Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  I did not say, Not much older than me. I said, “Dios la bendiga. She has a beautiful face.”

  “She is not healthy, and she is blind.”

  All this time I was eating the tamale, which was filled with raisins and nuts, mixed with the meat and tomatoes and an herb flavor I couldn’t name. As I finished, Rosa stood up and said she would get me some more. I thanked her and said no, then reached for the Bible.

  “We read to her,” Rosa said.

  The Bible was worn, the leather cover bumped and scuffed, the tissuey pages thickened and smudged from being pushed by licked fingers. The stringy threadbare ribbon marked the book of Ezekiel. To show my thanks, to be agreeable, the harmless gringo, I read, “La mano del Señor vino sobre mí”—the hand of the Lord was on me—and continued, “Hijo de hombre, vivirán estos huesos?”—Son of Man, how can these bones live?

  The old woman was nodding in recognition as I spoke. She said, “Señor Dios, tu la sabes.”

  “I like this,” I said.

  “Aquí es el valle de los huesos secos,” Rosa said. “And these bones are alive.”

  Now, with the clap of the screen door, a young woman appeared at the doorway from inside the house, but she stopped when she saw me. Some boys peered at me from the corner of the house. That it was a house of women and children somehow relaxed and encouraged me.

  Perhaps it was for their benefit that Rosa said, like a command, “Pue-des estarte con nosotros unos días,” and as I seemed to weaken, she added, “Or a week, or more, si quieres”—if you wish. Still in Spanish, she said, “It is cheaper than a hotel, and there are no hotels in La Soledad. There is nothing in La Soledad.” She called to the young woman. “Bring a basin of water so that our guest can wash his hands.”

  The young woman obeyed, hurrying inside the house and then returning with the basin, bowing, holding it while I wagged my hands in the water. Rosa stood aside and watched, seeming to evaluate the encounter. The woman was perhaps twenty, with the Asiatic features of Mexicans in these parts, many of whom were Mayan: dark eyes, long black hair, and full lips, and with these delicate features, strong hands gripping the basin she held between us in a posture of submission, her heavy breasts swinging within her white blouse, bowing slightly, not looking at me, her eyes cast down out of shyness or respect, so I saw only her eyelashes, the thick wide sweep of them, black against her smooth cheeks.

  “Maybe for a few days,” I said.

  Like that, I had a large clean room with a view of the river, a soft bed, and a table for writing. I had good food and friendly company. I had a family.

  That night, after dinner of a stew they called menudo, of tripe and vegetables, and more corn, sitting around the trestle table in the big kitchen that looked out on the yard (pigs in a pen, chickens in a coop), one of the smaller boys, at Rosa’s urging, brought the Bible to me.

  “Read to us,” Rosa said. “Abuela likes to hear your voice.” She said my voice was raro—unusual.

  The young woman had not joined us for dinner, and I wondered whether she was hired help—a maid, a servant of some sort. In my weird vanity I had hoped to impress her with my reading.

  Opening the Bible to where the ribbon lay, I said “Ezekiel,” and the old woman clasped her bony hands and rocked a little.

  “Entonces El mi dijo, profetiza. Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.’”

  The room was still, the faces attentive, gleaming by lantern light, the table like an altar. I had a delicious hint of what it might be like to be a preacher, to have the power of conveying the word of God to believers—their solemnity, their trust, their belief in me, the messenger from the Almighty. I was bringing hope to them, and glory.

  So the next day, by the river, when Nelson said, “Will you read to us tonight?” I was touched. But I also recognized that to them I was a novelty, a diversion, someone who might prove useful, a gringo with a car and money, perhaps easily tempted.

  The house was well built because Rosa’s husband, working in California, had for some years (“Por algunos años”) sent money every month. He no longer did so. “He is waiting for his papers”—another vagueness—I took to mean he was illegal. He had not come home for eight years. A visit to Mexico, I guessed, would mean that he’d be unable to return to his job at the fabrica de procesamiento de pollo—chicken processing plant—in Stockton; nor could Rosa visit him.

