by Samuel Park
Not wanting to be in that room a second longer, without saying a word, I grabbed the empty plastic bag that had once carried my mother’s clothes. I left the books, teddy bear, and flowers behind. As I walked out of the room, I could feel the two pairs of eyes following me, puzzled by my exit.
Then, something odd happened. Looking down, onto the first floor, I had the vague but persistent feeling that I recognized my mother’s back.
I was sure it was my mother—her hair, her particular walk, her height. Ana. My eyes were so sure, so convinced, that I found myself rushing down the soapstone stairs, toward that apparition.
As I started losing sight of her, I walked faster, pushing past some of the people blocking my way. Finally, I called out, “Mom! Dona Ana!”
The woman either did not hear me in the crowded lobby or did not recognize my voice, and I saw the woman grow smaller in the distance.
I practically tumbled down the wide steps, my heart pushing against my throat, the shafts of light through the glass mosaics teasing me. I ran faster than I knew I could, bumping against patients slogging their way through. My loud steps echoed through the main lobby, and the guard in front, seeing me running like a wild gazelle, yelled at me to stop. I sidestepped him by charging toward a different exit, and pushed past the heavy stone door, the explosion of hot air nearly suffocating me.
Out of the hospital, I looked desperately in every direction. “Mom! Mom! Dona Ana!” I screamed, hoping I’d be rewarded by a face in the crowd turning toward me. But she was already gone. I scanned the backs and faces of everyone in the streets. No one matched my mother. I sobbed, clutching the plastic bag with my hands.
It can’t be. It can’t be. You cannot be gone.
I staggered forward as if I’d just been grazed with a bullet. Pedestrians bumped into me, people stared and pointed, but nothing could jolt me out of my despair. From all sides I could hear the bustle of Rio de Janeiro that beat on, unfazed by my suffering—street preachers perched on broken boxes offering salvation; salesmen announcing two-for-one sales of T-shirts with the image of Christ Redeemer. Then a well-dressed woman who suddenly turned to me and asked for change, undaunted by my wet, haunted face. When I said nothing she wandered away, toward the sea of stores, with their heavy metal gates they’d lower at night, at closing, the extra protection that turned every commercial street in the neighborhood into a citadel.
“Mom . . .” I cried out, to no one in particular.
I couldn’t go home, not when my mother wasn’t there, so I wandered aimlessly along the boardwalk, crying. Finally, as if by instinct, I found myself outside Lima’s house. Would there be solace inside? When I thought about the Police Chief, and how much I hated him, the pain subsided.
I stood next to a cannonball tree across the street from his house. Its trunk resembled the insides of a sick patient—the bulbous fruits in the shape of tumors, the vines as tight around the bark as clogged vessels. All over the ground, fallen cannonball fruits sat with their skin broken, flies and maggots scavenging them.
It began to rain, a light drizzle. Trapped pedestrians started to seek shelter under store awnings. Men and women ran, ran with no concern for grace. A block away, a newsstand owner and a shoeshiner were packing up.
And then it began to rain so hard that I could feel it inside my ears. This was God’s fury and torment—a sign that he mourned our loss. The downpour had broken through the polluted and crowded skyline in a matter of seconds. A reminder of my exact size relative to the cosmos, the futility of nudging the future. Gutters turned into rivers, trash cans toppled in violent gusts of wind, and all the locals scrambled to evade the wrath of the black sky as it dropped heaven’s burdens onto the souls below. The cannonball tree shook with fury but I did not leave my post for what felt like hours.
I saw the side gate open.
Lazarus emerged, like a specter from the fog.
The house, unencumbered by the guests from the night of the party, looked even larger than I remembered. A crystal chandelier I hadn’t noticed before hung from the ceiling, as grand as the kind in an opera house. It looked recently dusted, polished. There wasn’t any hint of menace and doom. Not that I worried about my safety. Not that I cared enough about that.
