by Samuel Park
“And what . . . what did he say to you?” I asked, trying to hide my eagerness.
Lazarus cleared his throat and began. “He told me the story he told you. That’s what it was. A story. He left some things out. And he changed some things.”
“Like what?” There was a tense silence.
“It wasn’t the case that your mother was the one who initially offered him information in exchange for money,” said Lazarus, staring straight into my eyes for emphasis. “When he told me the story, he said that she did try, at first, to go along with the students’ plan. But he could see right through her, and told her that he didn’t believe her.”
“And that’s when he . . . he did torture her. Didn’t he?” I murmured. “Didn’t he?”
Here it was. The truth, at last. Lazarus would clear my mother’s name. I had been waiting ten years for this. He would tell me, in no ambiguous terms, that my mother had been innocent. Lima had lied. Lima had lied. She’d told the truth. Lima had lied.
“No, he didn’t torture her,” said Lazarus, casting a quick glance around the restaurant. I felt myself deflating, my back sinking against the chair. “He could tell that she wasn’t a true revolutionary. She was in over her head, he said. He’d tortured a lot of revolutionaries and she wasn’t like the rest of them.” He watched me carefully as he spoke. “She was just a civilian, and my father chose not to hurt her.”
I must’ve given him a skeptical look, because he added, “Listen, I know that my father did terrible things.” Lazarus leaned forward and lowered his voice. “But he really thought those revolutionaries were terrorists, and they were at war with him.” He paused for a moment as he collected his thoughts. “He told your mother that the people she’d gotten involved with were bad, and once she was done with her mission, they still wouldn’t leave her alone, and she would be stuck with them for the rest of her life.”
I looked away, trying to quiet my breath. This was what I wanted, wasn’t it? To hear what really happened? Somehow getting it felt strange.
I was just about to speak when Lazarus continued. “And then he offered her money. And she turned it down.”
“Your father said it was the other way around,” I repeated, “that she asked him for money—”
“No, no, he changed his tune when he told me the story,” said Lazarus, shaking his head with conviction. “He wanted you and your mother to have the money.”
“Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?” I asked.
I looked at him, not knowing what to think. I felt shame for not having taken my mother’s side. I’d taken Lima’s words at face value. I’d chosen to believe a torturer over my own mother.
“She resisted,” said Lazarus, his tone filled with a surprising admiration. “She resisted as much as she could. She didn’t trust the revolutionaries, didn’t like them, but she still didn’t betray them. Maybe she felt guilty taking blood money. Who knows?”
I exhaled. “And your father told you this?”
Lazarus furrowed his brows. “He had no reason to lie to me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I didn’t reply, my mind still racing, and he added, looking annoyed, “And I have no reason to lie to you, either. I don’t know why he didn’t tell you the full truth. Maybe he wanted to rewrite his own history. Maybe he was just toying with you. He was complicated at best.”
I leaned back against my chair, considering the ways parents can both protect and hurt their children with the truth. Outside the window led into an alley that served as a parking lot. There was no view.
“But she did, eventually . . .” I couldn’t finish my sentence. Betray the students. Collaborate with the enemy.
Lazarus leaned forward. “Yes. When my father told her that the revolutionaries were going to harm her child.”
It took me an endless second to accept that he was talking about me.
“He said that he would never hurt her daughter, but the revolutionaries would,” Lazarus said, his voice filled with surprising sympathy. “And that’s when she finally took a side. That’s when she revealed what their plans were. She didn’t do it lightly. My father said she cried.”
And there it was, so clearly, so explicitly stated. It was so much easier to see my mother as some kind of monster or a liar, an opportunist collaborator, than to really own the obvious facts and accept my own part, my own responsibility as her motivation.
It was easier to think of her as a bad person than feel the guilt of being the reason she’d made that decision. I had been only a child, only eight years old. But children can be powerful and drive adults to commit mad, mad deeds. This was the truth I’d chosen to sidestep, but had always known: She’d done it for me; she’d done it for our love.
