None of this Ever Really Happened

by Peter Ferry

  For several weeks we felt like the lords of the Villa Katrina. The Kronberg-Muellers had yet to appear (we had rented through an agent), Charlie went on vacation, and the maid and gardener who lived behind the garage were seldom seen. We picked limes and bananas from the trees just outside our door, gamboled on the lawns, mused in the gardens, even sat on the grand veranda and dipped into the very Mexican pool. (Its elaborate imported pump and filter system had never been connected, and it could be filled only by garden hose, which took a couple of days by which time the water was already fairly dirty.) Then one morning I came home from my morning coffee downtown to find two gardeners at work, the windows all thrown open, rugs being beaten and linen aired. Shortly after that a chauffeur-driven Dodge Neon (it is one of the idiosyncrasies of Mexico that people are less expensive there than machines) rolled down the driveway and disgorged Mrs. Kronberg-Mueller herself, her town maid, her daughter Cynthia, and her sister Louise Speicher.

  Katrina Kronberg-Mueller sat down on the veranda and stayed there. She was a stately lady of about eighty who kept a tiny silver bell at her side to ring for service. She spoke Spanish with an uncompromising Yankee accent that suggested that she found all those strange things native speakers did with their tongues and lips quite obscene.

  Cynthia was in her forties. She wore too much makeup and her hair in a style that hadn't been popular since just after the Second World War. She belonged in an Edward Hopper painting. According to Charlie, Cynthia had had an unhappy marriage and a daughter who had taken up radical politics. So Cynthia had taken up poetry. She had published a slim volume with a San Francisco vanity press and talked of her editor as if he called her every other day.

  One evening we were invited for drinks, and we entered the main house for the only time. We sipped sweet wine in the living room, which had the feel of a hunting lodge with its massive fireplace, and we listened to Katrina's life story.

  Katrina met Señor Kronberg-Mueller at a party in Boston before the second war. He sang in a rich baritone, and she fell in love. After a whirlwind romance, they were married. They sailed on a steamer for Veracruz and from there took the old narrow-gauge British-built rail line up and across the mountains to the capital.

  Shortly after World War II, Señor Kronberg-Mueller built Villa Katrina as a present to his wife. Then he died. Katrina stayed in Mexico. Perhaps it was because she had a family there or two lovely homes, but I suspect it was because she had a place. She was an aristocrat. Had she been one in Boston before the war, she would not be one now. There was no aristocracy to go home to. In Mexico she could still ring her little silver bell.

  And so, in a sense, could Lydia and I. We found ourselves admitted to some places and invited to others just because we were Americans, had fair skin, and spoke English. Actually, we were a couple of struggling artists, but no cold-water flat for us. We had a lovely house completely and tastefully furnished, French doors, red tile floors and gardens and gardeners outside every arching window all for a fraction of what it would have cost at home. Famous people were said to live next door and across the street. We were among—if not of— the elite.

  So was Charlie Duke. He grew up in a small town in Kansas and married his first girlfriend while he was still a teenager. They had three kids in quick succession, and fought almost constantly. When the marriage broke, Charlie severed all ties and headed for Florida. There he attended college, taught, and worked at various sales jobs for several years. But the grass grew under his feet, and he began to explore the Caribbean on his vacations. One of his trips took him to Veracruz and then Mexico City, and he fell in love. He took a job teaching at an American school and settled in for the duration.

  Before long Charlie met his second wife. She was somewhat older than he was and worked for Mexico City's English-language newspaper. As a result, she was on everyone's guest list. This was right up Charlie's alley. A natural gossip, he was born with a doily on his lap and a petit four between his finger and thumb.

  "Sylvia got absolutely blotto, of course," he said. "We were mortified. She went on and on about poor Renaldo revealing the most intimate, the most scandalous . . . and, oh yes, we finally got the lowdown on the phony count. He has vanished, disappeared into thin air, and with one million pesos worth of Marta's negotiable bonds. Can you believe it? Not a trace. She has had a total breakdown and is in a sanitarium in Valle de Bravo."

