Grace

by Calvin Baker

  “I am sorry you did not enjoy it.”

  “No, on the contrary. I enjoyed my time there immensely. But I quickly saw the lie of the country, so was happy to return home, and then, for what I sought to do, and people I needed to prove myself to, no one would be impressed if I earned another degree or not, only that I had something of value to contribute. It was the middle of a financial crisis, and the problem I wished to solve was not theoretical, but that my people were suffering. I hope you do not mind my frankness.”

  “I find frankness refreshing.”

  “I am too old. I say what I think because it no longer matters to the world, or my place in it. When it mattered I kept it private. Do you think that was cowardly?”

  “I think you did what you had to.”

  He was beating me soundly at bocce, and we debated the relative merits of different countries as he told me how his name came about when his grandfather landed from Sardinia, he thought it sounded illustrious. It was an enjoyable conversation and I was sorry when it ended.

  “I had better prepare the asador,” he said, after taking the third game from me. “Thank you for humoring me.”

  “You flatter me, señor.”

  “No, caballero. I have been playing this game a long time.”

  We went to a side porch, where he stirred the burning wood for the barbecue, before turning a crank to lower a heavy grille over the flames, and began placing thick cuts of meat over the fire, explaining to me where on the cow each cut was from, when he saw I took an interest, and that the wood was from a tree that had been cut down in his family’s vineyard. I admired the joy this simple pleasure gave him, and the care he took in what he was doing without being showy, as he distributed the embers and tested the heat of each part of the fire before placing the proper piece of meat over it. I realized it was part of his atomic unit of being in the world.

  As he cooked, the other guests began arriving from the boat launch, and other houses, beginning with the Maldonados, who lived on one of the nearby islands. Both were psychiatrists in their early fifties who radiated intelligent wakefulness. “It is a mixed marriage, and shouldn’t have lasted this long,” Mrs. Maldonado said slyly, after we were introduced. “Pablo’s a Lacanian. I’m a Jungian.”

  After chatting awhile, she went inside to seek out Mrs. Saavardra, and Mr. Maldonado came to the grill, taking a glass of wine with us around the fire, and asking how I was enjoying the country.

  “It is pleasant here,” I remarked.

  “Well, you must come back one day,” he said. “All the young people have left to find something new. Not knowing that we do not have to seek experience, it finds us whether we desire it to or not.”

  When the meat was ready, we ferried it to the dining table on the veranda, where Mrs. Saavardra and Mrs. Maldonado were deep in conversation with the other guests. “Olé,” they all exclaimed, when they saw the platter piled high with the steaming meat.

  “Gracias,” Mr. Saavardra said humbly.

  We sat around a large wooden table in the open air, and began to pass bottles, bowls, plates. “Sylvie,” Mrs. Saver, called into the house. “Everything will get cold.”

  “Momentito,” a cloudless, self-assured voice called from inside the house.

  “Don’t wait, Harper,” Mrs. Saavardra insisted. “It is best when it is still hot.”

  “I will wait,” I said.

  When the door opened a few moments later it was the woman from the launch that afternoon. She was a few years older than she had seemed from afar, with a presence that suggested character, and a guarded watchfulness in her eye.

  Mrs. Saavardra had seated us next to each other near the end of the table. She was American, down visiting relatives, but made it clear from the outset she did not care for my attention, which was fine since I was not looking for anything with anyone, but to be myself. After the perfunctory politesse, we barely spoke through the rest of dinner. “I know you don’t offer help to strangers, but do you mind passing the salt?” she asked.

  “I was lost in my thoughts.” I did not offer any further explanation, only put myself on guard to let the meal pass without incident. I marked her down as judgmental, the type who thought her experience of things was all of it. She was an attractive woman to make small talk with at a dinner party, nothing more.

  We ignored each other for the remainder of the meal except, please pass the salad, thank you, and other conversational bibelots.

  Mrs. Saavardra saw we were not getting along, and looked disconcerted. Mr. Saavardra looked at Sylvie and looked at me and looked at his wife and chuckled to himself.

  “Tell me,” asked Mrs. Maldonado, to break the tension, “what brought you here.”

  “I came by accident, really,” I said.

  “There are no such accidents,” she replied. “This place must have called to you for a purpose. How do you spend your days?”

  “In recreation,” I said, careful not to betray any more than that.

  “Or re-creation,” she replied. “The natives thought all thoughts, and all words, remain in the universe forever. Some points on earth focus the vibrations. These islands were an enchanted gateway to the netherworld and the cosmos, and the center of their place in it. They held their initiation ceremonies on them, because only in such places was full knowledge of, and access to, both worlds possible. They came here to remember their place in the universe and reconcile themselves to it.”

  “I never knew that,” Sylvie said.

  “Jung said man is indispensable to the completion of creation, is its second creator, giving it objective meaning. It is this consciousness they were tapping, the one that gives us our place in the process of being. So it is exactly when we seem to do nothing that we are really returning to our most primary function, which is to experience our place in existence.”

