The Taste of Ashes

by Sheila Peters

  He lifted his feet, one at a time, and picked out the small stones embedded between the scars. He pulled on the shoes, his fury gone, leaving him as it always did, rubbed raw and tender. He put his arms inside the sleeves of the jacket. The air, smelling of the roses climbing over the peeling white fence that bordered the alley, felt like needles under his skin. Tall stalks of corn, heavy with ripening heads, turned yellow in Walter’s garden. He walked into their midst and stood, head bowed, listening. He fingered his rosary. In the ways of their village, his mother’s brothers had planted corn for him, preserved its seed to pass on. His mother fashioned the seed into a rosary to bless his priesthood path. You never know, one uncle said, his mother’s face reflected in the pattern of wrinkles, the shape of the teeth, smiling. It might grow yet. Álvaro’s pale Ladino skin, blushing.

  Her whole village was gone now. The earthquake had taken his mother; two years later, the civil war had taken his uncles. And his father? Vinicio’s lies whispered in the wind as it sifted up through the side streets from the ocean, riffled through the narrow gaps between buildings, through holes in the boarded-up warehouses and into the leaves of the trees of Strathcona. It rustled in the stalks of golden corn and he felt as if his heart struggled to beat inside a crumpled wasp nest.

  The summer after his father had disappeared, the rains were good. There was plenty of pasture for the cattle and Álvaro, now fourteen, stopped dreaming of becoming a guerrilla or of finding his father. School was finished for him. Clara was rarely there, living mostly in the city with her mother. He rode with the foreman and came home to the ranch, to the small room off the kitchen he shared with his mother. Fortuny had given their house to another family.

  Vinicio will make you foreman, Clara whispered on one visit, pulling him aside. A graduate of military college, Vinicio had come home with his hair cut short, his posture stiff — as if he had been hurt somehow. Looked around his home as if he were a stranger to it.

  The old man was proud and encouraged him to bark orders. Told Álvaro it was time he learned obedience. Guffawing, he sent them out to find girls, Álvaro delirious with the smell of Clara, their bodies smouldering with something neither of them yet recognized. Until the night in the barn, the rain pummelling the tin, the eaves gushing water into the rain barrels. Vinicio shoved one girl in his direction and took the other into an empty stall. Álvaro and the girl beside him listened through the rain to Vinicio’s grunts. Álvaro stroking her hair and feeling her breasts through the stiff embroidery of her huipil. Afraid of her skin. Afraid of his mother discovering the wet stain on his pants where the girl had put her hand.

  That rain was thirty years and thousands of miles away from the mist now drifting into Walter’s corn. Sprinkle me with clean water and cleanse me from all my impurities and my idols; Give me a new heart and place a new spirit within me. Take from my body my stony heart and give me a natural one.

  Álvaro stood in the garden, ashamed of his earlier outburst, ashamed of all his outbursts, and there was no way he could find to force himself back into the house to apologize. Over the past month his apologies had become meaningless. He zipped up his jacket and pulled on the toque someone had shoved into its pocket.

  He slipped out the alley and walked toward the sound of traffic. Walter had kept him close to the priests’ house for the past month. He wasn’t ready, they thought, for the chaos of the streets. For the snapping electricity of the trolley buses and the police on the downtown east side. There was a crackdown on the dealers, Walter explained, and it was better to stay out of the way, especially if you didn’t like uniforms. But it was to the streets Álvaro wanted to go now, the places that every city had somewhere and some cities had everywhere, where pain was made visible, literal.

  Within a couple of tree-lined blocks, he saw the signs. Broken bottles. A needle. A pile of flattened cardboard at the base of a huge drooping conifer. Plastic bags rolled along the sidewalk. He picked one up, sniffed for glue, the desire for its oblivion a sudden explosion. A neurotoxin, the street worker had explained when he’d first started working in Guatemala City’s Zona Uno. It’s ideal for the kids, she’d said. It floods the frontal lobes where emotion resides. It floods them and disconnects them — no stress, no pain, and no fear. No memory. Nothing but the smell of plastic. He tried not to think of the yellow tube of glue in the kitchen drawer back at the community house. Glue he had stared at until someone asked him what he was looking for.

