The Man With No Borders

by Richard C. Morais

  “I am here now, Herr Álvarez. I am here.”

  And I suddenly know, as I did when I discovered my confessor priest was a fellow Spaniard, that God has sent this particular hospice nurse at this particular time to enter my life.

  It must be so.

  “Tell me a story,” I say.

  “About what?”

  “About the man.”

  “What man?”

  “The man who waited for the wool cap.”

  “Oh, Miguel. What do you want to know?”

  “Did he die alone? I want to know how his end came.”

  Sister Bertha studies me and then quietly says, “He died alone, as you would describe it. You would say he was abandoned and with no one but a silly hospice nurse by his side. But I know he died in Jesus’s arms.”

  “What does that even mean? That’s just Christian mierda.”

  “That is your opinion, Herr Álvarez. I’ll admit Miguel was in a bad state the first month I was with him, wrestling with his demons all night and every night. He suffered greatly. But when Miguel was at his worst, a man came to see him, his only visitor the entire three months I was sitting by his side. It changed everything. He was almost ninety, I would guess. Miguel called him ‘my Sweet Freak,’ and I suspect he had been a client at one time. The man was wealthy and very ill himself. He came in a motorized wheelchair, with a private nurse and driver. He stayed for thirty minutes only, but you could see how determined he was to pay his respects, and he brought Miguel one hundred roses. When the old man left, Miguel wore a lovely smile and said, not so much to me, but to the universe at large, ‘I was loved.’”

  I fall deflated back into my pillow when I hear this.

  “Toward the end, after Miguel dozed and had come back from wherever he was, he said, ‘Do you know, Sister Bertha, that God is into threesomes? Hombre. He likes his sex wild.’ I was both shocked and disgusted by this remark, that he should talk in this filthy way about God, but I tried not to show it and said, ‘What do you mean?’

  “He started gibbering then, making no sense at all, something about how there were times during sex when ‘the son becomes the father,’ which was also the exact moment when the ‘third in the threesome joins the party.’”

  Sister Bertha sees that the story has me riveted, firmly back on earth and among the living, so she gently lets go of my hand and retrieves her knitting from the canvas sack at her feet, before continuing with her story.

  “Of course, this all sounded to me like the fevered talk of a deeply troubled homosexual who was dying. So, I tried to humor him. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘And who is the third in this threesome?’ Ja. I will always remember his answer. ‘I think you know him as the Holy Ghost.’ It gives me the chills, even now, just remembering how he said it. Such conviction. I totally believed him. And why not? When love is in the room, then God is in the room, and whatever happens there, it is not to be judged by us common mortals. It is in God’s hands.”

  Sister Bertha yanks some blue wool yarn from the ball in the canvas bag.

  “Such an unusual man. It is strange, but I think of Miguel all the time, to this day, even though I did not know him long. I have seen ‘religious’ people who prayed all their life completely lose their faith in the final approach to death. You can see the terror in their faces and twisted bodies. But I have also seen sinners filled with divine grace at the moment God carries them to the other side. It is hard to explain. You just never know what kind of death a man is going to have.”

  She looks up, puts the back of her hand on my forehead. “Are you feeling better, Herr Álvarez? You look better. Life is back in your face. But I can see you want to retreat now. Yes, that’s fine. Go. Close your eyes.”

  PART VI

  1983

  ZÜRICH, SWITZERLAND

  THIRTEEN

  On the balance sheet of the soul, family secrets eventually have to be accounted for and reconciled—usually at a considerably marked-up price. My accounting started, quietly enough, that summer night when I was drinking Glenfiddich in the chalet’s family room. It was Sunday evening, and I was in a morose and dour mood. Lisa was in her blue bathrobe, lying on the couch before me, reading the Opera News. I kept watching for that hand of hers, which periodically shot out and grabbed a wafer-thin square of Lindt from the box on the coffee table, before popping it into her mouth. I counted each trip. She was on her fifth chocolate. When she reached out again, I looked away. My teenage sons were half comatose and sprawled out on the floor, watching Wimbledon on the television, as spineless and shapeless as beanbags and dropping popcorn all over the floor.

