The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  That afternoon, his grandfather was sitting on the cheap Turkish rug with those boxes of small cassettes stacked in front of him, hands at his sides, like someone who waits impatiently for the day to begin—and now and then he would pick up a cassette, place it in the player, and put on large headphones. After some minutes, during which Saul thought his grandfather had forgotten he was in the room, he would stop the cassette player, choose another cassette, and the process would start over once again. It was a long, aggravating process, distressing at times, but Saul never suggested they stop.

  At some point that afternoon, after Saul had started to feel invisible, he asked, who are you listening to now? His grandfather squinted and said, what? Push the stop button, tateh, he said and was surprised just then that he had used the old Yiddish term for father. His grandfather nodded and pushed the stop button. Who’s on the cassette, tateh? he asked. Maria Hitzig, he replied. Saul had never known a Maria Hitzig. Who’s that? he asked. Who do you think it is, Saul? his grandfather said. Then Saul shrugged and said, I’m sorry, tateh, I don’t know anyone named Maria Hitzig.

  Still, his grandfather looked taken aback, sure that Saul had known her. Then he said, of course, Saul, how should you know her, she was a cleaning lady I met years ago in a bar off Rush Street called The Trap. It was nothing more than a dark room with booths, a counter, and, if you were lucky, a pianist. When I walked in she was arguing with two German men sitting at the bar. She was a fat, pretty woman and her voice was like a brass instrument. She was in the middle of telling those two German men she was from the Kingdom of Prussia and they kept telling her that the Kingdom of Prussia didn’t exist anymore and that she was a crazy hag, even though she really was quite pretty and smarter than them. I recorded some of their argument before talking to her alone. Anyway, that’s who I was listening to, he said.

  Why did she tell them she was from the Kingdom of Prussia? asked Saul. His grandfather took off the headphones and his eyes contracted and became clear once again.

  Well, he said, for one, she really was from the Kingdom of Prussia. She was born there in 1910, some eight years before the German Revolution replaced the imperial government. That’s what she told me too when I pushed her a little about her origins. It’s all on the tape. “Don’t be stupid, Ben. Listen to me. I’m from Šilokarˇcema in the Kingdom of Prussia and if anybody says I’m from Heydekrug they have shit for brains.” Later, after a little digging around, his grandfather continued, I found that Šilokarˇcema was the old dialect name for a town the Germans called Heydekrug and which is now called Šilute in Lithuania. Three tongues for just one town. That was a common thing in those old Baltic towns which got used to changing hands and names, especially during an era when nations would appear and disappear with a simple stroke of a pen.

  But why did she insist that her town not be called Heydekrug? asked Saul. Try to connect the dots, Saul, his grandfather said patiently. She was raised during a time when Germans went about erasing as much history of the Kingdom of Prussia as possible. In a later era and in another nation, when Soviet orthodoxy was once again forced onto Czechoslovakia, the historian Milan Hübl said, “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.” This was true for the Kingdom of Prussia too, said his grandfather. The Germans erased their history and with it the names of streets and towns and books and people. Maybe those new Germans really did want to liquidate the Kingdom of Prussia or maybe they wanted to create the illusion that only Germany had ever existed and would exist for at least another thousand years. Nationalism always works overtime to create its own reality.

  But Maria wasn’t going to let those two German men erase the name of her town, just as their ancestors had done, or make her forget the Kingdom of Prussia of her childhood, the one that still existed unchanged in her mind. In her own way, he said and smiled, Maria Hitzig was a rebel. But, of course, she’s dead now. Long dead. So is the Kingdom of Prussia, or rather, it’s just beneath the soil in Germany and Poland and Lithuania and Russia and Denmark and Belgium and the Czech Republic. The garbage of the Kingdom of Prussia can still be found almost anywhere you dig, he said and then fell silent.

  But you have her voice on that cassette, said Saul, that’s not beneath the soil. Yes, that’s true, see, you’re connecting the dots now, he said and laughed a little. Then, after a moment of thought, he said, for some people, Saul, an entire place or an entire nation can’t just disappear in a lifetime, let alone overnight. Especially when that place is home.

  His grandfather did not speak of Mary Hitzig with a wistfulness common to men of his age when they spoke of long dead acquaintances or friends, but rather with such a deep and vivid fondness that he wasn’t so much slipping into the past but visiting Maria Hitzig in that Rush Street bar again. Her voice, hermetically sealed on that cassette, was instead a type of time machine. This was true for each interview, each voice in his “Vox Humana,” yet, there is always a moment, sooner or later, when one comes upon a voice that carries the weight and sadness and joy of all the others. Though neither his grandfather nor Maria Hitzig could have possibly known she would be so one day, she was his last voice.

  * * *

  Yes, Javier—and not him—shared that trait with his grandfather, thought Saul as he poked at his eggs. They were both men who insisted that others tell their stories, however long or short, however superficial or far-reaching, and almost everyone loves a person who loves to listen. Listening—even more than telling—was a type of gift that both men offered others.

