The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  Alex was no longer following the speakers. One after another, middle-aged white men had got up at the podium spouting rhetoric, mostly in English, though Alex had switched his headset to Spanish to help shut them out.

  Tell me, Alex, because I think people will find this pretty darn fascinating: How in bejesus did you end up in the mountains of Morazán running guns for the FMLN?

  Well, Peter, it was really my wife, María, who got me into it.

  Beside him María was taking notes, close enough for him to feel the heat off her, though the whole session she had hardly so much as glanced at him. Ghostly redolences of sweat wafted over from her, sharp and undoctored, that made something go weak in him.

  He took off his headset to make the effort, for María’s sake, to follow the current speaker. But he was speaking in French.

  María leaned over to him.

  “Is very interesting, no?” she whispered. “Is very important, this conference.”

  He had spent all summer reading about the Salvadoran war, when he should have been boning up on chlorofluorocarbons.

  “I have to admit I’m not quite following everything.”

  She tapped his headset.

  “You must use it for the French.”

  Maybe she was right; maybe this stuff was more important than he gave it credit for. What put him off about the environmentalists was the religion they made of things, how they seemed to have come back full circle to wood spirits and river gods, but maybe they were just correcting the great life-denying aberration that monotheism had been. Alex blamed a lot of things on monotheism—his messed-up sex life, for one.

  He’d put his headset back on.

  “Aleex!”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Is finished for coffee break. We must go.”

  They had set out refreshments in the concourse. Alex lit a cigarette—the place was already blue with smoke—and started beating a path to the coffee table. Along the way María ran into a fellow greenie, a tousled-haired Quebecois with the flimsy T-shirt and thin-legged jeans of the St. Lawrence bohemian set, and the two of them launched at once into animated French. Alex disliked the guy on sight. He had that natural elegance to him that Alex, all hulking shoulders and fumbling hands, could never aspire to.

  “Alex! Is that you?”

  He turned, and there coming toward him through the crowd, his hand already outstretched, was Félix. What was he doing here? Alex felt a moment of disorientation, as if he’d been caught at something shameful.

  “What a surprise! I didn’t know you were involved in this sort of thing.”

  They’d kept up their arrangement the entire summer. The more time they’d spent together, the more unsure Alex was about what they were up to.

  “You’re here alone?”

  The shadow that he always felt around Félix came over him. The shadow of those twenty-five dollars an hour.

  “No, no. With a friend.”

  There were introductions. María’s friend—Rudolphe, Alex got a snicker out of that, at least—hardly deigned to acknowledge him, turning at once to Félix.

  “Vous êtes du coté de la recherche?”

  Félix was in one of his business suits.

  “Non. De l’industrie.”

  There was an instant chill.

  “Ah, bon.”

  Rudolphe managed to hive off almost at once to a group that showed more promise, leaving Alex and María and Félix strangely islanded by the crowd. A feeding frenzy was in progress up at the refreshment table, with no chance of getting anywhere near it.

  “You are with an environmental group?” Félix asked María in English, pleasantly enough.

  “Oui,” she said, and didn’t offer anything more.

  Alex’s cigarette had burned down to his fingers but there were no ashtrays nearby to dump it in.

  “Félix and I met at Berlitz,” he said.

  María ignored him.

  “You are from a company?”

  “Yes.” Félix pulled a card from his pocket and handed it to her. “We make aluminum.”

  He didn’t seem quite so pleasant now. Alex could feel it, the iciness coming off him like an October frost.

  “You are against the agreement?”

  This wasn’t how you proceeded with someone like Félix.

  He smiled.

  “Not against. Just concerned. To see how it affects us.”

  “Is very important,” María said. “Is very new, this conference.”

  Félix looked at his watch. He was still smiling.

  “Ah, I must go,” he said, grasping Alex’s shoulder. “I will see you at our lesson.”

  Alex felt vaguely compromised when Félix had gone. A sourness hung between him and María and he had no idea how to get rid of it.

  He was still holding his fucking cigarette butt.

  “We must go back,” María said. “They are beginning.”

  The day was getting away from him. He glanced at his watch, a twelve-dollar Timex he’d finally broken down and bought, and a little buzzer went off at the back of his head.

  His appointment. He had completely forgotten about it.

  “Shit! Sorry. I just remembered something. I have to go.”

  María looked unfazed, as if he was not the sort to be counted on.

  “Your translation,” she said. “You must get your card.”

  It took him an instant to understand: his bloody headset.

  He untangled the thing from the pocket of his Windbreaker.

  “Here, you take it. You can bring the card tonight.”

  He felt a pang at the thought of leaving it, but she might actually show up if his faculty card depended on it.

  “You remember the address?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  For a moment, he dared to feel hopeful. He leaned out to kiss her, impulsively, and got her almost squarely on the lips.

  “Hasta esta noche.”

  “Sí, sí.” She had a startled look that pleased him. “Esta noche.”

  He hailed a taxi, his lips tingling. He still had the cigarette butt. It could be his last, he thought, suddenly full of resolve, and slipped the thing into his pocket for surety.

