So many foreigners, he thought, came to Mexico for the sun and then went to extravagant lengths to shield themselves from its rays. Those who didn’t were lobster red within hours - another mark of the tourist. The straw hat, decorated with a cloth hibiscus flower, just didn’t go with the woman’s hard-set features. There was nothing carefree about either of them, in fact. They almost appeared to be made of stone, like the good Marquis de Villar de Villa, who hovered above. What was it in life that turned some people into statues?
He brushed back a shock of black hair and jotted the idea down in his notebook.
“Habla inglés?”
He raised his head. The couple had approached his bench. Barely blinking, the woman with the straw hat stared appraisingly at him, as if she were evaluating a work of art or a prospective purchase.
“Yes, I do,” he answered. “Why? Is there something I can help you with?”
“Oh, my,” said the woman. “You speak perfectly. No accent at all.”
“My parents are American.”
“That would explain it.”
“You don’t look American,” said the man. The accent was faint, vaguely Scandinavian.
“No, you don’t,” agreed the woman.
He waited for them to say something more. But they seemed happy just to look at him. He would have to change places today, maybe go a few blocks to the Jardín Zenea. He closed his notebook. For the first time, worry replaced the rigor in the woman’s face.
“Oh, we’ve bothered you,” she apologized. “It’s just that——“
“You’re the one, aren’t you?” interrupted the man.
“The one?”
“The one from the mudslide. We recognized you from your picture in the papers.” He seemed to swell up with pride over his powers of observation. “My friend said to me, ‘That young man looks familiar.’ It came to us both right away. He’s the youth who survived the mudslide.”
The conversation had started to make him uncomfortable. He didn’t like people singling him out, making him into something he wasn’t. His mother had warned him this would happen. “I was just lucky,” he said.
“Why would you say that? Lucky?” said the woman with a puff of irritation. “You were the only one. All the others died. You were saved.”
“Yes, well, perhaps. I prefer to think I was lucky?”
“Were you unconscious the whole the time?”
They were more persistent than Little Jimmy. It was what everyone always wanted to know: What was it like? His response was always the same. “I don’t really remember. It was all a blur.” But it wasn’t a blur and he recalled the details vividly. He lived and ate and slept with the memory. Not the memory of lying imprisoned in the earth for three days, but the memory of the dream that had filled his consciousness. He hesitated to call it a vision, but there was no other way to describe it, really, without sounding mad. The dream had no plot, but a series of intense feelings ran through him, as would boiling liquids. And yet he had not been in pain, but intoxicated rather by the sensation.
It was as if he - or his body - had become part of the earth, atoms intermingling with atoms, so that there was no distinction between flesh and rock, worm and thigh, mind and matter. Intense feelings of joy and sadness, elation and misery, passed through him. The bowels of the earth seemed to contain the full catalogue of human emotions and he, trapped in the earth’s embrace, was privy to them all. There was no specific experience attached to the various emotions. It was not the sadness of losing a loved one he had experienced, but sadness itself; not the elation that comes from contemplating a majestic sunset, but joy in its purest essence, devoid of its source, all the world’s joys, as it were, rolled into one all-embracing emotion. He felt part of something whole, larger and more comprehensive than the life he had hitherto led.
The only blot on the euphoria was a distant planet on the fringes of his vision. At least it appeared to be a planet. Black, it was approaching at lightening speed from a point deep in the cosmos, every second getting closer, more ominous, until it virtually threatened to slam into the earth. And yet it never did. It simply got bigger and nearer, the moment of impact eternally imminent and eternally delayed at the same time. He didn’t know how to explain this sensation of suspension to his parents and had not tried. He couldn’t put it into words and the sketches he’d done in his notebook only communicated confusion.
