The Immanence of God in the Tropics

by George Rosen

  “Do you have a cheaper room?” he asked Reynaldo.

  The owner did. It was darker and smaller than the first, but it had the same crushed twist of dried flowers nailed to the wall above the head of the bed, the same beleaguered pine dresser, assembled in haste. There was no window, so the only fresh air swirled in above the transom of the door, cool at night, sure to be almost poisonous by day. Benson found it snug and unthreatening, though after a few minutes, mixed with time and the outside darkness, a little threatening. The lower ceiling, the walls closing in, his money running out.

  Benson smoothed the lace doily on top of the dresser and carefully put down on it the box of chocolate and the bottle of mezcal he had bought at the market. He paused a minute, considering the still life, then, retrieving the thick warm glass from the washbasin, he poured himself an inch of the liquor.

  As he poured, the pickled, shriveled caterpillar slid slowly from one side of the bottle to the other, like the snow in a souvenir dome. Benson broke off a rough piece of the chocolate and placed it in his mouth. The taste cheered him. This was the real thing, he thought. México auténtico! These people had invented the substance. It tasted substantial, the cocoa and the sugar in separable, grainy lumps he could roll over his tongue—first a puff of bitterness and caffeine, then a sweet blow of honey. He washed the chocolate down with the mezcal, its warm flush followed by the soft explosion of something planty, damp, and green, a lotus pod crushing in his mouth. A Hindu fable he had once read of had told of a man cupping water from the ocean. I remove abundance from abundance and still abundance remains, the man, standing in the shallows, had said. Who did he think he was talking to, Benson had always wondered, jealous as if of a perfect lover at the man’s obvious satisfaction.

  Later, the two thin blankets pulled about his shoulders, Benson heard, in among the birds and the wind’s sigh, slapping sounds rising through the floorboards from the room below that Maria shared with her mother. A whistle, a thwap, a rush of breath. Another thwap.

  “Solitaire,” Maria said, alone again in the bright light of breakfast, but seemingly happy to talk. “She plays concentration when she can’t sleep. The doctor recommended memory games. Personally, I think exercise is a crock. It’s not as if the brain is a muscle, is it? It’s like trying to run faster by thinking very hard. The doctor thought it would help, but I think it’s just training her for disappointment.”

  Maria put her hand on Benson’s arm. “What do you think?”

  “I can’t imagine,” Benson spoke slowly, barely able to think for the touch, “what it’s like to have to work at remembering.” He looked down at her hand, still warm on his skin. Should he cover it with his own? “I don’t mean that. I mean, we only work at finding the things we’ve already remembered. We work to recall things, to pick up things we’ve put down in our memory, and sometimes we can’t find them. But, if we’re healthy, we don’t have to work at putting things down in the first place. That just happens, doesn’t it?” And what was remember anyway, Benson thought, still swirling at Maria’s touch, the mere word itself? The opposite of dismember, the reattachment of lost limbs? “Things just go down, like gravity.”

  “But that’s great!” Before he had done anything to respond, Benson realized, Maria lifted her hand, to gesture it seemed, but maybe this was all of it, maybe all she had wanted was his unintentional or at least only partially understood encouragement. “If you can practice it, concentration would be perfect. A crossword puzzle would just be what you call recall, dahda, dahda,”—Maria, cheered, beat the rhythm with a spoon—“but concentration, holding on to the image of that card you just turned over, that would really be remembering, putting something down in the first place. That’s great.”

  Benson felt happy to give her hope, if that was what he had done, although he wished he knew more exactly how he had done it. How could one practice gravity? She smiled warmly at him, as warm as her hand had been, and the lines at the corners of her eyes, which so reassured him of their joint passage through time, were etched more sharply and invitingly in the sparkling sunlight, in spite of any mutual misunderstanding.

