by Alfredo Vea
Cassandra reached upward with her right hand, touching the familiar chest and belly of her ex-lover. The skin beneath her touch burned with a different, unfamiliar fever. This heat was a stranger.
“Once when I was a child, there were a series of particularly heavy storms raging in northeastern Mexico.” There was a hint of detachment in the padre’s voice. He could not speak of these things without drifting.
“Chihuahua had never seen such torrents of water and wind. One of my grandfather’s hidden treasures saw the light of day during one of those storms. I stumbled upon it on my way to the outhouse. I saw the tip of a canvas bag sticking out from the soil and the high grass. I dug it up and found another buried beneath it.
“I brought them both into our tilted home. When I opened the first one, I slowly began to understand why my father and grandfather had fostered, even encouraged all of those strange rumors about our family. He was protecting us … all those years he had been protecting us.
“I hid the bags in the basement and visited them each time the Mennonites allowed me to return home. Later I would visit the bags when the semester was over at seminary. My brothers at the seminary couldn’t understand why I didn’t vacation in the Grand Tetons or visit New York City. Something always brought me back to Mexico.
“At night I would cautiously remove the contents from the bags, then unwrap layer upon layer of protective cloth. Even as a boy I could tell that the old paper in the center of the larger bag was somehow sacred, precious. Within the second bag was the lyrical heart of my history. Even then I knew my family was different, Cassandra. In the years since then the truth has been at my door, begging to be let in. So often I have turned it away. I have never had the courage to speak the truth aloud. Secrecy has been my birthright.”
He pounded his skull—pummeled his calavera with his fists, banging his knuckles against the hidden meaning of words.
“Vô Dahn, while you have spent these years removing names, I have spent them covering one name with another. Are we going our separate ways, my love? I know that I must go to America! I believe that there is someone there who might answer my most heartfelt question. I must find her.”
She wrapped her thin fingers around the man’s wrist.
“I have loved no one. Regardez-moi. Ecoutez-moi, mon amour. Look at me, Vô Dahn. My God, I have loved no one so much,” she whispered. She leaned toward him and kissed his hand. “Viñh viêñ, ” she said softly. The Vietnamese words for forever.
“Kerereti, Cassandra. Te quiero. Something deep inside me loves you more than I can say. But I have to go back to a hill and find my lost flock, or what’s left of it. I abandoned them all, Cassandra. I walked away when they needed me the most. Will they ever forgive me? They are all back in America—the ones who survived. I know they are all back in the world.”
The chaplain closed his eyes, his face distorted with pain.
“Kerereti,” he muttered.
He rose from the chair and led her back to the bed.
“It is a word in Ladino—one half of the language of spiders. The other half is a smattering of Yiddish. You said that I can also speak French, Vietnamese, and Thai? Perhaps I needed all of these tongues just to speak a single honest thing. It was a copy of the Torah that I found, Cassandra, and a beautiful book of the Psalms. Both had been printed by hand on parchment and protected by the skin of lambs. I once said that I was nobody. Tôi khônglà gi ca. It isn’t true. I once played the fiddle in secret. I am a Mexican brown recluse. No, I am a violin spider. No, no, I am a Jew.”
The chaplain’s lips quivered as they pronounced a forbidden sentence. Cassandra released his wrist. He walked back to the chair and began to dress. She knew as she watched him that they would never make love again, that they would never sleep in the same bed again. Her delirious and desperate fingers would never reach around her lover’s back to touch the painted violin—to accompany her own orgasms with pizzicato.
She wondered if he would ever remember that they had slept together in pigpens and beneath woodpiles, that they had kept each other alive by stealing rice and by killing rats for food. Would he ever recall the night that they had slept curled up together in a sewer pipe near the harbor at Macao? A tear reached her lovely eye as she realized that his soft lips would never again brush against her cheeks and her neck.
“Will either of us love again?” she said.