  For these reasons and more, I was a welcome visitor. In the following days I ceased to be a guest and became the sole adult male of the household, giving them rides to the market at La Soledad to buy vegetables and cooking oil, and beer for me; helping to fix Álvaro’s bicycle; reading to them after dinner, always the Bible.

  In the morning I worked at the table in my room—and often overheard Rosa saying, “No molestarlo—el está ocupado,” outside my door. Most afternoons I walked along the river or joined the boys at the slipway near where they caught fish in a weir they’d made at the neck of a narrow backwater. They had a small boat they sometimes used for fishing or for ferrying firewood from the far bank. Seeing that the hull had dings and leaks, I told them that if they hauled it out, I’d help them repair it with material I’d buy in Ocosingo. And I introduced them to the simple effort of mixing chemical potions, hardener and fiberglass resin—and the magic of fiberglass patches.

  “We can travel downriver in this boat,” I said. “We will have an adventure.”

  We were sitting on the riverbank below the house, admiring my handiwork, the gleam of the patches on the old boat. Just then, Nelson looked up and saw Luma standing near the house, holding her baby.

  I said, “Where is the father of that baby?”

  “Se fugó,” Álvaro said.

  “Se escapó,” Nelson said.

  Gone. So Luma was abandoned and perhaps disgraced, and I saw how as a godfather I might fit into this family with the dead grandfather, the husband who’d stopped sending money, and the daughter whose lover had bolted.

  “She is good. She is not spoiled, señor,” Nelson said. “She never went to school and picked up bad habits like others.”

  It was easy to see what they’d envisioned for me, the designated male adult with a steady income. It was a role that suited me even better, perhaps, than they’d imagined. I was not dismayed. I liked the straightforwardness of it. I thought, Maybe this is the answer, maybe this is my future. The irony of it was that it had been B. Traven’s answer too, turning his back on his parents, his ex-wife, his child, abandoning everything he’d known for a new life as a writer in Mexico, obsessed with protecting his privacy and looking after his young Mexican wife.

  Abuela was not well—muriendo, Rosa said. Dying. Rosa ran the house but did not see me as a potential mate, although she was younger than me. Luma was the bait. Such an arrangement was not odd here, where older men often married much younger women, nearly always as a benefit to the whole family in the role of breadwinner or patriarch. And a gringo offered the added promise of American passports.

  They were not cynical manipulators; they were practical in the manner of peasants, for whom sentimentality was usually fatal. They were not so much looking for an alliance as for a father figure—padrino said it all, a godfather. On the first day, they’d asked me all the pointed questions: Did I have a wife? Children? Family? I assured them I was unencumbered, and from this they rightly surmised that I was adrift; they understood that I was grateful for their hospitality. They knew that I was happy, and I could tell from the way they teased me that they were comfortable around me. They must have known on some level that I was tempted by Luma, or why else after a week was I still here?

  They were right. This was the fantasy I craved, life at its simplest, a house in the tropics by a river, a place to work, a pleasant climate, good food, naps in a hammock, chickens clucking beneath me; tenderness, too, perhaps even a sortie at romance. All this and the pleasure of being far away, my dream of living the fantasy of “What’s become of Warin
g since he gave us all the slip?”

  The persuasive part of the fantasy was not the romance but the contented family—large, self-sufficient, and happier for my being with them, because I had money. None of them had gone to school past a few early grades, and though they knew a handful English words, only Rosa could read. My Spanish was improving. That was another of my uses—reading to them after dinner by lamplight while they sat, bright-eyed. At some point in the past, probably from an encounter with another stranger on the road from Ocosingo, this one an evangelical, they’d converted from improvisational folk Catholicism to the salvation of fundamentalist Bible-thumping, and I was the answer to their prayers in this respect, too.

  “Mas, Tío Hay.”

  I wasn’t the gringo anymore. I was Uncle Jay, and sometimes padrino. All they needed to do was think of a way of making me wish to stay. They’d agreed to the boat trip down the Río Jataté; they’d left me alone, undisturbed, when I was writing; they encouraged me to hold the baby, Carlos, whom they called Carlito, and talked up Luma. They could see, in my procrastination, that I was weakening.