  – 2 –

  The cardinal rule of Alex’s therapy, which Dr. Klein had made crystal clear from the outset, was that Alex had to pay out of his pocket for any missed session. With luck he could still make the last twenty minutes or so, enough, he hoped, to meet whatever attendance requirements the doctor might have to satisfy with the Ministry of Health. Over the summer his sessions had moved from the rehab center beneath the Shriners into Montreal General proper, and he had the cab drop him at his usual entry point at Emergency, to save circling up the mountain to the main lobby. Six dollars with tip, the cab cost him, a blow, but much better than the forty-three a missed session would have run.

  The Emergency entrance led into the hospital’s labyrinthine basements, great engines humming away behind vented doors and orderlies in the pastel non-whites of medicine’s lower orders pushing bins stuffed with laundry and waste. The hospital was divided into wings that seemed to have no communication one with the other, trailing off into perpetual dead ends, though by now Alex was able to race through the place like the seasoned regular he was.

  He caught the elevators to B4, Psychiatry. The floor was divided between the doctors’ offices to one side and the ward to the other, behind an intercommed metal door that read KEEP CLOSED. B4 and After. Alex always expected some scene from Bedlam to reveal itself behind the metal door, though whenever he’d snuck a peek through the little viewing window, the hall beyond was always eerily empty and quiet. If not for the door it might have been hard to tell which side was which, most of the doctors he ran into across the way looking wild-haired or wild-eyed or hunched up over their charts with the squirreled intensity of escapees.

  Dr. Klein’s door, as usual, was ajar. Alex, his heart pounding by then and his armpits drenched with sweat, paused a momen
t to collect himself, then pushed through and said quickly, “Sorry I’m late.”

  Dr. Klein was staring out the window. As far as Alex knew there was nothing to see out there except some kind of storage yard boxed in by the hospital’s other wings. The doctor turned as Alex came in but instead of the tight, unrevealing quarter-smile he always had whenever Alex was late, his mouth opened an instant in what looked like surprise.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “I was at a conference,” Alex said, flustered. “I completely forgot.”

  “It’s fine. It’s fine.”

  Alex took off his jacket and shoes and lay down. After months of chafing at every reference to his lateness, he thought, It can’t be fine. If it was fine, then it meant nothing. If it meant nothing, then maybe all of this, all these days and weeks and months—as he’d always suspected; as he’d always feared—meant nothing as well.

  “Maybe it was because I was with María,” he started.

  He was glad he’d got María in off the top instead of having to finagle her in later. He wouldn’t have predicted it, but María had ended up dominating his time here. Meanwhile all the rest—Ingrid, Desmond, Liz—remained stagnating in the usual backwater where Alex kept them.

  He was waiting for Dr. Klein to pick up his cue.

  “We ran into another friend of mine,” Alex said finally. “Félix. It was a bit awkward.”

  Another pause, but then Dr. Klein said, “Félix?” with the irritating shorthand he had for flagging points he wanted elaborated, and Alex felt on familiar ground again.

  “Not a friend, really. A student. From Berlitz.”

  And so they began.

  María had come into their sessions through the sort of subterfuge Alex used to sneak in anything suspect, in this case by couching it in high-mindedness.

  “It just seems so self-indulgent,” he’d said, striking a new low for sleaze. “I think of my Salvadoran friend, and what she’s probably been through, and then of me lying here every day talking about my little problems.”

  “But you’re still here,” Dr. Klein had interrupted, in a rare instance of unvarnished impatience, which had shut Alex up. But once María had entered the picture he found any number of ways to obsess over her, dreams she’d figured in, anxieties she’d touched off, contact he’d made through her with his Feminine Archetype. It was mostly bogus, just a way of being with her in a way he couldn’t be in real life, yet often his family crept into things when she came up, oddly, since she wasn’t anything like them. Not his mother, who was as phlegmatic and un-Latin as he was; not either of his sisters, whom he could not recall having ever seen on a dance floor except maybe doing the chicken dance and who would surely have looked at him as if he were deranged had he ever tried to kiss them. But then maybe María was not like María either. Despite how energy flowed out from her like heat from a stove she had a strange reserve, as if there was something important she was holding back. It made him think of the Samnites, his mother’s people—they were tough mountaineers, not Latins at all. The Latins had conquered them, but they had held themselves apart. That was his mother through and through, beleaguered but unbowed.

  In El Salvador, rather more recently, there had been la Matanza, a great massacre of peasants after an uprising that had managed in a matter of weeks what four hundred years of colonization had not: the almost total assimilation of the country’s Indians, who’d been blamed for the revolt and had quickly erased every mark of distinction to save their lives. El Salvador was a country of half-breeds now, what María surely was: no more Latin than Alex, just another of the world’s conquered indigenes. He took heart from this at first, as if he’d discovered some secret of birth that threw over an insuperable obstacle to their coming together.

  “Yes, la Matanza,” María had said when he’d brought the subject up, in that pointed tone of hers. “Of course is very important.”

  And that had been the end of the matter.