Yet, oddly, there had been nothing confusing about the experience itself. It seemed to clarify how he had felt most of his life. Both at one with people and apart from them. Aware of their grandeur and their squalor, as two sides of the same coin. He knew that the wailing baby would soon stop crying and forget what the tears had been all about. Just as he knew that lovers, strolling arm in arm, were experiencing the most ephemeral moments of their life. He knew that wars and conflicts would rage and subside. Today’s news would be quickly forgotten and only a few personalities would be transformed into myths. But somehow through it all the world would go on. The joy and anguish he’d known during his three days under the earth would endure, to be partaken momentarily by human beings whose lives, otherwise, had little consequence. How could he explain that he was more alive, more aware, under the ground than he had ever been above it?
He realized that the foreign couple was still standing there, observing him. Had his mind drifted off for an hour or a second? Nothing on their faces told him which.
“Look, was there something I could help you with?” he asked. “Directions or something?”
“No, thank you,” replied the man. “We just wanted to know if you were the one. Not many live to tell a story like yours, you know!”
“So they say. Well, it’s a pleasure meeting you.” He struggled to his feet.
The man automatically reached out to assist him.
“No, I’m okay. I’m fine. Nothing happened to me.”
“Not even a scratch?” asked the woman, incredulously.
“A few dirty fingernails is all,” he said, trying to make light of the situation.
The couple failed to laugh at his joke. Instead, the woman reached for his free hand. But instead of shaking it, as he expected, she proceeded to caress it, delicately, as she might an injured bird. Her features blurred and her breathing became heavy. “It is truly a miracle.”
“If you’ll excuse me, please.” The couple was not the first to approach him, but something about the forced intimacy they had displayed made him deeply uncomfortable. It was as if he belonged to them, and it was all because of newspapers and television. You lost something when the media talked about you. Not just privacy, either. Some part of your secret self went numb. He resolved to explore the idea in his notebook.
Click.
At the far end of the plaza, a photographer recorded the encounter. Even though the couple was too far away to hear the noise, the woman with the straw hat turned sharply and scanned the crowd, as if operating on a sixth sense.
“What was that?” she asked the man angrily.
The man turned to look, as well.
But the photographer had inserted herself into a group of tourists, busy shooting the historic buildings, thereby making herself invisible.
2:14
Sally arrived promptly at eight every morning and relieved Maria who worked the night shift at the house in Lowell. Which meant mostly that Maria watched a lot of TV, ate a lot of potato chips (Sally always found the empty bags in the trash) and spent the rest of the night sleeping in the bedroom down the hall. As usual Maria had not cleared away the dinner tray from the night before, so Sally began her day tidying up. Surprisingly, for such a large woman, she had perfected the art of making herself invisible. She could walk into a room, while the patient was asleep, clean the place up, mop down the floors, disinfect the bathroom, in short, do everything except change the bed sheets, without being noticed. Not that there was much chance today of waking Miz O, who appeared to be off in her own strange dreamworld.
Gatherin
g up the dirty dishes, Sally went downstairs and washed them, while she reran in her mind the conversation she’d had recently with Miz O about the depth of her sins. “Someday I’ll show you. Some day you’ll know.” The words had stayed with Sally for days. She didn’t know why. It was a variation on a theme she’s heard every since she’d begun working here. Whatever Miz O was guilty about - Sally thought, wiping her hands on a dishtowel - it couldn’t be much. But it was the way the woman had grabbed her arm, her fingernails almost cutting into Sally’s flesh, and the intense look in her eyes. Well, for the first time, Sally had actually believed her. Maybe she wasn’t just a woman whose mind was wasting away. What if there really was a story to tell?
Sally poured herself a cup of coffee. (The one constructive thing Maria actually did before leaving was to make a fresh pot of coffee with enough for Sally.) She was tempted to turn on the television and watch a bit of one of morning talk shows. But first – duty always coming first in Sally’s priorities – she went back upstairs to check on the old woman. When she peaked in the door, it was with some surprise that she discovered Miz O, sitting up in her bed, looking straight at her. Even more surprisingly, she was smiling almost peacefully.