  It seemed insane, certainly improbable, yet I had found myself in a kind of Eden. I’d come on the pretext of planning to write about it. But why would I leave? They were right: I had everything here I would ever want. It seemed slightly creepy to take Luma as a junior wife, but they assured me that was the village way. What it meant was that I would have to keep my part of the bargain: stay with them, be loyal, and support them all. Even on my small budget I could do that, because I now got a monthly Social Security check, enough money to live well in the depths of Chiapas in a modest house by the river.

  “The mother of Tío Hay is almost one hundred years old,” Rosa said at the dinner table one evening.

  “Older than our papelillo,” Nelson said.

  He meant the big tree in the yard that supported one end of the woven hammock, a vast, reddish, peeling paperbark tree that Mexicans sometimes called the gringo tree, for its sunburnt coloration.

  Hearing this news of Mother’s age, they looked upon me as someone of even greater value, not only for my money but for my strength and protection, my longevity. I was not marrying one woman; I was forming an alliance with an entire family.

  A further advantage to my living here was that my phone didn’t work. I had no Internet access. At La Soledad phone contact was intermittent; only in Ocosingo, more than forty miles away, was I able to make a call from my phone, but so far all I’d done was extend my car rental. This was a liberation. Intending to write a piece about B. Traven, I had become B. Traven, uncontactable, the vanished American. I loved the thought that I’d disappeared—from Mother, from my rancorous siblings—and to “Where’s Jay?” there was no answer, only bafflement.

  Whenever she saw me sitting on the veranda or lying in the hammock, Luma would bring me baby Carlito and offer him to be held. And I was happy to cuddle him, watch him gurgling, often a sweet milky breath from Luma’s breasts. And she knelt, watching.

  One day, holding the baby, I said, “I’m not going away. I love being here. I love your family. I want to go down the river with your brothers—to fish, to look. But I will come back. I will play with Carlito. I will take you to Ocosingo, to the shops. I will read to you. I want nothing else.”

  Saying it, I saw a whole life, my check deposited every month in the bank branch at La Soledad, writing in my room in the little plaster-and-brick citadel, picnics by the river, being looked after by the Trinidad family, and looking after them. I studiously avoided any mention of marriage or romance.

  “We will be happy. Do you believe me?”

  I was not sure what I was trying to say, yet—full of hope—I was giddy.

  “Sí, padrino.”

  Luma sat closer while I held the baby. She caressed his cheek, nuzzled him and made him laugh, and put her pretty finger on his lips. I was happy, I was the baby. I thought, This is the life I’ve always dreamed of.

  “Will you please take me to Ocosingo?” Luma said in a low voice. “I want to see the doctor there. Just for a checkup.”

  Revisión médica. Sensible mother.

  “Sure,” I said. “Tomorrow. We will leave early.”

  Luma’s younger brothers saw us off, and Rosa gave us food for the journey and a shopping list.

  “Hasta pronto!” they called out.

  Alone with me, Luma became talkative, telling me how she’d always wanted to go to the coast and see the Pacific Ocean, how she liked music and the fiestas at San Cristóbal, and perhaps she would travel when Carlito was bigger, maybe to the United States, just for a visit, to see all the things that people talked about. I encouraged her with questions, and I thought, I can make that happen.

  Nearing Ocosingo, she said, “I hear music. What is it?”

  At first I was bewildered; I hadn’t heard anything. Then I remembered my phone in my bag in the back seat, with my passport and valuables. I said, “My ring tone?” and she laughed at my odd words, but softly, and shook her head, holding the sleeping baby in her arms.

  I pulled over near a beer sign, Cerveza Amnesia Nocturna, and as I did the baby woke and smacked his lips, and Luma was clucking at him. That was what I would remember, the odd sign, the contented baby, Luma’s smile, and the message glowing on my phone: Mother ill. Come home at once, wherever you are.