  In Benson’s dreams, amid the crowing, Johnny Mathis sat on a folding chair before a table of multicolored toys: armadillos, macaws, jaguars, all small as beetles and painted in red and yellow stripes, and white dots, and green zigzags, each with a dangling, spring-sprung head that nodded with the breeze. And as he held them up to Benson on his palm, he sang. Maria! Maria! Maria! The most beautiful sound he ever heard. All the beautiful sounds in the world from a single bird! Maria! Maria! Maria! And the little animals all waved along their loose heads to the tune and the wind so enchantingly that Benson bought them all, flinging colorful peso notes on the table and scooping up the toys until they spilled from his pockets like grain, like gold. Benson tried to pick up the fallen ones, but as quickly as he could gather them from the ground, new ones fell from his pockets, and Johnny Mathis, smiling, singing, misunderstanding Benson’s frantic scooping, replenished the supply so that Benson could barely stand in the heap he was becoming of cheerful little toys.

  He saw a concert advertised in a gallery—a banner held in the hands of papier-maché skeleton in mariachi dress—and decided to ask her to go with him. That she seemed eager to go nearly overjoyed him and, as they walked at twilight toward the zócalo, Benson found it easy to talk with her. He felt he could say anything he wanted: how much he liked tropical vegetables or running his hand lightly along the walls by the sidewalk in the soft night air, feeling the dry chalky film of dust on the bump of stucco; how much he enjoyed the idea of building new things from old ones, like the church next to the ruins of Mitla fashioned from the stone brickwork of the old tombs.

  Though when he said that, Maria gave him a searching, disapproving look. “Oh, good. Right on. Rip up their temples to make the foundation of your church.” She pulled closer about her neck the long nubbly cotton scarf that she was wearing with the gravity of a vestment. “Destructive triumphalism. It’s the curse of the world.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.” Benson put his hands in his pockets. How did he mean it? And what was triumphalism? “I meant it more cozy—cozy and thrifty. Like barn boards, you know, paneling a room with barn boards? It’s not just wasting stuff or letting go. It’s provident, and conserving. And imaginative, if they’re in decent shape.”

  “That’s like saying making mortar from the blood of slaves is thrifty. They’re dead anyway. What else are you going to do with the blood?”

  Benson shrugged and looked down at the sidewalk, at first only in a reflexive effort to look appealingly contrite. This was, though it had been years and he hadn’t quite thought of it so plainly until now, a date. If he couldn’t be smart, Benson reasoned, his categories rapidly being sucked back into adolescence, he could at least, however ludicrous it was for a man of middle age, be cute. Or abashed, though he had never been certain exactly what that—any more than triumphalism—was, but what this seemed to call for was abashed. But then he sprang to his own defense, because, in fact, he did genuinely feel contrite or, at least, inadequate.

  “I don’t really disagree with you. I was just thinking something more . . . ,” Benson waved his arm, in what he sensed chillingly was Otto’s gesture, “. . . down to the ground. I think you’re more of a big-picture person than I am.”

  It was true, he thought. He was short-term, not that he didn’t think about history. Going to Mexico without thinking about history was like going to San Diego. But he didn’t have the long view that Maria obviously had. He, too, saw the crumbled stones and the shattered pyramids. Though when he had taken the short bus ride up to Monte Albán, they didn’t seem quite so shattered as he had remembered from the time he had gone with his wife, twenty years before. Men in white jackets were fixing the pyramids now. He’d seen them puttering around with wheelbarrows and trowels, putting in clean and fresh-cut stones.

  But that was just it. He tried to fly over history, take the
long view, but he was like one of those birds in the zócalo that neither he nor Otto knew the names of. He tried to stay aloft, but he kept landing on a fact he liked—the men with the trowels, a single white stone, the dampness in the air—and then flitting away to another attractive fact, unaware of what had gone before or came after, the whole idea of sequence and consequence gone completely distraught as he pursued whatever facts grabbed him by the senses. The nameless birds did it as a flock, moving like starlings—except they were smaller, lighter, more graceful than starlings—but the more Benson did it, over the minutes and the years, the more he realized that there was no longer a flock beside him. The others had gathered their berries. They had eaten and moved on, while he swooped and rose and turned by himself, alone.