  "Uh-huh," I said. I did not know—nor had I ever heard of—a single one of these people, and I came to realize that Charlie's "we" included him and anyone else he knew, had been with or had seen. But if that anyone was you, his pretentiousness seemed harmless and was even sometimes flattering.

  Charlie and his second wife lived in a luxurious villa in the San Angel colony of the capital and in their brief and glorious life together, they hit every embassy party, celebrity event, and costume ball in town.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "We found out that the only thing we really had in common was drinking."

  And so Charlie sought refuge in Cuernavaca, at first on weekends at Las Mañanitas, and then more permanently at Villa Katrina. He sat on the porch of his tiny cottage, drank, and waited for people like us to happen by. He seemed to know everyone and to see no one.

  All that changed in September when Charlie went back to school. Thereafter we saw little of him. Once he described his daily routine to me. He was up at 5:00 A.M. He showered, shaved, ate, listened to the radio, read, graded papers. He left for school at 6:30, stopping along the way to pick up riders: another teacher, two nurses and a young architectural student. After work he ran errands and shopped in the city, picked up the same crew for the return trip, and was home by 5:00. Between 5:00 and 7:00 he ate dinner, read, and drank a fifth of vodka. Then he went to bed.

  "I am not an alcoholic," Charlie said. "I am a drunk."

  "What's the difference?"

  "There is a difference. An alcoholic has to drink. A drunk just wants to drink. I enjoy drinking. It's my hobby."

  One night that fall Stella died. Charlie had never even mentioned that she was ill. "Oh, yes. Has been for years. Cirrhosis. She was an alcoholic," he said matter-of-factly.

  Another night, Cynthia Kronberg-Mueller rapped on our door. It seemed that she had sent her chauffeur back to Mexico City and now, suddenly, unexpectedly, the maid had gone into labor. "Could you possibly . . . would you mind terribly . . ."

  "No, no, of course not."

  All the way down the hill into town, Cynthia crouched on our tiny backseat, talking. "And to think, this poor girl, barely more than a child herself . . . quantos años tiene?"

  "Vientiuno."

  "Just twenty-one. Twenty-one years old and a mother for the . . . quantos niños tiene?" "Cinco."

  ". . . for the sixth time. Can you imagine? It is so tragic. And look at her. Fat and worn out. Only a child herself. Sometimes I weep, Mr. Ferry, sometimes I weep for these poor, poor people." She stroked Elena's hair. "Poor, poor girl. Pobrecita."

  I prayed that Elena understood none of this. She sat beside me like a smug Buddha, hands clasped atop her latest blessed event. In truth, I don't think she cared very much for any of us. Hers was the slow, quiet revenge of the centuries. She did little work except during the odd weekend when the Kronberg-Muellers came down and, Charlie claimed, sometimes entertained her family and friends in the main house.

  We moved into Mexico City before Elena and the baby came home from the clinic. It was there that Lydia had found a community of artists, studio space, and a gallery that was interested in showing her work. And while the quiet of Cuernavaca suited my needs as a writer, she had grown weary of its silliness and decadence and found herself longing for the hustle and hassle of a real city. Still, we came back often and, both ironically and predictably, it was only as visitors that we really got to know Cuernavaca and Charlie Duke as well.

  One early Saturday morning we headed over the mountain and stopped first at Villa Katrina to let Art run free for half a
n hour. Charlie got up from his seat on the porch of his cottage as we walked down the drive. It wasn't noon yet, but he was stumbling drunk. He was embarrassing and embarrassed, and we went away quickly.

  Later over lunch Lydia said, "You know, we invaded his privacy. That wasn't fair of us. We have to find a way to make that right." We decided to come again, this time announced, to invite Charlie to dinner and, I guess, to give him a chance to redeem himself. He did so with both the dignity and aplomb that only he can muster.

