The Taste of Ashes

by Sheila Peters

  She pushed back her chair, thinking Amy’s politics were messing with her head. That and the coffee buzzing through her system like electric currents, the coffee and her hunger. None of the pastries had looked edible. David stood, the red glow of the brazier lighting his face. “It’s more than whim.”

  “Is it?” she said, looking him over as if she was still in the gallery and he was a statue. She tilted her head, first to one side and then to the other, the way she’d seen people do in front of a picture. His face was slightly freckled, and she stepped sideways so she could look at his ear and the way his neck rose out of his jacket. She walked around him, not caring what he thought. She put out a hand, touched his shoulder to keep him from turning and walked right around him, pausing to note where the hem of his pants was trodden at the heels, the highlights in his gel-streaked hair, the blush rising right into his ears as he realized what she was doing. She felt dreamy as she walked her fingers down his back feeling for the vertebrae beneath the jacket. She came round the front and stared at him, feeling an arousal that startled her. One she didn’t care if he saw.

  “What do you have against whim?” she said. She shivered at what she felt was power.

  “I live just a couple of blocks from here.” He tried to keep it light but his voice was hoarse. “You’re getting cold.”

  She shrugged again and turned, felt his hand land lightly on her shoulder, guiding her through the rain, the umbrella forgotten. She felt like she was underwater: the rain on her head, the pressure of his hand like the pressure of water against her body when she swam, a pressure she could feel against all her limbs. As she followed him up the stairs to his place above the Asian import shop, she took off her wet jacket trying to relieve that pressure. His key so quick in the lock she barely had time to pause and think before she was lost in the taste of smoke in his mouth, the skin, and the urgency. But there was a moment when she thought of Isabel and about how these things happened. And then didn’t think of her or anything else.

  †

  She was half-asleep in a tangle of sheets when David raised her hand and kissed the writing blurred on her palm. When he tried to get her to talk about why she liked it so much, she ignored him, looking around the big bedroom. Two ornate dressers, the dark wood intricately carved, the knobs filigreed ivory balls. Clothes spilled off a big table under a big window draped with dozens of patterned scarves. The walls were covered, every inch, with posters of art exhibits and the ceiling slanting over the bed had hundreds of coins pressed into the plaster. She could hardly breathe in the dim perfumed air. She climbed down off the bed as he said something about cultural connotation and went looking for the bathroom. She didn’t want to analyze her feelings about the flute player. She wanted a weekend off from being a student.

  When he followed her right into the bathtub to ask her what she thought about the contaminating effect of western cultural imperialism, she turned him around and asked about the line of thumbprints tattooed down his spine. It was a first-year art project, he said. Before he could explain further, she nipped the top print with her teeth, wondering whose thumb it was. They alternated, left thumb, right thumb, left thumb, right thumb, all the way down to the crack in his butt. Her mouth still at his neck, she walked her fingers down the prints until her hands were in the water and he stopped talking about art. It had turned out to be exactly the kind of weekend she wanted.

  †

  By Monday afternoon, she was having doubts. Papers spilled out across the floor, where she’d dropped her bag when she crept in sometime around four that morning. Her weekend clothes, still in a heap on the bathmat, smelled of smoke and sex. Thank God she’d managed to have a shower before she went to class, shuddering to think of Greg taking off her pants. She had a vague memory of a girl helping him. A real gentleman. She tried to reassure herself about the weekend. She’d been working too hard and needed a break. She’d had that. She needed sex. She’d had that. She still needed food. She had hardly eaten all weekend. David had cooked something, but it had been too spicy. And late on Sunday they’d smoked a joint that she was sure was spiked with something else the way she could still feel it curving all the straight edges in her room. Like she told the rep, if she ate something, she’d be fine.

  She pulled on some clothes and ran down to the vending machines in the basement. She bought chocolate bars, chips, a packet of cheese and crackers. A couple of Cokes. Back in her room, she flipped open her laptop, turned it on, and popped in a CD, hoping the techno buzz and Cokes would be enough to power her up to tackle some of the work she’d planned to do over the weekend. There was no way she was going to be able to finish the statistical analysis, but she might be able to do a draft of her final report for international studies. As she stared at the neat lines of text appearing on the screen and felt the sugar jolt through her system, she began to think she just might pull it off.

