Heartland

by Ana Simo

  Now that I could wheel myself to the toilet, McCabe spent less time with me. I could see her walking around the garden in the early morning, even under the drizzle, until the FedEx man drove in with a packet of her overnight letters from New York. He would return at noon to pick up the load she was sending back. This was the busiest time of the year for art merchants, she said, when I asked about the increased activity. She always answered my questions in a clear, concise way. I would even say truthful if I were a jury member, although she rarely initiated a conversation. At first, I was careful not to ask her too many questions, even rhetorical ones, to launch a conversation, because questions are far more revealing than answers. Boredom made me relax my rule, but only after she had pronounced the words “the woods of chance,” and began to shed her Magdalene habit, of which only her nightly bandaging of my feet remained. Any day, I expected her to tell me that she had to go back to New York City. My only hope was to be on my feet at least two days before her (our?) return. I couldn’t think of a way to kill her from a wheelchair.

  I felt no ressentiment. McCabe had snuffed it out when she put her finger on chance. Blindly. By chance. I forgave her on that day for anything she may have done (she, personally, distinctly, and through her, the first McCabe, the one whose execution I still thought would set me free). I had forgiven her, even as my overfilled bedpans allowed her to play the Magdalene a while longer. Her presence did not bother me. It actually put me into a comfortably neutral gear, equidistant between happiness and sadness, boredom and excitement, vigil and sleep. She was now cutting some yellow roses from the top of the bush, which she could reach with her long arms. Those were not my secateurs in her hands. That is, the Judge’s secateurs, which I kept under lock and key in the gardening shed. She was moving her lips. Singing? I put down the binoculars. Perhaps this was not meant to be a crime of pure reason.

  ‌18

  Pilgrims

  McCabe and Petrona spent the entire day before Thanksgiving in the kitchen. Mrs. Crandall joined them at noon. I saw her zoom up the driveway in her husband’s black Lincoln Continental, halt in a gravel-scattering screech, and run into the house carrying in her arms something bulky and heavy in a blanket. All day long I heard the three of them laughing among the clash of pots and pans. That is, I identified Petrona’s and Mrs. Crandall’s laughs, which I had heard before (Petrona’s at the kitchen phone, when she thought she was alone; Mrs. Crandall’s at the public library, all the time, shamelessly), and I assumed the third one must have been McCabe’s. It was the laughter of a crystalline soprano. As different from old McCabe’s ample contralto guffaws as a coyote’s howl from the twelve bells of St. Mary le Bow.

  Mrs. Crandall was the last person I expected to see in the house. This was a puzzling and unwelcome development. Had McCabe invited her? Why? When? Was this the first time she had been allowed inside the house, or had she been here before? I had not heard her voice inside it, or the voice of any other stranger except the doctor. There had been whispers during the first days after I had regained consciousness, but I could not tell dream from reality then.

  At noon I heard Petrona leaving the lunch basket outside my room, as usual. I instantly wheeled myself to the door, hoping to cross-examine her, but I was too late. When McCabe had brought me my breakfast at nine o’clock, as usual, she asked me how I’d spent the night, as she always did, and we said something about the weather. Not a word about Mrs. Crandall or the upcoming kitchen activities. I would now have to wait until the evening to ask her. Directly, or deviously? I had not confronted this dilemma since we had settled into our dispassionate domestic routine. I felt rusty.

  Evening was when McCabe and I spent some time together. She would sit next to me by the window, scanning the sky with the Judge’s binoculars and jotting remarks in the small notebook she always carried. When it rained, we would play Chinese checkers. That soon began to bore me. The only unknown was the speed with which my blacks would slaughter McCabe’s reds. “Don’t you feel sorry for them?” I asked her, after one notably swift carnage. “Someone has to win,” she answered indifferently. I found a dusty Scrabble set that the Judge had wedged between Toynbee’s A Study of History and Carlyle’s The French Revolution. Scrabble would expand McCabe’s vocabulary. I would have to let her win now and then to keep her interested. Fear proved stronger than boredom in the end. I couldn’t even bring myself to touch the letters. Was it just a reading game, or could it be considered a form of writing? I had not tested my illness since that Sunday evening in New York when I lost nouns, the last words I could still write.

