“It is very difficult to give away what we have accumulated in our lifetime. It feels like we are giving away our inner reserves. But that is what is required at this stage of life. We must all, at one point, do a proper accounting and empty the gold we have accumulated in our vault.”
“Yes,” I counter dryly. “But preferably in a way that firmly marks your time while on this earth. I will ponder all this—and get back to you.”
There are some other small matters to attend to, and then the meeting ends on another round of firm Swiss handshakes. Lisa leaves the room before me, and I hesitate briefly in the conference room’s doorway, looking down the bank’s corridor. Hardworking staff is coming and going from their offices, folders in hand, and the air is filled with the sound of printers churning out documents. Light is streaming in through the west windows, as my wife, in a blue dress, disappears down the corridor’s funnel.
I have built the Álvarez family’s private bank. It has been my life for so long, but now it is passing on without me, no other Álvarez interested in its future well-being.
So be it.
I turn and shake my colleague’s hand.
“Thank you, Hans. Thank you for everything.”
“I owe you much, José. It is the least I can do. You are in my thoughts and prayers.”
Lisa is waiting for me down on the Bahnhofstrasse. “Are the tumors already pressing against your brain?” she snaps. “What were you thinking in there? There is nothing to debate here. The boys should get your estate.”
We start walking. She is furious.
I stop in my tracks. “Do you think I love my sons?”
Lisa looks down at the sidewalk. “Yes. Of course I do.” But when she looks up again, her eyes are sparkling with defiance, a look that is particular to independent American women. “But do the boys know that? It will kill me if you die without making peace with your sons.”
“Mujer. I need space. I have to work this out my way. In the time I have remaining.”
“I am so sick of this. It just sucks—sucks shit.”
“Lisa! This is no way for a woman to talk!”
“Well, it does. And will you please stop being so patronizing? Honestly. It’s so annoying. What’s getting into you? It’s like you are reverting to some autocratic, old-fashioned cabeza de familia Spaniard by the minute.”
So, we stand there, unable to move forward or backward, each of us adrift in a riptide of overwhelming emotions. But across the street a glass door suddenly slides open, and in that moment we both know how to move on. We cross the Bahnhofstrasse, dodging the vicious trams determined to run us over, and climb the steps to the café above the chocolatier, Sprüngli.
I am panting at the top of the steps and have to hold on tight to the banister while I catch my breath. For a few moments we hover at the dining-room entrance, eyeing the tables, alongside the other shoppers awaiting a table. In good Swiss tradition, we are all ready to elbow the other out of the way at the first sign someone is paying their bill. Lisa, always good to have on your team for such things, almost flattens a ninety-year-old grande dame in her dash to secure the suddenly free table in the corner, before our less agile competition.
A dour waitress in a black apron and white blouse takes our order. Even Lisa, in the gloom of the moment, abandons her perennial diet and has a mille-feuille pastry alongside her usual sugarless mint tea. I have a plate of Luxemburgerli, an almond macaroon that is the house specialty, and a double espresso, with, naturalmente, a shot of Williamine.
We pick at our sweets in silence. The room is filled with the smell of roasting coffee and melted Gruyère, and the clattering din of silver scraping china and the singsong of Swiss gossip. After a few minutes, Lisa leans over and says, fiercely, “I won’t wind up like that. I won’t.”
I follow her gaze to a table, where an elderly Swiss woman sits primly erect in a Chanel suit and pearls, her hair coiffed into a spun-sugar pile atop her head. She sits catlike before a monstrous Coupe Dänemark, the house-made vanilla ice cream topped with freshly whipped cream and served in a fluted glass goblet with a silver urn of melted chocolate by its side. The stiff and formal woman pours the chocolate over the dessert, and begins eating it, slowly, her eyes suddenly glistening like a drunk’s. It is so obvious this afternoon boul de glace is the highlight of her lonely existence, a widow’s dairy highball in midafternoon.
“That decides it. I am moving back to New York when you die,” Lisa says, slapping her linen napkin down on the table. “I won’t stay another moment in this goddamn country and wind up like that. I am going home. After fifty years here, because of you, I am going home.”