  The problem with his own family, maybe, was that they weren’t anything at all. They didn’t eat well, as Italians should, weren’t especially good Catholics, had never been especially close. The only time he could remember his mother hugging him when he was a kid was when he’d got lost once at the Heinz picnic. He could still picture the instant when they’d been reunited, how her face had lit up, as if some child in her had got loose.

  He was still talking about Félix.

  “It’s a little surprising,” Dr. Klein said, sounding almost peeved, “that you’ve never mentioned him before.”

  Alex took some pleasure at that.

  “Oh? Do you think he’s important?”

  What he remembered most about his childhood now weren’t particular incidents but an atmosphere, pleasant enough when he was small but then growing thick with something, what he might call shame, but that at the time had seemed more particular, like an odor his family gave off. The worst had been when David had lost his arm—he still didn’t like to think about that. He had walked home from school after a field trip to find his brothers and sisters home instead of at work and his grandmother crying in the kitchen.

  “What happened?”

  “S’ha fatte male,” she said. He got hurt.

  He had to piece things together. Gus sat hunched at the kitchen table; Bruno sat in the living room, staring at the blank TV.

  “It was from the tractor,” Mimi said. “He must have grabbed the power takeoff.”

  What was the power takeoff?

  “Oh.”

  Later his parents returned and then the visitors came, people who at least weren’t crazy with hurt, who made the thing look almost bearable. But at some point the wailing started and Alex left the house. He wasn’t sure where was safe, and ended up in the doghouse with the dog. The place had a sharp, feral smell. He felt uncomfortable and false in there, in a way he couldn’t explain, and meanwhile the dog clearly resented him, shifting and turning and finally shambling outside.

  He had made his pact with God there, in the doghouse, but it was just a rattle of desperate promises, of privations, the priesthood, if this moment would pass. He had known it was for nothing. Whatever was out there in the night beyond the dark, he couldn’t feel it.

  He had an image of his father that Sunday kneeling in church and bawling like a child, there in front of everyone. But he could also see him, that same service, taking a toothpick from his pocket to clean out his ear—they might as well be animals, Alex had thought, they might as well just shit right there on the floor of the church.

  He had fallen silent. God forbid he should ever mention any of this stuff to Dr. Klein.

  “You were talking about Félix,” Dr. Klein said.

  “Sorry.” It was the stink of the doghouse somehow that always came back to him, how insufficient and wrong it had made everything feel. “I was thinking about my brother David.”

  He waited for it, the doctor’s flag.

  David?

  “I think our time’s up for today.”

  The doctor stood hovering next to Alex as he put on his jacket.

  “I’ll have to cancel our sessions for the rest of the week,” he said. “Something’s come up.”

  “Oh.” It felt like a punishment. “That’s fine.”

  “So I’ll see you again Monday.”

  The doctor was already closing the door behind him. Fuck you, Alex thought, wanting to kick him, to crack his skull, though knowing that Monday he’d be back.

  – 3 –

  Outside, his resolve already vanished, he lit up a cigarette at once. The sun had warmed the air to a stubborn October heat, though Alex caught a downdraft off the mountain that felt like winter crouching in wait. At least Jiri would be gone by the time he got home, he could be grateful for that. Jiri had moved in with him exactly around the time all the plumbing work had started—“Just for a couple of days,” he’d said—so that the past weeks had been hellish. By a stroke of luck some sort of domestic crisis had called him away to Toronto, where
his wife and son had decamped, just in time to leave Alex alone for his evening with María.

  He was still making his pilgrimages past Trudeau’s house. Across the way the Cuban consulate sat virtually unchanged from the spring, the upper windows still boarded and scorch marks from the firebombing still showing on the stone. Alex felt less pleased than he used to at Trudeau’s intimacy with the place: all summer long he’d seen the actions coming in against Fidel in his Amnesty updates, this one jailed for some leaflet, that one kicked out of his house or his job. It wasn’t the bone-crushing stuff of the big-league tyrannies, just this constant wearing away, a little message The Revolution sent to its dissenters that they were out of step. Alex knew the argument, the collective over the individual, but Trudeau had staked his whole career on the individual, then there he was pitching his tent across from Mr. Castro as if he were ready to receive the man at a moment’s notice.

  There was another collectivist living just up the street, Alex had learned, whom Trudeau was less likely to be inviting over any time soon: his old nemesis Lévesque. Alex hardly knew what to make of that. Even Alex, for all his disdain of Canadian politics, thought of the battle between these two in mythic terms, Goliath to David, Achilles to Hector, Apollo to Dionysus. Now they were both ensconced in their modest retirement homes—Trudeau, mind you, true to form, in a house of Architectural Significance while Lévesque, always the poor cousin, was in a condo building with all the personality of a Howard Johnson’s—not five hundred yards from one another, like the wolf and sheepdog in the cartoon Alex had watched as a kid who used every foul means to outwit one another all the day long but then punched the clock promptly at five and parted amicably. What made it even stranger was that the two of them were here on this unlikely stretch of busy road at the very foothills of Westmount, which rose up beyond Côte des Neiges into shaded side streets and cul-de-sacs watched over by private security, as if they were both, after all, still the colonial lackeys of old, begging for scraps at the gates of the Anglo establishment.