“Until she killed herself, and what then? Another voice telling you to come to Mexico?”
“Something like that. Now you know all.”
“Not quite all, I think.”
“No, not quite,” he agreed.
“Well, maybe you’ll tell me another time. If there’s another time. Do you think they’ll come? I mean in force.”
“I expect so, as early as the day after tomorrow, in fact. You really should get out while you can.”
“No, I’ll stay, if you don’t mind. I’m tired of being a pretty face reading the news. I had to fuck a Mexican to get this pissy little assignment doing commentary on gang murders. After this story breaks, as you keep telling me, I’ll be a made woman, an actual reporter, like Christiane Amanpour or Alex Crawford. War impresses people—risking life, hearing the bullets fly.”
“And won’t have to fuck any more Mexicans ever.”
A giggle in the dark. “No, I just said that to annoy you. I didn’t really have to, but I had to crawl, which was even worse, if you want to know. But we could die. I mean if Cuello gets his hands on me, it’s over, and not in a pleasant way.”
“Because you shoot video and talk about his murders?”
“No, because of El Cochinillo, his kid. You don’t know this story? Okay, El Cochinillo, it turns out, once demanded a bride, a girl who’d won a local beauty contest. Nothing like our Lourdes, but young, pretty, and sweet, and El Cochinillo went to the father and said the wedding would take place on such and such a day, and what could the guy do? And so it took place, a huge affair, gangsters and politicians from all over. Unfortunately, the girl hanged herself on her wedding night, still a virgin. One has to wonder about the foreplay.”
“That was the story?”
“No. The story was that when El Cochinillo found her hanging there, he was so enraged that he fucked the corpse. And he got a taste for it. Girls have disappeared off the streets. We think he—”
“Yes, I get it,” said Marder. “But if I jump on you now, will you stop talking about murder, evil, and depravity?”
“Yes, I will,” she said.
18
Hungover and afflicted by uncertainty about what had occurred on the previous night, Marder lolled miserably in the shotgun seat of Father Santana’s venerable VW Kombi, as the van rolled from the causeway out onto the beach road, its destination the private cemetery at the former d’Ariés estate, Las Palmas Floridas, at La Huacana, up north in the tierra caliente. Marder was going to inter the ashes of his wife, which now rested in a ceramic urn on his lap. The car carried an uncomfortable company, all unresponsive to the priest’s cheerful morning chatter. In the back, Carmel Marder and Pepa Espinoza sat at opposite ends of the seat, both of them frowsy, glum, and silent.
They were probably hungover too, Marder thought, as he tried to make sense of the memories of the previous night. How much had been fantasy and how much real? His body told him that he had engaged in a sexual extravaganza, but he had awakened in his own bed, and La Espinoza had not with either word or look this morning given him the impression that there was any change in their relationship beyond that of reporter and subject. Statch had been a little cool this morning too, and Amparo had been all formality as she dished out breakfast, calling him El Señor, as in, Would El Señor like some more coffee?
Perhaps it was the occasion; perhaps there was a social taboo in Mexico against screwing one’s brains out on the eve of burying one’s wife, even though one’s wife was three years dead and one hadn’t had any sex at all in the period. Marder wished that he had garnered more of his late wife’s confrontational style. Had her ashes retained the power of speech, there would had been a barrage of “Qué pasas?” rattling around the bus, the reasons for the glumness would have been wormed out of each unwilling heart, advice would have been dispensed, tears shed, guts wrenched, shoulders dampened, and hearts eased.
At the occasion during which that woman had actually become the present ashes, Marder had impressed or dismayed his loved ones by his stoicism—not a sob from Marder at the crowded funeral service, not even when the casket had rolled through the curtain to the flames. The kids had been howling and clutching each other, but not Marder. Now he felt something collapsing inside him; his hands trembled around the urn, he found it hard to speak. He wondered if this was it: he would fall into fragments and Mr. Thing would pop and perhaps they could just leave him there at the cemetery with her, perhaps this was yet another of God’s happy jests.