“I think I know now why the phone calls started in the first place,” I said, tears welling up. I wiped them away with a napkin.
“What do you mean?” asked Lazarus, suddenly the recipient of information instead of the bearer.
“He wasn’t calling her because he’d tortured her and wanted to torture her again, like I thought,” I said, almost thinking out loud. “He was calling her because he hadn’t tortured her and she was proof that he wasn’t an entirely evil person.” He had spared her, hadn’t he? In his dying days, he liked the person he was when he thought of my mother, when he talked to Ana. That’s where the attachment had come from. That’s why he’d come back into her life so many years later.
I sat in silence for a moment, absorbing the meaning of my realization.
A waiter who wasn’t Bruno came by to offer slices of chocolate pizza, the dark cocoa melting pleasingly over the warm dough. Once again Lazarus refused and asked for the bill, in Portuguese. The waiter reached into one of his many pockets and handed it to him. As this transaction occurred, I felt an unexpected surge of affection for Lazarus.
“The food here isn’t so great, is it?” said Lazarus, stifling a belch and making a clear effort to change the subject. “I bet they’re not using butter, but margarine instead. And that olive oil stuff, it’s just not as good as corn oil.” He stretched his arms a little, never giving up eye contact with me. “One thing I want to do before I leave is get a Big Mac. I want to see if it tastes the same as back home. I feel like it shouldn’t. It should taste better.”
I smiled gently. “You know, when I first saw you here, I thought you came back because of the night we spent together. Maybe you were still in love with me.”
Lazarus chuckled, as a hint of sadness flew across his face. “You’re overestimating the potential of a seventeen-year-old boy for romantic gestures.” I nodded in agreement, and he continued. “I think when you left for America, I wanted, at the time, though not now, to escape, too, and that’s why I never forgot about you. You weren’t just Mara, a girl, you were also Mara, the girl who went to America.”
Also, the girl whose mother his father hadn’t tortured. He’d been looking for absolution, too, and he knew he could only get it from the daughter of the one woman his father had spared. Being Lima’s son must’ve been a terrible burden. I thought of that lonely boy by the gate. He desperately clung to the possibility that his father had not been a complete monster. Was it unkind of me to think that he hadn’t come looking for me out of a pure and guileless desire for charity? By clearing my mother’s name, he cleared his father’s, too. We were not all on different sides of the line. We were the line itself.
Lazarus told me that he was flying to Miami later that evening, where he’d spend a week before returning home to Rio. I wasn’t quite ready to relinquish him back to the world, though, a warm feeling that I’d had in almost every interaction I’d ever had with him. And so I asked him if he’d like to go for a walk. He agreed, wiping his lips one last time with his tiny, square paper napkin.
I took him to Runyon Canyon, a hiking trail only a few minutes away from the restaurant. We walked past the small, secluded gate, and found ourselves leaving the noise and traffic of Hollywood and being surrounded by canopi
es of trees and sandy hills in every direction. The park was pretty empty. The morning joggers were gone and it was too early for the late afternoon dog walkers. After twenty minutes or so, we reached the top of the cliff, and settled on an elevated concrete bench, staring at a view of the sun scowling over the thousands of tiny miniature buildings.
“Do you think we would’ve turned out differently if we’d had different parents?” I asked Lazarus, without looking at him. “That is, if you’d had a different father and I’d had a different mother?”
Lazarus thought for a second and then said, “Yes . . . and no.”
We sat in silence for a while, weighed down by our respective burdens, our respective heirlooms.
“I don’t hate my father,” said Lazarus, shooing away a mosquito with his hand. When he brought his arm back down, his skin brushed against mine. “Even knowing all that he did. Knowing what people think of him now. What they say about him. I still can’t hate him.”
