by Nino Ricci
In the elevator now he went to press the button for his floor but at the last instant hit the one for the second floor instead. Before he could change his mind the elevator doors opened and there before him, sitting hunched at his little desk in his office-cum-storage room, was Mr. Shapiro, looking a bit paunchier and a bit balder than the previous summer but not that much worse for wear. Alex felt a queasiness come over him at gazing like that on the baby-cheeked face of the enemy. The banality of evil.
He ought to just turn around and go home.
“Alan, isn’t it?” Too late. “Come on in, I’m just getting organized.”
The air on this floor still reeked of chlorine, though it had been many months now since the pool had been open. Another half-eaten sub sat in front of Shapiro, maybe the same one as the summer before, a cunning prop. To one side on the desk was an open banker’s box that looked stuffed with rumpled renewal forms, the building’s address scribbled across the side of it as if this were merely one enterprise among many.
“Sorry, refresh my memory about your last name. It’s a bit hard to keep track.”
Alex had to admit he was impressed that the man remembered him at all.
“Fratarcangeli. Alex Fratarcangeli.”
“Right. Alex. Sorry. Italian, isn’t it?”
He had turned from the banker’s box to what Alex hadn’t noticed resting on a low side table behind it: a gleaming state-of-the-art Compaq Deskpro, complete with a big CRT screen and a long row of fancy function buttons.
“You have one of these yet? I can keep that whole box of stuff on one disk.”
For a moment then, his eyes fixed on the screen, he was pure geek. He was running some kind of fancy data program, dBASE, it looked like. After a few glitches a screen came up with Alex’s name at the head of it. It gave Alex an eerie feeling to see all that data about him pixelating against the blue.
“Right. Right.” Shapiro’s brow furrowed as he scrolled through the file. “There’s still last year outstanding, I guess.”
He said this as if Alex were some shuffling deadbeat who’d come begging to him.
“So,” Shapiro said heavily. “How are we going to solve this?”
Alex saw his brother Gus in Shapiro’s place again, and his father, battling the welfare moms, the drifters, all the low-lifes who turned their hair gray and sucked away their tiny margin of profit.
It didn’t matter, he thought. He just wanted out.
“I’m not sure I’ll be staying, it turns out. I might need to leave in the middle of the summer.”
There, he had blown all his advantage. Now he was the one asking a favor.
Shapiro leaned back in his chair.
“I think we could work something out. I think we could manage that.”
It was all very dispiriting. Alex ended up agreeing to a five percent increase, backdated three months so it would have been in effect long enough to use as a basis for a new rent when he left, though Shapiro agreed to kick back the difference. The only other concessions he got were the right to break his lease on thirty days’ notice, and the ninety-six dollars the Régie had deemed he was due.
“Here, I’ll make the check out right now,” Shapiro said. “I’ll include the extra you’re paying on the rest of your lease, so you can just make out your rent for the full amount.”
There were half a dozen forms to sign. A new lease renewal, with the thirty-day clause, barely legible, scratched in in pen; then the agreement to backdate the rent, several retraction forms for the Régie. Alex felt like someone who had agreed, for the merest baubles, to sign a false confession.
Shapiro had taken on an unabashedly pleased, helpful air.
“Concordia student, right? What was it, history?”
“English, actually.”
“I always loved English. Shakespeare, Dickens, all those guys. I wish I still had the time, you know?”
In the elevator Shapiro’s check, for a hundred and thirty-six dollars, his damages plus his paltry kickback, felt like a scorpion in his pocket. He had given himself over to the zeitgeist, to profit and loss, just like everyone else. Social Darwinism was alive and well.
You can see it in the language people use these days, Peter, the metaphors, this whole mental shift. It’s all economics now. It’s not values anymore, it’s value.
Well, to coin a phrase, I guess that’s the price we pay. What is it they say about Thatcher? A shopkeeper’s daughter.
Exactly. Meanwhile, no one thinks of the social costs.
That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? But it doesn’t look like anyone’s taking stock.
María would never have taken the check. She would have stuck the thing out.
He ought to have clipped that coupon for Folgers. It was a cut above Maxwell House, if not quite Van Houtte’s. It occurred to him that he likely had Darwin to thank for Van Houtte’s: it was Darwin and his ilk who had displaced peasants around the world, so that great latifundia could be pieced together in places like El Salvador to grow things on more scientific principles than dumb peasants would ever manage. Liberals, they were called then. That had been Darwin’s camp. The conservatives, meanwhile, the bloody paternalists, had thought the rich should look after the poor, not realizing that that merely encouraged them.
He still remembered that awful coffee he’d had at Miguel’s apartment. It was all in the roasting, he’d heard. The thought of Miguel set off a little alarm at the back of his head. Shit. Their lesson. He had completely forgotten. He glanced at his watch: a half-hour late. If he was lucky, Miguel had waited. Or not lucky, exactly, but he was in charge of him now, María had put him in Alex’s trust. The least Alex could do was not make a botch of it.
