The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  Miguel had taken his place at the dining table and was leafing through the notebook Alex had given him for his exercises. Sure enough, he’d done barely half of what Alex had assigned him.

  “You know, you got to move from this place, man,” he said. “Is not good people here.”

  “I like them well enough.”

  “Is too many English, man. Too many racists.”

  This wasn’t quite what Alex had expected.

  “I wouldn’t think they’re any worse than the French.”

  “No, you’re wrong, one hundred percent. The French, maybe they say it in words, but the English say it in their eyes. Is the worst. The French know that. They know what it is, when someone looks at you. Like that book. White niggers.”

  Alex was astounded.

  “You read that?”

  “No, man, I seen it on your shelf the first time I came here. White Niggers. Is all I need to see. Is something you feel in your bones. The Quebecois, they feel it. They’re like us.”

  The ambiguous “us” again. This time, Alex was pretty sure it didn’t include him.

  “You know, I come to your door downstairs,” Miguel said, “with that fucking security you got, it doesn’t work, and is like a dog coming from the street how people look at me. I’m just saying to you, man.”

  Whatever will Alex had had to start tackling the past perfect tense had gone from him. Instead he pulled a couple of beers from the fridge, left over, for all he knew, from his end-of-term party a year ago, and handed one to Miguel.

  Miguel brightened.

  “My friend. I thank you.”

  They set chairs out on the balcony and sat drinking and smoking like mestizos in the village square. The office towers downtown reflected the sun as it sank behind Alex’s building. Out over the St. Lawrence the cars were crossing the bridges into Longueil, where Félix had lived in his fifties bungalow and Pierre Vallières in his tarpaper shack. Miguel had a photo tacked to his kitchen cupboard that showed a white stucco ranch house in San Salvador that looked much more like Félix’s bungalow than Pierre’s shack, though a sort of militarized version of it, the doors and windows barred, the garage battened down, the garden ringed with twelve-foot walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass.

  “Do you think it’s safe for your sister to go back?” Alex said.

  Miguel picked at the label on his beer.

  “What’s safe? How can you say safe in a war?”

  Alex felt all the questions he had never dared to ask hovering between them. He knew too much by now, was the problem, enough to piece things together. Little jobs, Miguel had said. Like a messenger. Maybe watching people come and go. Once they grew out of the youth groups, young men like Miguel normally graduated to the Organización Democrática Nacionalista. ORDEN. Order. This, depending on whom you asked, was either a fabrication of leftist propaganda, or a loose association of civic-minded peasants interested in controlling crime, or a CIA-trained counter-insurgent paramilitary organization that was the main recruiting ground for the death squads for government informants.

  “She said there was a boy there she’d been involved with,” Alex said. “That she’d got a letter. A threat.”

  “She said so?”

  Already Alex felt he had overstepped.

  “She seemed to think she was safe now. She wouldn’t say why.”

  Miguel kept picking at his bottle.

  “Is only for her to tell. Before, I was there, I could see things, but now who can say?”

  See what, Alex thought.

  “Did you know this boy? The one who was killed?”

  “Did she say so?”

  “She didn’t mention you.” Alex had never seen him like this, so wound up. “Only that he was killed.”

  “Is better you don’ ask too many questions, my friend. Is not Canada, my country. You don’ know the things there.”

  He had hit the usual impasse. It was as if a crust covered the real truth of the place, as if there was what could be seen and known but beneath that a kind of sinkhole where everything was darkness.

  Any next question he could ask seemed like stepping too far.

  “You know, in El Salvador,” Miguel said, “every day you wake up, you have to decide, am I going to live or die. That’s it. You just have to decide.”

  The comment settled between them a moment like a stone sinking down.

  “This boy. Yes, I know him. Not from María. From the street. She never brings him to the house, but I know him. Is my business to know. One day someone can knock on the door, and if you don’ know, they can kill you. They can kill your family.”

  They were at the heart of it now, the awful thing, unfolding just as Alex had feared.

