Heartland

by Ana Simo

  Now that Serafina’s improved brain became his only reward, Don Manuel redoubled his efforts. He drew up a curriculum, which included geography and history, but excluded Greek and Latin, which were fit only for gentlemen. Serafina would get free lessons only if she accepted his study plan. She agreed after he promised to continue teaching her reading, writing, and arithmetic. “Useful skills for a bodega owner,” her mother had said. Her dream had been to turn their shack into a dry-goods store. For that purpose she left Serafina the half of her savings that did not go to pay for her own burial. History and geography made Serafina sleepy. She concentrated on keeping her eyes open in the afternoon heat, while Don Manuel droned on about Julius Caesar, raising his voice above the swarm of flies circling their heads. She was glad that he was so long-winded. You did not have to listen to every word to be able to answer his questions. Serafina learned to nap with her eyes open, a few seconds at a time. Don Manuel was never able to catch her, no matter how quickly he swiveled to face her and throw a tricky question at her. Once, Serafina had no answer; she did not even understand the question. She gained time by furrowing her brow and setting her mouth in a snarl, as Don Manuel did when he was in deep thought. She then rhetorically repeated his question, and reiterated it in the affirmative, embellishing it with the sonorous, well-rounded subordinate clauses opening into more subordinate clauses so dear to Don Manuel. For content she used her common sense. When she stopped to catch her breath, three minutes later, Don Manuel dismissed her for the day, although she had just arrived. That night Don Manuel sat on his narrow bed in the dark looking at the fireflies burning in the tall grass outside his window. Now and then, one would fly into the room and then fly back out after it realized where it was. Whenever he had to bare his soul to himself, as he put it, Don Manuel would sit on his bed in the dark. He couldn’t do so in the front room, even with the window shuttered and the door closed. He was dazzled and angry at the way Serafina had bluffed her way out, dazzled at her brilliant sophistry, her daring, her accurate channeling of his voice and intellect, and angry at her for the theft of all he had. Anger soon turned into fear and fear into self-pity, always the last stop in Don Manuel’s emotional turmoil. Could Serafina be an incubus, or maybe a succubus? “Why didn’t You give me a teacher of Don Manuel’s caliber when I was this wretched girl’s age, eh?” he demanded, raising his voice, underlining and spitefully capitalizing the “You.” The half-bottle of rum he had drunk made him combative. At two-thirds, he turned weepy, engaging in a dialogue with his younger selves and several white women and boys who had spurned him in Salamanca and San Cristóbal de La Habana. The last drop of the bottle had a calming effect. He had dissected his life many times before, but Serafina had handed him a particularly sharp scalpel. He was sixty-five years old. He might not be alive a year from now. There was no time left for his dreams to come true. Serafina was his last opportunity. His genius would be recognized in her. He would be remembered as her intellectual master.

  When Don Manuel woke up at noon the next day, unsteady and reeking of rum, his ego had shifted from the aspirations of his younger self to the possibilities of the one he now called, with a touch of hauteur, “my pupil.” As often happens when someone gives up what he holds most valuable, he felt an unknown lightness, which he mistook for happiness. Serafina knocked fearfully on his door at their agreed time, convinced that she would be dismissed for good, or roundly scolded. She was embarrassed when he opened the door wearing a dirty nightgown. He noticed, and hid most of his body behind the door. “There will be no lesson today. I am not well. Come back tomorrow,” he said, handing her the filthy clothes he wore every day. She was so relieved that she immediately ran home to wash his clothes and hang them in the sun, instead of finding out what had happened to Tirant lo Blanc after he saved Constantinople from the Ottoman Turks. The shirt and undershirt she had to wash and bleach in the sun many times that afternoon and the next morning, until their dull grey turned into a pure white. It was only after the last garment had been ironed and folded that she opened the book and found out that Tirant lo Blanc had died in his bed overlooking the Bosphorus. Serafina was disappointed that his cause of death was a respiratory infection, not a battlefield wound. The violent reaction of Tirant’s beloved princess Carmesina, on the other hand, pleased her. Carmesina kissed Tirant’s cold corpse with such force that she broke her nose, and her blood flowed so abundantly that her eyes and face were bathed red.

