The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  * * *

  They arrived around midday and set up camp next to the test instruments that Maxwell and his graduate students had installed some five years earlier. Then they went for a short hike around the plateau, not more than five or six kilometers total. When they reached the eastern edge, they gazed across the volcanic peaks, and the scattered mountain villages of Argentina beyond. They kissed for a long time and then Maxwell told Victoria about the chair’s adventures in the White Desert. He took out the khanjar dagger and handed it to Victoria. She turned it over in her hands skillfully. Do you think the chair’s story is bullshit? she asked him with a wry smile. It hadn’t occurred to him. I don’t know, he said, maybe it doesn’t matter either way.

  Later, after dinner, Maxwell set up his portable telescope and they spent the next few hours reading the translucent night sky, which was aflame with stars. Through the telescope’s eyepiece, they could see swirling snake-shaped nebulas, the blue, orange, and brown cloud bands of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the constellations of Scorpio and the Southern Cross, the globular cluster Omega Centauri, and even the timorous outlines of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds some two hundred thousand light-years away, all of it right at the tip of their noses, giving Maxwell the familiar impression that there was no border between space and the Earth, and that one inevitably dispersed into the other and then fragmented into beauty.

  You once told me that a theoretical physicist could re-create the entire universe on paper without ever leaving his office, said Victoria, as she pressed her eye against the telescope. So, why help with this ALMA project, what else do you expect to find out here in the middle of the desert?

  For a few seconds, Maxwell was lost in thought. Then he said, unusual claims like evidence for parallel universes require a very high burden of proof. The ALMA telescope or one like it could potentially detect gravity from one universe leaking into ours. Or a NASA satellite might detect other universes nestled within the black holes that formed some three hundred million years after the Big Bang or even signs of a collision between our universe and another. In other words, a telescope like ALMA could one day give us evidence of a multiplicity beyond our imagination.

  But what surprised him most and what he didn’t say to Victoria was that all he could think of when he had first gazed into the Atacama Desert’s translucent night sky was the fiery constellation of his mother’s slender face framed by her long, coffee-colored hair and all the lives that she had lived in those other universes just beyond his reach.

  * * *

  On March 20th, the same day the United States invaded Iraq, Maxwell boarded a flight from Santiago to Panama City, where he had a short layover before boarding another flight to New Orleans. On the final leg of his trip, he sat next to a one-armed businessman from Colombia. They talked for a while, as the man flipped through the pages of a news magazine, and Maxwell learned that the man had lost his arm fighting FARC rebels. According to the businessman everything was about to change. The norteamericanos are at war, he said, and a new era was about to begin. But then again, the norteamericanos are always at war. They are at war in my country even as we speak. So, maybe, nothing ever changes, he said, laughing slowly, with his eyes and teeth shining in the dark cabin, and scratching his prosthetic arm as if it were a sleeping cat or still an arm. Right, said Maxwell, and he turned away and stared out the window at the purple clouds that looked like the arched cloister of a cathedral. They love war, the one-armed businessman said some minutes later just as Maxwell was drifting toward sleep. It’s their national pastime, he said, baseball, free enterprise, and war.

  * * *

  Despite the considerable humidity, the first year in New Orleans was peaceful, uneventful. With his savings, he bought a modest two-story cottage on South Telemachus Street, a relatively quiet street lined with old elms, swaying palms, massive elephant ears, and the occasional banana tree. In the mornings, he sat in the kitchen and worked on a long essay about the multiverse titled “The Outer Limits,” which was to be published in September 2004 in an anthology inspired by the work of the late Hugh Everett III and titled A Brief History of the Future.