  It wasn’t too late to stop.

  “Is that what happened?”

  “Why do you want to know this, man? It doesn’t matter now.”

  “But she’s going back there. It doesn’t sound safe.”

  “What did María say? The letter. Who was the one that sends it to her?”

  Alex wasn’t following.

  “She didn’t say. The military. The death squads. Whoever sends those things.”

  “Was not the right, my friend, was the left. When the boy was killed.”

  Twilight had set in. Miguel was growing dark beside him. The goodwill Alex had felt between them when they’d come out here was gone. Miguel had been right. They should never have talked of these things. In his mind Alex saw the bungalow in white stucco with its barred windows and bunkered doors, the men who came knocking. A name was whispered, an address, and an hour later the army stormed some hovel in the barrio. It happened every day.

  It came to him that María must know all of this.

  Miguel had risen.

  “I’m going, man. You call me or something.”

  Alex didn’t know what to put his hand to afterward. He picked up White Niggers of America from the shelf in the living room, no doubt right where Miguel had seen it a year before. Vallières was living out in the country now. He had done time for a bombing but then had renounced violence and The Revolution and gone back to the land. Even the kidnappers who had got free passage to Havana had gone straight—they had grown so despondent and bored in the hotel life Castro had provided for them that they’d preferred to come home and do jail time. That had been his own country’s brief flirtation with the violent overthrow of the established order, completely unglamorous and incidental and banal. It was something to be grateful for.

  The twilight hour. Alex rummaged around in his fridge, found nothing, then stretched out on his couch while the light died.

  – 9 –

  Hunger finally drove him into the streets. He headed toward the Casa Italia. The restaurant’s sign had been removed at some point and Alex almost walked past the place, so anonymous had it suddenly become, with the half-illicit look of a speakeasy or a gray-market eatery in Eastern Europe.

  The restaurant was packed. Domenic, his round mountain face beaming, his mongrel face, it turned out, the face of slaves, was holding court from behind the cash.

  “Alex, what’s the matter with you, you look like your dog died!”

  His mother’s face. He must remember to call her.

  It’s my mother, actually. The Big C.

  “I’ll just take whatever the special is.”

  In the three months now since his mother’s diagnosis he had barely let himself think she might actually die. He felt too young for the death of a parent. He hadn’t worked through his issues yet. He hadn’t got around to mentioning who he really was.

  Oh, by the way, Mom, before you die—I’m not sure I told you about my son.

  Domenic’s attention had already shifted to the man in a suit and tie who had come in behind him.

  “I’ve been h’eating in every place in the city, and yours h’it’s still the best.”

  “Then you should write in your newspaper and tell them to give me back my sign.”

  “Ye
s, it’s just crazy, I know.”

  She had had her operation a few days before Easter, a convenience for Alex, since he’d been able to make two family events for the price of one. They had all sat in the hospital waiting room, the six siblings, her whole crop, while the doctors had cut out the thing that had given them life. It had done yeoman’s service, it had ensured her genetic line, then had tried to kill her. Alex pictured it lumpy and flaccid like an old valise, a battered immigrant’s handbag.

  “I guess we’re both on intimate terms with my mother’s uterus now,” Gus said to the surgeon afterward, a good line, though Alex always thought of Gus as a humorless neo-con. He had Alex over that evening to his new house on the lake and his girls gave Alex such a hug he thought they’d mistaken him for someone else.

  “Wow. What did I do to deserve that?”

  “All you have to do is show up,” Gus said. “That’s all it takes.”

  The surgery, apparently, had gone well. By Easter his mother was already home and going about her chores in her usual tortoise-like shuffle, as if she’d merely had her tonsils out.

  “How’re you feeling, Mom?” In the hospital Alex had caught a glimpse of the blood-encrusted stitches across her belly, just around the spot where his father had had half his stomach removed for an ulcer.

  “Oh, ’n’g’e male. Not too bad.”