He did not respond, but turned his back to the mirror, then twisted his neck and upper body to inspect the wonderful tattoo that he had never seen. He nodded silently, then winced as he tightened the belt around his waist. An old wound to his ribs had never healed. He pulled the shirt on, walked toward the door, then turned to face the beautiful woman who was crying softly on the bed. Now he truly understood what that buzzing in his childhood cellar had been.
It had been the soaring and driving intonations of his father’s voice. It had been the resin and horsehairs of the ancient fiddle. There had been secret services in that basement for other spider families. There had been weddings and bar mitzvahs and silent seders. Now he remembered those slaps to his face whenever the family was in the midst of strangers and an odd, foreign word inadvertently leapt from his mouth.
Now he knew that tesoro meant Torah. Caser meant kosher. The old well on his father’s farm, the aguada, had, in truth, been the hiding place of the Haggadah. Culture had been buried in those holes, artifacts of the chosen. Joyous music had been muffled for centuries. His whole family line had been skilled cryptographers, codemakers, beginning in the darkest years of the seventeenth century. Hiding had been passed down in the blood, as had the ability to spin homonyms in three languages.
He faced the door, turned the knob, and pulled it open to reveal a dimly lit hallway that he had never seen before. His right hand reached up automatically to touch the nonexistent archstone of a cheap wooden casement. It would be the first of a thousand such empty hallways, common areas filled with shadows and tender theory. He turned toward her one last time.
He tried to memorize her beauty. God’s breath was dispersing them. She was as striking as Tirza, as bright as Jerusalem. Her breasts were like twin fawns feeding among the water lilies. Slowly, she lowered her eyes for fear of making him tremble.
“Hob mich vainik lieb, nor bob mirlang lieb, ” he said to her in the second language of the violin spider. “It’s all right, Cassandra, if you should love me a little less tomorrow and a little less the day after that. I’ll understand.”
He turned to walk away, never asking for her true name.
“Love me less, but please, love me forever.”
10
gods go begging
There was a stirring in the silence. A soft breeze of stale, dank air escaped from the room as though the weathered seal of a long-forgotten vacuum had, at last, been broken. A sudden shaft of glaring light appeared, flanked by sharp shards of shadow. Curtains had been moved aside and a window was forced open. A human being, once in deep, tormented half-sleep, was now awake. He had forced himself to stagger through a minefield of empty bottles to suck in the light and air of the harsh present.
Jesse shook his unresponsive head, stirring up the mezcal and nightmares of last night and this morning. There was an uneasy moment of disorientation and dizziness as he stood unsteadily before the open window, first one knee then the other almost giving way. The skin of his face still vibrated with the pain of those horrid dreams, with the ever-echoing enunciation from Persephone Flyer’s lips. Jesse shuddered, shaking his head and body in an effort to come back to the here and now. The dreams of Vietnam had always been with him, but never before with such ferocious and unrelenting intensity.
Jesse knew that the terror of last night had been much more than a mere dream. That hill near the Laotian border had always been haunted, possessed by the restless ghosts of hundreds, perhaps thousands of young men. Last night his own living spirit had been kidnapped from this room and taken there, not for a reunion but for a quick object les
son, a reminder that his soul would never leave that hill, no matter where his body went. No bachelor’s degree, no law degree, no jungle grasses could hope to cover the impossible fear and anguish that still lingered there; no roots could ever leach from that soil the grief and blood, and the sorrowful shouts that had been sown there.
While his sweating, drunken body had been pinned to a bed in a motel room, his soul had been forced to revisit a time when, no matter where Jesse’s gaze had fallen, he had witnessed something he could not bear to see. Last night it had been raining in Vietnam; the monsoons had been in full swing. The swollen cloud of death that hung eternally over that hill had poured down a steady stream of regrets. Top soil had been washed away in torrents, leaving yellow bones exposed. The spirits of those killed in war were always helpless in the dry season. They needed to ride down on weather, to come down with the rain. In Jesse’s dreams there was always rain.
Without thinking, Jesse mumbled a line from a poem. Perhaps the sound of his own voice—his own mortal, living voice—could chase away the lingering vestiges of the night before. He repeated the line as he left the hotel room and fell into the driver’s seat of his car, attempting to speak each word carefully and precisely. He found that enunciation was extremely difficult because of his dry mouth and his buzzing, pounding brain.