– 8 –
Miguel was sitting up against Alex’s door thumbing through another of the glossy magazines he went through like candy. Cheesy men’s stuff, mainly, of the sort that Michael sometimes bought for the bods, but also fashion magazines, National Geographic, Chatelaine, anything he could lay his hands on. He never read them, from what Alex could tell, only leafed through them looking at the pictures, pausing over these with the childlike curiosity of an extraterrestial marveling at Earth culture. Alex felt a jumble of emotions seeing him squatting there so innocent-seeming and absorbed. Relief that he hadn’t missed him and a grudging protectiveness, but also the inevitable irritation that Miguel had managed to worm his way into the building as if he was no better than all the other riff-raff that waltzed in off the street, that he was poring through his trashy magazines rather than doing the worksheets Alex had given him, which he surely wouldn’t have finished, that he was simply there, still in Alex’s life, practically his ward now, so that they would probably end up bound together in unholy alliance until the end of days.
“Hey, man. Is not normal for you, so late.”
Normal for Miguel was to waltz in forty-five minutes after the appointed time as if it were nothing. Now this one occasion that he actually seemed to have been punctual he had the gall to lord it over him.
Alex went straight for the door, leaving Miguel to scramble clear of him.
“Been waiting long?” he said tersely.
“No man, I’m jus’ coming now.”
In the elevator Alex had started gearing himself up for a possible man-to-man on the subject of María’s departure, but already he felt the minginess that always came on him around Miguel, the unwillingness to let him imagine he took him seriously.
“I saw your sister.”
“Yeah, man, she’s going home. Is jus’ crazy.”
“So you know?”
“She’s my sister, man, you think I don’ know?”
Man this and man that. You’d think the place was crawling with men. Meanwhile the real men, apparently, were off fighting the war.
“If she’s your sister,” Alex said, aiming below the belt, “then why don’t you stop her?”
“She’s my sister, man, not my kid,” Miguel said gloomily. “You know what she’s like. Eve
n back home she’s always been breaking my balls.”
Though Alex didn’t feel he had given him any encouragement, Miguel had never wavered from his first attachment to him. After things had soured between Alex and María, Miguel had commiserated with him as if Alex was the one he’d been watching out for.
“Is better for you, my friend. She’s my sister, you know, but very hard. Very tough. Not like you.”
Since then Miguel had kept up the connection between them as if it had never been in question, calling at all hours, showing up unannounced at Alex’s door to drag him to some friend’s place or function. The simple fact was that he actually seemed fond of Alex, had grown attached to him as if Alex were a young naïf in a bad neighborhood whom he had taken under his protection. Alex, post-María, post-Amanda, didn’t have the will to fight him off. It was a relief, really, to let Miguel take charge, to fall into the rhythm he had of coming and going without plan as if he were still roaming the streets of San Salvador trying to keep his finger on the pulse.
“What did you do back there, exactly?” Alex had asked him, not entirely sure he wanted to know.
“This and that. First my father’s factory, then when it closed down jus’ little jobs for money. To carry things and so on. Like a messenger.”
An innocent. Except that in El Salvador there were no innocents, only sides. The army there organized youth groups to stand on street corners and watch everyone who came and went, a sort of demonic Boy Scouts that formed the recruiting grounds for the death squads and paramilitary.
Miguel still had his network of mole-like associates, short, slick-haired young men who would come together in little nodes at the Salvadoran events and stand laconic and dark-eyed and watchful like boys at a high school dance, then melt into the crowd again. Alex was lucky if he ever heard a complete sentence pass among these boys—it was all Miguel’s unibersal language with them, a nod, a grunt, a wave of the hand. Not like the politicos, with their heated talk. Alex couldn’t have said if they were simply scoping the place for women or arranging names on a hit list. More likely they were doing the sort of “little jobs” they had done back home, since none of them ever seemed to lack for cash. Miguel sometimes would open a wallet packed with wrinkled twenties and hand over a few bills to this one or that one like a mafia overlord, a separate economy unfolding within his little cell that seemed to have nothing to do with the normal Keynesian flow of the refugee world, the welfare payments or the low-end service jobs or the remission of funds to family and freedom-fighters back home. Never once had Alex seen Miguel express what could pass for an unambiguous political position—he stood above all that, or beneath or beside it, wherever, it seemed, he’d be clear of the line of fire.
“The rebels, you know, they have guns like the army. You shoot, someone will die. The bullet doesn’t care if it’s left or right.”
It was Alex who had suggested the tutoring, in that way he had of bringing upon himself the things he most dreaded. He thus managed to institutionalize a relationship that might otherwise never have survived its flimsy foundations. He had hoped to keep some sort of connection to María, he supposed, though he never actually asked about her. It was only by chance that he learned she had moved out on her own—he dropped by their old apartment once when he couldn’t reach Miguel on the phone to find María’s room had been taken over by one of Miguel’s ferret-eyed young cohorts.
“Sorry, man, she take the phone with her,” Miguel said. “A couple of days, I get another one.”
