Pictures of my family, mementos from friends, angels I collect to guard over me. There is a picture of my grandmother's family, her ten brothers and sisters, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather, shortly after their arrival from Russia. They are in front of a backdrop, a bucolic setting of a picket fence, rosebushes, a cloudy summer sky—a setting none of them would ever know. They pose turn-of-the-century style, hands on each other's shoulders, sister to brother, mother to father. These are people who belong to one another.

  My great-grandmother looks rigid, severe. She will die an early death. My great-grandfather is different. There is something sensual in his lips, a warmth to his eyes. I would marry him if I could. But the children seem to take after the mother. No one is smiling. It does not look as if they have much fun. Many of them are twins. Buni and Dave. Herman and Hezi, each with a single blond curl, thick as an ice cream cone, rolling down his forehead, who opened a lumber yard together at the end of the First World War. My grandmother, Lena, whose twin, Mary, died shortly after birth. Now as I write, Dave is ninety-nine and paralyzed with a stroke. All the others are dead. Eva, Morris, Hannah. My uncle Dave told me once that his first memory was this: In his town in the Ukraine, when he was six, he buried a dog alive in the mud. When he told me, he laughed out loud. I cannot imagine having a first memory like this.

  My first memory is of my mother. We are living on Roscoe Street, which means I am less than two, and my mother says I cannot remember this, but I am sure I do. We are going somewhere. I am dressed in blue and my mother wears beige. She is yelling at me, telling me terrible things, and I am not crying. I am stubborn, standing still. When I tell this to my mother, she says I am a liar. She says I have made it up. Pure invention. I never raised my voice to you, she says.

  In my apartment there are pictures of my mother, with her long red hair, riding a pony. Another picture of her, older, in a cowgirl outfit, waving a hat, looking incredibly slim and beautiful. And then later still, a woman with gardenias in her hair. And there is that picture of my father, cigarette in his mouth, in front of a Model T, still a gay bachelor, years before they met.

  All of this is in my memory now. I have brought nothing with me. No pictures of friends, dead pets, old boyfriends, parents, nephews, siblings, the house I grew up in. It is all behind me. In memory and remembrance. I have brought nothing to recall my former life, none of the smells or textures or tastes or faces or roads or landscapes I have known before.

  Sometimes at night I lie awake and try to remember a certain person's features. Or his scent. There was a man I loved. Not the one who hit me, but another. And I try to piece him together, like a jigsaw, but I cannot find his substance. I try to do the same with my family, but I feel orphaned, adrift. Sometimes I think there are ghosts in my room. I have felt, from time to time, my grandmother's presence. But even the ghosts are insubstantial as ghosts. My life has lost its résumé, its vita, its biographical note.

  Like Lupe I exist here in the present. Lupe knows who she is only by what is whispered to her, what people have said. She does not know who she really is and what she will become. She makes up more stories for me. Her mother grows more beautiful, her father wealthier, with a ranch the size of Texas, her grandmother crueler by the day. I invent for her incredible loves I have known, a happy childhood, a brilliant career. But they are all the lies we use to prop ourselves up and I do not know why we need them.

  ***

  I began to learn things from the Mexicans. The brujas, or witches, live in the sierra, and they can cast spells. Since some of the women of San Antonio had seen me climbing in the afternoons, they stopped to tell me things. They told me what to look for to find out if a curse had been placed on my head. My fruit would be full of worms. I wouldn't be able to light the fire. Plants would wither at my touch. They shared with me their fears. A howling dog was a dead man's song. If you fell down on a dark road, part of your body would go to hell.

  I had not been living there long when a dead bird appeared, wings opened, nailed to a tree across from my house. One of the women stopped me on my way to market and pointed to the dead bird. She said that someone had put a curse on my house, but I had no idea who. I was told that a white witch was trying to counteract the bad spells, but I had to beware of the one who put the curse.

  Early each morning noises woke me—running water, children playing, a bleating lamb. Every morning Lupe came to my house with one or more children. She handed me coffee and brought fresh flowers. One day I told her what the women said about the curses and she shook her head. "You are good in your heart," she said. "No curse is stronger than a good heart." In the morning I saw that the dead bird was gone and a red powder, like paprika, had been sprinkled on the tree. When I asked Lupe about it, she just smiled. "You are safe here," she said. "Trust me."

