Earlier that fall, after several days of feeling flu-ish and weak, she had slowly walked the two blocks to Dr. Bodkin’s office.
“I think I’m having a heart attack,” she politely informed the receptionist.
She spent about a week in the hospital and then came home to recover. I’m not even sure my father informed me of the details; in those days, a woman’s heart attack didn’t have the drama of a masculine cardiac event. Years later, I wondered if it might not have been an episode of depression, or a bit of both; it hadn’t been a good year for my mother. My 20-year-old sister had just married, had a baby, and moved to Toronto, out from under her wing. My brother’s first marriage was rocky. The whole family was unravelling, and now I was heading off too, on some cockamamie trip with boyfriend C,or D,when I should be signing up for teachers’ college.
None of the usual dips and zero-fat snacks awaited me in the kitchen. I made a pot of tea and gave them both a spirited pitch about the value and legitimacy of this new adventure of mine. Tom and I would be part of a group, a National Geographic expedition, I pointed out. (Briefly. We decided to fly over the impenetrable Darien Gap and make our own way down through South America.) I would learn Spanish (the words for “inner tube” and “severe diarrhea”). Using my mother’s old sewing machine, I had already made some flare-orange bike panniers from a mail-order kit. And look, I said, we cut up our map and glued it to a big piece of cloth, so it can be folded and refolded without ripping.
They glanced at the huge map, with our route inked in black, and said nothing. To my prairie-raised parents, South America was unimaginable, a lawless continent of anacondas and piranhas. (We did in fact encounter a very, very, very long anaconda, the diameter of a telephone pole, sunbathing on a culvert under a bridge. Parents are not always wrong.)
But I wasn’t ready to think about my mother as being frail or needing my care. And was it my fault that all three of her kids were not thriving in the ways she had hoped they would? As for being in shape for pedalling through the Andes, that didn’t concern me. I had already cut down to one cigarette a day.
“I better go or I’ll miss my train,” I said, as I stood at the front door with my backpack on, trying not to bump into the door chimes. My mother didn’t get up. I leaned over to kiss her, but she seemed to want the moment to pass quickly, so I let it.
“I’ll stay in touch and phone at Christmas,” I promised. “I can always fly back, you know.” She swung back to the window. My father jingled the change in his trouser pocket, a sign that he was agitated. He clamped a hand on my shoulder.
“You be careful down there,” he said gruffly, full of love.
Back in Santa Margarita, I write postcards while Bob and Kathy water the pots of geraniums in the courtyard, bowing again and again, like monks. The little swimming pool has been filled but it’s still too cold to use. I’m considering a quick trip into Alte to buy a bottle of wine and to use the phone kiosk there. It’s red, and right in the middle of the main square, like a religious shrine. My outings on this holiday, I realize, are mostly communication-related.
But I know Brian won’t be waiting to hear from me. He’s probably relieved to have his hand-wringing wife off the grid for a while. At a certain point anxiety becomes more about the anxious one than the object of worry. I know it’s only normal for a mother to fret about a young son on the road but I suspect that Casey’s going away has also stirred ancient fears in me, of loss and desertion. I can’t stop imagining all the terrible things that could happen to the people I love. But then my father was a catastrophizer too.
I remember sitting in the sofa-sized back seat of the Buick when I was young, with my father at the wheel, his big square hands at the ten and two o’clock position. He was driving up the main street, under a yellow traffic light suspended over the road. It swayed slightly in the wind.
“That sort of thing shouldn’t be allowed,”my father muttered. “It could come crashing down and kill someone.” He loved the words “bashing” and “crashing” and used them often,with relish. The weather worried him too,which was not surprising for someone who grew up under unpredictable prairie skies and had lost his own father to TB at the age of 12. He’d stand at the window, twitching the protective curtains (two layers, nylon sheers under heavy pleated drapes, on tracks).
“Look at those clouds,” he’d say darkly. “Boy, we’re in for it now.”