  After birdwatching or Chinese checkers, we would have dinner on the Judge’s desk, from a cart Petrona would leave outside the door before going home. She was surpassing herself in the cooler days of November. We ate pozole, choucroute, boeuf bourguignon, an airy arroz con pollo, polenta with mushrooms. I decided to give her a Christmas bonus out of my own pocket. To reward her improved cooking, and also to get her on my side for when the time came. The wines were cannily chosen, too. Was it Petrona, or McCabe who picked them? Both were wine illiterates. I never asked. I didn’t even care anymore how they could get into the wine cellar while I was still holding the only key. The endgame was approaching. Besides, I confess that I enjoyed my nightly oenological surprises.

  After dinner, I would choose music for McCabe. Easy things at first, like Chopin’s mazurkas. She would sit in a straight-backed chair, her long legs stretched before her, crossed at the ankles. If asked, she would say this one was very nice, and that one she did not understand, and that other one she liked less than the one she had heard a week earlier. Since I had already forgotten which was which, and she could not remember titles or composers, she would whistle the music for me. She was an accomplished, pitch-perfect whistler. She spoke using two hundred words at most, but had the instinct of a good hunting dog if dogs hunted music, not ducks.

  On Thanksgiving Eve, when it got too dark for McCabe to scan the sky for laggard flocks, we dined on a pumpkin velouté soup (a Mexican standard reinterpreted with a delicate French technique. Petrona astounded me—I did not think McCabe, much less Mrs. Crandall, could have pulled this off), braised quail and jasmine rice, and leeks au gratin. The wine was a Cahors Clos Triguedina 1998. Two bottles. Dessert was an upside-down pineapple cake. “Is this our Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked in my most inoffensive voice, fishing for information about Mrs. Crandall’s presence and the unusual kitchen activity, which the size and art of this dinner alone could not explain, since Petrona had been gradually exceeding herself on both counts for the past month. “It’s only Thanksgiving Eve,” said McCabe firmly. Was she dumb, or just a bad liar? Unable to tell, I uncorked the Cahors, tasted it, and declared it extraordinary. She smiled indulgently, as she often did, lately.

  There was a prodigious amount of food on the table that evening. Dinner lasted more than three hours. “All we’re missing now is the flying hog,” I quipped when the wine went to my head. McCabe’s face suddenly became so pale and translucent that when she drank wine to hide her perturbation I could see it swirling inside her mouth. I showed her the Judge’s translation of Rabelais’ Quart Livre, one of the few works of fiction on his bookshelves. The skin on her face slowly recovered its normal opacity and hue. Her hands were greasy from the quail, she said, so she did not want to touch the book. I opened it to an illustration of the monstrous, bejeweled hog flying over the andouille army opposing that of Pantagruel. The andouille warriors were depicted throwing off their weapons and falling on their knees, their hands joined together in silent adoration of the winged hog, on whose golden collar the Ionic inscription ΥΣ ΑΘΗΝΑΝ (“a hog teaching Minerva”) could be read. McCabe examined the illustration for a long time, while chewing on the tiny quail bones. She asked me to tell her the story, because she would never be able to read a book as old and valuable as this. “Put it back on the shelf. I’m afraid of an accident,” she said, her voice raspy from all the eating and drinking. I obeyed and she
relaxed on her seat, attacking another portion of quail.

  I told her about the battle between the scholarly giant and the tripe sausages, halted by the grizzly hog flying from the north, making up half of it: my forgetfulness matching McCabe’s ignorance. When she asked for more, I narrated young Gargantua’s culinary excesses, which I envied and remembered better. Soon I was also eating the quail with my fingers. We were not piggish, McCabe and I, even if we used our fingers to separate the flesh from the bird’s dainty skeleton. Forks and knives were still used for the rice and the leeks; dessert spoons, for the cake. McCabe followed the story as avidly as she was eating the bird. She was starved, not just for food, but for words.

