She leaned back again in her seat. So she was a little older than I’d thought, maybe late thirties.
‘When’s your next performance?’ I said.
‘Of Pablito’s Milonga?’
‘Yeah. At La MaMa.’
‘Saturday.’
‘I’ll come.’ I don’t know if she believed me or not.
We sat in awkward silence for a while. At least, it was awkward from my side. She was a very attractive woman. I didn’t know to what extent she was involved with the man by her side. Of course, I wanted to get to know her better.
I stood up and took my lecture notes from my computer backpack and started to look them over; but in my mind was the fact that this woman was part of a theater company that had been in existence since before I was born. I’d never heard of it. As far as I knew, nobody else in my field had ever written on it. She was too young to be part of the original group, so she must be part of a second or third generation, like the actors in Peter Brook’s present company.
The train pulled into Stamford.
I was leafing through my notes when Clara leaned over again.
‘When will you go to Argentina next?’ she said.
So she wanted to engage with me, too. I had a small rush of elation.
‘Well, I’m going to a conference in Montevideo in September: Theater Arts in the New Democracies. So I’ll get to visit my grandmother then. I’ll take the ferry.’
‘What will you do at the conference?’
‘I have to give a paper.’
‘On what?’
‘To be perfectly honest, I don’t know. It’s supposed to be about theater at the margins. We’re academics, we like margins.’
She laughed.
‘You can write about us,’ she said.
Yes, I thought. I can. I probably can. And I’ll get to meet you again.
And even then, while talking with this vivacious woman, the researcher in me was thinking, a theater group that’s been in existence for over forty years, right through the dictatorship period and the restoration of democracy, and if they were still in existence, people must have continued to go to see them over all these years; and nobody had written a monograph or a book about them in the USA… at least as far as I knew. If they were any good, I’d write about them. They had to be good to have lasted forty years. I got that tingle, that avidity for something new.
‘I’ll come to see your show for sure,’ I said.
‘Yes. Yes, you must come.’
The train pulled into Bridgeport: dereliction to the left of the train, and marinas to the right of it.
‘Does the company always develop its own work?’ I asked.
‘Until recently, yes.’
Now, for the first time in our conversation, she looked uncomfortable. One shoulder raised, she looked back over it, down toward the floor.
‘Until recently?’ I said.
‘We’d like to keep going like that,’ she said. ‘Developing our own work.’
‘Why wouldn’t you? The company’s been going for forty years. That’s staying power… I don’t imagine it was always that easy.’
‘No, not always.’
She dragged her hair back with one hand, the warmth in her eyes replaced with a kind of ferocity. I was glad that the aggression wasn’t being directed at me.
‘Who writes for the company?’ I asked.
‘One writer,’ she said.
‘May I ask you for a name?’
‘Gerardo Fischer.’
‘Will he be at the La MaMa show?’
Hernández turned his head and exchanged a glance with her.
‘Gerardo disappeared a few years ago,’ she said. ‘We’re still looking for him. Javier is looking for him. We still hope he’s alive.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘We’ve had no word of him since… a long time.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I hope you find him soon. Alive and well.’
We sat in silence for a while. She reached into her purse and gave me her card.
‘The more people who know about Gerardo the better,’ she said.
I felt strange that we were talking about this in English; that the other passengers might be listening in to what we were saying, but Clara didn’t seem to care. Far South. There was the address of a website.
‘People have responded to Gerardo’s disappearance,’ Clara said. ‘We’ve just launched this website in English to coincide with our tour of the United States. We have films there, images, sound files about Gerardo. But Javier wants to publish his case notes and transcripts of interviews in Spanish. We need English language versions. Javier thinks that Gerardo has found his way to the North. Up here. The USA. It’s possible.’