  It was a cool night in January. We wore heavy sweaters and ate fresh red snapper in a restaurant garden. Charlie drank only beer and was full of stories about a new friend named Father Dick, a Trappist monk from County Kildare in Ireland who lived in a little monastery outside of town, said the English-language mass in the cathedral and had bought a ranch. He was going to make it the center of an agricultural co-op, and Charlie was going to build a house on it. I don't think we believed any of this, but we had a wonderful evening together and after Lydia had gone back to the hotel, Charlie and I finished up with a schooner or two at the open-air Café Universal on the plaza. I think that's when I heard about Charlie's past. And I remember that he asked me then about the writing I was doing and told me that he wanted to write, too, that he had a great story to tell about Cuernavaca.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "No," he said wagging a finger and smiling. "You might steal it." I remember that because it was the only time I ever saw Charlie show any caution or distrust.

  On another visit to Cuernavaca I met Father Dick. The three of us had dinner. Father Dick was a brawny, crew-cut, very shy man of about fifty. He spoke with a lisp and the reticence of someone who had spent many years in virtual silence. That evening ended early, however, because Charlie got sick. He was not taking his blood-pressure medicine, and he nearly fainted. I watched Father Dick drive away. Charlie sat beside him, his head lolling back over the seat.

  The next time I saw Charlie, it was to say good-bye. A year had passed, our money had run out, and we had been unable to get the working papers that would allow us to stay. We drove over the mountain one final time, and as we walked around the grounds of Villa Katrina with Charlie, we were surprised to find the Kronberg-Muellers on their veranda. They invited us to lunch. We hadn't seen them since moving into Mexico City and took some time to get caught up. Then, after the usual discussion of Bolsheviks and gardeners, I said to Cynthia, "How's our baby?" I drew a blank stare.

  "Elena's baby?"

  "Oh yes, indeed," she recovered, "fine, fine, very good. Yes."

  "Healthy and happy, I trust?" I asked.

  "Oh quite healthy and happy. Yes, yes," Cynthia said.

  "Is it a boy or a girl?" asked Lydia. Neither Katrina nor her sister Louise feigned knowledge, interest, or embarrassment, but Cynthia looked at me for a very long moment with a stupid smile on her face before Elena appeared and rescued her. "How is the baby?" I asked her. "A boy or a girl?"

  "A little girl," she said.

  "What do you call her?" Lydia asked.

  "Gordita," she laughed, "the little fat one."

  "May we see her?" I asked.

  Elena brought the baby out in a big two-handled basket, and we played with and held her as she giggled and kicked. She was nine months old.

  During the next few years, Charlie proved to be a faithful if amusing correspondent. I knew just when he began each letter (when the bottle was full) and just when he finished it (when the bottle was empty). Each moved from coherence and even wit to non sequitur and confusion. There was the usual quota of people and events we had never heard of, but there was real information, too. Charlie's house on the ranch now had four walls and a roof, and he had moved in. In the meantime, his long-lost children had made contact, had come to visit and one—his eldest daughter—to live for a while.

  We had news as well. We were back in Chicago with new careers and a new apartment in Evanston. Lydia was designing books for a publishing house and I was teaching. A year later, we flew to Mexico for a two-week winter vacation. We didn't tell Charlie we were coming because, frankly, we weren't sure we wanted to see him. After a few days in Mexico, however, we admitted to each other a bit sheepishly that we both did. There was something about Charlie Duke that drew us to him. I hoped without saying it that it was something more than being smugly amused by him.

  Since Charlie had no telephone and only a P.O. box for an address, we went to his school in Mexico City. We stood for several minutes outside his classroom door watching as he worked at his desk with a gaggle of kids. He was a real teacher. Despite ample evidence, I'm not sure I had ever really believed this any more than I had believed anything Charlie told me. It was not that I thought Charlie a liar; it was just that virtually everything he said had the sound of bad fiction. He had a way of always choosing the least probable, most dramatic detail, and then embellishing it. "Father Dick didn't say a single word for twenty years. When he finally tried to speak, his voice wouldn't work for two weeks. Isn't that right, Father Dick?"

  "Well, not quite."