  I went to Lupe for things I needed. For washing clothes I could not get clean, for cooking rice and making fideo soup—a soup with thin noodles. One afternoon when I wasn't feeling well, I left Lupe a note which I wrote in my then ungrammatical Spanish. It read, "If you are going to market, could you bring me some eggs, mangoes, and drinking water." I enclosed a hundred pesos. Later that day I found on my counter a plucked chicken, salad, and a six-pack of Dos Equis, plus change. When I saw Lupe next I thanked her for going to market for me and asked if she'd had difficulty with the note I'd left. She nodded and looked away as if she did not want to embarrass me.

  Whenever I went to Lupe's, she slid her body through the door so I could not see inside. Once I said to her, "Lupe, I have already been inside. You don't have to hide anything from me."

  She shook her head. "It is not for someone like you to see." But slowly she let me in.

  I never went farther than I was invited. It took weeks to get past the first rooms she shared with José Luis and the three smallest children and the pictures of naked women. The three oldest children, the teenage girls, all of whom went to school every day, slept in a smaller room with a curtain for a door and one tiny window. One day when I ran out of cooking gas, I went next door to ask Lupe to help me find the gas man. The teenagers were home and they invited me in. They pulled back the curtain to their room and I sat down on their big bed. The room was infested with flies, but all their clothes were kept neatly washed and folded in trunks. Only a curtain separated them from the outside. I asked if that was enough and they rubbed their arms. "When it is cold," said Maria Elena, the oldest one, who was very tall and much too thin, "it can be terrible."

  I knew Lupe for a long time before she invited me into her kitchen. It wasn't really a kitchen, though. The stove was a small pile of bricks where she burned coals. Pots and pans of rice and beans sat uncovered while flies hovered, and Lupe kept swishing them away with her hand. Buckets of water stood filled with dirty dishes. There was no icebox, no sink. "Where do you wash?" I asked, and Lupe took me out back. There would be no more secrets between us now.

  In the yard I saw the wood-plank lean-to with a washbasin where water ran. Toward the back of the lean-to, near the wall that divided my house from hers, a slab of wood rested across a wooden seat; I knew this was their toilet. "Lupe," I asked, dismayed, "where do you bathe?
"

  She pointed to the washbasin. "In cold water?" She nodded and suddenly I saw she was ashamed. "The Señora says she will build us a bathroom when she is done constructing the apartments," she said, trying to save face, but she and I both knew that the Señora would never give Lupe a bathroom.

  "You may bathe in my house whenever you wish," I told her.

  She looked surprised. "There are too many of us."

  "Whenever I go into town, all of you may bathe," I told her, and she understood that I meant this.

  On Saturday night I went to the jardín, trying to decide if I wanted to go to La Fragua for a drink, when I saw Guillermo, the photographer who had stood me up when I first arrived in San Miguel. He saw me as well and came over. He sat down beside me. "I am sorry about our date," he said. "Something came up."

  "Oh, it's all right," I told him.

  "I am married," he said. "I have two children. I probably would have slept with you if I had picked you up, so I thought it was better if I didn't."

  "What makes you think I'd sleep with you?" I asked indignantly.

  "You are lonely," he said. "I can tell."

  For some reason I started to cry. In fact I began to sob right there in the jardín, and Guillermo didn't know what to do with me. He let me cry and then offered to drive me home. But I preferred to walk. I walked down the hill and crossed through the neighborhood of the rich people. I cut through the hole in the wall and rushed into my apartment just as the rains came. It wasn't long before the lights went out and I had still forgotten to buy candles. I sat alone in the dark, drinking Kahlua.

  Soon I heard laughter and voices, one of which was not unfamiliar. I pulled back the curtain and saw beneath the eaves Lupe's oldest, thin daughter, Maria Elena, soaking wet, in the arms of a boy I'd seen visiting her before. I wondered if they had been the lovers I'd heard when the lights went out for the first time. They must have seen me pulling back the curtain, because soon after I closed it, they were gone.