My father was both a worrier and an engineer, which might explain why he became such a consummate fixer of things, a saver, and a planner. What a provider—quaint word!—he was. He would meticulously chart the vicissitudes of the stock market on hand-drawn coloured graphs, copy, laminate, and bind the pages, then present them to his three children. We would thank him and stick the envelopes in a bottom drawer. Money didn’t interest us.
I walk down into the village, where there isn’t a soul in the streets. Is it Sunday? What the hell do they do behind those fringed plastic curtains? I pass the sunny patio of a café, where six or seven grizzled men in dark fedoras sit at tables with glasses of aguardiente, arguing. It sounds as if they are about to rip each other apart, but it’s just an animated conversation. No women in the bars. They stay inside. In their kerchiefs and hats, covered in black from top to toe, they could be wearing hijab. It’s a perfect place for a middle-aged woman to feel comfortably invisible.
The café overlooks a broad, lush valley covered in orange groves. Fresh from the sparrow greys of Toronto in March, the oranges look unnatural to me, almost digital. Someone has Photoshopped them in.
The walk back to my street of the two horses is steep, and on the way I glimpse secretive, alluring lanes that curve up, crest, and then disappear out of sight. Everything here seems to happen offstage. The donkey I never see begins to bray, a sound like a strangled sob. It is a hillier version of the landscape I remember from my months with Chris, in Alportel; I take out my maps and see that it’s not so far away, to my old haunts. But it feels too soon to go there.
When I get online the next morning, I check the Canadian Embassy website again. I see that new warnings have been posted about bandits and growing political unrest in Guatemala. “Visitors are advised to stay on the main highways and travel during daylight.”
I email Casey, in pleading caps:
MI HIJO,
IT IS FOOLISH TO BICYCLE ALONE IN THOSE MOUNTAINS RIGHT NOW. TRUST ME, I KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT HERE . . .
Then I log off and force myself to go hiking through the countryside, along the footpaths that once joined the villages. German tourists like to come to this area to “tramp,” and so I follow an insanely detailed German walking guide. You will reach a discarded washing machine beside a wall of bougainvillea; turn left and go 235 metres to a pile of red rocks . . .
Total physical exhaustion, I find, is helpful. I eat a large plate of grilled sardines and hundreds of green peas then fall into a stupor on my puffy bed. The following day,my very best girlfriend at the Alte hotel smiles and waves me toward the computer,where a fresh email is waiting. Casey has now bought the bike and the touring gear, he reports, and has set off on his trip.
. . . I biked my first day in the direction of Mexico out of Panajachel (they call it gringo town). This happened to be up a mountain that is the rim of the former crater. I wanted to cry, and puke and die. It was a bad first day, accompanied by increasing stomach problems. Around noon, I took a siesta under a tree.
He went on to describe a lone farmer who came along, commiserated with him, and made him an offer; for a few quetzals, he would pray for Casey.
I didn’t have small change, and I didn’t really want him to pray for me (although it may have helped, in retrospect).
The next day, he was too sick to ride. A pastor in a truck eventually stopped by the side of the road to give him and his bike a lift. Once he had recovered, there was a beautiful three-hour downhill ride from San Marcos, he wrote. Then came the gratifying part:
Biking alone in the mountains o
f Guatemala was great, but way too hard! Do not try to bike out of Lake Atitlan. It is stupid. The border town of Tapachula is really damn hot too. I felt like my body was going to explode.
In Santa Margarita, there’s not much to do in the evenings except read and write in my journal.
A cool twilight, with a blustery wind and dark clouds coming. I feel more settled, now that it’s almost time to go home. I have my pictures of Casey and Brian, both looking so handsome, propped up in front of me, against my bowl of oranges—the market man gave them to me for free. They’re all over the ground here, like rubbish. My gas-fire heater splutters and flutters behind me.