  Charlie's little house was also real. In fact, it was quite wonderful. It perched high on the mountain slope facing east toward rugged rock formations and cliffs, and above them on clear days the snowy peaks of the volcanoes. It was all of his own design, including a vaulted roof, great windows across the front, and a handsome stone veranda that ran the length of the place. We sat there one evening drinking margaritas while Father Dick (he had built a house just a stone's throw down the hillside) described the route of Cortés's army as he had traced and then walked it himself following Bernal Díaz del Castillo's explicit directions up this ravine and around behind that hillock and finally up through that pass there and then down to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán.

  Charlie insisted that we abandon our hotel and come stay with him on the ranch. For the next few days, he took us to corners of the state I had never seen before: hidden forests and markets and mountain villages. We watched woodcarvers and stood in cool, ancient churches and shared a lunch of hot enchiladas and cold beer beneath a bright yellow awning. We ate big bowls of stew and told stories about each other late into the night. (I hadn't realized there were so many to tell.) And we talked with Father Dick who came to sit on the veranda in the evenings and watch the sun set.

  Sunsets in that place are dramatic to the point of being histrionic. The actual disappearance of the sun is the least of it. That happens behind you if you are sitting on Charlie's veranda, and you may turn to glance at it or simply know it's going on by the absence of the sun's rays on the back of your neck. The real show is high above you, where for a long time after the shadows and evening cool have descended on you, it's still bright daylight on the mountain peaks and gleaming snowfields, and below you where in the depths of the valley it is dark night and the village lights have long since twinkled on. Seeing day and night all at once may tempt you to feel momentarily immortal, if there is such a thing, and when taken with a bit of red wine, to wax philosophic. We did some of that. One evening looking down into the village as if from on high, Father Dick said that a la Senator Paul Douglas, he had set out as a young man to save the world, and now he would be quite content to save this small place or even part of it.

  "I don't suppose you'll ever leave here?" Lydia asked.

  "Oh, yes," he said to our surprise, "I'll leave one day. When my work is done here, I'll go back to my community in Ireland. The monastery is my home, the community my family."

  "I'll never leave this place," said Charlie.

  "What place?" asked Lydia. "This ranch? Cuernavaca? Mexico?"

  "This ranch near Cuernavaca in Mexico." It was just a clever answer until the next afternoon. Coming back to the ranch we discovered that a long-awaited calf had arrived. It was standing in the field on shaky legs beside its groggy mother. Charlie threw open the car door, got out, and did something quite unexpected. He started to undress. "Here." He handed me first his shirt and then his pants. Then, mut
tering something about needing to separate the calf from its mother, he stooped and gathered the little cow still wet with blood and afterbirth into his long arms. He hurried across the rocky pasture wearing only underpants and work boots, and I stumbled after him looking at his broad, strong back and realizing a rather astonishing thing. This silly man whom I'd been making fun of all this time was in possession of something I hadn't even started looking for and hadn't known until that moment that I wanted or needed. He was a complex, original, troubled, many-dimensional, self-invented, flawed and foolish but complete man, and he couldn't care less if I was laughing at him. He'd probably known all along.

  That night we sat on the lawn at Las Mañanitas drinking cold white wine and eating camarónes al mojo de ajo, butter-flied shrimp sautéed in garlic butter. It was our last night in Cuernavaca. There was wood smoke, the scent of flowers, some distant music and one of Charlie's stories in the air, and as I watched him tell it, I smiled at myself. Charlie was the guy I'd come to Mexico to find in the first place and I'd never realized it.

  I shook my head. What a boob.

  4

  . . .

  THE LOVE NAZI

  I WAS NOT SURE what I was looking for, exactly. It certainly wasn't Lisa Kim. I knew that she was dead; that much I knew for sure. But it may have been her tracks, her trail, evidence of her, clues about the woman who had written the letter that became for a period of time my most important possession.

  Maybe I was trying to get rid of the letter. I was. I wanted to give the letter to Peter Carey or Peter Cleary and put an end to the strange sense of responsibility that had come with it. Responsibility was a thing I'd spent much of my life avoiding. It's why I lived in an apartment, drove an old car, and worked at a job in which my principal responsibility was to myself and to large children most of whom I could browbeat. It's why I lived with a woman who didn't want to get married, and with whom I had no children.