  Afterward, he went for long walks. These walks inevitably took him to the waterway Bayou St. John which routed itself through a neighborhood of the same name. The waterway had been in use since pre-Columbian times and it pervaded the entire neighborhood with a freshwater scent and the awareness of something primeval always moving nearby. Other times, he took the Canal Streetcar to the Carondelet stop and wandered the old stone quadrangular streets of the French Quarter, which, at first glance, seemed very different from those of his childhood. Long gone were the frenetic courtyards of Sicilian tenement buildings, the huge black Spanish jars, and the melancholic sounds of the accordion—but on second glance the streets of the French Quarter didn’t feel very different at all. It was as if the teeming, operatic city of his childhood was an invisible city inside yet another invisible city, and so on, back through the decades and even centuries, a great big invisible belly heaving slowly under the near-tropical heavens, as the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar might say.

  Occasionally, his next-door neighbor Antoine, a chef who came knocking on his door one June night to introduce himself, stopped by to help cook. Antoine spent a good deal of time in Maxwell’s kitchen radiantly musing over food, ecology, Darwin, and mass extinction, which, according to him, was inevitable for the human species. Maxwell, in turn, talked to Antoine about the multiverse or the events that had precipitated his return to New Orleans or his happy, sometimes accidental, travels through Europe, Asia, and South America. At some point, Antoine started calling him Traveler.

  Afterward, if it was cool enough, Maxwell sat alone in a black wicker chair on his front porch listening to the faint, boiling blasts of trumpets and trombones coming from a nearby elementary school or to the drumming rain that often seemed like it would never end, reading or thinking about a few unsolved problems in physics, or so he claimed in emails written to colleagues, but in truth he wasn’t thinking anything at all.

  * * *

  What did Maxwell read that first year in New Orleans? He read The Data, which was, as one might expect, a book about how the basis of the physical universe was data made of bits of interconnected information that would dissolve little by little until there was nothing left. He read Mars, an apocryphal dark comedy written entirely in dialogue in which Mars converses with the Earth every seventeen years. He read The Fifth, a crime novel about a detective on the brink of solving the case of a serial killer living in the 5th dimension, a novel which inexplicably ends mid-sentence, just moments before the case is fully solved, like the writer too had suddenly disappeared into the 5th dimension. He read Our Messenger, a tragic biography of Peter L. Jensen, who invented the loudspeaker only to later regret his invention when fascists started using it with great success, wondering, while he read, if the Internet would one day face the same fate. That book inevitably led to The Samurai and the Statue, a historical novel of sorts following the life of a poor old sculptor living in Rome from the summer of 1924 to the winter of 1925 as he attempts in vain to sculpt a Cubist bronze sculpture of Hasekura Tsunenaga, a 17th century samurai who headed a diplomatic mission to the Vatican, passing through New Spain and various port-of-calls in Europe. What Maxwell enjoyed most about The Samurai and the Statue was that the writer made little attempt to accurately represent either the life of the Roman sculptor or the life of the 17th century samurai (even if the writer hadn’t painted a careless or ordinary picture of either), but rather did want to present a theory of their relationship and the relationship each had with the Old World. He also read The Census Taker, a prescient novel about American apartheid in 2050. Then Uruk, about an android in the third millennium named Gilgamesh. In a thin but immeasurably elegant collection of poems by the Cuban poet Norberto Codina, he found the following: el ser humano es infinito. Of course, numerous books followed. When he finished a
book, he exchanged it for another at one of the cramped used bookstores that could be found in the French Quarter or in one of the surrounding neighborhoods.

  * * *

  It was around this time, as he wandered the city in search of other bookstores, that he happened upon the New Orleans Rare Book Center and Ms. Zora. While he was looking through a rather impressive bookcase, she approached him and asked if he needed any help. She wore a black wool shawl wrapped tightly around her thin shoulders, an unusual sight in New Orleans, where there was only water and sun. Her hair was long, way past her shoulders, and black. At first, as if unstuck in time, he recognized her immediately as Afraa Laguerre, but on second thought realized that this was impossible. He didn’t say anything, what could he even say to her just then without sounding like a rambling old man, but later, when she rang up his purchase, a biography on Nezahualcoyotl, the 15th century poet and ruler of Texcoco, he saw the photographs on the wall behind the front counter and was struck for a second time by the stunning image of Afraa Laguerre.