I read a few more of Chris’s letters. They’re very tender, both toward me and toward our Portuguese neighbours on the hill, Snr. Mario and Sra. Vitoria. An older couple who befriended us. He and Snr. Mario became partners in a hog-raising venture sometime after I left. In one of his letters Chris tells the story of an afternoon he spent drinking with Snr.Mario and a few other men down at the taverna. How, after several copinhos, the men would improvise little rhyming songs about the wine, or that particular day. One was about how time ran backwards there. O tempo volta para tras.
I know I’ve constructed a romance about it all since then, but why not? There was a man in a white house on a hill, in a peaceful world, where time ran backward. I could have stayed to see what would happen, but I moved on instead. As we tended to in those days.
I spoke to Brian on the phone, who finally sounded a bit forlorn. He’s having trouble sleeping, he said. He needs that warm back and whirring early-morning brain beside him.
Last night was cold; I slept under two big duvets. My watch has lost its little turner and (tellingly) is stuck on Toronto time. I take out the latest alarming email from Casey and reread it. I didn’t quite take it in the first time through:
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2003 15:36
Subject: Hello from Puebla
Hi there
I spent a week in San Cristobal, the beautiful, tourist-filled, mountain city in Chiapas. I soon found out that ever since the Zapatistas took the city in ’94, San Cristobal has been at the centre of the uprising. My first day there, I went to see a movie on the Zapatistas and asked someone if they were here to fight the revolution. I soon learned that you shouldn’t really talk about working with Zapatistas in public places—it’s better to talk about hiking and visiting churches. So, I saw a bunch of movies on Zapatistas, La Violencia in Colombia, the massacre of students in Mexico City. I heard the bishop of Chiapas speak—he was very eloquent, and spoke a lot about peace, but I still don’t speak Spanish and missed a lot.
The revolution is certainly in the air. I met lots of people doing community development work, being peace observers in poor Zapatista villages. There is even a way too hip, revolutionary-themed bar filled with young gringos . . .
On my last day in town, I went with three Spanish folks from my hostel to visit one of the Zapatista villages northeast of San Cristobal. Part way through the ride in the collectivo, going into the mountains, we met a block in the road. A few cars were lined up, and we sat in the car for a while. Down the road, there was a crowd of people. It took me a while to get the English translation that there was a man in dark green, wearing a balaclava, shot dead in the road. We all assumed the revolution was on. I only saw his boots. There were lots of native people in traditional dress (colourful dresses for women, men in black wool cloth things, some wearing broad-brimmed hats with multicoloured ribbons hanging down). It turns out that the dead man was one of two bandits who held up a car in the night. Supposedly, they only had plastic guns, but the driver being robbed had a real one. The other bandit went to hospital and this one stayed here.
So it was not Zapatista-related. Just more life and death in the South.
Bodies on the road. Holy fuck. Now he realizes that I wasn’t crazy to talk about bandits.
I can see from my maps that Alportel is no more than 50 kilometres away over winding roads—nothing, by Canadian standards. Time is running out before I have to fly home, so I set off in the Corsa.
I drive through Benafim and Barranco do Velho, winding higher into the mountains, then down through forests of cork trees to a village that people normally speed through on their way north to Lisbon.
The place appears miraculously unchanged. A man in a brown cap squats by the side of the road with his back against a white wall, warming himself in the sun. There is the same plain white church with the same worn-out, tape-recorded bells tolling the hour. I step into the dark coolness of a store where there are open barrels of amber honey. The woman behind the counter is asleep, head on her folded arms. On the patio of Café Vitória, several old men sit as if they haven’t moved for 33 years. Which might be the case.
I park the car by the highway and right away I find the overgrown footpath that goes the back way up the “mountain”—just a big hill, really. Our place was on the crest of it. Everything feels the same, even the small white wildflowers underfoot and the clarity of the air. It has a distinctive sparkle here, like Vinho Verde. I walk past barking dogs, and clucking chickens. O tempo volta para tras.