  When I met Lisa at the Columbia University mixer, so many years earlier, I knew this was the calm and kind woman with whom I could build a “normal” family life, the exact opposite of what I had experienced as a child—and we did build the home I always dreamt of. And she dreamt of. But that night, the family scene before me, the very thing I craved for so long, inexplicably filled me with rage.

  Is this all there is? Is this what the hard work has been about? So she can eat chocolate and go to the opera—and they can watch fucking tennis on Swiss TV?

  Luckily, a few days afterward, I was distracted by Deutwiller, who came into my office and announced he wanted to retire. It was a good time to restructure the bank, he advised. This corporate shuffling briefly gave me a new purpose in life, and I threw myself into the reorganization, burying in work the morose restlessness and depression that was slowly and steadily growing inside me. Over the next four years, Deutwiller retired, I bought out Grupo Central de Bilbao’s 10 percent share, and groomed a sharp young Swiss banker, Hans-Peter Grieder, to become my second in command.

  So the distraction worked—for a while.

  My Venezuelan client turned, and for a brief while, I watched him, trailing cigar smoke, as he walked stiff-legged back to his suite at the Savoy on Paradeplatz. We had just eaten in an Italian restaurant near the Zürich Bourse. It was near midnight on a weekday, and when he was out of sight, I turned and walked in the opposite direction, back toward my apartment in the Niederdorf.

  There was something in the deserted November air that night—in the wet mist, the rotting linden leaves—that made me profoundly sad, and I picked up my pace as I crossed the Rudolf Brun Bridge, trying to brush off my growing melancholia.

  The city and its lights were bleakly reflected in the black Limmat River below, and this mirrored vision did nothing to cheer me up. Zürich seemed morbidly dead that night, and, somewhere in the middle of the bridge, I recalled the raucous nightlife of San Sebastián—the pavements filled with promenading families, the loud lowlifes drinking too much. What I had lost, by the choices I made during the course of my life, suddenly hit me full force, and a kind of grief accompanied my leaden footsteps across the bridge, as I headed deep into the buttoned-up Swiss-Protestant night.

  It was dark, in the old quarter, but for the occasional cast-iron lamp clamped to the medieval stone walls rising around me. I took a deep breath, to calm myself, and then descended stone stairs. A cat walked a ledge just above my head.

  At the bottom of the stairs, in the square below, I came across a linden tree, a stone fountain, an overflowing garbage can—and a young woman. She had blunt-cut, almost altar-boy hair, and hovered near the door of the Haifisch Bar. Her Nautilus down jacket was unzipped and open, so the men passing by could see she wore nothing underneath but a yellow tank top and blue-satin hot pants.

  A gold chain purse hung from her shoulder, and the platform shoes with cork soles gave the illusion she was tall. The way she puffed her cigarette, it all brought back the memory of that long-forgotten experience in Ribadesella’s whorehouse—the thrill, the shame, the sensation of feeling intensely alive.

  But I resolutely took the quickest route back to the family apartment, giving the prostitute only the smallest sideways glance as I passed. She wasn’t more than twenty-five years old, I guessed, and was visibly trembling in the cold. There was something to
uching and awkward in her youthful movements, but I really wasn’t giving her that much thought, was genuinely heading home, when the Haifisch Bar’s door smacked open.

  A portal to the underworld suddenly opened up, spilling light, smoke, and raucous chatter onto the square. Two laughing men fell out of the oak door. The girl, now in the bar’s yellow seepage, looked up at the men hopefully, but they stumbled off, swaying arm in arm, and she turned disappointed back to the nub of her cigarette. The bar door pulled shut.

  It was her pale and innocent face—the short fringe of hair and the nails bitten down to the quick, but mostly the stud earrings caught momentarily in the bar light—that made me stop in my tracks. Those stud earrings were what baby girls wore at their christenings in Spain, and, as one thought triggers another, I had a vision of my brother, when we were just innocent boys and attending our neighbor’s baptism in San Sebastián.

