ALSO BY ANTONIO GARRIDO
The Corpse Reader
The Scribe
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 Antonio Garrido
Translation copyright © 2017 Simon Bruni
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as El último paraíso by Editorial Planeta in Spain in 2015. Translated from Spanish by Simon Bruni. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2017.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503941885
ISBN-10: 1503941884
Cover design by Michael Heath
For my parents, Antonio and Manuela, with all my love. Just a handful of words, but I’d need a book without end to tell them how much I love them.
CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A GENUINE STORY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
1
Winter 1932
Brooklyn, New York
Jack Beilis ducked into the narrow streets of the Williamsburg neighborhood with the desperation of a cornered jackal. Now and then, the weak light from a streetlamp illuminated his gaunt face emaciated by hunger, his blue eyes showing no sparkle. As he walked on, he rummaged in his pockets for a crumb of stale bread, a vain gesture so often repeated. His stomach protested. In the year he’d spent in Brooklyn, his savings had enabled him to avoid the charity lines, but the Depression had eaten away at those funds just as it had eaten away at his body until he was down to his last ounce of fat. He cursed the Ford Motor Company and Bruce Tallman. Especially Tallman.
Harried by the rain, he escaped through a doorway and climbed the rickety staircase that led to his father’s apartment. He stopped on the fifth-floor landing. As he searched for the keys in his pants, he could taste helplessness at the back of his mouth.
He opened the door and hit the light switch without much confidence. Fortunately, the bulb flickered on. He shed his raincoat and traded it for the blanket he found on the couch. Then he walked through to what had been the dining room, before his father, Solomon, turned it into a dumping ground for old shoes, scraps of leather, and scattered awls. From the hall, he heard snoring. Entering the bedroom, he found his father asleep on the bed as if he’d simply collapsed onto it, fully dressed and giving off the pungent smell of alcohol. Beside him stood a near-empty bottle of bourbon. Jack covered the old man with the blanket and snatched the bottle. Back in the dining room, he lit the menorah, the seven-armed Jewish candelabrum that rose up from the table. When his father woke up, he’d be pleased to find it burning.
That night, it took Jack a while to get to sleep. His feet were swollen from so much walking, and he was numb with cold. Lying on his back on the threadbare couch, he longed for the days when he would arrive home from school and his mother would welcome him with freshly baked buns that melted in his mouth with their warm butter glaze. Days that would never return. He opened a drawer in a nearby side table and took out a picture faded by time. It was a photograph of his mother, Irina. He contemplated it nostalgically. He could almost feel her soft, delicate face, and see the deep, dark eyes that seemed to protect and advise him: Keep going, son. You have to look after yourself . . . and look after your father. He’d been trying to do that since he’d returned from Detroit.
But Solomon wasn’t cooperating. His only concern was to secure his daily ration of drink, as he’d been doing since the day Irina fell ill.
Jack grabbed the bottle and took a long draft. The liquor burned his throat but comforted him. For the first time in a long while, his stomach was filled with something warming. He closed his eyes to enjoy the feeling. The remaining gulps raised his spirits enough to give him a flicker of hope. Unlike his father, he was young and strong, with two skilled hands and an ardent determination to find a job that would save them from ruin. For a moment, he considered himself lucky, comparing himself to the thousands of destitute living in shantytowns across the city. At least he and his father still had a solid roof over their heads. For as long as Kowalski allowed it.
He looked at his mother’s portrait again. Five years ago, when times were still good, Solomon had moved his shoemaker’s store to a more central location on Broadway. But shortly after Solomon’s Shoe Works opened, the dreadful symptoms of disease began to appear. The cancer didn’t just end her life. It exhausted Solomon’s life savings, leaving him only debts. Jack was working in Dearborn. By the time they’d told him she was sick, it was too late. When he asked his father for an explanation at the funeral, Solomon was barely able to murmur that he’d merely fulfilled his wife’s wishes. Irina had not wanted her son to know of her illness and to suffer because of her.
The bourbon eased his sorrow, though he attributed his change of mood more to the medallion he wore around his neck, an ancient seal of Hebrew characters that his mother had given him for his tenth birthday. Since her death, he hadn’t removed it; it was all he had to remind him of that happy time in his life. Which was why he squeezed the medallion between his fingers before sleep overcame him.
The cold of dawn woke Jack as if he’d slept out in the open. He looked at the window. The wind had torn the newspapers that covered the broken panes, turning the room into an icebox. He loosened his muscles, went to the bathroom, and stood in front of the mirror, contemplating the cadaverous set of features his face had become. He took a deep breath before dunking his head in a basin of icy water, then dried himself with a ragged towel and used little pieces of soap to plug the cuts he’d made shaving. He looked at himself again. With each day, he found it more difficult to accept that the deep rings around those blue eyes belonged to the same young man who a year before had provoked sighs of admiration from the girls at the Dearborn Dance Society. But he had long ago stopped being the attractive Ford Motor Company supervisor who wore French jackets and frequented the best clubs in Detroit. And that reality ate away at him.
