by Alfredo Vea
“No one would ever sneak up on him,” whispered the old soldados, their voices filled with grudging respect, “not even the wind.”
Two hundred miles down the Mekong the wind had pushed the lieutenant toward the bank, where he was rudely prodded by oars. He responded with half-groans and semi-gestures that spoke the whole truth about war. It was his death moans that would shield him from the curious. The living would abandon him to the currents and allow him to float out to landless sea with all the other dead. In the South China Sea there would be floating islands of once living persons who had turned to clay—coves, peninsulas, and archipelagos of flesh bobbing on foam, shaken loose from life by unwitnessed forces. Above all the bodies were the pungent, swirling fumes of remembrance. A bird landed on the chaplain’s forehead and began to peck at insects that clung to his hairline, and still, the padre dreamed of Chihuahua….
But even all those cruel whispers and twisted tales about his family were not the end. More arcane and slanted rumors began to circulate about the chaplain’s ancestors. The gossips in the Pedernales lavandería swore that, in truth, Tata and Papa Guillermo Calavera were not even human at all. If the truth be told, the two men had begun life as lowly insectos, as burrowing spiders, arañas who had been magically transformed into fully grown human men only after having made an unbreakable pact with Satanás, the devil himself.
In exchange for this miraculous transformation, the two spiders had, in turn, agreed to live lives of depressing loneliness and to years of digging in the soil. In their original form—the form that God intended—both men had been what modern entomologists call a Mexican brown recluse, a small nondescript arachnid that spends its entire life spinning its silken traps in the hollows of trees and in earthen holes.
But even this dark slander was not the worst of the malicious tongue-wagging. It was said that both men, though by no means handsome specimens, had somehow managed to woo and to marry women who were renowned throughout the land for their stunning physical and spiritual beauty. The same savage tongues that went on and on about brown spiders recounted in whispers that the two men had trapped the women in their hideous webs, then dragged them, kicking and screaming, down into the darkness of their subterranean lives.
Both of these beautiful women had once been delicate mariposas, butterflies, lovely Mexican painted ladies. It was whispered that both women, at their wedding ceremonies, had been adorned with voluminous, flowing gowns in order to hide the eye spots beneath their armpits and the wide red bands than ran across their lovely breasts.
The world just below the Rio Grande had been both revolted and amazed when the younger set of mismatched insectos somehow gave birth to a human son. He looked like a child in every way, but could the boy truly be human? Madre de Dios! Beneath his skin, wasn’t he little more than an abominacíon, a creation of mágico obscuro, black magic? One midwife whispered that this bawling infant had never seen the inside of a womb, but rather had been a wriggling pupa carried in a bag beneath his mother’s dress.
There were those treasure hunters in the village who swore on the blessed eyes of their departed mothers that they had penetrated the perimeter of the hill and slid soundlessly past the sensitive web. These people proclaimed over and over that they had heard the occupants of the house on the hill humming and buzzing an insect’s babble. There had been ear-splitting, sibilant sounds like the ones that sprang from the legs of giant crickets and the mandibles of the largest butterflies.
Some had actually glimpsed the man and the woman levitating and dropping down to the floor inside their dining room. They related that the woman, like her sisters the monarch and the moth, was drawn again and again to a flickering line of golden candlesticks that dominated the room. And in the darkest corner of that room the boy’s bed hung from the ceiling like a gigantic egg sac, swaying back and forth to the high strains of an unearthly music. It seemed to all who had eyes to see and ears to hear that the Calavera boy had descended from a line of insects … and now he has gone to live with unsuspecting Mennonites. If the gossips only knew. The truth behind all their suspicions was far more bizarre.
The chaplain floated past banks of torched homes and tiny villages that had been ravaged by one side or the other. There were hungry hollow-eyed people everywhere, quietly cleaning up the mess left behind by the warriors. At times he was joined on his journey by travel mates. For a while a dead girl kept him company, but she sternly refused to share his upended view of the world. She preferred instead to stare downward at the muddy riverbed, her unblinking eyes forsaking the sky altogether.