So that is that. It is all ending, the life we built together. We are slowly preparing to go our separate paths. I am so full of sadness and ache, I can barely move, and I think of that fateful evening in New York, from sixty years ago, when our journey together began: It was our third or fourth date, at a French restaurant in the West Village, and I had opened up a little about my family and background, and, uncharacteristically for me, let Lisa know that my mother had been an alcoholic. Lisa was quiet for a moment and then stuttered she understood what I was talking about. Her father was also an alcoholic—and physically abusive to boot.
That evening, when our fingers interlaced and we walked back through the leafy and lit streets of the West Village, to the hotel room I had booked for our first night together, we somehow knew we had just struck a pact with each other: Let us do everything in our might, rose our mutual but unspoken prayers, to raise a wholesome family far from the madness of our own childhoods.
Here we are now—at the other end of that journey.
Lisa pays our Sprüngli bill, stands, and I follow suit. This time we take the elevator downstairs. Two chattering Swiss teenagers in faded jeans, their shirts half unbuttoned to reveal gold necklaces and firm cleavage, push their way into the elevator, just as we are trying to depart.
One of them bumps Lisa, doesn’t apologize, and a sudden heat comes over me. I wait for the right moment, lift a cheek, and let out a loud fart in their direction, just before exiting the elevator. It’s highly satisfying to see their utter disbelief and hear them gagging, right before the doors close and trap them inside with my gases.
Lisa is waiting for me on the street, a look of alarm and revulsion on her face. “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t do what I think you just did.”
“I can’t help it,” I say. “It’s the tumor.”
On our final day of errands in Zürich, we visit St. Agatha’s Hand of Mercy, a convent up on the Zürichberg, to take care of the last item on our checklist. It is so lovely up on the mountain. Cypress trees protectively encircle the cream-colored convent, like a mother might cradle a baby in her arms, while a faint late-summer breeze rustles their branches. Below us, the industrious city is spread out, from the curved bottom of the Lake of Zürich, down the Limmat River.
“Even I have to admit, it’s a beautiful city,” Lisa says.
We turn and enter the eighteenth-century courtyard door, have a word with the nun at the desk, and then climb the convent’s gloomy staircase to the hospice director’s office.
The smell of the hallway’s beeswax polish is laced with acrid medicinal fumes and the sickly sweet odor of rotting flesh, strange smells seeping out from under the closed pine doors. And the silence—it screams. It would make heaven sound like a Friday night on Las Ramblas in Barcelona, and my spirits, as we walk these corridors of death, plummet to a new low. But that’s also when I understand how it has to end, and when we sit down in the director’s neat office, I instantly blurt out, “I don’t want to die here. I want to die at home.”
“It’s a very common wish,” says the abbess. “And where is home?”
Lisa and I stare back at the nun, stumped by the question. We must think for a few moments. “We live in Ägeri. In Canton Zug.”
“Aaah, such a lovely part of the country, Central Switzerland. That will not be a problem.
Some of our Sisters drive.”
The requests, they pour out of me. I want a bed set up in the middle of my downstairs study and Alfredo’s bed next to mine. “He’s my dog,” I say. “And that is where I will die.” As I make each pronouncement, Lisa slowly lowers her head a bit farther, like I am walloping her with my fist. She fishes inside her purse for another tissue.
I put a hand on her thigh and give it a squeeze. The Mother Superior discreetly looks away, but turns her attention back when I take out my checkbook and write a large check in my shaky hand. She takes the proffered green slip, scrutinizes the sum, and takes off her glasses.
“We will arrange everything, Herr Álvarez. We wish to be of service.”
On our way back to our apartment, Lisa and I take the No. 6 tram down toward Zentral. I sit by the window. Lisa sits by my side, purse on lap, staring out into space, lost in anxious thoughts about the future.
As the tram whooshes down Hirschengraben, clanging its bell, the yellow-stone tower of the Liebfrauenkirche to the right catches my eye. The Catholic church is up on a raked hill, and requires, from the penitent, he climb a set of steep stone steps, through a thicket of rhododendron bushes. The tram turns and lurches into Zentral. We exit. “Lisa, you go ahead. I have a few errands I still need to run.”