  * * *

  You never answered my question, said Saul eventually, breaking the silence. When was the last time we spoke, Javier reiterated. We spoke last in November, pana. In fact, we spoke at least once every month for a few years.

  Saul looked away from Javier and glanced at the manuscript. I didn’t know you two spoke while you were away, he said.

  I’m sorry, pana, Javier said. I tried to tell you that night in the bar after you told me he had already died, but it wasn’t the right time, we hadn’t seen each other in ages and maybe I was a little shocked. In any case, I called him first a few years ago, somewhat out of the blue since—to be honest—I wanted to see how you were doing. For a time, we just talked about you. I suppose that it was unfair not to tell you, he said.

  What do you mean, “how I was doing”? asked Saul. We spoke on the phone. We emailed. You knew how I was doing. Javier fixed his eyes on Saul like an interrogator. Yes, there it was, thought Saul, that same gaze which saw right through him, that same gaze which now said: you know exactly what I mean, pana, I had no idea how you were doing, you never really told me more than “I’m fine” or “Everything’s fine” or “Everything’s the same,” like a tiresome teenager.

  Sure, said Javier, I was in the Amazon and the Andes and those foreign cities falling apart before my eyes, but you were the one who was away, pana, you revealed so little about yourself during these past ten years, you told me next to nothing at all, so, of course, I spoke to your grandfather, but don’t think for a second that I took our friendship for granted.

  At some point, continued Javier, your grandfather and I got to talking about other things, about traveling, about his books, about the other foreign correspondents I knew who were either pompous little gods in foreign lands or who were talented and penniless. Then I started seeking his advice, especially when I ran into roadblocks on certain pieces.

  Saul nodded. There was nothing to do to change the fact that they had talked about him without his knowledge. Which pieces did he give you advice for? he asked. The BBC piece on the Tepito Market in Mexico City, for example, said Javier, and another one was a profile on José “Pepe” Mujica and the Movement of Popular Participation
in Uruguay. He suggested that I follow “Pepe closely since he had a talent for dissent.” His exact words. There were quite a few others actually. He even gave me advice during my coverage of the Argentine Great Depression. I learned a great deal from your grandfather, pana. He taught me that journalism, like history, is an apparatus of justification. Your grandfather and his books also taught me how to ask people questions that meant something to them and how to urge them to reveal things they wouldn’t otherwise reveal and sometimes the things that others didn’t want them to reveal, which can be dangerous, both for them and the listener. Maybe, pana, I never told you how much I admire his work, he said and took a quick bite of the eggs, which by now were pale and in all likelihood cold. I should’ve, he added, it’s stupid that we only say these things after someone is gone.

  Saul nodded. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right away when he died, Javier, I know it must have been a painful shock when you showed up here, he said thoughtfully. Anyway, it all happened so fast, even though I was waiting for it to happen, he said. Does that make any sense?

  Javier hesitated. It does, to a degree, he said. But we can’t spend our days and nights waiting for things to happen, either. Anyway, to answer your original question, pana, that November day we spoke about interviewing taxi drivers in Mexico City for a piece about the long shadow of the Zapatistas. I spent a lot of time in taxis, but it was a shit piece. Later that night, continued Javier, he got a hold of me again, an unusual thing for him to call twice in one day. He wanted to know if I would ever visit Chicago again. I told him I was sure I would visit, but I didn’t know when. Without really listening to my response, he then told me he could make a call to an editor he knew at the Chicago Tribune if I ever decided I wanted to move home. From what I could gather, the editor was a granddaughter of one of his old friends. I never expressed to him an interest in moving back to Chicago, said Javier. But maybe, that night, I did in fact get the idea to move, or maybe I had already been thinking about what Maya’s future in Mexico City might be like. Maybe I was just tired. I don’t know. In any case, I didn’t need him to call an editor at the Chicago Tribune or anything of the sort, but I didn’t say that to him. I could tell it would make him feel useful to make that call on my behalf. In the end, he made the call and I took the job.

  A suspicion suddenly crossed Saul’s mind. Did you know then that he was dying? he asked. It occurred to him that the story of his grandfather’s life and death didn’t belong to just him anymore. It didn’t belong to anyone. It would be told for a few years by others like Javier who still remembered him and then, eventually, it would dissipate like clouds over a cemetery.

  No, said Javier, I suspected something was wrong, but I didn’t know what and I didn’t ask him anything specific on the phone. Later that night, in bed, I told Marina about our conversation and I remember she said that he might not have that much time left and that I should call you. She’s rarely wrong with these sorts of things. She has gut instincts about the sick and the soon-to-be sick and the dying. It makes her quite a good doctor. So, yes, I suspected something and I did in fact call you. I left three messages that you never returned, but that’s okay, in the end how can we really know what’s going to happen while we’re away? If we knew all those things, pana, there wouldn’t be anything left to tell.