Hernández turned to look at me again and the warmth that had been there was now a searching stare that made me uncomfortable. I had a sudden feeling of déjà vu. Maybe it was because I was sitting backwards on the train that I had a violent sense of losing my equilibrium. It was as if a vortex spiraled shut in front of me, cutting me off from the past, and a vacuum was sucking me backwards into the future. It was an altogether unpleasant sensation. It persisted for as long as the eyes of Javier Hernández were on me. I felt that I was looking at a man who could erase the past as much as uncover it, which is what his job must be – to uncover the past – if he was really looking for this Gerardo Fischer who had disappeared. I was glad when Hernández turned his gaze back to the window.
‘Maybe Gerardo doesn’t want to be found,’ Clara said. ‘But we’re still searching for him. Do you understand? Perhaps you can help us find a good translator for Javier’s casebook.’
I nodded. For all the warmth and attraction that I’d felt for Clara up to this moment, I sensed something darker about her and her theater company’s history. It didn’t make her and the company any less attractive to me. If anything, I really wanted to know more.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘perhaps I can help.’
I could. I might even do this translation myself. Why not?
‘We like people to get involved with us as much as possible,’ Clara said. ‘We love interactions with new people. It’s the beauty of live theater, isn’t it? Don’t you think?’
I was still recovering from the strange sense of vertigo that had overwhelmed me only a few minutes before. The warmth was back in her eyes, the smile on her face, but the darkness hadn’t completely dissipated. It made her, if anything, more attractive.
‘What would you say,’ I asked, ‘about your kind of dramaturgy?’
‘It’s about masks,’ she said.
‘Like classical Greek theater… that kind of mask?’
‘Oh no, no, no. It’s about stripping away masks.’
‘Pablito’s Milonga, too?’
‘Yes, definitely.’
‘How so?’
‘You’d have to see the play,’ she said. ‘I can’t explain.’
‘I’m intrigued,’ I said.
She laughed. It was a sound that was to echo in my skull for days.
‘We’re getting close to New Haven,’ Clara said. ‘We’d better get our things.’
I didn’t want her to get off the train.
‘I wish we had more time to talk about this,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I could give you my card, too.’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Clara stood up in the aisle and so did Hernández.
I already had a tremendous sense of loss. I didn’t want to lose contact with her.
Hernández pulled two small overnight bags from the overhead rack. I took a card from my wallet and handed it to Clara. She tucked it into the side pocket of her overnight bag. I hoped she wasn’t going to misplace it.
I would go the performance at La MaMa. No need to panic, was there?
The train pulled into New Haven. The train always stops here for a while to change engines. I couldn’t help but follow Clara and Javier out onto the platform.
‘I’ll come and see your play for sure,’ I s
aid.
‘Yes, okay,’ Clara said. ‘I’ll call you. I promise.’
Clara stepped toward me. She surprised me with a single Latin-American-style kiss on the cheek. Javier Hernández shook my hand. He leaned forward and kissed my cheek, too. It felt as if they really would stay in touch with me, and that I wasn’t just a passing encounter on a journey that they’d forget as soon as they’d left the station. The subway stairs were near the middle of the platform. All the other passengers had gone down them. Hernández and Clara turned and waved once.
The train guard called, ‘All aboard.’
I raised a hand and stepped into the open doorway of the train carriage. They didn’t look back again. His right hand and her left drifted towards each other. Clara took his fingers in a momentary collusive squeeze and let go again. That small action caused me a quiver of anxiety, a sensation of profound envy.
The door to the train carriage slid shut.
Hernández and Clara disappeared down the exit steps.
I went back to my seat, and I sat down and stared at the card that she’d put in my hand.
www.far-south.org
Explore the files of the Far South Collective at
http://far-south.org
David Enrique Spellman is the voice for the Far South Project. The Far South Collective is a loosely affiliated group of artists, writers, actors, filmmakers, musicians and dancers. He works in close collaboration with Esko Tikanmäki Portogales, a Uruguayan web designer.
‘Far South is like a lucid dream, a book that fuses acts of creativity with matters of absolute seriousness’ Álvaro de Campos
‘The spirit of collective endeavour is alive and vibrant in the Far South Collective. I wish them all good fortune in their search for Gerardo Fischer’ Ramón Benítez
1 http://bit.ly/farsouth1
2 http://bit.ly/farsouth3
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