  Or rather, images. In one small black and white photo, in which she was about the same age as when he had known her, she stood in a stylish courtyard with an unknown writer (at least to him), but what Maxwell really saw was a woman with a fearless smile and gaze like Audrey Hepburn or Dorothy Van Engle, which is to say a strong-willed, intelligent gaze, the gaze of someone who had committed her life to unanswerable questions, to the abyss.

  Afraa Laguerre, he said slowly and in something like a whisper. That’s right, she said, my grandmother and the founder of this place. My mother was a writer, said Maxwell. What was her name? she asked. Adana Moreau, he said. Well then, said Ms. Zora with a great big vatic smile, we have a lot to talk about.

  * * *

  It wasn’t too long after that Maxwell and Ms. Zora went searching for his mother’s tomb. He remembered, vaguely, like in a waking dream, that it was in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, but he wasn’t sure exactly where. As they searched the damp aisles of the cemetery, Maxwell talked about a trip his family and Afraa had taken to an island off the Gulf Coast shortly after the publication of Lost City in 1929. He had been nine then. The island, from what he remembered, was long and thin, so that you could turn your head one way to see the sunrise, which was faint at first, then strong and dense, and then later turn your head the other way to see the sunset, which, inevitably, tinted the sand and trees a soft red. During one of those sunsets, they went for a walk along a western stretch of beach. While Maxwell and his father hunted for seashells and crabs and strange rocks, Afraa and his mother talked for a long time about books, about books found by ineluctable chance on old but tidy shelves, and books that devoured readers, not the other way around, like a fanged beast.

  A little later, he helped Afraa build a campfire on the beach. His parents went up to the water’s edge, gazing out to sea. They stood inches apart, like Aztec stone statues, obsidian and immortal, or rather that’s how he saw them then, and maybe even now. At some point, he heard his mother laugh. Then his father said te amo, te amo, te amo, three times, like a pirate’s charm, and they kissed.

  A few years after that, said Maxwell, they were both gone from me. They entered something like a labyrinth of time and never left.

  Maxwell and Ms. Zora walked in silence until they reached a brick tomb near the western edge of the cemetery. His mother’s name had faded, but was still, if obliquely, legible. It’s still here, said Maxwell and he smiled. Before they left, Ms. Zora laid a small bouquet of blue roses in front of Adana Moreau’s tomb.

  * * *

  In April, a few days after Maxwell’s eighty-fourth birthday, while thumbing through an illustrated 19th century book about trees in the Amazon, he found an old postcard with a black and white photograph of an immense cypress tree. He suddenly realized that during all this time he hadn’t written Victoria Ortiz. He discussed it with Ms. Zora while she reshelved a few books. What a waste of time, she said. I don’t know how I could’ve forgotten, he said.

  That night, on the back of the old postcard, he wrote a letter to Victoria in which he told her about his house on South Telemachus Street, about the sky in New Orleans (shades of Cézanne, Kahlo), about the sounds of drums and guitars that he sometimes heard coming from a neighboring house that was home to a group of Brazilian musicians, about the streetcars at dusk, their lights already on, heading home.

  Three weeks later, he received a postcard from Victoria with a photograph of the incandescent night skyline of Santiago, where she was staying with her granddaughter for a few weeks. In the postcard, she told Maxwell about the rumors that Pinochet’s health was failing, about how in interviews he still clung, like a toxic lichen, to the falsehood that he had done the country good, about her treks into the desert, which continued without pause, and about her involvement in the planning of something called the Museum of Memory. Other postcards followed.