I followed Lazarus wordlessly through the house, as we passed by a couple of giant mirrors, in which I caught my own reflection and hardly recognized this new girl. On days like this, in the top-floor apartment I shared with my mother, I would have to collect pots and bowls from the cupboards and place them on the ground to catch drips.
I heard a loud conversation coming from the dining room as Lazarus led me in, the interruptions and eruptions like the crisscrossing of telephone wires. I could hear the bonhomie, the cadences of gladness, of the good life, of confident souls. I could hear the complacent, walled-off snorts of the old, which had a different timbre from the indulgent, permeable clucks of the young.
Here I was, in that hole in the world where I’d fallen in once before, in the dark warm quicksand of the night. Outside, the rain continued its concerto.
The Police Chief sat at the head of the table, eating. An elegant meal had been laid out, salad Niçoise and some cuts of beef. There were six or seven other people, all around the same age as the Police Chief, wearing formal clothes. I had interrupted some kind of luncheon. The entire table glowed with reflections. Off the silverware. The chandelier. The Rolexes on the men’s wrists. One woman sporting a white diamond glistening like tinfoil. The shiny necklace rising from a woman’s chest like a pregnant moon.
I imagined the moments preceding my entrance: a maid informing Lima and his guests of the presence of a strange girl standing outside, across from the house, apparently lost, her eyes red with tears, her stare fierce and unrelenting; Lima asking his son if that was me, and, upon Lazarus’s visual confirmation, finally, telling him to invite me in.
“Is it you, Ana’s daughter?” asked Lima, remaining seated, his hands still holding a fork and a knife. “Were you going to ring the doorbell at some point or just stand outside in the rain all day?”
“I think she’s been crying,” said Lazarus, taking his seat.
The other guests grew silent, staring at me, the grief so evident on my face. They were confused. I wasn’t dressed or perfumed like themselves. My kind of intensity didn’t belong at that party.
The Police Chief’s expression, too, grew somber. “Sit down. Have some lunch. Is everything all right with your mother?”
“It is your fault what happened. It wouldn’t have happened if you’d left us alone.” I choked on my words, the rare beef on his plate making me feel nauseated. “My mother’s dead.”
The Police Chief closed his eyes, and pressed his fingers against his temples. To my surprise, he began to whimper, a quick tear racing down his face. A couple of his guests, at the far end of the table, started whispering.
Lima opened his heavy-lidded eyes again and turned his head in the direction of my voice. “When? When did this— How did this—”
“Today. It happened today,” I said.
He paused as if considering the weight of the statement, or perhaps its truth. “I’m sorry for your loss,” said Lima.
Lazarus stared at him, looking a bit helpless.
“This is your fault,” I said, the words racing out of my mouth like flying razors. “You tortured her.”
“I never hurt her.”
“Eight years ago, you—”
“That is not true.”
“You put her on a dragon’s chair; you tied her upside down—”
“It’s becoming apparent to me,” he said, standing now, “that in spite of your love for her, you actually know very little about your mother’s life.” He pointed a fork generally toward me. “And you’re not the least bit afraid? I mean, if I really am this monster you describe.”
Some of the guests laughed. I noticed now that the woman to the Police Chief’s left stared at me quizzically. She had an elaborately coiffed h
airdo, the tresses curled like knotted ropes. The man to her right looked at me with pity. They all did.
Every great act was a matter of timing. I pictured the next few seconds: If I had a gun, holding it in the air and pointing it at the Police Chief, a loud series of gasps spreading across the table. Screams. Panic. Cocking the hammer, pulling the trigger. Firing the gun, a single shot in the Police Chief’s chest. Click. A fatal wound. A stampede. Guests leaving without their jackets. Some trying to get ahead of others. The maid crying. The deafening noise of sirens. A red rotating light. The police taking me away, handcuffed. The mournful remnants of the party—empty plates, broken glasses, chairs turned in every direction. Shards and slivers. Dirty silverware. Half-filled jars of water and containers of coffee. Crumbs and leftovers and peels.
