Clara Mondschein's Melancholia

by Anne Raeff

  Even Mercedes, who is pretty cynical about almost everything, has a little corner in her room with a shrine she made herself from stuff she bought at one of those botanica stores in New York. The shrine includes a plastic Black Virgin and some bottles with different-color oils, some flowers and I think I saw some chicken bones. She told me she lights a candle in front of it every night before she goes to bed. I wonder if my mother prays during her ceremonies. She has never told me that she does, nor has she ever told me to pray. She just always says we should concentrate on the suffering and the dying, try to transport ourselves back to those cold, smelly barracks where she was born. I used to be good at doing it, but I haven’t really tried for a while now. I used to be able to smell the shit and the vomit and my fingers and toes and ears would get red and numb with cold, and I would start shivering so hard that sometimes my father put a blanket over me. When I was very young, I would lull myself to sleep pretending I was in the barracks, my stomach crying for food, my fingers cracked from cold.

  When I was in seventh grade, I wrote a composition called “My Mother Was Born in a Concentration Camp.” My teacher Mrs. Harris, an old woman who had some kind of condition that made the skin on her arms and neck scaly and bright red so she was always scratching herself, asked me to stay after school.

  “This is very powerful,” she said, and I said nothing. “Where did you come up with such an idea?”

  “It’s true,” I replied simply.

  “Now Deborah, you shouldn’t mix fact with fiction.”

  “I’m not. My mother was born in Pribor on February 12, 1945, a month before the liberation.”

  Mrs. Harris didn’t know what to say, so she gave me back my paper, which had a big A on it even though, as usual, I had made quite a few spelling errors. I’ve never paid much attention to spelling. After that, I wrote all my compositions about the Holocaust and I got an A on every paper. I don’t know if that means that she finally believed me or if she just liked my writing, but Mrs. Harris never said another word about it.

  By the time I got to high school, I was sick of writing about my mother and Pribor, so I decided not to tell anyone about it anymore. So now Amy is the only person I hang out with who knows because I’ve known her forever, but she has been sworn to secrecy. It’s also not fair to go around telling people because it makes them nervous. What are they supposed to say, anyway? I wouldn’t know what to say, so why should other people know how to respond? It’s like when someone dies and you have to say something, so you say, “I’m sorry.” I’ve actually become extremely quiet over the past two years. Only Amy and Josh get the benefit of my conversation, and Mercedes too, I guess, although I haven’t talked to her much since her cousin moved here from Cuba.

  In school I shut up almost completely. I answer if I’m called on, which doesn’t happen very often because then I try to say something weird enough to make everyone uncomfortable, so the teachers pretty much leave me alone. Like just last week in English class we were discussing Thoreau, and I said that nature was overrated. The teacher didn’t even bother to ask me what I meant, luckily, because I don’t have a very good argument; it’s just something I feel. Not that I don’t like nature, but I don’t get inspired by it like some people do, and I dislike art that depicts nature like those boring Dutch landscapes and poetry by Wordsworth. I prefer walking around a city, sitting on the fire escape of my grandmother’s apartment, watching the Dominican men play dominoes. But I would never have said all that in class even if the teacher had bothered to ask me what I meant instead of just smiling and calling on someone else right away. I might have even explained it to Mercedes a couple weeks ago, but, as I said, we haven’t talked much lately. I did notice that she smiled when I made that statement in class, though.

  Mercedes has been busy with her cousin who just escaped from Cuba on one of those rafts. This cousin of hers is actually a very distant cousin who belongs to the only part of her family that stayed in Cuba after the revolution. His parents are communists, very tight with Castro even, and so Leon (he was named after Leon Trotsky) escaped all by himself on a homemade raft. He even had to spend a week in the hospital in Miami because of dehydration before they flew him up here to New Jersey.

  Anyway, Mercedes is really into finding out all about this long-lost side of her family, so we haven’t seen each other except at school. She keeps telling me that she wants me to meet Leon, but he’s still feeling weak from his ordeal. That’s what she calls it—his ordeal. It’s not like we spend that much time together anyway. We were working on a flute and cello sonata, but that kind of fell by the wayside. I guess neither of us was really into it.

  Mercedes hangs out with the theater people. She’s been in all the productions and always gets an important part, especially in the musical theater productions, which most of the productions are because the drama teacher once had a supporting role in a Broadway play. I can’t remember which one it was, but I really hate musicals, and I’m not much of an opera fan, either. Mercedes loves opera, and I think it kind of bugs her that, though she has a nice, steady voice, it’s not anywhere near strong enough for opera. She doesn’t really like musicals either, but she likes acting and hanging around the theater people who spend all of their lunch hours and free time in the drama room building sets and dressing up in costumes and being witty. At least she knows not to bug me about joining her. I’m only in the Bergen Youth Orchestra because Mrs. Abadjian insists on it. She says that even if I were as good as Yo Yo Ma, there’s no way I’ll get into a conservatory if I haven’t ever played in an orchestra. The Bergen Youth Orchestra is how I got to know Mercedes. Actually, I’ve known her for a long time—since middle school, but I had not really talked to her until she got a car. Then she asked me if I wanted her to give me a ride to the orchestra rehearsals since I often had to take the bus all the way to Hackensack if my father wasn’t available. My mother never learned to drive. She’s lived in the suburbs for half her life, but she still likes to act like a New Yorker who has no use for cars.