To not hate. That was a thing worth trying to do. To love instead, even if that love was a secret. One that glowed privately, shielded from scrutiny. Dictated by mighty forces. If Lazarus could forgive a monster, why couldn’t I do the same for a woman who’d done a fraction of what he had done? So many good things in my life had come out of her.
I gave myself license to rest my head against Lazarus’s shoulder. Together we enjoyed the extravagant view of the whole steaming city, without remarking upon it, without drawing attention to it. It would still be a few hours before that ball of fire in the distance even began to think about setting. What a luxury, then, to enjoy it without thinking of endings, a thing freed of any demands upon it, able to simply be itself for that moment.
The next day, the weather suddenly turned. The day was gray, with hints of rain. And just like that, the ants disappeared. I had no idea where they’d gone. Nature had its own logic, and though the ants had invaded our apartment, our apartment belonged to something larger, more complex and ignorant than them, too. All I knew was this: Once they were there and then they were gone; the humans tried to kill them and failed to do so before they succeeded. When they left, they obeyed a solstice cycle that prefigured me and my kin, but who was to say I couldn’t take credit?
I took their absence as a good omen.
Bel Air, California
Two years later
Epilogue
SHORTLY AFTER RENATA BOUGHT HERSELF a condo and moved out, Bruno and I found ourselves alone in the apartment and with that our dynamic changed. I learned more about him, and the more I learned, the more I cared for him. I discovered in him a humor and an adaptability and a resilience that I admired. He loved not knowing the names of things, or how to speak properly. His helplessness seemed to inspire everyone else’s kindness. And being a foreigner gave him an excuse to be an outsider. It felt like a relief not to belong.
In the beginning of our relationship, we would treat each other as friends, as enemies, then friends again. He would rant about his work, how much he hated a female coworker who hadn’t sided with him during an argument, and I would surprise him—and enrage him—by taking his colleague’s side. All the things I’d heard described in the love sections of the women’s magazines Claudia and Capricho would come true, but things I hadn’t expected, either, like having a dream that something terrible happened to Bruno and waking up in a fright, my fingers squeezing his arm and my heart beating fast until I was convinced he was really there.
At times, I would think of ways to escape the relationship and then how much I would miss the relationship, all in one breath. I would hold everything in, frustrated, mad that I’d lost control, that I had to surrender to a stranger’s whims, until one day I’d explode at him about it and he’d mention—hurt, surprised—the fact that he’d been doing the exact same thing for me, too.
We would talk about marriage, though without making actual plans. We would make love looking at each other, and then at different points each of us would drift and conjure someone else’s face. I would find out that he had likes and dislikes in bed, and more surprisingly, that I did, too, and those had less to do with positions or intensity than with the look in his eyes, how hungrily he needed me, how hard he tried to please me.
After a while I would grow used to almost everything about him, and accept the fact that Bruno would never really stop being a single man—he would now be a single man who happened to have a woman next to him when he did all the things he’d grown used to doing as a single man. He would be the kind of man who compartmentalized, who held things back from me, who eyed me with utter mystification at times. He would be the kind of man who knew that being around me was like being by himself, but a relief, without so much loneliness. Sometimes, I would see a man in the supermarket—a man who looked like Bruno, the same dyed blond hair and facial features, a younger version of him or him in ten years—and I would feel myself filled with an unexpected wave of longing, wanting to protect that person, staring at him until he turned the corner and disappeared.
Most evenings, our routines were the same. I would cook dinner—Brazilian food, or Italian food that was also Brazilian—and serve it, call for Bruno, and then be frustrated that he always took ten or fifteen minutes to finish transferring a video, or quit his game, or put away his cameras. By then the food would be cold—a source of irritation that I would never bring up with Bruno since only someone who cooked would understand it. I would try one day to trick him by saying dinner was ready when the Chicken Stroganoff still had ten minutes left on the stove. Bruno would choose that day to come sit at the table right away.