  That afternoon, Don Manuel made Serafina wait outside his front door while he put on the clean clothes. Before the lesson started, he announced that he would also teach her the rudiments of Anatomy, Physiology, and Philosophy. She wondered what the three were, and why only rudiments, but dared not ask, still afraid he might be toying with her before kicking her out. (Serafina knew nothing about her mother’s “sodomite” leverage.) Don Manuel explained to her the theory of humors, which overlapped all three of these sciences. Serafina paid close attention this time. This theory might be the key to the acrid odor that emanated from the old man, even after he had bathed (his hair was still damp) and was wearing clean clothes. On her way out, he gave her his soiled nightgown and cap to wash and iron. From then on, she washed his clothes once a week.

  One afternoon, Don Manuel did not answer the door. Serafina peeked through a crack in his bedroom wall and saw him sprawled on the floor, holding an empty bottle of rum. She forced open the bedroom window and climbed through it. Don Manuel was dead. She did not need his anatomy lessons to know. She had seen her mother die, and she had killed many chickens and one pig. In the three years since she first washed his clothes, he had taught her everything he knew, and she had also learned from his books many things he did not know or had forgotten. The art of writing love letters was the only thing that she was unable to learn. He tried to teach her, hoping to put her to work for him in the port market, where the novelty of a female scribe would have made him some money. Her letters were too short and to the point, and without the indispensable flourishes. When forced, she would try to add some, but they would be either obscure or inappropriate. Instead of flowers, birds, butterflies, dew, sunsets, fair hands, rivers, and so on (he had gone so far as to draw a list for her), she would weave in dogs, pigs, hay, gold doubloons, mud, and buttons. “These are love letters, not a shopkeeper’s account book,” he told her with his usual distaste (his decision to unselfishly devote his last years to Serafina’s education had increased his dislike of her in direct proportion to the admiration of his, and God’s, handiwork). “I am going to be a shopkeeper,” Serafina thought, flattered by Don Manuel’s conclusion, but careful to keep her mouth shut. For the past six months, Don Manuel had nothing left to teach her except for those silly love letters. Everything that was left to learn in his shack she had extracted herself from his books. Now, it was not so much what the books said, but what they left out. Serafina had discovered recently, in awe, the gaps and silences in books. She was now reading between words, beyond words, and without words. It was great fun: Serafina was still a child. She could do it from memory, while washing and ironing, cooking (she had begun selling cod fritters in the market and was now delivering two dozen every Thursday morning to one of her laundry clients), walking, and even sleeping.

  By dying when he did, Don Manuel decreed the end of Serafina’s formal education and the beginning of her adult life. Serafina was happy that the choice had not been hers. The inevitable felt luckier. She buried Don Manuel under her mother. At first, she had found it distasteful, but a separate grave cost too much, and the pauper’s field was out of the question. Besides, she had scrubbed him well before putting him there, and it was only provisional. Once she had the money, she would move her mother into a bigger, nicer, plot. Serafina sorted out Don Manuel’s books, moving the good ones to her shack, and burning in a bonfire the stupid and fraudulent ones. The complete works of Thomas Aquinas perished. Tirant lo Blanc, The Praise of Folly, Aldrovandi’s gorgeously illustrated Ornithologiae, and the treatises on
anatomy, physiology, astronomy, geometry, and mathematics survived. So did Don Manuel’s French, English, and Dutch dictionaries and books. When there was little else left to teach, he had plunged her into those three languages, which he could read, but not speak. That did not bother him. He considered all languages to be dead tongues, interesting only in the books that were written in them (Don Manuel did not much care for people). Serafina, on the contrary, had been able to conduct simple conversations in all those languages since she was little. San Cristóbal de La Habana’s port area was a Tower of Babel in the early 1600s, and her mother’s night clients spoke a cacophony of Malaccan Dutch, French Creole, Wild Geese mercenary English, and all kinds of Portuguese and Spanish pidgin. Learning to read in what Don Manuel reverently called “the major European languages,” even if slowly, and aided by a dictionary, was the most useful thing that he taught Serafina. Books in those languages were at once strange and obvious. So was truth, Serafina concluded many years later. After swearing her to secrecy, Don Manuel showed Serafina several foreign books that did not bear on their title page the name of the author or the printer or the place of publication. “They don’t want their nails and testicles pulled out by our Holy Mother the Church,” he said, crossing himself. “News of the Index of Forbidden Books takes a long time to reach us. So it is prudent to hide all foreign books, including the dictionaries. You don’t want a nosy neighbor to see them,” he warned her. “How could a neighbor tell, since they were all illiterate?” Serafina was going to ask Don Manuel the day she found him dead, although what she really wanted to know was why Don Manuel was always so frightened. He would have claimed it was just because of his questionable books, concealing his deeper terror that his sodomite past (he had been too sick lately for this to be more than a fond memory) would surface if his books attracted attention, or that some long-forgotten boy uttered his name while being tortured or serviced by a faggot priest, the worst and most common kind. Then he would be accused of heresy in addition to sodomy, ensuring an even slower and more horrible death.