  I’m not very good at talking to people my own age, so I was really nervous about having to spend forty minutes in the car with Mercedes with nothing to say. Usually I take my lunch to the park because I don’t like to eat in the cafeteria where I might end up sitting with a bunch of people and feel obligated to converse with them. The problem is I never can think of anything worthwhile to add, so I just sit there racking my brains for something interesting to say. I don’t have that problem with my parents’ friends because they talk about a book or history or religion, but my classmates are always talking about other people—about teachers or something some other kid said, which I either find boring or none of my business. But with Mercedes it’s a little different, largely because we try to talk to each other in Spanish, which is mainly for my benefit because, after all the progress I made last summer, I really want to practice. She speaks Spanish with her parents, but she never talks to them, so that doesn’t count.

  At first the resemblance between Mercedes and Marisol didn’t register, I guess because I hadn’t really thought about Madrid in a while. When we first got back at the end of the summer, I couldn’t bring myself back from there. If I was out riding my bicycle, I found myself blanking out, not knowing where I was, imagining that I was wandering around the streets of La Latina—looking up at the balconies, the tile rooftops, breathing in the smell of garlic and bread baking in the early morning. In school I found myself involuntarily conjugating Spanish verbs, muttering them, so kids started looking at me like I was crazy. One of my classmates asked me if I was meditating, and I told her that I have never even contemplated meditating in my entire life, which isn’t exactly true, and then I could tell she felt bad because I know she’s really into Buddhism and that kind of thing. Still, it scared me that she thought I would be interested in meditation. I felt it was almost a sign of sorts because I would be walking through the halls at school an
d all of a sudden one of the girls would look like St. Teresa—robes and all, with only the small oval of her stern face peeping out at me—and I would find myself laughing out loud. But all that died away by Thanksgiving, which was when my mother finally couldn’t keep it together anymore and my father and I were too occupied with trying to coax her to the dinner table with special cheeses from Zabar’s and heavy black Ukrainian bread. But, even if she did deign to come down for dinner, we would just end up watching her move the food around her plate and chewing with great effort like we had served her an overcooked mutton chop full of tendons and gristle.

  It was just after Thanksgiving that Mercedes got her car and we started talking, but I’ve never talked to her about my mother’s depressions or about Pribor or any of that. I think I was afraid she would think I was unstable. Maybe I thought she would think I was one of those at risk kids, one of those quiet, tortured types that murder their parents. Not that we ever talked about anything like that, plus she’s the one with all the weird clothes that so many people think are a sure sign of extreme mental instability. I wonder whether my teachers would keep an eye on me if I brought in my concentration camp drawings for show and tell. But we don’t have show and tell in high school. Maybe they should bring it back, though. They could call it something more mature like sharing and the teachers could encourage us to reveal things about our lives and families, and then afterwards the whole class could offer advice. Maybe Mercedes could show her nipple ring. Apparently she and a friend from music camp ditched school one day, met in the city, got drunk, and ended up getting their nipples pierced. When she told me about the pierced nipple, I could tell she wanted me to be shocked, but I wasn’t. Instead I told her that when she’s an old woman, she’ll be covered with shriveled and faded tattoos and her nipples will hang down from the weight of the nipple ring, but she just laughed and said she wasn’t planning on living to a ripe old age.

  A lot of kids my age don’t think about the future. Not that I am planning my life out career-wise or anything like that, but the future does concern me. I don’t want to be sick when I’m old and it bothers me that I won’t be around in a hundred years to know what’s going on in the world—like whether China becomes the dominant power and whether people from different cultures are going to get along better because they’ll be more similar or worse because they’ll be more different, or whether things will always stay the same even though they change. I asked Mercedes if she insists on smoking like a chimney because she wants to make sure she’ll die young, but she said that by the time she gets cancer, they’ll have found the cure. Her smoking really gets on my nerves, especially since she’s ruining her lungs, which are so essential to a flute player, but I never tell her not to smoke in my presence, even if it’s in the car, which really makes me sick. She smokes about three cigarettes on the way to orchestra practice and by the time we get there I always have a headache. I should tell her that the smoke bothers me, though, because Mercedes is always telling me how she hates it when people don’t speak up about things.

  I often think about making an effort to communicate more of my thoughts, but I know people will just twist around everything I say, so that if I could get into their heads, I wouldn’t even recognize my own ideas anymore by the time they had a chance to mull them over. I try to listen really carefully to what people say so I don’t get it all screwed up, but I know that a lot of the time they’re not telling me what they really think anyway or they’re leaving out most of the important stuff, so I don’t know why I bother.