The first time I arrived here, I had taken the bus to São Brás, left my bags in a residencia then walked the four kilometres to Alpor-tel, asking here and there after the tall inglês. They kept gesturing up the road. It was dusk by the time I left the highway and began to climb. At the top of the hill I came to a two-storey house, ochre and white, with an explosion of purple bougainvillea against one wall and grass growing up through the tiles of the patio. The dark wooden panels of the front door,with a brass knocker in the shape of a woman’s hand, were narrow as a cupboard and opened down the middle. The place was elegant but slightly derelict-looking.
I had no idea what to expect. My plane mate could have a wife and family with him, if not a cult.
I knocked, then pushed open the door and there he was, like a page out of some Graham Greene novel. He was sitting in a dark leather armchair in an otherwise empty room,with a book in his lap, a cigarette between his fingers, and a glass of red wine on the floor. He was surprised to see me, but not overly.
“Amazing,”he said. “I’ve been thinking of you the past few days, wondering if you’d come.”
That night, we walked all the way back to my residencia, where we slept badly in the single bed, facing the painting of Jesus Christ on the wall. The next morning we brought my things back to the villa, and I moved in. His father owned the place and planned to rent it out some time. But for now it was empty.
We cooked over a brazier and lived mostly outside, where the back wall of the house jutted out into a ledge. Hours were spent just sitting on the ledge, watching the mists lift off the hills to the north. Our Portuguese neighbours were remarkably accepting of these English hippies who did nothing all day long. And it was, accidentally, domestic life, a home, the thing I missed but didn’t realize. There wasn’t even the problem of being in love, at least at first. Politics, the scene in London,my family—they all felt as far away as Jupiter. We had successfully dropped out.
Several months went by.
My decision to go back to Canada was as casual and careless as my arrival; it was almost Christmas, and I thought I should show up for it.
Chris walked me to the highway,where we flagged down the big smoke-windowed bus to Lisbon. I was wearing a long, three-tiered brown woollen cloak, the kind the local shepherds wore, and had packed a big bag of unshelled almonds. Although I waved from my seat on the bus I doubt he could have seen me through the tinted glass.
My parents lived in Burlington, near a big bridge called the Skyway, not far from the American border. On the day before Christmas, at the end of 1971, I flew to London, then New York, then took a bus north. One of Buffalo’s famous snowstorms enveloped the area—the winds were strong on the arch of the Skyway. The driver agreed to drop me beside the toll booths, where my sandals sank into more than a foot of new snow: O Canada.
In my bag was a
glass kerosene lamp and ceramic bowls from Portugal, presents for my parents. A cab ride took me to my parents’ front door. It was early, 7:30 or so. The shoulders of my cloak were covered in snow. I was excited, breathless. My father in his bathrobe took his time answering the knock. Merry Christmas! I said,with a conscience as smooth and clean as a skating rink. His face registered surprise, anger, worry, relief, surprise, anger, like symbols rolling by in a slot machine. Either I hadn’t written in weeks (a possibility) or else they hadn’t received my letters. The worst part is I can’t remember which it was. In any case, they weren’t expecting me. They had accepted the fact that I wouldn’t be home for Christmas. Now I was on their front step, in a goat-smelling cloak.
My mother appeared at the door, brought me into the house, and went about normalizing things. It was Christmas day, after all. I sat down to proudly show my mother pictures of my travels, photos of the inglês, in his Indian shirt looking, I now realized as I saw him through their eyes, like a cross between a pig farmer and a dope dealer. She studied the pictures without saying a word and then went to the table, already set for 11—the whole family, minus me.
My mother added a place setting and turned my attention to the turkey on the counter, trussed and ready for the oven. Did I think five hours would be enough? We gazed at the bound bird and I tasted her dressing. No one said a thing about the fact that I had disappeared off the face of the earth or that my mother had been worried for weeks.
I couldn’t see what I had done wrong. My carelessness eluded me. I was only miffed that my prodigal-daughter surprise didn’t go over the way I had hoped.
But Christmas is nothing if not a set of small rituals, and these eventually salvaged the day. My mother made it clear that I was welcome, although now that I had crossed the border into her country, I would do well to put my alarming photographs away and observe the local customs instead.
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