  They curved around the Templo de Santo Domingo and left the cement of the sidewalk, their shoes crunching the even gravel of the path that bordered the church, the moonlight catching the edges of the smoothly raked scallops, the soft waves of fine stones.

  “Was it just the Spaniards?” Benson felt compelled to pursue his earlier thought. “If you leave aside the good and bad of the deal—if you can do that—the pre-Columbians built things out of the skulls of sacrificial victims. And they ate the flesh. They drew pictures of limb bones in cooking pots in the codexes.”

  “Codices,” Maria corrected, then apologized. “Sorry, I’m a historian. Professional reflex.”

  “No, that’s OK. Thanks. Codices.” He pronounced the word carefully; she was a nice person. “It was ritual, but it was protein, too, don’t they think?”

  “Cannibalism as recycling?”

  Benson stood his ground with gravity. “I don’t endorse cannibalism,” he said, though as he spoke, he was unsure if he had real people in his mind—the ones here, now—or only the little clay figures in the museum dioramas, marching up and down the pyramids to bring gifts and have their hearts, bloodless and nearly unbreakable, torn out.

  “Good. That’s good.” Maria’s voice softened. “My husband and I once had a cat that used to do that.”

  “Cannibalism?” Benson was even more startled by the husband than by the cat.

  “No, he, it was a he, would just leave the—what do you call them—remains?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “The remains, the parts he didn’t eat. He’d just leave them, but eventually they accumulated in the same spot, under a tree. A little funerary heap of vole skulls. The bugs got the soft parts. He wasn’t making a point, of course. It was unintentional, but it was a cat’s kind of building. I used to think he could visit it, look at the skulls, and maybe remember the hunts.” She turned toward him. “I don’t have him anymore, by the way. My husband, that is. The cat has passed on as well.”

  She moved closer to him, and Benson could hear the light, wind-like sound of her legs walking in the smooth cloth of her dress. He leaned toward her, trying to be companionable, to match her steps on the descent, twilit and gradual, into the light and music of the downtown streets, but he could see Maria thinking, sure that she was absorbed either in her husband, whoever he might be, or in the cruel, elaborate civilization domestic cats would establish, if left to their own inclinations.

  And what was he thinking himself? Benson wasn’t sure he was thinking anything he could call his own. Certainly he was waiting to be helpful, waiting for her to supply him with something he could consider and respond to, but was that what she wanted, what any human being wanted of another? He blamed himself for being caught up too much in the moment, yet he didn’t know what to do instead. Without memory and with only the faintest expectation, he was only a sympathetic ear, savage and detached. The thought frightened him.

  The concert was terrible, though the setting was lovely. They sat on wooden chairs put out in the courtyard of an institution of education, and listened, surrounded by elegant archways and obscure corridors, to a Bach quartet played by a violin, two oboes, a cello, and a supernumerary snare drum. The drummer, a seemingly starving man with a squared black beard and a feral, intense expression, explained his choice of instruments at tedious length, gesturing with his brushes. Benson had little formal knowledge of music, but bad intonation could cause him genuine pain. The unmatched oboes, the sad sighs of the strings, and the leader, whisking steadily on his drum under a rectangle of stars, carried Benson against his will to a strange and uncomfortable place. Two days earlier he had nearly been struck in the street by a pickup filled with dishwashers and an ornately painted sign on the rear panel that read Solo dios maneja este camión—only God is driving this truck—though, in fact, a large straw Stetson with huge hands seemed to be at the wheel. Sitting in the severe chair in the growing chill of the Mexican night, Benson listened to the sprung Bach and the sensation of the truck swerving toward him formed again in his mind, both threats joining together in a stream of roaring apprehension, though, next to him, Maria sat sleeping in her chair.

  “I’m sorry I was so tired,” she said later, walking back through the streets, the soft trees.

  “You didn’t miss anything.”

  “I know. It’s just that each day is hard.”

  “I can imagine,” Benson said, though as he said it, he doubted he could.