After being together almost a year, he proved to be a better boyfriend than he was a roommate, though now technically he is both. In fact, Bruno was the one who encouraged me to transfer from Santa Monica College to UCLA, which I am now attending on a generous Regents’ scholarship that covers my entire tuition. That is a big deal for someone without a Green Card like me. My expected BA is in Latin American History, and even though I am older than a lot of my classmates, I do not feel out of place. In fact, I feel much more at ease with my professors and fellow students than I ever did with my former employers. With the exception, that is, of Kathryn Weatherly.
I think of her often. Especially lately. From what I knew about stomach cancer, and I knew a fair amount after my months with her, I knew it usually killed within the first two years after diagnosis. Sometimes my own stomach curdled as I wondered if Kathryn was still alive. When I mentioned this to Bruno, he suggested I simply call her. If she answered, I could just hang up if I didn’t want to talk to her. He suggested I drive by her address. That’s how, two years after I saw her last, loathing not knowing what had happened to her, I found myself going to Kathryn’s house in Bel Air once again.
There, I remained in the driver’s seat, unable to make myself get out of the Honda. I opened the window as a compromise. Outside, the shade and the breeze greeted me like a long-lost friend. The day tasted like taffy. I waited, watching the maids and gardeners trekking up and down the driveways. I recognized a couple of them.
A half hour or so passed, and I noticed a Jeep idling at the stop sign at the other end of the street. It was packed with rich teenagers on their way to school, all blissfully rambunctious, bobbing their heads and arms to the rhythm of a loud song blasting from the car’s stereo. They acted as if they were on their way to a party. They didn’t notice me, or how their morning had intersected with mine. They remained at the stop sign for a long time, and I couldn’t take my eyes off them. As they drove away, I felt the afterglow of their happiness.
What was I doing there? I thought of the day I’d lost my mother, how suddenly she’d been taken from me, our final embrace brief and insufficient. I could try to understand the present moment only in relation to that day. I would spend the rest of my adulthood, I knew, trying to hear that echo from my past, slip into one of those faded notes. There were so many days, so many chapters in my life, and yet when it came down to it, if memories
were objects to be saved from a fire, there would be only one or two I’d reach for before leaving the burning house.
I thought of myself at age five. Five-year-old Mara had been a skinny little thing, with a fat belly. When Ana had to leave home, even for the briefest of errands, I would wrap my arms around my mother’s waist, hanging like a monkey. I’d look up at her, smiling, my head dropping back. My eyes were big and happy and adoring. Back then, my mother had been the sun and the moon and the stars for me. She was the water I drank when I was thirsty; the blanket that warmed me when I was cold. I could not survive without her; I knew that—as a little five-year-old—and I hung on to my mother with joy. Don’t go, I would say, or Take me with you, or I want to go with you wherever you are going. I thought of my own big eyes at that age, bigger than the rest of my body. I would jump and fall and jump up again; make myself into a ball, then stretch out, all legs and arms. I would kiss my mother while smiling, and smile while kissing her, and I did think, innocent as I was in those days, that it was really going to be like that forever.
My mother’s biggest gift had been to teach me how to be a good daughter. She’d taught me how to be mothered, how to find new mothers, how to be loved by a mother. So even without her, even with her gone, I might still be taken care of. It was as if she knew—of course she knew—that eventually we’d be separated. That I’d need somebody else to fill her place. Not one new person, but maybe many, a series of women, for the rest of my life. I would be loved again and again, and it was because she’d taught me how.
First, I had forgotten what she sounded like. Then, her smell, I had lost her smell. The last thing to go had been my memory of her touch. Each of these losses I bemoaned. But I would never, ever forget what she looked like, and with eyes opened or closed, I could see her, her luminous face, smiling mischievously at me. I had that image still. From the day I lost her, wherever I was, whenever I had felt particularly lonely, I had cradled the memory of my mother’s face, the essence of her. I had wrapped her around me like a shawl.