  He turned a corner into a street blocked with cars. Beyond the choking traffic, the grey water of the harbour. The white froth on the waves made him thirsty, even though he knew it would be salt.

  A bell rang at his heels and he jumped around, down in a crouch. A huge grey-haired man in a wheelchair held both hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Whoa! Sorry about that, man.”

  Álvaro stood up again as the man backed his chair away, his pitted face pinched in apology, his eyes watchful. His jacket was submerged beneath a welter of pins and ribbons and bows and his legs were covered in a plaid blanket. The wheelchair was festooned with bulging plastic bags — they were tied to the armrests, the backrest, and a rack behind his shoulders that looked as if it was rigged up just for the purpose. The bags were full of cans and bottles. Perched on the top of the whole contraption was a huge striped umbrella.

  He bent his massive body sideways to fish in a pocket. He held out a coin, his fingers encased in translucent plastic gloves. “You need a couple of bucks to grab some breakfast?”

  “I would very much like a drink of water.”

  The man pointed a couple of blocks down where people clustered around a van pulled up on the sidewalk. “They have juice.”

  Álvaro took the shiny gold and silver coin and looked at it carefully. The queen, he recognized. Flipping it over he read, “Canada. 2 Dollars. 2000.”

  “You just off some boat?”

  Álvaro smiled. “I’ve been away for a long time.”

  The man’s finger, ghostly under the glove, pointed at the polar bear on the coin. “I used to take my kids to see the bears at Stanley Park. Those are big buggers.”

  Álvaro welcomed the small details. The shape of money. The English name. Stanley. He thanked the man and walked toward the van.

  In the cluster around the cart, people moved with the careful steps of the hungover, the still stoned, and the damaged. They didn’t jostle one another; they formed a semicircle where they could all see each other. A woman who looked as rough as the rest of them served up coffee and pastry. She forced juice on some, chiding them about blood sugar. Some paid her in beer cans and empty whiskey bottles. For his two dollars, she handed Álvaro a plastic bottle of juice, a pastry, and a stick of gum. He thanked her and sat on the stone steps under a nearby awning to drink the welcome liquid.

  A thin youth moved around the van like a broken bird — flapping, dipping, and turning. Stopping to nibble a bite of pastry, then revolving like a top, spinning and circling at once. Drivers’ pale faces, sleepy in the red light, watched those on the sidewalk from behind locked doors and thick shields of glass. The boy staggered in widening circles around the pastry wagon and in between the cars, the drivers anxious for their paint jobs.

  “I had a dog like that once,” the big man said, parking his wheelchair beside Álvaro. “A retriever. If she couldn’t find the bird you’d dropped, she’d start running in circles, getting wider and wider until her nose caught a whiff of blood, and then,” his arm zapped out, “she’d take off straight to the bird.”

  As he spoke, the youth saw something down a side street and ran across the lanes of traffic, the broken bird and demented retriever in one body. Álvaro bent his head into his hands, dropped his elbows onto his knees, and watched the tears he could not stop drip down to splash on the speckled stone between his feet. Where he’d felt fury and fear before, he now let waves of despair wash over him. He was back in the morgue in Guatemala City, the attendant’s gloved hands pulling another sheet off another body.
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  “They just let you out of somewhere?” The kindness in the man’s voice broke through.

  Álvaro looked up. “You could say that.”

  From under his blanket, the man pulled out a box of tissues. Álvaro took one and wiped his eyes.

  “Where’d they have you?”

  Álvaro thought of the small room, the curtains, the dusty Madonna. “A private place. Just a house, really.”

  “Family?”

  Álvaro nodded. He held out a hand. “Name’s Al,” he said.