“Good mornin’, darlin’,” Sally called out, hoping the day was, in fact, beginning on a positive note. “Lovely April morning out there. Should I open the window? Air out the room a bit? You’ll be able to smell the lilacs, I bet.”
“Would you please, Sally?”
Thank goodness, Sally thought. It was going to be a good day, free of demons. Maybe they would watch some television together here in the room. Relax for a change.
“I had a dream last night,” said Miz O.
“A good dream, I hope.”
“A wonderful dream. Miraculous, in fact, But I am afraid it will fade, so I am just going to close my eyes and try to hold onto the feeling as long as I can.”
“Yes, you do that. I’ll leave you then.”
“Oh, no. Don’t move, please. It’s fading. It’s fading away.” Panic filled the woman’s face.
Maybe not such a good day, after all, thought Sally. “Tell me about your dream. Maybe if you talk about it, it will help you remember.”
“Oh, yes. Talk about it! What a good idea.” Her face relaxed. She turned her head so she could fix Sally directly in the eyes. Then, her usually strident voice soft as a hush, she began, “I dreamt I was never born. I dreamt that my whole life had never been lived. And that I didn’t end my life in this bed, staring out the window down the street to the church steeple. I dreamt that life itself was the dream. And all my pain dissolved. Because my suffering had never taken place. It had been erased. It had somehow disappeared. Everything that had happened had never happened. I had never sinned and I was free. Free from it all. The sins, you see, had … died! And I felt joy for the first time in so many years! And that joy came from knowing that I had never walked the earth.”
Her voice dwindled to a mere trickle of sound.
“Never….ever,” she said.
And she closed her eyes, closing out Sally in the process.
2:15
Knowing she was late for lunch, Teresa dodged the pedestrians on Cinco de Mayo and picked up her pace. Her mother was far from being a disciplinarian. If anything, she coddled her children. But the one thing that set her off was lateness for meals, especially Sunday, which was the big meal of the week and the one occasion the family came together without fail. She’d had an argument with her boyfriend, time had slipped away from her and suddenly she’d thought, “La comida! Lunch! Mother’s not going to be happy.”
She rounded the corner of Cinco de Mayo and Altamirano at a clip, colliding with an older couple.
“Perdón!” she mumbled automatically.
The woman facing her seemed momentarily stupefied. “Hannah?” she said. “Hannah Manning!”
No sooner had the name popped out of the woman’s mouth than she blushed with embarrassment. The young girl who had almost bumped into her was a teenager. Hannah Manning would be 39 or 40 now. Still the resemblance was astonishing. Same blonde hair. Same look of innocence around the eyes. For a second, she’d been transported twenty years back in time. Her confusion translated into a flood of words.
“My mistake. I’m sorry. It’s nothing. Nada. I wasn’t paying attention, that’s all. Excuse me. No hablo español. Come, Eric. We must be going.”
“Excuse us,” said the man. Then in a scolding tone he said to the woman, “Must be more careful. Not run into people.”
“Hey, that’s okay,” replied Teresa, taken aback by the woman’s agitated state. “I speak English. Nobody got hurt.”
But the couple had brushed past was her and was hastening on their way. For older people, Teresa thought, they moved swiftly. Then she thought she had better get going herself, too, or she’d have a scolding in store, by the time she reached home. She unlocked the heavy door on Venustiano Carranza and pushed it open, the moan of the wooden planks announcing her arrival.
“Teresa?” came her mother’s voice from the dining room. Firm! Not as cheerful, as usual.
“I know, I know,” the girl said apologetically, as she slipped into her seat next to Little Jimmy. She noticed her older brother’s place was empty. Perhaps she’d get out of a scolding today. “Sorry I’m late. But I almost got run down by some tourists on Altamirano.”
Her mother considered the explanation and decided to let her daughter squirm. For a minute the silence was broken only by the scraping of knives and forks before she relented. “Tourists? Well, I’m not surprised. There are more and more of them each year. When your father and I first came here, the place was not in any of the guidebooks. Only the rare backpacker came through. If this keeps up, this town will be another San Miguel de Allende before long.”
