Some people hissed. Fortunately, most seemed too stunned to react.
“But I worked too hard. I gave too much of myself to this thing—this work. And I came to resent it when my life fell apart. I’m middle-aged now and I—I am very angry. I thought that we should be doing better. And when this man, this representative of the Bush administration, came up to me one morning and asked how ‘we’ were going to respond if Evo Morales won the election, I was infuriated. I was more than that. I was so upset. I felt—I was not with him, this man. I hated him and I hated his boss, George Bush.”
There was scattered laughter, applause. He tried to see if Lenka was applauding, but he couldn’t locate her in the darkness spread before him. He could see no one, really—just the shapes of them—and he could hear them and smell them, the bodies packed into that space.
“But I’m here to tell you that the World Bank is a big and complicated place,” Vincenzo said, as he finally started to relax into the moment. “You know, many of my colleagues . . .” He stopped, realizing that he was about to digress altogether too far, talking about the colleagues he liked and how they hadn’t gone to work for investment banks despite the obvious financial incentives. Instead, he got back on topic and said, “I congratulate Evo Morales on his win. I hope he can do more for this country than those who have come before him. His job is very difficult. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.” No one laughed. Lenka would not have liked that, he realized. “The odds against him making it a full four years are very significant, but I know he means well, too. He is here because he cares about Bolivia. He has said he is going to slash his own salary by half and I believe him. I spoke to Evo a little while ago, a few days ago. We met in his office and he is a very pleasant man and he is sensitive, and I know he means what he says. That should count for something. I think it should, anyway. I have met quite a few presidents in Latin America, and most of these men don’t mean what they say, not in the way that he does. He is real.” No one stirred. There was nothing else to say. The presidentelect had flown him down and he had taken the stage, rambled incoherently, and all but insulted his host, before finally losing his place once again. It had been a flawless disaster. He’d managed to please no one at all. Before they took the microphone away, before his platform was erased, he concluded, “I hope—I hope that doesn’t change about Evo. I hope that he can make a difference. But I must confess that I did not do what I did because of him.”
Vincenzo stepped away from the podium.
The crowd hovered, motionless, uncertain of what to do. The applause began inside the narrow room and spread out to the atrium. The applause was rapturous, too enthusiastic to be sincere. Were they delighted by the awkwardness, or did the halting and naked honesty somehow overwhelm them with a more visceral pleasure than they’d planned for? Maybe they just didn’t understand his English. In any case, it was over, the move—such as it was—had been played. Vincenzo waved at the audience. He wiped his brow again and walked back toward his seat.
Evo laughed too forcefully, unnaturally, while shaking Vincenzo’s hand, and asked Vincenzo if he was drunk.
Vincenzo said he was not, but that he hoped to be soon.
Walter’s expression, meanwhile, was frozen in a kind of shock that only Walter could experience—equidistant from horror, amusement, and bafflement. Vincenzo hated Walter for being amused at all. It was maddening, and he hated the thought that this, too, had been another dose of material for Walter’s dispatches. This look here, this pseudo-amused look from Walter, clawed at him as other people started approaching him; they wanted to shake his hand and speak to him. Miming his way through the conversations, shaking the hands, he looked at the faces, noticing that most of them were laughing or smiling at him like he was a chimpanzee in a top hat. There had been two video cameras, Vincenzo now saw, and the cameramen were chatting animatedly among themselves, while one of them casually reviewed his footage on a small screen. Lenka, locked in somber conversation with several people—maybe press, maybe colleagues—was stranded on the far side of the room, and when Vincenzo finally excused himself from the swarm around him to go see her, he saw her glance at him and he saw her face harden and he knew, right away, that she was not happy. Of course. This event had been her idea, in a way, what part of it wasn’t his. It had been her responsibility and he had blown it. She, too, had wanted him to perform a certain way, and he had not managed to do so.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her when he got near. “I had a speech, but I couldn’t—”
“You think this is a joke?” she said.
“No, I don’t think this is a joke. I wanted to be honest.”
“Honesty was not your problem. You made us look stupid.”
He nodded at her and he felt his heart shatter at witnessing one more attractive opportunity lost, another possible future squandered. She turned away and started to walk and talk with someone, a woman, probably an assistant. A photographer came up and started snapping pictures of him, the flash strobing in the corner of his eye as he watched Lenka walk assertively, in her gorgeous limoncello suit, toward the exit.
“¡Señor!” the photographer called to him, waving a hand at him. “¡¿Señor?!”
But Vincenzo wouldn’t look away, wouldn’t turn to him.
15
THE PURGE
The police officer who had presided over the case called Vincenzo two weeks after Cristina died to say that the man who had been driving the truck that hit her wanted to see him.
“It’s an unusual request,” the policeman said, “but it happens. Of course, you have no obligation, and you can also just not decide, you know, for as long as you want. Just hang out. I recommend that, actually. Really, if you don’t want to do it, don’t. I mean it. You’ve got no responsibility to this guy. He feels terrible, that’s the point. It has nothing to do with you.”
“I want to meet him,” Vincenzo said. “Where?”