  The other man shook it, his plastic glove sticky and warm. “Constantine.” He shifted in his chair. “The folks inside the Carnegie here, they’ll help you find a place. That is if you need one.” He hurried on, anxious not to cause offence. “They don’t ask a lot of questions.”

  The coffee wagon bumped off the sidewalk into the traffic. Buses passed, stopped, doors hissing as they opened and closed.

  Constantine nodded to a clock at the intersection where time and temperature alternated in blue light. “The bottle depot’s opening. Gotta go.”

  He wheeled off across the street and up toward the highrise office towers. Behind Álvaro, locks clicked back and doors swung open. A trim woman and a man in a suit, both Asian, scooted up the stairs and ducked inside. People drifted away from the curb and up the stairs. The cold stone seeped through his pants, chilling his back, and making his kidneys ache. Two cops walked by, yellow jackets saying Vancouver Police. They gave him a look. He flinched. They stopped.

  “Your name, sir.” A woman. Bulky. Her body padded with gear. His body spasmed into a fetal crouch. An arm under his. He screamed.

  “Christ, we’ve got a live one here.”

  He heard raised voices, people gathering. People asking who he was. He called out a name. Clara. The metal gate squealing open. Clara, he screamed.

  The woman bent again to ask his name, her hand on his shoulder. Clara. He would not go with them. Never again would he go with them. He lashed out, his fist hitting the padding on her chest, his hand yanking her hair.

  He was face down on the steps faster than he could think, held there as the voices rose around him, the English suddenly the cackling of outraged chickens.

  The woman hissed as she manacled his hands, and hauled him into the back of a wagon. There was no safe place. It was dark and he was inside another van, in another country, rolling on the metal ribs of the floor, banging into the wheel wells as the driver squealed around corners and accelerated for the speed bumps, the men cackling as they heard him cry out. He could not stop screaming.

  And then he was strapped down in a pink room. George’s face was pale against the pink wall. Álvaro closed his eyes. He sank down again, down into a room where screams ricocheted in bright colours off the filthy walls. When he awoke again, George was still there. The room was full of people in lab coats. A man released the restraints.

  “Padre, you’re a brave lad to take on the city’s finest. Not good timing, though. Things are a little tense down there these days. Best to lie low.”

  What had they told him? Álvaro wondered when the doctor traced the scar on his eyebrow, along his chin. He lifted his hospital gown. Even through the sedation, Álvaro could sense the man’s distaste at what looked like self-mutilation. A bizarre tattooing. Crude arrows pointing to his groin.

  “A most extreme case,” the doctor said. He pulled the gown back down and turned Álvaro over to open the back of his hospital gown. There was a collective gasp from the students gathered at the door. Letters carved to remind him. Nuncas mas. George cried out. The doctor’s voice changed.

  “What kind of monsters has he been mixed up with?” He parted the hair to trace the cross carved into Álvaro’s scalp. He described the ruin of his feet.

  “I think that’s quite enough,” George finally said. He pulled the curtains closed around the bed and Álvaro felt the air move across the skin he had kept so well hidden for the past month. For the past two years. On the other side of the curtains George spoke quietly to the doctor. Álvaro rolled over onto his back, raised his palms in front of his face. The lifeline on his left hand carved a path right around the base of his thumb clear to his wrist. The line on his right hand was broken, crosshatched into a hundred tiny scars where he’d put his hand out to stop his fall onto the shattered glass of the torture room.

  George stood beside him, barely able to meet his eyes. “I don’t think we realized,” he stuttered. “We’ll get you the help you need.”

  That’s what Álvaro was afraid of as he stared out the window of the car that drove him through the shining stream of traffic on the clean streets of Vancouver. Through the towers glittering in the afternoon sun, across one of the bridges high above the boats sparkling on the water below, up the long straight street lined with trees, the big houses hidden behind high hedges, all sparkling clean.