An hour away, San Miguel was a picture-postcard magnet for American tourists and retirees, who swarmed the shops and the plazas in such numbers you heard more English in the streets than Spanish. Jimmy called it “the 51st state” and claimed it had about as much to do with the real Mexico as Palm Beach.
“When your mother and I bought this house,” he said, “you could pick up property in the Centro Histórico for a song. At night, it was so quiet, you thought you were in the country. Well, those days are gone.”
“The woman called me ‘Hannah.’ For a moment she thought I was you. I know it. From the look on her face, you’d have thought she’d seen a ghost.”
Hannah laid down her fork. “Who was it? Anybody we know?”
“Nobody I’ve never seen her before. But she used your maiden name. She said ‘Hannah Manning.’ She was with some older guy. I almost gave them a heart attack. They got out of there so fast you think they’d robbed a bank.”
“Did they say anything?”
“No. Just, ‘Excuse me. I made a mistake.’ That sort of thing. I hardly had the chance to talk with them.”
“You said the woman was with an older guy? How old?”
“I don’t know. Late sixties. Seventy. He talked kind of funny. Weird accent. Oh, I remember. The woman called him Eric. She said something like ‘We’ve got to get going, Eric.’”
Hannah could tell from the look on her husband’s face that he was thinking the same thing as she was. But they tried not to show their agitation in front of the children.
“Where’s your older brother,” she asked.
“Oh, he’s probably off drifting in his own world, as usual,” Little Jimmy cracked.
“Don’t talk that way about him,” Hannah snapped.
“Everyone at school thinks he’s strange.”
“That’s enough!”
“Why are you getting so upset, Mother?” Teresa asked.
“Because rules are rules. All this week he’s been out of the house, wandering around town, coming home at all hours. I never know how much to cook. How many places to set.”
“But he’s always been that way.”
“Well, as long as he’s p
art of this family, he will participate in mealtimes. He should be here.” Hannah got up, cracked open the window and looked up and down Venustiano Carranza. “No sign of him!”
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
“I’ll go find him,” said Jimmy to his wife. “You wait here.”
“No,” she answered her husband in a whisper. “I’ll recognize them more easily than you.” Then addressing her children: “Teresa, you and Little Jimmy stay here with your father ‘til I get back. Promise me.”
“I promise,” replied Teresa, puzzled by her mother’s uncustomary anxious behavior. “What’s the big deal? Who are these people, Dad?”
The wooden door swung open.
“And don’t unlock this door for anyone.”
With that, Hannah was gone.
She saw them in the plaza. Twenty years had passed, but she would never forget those two faces. Judith had changed the most, filled out, her face fleshier than before, her hair blinding white now. All told, she looked rather innocent, a Norman Rockwell grandmother. But Dr. Johanson had stayed remarkably the same, just an older version of himself. The nasty scar that bisected his forehead had faded with time to a thin pink line. He still had that courtly bearing.
Strangely, it was not a surprise to see them. The moment Teresa had told her what had happened in Calle Altamirno, she knew. She’s always known in her blood it would happen one day. But now seeing Judith Kowalski and Dr. Johanson brought home the reality that they and their son were always going to have to face. The past could no longer be kept hidden. How many times over the years had they started to tell their son the special circumstances of his birth? There always seemed to be a reason to put it off. Until he was older and could understand. Until he could appreciate how different he was. Somehow the right moment never came.
Four other people joined the couple in the square. Hannah recognized none of them. They were younger than those who had held her hostage years ago or those she’d met at the art gallery, unaware that she was the principal attraction, not the paintings on display. It occurred to her these people might be the next generation of Dr. Johanson’s recruits. Were she and the family going to have to flee a second time?
The Son, The Sudarium Trilogy - Book Two Page 5