From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire.
He seldom climbed out of bed without thinking of Robert Frost’s enigmatic poem “Fire and Ice.” He drove down Highway 101 South toward the Golden Gate Bridge. He turned his rearview mirror for a look at his own face. He was hungover and disheveled. His teeth were unbrushed and his hair uncombed. There was blood on his incisors. Sometime during the night, he had bitten his tongue. All in all, the weary face in the mirror was a perfect reflection of his soul.
He cast a final glace at the mirror as he crossed over Richardson Bay. The eyes were the same. They had always been the same, constants in a changing face and a changing world. Jesse shook his head in utter frustration and confusion. Who was seeing whom in that mirror? Was it the young soldier gazing at his own future countenance or was it the middle-aged lawyer looking back through the pupil and the iris at the tormented boy? His mind was not working well enough to be asking such questions.He turned his eyes to the road just in time to slam on his brakes and barely avoid colliding with a truck.
When Jesse reached Nineteenth Avenue he took a sudden right on Lake Street and pulled over. He closed his eyes and rested his head on the steering wheel. His hangover was killing him. The last face he had seen in his dreams was the face of Carolina. Could she ever understand the whirlwind of his mind? Could she ever understand why he had failed her again and again, why he would always fail?
Suddenly his hands were flailing at the driver’s door in an attempt to locate the door handle. After a seeming eternity it flew open and Jesse heaved a torrent of fluids out into the street. After wiping his mouth and chin with his sleeve he started the car and headed down Geary Boulevard toward the Dublin City Bar. Hollis would have the antidote for this agony. Somewhere in all of those brightly colored bottles behind the bar was the cure for what ailed Jesse Pasadoble.
“Do you know how it feels, man, knowing you’re gonna die?” The customer raised his voice for a second salvo. “Do you have any idea how it feels? My wife doesn’t give a shit. None of my kids give a damn about me, either. They’re all computer-literate. Wouldn’t know a transistor from a turd but they’re computer-literate!”
“It’s too early in the day to be so damn drunk,” said Hollis. “That drink you have there in your hand is your last pour from this bar. So move along, my friend. Go home and get some rest and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You’ve got no heart, Hollis,” said the drunkard as he staggered from the stool and out into the sunlight. “You’ve got no heart at all.”
“Jesse!” cried Hollis. “Jesus, boy, you look like shit. You look like a self-propelled Howitzer run over you. Come in, come in. Light ‘em up if you got’ em. I’ll make you a coffee, one of them newfangled café mochas. We’ve got this here shiny new machine, one of those Italian gadgets. Personally, I don’t think they belong in an Irish bar.”
“No thanks, man,” said Jesse, his voice filled with troubled desperation. “Just get me some mezcal.”
“Bullshit,” shouted Hollis. “That old hair-of-the-dog crap holds about as much water as the fuckin’ domino theory. I’ll make you a coffee that’ll have your hair standin’ on end. You’ll drink it and like it.” Hollis smiled.
Jesse sat on the first stool and watched wearily as Hollis attempted to manipulate the new Italian coffeemaker. Despite his obvious disdain for the machine, his scarred hands moved in a slow, deliberate manner. Even while swathed in nausea, Jesse understood that Hollis was a kind of miracle. He had done three tours in Vietnam. The injuries that he had sustained while in the Airborne were everywhere on his body: both legs, both arms; there were metal fragments in every muscle of his upper torso and a patch of plastic mesh sewn into his forehead.
Oddly enough, the cumulative effect of all those wounds was one of perfect balance. What should have been a severe limp in his left leg was little more than an almost imperceptible twitch, as it compensated for the twisted knee and ankle of the right leg, the right leg itself compensating for a mass of mangled back muscles that had healed in such a way that his posture seemed perfect, almost imperious. Hollis didn’t limp, he simply moved much slower than most people. Those who didn’t know his history misconstrued it as a surfeit of patience and reserve.