  “It’s a second active principle, activated by the first in the same system,” her husband mused. “The idea of god can only resonate if you believe in god. Naming it presupposes its existence.”

  “Maybe,” Mrs. Saavardra added, “or it means what King David meant when he told his people, ‘You are gods.’”

  “What is the difference between that and what the rishis teach in the Vedas?” Sylvie asked.

  “What do they teach?” I asked.

  “That there is full consciousness, then a higher, or deeper, consciousness; beyond that is all of consciousness.”

  “That is an interesting construction,” said Mr. Maldonado, who mostly listened and rarely spoke.

  “What allows us to construct it? What allows us to figure out the laws of nature? To make music? How strange is it they should be comprehensible, and we are the only animal on the planet the universe has given the ability to puzzle over and understand it.”

  “So far as we know.”

  “We are simply the universe looking back at itself.”

  “Or,” said Mr. Maldonado, “characters in a text someone has written.”

  “But isn’t the text just an image, to focus the mind on the idea of god? To bring it home that god makes all things, even his own reflection?”

  “I am not a believer.”

  “Why don’t you believe?” Sylvie asked.

  “When I went to church as a boy—”

  “Don’t tell me you let the church get between you and God.”

  “Still, you mean an idea.” Mr. Maldonado corrected.

  “No. The idea,” Sylvie interjected. Mr. Saavardra gave me a fresh glass, which he filled with a different wine. “Like the feeling you get in Rome when you realize even gods die. Or are consumed. And see the clock of life and the clock of history, and understand that there is another beyond that.”

  “I have never been to Rome.” I drank the new wine.

  “He means wherever you were the first time you grasped time,” Mrs. Maldonado said.

  “Go to Rome.”

  “Yes?”

  “If only to see how thin are the things we tell ourselve
s are permanent.”

  “He had a girl there he almost married. Tell him about the girl.”

  “It did not last. Was is there to say? I was young, headstrong, even careless. She was beguiling as she was proud and reckless. We had a divine affair that burned everything all up. There is nothing remarkable to tell.” His voice was sad with remembered happiness and unbearable knowledge. “When I left I am not ashamed to say I wept. I still do not know whether it was the perfect agony of a divided love, or only the melancholy of leaving Rome.”

  “You think there is no difference between their story of god and our own?”

  “I think, for the most part, there is only an eternal masculine, an eternal feminine, and a demi-divine human.”

  “And you think it is experienced the same by everyone, or are there ten billion ways?”

  “What I’m curious to know is whether anyone here has ever had direct experience?”

  We all contemplated the question in private silence.

  “Have you heard about this new man in America,” Mr. Maldonado asked when no one answered, “who has a theory that all of us, and all of the different ways of being, are just different organs in the same body?”

  “I don’t see what’s new about that. Don’t the Buddhists say since forever any path is only a path?”

  “Do they include their own in that?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is honest of them.”

  “Do you have to follow a known path, or is it permissible to create your own?”

  “Even if we follow a known path, aren’t the steps we make our own?”

  “I’m not that advanced yet.”

  We had a lively debate, and I was impressed by their learnedness, and the seriousness with which they took their inner lives, and the inner life of their society, as we talked under the stars until the embers faded and the bugs on the patio grew too fierce.

  As we began to move inside I was overcome with drowsiness and made motions to leave. My days started with the sun; they were all still on city time. They were adamant I remain, though, to keep even numbers as we split into teams to play a card game, and later, charades with the names of movies, which was difficult since I did not know the local films, and also because some names were completely different in translation.

  I feared making a fool of myself, but my self-consciousness quickly gave way to laughter, although Sylvie took glee in ribbing me.

  “Señor Roland is clever,” she said, as I mimed a title. “For a gringo.”

  Her aunt began to reprimand her, but stopped when she saw Mr. Saavardra shake his head in bemusement. We played the levitation game after that, and everyone was full of pleasure and the oxygen-rich ocean air increasing our majestic mood.

  Mrs. Maldonado, who reminded me of Bea, was inspired to sing, and soon we all were. When I heard Sylvie sing I was surprised by the strength of emotion in her voice. Not for the first time that night, I found myself trying to reconcile the qualities about her I did not like with the feeling here was a person of substance. As I listened to her sing I also wondered what shelter she had lost, what child of hers murdered, or gone astray, what husband she witnessed wither with work, to make her sound so ancient and wise.

  “Harper,” Thiago asked, the formality having melted hours earlier. “Do you by chance play tennis?”

  “Not well,” I said.

  “We have a lovely court,” he offered, “which you should feel free to use.”

  “I saw it when I arrived, it is a lovely court. Thank you.”

  “While the weather holds, please feel free to play whenever you wish.”

  “Would you like a game?” I asked. “As long as you don’t beat me as badly as you did at bocce.”

  “I’m afraid my knees do not allow me to play much anymore, and when I ignore their advice it is my pride that puts an end to it. Sylvie is quite accomplished, though.”