  We ate and drank everything on our table—and on Gargantua’s—to the last crumb and drop: our bird flesh and bones, caramelized fruit, flaming soup, the thick and velvety Cahors, and his sausages, boars, hams, eels, cheeses, and barrels of cheap wine. The table was a battlefield littered with bones, the white tablecloth soaked in Cahors blood. I wished McCabe were the size of a quail, so I could snap her neck, dismember her body with my own hands, eat her meager flesh, and hide her skeleton in this miniature Antietam. The perfect, effortless crime. But McCabe was a giant when measured against the average quail, and even compared to me, slowly shrinking in my wheelchair as my inactive muscles and bones atrophied.

  My eyelids felt heavy. When I woke up, my forehead was encrusted with quail bone shards. I must have dropped it on the table with a loud thump, like a reverse wax seal. McCabe was standing next to me with a glass of water. I drank it. After thanking her for the pleasant evening and wishing her a good night’s sleep, I wheeled myself into the bathroom to empty my painfully full bladder and pick the bone shards off my forehead. When I emerged, ten minutes later, all signs of our banquet were gone. The dining table was, once more, the Judge’s desk. All lights were off, except for a table lamp at the far corner. I was alone. As I was wheeling myself to the bedroom, I heard a rustle. McCabe was sitting in the dark, in her music-listening chair. It was past one in the morning. I was exhausted. I should have refused to choose music for her that night.

  We ended up listening to César Franck’s Symphony in D minor. I had been tempted to play it for her before, but always held back at the last minute. She was not ready for it, I thought. The first time was precious. Unrepeatable. What if she just heard a jumble of sounds, but not music? Worse, what if she tried to make sense of it with the only building blocks she had (implanted in her brain via countless elevator, movie, TV, Top 40 and airplane exposures) and re-composed Franck’s wrenchingly sublime cry into a cheap, weepy soundtrack? I could not risk that. This was music I had listened to hundreds of times since I first found it at the Elmira public library, at the age of fifteen, long before Mrs. Crandall dreamt of marrying Mr. Crandall and moving here from… where? I had sensed, obscurely, from the first time I saw her, that Mrs. Crandall was not an Elmiran by birth. Only now, while fingering the archaic Franck CD, did my mind gel around the fact of Mrs. Crandall’s questionable origins. Questionable not because she was from somewhere else, but because she was insufficiently so.

  While pretending not to be impressed, Elmira secretly embraced with pride those it considered the true foreigners in their midst—from Chicago, New York, Boston, and, when it existed, St. Louis—all wealthy, white, and inaccessible. That’s how Elmira dealt with the truly foreign, whether human or meteorological (such as the news that Elmira would become a new Atlantis). Spics, niggers, Chinks, wogs, etc., were not foreign, but alien. They need not be discussed here.

  But beyond the truly foreign and the alien lay the disdained: the small towns on the far edges of the county whose inhabitants Elmira classified in two distinct categories: the unwashed and semiliterate who liked it there (and which Elmira, while avoiding them in person, endowed from a distance with all manner of folkloric virtues), and those who dreamt of becoming Elmirans. Mrs. Crandall pertained to this last category, as revealed by her rebellious buttocks. Her rise to more or less full Elmiran-hood must have been arduous and dangerous. She began acquiring an Amazonian grandeur in my mind at that moment, a new Liberty Leading the People. Transfixed by the image of Mrs. Crandall, splendidly barefoot and bare-breasted, charging forward over a barricade and a pile of heroic corpses, I recklessly put the Franck CD in the player.

  The first chords brought me back to the room. McCabe was staring at me, but quickly looked away. I must ask her what Mrs. Crandall was doing in our kitchen, I thought as I let the moment slip away. Then the music swept into the room, dwarfing us, taking control. Free will is a joke, little human quail, it said. Before surrendering, I managed to position my wheelchair across from McCabe. Those were our usual seats, at opposite angles, separated by a red oriental rug and a low table where I kept the books I was reading, now all from the Judge’s bookshelves (I had not asked McCabe to get me books from the public library, wanting to keep her out of the public eye). The books between us were old and opulently bound, books I would never have read on my own, or even held in my hands, such as the account of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, and Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War.