He looked over his shoulder. Pepa had her eyes closed, her head jammed in the corner between the top of the bench seat and the van body. She had put together a funeral outfit—black skirt and a matching jacket over a bloodred shirt. Carmel was wearing loose dark trousers and one of her many safari shirts, this one charcoal, untucked, and on top of that was a garment that for Marder had no name but resembled a kind of duster. It came down to her knees and had a very large number of buttons. He thought she looked good in it, but Marder thought she looked good in everything, so his opinion did not count. He caught her eye, and she smiled wanly at him before also closing her eyes and assuming the position that Pepa was in, on the opposite side of the seat.
The car stopped in front of the Cangrejo Rojo cantina. This was part of the escape plan, for Lourdes could not be seen leaving the casa with the funeral party. Instead, Amparo had taken her in the back of her old pickup truck, concealed under a tarp, and dropped her at the cantina on the way to Mass. Now the girl came bubbling from the door of the cantina and into the car, carrying a huge wreath of Mexican marigolds. Instantly the mood of the passengers lifted. Lourdes was happy, and therefore the world had to be happy, and her talent was such that the world could not but comply. Nearly against his will, Marder found himself smiling; one would have had to be a corpse not to bask in the radiance of her delight. Marder thanked her for the flowers, feeling irritated at himself for forgetting to buy any. Her smile flashed out as she gave him the de nada.
The noise of the old VW prevented Marder from following the conversation among the three in the rear seat. The priest was saying that he hoped there was not going to be much traffic on 37 north or in the city of Lázaro Cárdenas, because he had to get back for a special Mass at five-thirty. Roads were often crowded on the second Day of the Dead, as families visited their deceased members in various cemeteries and went to the favorite shrines. Besides that, El Día was a prime time for religious visions and there would be a line of people at the rectory this evening, all claiming to have seen wonders and miracles.
Marder had been letting the priest’s chatter wash over him, like the noise of the tires and the wind, but this remark caught his attention. “That’s interesting,” he said. “How do you tell if they’re real?”
“You mean visions?”
“Yes, like a sense of God or angels directing you, telling you things. I mean, lots of people hear voices, and generally we lock them up and medicate their heads for them. But obviously the Church believes that kind of thing is not all craziness, no?”
“No. With the greatest reluctance, the Church has agreed that the Holy Spirit is allowed to talk to people directly, without having first cleared it with the appropriate ecclesiastical authorities. It falls to us, its servants, to distinguish between the three possibilities—madness, the divine, or the demonic.”
“That’s what I meant,” said Marder. “How do you do that?”
“Well, it’s fairly easy to distinguish the mad. We do it all the time. Madmen are withdrawn or manic, they don’t think clearly, they’re unnaturally fearful or unnaturally bold. Most of all, they develop a kind of flawless logic that doesn’t admit to any challenge from another mind. You could say the mad are sealed off from the human community by their affliction. That’s why we say they’re in a world of their own.”
“And saints aren’t?”
“Oh, no. The great thing about saints is not so much that they get messages from God but how they behave toward others. People re
cognize saints because of their actions. In contrast, you have people who imagine messages from God and then go out and violate every one of God’s laws. They’re puffed up with pride—God has chosen me to accomplish this great deed. Which is how we know they’ve been contacted by the devil. The devil most often presents as God, which is one reason for the perpetual demonic behavior of the Church. It’s not surprising when you think about it. What else has the devil to do but wreck the Church and thereby keep people from God? In contrast, the person touched by God is characterized by great humility, even perfect humility in some cases. Are you familiar with The Cloud of Unknowing, by any chance?”
“The name rings a bell. I haven’t read it.”