  You sound exactly like him, said Saul. Then he shuffled the pages of the manuscript, took a short deep breath, and began again.

  * * *

  My sense is that in her own way Adana Moreau was thinking about the end of history, said Saul quite unexpectedly after finishing Part III and without adding anything further. Then, after a short silence, he nodded at the kitchen window and said, look, it’s morning.

  * * *

  Javier leaned back in his chair and gave out a long, contented sigh. Saul could tell just then that Javier felt, more or less, the same sense of wonder and exile he had felt after reading A Model Earth.

  Then Javier held up his pointer finger and said, just one more thing, pana. He reached into his back pocket, smiling from ear-to-ear now and with his eyes wide like a boy about to play a trick, but also that same boy’s father who hoped the trick went smoothly and that nobody got hurt in the process. Then he handed Saul five sheets of paper, folded three or four times into one small flat rectangle, and said, so, I found Maxwell Moreau.

  * * *

  For a while, Saul sat on a park bench in Palmer Square Park reading an article entitled “Un ojo gigante en desierto solitario” which appeared in El Universal on October 15th, 1999, and was written by a Mexican reporter who had gone to Chile to cover a small group of elderly women who had spent the better part of two and half decades combing the Atacama Desert for the preserved remains and bone fragments of their husbands and children “disappeared” by the brutal Pinochet regime.

  The article, which had been translated by Javier for Saul onto those five sheets of paper with the title “A Giant Eye in the Lonely Desert” and which was now spread on his lap, proceeded in five stages: First the Mexican reporter went to Calama, Chile, to interview the group’s organizer, Victoria Ortiz, a sensible and assiduous woman “like a Flemish painter,” who in 1979 had watched helplessly as her son was taken away by DINA, the secret police under Pinochet, never to be seen again. Then the reporter recounted her experiences traveling through the Atacama Desert with the elderly women as they drove in two large white pickup trucks from the little town of San Pedro de Atacama with just two telephone lines and one gas station to the edges of a long-abandoned town even deeper in the desert, a “surreal trip,” according to the reporter, full of stony “Mars-like” terrain, sand, salt lakes, felsic lava flowing toward the Andes, pre-Colombian rock carvings made by shepherds ten thousand years earlier and preserved almost flawlessly by the desert’s extreme hyperaridity, and even visible land mines planted decades before by the Chilean military.

  Then the reporter explained how she helped the elderly women as they combed one hundred square yards of red and yellow desert “like archeologists” until it was too hot and they had to retreat to the shade of their white pickup trucks, where they talked about the fate of the “disappeared,” about which next to nothing was known. They reviewed old rumors and gossip, compared anecdotes and possible bone fragments (phalanges, femurs, a mandible), and speculated about the whereabouts of their loved ones’ remains—thrown into the sea or buried beneath the sands under their feet. And finally they returned to San Pedro de Atacama and ate lunch in a small nameless restaurant with a “tall, enigmatic, and easygoing old man with immaculate gray and black hair,” a professor of theoretical physics from the Universidad de Chile who was setting out afterward into the expansive plateau at the bottom of the Cerro Chajnantor in order to camp for a few days and “read the night sky,” which was, according to the reporter, “a strange way to put it,” and also take measurements for research groups who were planning on building the world’s largest and most powerful radio telescope. Because of its sheer height, dryness, and translucent sky, the Atacama Desert was the perfect place for such a telescope.

  The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array or ALMA for short, as the telescope would be called, would allow astronomers to glimpse the very first galaxies that formed and even register light produced by the Big Bang. “A giant eye in the lonely desert,” the theoretical physicist said in a casual and elegant Spanish, “gazing into the very origins of the universe.”

  Later, when the professor asked the women what they were doing in the Atacama Desert, they told their stories just as they had told the reporter. The professor nodded solemnly while they talked, but didn’t say anything. Later, as they walked the bright, arid streets of San Pedro de Atacama, Victoria Ortiz and the professor exchanged contact information in case he happened to find any remains during his trip. Then, as the two large white pickup trucks wound their way from San Pedro de Atacama to Calama, the road empty save for a shepherd sleeping in his dilapidated truck, th
e elderly women turned their conversations to the living, to their grandsons and granddaughters, to their neighbors and friends, who all wanted them to “get on with their lives.”

  At some point, the reporter finally asked Victoria Ortiz the question she had meant to ask since the beginning of their trek. Why did they keep returning to the desert again and again when only fragments of their loved ones remained? What did they hope to prove or change? Instead of Victoria Ortiz answering her, another elderly woman sitting shotgun, who, up until that moment, had said little, looked at the reporter in the rearview mirror as if analyzing a missed exit and said: I think for the same reason that the professor we met today comes to this desert to “read the night sky.” Memory is a gravitational force. It is constantly attracting us to the past, even if we shouldn’t stay there for too long. Those of us who have a memory are able to live in that fragile space between the past and the future. Those of us who have none are already dead.