  10

  Álvaro’s suitcase, still streaked with the dust of Guatemala City and smeared with Vancouver rain, lay open on his bed in the provincial house. He’d stripped the sheets, spread the blanket back over the mattress, and laid out his few possessions. His clothes. His Oblate cross tucked between his socks. The blue tin cup that had stood, full of forgotten water, on the table while his uncle’s small house crumbled around it, a single roof beam crushing his mother in her bed. February 4, 1976, when he was a novice in Mexico City.

  He tucked the cup in a corner of the case and, between the folds of his one white shirt, he slipped the creased postcard of the Virgin of Guadalupe. After visiting her shrine, he’d sent the card to his mother to celebrate a day of pure feeling with the spirit alive in every nerve. Once he became a novitiate, his mother had returned to her village and been welcomed home. She was a respected healer and a midwife, the uncles said later. Things she’d never told him. They had taken a photo of her in her coffin for him. She wore the carefully preserved huipil of her youth with its lightning zigzags and coiled around her beautiful silver hair, the red coral snake tzute, cloth he remembered from the time before his father disappeared. Another mystery he’d thought back then he would never unravel. He’d spoken to the carpenter who had built her coffin, a young man uncertain how this pale Ladino was connected to the village and why he wanted to know where he’d learned his trade and how busy he’d been after the earthquake.

  The uncles told him they’d found the postcard propped up against the cup, the stars in the Virgin’s robe the same blue. If only she’d had it with her, they said. The Virgin’s grace wasted on a cup. These men he was meeting for the first time lit candles and fed him liquor. They told him about the mountain’s saint name. Gave him the rosary in its little pouch. He was a pure and fiery Catholic then, washing himself clean of the old ways and the rituals his mother performed in quiet corners. Rituals he and Vinicio had trampled as they rode Fortuny’s horses through the planted ground.

  It was to the Virgin of Guadalupe, Álvaro thought, he should go for guidance now. He would ask her for a sign as clear as Juan Diego’s roses in winter to see if he was, at last, on a path that would make him whole again.

  The first thing he had drawn for Chris Mundy was a milagro of the heart. He’d sketched dozens of them in the week before his first appointment. The four lines of a square. The soft curves of a heart and the shading to show its volume. He was bursting with its urgency, jiggling his knee impatiently as she explained the process. How they would begin slowly. Find out how much energy he had for this and how far he wanted to go.

  He wanted to begin by drawing something for her. A gift. He started to explain milagros. How they offer protection. We’ll talk later, she said, and sat him down at a table with paint, brushes, pencils, and crayons lined up around the edge. Dozens of colours. She spread a big sheet of paper in front of him and sat down, off to one side. His certainty vanished in the face of the blank paper. He brushed his open hands across it several times, feeling its texture. His breath caught in his chest as he struggled to choose. He felt l
ike he was choking as his right hand moved of its own accord over to the thick crayons.

  Silver for the square of tin. Four grey slashes, forming a square as wide as the paper itself. The pain in his chest became acute as his fingers hovered over the reds, the pain so palpable it was as if his heart itself was crying out for the right colour, and leapt, joyous, when his fingers figured it out and chose three. The joy turned to despair at the clumsy lump cross-hatched with scribbles. He had made the heart too big.

  He looked across at her, desperate. It has to be smooth, he’d said, and she showed him how to use his fingers to spread the colour. Many people are surprised by what happens when they draw, she told him. They are surprised at what comes, how quickly they are engulfed. He struggled to catch his breath, to find words to tell her about the heart. He bent to ease the constriction in his throat, bent close, and rubbed the harsh burgundy, orange, and scarlet scrawls until the paper glowed as red as the sacred heart on the crucifix in la finca’s kitchen. The constriction grew and grew until he bent to kiss the heart as his mother had him do each morning when he ran into the kitchen, still warm from his bed. He was panting, exhausted from the effort.