“Well, it’s mainly a guide to the contemplative life. At one point I was about to join the Cistercians, and I read it and discovered I was not meant for a life of quiet contemplation. In any case, the author distinguishes between imperfect and perfect humility, which he considers the predicate for any real sustaining contact with God. By imperfect humility, he means our consciousness of our sinful nature and our utter inability to escape from it by our own efforts. It’s what modern people would call self-knowledge. It’s a necessary first step, he says, but inferior to what he calls perfect humility, which is the direct experience of the superabundant love of God. They have the sense of what grace really is, that they have been chosen not because of anything personal to them but as a pure act of loving. I know people who are in that state, and I am hard pressed to avoid the sin of envy when I consider them. I’m doomed to be Martha, I’m afraid, repairing the roofs of churches and carrying soup and putting up with suffering humanity. As are you, I think.”
“But I had a vision,” said Marder. “I heard the voices of angels.”
“Did you?”
And now, for the second time in as many days, Marder poured out the story of the destruction of Moon River and his own mystically guided hegira to Quang Loc, a story he had kept from everyone, often including himself, for more than forty years. A thought flew around in his head as he did so that this was not him, that something was impelling him to purge the secrets, and he wondered whether Mr. Thing had something to do with this, whether it was a tiny leakage in the zones of the brain that involved inhibition. Perhaps he would start stripping in public and sputtering false angelic messages to the world. In any case, it was all of a piece with this grand dismantling of the old Marder that had begun in a doctor’s office in New York some eight weeks ago.
The priest listened silently, and Marder was uncomfortably aware that this particular confession was by no means the weirdest account that Father Santana had heard in his career or even the weirdest of the past week.
“That’s a wonderful story,” he said when Marder had done. “What do you make of it?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me.”
“Well, you don’t seem crazy to me now, and I suppose one could make up a story about the stress of combat. Yet you did something that competent judges would have considered impossible, which is one definition of a miracle. And afterward—did you ever have the sense of being guided by still, small voices?”
“Not in the same way, no. The idea of coming down here exploded fully formed into my mind, with no prior warning. Maybe that’s a similar phenomenon.”
“You think God wants you to live in Playa Diamante and do what you’re doing here?”
Marder choked out a laugh. “Well, when you put it that way…”
“Yes, it sounds insane, obeying the voice of God, like American politicians, or Hitler. Still, we have this thing called discernment.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, we start with this outrageous idea that the ground of being, existence itself, is a person, and that this person is intimately concerned with each of our lives and desires us to turn our hearts toward him. Once you accept that level of insanity—or faith, as we prefer to call it—then it makes perfect sense to try to discern what God’s purpose is for your life through a disciplined process of prayer and self-examination, discernment, as we say.”
“You think I should do that?”
“I think you’re doing it. I think that’s all you’ve been doing since you got here. And we are all extremely interested in what you ultimately decide. Here is the oven.”
“What?” said Marder, startled, but the priest was not making a theological point but only gesturing at the view, which had come to include a flat sheet of water surrounded by low hills. This, Marder now recalled, was the vast impoundment known as Oven Dam, Presa el Infiernillo. After this they spoke about the countryside, the development thereof, the decision to drown villages and their churches under water for the sake of irrigation and hydropower, and other nonreligious topics, as the VW strained noisily to mount the Sierra Madre.
* * *
In the backseat of this vehicle, Carmel was experiencing yet another life-changing illumination. Lourdes had jumped in, flushed and excited from her escape, shining with the romance of it and the promise of her future, and Carmel had responded, grinning and giggling along with the other two women. Then, gradually, as the conversation went on, she began to feel odd. Of course, she spoke the language fluently—a cradle tongue, after all—but she soon became conscious that she was not getting it, that she was not inside the conversation but outside, looking in. Partly this was because of the subject under discussion—life in Mexico City, a place she’d never lived. Pepa had apparently arranged for Lourdes to stay with a friend of hers, a well-known television producer, and her talk was all about the telenovela game and what life would be like for a beautiful young actress in the capital. But now Statch thought that even had the discussion been about Boston, she’d still be a little out of it, a little slow on the uptake, incapable of easy repartee. She thought back to the talk in Cambridge, in the labs, the hallways, the bars; she thought about the foreign students, the glazed expressions on their faces when the Americans got going on some riff or climbed the staircase of an idea, and she felt that the same expression was congealing on her own face now. And it struck her like a physical blow: this is what her mother’s whole life in America had been like, this was the life of the exile.