  It had all happened with the quickness of catastrophe—the bleeding, then the tests, and then in a matter of weeks the surgery. To make matters worse, Mimi, the family’s backbone, the only one who was any good in a crisis, had fallen into a slump that had taken a sharp turn for the worse not long before their mother was diagnosed. It had started, really, with her new house, the place she had planned out and longed for all of her life and then had ended up hating. After that everything seemed to sour for her, her marriage, her children. Then an NFB film crew had come through to interview her on the pioneering work she’d done on her greenhouse farm in areas like pest control and bumblebee pollination, but when the film came out she discovered she’d been duped.

  “They twisted everything,” she’d said on the phone, beyond distraught, ready to leave her husband, her kids, to move out of town, to change her name. “They made me look like an idiot. It’s like I’ve wasted my life.”

  It turned out the film hadn’t been a profile of the town’s burgeoning greenhouse industry but an exposé on the treatment of Mexican migrant workers.

  “The woman was so nice,” Mimi said, practically in tears. “Just this little Chinese woman. She spoke English so well.”

  Alex prayed Mimi hadn’t actually said that to her.

  “It’s probably not as bad as you think.”

  But then Alex had caught the documentary when it aired on TV, and it had been bad. The main figure, interviewed with a J-Cloth tied bandito-like around his face to protect his identity, was actually a disgruntled migrant who worked for a big fifty-person operation whose owner was never named and never chose to appear. Meanwhile perfectly upstanding people like Mimi had been lured by flattery and indirection into saying things they ought not to have said.

  “Oh, yeah, we have to kick ’em in line once in a while,” one of Alex’s uncles was seen to say, clearly relishing his moment in the spotlight. “But, you know, they’re the workers and we’re the boss. That’s how it goes.”

  The death blow for Mimi was a particularly cruel one, strategically placed toward the end of the film like a coda.

  “It’s true they go into town sometimes and get drunk,” she said, in answer to some question that wasn’t heard, “and then their owners have to go and pick them up.”

  Their owners. The filmmakers must have been rubbing their hands in glee at that one. Where had Mimi been the last forty years, when everyone else was learning never to say such things? But the whole matter apparently turned on an unfortunate semantic shift: the local greenhouse owners, who had been known as “growers,” had found themselves competing for the term with a new class of professional managers-for-hire and had decided that henceforth they would be known as “owners.”

  “It was just in my head,” Mimi said. “It was stupid. It was stupid. But then you say it, and you can’t take it back.”

  The whole affair was more depressing to Alex than he would have expected. Of course these farmers were racists, who wasn’t in these little towns? The Germans looked down on the Italians, the Italians on the Lebanese, the Lebanese on the Portuguese, and the Anglo-Saxon gentry on everyone. This was a town where there had been a law on the books well into the fifties banning blacks from spending the night. And yet the film was a travesty, through and through, the sort of thing that gave social action a bad name. It had divided the church, after one of the new priests had started a union drive; it had divided the migrants themselves, most of whom were just anxious not to kill the goose that laid the egg. What the film seemed to miss was that there was a whole ecosystem at work in these places, full of the minutest subtleties of interrelation, that you couldn’t really understand a piece without understanding the whole.

  In Montreal, Alex had seen a Chernobyl film at the Cinémathèque that was part of a new glasnost series coming out of the Soviet Union—it was all propaganda, of course, a shining tribute to the workers who had risked their lives for the nation, but at least it was honest propaganda, at least it showed enough of the poor sods scraping through the radiated earth in their shirtsleeves to let you piece out the truth. There were shots of the emptied town, the meals left behind uneaten, the desolate apartment blocks, as chilling and still as the final scenes of On the Beach.

  Jana had seen the film and had dismissed it at once.

  “It’s still the same story. They’re all dead by now, those heroes of the revolution. Even the filmmaker’s dead.”