  Serafina was fearless, like Tirant. Unlike him, however, she was a realist. When she became one of the richest traders on the island, few knew it because she was careful not to flaunt her wealth, or tie herself to any man. For the rest of her long life, she also kept her voracity for knowledge to herself along with all her foreign books, two thousand at last count, hidden in a priest hole she built with her own hands behind the massive mahogany armoire in her bedroom.

  ‌21

  Gone

  People always leave something behind when they go, a letter, dirty tissue, loose change, a gum wrapper. But not McCabe. It was as if she had never been in the house. As the sun began to set on Thanksgiving Day, I sat on the floor in front of the open refrigerator eating slices of supermarket ham and white cheddar with my fingers. I’ll eat here like a pig until McCabe shows up, I thought. “That’ll sure bring her back,” Reason remarked, blowing cigarette smoke in my face. “You don’t know why or where McCabe has gone,” she said, ignoring my protestations that McCabe must be back in New York City tending to her gallery. “Furthermore,” she added, lighting a fresh cigarette off the butt of the old one, “you don’t even know why you care.” That was preposterous. One thing I was absolutely certain about: I cared that McCabe had vanished because I was about to kill her. I needed her here for that purpose. This rational certainty was the cornerstone of our domestic happiness since my accident. Reason didn’t hear my indignant answer. She had returned to my frontal lobe, where she dwelled, having implanted her poisonous pods.

  The more rational a certainty, the harder it is to kill the vulture of irrational doubt circling overhead. The tools of reason fail: the hungry vulture just circles lower, excited by the stench of the logical brain. McCabe’s sudden absence, the clean blank page she left, the way she erased herself from the house, amplified the doubt, which was now being played inside my head by a full, bombastic symphonic orchestra, all 230 instruments in thickly imbricated harmony. It was, and it wasn’t, the “Finale” of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, in whose tragic reverse recapitulation Goebbels had found the equanimity to admit that two thousand years of Western history were in danger.

  I returned to my room on my hands and knees, oozing blood and pus. By the time I was soaking in the tub, my orchestra had stopped playing, and I, too, contemplated doubt with equanimity, even with pleasure. With the familiar (McCabe) gone, leaving a horrific chasm worming with serpents at the end of the map, doubt—musically implanted, repeated doubt—had become familiar. Why and where McCabe had gone, why she hadn’t told me, and why I cared now, seemed legitimate subjects of inquiry. Physical pleasure and its concomitant indolence fueled this benign view: the warm water luxuriously covered my body up to my throat. This was my first bath in a month. I left my feet out, propped on the tub ledge, wrapped in clean towels. Tomorrow I might get them wet and see what happened.

  I examined McCabe’s disappearance dispassionately. An emergency could explain the suddenness of her departure. Could it explain her silence, too? I imagined McCabe getting a dead-of-night phone call from her boy assistant: her gallery, along with Manhattan’s southern tip, set on fire by Caliphate terrorists, or flooded, or blown off (all of which had happened more than once before, although her gallery was unscathed each time). McCabe calling Elmira’s only cab and rushing to the state capital, where she rented a plane to fly her to Chicago (the lone commuter flight to that destination today, Thanksgiving Day, being at 7:00 p.m. instead of the usual 7:00 a.m., which I knew because I had been keeping tabs on all means of exiting Elmira, for my own sake). McCabe arriving in New York from Chicago to find the tip of the island in flames, or at least her gallery. McCabe caught up in the testosterone hysteria of the heroic rescuers, maybe even escorted away in handcuffs for trying to jump a Firecop barricade to save her precious Beuys, still in its German crate, or hurt by a falling cornice, or huddled with her lawyers and insurance people, unable to place the one call even mass murderers are entitled to, so she could let me know, out of common courtesy, her whereabouts. As I pulled myself out of the tub and onto the cold, tiled bathroom floor, I swore to stop scratching the bloody crust of McCabe’s disappearance. Pragmatism and action were all that mattered now. McCabe had to be brought back to the slaughterhouse.