  “You played competitively?” I asked.

  “Not seriously,” she said modestly, “but I played.”

  “When did you stop?”

  “When my father lost all his money.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “No, it made me know something about life.” She looked me directly in the eye with the full, steady gaze of someone who has done copious self-reflection. “What it means to have things, and what that is worth. What it means to lose them, and be without, and what that teaches you. But mostly, what it means to dream and to chase recklessly.”

  “He get what he was after?”

  “It cost him a family.”

  She did not say it with bitterness, but a matter-of-fact evenness that touched me that much more. I did not know whether her sadness was in the past and healed or permanent, but she seemed sterling clear, without either illusion or anger, and there was no question that I liked her. Not with lust, simply the way some women make you think about family.

  “Do you still enjoy the game?” I asked, turning the conversation back to tennis, and our plans for the next afternoon.

  “I enjoy what it shows about people,” she answered, with what seemed to me a challenge.

  “Don’t be lulled,” Mr. Saavardra cautioned. “If she offers you a wager, don’t accept.”

  “I won’t bet,” I said, “but I’ll play.”

  She and I talked in the airy living room a while longer, sometimes disagreeing strongly, but whenever she laughed I saw how alive and free she could be, which softened any edge.

  When our conversation broke off we looked around to see everyone else had gone to bed. Realizing we had talked so intently, we grew awkward and I stood to say goodbye. She looked at me full and steady again and smiled with the transparency of those who might see us fully, and I was arrested another moment, sensing some unseen possibility and abundance just out of reach.

  There was nothing dramatic; a tiny lunette opened—unformed desire—until our shared question—fear, uncertainty, caution—was whether we would leap through the high, small pane or flee. It was a feeling I knew not to trust. The pain of erring was too much.

  We broke apart—the tension between us alive enough to name. The current was soon replaced by awkwardness, as I thanked her for her family’s hospitality and excused myself to walk back around to my own side of the island; feeling, as I made my way through the dark, the quick pulse of want and hope from some other body hidden within me that wished to override the rest with its own certainty. I silenced it with the simple, rational knowledge that I did not know her. It was merely something in my subconscious that had caught and fought back irrationally, and difficult to resist.

  23

  Thiago answered the door the following afternoon when I arrived.

  “I hope we did not keep you up last night,” I apologized, as we waited for Sylvie in the vestibule.

  “I am sorry we did not say goodnight,” he said. “But we did not wish to interrupt your conversation. You know, Sylvie is an excellent person, a deeply good woman.” He nodded thoughtfully. “The women on that side of the family can be real forces.”

  “Friends should not be involved,” I said.

  “True, but men and women need each other. What are rules in the face of that? Some of them matter some of the time, and others are arbitrary. Even those that matter become irrelevant when you have in mind the thing you must do in work or life. There is no authority above that. Power, consequences, perhaps. Authority? Not for people who know what they are about. You elect your values and burdens and way of being after considering carefully the options available to you, and their cost. Who is great serves what is great, and pays the cost. Who is less, serves something less and pays for that. But I think you know this already. It is something we hear in the first part of life, and only understand in the second.

  “I trust you, in any case, to know what you are about. If you do, everything else is in compliance. Things will work out or not. The rest, only the two of you can determine: whether she is whom you would be responsible to, and
entrust with your life, and vice versa. If so, the only thing for me or anyone to say is, Olé, señors.

  “If she is not, you will know in an afternoon, and she will know inside an hour. Whatever this true voice says, you will abide by. That is the way to be gentle with each other. You are young, enjoy your game.”

  “Thank you,” I said, as Sylvie entered the hall breathlessly. His exhortation in another context might have made me apprehensive, but here it only made me glad to see her so well loved.

  “Whatever my uncle said, don’t listen,” she said, looking at each of us as he went back to his study. “He is old-fashioned and patriarchal. Did he tell you I’m an innocent virgin?”

  When she alluded to sex it made me flush and as we walked to the court, where we hit a few balls to loosen up and get a feel for each other’s game before we started to play. She had beautiful form, and beautiful instincts for the game. She could not out-hit me, so worked patiently, waiting for my errors. I had weight in my right arm, and relied on my harder serve and forehand to make up for any lack of finesse when she tested my other wing. In the end I took the first set, not beautifully but I won.

  Midway through the second set my legs began to cramp, but I played through stubbornly until the end of the set, which she won. As I tried to stretch out the cramp, she came to see if I needed help.

  “I am fine.”

  “Don’t be macho. Tell me if you want to quit.”

  “No.”

  She smiled and laughed, and we started the third set. The cramping did not let up, however, and she showed real concern for me. But I was determined to play through.

  She was mindful of my situation in the beginning, until I gloated the tiniest bit, after a long rally. After that she was meticulous and relentless, making me run as much as she could.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I will still respect you when you lose.”

  “It’s not important to me.”

  “That you win, or that I respect you?”

  “Either.”