  Chris said something about establishing a sanctuary, a place he could visualize if things got too upsetting. Perhaps a place he had loved as a child, a place where he felt safe. He thought of Clara saying her first prayer of the day, then sitting at his feet while he brushed her hair and his mother prepared them each a cup of chocolate.

  “Keep hold of that image,” Chris said. “Tell me what you’re seeing.”

  He told her about the wood crackling in the stove, the metal creaking as it warmed up. Herbs hanging from the ceiling, the smell of coffee, and the sticky skin of milk on the surface of the cocoa. But he relaxed too far into his own story and was smiling at Chris across the table from his silly heart when he heard the click of riding boots on tiles. Vinicio calling the dog. Calling Álvaro. Chris’s studio filled with the smell of lemons and the voice, a soft hiss. El pobrecito, he heard. The boot on the spade, the spade cutting into the crumbling dirt, and the yellow bones. Finger bones reaching out to pull him in. He tried to push them away and was surprised to find that his own hands were not strapped down. Stained from the drawing, they scrabbled at the crayons on the table.

  “Father Álvaro.” Chris’s voice was a thin thread flung from a great distance. “Father Álvaro, there’s no one else here. You’re safe, Father.” She was close to him and he smelled her shampoo, something apple. The lemon vanished and he slumped back in the chair, his body trembling. He lay his head down on his arms and sobbed.

  He didn’t know how long he cried before Chris touched his arm and handed him a box of tissues. As he lifted his head, the smeared red of the heart glowed on the paper. He took a tissue and wiped his face. His shoulders relaxed. He took another and blew his nose. His stomach unclenched. She handed him a glass of water, gathered up the soggy tissues, and tossed them in a wastebasket. Gave him a few minutes to stare out one of the high windows at the bare branches of the trees outside.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  He felt the rosary in his pocket.

  “Why don’t you bring it out?” she asked.

  He pulled out the chain of corn, the kernels forming a rosary, the cross woven of corn husks. Each seed’s centre was punctured by the threading of the string. He wrapped it around one hand. He wondered as he always did if it could still germinate.

  Chris waited.

  He unwrapped it and spread it out across the heart. There was no refuge for him in the kitchen of his childhood. No refuge in his memories of Clara. No refuge in his mother’s love. And even as he struggled to speak, the smell of lemons again wafted through the room. The fear returned and clenched every muscle in his body. Fear and enormous fatigue. He was so tired of being afraid. He was so tired of trying not to be afraid.

  “What do you smell?”

  Her attentiveness gave Álvaro an understanding then of last chances. He had to try. “Lemons,” he said, his jaw clenched around the word.

  “Tell me about the lemons.”

  “He uses lemon juice for an aftershave. He has a lemon tree beside his house, and like his father did, he goes out in the morning and picks a lemon. Slices it and rubs the cut surface over his face. Then he squeezes out the juice and drinks it. His body’s bullet-proof vest, he says.”

  “He?”

  Álvaro reached out and picked up a small pot of paint. He unscrewed the lid, poured thick black drops down the length of the rosary, and smeared them across the heart. His skin seemed to shrink and tighten across the scars on his face and skull. “Ms. Mundy, may I introduce Vinicio Fortuny. My constant companion.”

  †

  And so the therapy began. Saying the man’s name out loud unstopped something in Álvaro and he had not been able to stop drawing since. But each drawing left him more exposed. Stumbling in, exhausted after that first session, he tried to retreat to his room. He was called to come to dinner and meet with old friends from Winnipeg. After the second, he was asked if he would help translate for a delegation from Costa Rica. After the third, he was asked to sit with Father Donald who was swelling up with fluid, his heart unable to pump the blood away from his lungs. He said yes to every request, each so small, so well intentioned. He felt guilty about the shrinking energy of his community, of the men who had been everything to him after he had lost his mother, who had helped him transform the loss of Isabel into compassion, who had let him go back to Guatemala when he could no longer bear listening to the refugees’ stories he was asked to translate as they tried to make a life in Winnipeg. Whose warnings he had ignored as he tried to lose himself in the debris washed up in the streets of Guatemala City. Who were paying for his sessions with Chris.