  I think that’s why I enjoyed George Liddy’s company so much—because half of what he said didn’t make sense and the other half you could tell was just made-up stuff that he found amusing. Still, it took me a few days to forgive him for abandoning me for my mother and Marisol that afternoon at the Barbieri. And then once I did finally forgive him and sought him out at the bar in Atocha Station, it took me almost an hour to convince him not to be angry at me. He insisted that I was the one who had abandoned him, which I had to admit was true even though I had reason to be annoyed with him for showing my mother and Marisol way too much interest.

  “I was just trying to be polite,” he insisted. “How would it have seemed if I had been unconscionably rude to your mother and her friend? They would have thought me terribly uncivilized and we Irish must avoid that at all costs. You must remember we have a reputation for being terrorists.”

  “Polite is one thing, but you were laughing and reciting poetry and lighting Marisol’s cigarettes.”

  “Was I supposed to make snide comments instead?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  And that’s really all he wanted to hear, so I let it go at that and we went to Ávila. George Liddy spent most of the train ride out there describing the bone-chilling winters of Ávila—the wind ripping over the plains and beating on the windows and how he was forced to spend days and nights on end without sleeping, sitting in front of a hearth (he loved to use words like that) drinking cognac at a very ancient bar under the walls of the city. He went on and on about eating bags and bags of yemas, a sickeningly sweet candy made of raw egg yolks that a young woman with whom he did not exchange even a word brought to him whenever he requested more. When we went to Ávila, it was unbearably hot and a dry wind ripped over the plains and the sun beat down on our heads as we walked from the train station, looking for that same bar under the walls, which we couldn’t find, though we must have circled the city at least twice, hugging the walls that protected it. It seemed, also, that George Liddy was completely unaffected by the heat despite his usual attire—jacket, ascot, beret. After we had walked for over an hour, my scalp was scalded and my head ached from so much squinting, so I was the one who insisted we stop for a drink.

  “I had been entertaining the thought of not taking a drink today,” he said sadly as we entered a long slim bar with twelve paintings of St. Teresa running along the walls like the stations of the cross. “But I suppose it was a pipe dream,” he laughed. “Yes, a mere pipe dream.”

  He wanted to sit at a table under one of the paintings, so we settled in and I went up and ordered his usual coffee and Cointreau and a beer for myself. The waiter brought our drinks and we sat silently getting used to the dark and quenching our thirst. I was sure he was about to tell me about his friend because you could tell he was thinking very seriously about something, like he was trying to figure out where to begin because it was a very long, complicated tale. I didn’t want to push him because I knew if I did, he would give up on telling me altogether.

  “I think we’d better go see the finger,” he said, stroking his perfectly smooth chin. That was when I noticed that he didn’t really have any facial hair even though he did have hair sticking out from under his beret, but there were none of the usual hair pores you can see on men’s faces even right after they’ve shaved. His hands were completely smooth and hairless and there were no hairs peeking out from under the cuffs of his jacket, which is something that has always struck me as ridiculous, as if the hairs were surreptitiously trying to get a look at the world.

  “What finger?”

  “You shall see.” He went up to the waiter and asked him in his Irish-accented Spanish how to get to the finger of St. Teresa, and the waiter gave his directions very nonchalantly, as if he were telling us how to get to a hotel or the train station, drawing a little map on a napkin for us as he spoke. George Liddy took the napkin and thanked him with a slight tip of his beret. Then we were back out in the sun.

  We followed the waiter’s directions exactly, but when we reached the end of them, when we should have been at the church that housed the finger, we were in front of a school. We walked up and down the street looking for the church, but there was nothing that even resembled a church, not even a chapel, so George Liddy decided it was a sign. Instead of asking someone else for directions, he insisted there was a reason we had been given the wrong d
irections, that we were not ready to be confronted with the finger, that perhaps our whole outing to Ávila was terribly misguided, that I should be in my Spanish class, that this was no way for a young lady to spend a day. He was extremely frazzled. His hands were trembling and I had to help him light his cigarette. I didn’t know what to do with him, so I suggested we have a drink. This proposition seemed to cheer him up.

  “Do you really believe in signs?” I asked once we were settled at the bar. I was disappointed that we weren’t going to see the finger, and I was disappointed that he believed in signs. I hate it when people say things about fate and signs. The one that bugs me the most is when they say that something was meant to happen. Like if someone’s mother dies, or someone’s child is born with cerebral palsy, or someone gets hit by a drunk driver and ends up paralyzed, or someone loses her engagement ring, or whatever it is and they get that really fake peaceful look in their eyes and say, It was meant to happen or The universe is trying to tell me something.

  “Do you believe in them?” George Liddy asked me.

  “It depends what you mean by a sign. If someone is acting really crazy, crying all the time and not eating, that could be a sign they’re depressed.”

  “You know and I know that we’re not talking about that kind of sign.”

  “Do I think that our not being able to find the church is a sign? Is that what you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, what else would I mean, then?”

  “No, I don’t believe in signs and neither do you. You’re just being a coward.” I don’t know why I said that or why I knew that because I’ve never been very good at understanding people.