“So how’s it going?” asked Jesse, his feeble voice barely audible across the bar.
“Is that my friend askin’ the question, or is that my lawyer askin’ the question?”
“Both,” said Jesse.
“Well, sarge, I been keepin’ up with my probation officer, if that’s what you mean. I’ve tested clean every time. I’ve kept this here job now for … eleven months, longest I’ve ever worked in one place. I’ve made lots of new friends here. There are beautiful girls in here every night.” Hollis winked. “I emcee the wet T-shirt contest on Friday and Saturday. I’ll tell you, I’m staying right here. No more streets for me.”
Jesse stared at his old friend as he fumbled with the new espresso machine. Jesse had met him years ago, when Hollis was making a living stealing cars to pay for an ancient drug habit. Then a young public defender, Jesse had been given all of Hollis’s cases. In five minutes’ time they had become fast friends. Like so many other boys, Hollis had been flash-frozen by war when he was still so very much in love with his own life and the world around him. He had enlisted at the age of sixteen. At the age of seventeen—in the space of a few days—he had become sickened with experience, gagging on the slice of life that had been given him. Hell, he was still choking, and taking his first real breaths almost thirty years after that war. Jesse could never understand why Hollis had reenlisted twice.
“Here’s your coffee. Drink up, now, there’s more where this here came from.”
Jesse drank from the mug, then covered his mouth with his hand, trying not to spit up.
“Shit!” he screamed after swallowing a scalding mouthful. “That’s not coffee, that’s tar!”
“Sure woke you up,” said Hollis, whose face suddenly took on a pensive look. He hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Have you seen Carolina? She was in here the other day looking for you. She sat in that seat and drank a lemonade. She never said a word about you, but I know why she was here. Is it her, or is it the Nam?”
“You, more than any other man, know that there’s no difference between the two,” said Jesse quietly. After a moment of thought, he repeated Hollis’s question. “Is it her, or is it the Nam? Hell if I know. What the hell do I know about anything?”
Hollis stopped washing glasses for a moment; the wineglass and the sponge were frozen in midair.
“Do you ever ask for forgiveness?” asked Hollis.
“I a
m the only one who has never forgiven me,” said Jesse in a sickly monotone.
“You’re the only one who can,” said Hollis, who had abandoned the dishes and was now attempting to make himself a caffé latté.
“Over the years I’ve been able to get by,” mumbled Jesse. “You know what it’s like, Hollis. I cover my friends’ backs and I can hump it around the courtrooms pretty well.”
“You’re a hell of a lawyer,” interjected Hollis.
“I’ve even had my share of girlfriends,” continued Jesse, his voice almost breathless. “But I’ve never really been there for any of them. I’ve never been … in the moment, never existing with any woman in the same time and place.”
Jesse diluted his viscous coffee with a half cup of hot milk. Hollis nodded sympathetically. He understood all too well.
“So many would-be lovers have ended up pounding on my chest in sheer frustration, begging to know where I was, pleading to know why I was never really present for them. I can barely accept love, Hollis, and I am even worse at giving it. Jesus, sometimes it feels like my soul has turned gray with freezer burn. I don’t know how any of them ever tolerated me. And now it’s Carolina’s turn. If I really cared about her, I would walk out of her life today. I would give her the chance to find someone, some normal guy who is capable of loving her.”
Jesse shook his head sadly.
“Can I have my mezcal now?” he asked plaintively.
“You ain’t answered my question, Jesse,” said Hollis as he tasted his latest creation. “Answer my goddamn question!”
“Forgiveness?” Jesse shrugged with an air of hopelessness. “Forgiveness,” he repeated into the coffee mug at his lips. The tarry substance burned its way down his gorge.
“You see, I think there is something here much more important than forgiveness,” whispered Hollis while putting a finger to his lips, indicating that he was in possession of a secret. This was something that he had thought about for a long time. For years the question had ridden his veins on a streak of heroin; it had slipped into his mind every night on a puff of crack cocaine.