And she recoiled from this feeling, calling herself a fool. It was not the same. She could go back to America, to Cambridge, at any time; she still had her friends from college, her peers at grad school, her various lovers. Yes, but unless she left now and talked her way back into her former life, unless she abandoned Casa Feliz and all it represented and climbed aboard a plane with Lourdes, she would in short order become a stranger in Cambridge too. Like an ancient trilobite falling to the bed of a shallow Paleozoic sea, she’d be covered in sediment, fossilized; she would never again be current in the life of a lab, or a field, would be, perhaps, “interesting” to those people, a novelty, but never again at home.
She felt a dreadful tug, as if her heart were being wrenched from her breast, and then a release. She would have her mother’s life, or at least a version of it, she would be a gringita henceforth and forever. This realization seemed to suck all the energy out of her, and she slumped against the window. The sounds of the chatter from the two true Mexicanas faded in her ears, and she focused her attention on what her father was saying to the priest.
* * *
They passed through orchards and fields of maize and tiny dusty villages barely named—a bodega, a gas pump, a cantina, and gone. At the town of La Huacana they slowed for a church procession: the local saint carried high, the crucifix, the monstrance, the altar boys, dark skins against white surplices, and crowds of kids in bright clothing, sucking on skull lollipops and wearing the white bone masks of the day. Then they came up over a ridge, the tiny engine roaring, wheezing, and there on its hill was the hacienda of Las Palmas Floridas, just a glimpse, white walls and the red roof, and then it vanished again in foliage. Father Santana turned his Kombi off the main road and they traveled in dust for a while, then turned into a drive past orderly orchards of mango, avocad
o, grapefruit, and at last stopped in a graveled parking lot before the great house. A fairly new dusty Dodge pickup truck was the only other inhabitant of the parking lot, and Marder thought he knew whose it was.
Marder studied the house. Although he was seeing it for the first time, he’d heard about it for longer than he’d been married to the woman whose family had once owned it. It was a great hollow square of whitewashed adobe brick, with a tile roof and a courtyard with a bronze fountain in it, a Flora with flowing horn, imported from France. The fountain had hosted golden carp, but these had not survived the revolution, nor had the ballroom mirrors, smashed by the rebels. It held more than twenty bedrooms. Such tales had been handed down from the grandfather, to the father, to Soledad, to Marder, becoming ironic in the final telling, for in the New York of the seventies in the circles frequented by literary types, one could not (unless one was Nabokov) boast of ancestral palaces built on the sweat of the oppressed. The Zapatistas had seized it in 1910 and turned it into a field hospital, which was why it hadn’t been burned like so many other haciendas in Mexico, those symbols of unbearable grief and oppression. Now it was an agricultural institute, as the sign outside it announced. It was closed for the Day of the Dead.
They all left the VW and stood in the warm sun and the silence; wind and the cheeping of small birds was all they heard, and then the crunch of gravel as Statch strode away.
“Where are you going?” Marder called out, but got no answer.
“I believe the cemetery is in the rear of the property,” said the priest, and they all walked down a path, past test plots of infant plants with fluttering plastic labels. Marder strode over the neat gravel, carrying the urn. He had imagined he’d be arm in arm with his daughter, mutually grieving, but this was apparently not part of the actuality, nor was it the sort of dim rainy day he’d always associated with funereal occasions. He’d buried both his parents on rainy days, but here in coastal Mexico there was bright sun; the pathetic fallacy was not in play here, and Marder felt oddly disappointed. And what was wrong with Statch? She’d practically trotted ahead, and now he could see that she was at the gate of the little cemetery, looking up at something enclosed by a round lunette in the arch above it.
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