The cop set it up. The two would meet at the Starbucks in Tenleytown. The cop described the driver. He said that he was from Nigeria, and that he was brawny, with short hair. “Very dark black skin. Blue-black.” From the cop’s voice, Vincenzo guessed he was black, too.
Vincenzo had no problem locating him. He was the only black man in that Starbucks.
The man was burly, built like a boxer, but he seemed to be trying to shrink himself into the faux-leather armchair. Vincenzo could see that the man was nervous. Unable to look the man in his yellowy eye, Vincenzo studied his long-fingered hands resting on his lap, clasping each other. The fingers looked surprisingly dainty and thin considering his broad shoulders, his otherwise brawny bearing. For some time, neither said anything.
“What can I do for you?” the man said.
Vincenzo shook his head. For the first time in a while, he didn’t feel like weeping at all. Already, he had seen that the first phase of grieving was, in a way, a cataloging of things lost. The shared memories no longer shared, mannerisms never to be seen again, plans obliterated, the films, gardens, medicines, furniture, historical eras discussed—and then, of course, the miniature joys and even the annoyances forever gone, and, one of the more onerous tasks, the list of places and objects and other people who would be marred, or at least tainted, by the life that had been. Now, for the first time, he was able to enjoy a reprieve from that cataloging. He looked out the window. It was raining lightly. It was supposed to snow later.
“When did you come here?” Vincenzo said.
“Washington?”
Vincenzo nodded and glanced at his face, looked away. Apart from a few small pocked scars, the skin on his face was flawless, like some polished volcanic rock.
“Six years.”
Still nodding, he said, “And how do you like it?”
The man shook his head. “I am sorry. She—she came—she came—I didn’t see her.”
“I know that, I know you didn’t see her. The police said that—I know it wasn’t your fault.” Vincenzo wondered if the man was maybe
just worried about his job. Maybe he had set up the meeting in the hopes of averting litigation. “Do you have a family?” he said.
“I have a brother and a sister and a wife. I had two sons, but they were sick and died.”
Vincenzo nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said and nothing else, but he felt sure that the man felt the sincerity. They were both fluent in the language.
“You send money home?” Vincenzo said.
The man nodded.
“That’s good. Do you make enough?”
“Yes.”
“I work at the World Bank. Did you know that?”
The man shook his head. Vincenzo glanced at his eyes, checking for a reaction, and he did observe a little surprise.
“You work at the World Bank?” the man said.
“Yes. I am a senior economist. I’ve never been to Nigeria, but I have worked on some Nigerian programs.”
The man nodded; now it was his turn to look away. Vincenzo was aware that there had been riots in Nigeria in recent years about the country’s debt to aid organizations. Nigeria had been borrowing for decades and had rarely, if ever, been able to repay. Because of corruption, mismanagement in the Nigerian government, and poorly orchestrated and executed World Bank projects, the debt had not produced many meaningful programs. No one in Nigeria did not know what the World Bank was.
“Can you tell me about her?” the man said, still looking away.
Vincenzo shrugged. “Not really,” he said and the thought of her voice, the thought that he would never hear it again, arrived, and with that the sorrow tackled him once again—it came on with savage and terrifying immediacy, a thunderclap. Tears fell out of his eyes instantly and he inhaled deeply, held his breath, afraid to exhale, afraid of the sound that might happen. He stood up, still holding his breath. He nodded energetically as warm tears fell out of his eyes and he gazed at this man, and he wanted to say, “This was a mistake, I have to go now,” but he didn’t dare and instead just turned toward the door. “I have to—” he managed to croak, pointing at the door.
The man stood up, and nodded, tears shimmering in his eyes, too. “I am sorry,” the man said and reached out a hand, but Vincenzo just shook his head, hurrying away.
He ducked outside and exhaled in a garbled gasp, wiping his eyes and walking away, surprised to find himself in a flurry of snowflakes, and he saw, through his burning eyes, how the snowflakes seemed to hesitate in the air like the feathers of a freshly punctured pillow, how the world itself had opened up an envelope of time for him.
After his disastrous speech, Vincenzo made his way through the bodies crowding the museum until he could smell the air outside. Hurrying around the corner, he broke out into a jog, running down the hill to the main drag. Loosening his tie and slinging his jacket over his arm, he slowed—his lungs ablaze—and kept walking quickly toward his hotel. Girls holding ice cream cones giggled at the sight of the aging bald man in a suit running down the street, perspiring under the yellow streetlights. The last several blocks, he slowed even more, but his pulse kept hammering in his head, his lungs still shrieked in pain.
Sitting on the edge of his bed, still cooling down after a shower, he heard a knock on his door. Assuming it was Ben wanting to thank him for neutering himself in public, he flung the door open, but, to his disappointment, he found Walter there, holding up a bottle of wine.
Walter sat in the plush armchair, put the bottle of wine down on the glass coffee table. Vincenzo handed him two water glasses and Walter poured.
“Believe it or not, I have heard worse speeches,” Walter said, and sighed as he sat there gazing at Vincenzo with an intense expression that he often wore when concerned.