  But Alex had found it oddly moving. Part way through, it had shown the interrogation of a technician who had fled the site after the initial blast, hangdog and shamefaced now like the worst sort of shirker, good only for the Gulag. Alex had squirmed then much as he had when he had watched Mimi: the guy was just another poor filmic scapegoat. He couldn’t help thinking—maybe this was the point, what was there to be read between the lines—that he would have done the same, he would have run, just as he probably would have been caught out by that film crew like his fellow townsfolk. People couldn’t bear this sort of close scrutiny, it was asking too much. That was surely what had bothered him so much about Mimi’s film, his survivor guilt.

  By the time of the surgery, however, Mimi had pulled herself together.

  “I don’t even want to think about all that anymore. All that matters is that Mom gets through this.”

  Alex was relieved. It had reached the point where she’d actually been turning to him for advice, a clear measure of how desperate things had got.

  Easter Monday, he had shown up at her place. She was out in the greenhouses winding tomato plants up their support strings along with the Mexicans, who were still putting in their ten-hour shift despite the holiday. Recently they had come to Mimi afraid that because of the film, they would be forced from now on to take holidays off.

  Alex stood watching Mimi at her work, feeling instinctively guilty at being at leisure and clean. The air was rank with the steamy earth smell of his childhood, the pungent odor of the vines. The steam pipes clanked as the heat fed into them, with a sound like bullets whizzing through them.

  “I don’t know how to say this, exactly,” he started.

  Mimi kept her eyes on her work, winding her plants with unthinking expertness, her hands moving like dancers.

  “This better not be something bad. If it’s something bad I don’t want to hear it.”

  He was afraid to go on, watching her hands move. One little slip in this sort of work, and the plant snapped. That was the Great Sin of their youths, to break a plant.

  “I guess that depends on how you look at it.”

  “It sounds bad already.”

  The first few sets of flowers had op
ened on the plants. All up and down the rows they hung with their brazen yellow anthers heavy with pollen, utterly promiscuous and unabashed.

  “The thing is … I have a son.”

  Mimi kept at her work with a dangerous calm.

  “You’re joking, right? Tell me you’re joking.”

  It seemed briefly possible that he was.

  “Not really. I mean, I could lie if you want.”

  Her hands rose up and up another plant, then the smallest miscalculation, and the head snapped off.

  “Fuck! Fuck!” For a moment they both seemed to relive all the old childhood terror. “It’s all right. There’s a sucker. It’ll come back.”

  They went up to the house. Alex knew better than to ever comment on any aspect of the house by now, or to use the upstairs bathroom, which had been a particular disappointment.

  “So. I guess you better tell me everything.”

  This was one instance where talking about something actually seemed to bring a measure of relief. Not that Mimi was easy on him: she was completely scandalized, in the most Old World sort of way. Once she’d realized that this wasn’t simply some nascent indiscretion that could still be hidden away, she began to circle the wagons.

  “You can never tell Mom and Dad about this, do you understand? Never!”

  “What do you mean, never? I have to tell them eventually. He’s not just going to go away.”

  “You don’t understand, Alex. This isn’t something Italians do. Not around here.”

  “You were going to leave your husband.”

  “That was different. I didn’t really mean that.”

  “I didn’t really mean this either.”

  They left it that he wouldn’t say a word to anyone until their mother was in the clear. After that, Mimi would feel things out for him. Their mother, at least, was a possibility—nobody ever knew what she really thought about things, but that, in a way, was an advantage.

  They didn’t even mention their father.

  “At least he’s in Sweden, thank God. At least he’s not going to show up at the door.”

  He ought to have been angry at her, as anyone normal would have been. This was an actual child they were talking about, this was the twentieth century, the modern world, not the village back home, where people used to abandon their bastards at the local convent in the dead of night or leave them to die in the cold. But afterward Mimi began to call him almost daily in Montreal, never mind the long distance, asking questions that all had the same grudging tone of interrogation but that seemed to have less and less to do with the issue of avoiding scandal. What did he look like, she wanted to know, did he speak English, did his mother own a house? He was part of the family, after all; provision would have to be made for him.