He preferred not to think about it. Lately, thinking only gave him stomach cramps. His most pressing concern was to find a job, or he and his father would be forced to wander the streets and sleep under cardboard boxes in Central Park, surrounded by beggars and criminals.
He opened the wardrobe and took out his only smart shirt, a classic-cut white cotton number. The garment still had the tag
from the Abraham & Straus department store where he had purchased it. He delicately stroked the buttons with his fingers before slipping it onto his fibrous body. He put on a woolen vest, and on top of that, the worn raincoat his father had lent him—he’d traded his own the week before for a little lard and a pound of potatoes. He left the coat unbuttoned because it was small on him, and picked up his Bulova watch, which he’d tried to sell so many times; no one had offered him more than a bowl of soup for it. Before fastening the band, he looked at the engraving on the case back: Ford Motor Company Worker of the Year. He gave a bitter smile. Last, he donned his hat. He looked at himself in the mirror again. The shadow of the brim hid his drawn face so that nobody who saw him would know how bad things were. Numb with cold, he rubbed his hands, turned off the light, and exited the room.
He was about to leave the apartment when a soft voice stopped him.
“Where’re you going?”
When Jack turned around, he found himself face-to-face with what was left of his father. The old man’s hair was as disheveled as a used scourer, remains of food still clung to his gray beard, and his eyes were half closed, as if they refused to fully see the ragged body hidden under a stained T-shirt.
“To work,” Jack lied. He disliked lying, but he didn’t want to trouble his father any more than necessary.
“Dressed up like a dandy?” The man hawked as he tried to squeeze a last drop from the empty bourbon bottle. “Damned headache. What time is it?” he sputtered.
“Early . . .” It was getting late. “Have you had your syrup?”
Solomon Beilis didn’t respond. He scratched his armpits and stood looking at his son with glazed eyes, as if searching his brain for the right answer. He didn’t find it. He sat on the couch and turned to Jack.
“Kowalski was here yesterday.”
“Again? And what did he want?” he asked for the sake of asking. Kowalski always wanted the same thing.
“The low-down Polack doesn’t listen to reason. He says he’s sick of waiting for us to pay the electric bills and has people waiting to move into our apartment.”
“He must’ve gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. I’ll speak to him. There’s still some mashed potato in the pot. I’ll see if they’ll give us some bread on credit at the bakery later. Now, put on some clothes, or that chest will never get better.”
“And how about a little something to drink?” the old man replied. “It’s a day of celebration. I’ll have to go out and find a drop or two.”
Jack shook his head. He still couldn’t understand how his father managed to get his hands on alcohol, with no money and in the midst of a prohibition. He watched his father stagger as he headed toward the menorah to light one of the wicks that had gone out. After a couple of attempts, the old man managed to light a match, but it slipped through his fingers.
“You’ll wind up burning yourself, Father. Come on, I’ll take you to your room.”
“Get your hands off me! The Christians have their damned Christmas, and we have our Hanukkah, so I’ll be darned if I’m not going to light this sacred candelabrum. And I’ll light you with it if I have to, boy!”
As he tried to shake his son off, the old man splashed Jack’s vest with wax. Seeing it, he mumbled something like an apology, but Jack ignored him. He cleaned himself up as best he could and left the apartment.
Outside, the wind howled between the buildings, picking up dust and dead leaves. Jack wrapped himself in his raincoat. For days, the sun had remained hidden, as if ashamed to cast light on that landscape of grief and desolation.
He lifted his head to look around him. The apartment where he now lived with his father was on South Second Street, three blocks north of the Williamsburg Bridge, in an old tenement house mostly occupied by Jewish immigrants who had arrived from Europe at the turn of the century and had settled in the area for safety in numbers. Many had Americanized their surnames to make integration easier, but Solomon Beilis was proud of his Russian roots. That was why he had made sure his American son learned the language of his forefathers. Those were different times. Now the hustle and bustle and the children’s laughter that once filled the Williamsburg streets had evaporated, and the neighborhood had become a wasteland of deserted alleyways and barren parks.
Jack saw some people on the streets in spite of the cold, and he stopped reminiscing. He had to hurry, or by the time he arrived at the market, the earliest risers would have torn off the job offers that were sometimes pinned to the notice boards.