“You have?” Vincenzo thought of the cameras, thought of those videos spreading through the Internet. The responses last time—that stranger who’d sent him flowers, the others. What would they say when they heard that the martyr from the World Bank had bashed erratically through a speech that somehow both declared fidelity to Paul Wolfowitz and announced his respect and admiration for Evo Morales?
“No, I was just trying to be nice.” They clinked glasses, sipped. “It almost seems intentional, if you don’t mind me saying so.” Walter gazed at him again, same as before.
Vincenzo drained his glass, refilled it. Glaring at Walter, he said, “Yes, yes, congratulations, you are impenetrable.”
“Impenetrable?”
“Yes! You know that? I think that’s why your marriage was so horrible, because you are immune to the world.”
Walter blushed, unaccustomed to this, to finding himself in the crosshairs. Then he laughed uneasily, and said, “Thank you, but I thought we were talking about you.”
“No, I am finished with talking about me. Let’s talk about you.” Vincenzo gulped down his second glass, and his stomach convulsed. He felt saliva flood his mouth and took a deep breath, steadied himself against the rising nausea.
“You sound exactly like my ex-wife,” Walter said, “accusing me of being carefree, as if it were a crime.”
“Carefree? You have a fucking blue vein throbbing beside your eye. You used an empty yogurt container as your breakfast bowl for five months—you’re not carefree, you’re a wounded duck who believes that he is an eagle!”
Walter’s face remained red, but his expression was frozen, locked in some kind of fake amusement. Once he had control of his face again, he rolled his eyes, but Vincenzo could tell that he had landed a devastating blow. Walter shook his head and, collecting himself, said, “Get over it, Vincenzo. Yes, the world did not give you everything you wanted. It gave you almost everything, and then it took something away. Tough luck. Look around, it gets worse.”
“No! This is it!” Vincenzo replied, aware that he was shouting and that people elsewhere in the hotel might hear. He lowered his voice to a hissing whisper. “From now on, for me, it gets better. This is it.”
“You think you get to choose? You think you’re steering this ship?”
Vincenzo nodded, shook his head, and nodded again, his lips pursed. He was ready to punch Walter in the face, but he wouldn’t do that. Not since his father’s funeral had he punched someone, and he wouldn’t do it again now. Instead, he redirected. “You know, that fucking CIA agent showed up at the hotel earlier?”
“Jesus, really?” Walter leaned in, and, whispering too, said, “What’s he look like?”
“This is off the record, of course.”
Walter nodded, grimacing, unable to hide his disappointment. “Sure—go on.”
Vincenzo glared at him. “No. Everything I’ve said to you since your last piece is off the record. Everything!” he yelled.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Walter said. “What is wrong with you?”
The rage swelled, but Vincenzo resisted the urge to hurl his glass at the window. He held himself still, dared not move.
“What concept are you protecting?” Walter said. “You got up there and acted like a deranged person in front of the world. Videos are, I’m sure, already circulating the Internet. I wouldn’t be surprised if you ended up on the Daily Show. The Lehman Brothers are, I promise, not interested anymore. Tellus, likewise, doesn’t want you. You’ve alienated everyone in the most public way possible. Why refuse to be on the record with me, now? What do you gain? You’ll just damage me.”
“I’m ready to live with that. I’m done with this.”
“This is not yours. You do understand that, right? This isn’t about you. You may be done with it, but it is not over. This isn’t your decision, not anymore.”
“That may be true, but it doesn’t change anything. It’s all unprintable. I want nothing more to do with this thing you are doing.”
“Why are you doing this? I set this up and fly down here with you and then, once we’re done, you throw me away?”
Vincenzo picked up the bottle of wine and emptied the rest into his glass, put the glass down on the console. “Thanks for the wine.” He extended his hand to Walter.
“Am I supposed to shake your hand?”
Vincenzo nodded.
“God, you’re a fucking asshole.”
Vincenzo nodded again, withdrew his hand. “But at least I’m not a vampire,” he muttered, aware that it wasn’t fair. But this wouldn’t be accomplished by half measures. He opened the door for Walter, stood aside while Walter walked through.
Up close, the doppelgänger looked less like Cristina than she did even from a slight distance. When she stared at him there, beside the horrible bar at that horrible hotel, saying nothing, he knew he was looking at someone else altogether.
“You look a lot like someone—my wife,” he said, in English.
She smiled, surprised. “I do?” She looked relieved, in the way of a woman who, after being leered at, discovers that the source of her discomfort is happy to speak of his wife.
“Yes,” he said. “Very similar—it’s very, very, very similar.”
“How long have you been married to her?” she said.
The question boomeranged through him, and he let it do that, he let it move. Then he did the math. “Twenty-five years.”
“That is incredible,” she said. Her voice was nothing like Cristina’s. It was higher, ditzy. It was no good.
“Yes.”
Now was when he would have kissed her, now was when he almost needed to kiss her, but it wasn’t fair, not to him, not to her, not to Cristina, not to—who else? He knew that there were others, too, who would be understandably offended. So he just reached out and took both of her hands in his hands. She looked perplexed, even worried, but he squeezed and released her hands quickly and she smiled at him, confused, sort of, and maybe very sympathetic, too.
The Dismal Science Page 20