She had moved up to Jean Talon to be closer to her work, Miguel said. Her departure looked suspicious to Alex, but Miguel took it in stride, over the next few months taking in an alarming number of new roommates, as if he were running a sex trade operation or underground railroad. Each one seemed as transient and shifty as the one before, but they all had a story, had smuggled up from the States or been evicted because their welfare had been cut off or were the cousin of an in-law on Miguel’s mother’s side.
Then out of the blue one day Miguel told Alex he had moved, like his sister, to Jean Talon.
“I thought you said there were too many Salvadorans there.”
“No, man, you don’ even see them. Is all Italians. Good people, like us. Latin people.”
Alex wasn’t sure whom exactly Miguel meant to include in that “us.” His apartment, when Alex saw it, looked like a carbon copy of the last, except that instead of clotheslines strung with laundry out back there were the elaborately trellised and furrowed back plots of the local Italians. Alex had never spent much time around Jean Talon but now suddenly he was there every weekend—Miguel would call and wheedle and cajole, say Alex’s brain would rot if he was always working, until Alex would lose the will to resist.
“You become a machine, man, is no good. You become a fucking Canadian.”
Somehow Miguel had already so understood the instinctive self-abnegation that formed the bedrock of the national character. It was true that there was hardly an outpost of Alex’s emotional landscape these days that didn’t feel colonized by an almost Presbyterian sense of chastisement—most recently Katherine had dropped out of school and taken a shit job as a receptionist and his parents had canceled a trip to the Holy Land because of some funny bleeding from his mother’s nether parts. Miguel took him to bars up in Little Italy that were worlds away from all of this, full of overdressed Italian girls on the lam from their nineteenth-century parents and gold-chained Ginos who drove up in muscle cars. It was everything he had fled from back home, but it felt like a kind of anaesthesia now, familiar and without pain. Miguel had abandoned his own kind the instant he had moved in amongst them and cleaved himself to the Italians, which suited Alex fine—he didn’t know how many more cumbia nights he could have borne, how much more of seeing María across a room and feeling like a eunuch. In the bars he got mildly or totally drunk and even managed to fraternize with the womenfolk, because Miguel, who looked at home here with his black pants and lamé shirts, had wasted no time on that front. They might end up dancing until two in the morning, something the normal Alex simply didn’t do. But then it wasn’t the normal Alex who went out to these bars, but some other sleazy, devil-may-care one, the sort of person that back in high school he had despised and desperately longed to be.
He never made the mistake of trying to take any of these Italian girls home. Even if that had been remotely possible it would surely have led to unmitigated disaster—within a week he would either have found himself bound up in a web of soul-strangling obligations he would never have got clear of or paralyzed with ethnic shame. But Miguel never left with anyone either. Alex suspected he had never had sex with a woman, for all his talk, and indeed he always looked relieved at the end of a night to have Alex to rescue him.
If the trains had stopped Alex crashed at Miguel’s, stumbling home with him through streets that looked surreal in the night time desertion. The houses were mainly poky two-story townhouses built right up against the street, but half of them were done up with the rococo flourishes of ducal palaces, fancy brickwork or pillared doors or Juliet balconies in swirling metal that seemed straight out of the grand apartment houses of Milan. Once Miguel tried the door of the big Romanesque church off Dante Street, and found it open.
“Let’s check it out, man! Come on!”
He was already inside. Alex imagined alarms going off and the pastor appearing from the rectory half-dressed and furious, but there was only the cavernous silence. He made his way through the dark, ghostly shapes looming up from every direction.
Miguel had found a light switch.
“Over here, man.”
A couple of sconces came on in the chancel to send grainy light up into the dome above the altar. It was adorned in a massive fresco crowded with iconography, a Madonna ringed by the angelic host and below these the saints, perhaps, and lower still the mere mortals, every creature in its place. The bottom tier was a veritable mob, fat-cheeked clerics and dewy-eyed altar boys and a man in a suit wh
o looked like he’d wandered in off the street by mistake.
Miguel pointed to a figure in the bottom corner. “Is your hero.”
Alex had to strain in the light to make sure he’d seen correctly: it was Mussolini, in full military regalia, a bit more hirsute and robust than in life, perhaps, but clearly him, sitting astride a charger flanked by a host of cardinals and by the pope himself on his throne.
“He wasn’t a hero,” Alex said. “He was a dictator.”
“You are wrong, my friend. He was for the poor. Schools, hospitals, all of this.”
Alex felt irritated that Miguel knew these things.
“That doesn’t make him a hero.”
“Is depend what was before. For some people, I think, he is a hero.”
“Is that how people think back in El Salvador? That it’s better to have a dictator?”
Alex was surprised at how wounded Miguel looked.
“No. I don’ talk about El Salvador. Is different.”
Anyone other than Alex would surely have softened to Miguel long before. He was just a child, really, nearly ten years Alex’s junior, just someone trying to make a life. Yet each time Alex saw him he felt the same little node of resistance form in him.