But no, I had no gun. I didn’t kill him. The last thing I saw was the bright glow of a chandelier, the rain beating against the window, a fever peaking through me, and everything went black.
I woke to the sound of my own startled breath. My eyes looked onto the dark ceiling, my heart pounding. I couldn’t believe I had allowed myself to be unconscious in that house. I knew the Police Chief was a dangerous man despite his blindness, his fatness, his incapacitated state. They had locked me away in some room in the house. But I marveled at the normalcy of the room. This was no interrogation room like the one in which Lima had once locked up my mother. There was no dragon’s chair here, no corrugated steel, no binding straps, no electroshock machine.
There was: a bed covered in doily-shaped cotton linens that I was lying in. It smelled powdery, dusty. A nightstand made of unvarnished oak. A half dozen hardcover books. A large closet that included a built-in vanity mirror and table. Its hinges and knobs were upside down, inside out, as if it had been assembled in a hurry.
Rubbing my eyes, I reached for the lamp next to me, but the bulb did not come on. It was easier to stagger to the window than to the light switch on the wall, and I pushed open the wood blinds. It was still light outside, though the rain had ceased. How long had I been asleep?
The door was unlocked. Evidently I wasn’t a prisoner.
As I walked down the hallway, there were no signs of anyone until I heard Lazarus’s voice from behind a door. He was singing. Playing the guitar. I touched the painted wood with the tip of my fingers, as if this door were the second layer of skin covering him. I believed, as deeply as I believed anything, that my exit from that house depended on the same person who’d shepherded me in. If I wanted to get out, I needed Lazarus to help me.
The room was dark, though more gray than black, making the furniture seem out of focus. Even from where I stood, I could feel the heaviness of the velvet curtains blocking the window. The adjacent wall was covered completely, from floor to ceiling, by a giant rosewood closet. There was a large bed, and lying there, with a guitar on his lap, was Lazarus. The floor was littered with clothes—shirts inside out, pants with each leg pointing in a different direction, a towel or two. A tray sat next to Lazarus, filled with half-eaten food—the spine of an apple, the flaccid skin of a fig, a plate browned with the fatty juice of beef and bedecked with chicken legs and vinegar. The room smelled musty, medicinal.
I came into his room so quietly, so like a feather, that he did not notice me at first. He had his back to me, facing the window, but I could see part of his face. I listened to him sing the chorus to a sad old Roberto Carlos song. Some loves, the lyrics went, were too big to take home with you, and so you had to settle for a postcard. A burn, a sadness, an ache. Some loves you left and promised to go back to, but you knew it wasn’t possible. A burn, a sadness, an ache. Some loves you could only have for the briefest of moments.
For a few seconds, I didn’t betray my presence, watching him. I didn’t want to break the spell. A sadness lingered over him—almost a physical thing I could touch. I hadn’t seen it in him before—not quite like this—and the irony struck me, that in order to truly see someone, the person could not know you were in the same room with them.
“Lazarus . . .” I said, stepping forward.
Lazarus looked up and his look of sadness turned instantly into a smile, but instead of making me happy, the smile just reinforced the sadness I’d seen in him. I could see the air around him shift, the room changing the way one changes in front of a camera. He put away the guitar, as if it belonged only to the private part of himself.
“Are you feeling better?” he asked. “We thought we might have to call a doctor.”
“I’m fine. But I want to leave. Can you walk me out?” I asked, my legs feeling like melting Popsicles.
“You’re leaving?” he asked, looking disappointed.
“I can’t stay a minute longer under the same roof as your dad.”
“He’s not going to hurt you. Even if he wanted to,” said Lazarus.
“Were you the one who brought me upstairs?” I asked.
“Me and the driver. Don’t worry, my dad didn’t come anywhere near you.”
A shiver ran down my spine. “How can you—how can you live with him?”