He had no luck at the market, or at the building site for the new line on the Independent Subway System, or at the Brooklyn docks, where corporations like Esso, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, and D. Appleton & Company hired dockhands from time to time. For hours, he walked from factory to factory, receiving the same shakes of the head as the rest of the throng of unemployed that surrounded him. Even the vast dry docks of Red Hook had limited the number of workers they were taking on, allocating the vacancies to the Italian immigrants who paid protection money to the Mafia families that controlled the docks.
At midafternoon, the businesses closed their gates, and the jobless set off home with their pockets empty, their bones creaking, and their spirits crushed. It was the worst moment of the day, when hunger’s claws were the sharpest.
On the way back to Williamsburg, Jack stopped at the house of charity at Brooklyn Bridge to gaze at what New Yorkers had christened “the breadline.” That day, the line of people hoping to raise a bowl of soup to their lips stretched around the block and disappeared out of sight. Jack recognized Isaac Sabrun, the storekeeper whose furniture business went bust not long after the stock market crash. He was dragging his feet, his gaze absent. A little farther back, he saw Frank Schneider, the River Street lawyer whose sizable investments turned to dust overnight. The poor man said that he joined the breadline after his wife died, but everyone in the line knew that, when he lost everything, she’d run off with a wealthy rancher from Nebraska. Behind Schneider, he spotted the well-known journalist Dave Leinmeyer, who reportedly lived under the bridge, and who’d let his beard and mustache grow so that he wouldn’t be recognized.
Jack pitied them though his own stomach grumbled, imploring him to join them. He wondered whether he should listen to it for once. He hadn’t had a hot meal in weeks, yet something inside him stopped him from accepting charity. Doing so would have been to admit he had lost all hope as well as everything material.
He walked on, head down. He didn’t want anyone to see him gnaw at the scrap of bread he’d surreptitiously picked up from a coffeehouse table earlier that morning.
While he devoured his meal for the day, his mind turned to the landlord and the unpaid bills. Until now, he’d managed to keep him happy with the promise to return the money owed with interest, but if, like his father said, Kowalski had tenants ready to pay up front, it wouldn’t be long before he took action.
Jack despaired. The odd shift unloading goods wouldn’t remedy the situation. He needed money, and fast. For a good while he pondered what he might do. Finally, he rummaged through his wallet until he found his last five-dollar bill. It was all he had, enough to feed himself for three weeks, but nothing like what he needed to save him and his father from being turned out onto the street. He crumpled it up in his fist in anger, then stepped into the nearest grocery store and asked if they had a telephone. The storekeeper wiped his hands on his apron, assessed Jack’s appearance, and shook his head, until he noticed the bill in the young man’s hand. Without a word he took it, opened the cash register, and gave Jack change. Then he gestured at the device that stood on a corner of the counter. Jack eyed it. He wondered whether to make the call. Finally, he picked up the receiver and dialed a number he knew from memory. When the conversation was over, he prayed that his idea would work.
He had time to spare, so he went to the entrance of the American Sugar Refining Company thirty minutes early.
Built on the East River docks, ASR continued to process more
than half of the sugar the country consumed, and it employed hundreds of workers to stow, handle, and transport its product. Jack knew that securing a job there was a difficult task, but if anyone could help him do so, undoubtedly it was his friend Walter.
It was beginning to rain, and the American Sugar watchman had been out a couple of times to tell him to move away from the entrance. Jack muttered something but grudgingly obeyed. He waited impatiently in the rain for his friend to appear.
Though they’d once been best friends, he hadn’t seen Walter Scott for some time. For years they had shared a desk at the Brooklyn Technical High School, and they had been inseparable. He recalled those days. Though feeble and sickly, Walter always seemed to be in a good mood; he enjoyed hunting lizards, and his laughter was infectious. His comedic gifts were matched only by his ability to get himself into trouble, forcing Jack to stick up for him against whoever lashed out at him. At the time, Jack’s physique was beginning to make him conspicuous among his classmates, since he now stood almost a full head taller than the rest of them. His arms were strong and his hands skilled, earning him the boys’ respect and the girls’ admiration. Sometimes Walter envied him, but Jack always pointed out that, despite his strength, his grades in lettered subjects were not as good as Walter’s. Fortunately, Jack found a way around his limitations when he began to study mechanical engineering. He interpreted designs, analyzed mechanisms, and fixed faults as if they were a child’s puzzle. As he learned, his fascination with any contraption that he could dismantle, figure out, and repair grew. A bicycle, a cash register, a lock, a gramophone . . . He didn’t care what it was or where it came from. The more complicated it was, the sharper he became, and the greater his satisfaction when he managed to bring it back to life. Walter, on the other hand, took an interest in politics. At sixteen, he spent his spare time reading books on the violent events transforming Europe. Sometimes he asked Jack for his father’s opinion on the Russian Revolution, but Solomon never spoke of such matters.
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