Once a beheaded Korean ranger joined him, and for a time the two were trapped in a shallow whirlpool, circling endlessly with the shards of a boat rudder, slivers of a broken oar, plastic bottles, and a burned flotation device from a downed helicopter. The two became caught up in a hopeless discussion. While the chaplain’s mind swam with bullocks, butterflies, arks, and shattered tablets, the Korean had few original thoughts, if any at all. Their trip together ended abruptly when the wash of a passing gunboat released the living man to follow the river.
Tides of considerations, like brine, rose and fell upon the half-drowned man, slapping his body and wearing away his outer layers of skin. He slowly began to find in the river new beliefs to believe: the sperm in the fallopian tube will defeat the loaded mortar. The hoe will surely slaughter the tank. The glance between lovers will rebuild all that radar and artillery can detect and destroy. He came to believe that someday, a legion of one-legged men will proclaim the fields of grass to be free of land mines, their absent limbs the first step into the future. It would be armless girls who would undo the tangled nets of war. Somewhere between a tiny rope bridge and a small, isolated colony of lepers, the chaplain came to believe in all of the small people who would come out to rebuild when the machines of war were stilled.
Five hundred miles downriver his body was used for target practice by a newly formed platoon of Viet Cong. One bullet pierced his bloated thigh, but exited without drawing blood. A thousand miles and a million thoughts later, his body chanced to foul a fishing net, and an exasperated, cursing fisherman was forced to haul the carcass on board. Now released from the waters, the padre was free to dream of the years beyond Chihuahua, beyond the hill near Laos, and he dreamed of a long sea voyage in an overcrowded boat. He had visions of salt burning in his wounds, of thin chicken broth, wretched seasickness, and the acrid smell of living bodies pressed one against another.
He dreamed of urine and rice, the cry of a child that decayed from an embittered wail, past a delirious whimper, and finally, into stark silence. He dreamed of breasts drained dry and of burials at sea. He dreamed in color and saw the red rash and bright pus of his own wounded thigh. He suffered an unending nightmare of concertina wire and tents, of overseers and of the overseen. Somewhere he heard the careless rip of clothing and saw the cruel dominion of male flesh over female flesh.
He had lied to the colonel in Da Nang. He had never really been a Unitarian. He had never been a Mennonite or a Catholic. Had he confessed as much? There had never been gold nuggets and silver coins hidden in the hill of his childhood back in Chihuahua. His ancestors had not been misers. It had all been a ruse, a decoy.
Things of much greater value had been buried up on that precious hill. But most important of all, he had never been a recluso Mexicano, a spider. When, after an unknowable time had elapsed—perhaps months or perhaps years—and he finally woke from his drowning dream, he was sweating, naked, and breathless, his erect male member inside a woman who called herself Cassandra.
“Why did you stop?” Her large eyes were open now, her heavy breathing had slowed. “Vô Dahn, please don’t stop. Vô Dahn, what is it? I was getting so close.”
The man above her stared downward at the lovely face of the woman beneath him—at her rising and falling breasts, at the glistening patches on her skin where their sweat had mixed. He raised his head to look around the room. He recognized nothing at all—not
the paintings, not the furniture, not even the remains of a meal for two. He rose from the bed and walked to the window, spreading wide the curtains despite his nakedness.
He looked downward at the harbor and the bay and the construction cranes and gray high-rise buildings that glutted the skyline to his left. He wondered if he was in San Francisco or Seattle. There were signs down below written in Cantonese. He shook his head. How did he know it was Cantonese? He could be on Stockton Street, looking toward Oakland. His eyes returned to the distant bay. The very sight of water left him cold.
After a moment of silence he moved back to the bed but did not rejoin the woman lying there. He sat down in a blue chair that had been draped with hastily tossed clothing. He lifted a man’s shirt to eye level, then let it drop. The shirt slumped to the floor, disappointed, deflated, unrecognized.