  The following year, in late July, while visiting Santiago for the month, Victoria’s granddaughter bought her a laptop and taught her how to use email. Shortly after, Maxwell and Victoria’s communications became more frequent and, soon enough, at hyper speed, all pretext finally dissolved. Every few days now, they wrote each other long emails which were, more or less, faithful simulacrums of the conversations they once had in person and which were, in a word, about the need for companionship, especially at their ripe old age, joked Victoria in an email written on August 22nd, because the truth was that they both still felt very young and almost infinite, like Sisyphus, Maxwell happily responded the following day, who cheated Death again and again to be with his wife.

  * * *

  On Wednesday, August 24th, Maxwell woke early, took a cold shower, made a cup of Cuban coffee, and turned on the computer. He wrote an email to Victoria. Then he spent a few hours on the Internet searching for odd bits of news, names in theoretical physics that no one remembered anymore, forgotten theories. At some point, he read about a tropical storm some two hundred and thirty miles east of Miami, wondering vaguely if he knew anybody in that city. Some hours later, the tropical storm was given a name.

  Later that afternoon, he stood on his balcony and gazed east, toward where he imagined the storm to be, and he didn’t see anything. The sky was gray and pinkish and slumbering, like the backdrop of a Finnish painting. The day grew hotter and hotter.

  * * *

  That Saturday evening, his next-door neighbor Antoine stopped by to see if Maxwell was evacuating like the others before the Storm or if, like him, he would ride it out. He thought about his prospects in Houston or Atlanta or Memphis and decided to stay.

  On Sunday morning, he filled his bathtub with water. Then he put plastic jugs of water in the freezer. Later, Maxwell went with Antoine to the hardware store to purchase supplies and plywood to cover his windows. On the highway, a few traffic helicopters passed overhead. When they reached the Home Depot, it looked to Maxwell like an enormous, frantic launching operation for a spacecraft.

  * * *

  Later that evening, after Antoine had boarded up his restaurant with a few employees, he came over to Maxwell’s house with a bottle of good whiskey, two large crabs, and andouille sausage, of a spicy variety, he told Maxwell, direct from a butcher friend of his in the West Bank.

  Tonight, he said, I’ll do all the cooking.

  As he cooked, Antoine talked excitedly about the storms of his childhood, about how the green parrots would vanish from the city beforehand, about the sound of rain on tin roofs, about lightning like vast rings of Bengal fire, the streets like shallow Venetian rivers, the green scales and white, knife-like teeth of a Nile crocodile head on the fireplace mantle of his family’s shotgun house, the deep sweaty pores of his sister’s forehead as she slept fast and hard next to him in bed, oblivious to the wind and the rain and the air charged with a fleeting electric value that prickled his skin, and memory.

  After dinner, as the rain started to fall and as the wind picked
up wastrel speed, Antoine said, let me tell you something, Traveler. Sure, said Maxwell. For the first time in a long time, I feel good and I can’t explain why.

  For a few seconds, the wind howled, and both were silent. Then: does that make any sense, Traveler?

  Yes, said Maxwell, I think it does.

  I feel alive, said Antoine.

  * * *

  Around 5:30 a.m., Maxwell woke from a dream. In the dream, he was talking with a crocodile. The crocodile was mudstruck, delirious. His breath like vaporous clouds. What happens when galaxies devour each other? the crocodile asked.

  After Maxwell woke, the first thing he noticed was that the plywood covering his bedroom window had blown off and that the window had shattered, letting in hot blasts of wind and rain. The house shuddered, breathed in and then out. The roof thundered with water, like an army of Tartar horsemen had suddenly gathered there. Across the street, through a sheet of lashing rain, a palm tree was lurching forward at a grotesque forty-five-degree angle. He watched as a long length of old white fence tore from the earth and went spinning, like a scarf, into the darkness. Two plastic chairs galloped, then lifted off the ground. He heard car windows popping. At some point, all the buildings on the street went dark and then there were only vague shapes, as if the street had been drawn with charcoal. Maxwell ran downstairs to the first-floor bathroom. He sat on the edge of the porcelain tub, still filled with water, thinking that, at any moment, he would be sucked out of the house, skyward, and simply disappear into the all-devouring sound and fury.