  48

  Angor Animi

  The first hard autumn rain had beaten the brown leaves from the trees—mid-November on the Cape, the days growing bleaker with each denuded branch, and instead of the sigh of leafy boughs, the sorrowful moan against the black limbs and the knuckles of the twig ends stuttering in the gusts. Impossible to sit in this early darkness, a season of withdrawal and departure and desiccation, brittle leaves and the frizz of withered blossoms, and not think of death or the mental paralysis I’d suffered before I vanished in Chiapas. And I had traded that sunny, hopeful household in the jungly south of Mexico just a day before for this—for this.

  “It’s all a shock. We don’t think Mumma’s going to make it,” Franny said when I called for an update. Her voice was the familiar one of the people in this family, which was a peculiar country with its own discouraging accent. It’s awl a shawk. “She’s wicked thin. I brought her a bottle of tonic and she wouldn’t even drink it. It’s like she wants to go.”

  “When’s the last time you saw her?” And I had winced at bawdle of tawnic.

  “Two weeks back. Marvin keeps me busy. He can’t use his walker anymore. He needs a wheelchair. I have to put him in it and then take him out. Plus, he’s got wicked bad digestion issues. And restless leg keeps him awake all night.”

  “Who’s looking after Ma, then?”

  “Fred was, until a week ago. But he’s been diagnosed with phlebitis. They think it’s all his flying catching up with him. Or maybe peripheral vascular—that’s what Hubby says. That’s why we sent you the message.”

  “I was really busy,” I said, and an image of the friendly faces at the dinner table, shining by lamplight, sprang to mind. “I don’t see why Floyd couldn’t have stepped in.”

  “He’s scheduled for a gallbladder operation,” Franny said. “Remember he had that acid reflux? Remember Hubby told him to take Zantac for it, or was it Tums?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t care.”

  “It wasn’t acid reflux. It was gallstones. He’s going in for surgery. Hubby explained everything.”

  “Is Hubby looking after Ma, then?”

  “Not really. He’s pre-diabetic. It’s either type one or type two. Which is the nonserious one.”

  “Aren’t they both serious?”

  “The one you don’t need to take insulin for. He’s in and out of the hospital.”

  “And what’s Rose’s excuse?”

  “She had a bad fall. She’s day to day.”

  “Gilbert? I guess he’s in Kabul. Know what? I was once in Kabul. I went down the Khyber Pass. Did anyone in the family wonder why?”

 
“Gil’s in DC with serious lower back issues. It’s work-related.”

  “All he does is sit. In various far-off countries. At various desks.”

  “‘Sitting is the new smoking.’ That’s what he told me.”

  “So no one’s looking after Ma.”

  “You are, Jay.”

  “Because everyone’s sick.”

  “Everyone’s wicked sick.”

  “Especially Ma?”

  “Like I said, we don’t think she’s going to make it.” Franny gasped into the phone. “Jay, she’s nearly a hundred!”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Everything.”

  “What does her doctor say?”

  “You know how she feels about doctors.”

  Mother distrusted doctors for creating alarm and despondency, for exaggerating consequences. Look closely at doctors, she said; are they so healthy that they should be lecturing the rest of us on how to live? No, they were pale, they were fat, and many of the ones Mother had known had been smokers. This folk wisdom was shared by Roald Amundsen, who refused to take a doctor on his expedition to the South Pole, for the reasons Mother enumerated. Captain Scott had a doctor, Edward Wilson. Amundsen successfully reached the pole and returned in triumph. Scott and his doctor found Amundsen’s flag and froze to death on the way back.

  As for medicine, Mother preached that the side effects outweighed the benefits. All medicine was snake oil, a confidence trick, weakening you and then bringing you down. Medicine did not cure you, it deluded you, then it killed you. I had begun to think she might be right.

  “You have to go see her. It’s all up to you now.”

  “In which hospital?”

  From the tone of her reply, she found my question ridiculous. “Mumma’s home.”

  She was sitting on her throne among her shelves of knickknacks and family photographs, wrapped in a shawl. Rain lashed the front windows. I’d brought a basket of fruit, and this time remembered to include a pineapple.

  “Are you all right, Ma?”