  He had taken to sneaking in to his room, hoarding the time it took to draw the images that kept coming. Every handprint on the floor, every fence and tombstone, every chicken bleeding in the dirt was something made bearable. Diving deep into his own dark house with a crayon to light the way, terrified and exhilarated. A knock on the door asking if he would walk with Father James who was in the restless throes of early dementia. He said yes to everything and failed everywhere. Hiding in a hedge with the old priest for an hour, half a block from the house because a hydro truck with its man in a hardhat and the orange traffic markers represented indecipherable threats. James, incontinent, wet, cold, yelling and hitting at Álvaro until a neighbour called the police.

  Clearly the provincial house was not suitable. Perhaps he needed a residential facility — there was one on Vancouver Island they could send him to. But he wanted to keep working with Chris. She was called in to consult with the superior. With her, she brought Margaret Coleman’s invitation for Álvaro to move into a quiet upstairs room in her house. She had taken in many refugees, Chris said, some who had been tortured. She would provide a quiet place with no obligations. The superior, not waiting to see Álvaro’s response, simply nodded in thanks. Margaret would pick him up the next day.

  Álvaro closed his suitcase and looked around the small bedroom. One of so many rooms he had shut the door on. So little to carry, really. He walked across to the main building. None of us really knows how much weight another carries. Or why some of us keep it all while others can let it float away. Like Walter. He heard his voice before he saw him, standing in an office doorway, talking to someone about the previous night’s hockey game.

  Álvaro paused, waiting for the inevitable. Walter turned toward him, his walker filling the hall.

  “You ever play hockey in Winnipeg?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “That’s what you need. A good hockey brawl with young players, ones who can knock the stuffing out of you.”

  “I do better at soccer.”

  “It’s because we’re all old men in this town. You’re damn near one yourself but around us you act like one of the young roosters, voice still breaking halfway through a squawk.”

  Álvaro set
his case down. His cardboard tube of drawings.

  “If I was ten years younger, I’d do it myself, like I did the first time you ran off the rails.”

  That was another bedroom, the one they’d shared for his short time in the north. The summer of Isabel.

  When Álvaro first turned to the church it was not for the love of God. It was to escape the chasm that had opened up beneath him when Clara was sent to school in Los Angeles. Forever, it seemed, she had opened her door to him. Her twin. As the house subsided into sleep, he would sneak down the hallway, his bare feet certain of every step, his hands sure on the latch. At first they were just children cuddled together for comfort. But that changed and the hands set out on different journeys under the covers, under the clothes, all their attention focused on each other’s skin. Endless kisses in the damp darkness. The little gasps as they found new places. Their whimpers as he travelled a little distance into her, stopping before he hurt her, his fumbling ejaculations.

  Then one night, Clara’s door had been locked and he heard his mother’s voice inside. The next day Clara was gone. Their secret, his mother’s now. If they find out, she told him, dying would be the least of your worries. When he opened his mouth to protest, she slapped him. Do as I tell you, she’d said. One of the catechists ducked under a roof in the village, the water spouting out of the gutters, the streets streaming. Yelling an invitation to a seminar in the next town. When? Now. The truck idling, the faces watching. A couple of young men from the village and a couple of strangers, all of them nervous. The man holding out a bundle of clothes his mother had wrapped for him. Tortillas still warm in the middle. He was fifteen. He’d gone.

  The seminar led to the seminary and somewhere in that first year, he had ignited. He had burned through school, burned through his mother’s awkward visits, burned right through his farewell visit to the plantation two years later — Fortuny’s pistol on the table as he paid the men lined up outside the back door of the main house, Vinicio standing behind him in his army uniform. Clara’s debutante portrait hung in the dining room, all satin and ruffles showcasing her pale shoulders and neck. Her eyebrows arched, eyes looking over the photographer’s shoulder. It’s not a good place for you, his mother told him. Don’t go there anymore. The discipline of his studies had been a luxurious freedom. A call to leave his past behind, his desire sublimated. Or so he thought. In Smithers, everything was new, his parishioners a confusing mixture of Carrier, Dutch, Italian, Irish, and Canadian. And there was Isabel. Her little boys like puppies. His body in flames.