  “Do you want a drink? It’s a bit cold to be standing out at night in hot pants. Let’s have a talk. Coño. I’m shivering just looking at you.”

  “Talk?” She looked me over. “Is that all you want?”

  “Yes,” I answered stiffly. “Let’s start with talk.”

  “Ja, sure. I’ll have a drink. It’s a slow night. Can I have a bite to eat, too?”

  “Of course. Come. Let’s get you warmed up and something to eat.”

  We turned and she leaned on my arm, clutching me to her side. It wasn’t an erotic gesture at all, but more like how a novice skater with weak ankles might reach out, without thinking, to clutch the nearest person for stability, as she wobbled unsteadily in her cork platform shoes, down the uneven cobblestones.

  “What’s your name?”

  “José.”

  “Lena.” She had a slight accent.

  “Where are you from?”

  “I am Swiss. From Bülach. But my father is Serbian.”

  We reached the covered archway of the Zum Saffron guild house, and stepped inside a smoky café, taking a table in the back. Lena ordered a peppermint tea and a salami-and-cheese roll. I ordered a Café Lutz, a coffee laced with apple brandy and sugar, although, truth be told, I really didn’t need any more to drink.

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes. I have three sons.”

  “Where are they?”

  I looked across the tables, toyed with my spoon. I didn’t want to reveal too much.

  “Central Switzerland. And you? Do you live alone?”

  “Yes. I have a studio. Behind the train station.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four. And you?”

  “Forty-five.”

  “So. Now we have that out of the way. No more discussion about age.”

  She took a bite of her salami Brot, chewed hungrily, and then said, in a hopeful and nervous way, “Would you like to see my flat?” like she was twelve and asking me over for a playdate. I looked at her blunt-cut hair and those earring studs and said, “Yes. I think I’d like that very much.”

  We quickly finished up, left the restaurant. Lena took me by the hand and hailed a taxi. My heart was pounding and I could say very little, but she held my hand tight, determined not to let me go. The taxi stopped before a run-down apartment building from the 1900s, in the industrial part of town behind the Hauptbahnhof, which, very un-Swiss like, had not had a facelift or refurbishment for decades.

  The brown wallpaper in the building’s central staircase was ripped and soiled and scraped by the sofas and commodes that countless times had been carried up and down the turning staircase. The hall smelled of Turkish and Armenian stews cooked earlier in the day, their lingering odor left to hang stale in the cold hallway, like the smell of old socks.

  I recoiled from the sordidness of it all and wanted out. But Lena’s little hand tightly held mine, and we climbed the dimly lit stairs together, to the sound of her platform heels clunking on the steps. Her room was directly above the corner bar, and the roar from downstairs penetrated the wooden floorboards, as did the odor of spilled beer and stale cigarettes. But she had done the best she could with the room—there was a neatly made bed, a few celebrity magazines in a tidy pile on the sill, and a breakfast table with canine salt-and-pepper shakers.

  Lena relaxed once she was inside her flat, stopped shivering, and seemed more mature. She kicked off her shoes and flung her purse onto the breakfast table. “Let me help you,” she said. She took off my jacket, loosened my tie. A trembling heat was coming off me, through my shirt. I was confusingly filled with doubt, guilt, and a desire so powerful my breath was coming in gasps.

  A voice inside chanted, You swore you would never do this. You promised Lisa this was not you. But my body was aching for me to take the other route, and my father’s voice was forcibly roaring encouragement in my head.

  Lena sensed it all, these riptides of conflicting feelings, and she put a finger to my lips. “Hush. Don’t worry. It’s natural to be a little afraid.”

  “I . . . I . . . don’t know.”

  Lena surprised me then by quietly resting her head against my arm. She leaned against me, as if she were surrendering herself to me, and not the other way around. “It’s perfectly natural. Men have hunger.”

  She guided me to the bed, murmuring comforting words. “Come here. Sit. We both have needs. You are helping me, too, you know. I need the money. And you are such a nice man. I can tell. This gives me pleasure, to be of service to you.”