“Vô Dahn, mon cher, you’re beginning to remember things, aren’t you? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve prayed for this moment, even though I knew it might mean that you could forget us, what we’ve meant to each other.”
She lay on the bed as she spoke, her eyes still gazing upward and her legs still open and receptive. There was a trembling on the surface of her skin. At last, she was living the moment that she had both dreaded and longed for. Now that the time had finally come, she felt relieved.
“Now I’ve become a liar,” she sighed. “Now I’ve become a liar. Maintenant, je suis une menteuse.”
“It seems that remembering means forgetting,” whispered Vô Dahn. He hadn’t heard her last words. “Somehow, remembering means forgetting.” He raised his head to look at the beautiful woman on the bed. “You called me Vô Dahn. How did I get the name Vô Dahn?”
“You got that name by forgetting your own true name. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been without a name. Vô Dahn means nameless. You have been called Vô Dahn for at least three years. It was I who named you.”
“What year is this? Where am I? What have I been doing? Do we live here together? Are we lovers, you and I?”
The woman sat upright on the bed. The man noticed for the first time the flawless, almost alabaster skin that covered the last layer of her soul’s temple. Only a blurring tattoo on her forearm marred the perfection of her skin. He canted his head to read the words written there, then his eyes returned to her face and hair. She had long black hair that fell almost to her waist. Her face was unwrinkled and un-marred by worry, but there was such grief in her eyes.
She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and jumped down to a soft woven mat. Her legs seemed as smooth as marble. It was clear that their lovemaking session was over. Perhaps they would never make love again. A sigh of disappointment escaped the man’s lips as she threw a loose robe around her body, covering her thighs and her breasts. The sigh was familiar to her, so she smiled. Not everything had been lost.
“I have been lying about you to myself for years, Vô Dahn. But since you have always insisted that you are no one, I never thought of it as a lie. As long as you were my lover, I knew that someday I could tell my husband that I made love to no one.”
“You have a husband?” asked the man.
“I am married.” She exhaled deeply. He could taste her breath. Its flavor calmed him. “He might be dead—he’s probably dead, but I still have hopes. As his wife it is my duty. Every day I hope.” She walked toward the sitting man and let her hair touch his shoulder and his bowed and confused head.
“My name is Cassandra. At least that’s my English name. I’ve had a dozen names in the last few years. But it is Cassandra who knows that her husband is dead. It is Cassandra who knows that today is the end of our love affair—that the time has come for me to begin my search for someone. Mon cher, you and I met five years ago. For three years you and I have taken care of each other. You have been more to me than a husband. You may not know it and you may never know it, but for a year or two, perhaps more, you were a very happy man.”
The man who had raised his head to listen to her now dropped it back down, as a thousand thoughts fought for access to a single throat and tongue.
“My name was once William Calvert,” he said, in exchange for her revelation.
“This is our apartment, Vô Dahn—I mean, William Calvert. We met in a refugee camp in Thon Buri, Thailand. If you think hard, you will find that you speak some Chinese, French, Vietnamese, and Thai.”
The two were speaking just above a whisper. They were rank strangers now, risen up from a warm bed of intimacy. He rose from the chair and placed his hands upon her waist as if to lift her. The woman was confused: should she embrace him or not?
My name is a lie, he thought to himself as looked down at the woman before him. Now he remembered that the useless land the Mennonites had purchased from his father had turned them into rich apple growers. It made them gentleman farmers, and to assuage their guilt, they had given the poor Mexican boy a luxurious name in repayment. They had always known the real value of the property and had paid his father next to nothing for it. When some of their children returned to the United Sates for a proper advanced education, he had been allowed to go with them. Quelle folie! Vô Dahn suited him well.
“The city outside that window is Hong Kong. We live in a small apartment on a small hill just north of Boundary Street. Kowloon is in that direction and Kai Tak airport is in the other direction.” After a moment of hesitation she ventured her bravest question.
“Do you know who you really are, Vô Dahn?”
“The name my father gave me was Guillermo Calavera, but that name is a lie, too, like everything else in my life.”