  After sanitizing my feet with the washes and ointments in McCabe’s nurse’s bag and putting on a pair of clean white socks, I crawled on my belly and elbows from bathroom to bed to spare my knees, pushing the bag ahead of me with my forehead. My feet looked less unnatural than when I had taken off the bandages. Whether this was an objective fact or mere habituation, it’s hard to tell. My knees, though, looked like raw steak, with strips of dead, bruised skin still attached here and there. I treated them with whatever potions seemed to apply. The storm’s howl had turned into a spasmodic whistle. The rain had stopped. A thin sliver of the new moon peeked out from behind the slow-moving clouds, still low and dense like bags of coal, a reminder that the storm could resume if it wished. I fell asleep only after I swallowed a narcotic pill from my pillow cache.

  The phones were still dead the day after Thanksgiving. Petrona did not show up for work. The Little Ohio had risen higher than in the celebrated flood of 1863 when two-thirds of Elmira was buried in mud and left there because most able men were fighting with Grant in Vicksburg. Elmira was rebuilt on top of its own grave in brick this time, not wood, when the survivors returned. All day, the local radio played Perry Como and The Beatles in an orgy of self-congratulation disguised as public service. Churches vied with one another to offer sanctimonious, useless emergency services, generally involving prayers and donuts. Idiots who let their dogs and cats roam and shit everywhere pleaded tearfully for their safe return. The pièce de résistance, however, was The Witnessing, as the radio announcers solemnly called it, a fifteen-minute call-in segment every hour, during which the town’s remaining whites disgorged family memories of that great flood and heroic war. This is what we
have and you will never have: a genetic memory of Elmira’s foundation, and second foundation after the great flood. They hammered that in all day long without actually saying it. You just had to listen to their repressive gasps. Forbidden to call a nigger a nigger, a spic a spic, a wop a wop, etcetera, on the radio and in most public forums, Elmira’s whites had created a new tongue rich in elisions, and syntactic and semantic black holes, where the now unmentionable were buried and forgotten, as if they had never existed, with no markers left on their linguistic graves. The new flood was a time machine, a tongue-loosener, a fountain from which sprang a fraternity of pale hue. Elmira was jubilant.

  The Judge’s binoculars confirmed that the river was lapping at the base of the bridge, cutting off Round Hill from the town, just as the radio announced. Elmira’s Main Street, however, was nothing like the 1863 photographs I had seen at the local historical society as a child, when I still thought the word “Elmiran” applied to me, too. The windows of shops and parked cars glistened in the morning sun, intact. I could see three high-wheeled trucks slowly making their way from the county building to City Hall. Two rubber boats sat idle on one side next to a building, maybe waiting to ferry white flood victims to a church donut-prayer service. The Firecops were on their way, the radio trumpeted. Elmira could enjoy its day in the water.

  Looking at the rich brown river stew of mud and detritus swirling angrily at the Shangri-La bend, the last visible point from my window, I felt the full gravity of McCabe’s absence. Gravity in the physical, not just the moral, sense. Skull-crushing, eye-popping, Jupiterian gravity. Would killing her restore the universal laws of physics? My mind said, Yes, Yes, Yes, but my body said. No, Never. You will feel her weight until you die. It was around midday, and the sun seemed to stand still in the cloudless sky. I knelt in front of the window, looking at the river. My shadow was a tiny black circle around my knees. I vowed again to kill McCabe even if it was not to be a cold-blooded, remorseless, liberating crime, but a guarantee of everlasting suffering. Tears poured out of my eyes. They rolled down my face and dropped on my chest and onto the floor, unstoppably.