  She talked quietly in this surprisingly honest way, making me feel quite innocent, and that it was just the natural order of things, this body exploration, somehow creating the illusion we were nothing more than innocent children playing doctor on the floor of a bedroom. I sat befuddled at the end of her bed, as she knelt before me and untied my shoes, gently pulling them off my hot and pinched feet.

  She unbuttoned my shirt, slid it from my shoulders, before one of her hands—quickly, expertly—undid my belt, popped open the top button of my pants, and unzipped my fly. As each layer of clothing was removed, I felt myself stripped of the outer skins of my life—my roles as father and husband and private banker—until in the end I was reduced to my most basic essence, finally at rest with all my greedy flaws and imperfections, returning to a more brutish and primitive self, as the tip of my cock slid into her mouth.

  It was morning. I heard the metallic sounds of the tram taking commuters to work, the crackling electricity from the overhead cables, the wheels underneath sending out a grating, skate-sharpening sound as the tram turned along the tracks into the station. The light was pink and pale and freshly innocent. I stared up at Lena’s cracked and pocked ceiling for some moments, full of nausea and disgust, and then, unable to contain the self-loathing any longer, rolled off the bed.

  Lena’s eyes fluttered open. She looked pale and tired.

  “Are you going?”

  “Yes. Thank you for the lovely evening.”

  I left on her bedside table almost all the cash I had, four hundred francs. It was more than she had asked and her eyes briefly widened with excitement.

  “Thank you, José. You are a nice man.”

  “No, I am not. But it is kind of you to say so.”

  I eased shut the door of her apartment and descended the stairs, behind an unshaven Albanian wearing a roadworks-orange vest, just heading out to work. The hall in the morning smelled of fresh winter stews again bubbling on the stove, and once outside, I grabbed a taxi and went directly to Hechtplatz, letting myself into the penthouse and the life that Lisa and I had built.

  I went to the bathroom, dropped my clothes in a heap on the floor, and stepped behind the glass doors to take a boiling shower. I stood under the showerhead for I don’t know how long, still trembling from the night, telling myself again and again that I had momentarily slipped, on a lonely and drunken night, but it wouldn’t happen again. I stepped out of the shower, toweled off, and drove home.

  “What is it?” Lisa asked.

  We were in our living room in the far
mhouse. I looked up from my paper.

  “What is what?”

  “That thing you are doing.”

  “Mujer. What are you talking about?”

  “That thing that makes you so sweet and attentive one moment—and then cold and angry and withdrawn the next. It usually happens when you come back to us after a night at the apartment.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  She dropped her head, back to her sketch pad, and after a pause said, “Well, it’s probably best I don’t know. I should just focus on what I believe. That you love me, that you love us, and that you will never really jeopardize what we have built here.” Her eyes were brimming and her voice trembled a little when she added, “Remember, we swore to each other we would raise our sons in a safe and kind household—that we would not let the madness of our childhoods infect this home.”

  For all her trembling, there was also steel in her voice, and her comment, it made me bleed inside. I could not speak. The scratch, scratch of her pencil across the paper was the sound of termites eating away at my insides. I was just about to confess all. Not just what had happened with Lena the previous night, but the family secrets I had so diligently hidden from Lisa during all our years together—that my brother was actually my cousin, and that, worst of all, I had killed him with my own hands.

  But perhaps Lisa sensed a violent eruption was coming, because she looked up and said, “I think peace and tranquility are the most undervalued of virtues. I never understood why the ‘truth’ is always what everyone raves about—that it will set us free. Really? The ‘truth’ in my parents’ house was used to bludgeon us kids to a bloody pulp. I don’t have a problem with keeping unnecessary drama out of the home. I’m all for containment. Borders serve a purpose.”

  My wife, I realized then, believed as profoundly as I did that there were times when secrets must be kept. She was my soul mate. We were made for each other. I took a deep breath and said, “Lisa, I often forget how hard you had it while growing up. Unlike me, you show few scars on the outside. It is only during moments like this do I remember—and understand.”