  When the music stopped, McCabe’s eyes were closed. I could not tell if she was awake or sleeping. “What do you think?” I said, and then, when she did not answer: “Did you like it?” She opened her eyes. She looked tired, or sick. I offered her a glass of water. She declined it. In all my preparations to get rid of her, it had never crossed my mind that McCabe could get sick, could die a natural death in a hospital. “It’s too intimate,” she finally said. I saw the intimacy of her naked, lifeless body under the hospital sheets, with only her hands and face uncovered. “That music,” her voice echoed, as if I were waking up from anesthesia. “It’s too intimate.”

  Shame does make your face burn. Mine did. I had been caught crossing a line I had not seen. I apologized repeatedly until McCabe’s calm gaze stopped me. Then I apologized for apologizing. I did not tell her the one thing that might explain my faux pas, and at the same time render it more intolerable: César Franck’s symphony had been my secret soundtrack for Bebe, as it had been, earlier, for Glorita. Telling her would have been “too intimate,” nauseatingly icky, and turned me into a creep—which I am not, in spite of everything I have confessed so far. More importantly, it would have discredited me in her eyes. Turning this sublime monument of the Western musical canon into a private, jerk-off soundtrack was bad taste of the worst order, the kind that makes white people laugh, and spics cry, and thus confirms the subhuman nature of the latter along with their propensity to confuse emotional bulimia with culture.

  There was one last, dishonorable reason for not having told McCabe all about César Franck’s musica interrupta: I was afraid she would beat me up. Old McCabe could still be lurking somewhere inside this pale creature. The bridge of my nose had thickened permanently after Old McCabe had punched me, the day after our arrival. It was a subtle change, probably invisible to all but me, for whom it was (and still is, even in my terminally disembodied state) a disfigurement. Every day I checked my nose in the mirror a dozen times, repulsed at the new Hottentot bone with its tiny incongruous bump, until little by little, I forgot the bridge of my original nose, narrow, straight, perfect. A Madison Avenue plastic surgeon I consulted under an alias, by phone, said that to restore my nose to its original shape he needed a clear picture of it, in profile. I did not have one. The second-best option was to find my birth nose among the three hundred and forty-seven in a catalogue he sent. Not only I did not find it, but hours of studying hundreds of similar noses destroyed the memory of mine.

  Underneath every shameful secret there always lies another. While César Franck’s Symphony was my secret soundtrack, there was another behind that, even more secret, one that I had denied all my life. It was an old song that my grandmother first heard as a child in La Esperanza, a syrupy, heart-wrenching bolero. I listened to it as much as to the Franck piece, and for much the same reason, though at the time, I never
allowed myself to think of Glorita, or Bebe, or anyone or anything else while I did. I emptied my heart and my mind first, as they say you must do when listening to Bach’s partitas, to better appreciate their architecture.

  I was not ashamed of using Franck’s music for my own tawdry ends. Only of being found out by the Big White Eye, whether Cyclopean (attached to the flesh and blood of individuals) or diffusely societal. However, my ultra-secret bolero triggered such shame and fear that I did not even want myself to know that I was listening to it. Decoupling sense and consciousness was a Shangri-La specialty: we were all born with that gift, although Rafael and I excelled at it. This little song had to be decoupled for security reasons: it unveiled my spic soul. If the knowledge that you listened to it—or even knew that it existed—fell into the wrong hands, you could be squashed. I kept the bolero recording hidden under a loose floorboard at the bottom of my closet, not even trusting my parents, or my grandmother, or the Cohens with my secret. It would have given them the same intimate knowledge of me that I had of them. They used to listen to that bolero when I was little, but then they stopped, because it made the men sad, and the women smile at them indulgently to hide their even deeper sadness.

  If I could have told McCabe about the bolero that evening, confessed that there was something even more shameful and inappropriate than the Franck symphony. If I had played it for her then, would she still have found the symphony “too intimate,” and would that have changed anything because removing even a tiny cog alters the flow of events, as Hollywood has been warning us for two centuries? I did not have the choice that night, because I had forgotten the bolero. It just came back to me a moment ago in this cold, dusty landscape in which the underside of a mattress is my last sky. I am listening to it in my mind right now.