  Outside her door—her and her mother’s door, the yellow light flickering through the uneven transom pane—Maria gently kissed his cheek and said goodnight. Benson walked past the parrots and up the enchanted stairway, past the room that had been his the week before, to the lower-rent alcove around the corner.

  Seated on the narrow bed, he blamed himself for not being complex enough, even after all his living, for a woman like Maria. She was preoccupied—justifiably, understandably—with forgetting, and he, it seemed to him, had forgotten too much of his own life even to be a distraction, less still a gift, to someone of her burdens.

  In the middle of the night, at another cock’s crow, Benson awoke with a start and remembered in its entirety what he had completely forgotten: a small crafts market for tourists, blocks south of the central building of stalls, that he and his wife had seized on during their honeymoon walk through the city, smelling the new paint of the entrance sign, the fresh whitewash on the outer walls.

  It was a roofless open yard without shelter, an attempt to recreate a village plaza and nothing to do with the real warren of things up toward the zócalo. “All that buying and selling,” Otto had said. But here there were just straw mats laid out over cement polished the green of grass and on them rows of new-shined pots, glazed a darker green and black, like stones in a stream.

  The small stalls were only half-filled and, though it was meant to mimic a mountain village plaza, it had the smell of a suburban development—more plats than houses, more speculation than grass. Everywhere about it was the newly constructed odor of hopeful geometry. The vendors wore their newest clothes, and a priest, a windbreaker over his shirt and collar to obey the law against clerical garb in public, walked through them, sprinkling holy water on their commercial expectations. His manner was mournful and cramped, his eyebrows heavy and singed with an ashen gray that matched his eyes. Beside him a boy swung a censer, the smoke spiraling furious in the strong warm wind, and just behind came three mariachis in full finery as vividly out of tune in Benson’s memory as last night’s Bach. Benson, his wife, and the other tourists fell in behind, a procession in tiny steps.

  The priest’s Spanish was unintelligible or perhaps not Spanish at all, but an Indian tongue. Zapotec. Nahuatl. Twenty years later, even with a dictionary and guide book on the night table, Benson was still stymied by the names, the effort like reading cue cards from a distant past. For whatever reason—the language, the strain of the battered trumpet and guitarrons, the entrancement of the motion itself, small measured steps among the pots—Benson could barely discern whether the priest was marking birth or death, the sprinkled water baptismal or funereal, Christian or pagan, European or American.

  But now, in his dream and his waking, in this night and that day, everyt
hing was suffused with an intense sweetness. He knew a joy of recollection, not called for or labored at, that he had once loved a woman in a way that had spilled over into a love for every object that he saw and remembered, every sweet uncomplicated toy, every sweetly curved pot—fire-black underneath, a splash of shiny green glaze above—that lay before him. And he remembered not just one pot, but row upon row of them spread on the blankets, all slightly different, not in their shape or purpose, but in the splashes of green glaze that curled around them, as varied as sea waves or leaves or the longings of the heart.

  Benson realized now that everything had been laid down then—everything, all the betrayals, incandescences, abrasions that now blurred in his mind into the long arc of love’s decline—like objects placed in a time capsule and sealed within a cornerstone, to be dug up and revealed twenty years later. Then he had wanted, he remembered, to buy everything he saw.

  In the end, though, they didn’t buy anything, not knowing where to put the plates, the bowls, the pots, or what to put in them. Surely they were of use in Mexico, but at home he would not store grain or carry water from a well. At home they would just be empty, decorative, and accusing. He had taken nothing home but an unaccountable sense of beginning. Now he remembered it all: the wind, warm and powerful, scouring the marketplace; its touch on his skin, dry and restoring; the vision of hills beyond.

  East Africa, 1858

  The Immanence of God in the Tropics

  Andrew Seavey’s brow was unlined, his skin drawn tight across small features. He had a thin fine nose, hazel eyes, and lips without fullness. When Seavey sang hymns after morning reading, his mouth formed a small and perfect circle, a miniature of God’s praise.