She nods, kisses me, and crosses the street, relieved, I suspect, at having a little time to herself. I don’t blame her. Dying, it turns out, is a rather tiresome affair. I stand for a moment, watching her disappear down Limmatquai, imagining she’s off to have a restorative bath with the perfumed oils and unctures that do nothing for me but seem to provide my wife with great comfort.
I am a sweating and gasping mess by the time I reach the oak doors of the Liebfrauenkirche. I have to stand panting for a few minutes on the top step, holding the balustrade, wiping my brow with the linen handkerchief from my jacket pocket.
A young man with long hair comes up the stairs, two by two, and, without a glance, sidesteps me and slips inside the heavy doors. My impression, I don’t know why, is that he is a waiter who has just dashed up from the corner pizzeria. He leaves a trace of lavender perfume in the air.
I know that smell.
It is Suavecito, a blue-bottled Spanish pomade that we all wore, back in time. Faint memories, from long ago, float up, and I am filled with an ache that radiates from the center of my being, like the pressing of a tumor.
The church inside is cool and airy, enveloped in a black hush. The waiter is already on his knees in a pew up near the nave, his hands clasped in prayer and his head bowed. I am suddenly unsure of myself. I stand in the gloom, not sure why I am there and what I should do next.
My eyes adjust slowly to the twilight. The church is late nineteenth century, a mash-up of Renaissance murals and Byzantine architecture. I slip into a pew, and for some time sit like one of those black-dressed crones from my childhood in San Sebastián, staring at the emaciated and bleeding Christ on the crucifix. The last time I was in church, I was a teenager, kneeling next to my black-shrouded mother, the perennial martyr and penitent in our family. I see her in profile—the aristocratic nose, the brow furrowed in guilt, repenting her many sins.
I look down at the leather pocket hanging from the bench before me, and see a stack of bibles and some white pamphlets. I pull one out, and, under the heading “Jesus Calls Four Fishermen to Follow Him,” find a printed excerpt from Matthew:
And passing along the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brethren, Simon who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net in the sea, for they were fishers. And Jesus saith unto them, “Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.”
There is a crack and creak from somewhere behind the altar. A priest with a speckled-silver head emerges, wearing the purple sash of confession around his neck. He goes down the right side of the church, enters the confessional, and waits for penitents. It is 4:00 p.m.
I know, then, why I am here, and stand, shakily, to make my way to the cubicle. The confessional is dark and enclosed like a wooden coffin, smelling of dust and sweat, a semen-like whiff of spilled sin. The panel between us slides open, and through the reed grille I can just make out the priest’s profile, as he faces forward, never looking at me.
He asks, in Swiss German, when was the last time I took confession. I immediately detect the accent.
“Hablas español?”
“Sí, mi hijo.”
I think then that perhaps God has guided me here, on this particular day, to sit opposite a Spanish priest. For I know it would have been impossible to unburden myself in Swiss, or even English, the language of my household for the last fifty-two years. I must return to the language of my childhood and my mother and of the mother Church, to do what I have to do. So, I hold up my head and proudly announce, in Spanish, “It has been sixty years since my last confession.”
“God is listening, my son.”
And so I confess, confess to all the bad things I have done in my life, the cruelty and indifferences, the hurts and slights and neglect, all the pain I have inflicted or enabled to happen over the course of time. I recall how I despised my mother and hated my father. How I drove my uncle away and abandoned my wife; how I ruthlessly cast my friend Miguel aside and taught my own boys to be duplicitous and economical with the truth. And I save, to the last, the worst of all my sins—the role I played in my brother’s end.
But I meticulously lay it all out, in a dry and unwavering voice, and write the church a check for one hundred thousand Swiss francs, which I hand over, with a list of names—starting with my wife and sons, of course, but also including my brother and parents and uncle, and Miguel and the names of my friends and worst enemies—all the figures alive and dead who haunt my sleep.