He inhaled as his muscles swelled. His hands tightened on her tiny midriff. She flexed her lovely legs. Still confused and a bit awkward with her own nakedness beneath the robe, she turned first to the right and then to the left, une pirouette dehors. Her long hair leapt from one shoulder to the other. Then, following the force of his hands, she jumped straight up. He carried her back to the bed and laid her down once more.
“My name is not really Cassandra. I’ve had a Thai name, a Chinese name … so many names. But I want to say that our life together is not a lie.”
“Me llamo … my true name is Guillermo Moises Carvajal. I was a chaplain for the U.S. Army in Vietnam. My life alone has been nothing but lies!”
“I was a whore for the Thai guards.”
A tone of indescribable grief settled into Cassandra’s voice as she forced the sentences from her mouth.
“It was an ugly camp—they were all ugly camps. I had no other choice. If I hadn’t surrendered my body to them they would have taken the little girls. I couldn’t bear the thought of that. It was you who gave me the strength to endure it. It was you.
“Since then I have cleaned bilges and outhouses in Bangkok and Macao and waited on tables in Victoria. Now I am a maid in one of those British hotels over there. They make me wear very short dresses. You are a taxi driver for the English and the Germans. You know every street on the Heights and on the Island. Your taxicab is down in the street below. It’s that little green Toyota with the front fender missing. There is your coat and hat.”
She pointed to a closet on the other side of the bed. He turned to see, but only as a gesture. Like the woman, his entire being was flailing desperately at the words that filled the room. It was as though the words had always been there, hovering in that small apartment, waiting patiently for the two mouths that would, at last, come speak them. Each word was tinged with frenzy and relief, glad that their human conduits had finally arrived.
“It was a hill—it wasn’t just terrain,” said the still naked man through clenched teeth. “Cassandra, there were young men out there—not just ground units, grunts. There were trees, stands of elephant grass and deep ravines—living things, not goddamn lines of fire and killing zones. They were not just soldiers, they were my flock. What became of them, Cassandra? Where are they now?”
“The North Vietnamese have marched into Saigon.” The woman sighed, then
knelt down before the man in the blue chair. She took his hand and gave it the kiss that haunts.
“The land is filled with reeducation, revenge, and the ghosts of millions of my people. Your flock has gone back home to a country that is fighting itself. Many soldiers are living in Lisbon and Paris. A few of them have become senators or congressmen, but many more are drug addicts or living under bridges. I’ve seen them on the television news. They are lost in their own homeland.”
“Do they still need me?” asked the padre. There was pain in his voice. “Do you think my flock needs me now?”
“Back in Thailand, Vô Dahn—Guillermo, you would whisper into my ear late at night. I remember, your lips right next to my ear, words of hope carried upon your breath. You never let me lose hope. You tended to the women who gave their bodies, and to the children. When the young girls found the first stains of blood in their underclothing, when they knew the Thai soldiers would be coming for them, you told them what was love and what was not love. You taught us all how to suppose, and we passed so many nights supposing world upon world, better worlds than this one. Don’t you remember that? Vô Dahn, my dear, you were the strongest one of all. I am sure they need you, Vô Dahn. I am sure of it.”
The chaplain closed his eyes and fell backward into the chair. His dance with Cassandra had not ended. It would never end. But Vô Dahn, William, Guillermo had no idea what steps, what movements came next in this bumbling, self-conscious pas de deux.
“One night, on the boat that finally brought us to Hong Kong, you told me little things about the Mennonites in Chihuahua. I hope I pronounced it right. After years together, you finally shared with me some of the story of your parents. You once even told me about the insects and about a little boy with polio. It was then that I put that beautiful painting on your back. It is the only tattoo I have ever made. An old Laotian woman helped me to do it. Why did you make me put it there, Vô Dahn? At first I understood so little of it. The boy was upstairs, the boy was like God. You have been sick so often that I thought you were dreaming. Over time, I came to understand. It was you who taught me English.”