  Who here would understand anything of what he’d been through? In this city without razor wire or gates. No men with rifles. The car turned into lush green shade, circled and came to rest in front of a white building, a building that looked Spanish. Turquoise trim. George helped him out of the car. Oblate House it said on the door. Welcome on the mat. The last time he had been to the provincial house, the Oblate order’s administrative centre for western Canada, the superior had been very cranky after hearing what had happened with Isabel. They’d kept him here until the transfer to Winnipeg had been arranged, a naïve young priest whose holy anguish barely disguised his fierce desire for one woman’s flesh. A desire he thought would never dim.

  The door opened and he walked across the cool floor, a thin, quiet woman drawing him inside.

  “Eloise,” he said. It had been twenty years, but he remembered. She had been plumper then. Now she was thin to the bones.

  “Father Álvaro,” she said. “It’s been a long time. It will be good to have you here.”

  “The home for errant priests.”

  She giggled. “And you’re the only one under seventy.”

  He followed her through the back door, across the lawn to another house. One he didn’t recognize.

  “The Oblate country club,” she laughed as she led him past the swimming pool, the little grotto for the virgin, and under the second-floor balconies into the L-shaped house. “From the days when we needed more room, if you can believe it.” She showed him into a room — a single bed with a plaid bedspread, a table, an embroidered wall hanging, a crucifix, a chair. A small braided rug. A closet. She put his case on the table, turned back the covers, and patted the pillow. She drew the curtains.

  “You’ve had enough excitement for this week,” she said. “Why don’t you rest? I’ll send Andrew over — he’s our one living breathing novice and the only other resident under seventy — I’ll send him over to fetch you for vespers.”

  He sat on the bed as she closed the door. A lawnmower hummed somewhere. The reflected light off the water in the swimming pool rippled across the curtains. His left thumb traced the scars on his right hand. After a while he wedged the chair under the doorknob and lay down on the floor. He began to do sit-ups.

  6

  Amy found Janna in the library. Janna cleared her computer screen and sat back. Her report on the principles of partnership for her commercial law class was due tomorrow.

  “It’s too bad you left when you did,” Amy said. “Just when our little costume party was getting revved up.”

  The international business seminar had featured a mining company executive with projects in Asia and Madagascar, the Canadian distributor for a clothing manufacturer with factories in Central America and the South Pacific, and a vice-president for a detergent company that sold its products worldwide. Three suits and a grad student moderator. Janna was wondering what it would be like to work in Madagascar when Amy, dressed in the consignment clothes, slipped in, a thirty-something man in tow. She winked at Janna, but didn’t sit with her. She took careful notes during the presentations, and nodded as questions about Asian b
anking procedures and the culture of Nicaraguan contract negotiation were answered. When she stood to ask a question, the moderator didn’t hesitate to acknowledge her.

  She asked the mining company executive, very politely Janna was relieved to hear, how he dealt with conflicts over land acquisition in Indonesia where local indigenous people disputed ownership with the government. A little mutter went through the class as people tried to place her. The man tugged at the knot in his tie and leaned into the microphone. Spoke about the delicacies of doing business where there are internal politics that are really none of our business. But a good company working in places where the rule of law is not always followed needs to make alternate arrangements to protect its shareholders’ investments. And to protect the jobs for those people who want to work.

  “This is perhaps an accounting question then,” Amy went on. “The two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year you pay the security firm that has been implicated in the deaths of thirty-five villagers and the injuries of another two hundred. How would you enter that in the books? Would it be security or risk management? Public relations?”

  The man leaned back in his chair, all jovial man of the world. “I’m an engineer,” he said. “I leave the accounting to skilled people like yourselves.”

  Amy turned to the students and shrugged. “Beats me,” she said. “I thought protection money was something you paid to the Mafia.”

  Some students snickered, but none made eye contact with her. Janna saw that the man she’d come with held a small video camera on his lap.

  “I think it’s someone else’s turn now,” the moderator said and pointed to a small dark woman standing at the back. She wore a navy belted dress.

  She addressed her comments to the detergent manufacturer. “I’d like to begin by acknowledging your company’s skill in maintaining its market diversification.”