“I know. He’s a strange man,” said Lazarus, getting up. He looked around the floor and found a pair of socks, a pair of shoes that he put on. “You know we own every appliance known to man, but he makes the maids do the dishes by hand. The laundry, too. He thinks the washing machine uses too much water. ‘People who live in apartments have no idea how high the water bill can be!’ is his favorite refrain.” When he was done lacing his shoes, he reached for a joint from the nightstand and offered it to me, while lighting another one for himself. “Sometimes he has the maids save the water from doing the dishes and pour it into the plants in the backyard. That water’s full of soap, the poor plants.”
I shook my head, turned down the joint. “I was actually thinking of the people he hurt, back then.”
“Ah!” Lazarus smiled ruefully, inhaling and exhaling. “The folks who throw watermelons over the gate.”
“Watermelons?”
“Yeah, they break in an explosive way.” The joint between his fingers was so small I could barely see it. “Those folks know what they’re doing. Eggs, too. And crucifixes.” Lazarus sat his still unfinished joint carefully on top of a paper cup, not wanting to waste it. “You ready to go?”
“Yeah,” I nodded.
Lazarus led the way out of the room. “You don’t need to be afraid of him. He has diabetes. The doctor says he’s only got a few months left.”
I didn’t feel sorry for Lima. Let death come for him; let it offer him its final and elegant period. I felt sorry for Lazarus, though. He, too, would soon lose his only parent.
Outside, there were no bugs, no animals. The front yard almost felt like the floating deck of a ship. A long clothesline stretched from one end to another, hanging low, slicing the sky in half. Leaving the house I felt as though my senses had changed. The once familiar sky now a vastly different shade of blue. Along the pathway, some pots of geraniums and lilies had been knocked over, lying on the concrete with the elegance of drunken sailors.
I stopped, almost involuntarily. As luck would have it, the Police Chief sat under a gazebo, alone in his wheelchair, only a few yards or so away. I left Lazarus’s side even as he reached out to pull me back and walked over to the Police Chief. I stood in front of him. Him, whose face looked like it had been broken and then put back together in the dark. In his wheelchair, his posture was hunched and tired-looking. Without speaking, I stood by the table in front of him. Lazarus looked at me with a confused expression on his face. I didn’t know what I was doing, either.
“I shouldn’t have come here,” I finally said, with rancor in my voice. “But since I’m here, and before I leave, I have to ask you a question.”
“Go ahead,” said Lima.
I gathered the courage to say the words. “Why did you give my mother all that money?”
He sat there with his pale and spotted skin. The figure sitting there didn’t match the Police Chief of my mother’s st
ories, or even the Police Chief of the other night, and I wondered how much had been bluster all along. His mouth gaped open, as if wanting to be fed, or to suckle. I felt instant revulsion, but also a strange familiarity—this wordless begging to be cared for. He appeared almost worthy. Underneath his damaged spirit lay a body as miraculous as any other person’s.
“Your mother would not want me to tell you,” he said.
“But I want to know.”
He couldn’t see them, but I fought back tears as well as I could.
“All right, I will tell you.”
As the Police Chief began to tell me my mother’s story, I focused closely on his voice. It was easier to listen to him than to look at him.
“I gave her the money because I owed it to her.”
“How?” I knew Lima was sick, but had he lost his mind?
“Eight years ago, on the day of the failed raid, your mother came to me and asked me for a hundred thousand cruzeiros in exchange for information that would lead to the capture of key members of the Revolutionary Popular Movement.” He said it matter-of-factly. “I took the information, but gave her no money. I believe the situation has now been rectified.”
It was as though he’d said this all in a secret code I had to decipher.
“I don’t—I don’t understand.” Terror tightened around my neck. Like water in a rushing stream, only one direction possible, no turning back.
“She led the student activists to believe she was working for them, but she wasn’t, she was working for herself,” he said, as though speaking of an admired peer. “And she had a healthy respect for the power of money.” He squinted his eyes at me. “What don’t you understand? She came in to make a deal with me. Let me repeat, so we’re very clear: She offered the students on a plate in exchange for cash.”
“No, she didn’t offer, she said you tortured her, and that’s how you found out—”