“On the first day of the month, for ten years, I want you to pray for everyone on that list.”
The priest eyes the check resting on the divider before us, and I can sense his animal-like excitement and greed through the grille. “It shall be done,” he says, before delicately reaching out to take the check, like my dog, Alfredo, might cautiously pull a piece of beef from my hand, worried his master might suddenly snatch it back. The priest places the check in his bible, like a bookmark.
Our business transaction conducted, he prays for my forgiveness, dispenses my penance, an arbitrary but long list of Lord’s Prayers and Hail Marys that is nonsense, of course.
I am both sweating and chilled but rather pleased I have successfully achieved my purpose. I wipe my brow with my handkerchief, and head to the pew to say the required penance of prayers and complete my pact with God. But as I move to a pew at the front, the young waiter in the second row gets off his knees, makes the sign of the cross, turns heel, and heads my way.
As we pass each other, he presses a piece of paper into my hand, like we are spies conducting a clandestine exchange of secrets. I instinctively grasp the note before I know what’s happening. When I do register what has just occurred, the young man is already down the length of the church and out the main door, trailing that smell of Suavecito.
I look down at the note. It, too, is in Spanish. “You don’t fool anyone. You and I both know that was not a proper penance.”
The priest emerges from the confessional and heads back to the nave.
“Who was that young man?”
The priest turns, smiling unsurely, as if I am going to make another bizarre demand of him. “I am sorry. What young man are you referring to?”
I stretch out my hand, to hand him the note, but nothing is there.
TWO
I do not tell Lisa about what happened at the church, or in fact that I went to the basilica at all, and we later return to our farmhouse in Ägeri. Before we go to bed, I look over at my wife, in the quiet of our chalet living room, as she drinks her evening rooibos tea. Her face, so droopy and lined by worry, makes me recall a long-forgotten phrase that my father frequently repeated about my mother: That woman is sad, sad to her marrow. But Lisa is a great in
tuitive, and, perhaps sensing she is the subject of my thoughts, she looks at me over the rim of her teacup and says, “I can’t stand this. It’s unconscionable.”
She is sitting in the armchair, I am on the couch, and between us the room is darkening, as the embers in the grate collapse and die. But I can see in her face how she is struggling with my choice not to fight the latest spread of cancer. She simply doesn’t understand I want to manage the end my way, to face its reality and not cling to some delusional cure for what is clearly a death sentence.
I suddenly remember a time from when we were still young and courting. Lisa and I were walking in the woods just behind the village of Milford, Pennsylvania, when I heard anguished peeping coming from a logger’s woodpile. I pushed a fern out of the way. A young mourning dove was squashed between two logs, a gray-blue clump of downy feathers, one wing laid out flat. Its wing, at an odd angle, was clearly broken and I knew it would never fly. When the exhausted bird stopped chirping and lowered its head, I stepped forward and put my hands on it, like a healer might, and then, with one quick motion, broke its neck.
“Oh, no! You didn’t! How could you!”
Lisa burst into tears, turned back the way we came, and ran. I was left dumbfounded by the log pile. I eventually found her sipping black tea on the porch of Hotel Fauchere, the inn where we were staying. I sat down beside her. She explained how mourning doves were special to her, how they constantly showed up in her own poetry, because when she was growing up and sad, she used to wander behind her family’s home on the Mainline outside Philadelphia. She’d walk under the fir trees and see a mourning dove nest filled with gently cooing parents, and would watch them tenderly feed the chirping chicks with the gaping beaks.
This vision of family life as it should be, it filled her with peace and awe and hope—that she, too, would have a happy family life one day. I in turn told her of my upbringing, of the quail hunts with Papá and Uncle Augustin, and how it was a point of manly honor, of kindness, to step forward and instantly put a suffering animal out of its misery. I apologized that I did not think about how she might react at seeing such a thing, but killing a suffering animal, quickly and confidently, it was second nature to me, and the way a young Spanish gentleman is bred. And then we sat for some time, both of us sipping afternoon tea, silently wondering if we could marry if we were so different.
The Man With No Borders Page 2
