The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  “Oh, Lord,” Dot said with a sigh.

  “Now, Dorothy,” McGee said.

  “No, Cliff.” Dot’s voice trembled slightly. “I don’t care. Their poor mothers. You know”—she turned to Sarah—“after the boys are trained, they’re sent to other parts of the country, because it does work out better if they don’t speak the language, doesn’t it? Oh, I know that it’s all necessary, but it’s terribly hard for the families. Their families love them. Their families need them to work.” She turned back to McGee. “I think it’s disgusting, Clifford, frankly.”

  McGee lifted his hand for peace. “I never said—” he began, but just at that moment a tall man of thirty-five or so approached. His thatchy hair and matching mustache were the color of dirty Lucite. A large, chipped tooth might have given his smile an agreeable, beaverlike goofiness except for an impression he gave of the veiled, inexhaustible rage you see in certain ex-alcoholics. “Excuse me,” he said. “Do you happen to be Clifford McGee?”

  “I am he,” McGee said judiciously, extending his hand.

  “My name’s Curtis Finley,” the man said. “I work with your old outfit, and you were pointed out to me once at the Camino.”

  “So, they’ve got you down here, do they?” McGee said. “Have a seat. We’re just—what is it they say?—improving the shining hours.”

  Sarah stood up suddenly, then flopped back down into her chair. Finley glanced at her. “Thank you, sir,” he said to McGee. “Yes, I’ve been here for a bit, now. I’m on my way to supervise a project up north.”

  “Really,” McGee said. “A lot going on up there. You’ll have to come by when you get back, let me know how things went. I like to keep up.”

  “I imagine you do, sir,” Finley said. “They still talk about you at the office.” The two men smiled at each other, and a faint smell of sweat imprinted itself on the air.

  Dot nodded toward Sarah, who was splayed out glumly in her chair. “This young lady saw a recruitment the other day,” Dot said.

  “Dorothy,” McGee said, as Finley looked sharply at him.

  “Those cretins,” Finley said. He turned to me and Sarah, showing his teeth to indicate friendliness. “So, what brings you folks down here?”

  “Dennis is a journalist,” Sarah said. She drew herself together and smiled primly.

  Finley looked away from her legs. “Recruitments are very unusual here in town,” he told me. “And technically against the law. In fact, as I understand it, something’s being done about them now.”

  “I’m not really a journalist,” I assured him hurriedly. “I’m just doing food. Hotels, Easter celebrations in a general sort of way…”

  “I see…” Finley said.

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m a banker.”

  “Oh.” Finley looked at McGee.

  “No,” Dot said. “You see, Dennis is doing the most marvelous thing—he’s writing a nationally syndicated article about Holy Week. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Finley frowned. “Oh.” He showed his teeth again. “Well, how are you enjoying it? Beautiful town, isn’t it?”

  McGee shifted in his chair. “We’re taking these two to the de Leóns’ tonight, for dinner,” he said. “They’re old friends, and the cook does wonderful things with regional produce.”

  “Oh, yes.” Finley looked at me with vague bitterness. “Interesting fellow, de León. Never met him personally. Good morning, isn’t he?”

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “Good morning,” McGee said. “You’ve seen them in the supermarkets. Oranges, grapefruits. Even some bananas with the little sticker that says—”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Of course. Good Morning!”

  “Yes,” McGee said. “that’s de León. Good Morning! Oranges, Good Morning! Grapefruits. Coffee’s his main thing, but he’s all over the place now, really.”

  “Had some trouble with a son, I remember hearing,” Finley said.

  McGee nodded. “A bad patch. Over now.”

  “Kid had one wicked case of red-ass, as I heard it,” Finley said. He turned to Sarah. “If you’ll pardon me.”

  “Excuse me?” Sarah said with a misty smile. “Sorry, I wasn’t really…Oh, Mr. Finley, do you happen to know what this pretty vine is?” She pointed to an arborlike construction above us.

  “Curtis,” Finley said. He peered overhead, then looked at Sarah. “Vine?”

  “I think,” Dot said, squinting distantly, “that the rain is going to come early this year. Last night I saw lightning from over by the coast.”

  McGee smiled comfortably. “Same family as the Japanese wisteria,” he said.

  Later Sarah hunched over in the big chair in our room, hugging her knees while I walked back and forth.

  “Just because a fellow doesn’t happen to recognize one particular plant,” I said, “does not mean he’s some kind of impostor.”

  Sarah sighed noisily.

  “Well, after all,” I said. “But, besides. I think one has to ask oneself what, in all honesty, are the alternatives.”

  “What on earth are you saying, Dennis?” Sarah said.

  Mustn’t let Sarah force me into positions—her willful naïveté, threat of shrillness. Always have to remember to relax, keep perspective. Allow her to relax. Tried to point out calmly that, whatever one thinks of this method or that, people’s goals tend to be—on a certain basic level—the same. “We all want life to improve for everyone; we’re all struggling, in our own ways, to make things better. Yes, even people who differ from us can be sincere, Sarah—I mean, unless you’re talking about a few greed-maddened dictators. Psychopaths, like Hitler, or Idi Amin. Sociopaths, I guess, is what the word is now. Is that what they say in your classes, ‘sociopaths’?”

  Sarah gazed down at her sandaled toes and wiggled them.

  “But it’s funny,” I said, perching next to her on the arm of the chair. “Isn’t it? The way terminology can change like that. It must reflect a wholesale shift in the way moral reasoning, or whatever, is perceived to work. I think it’s so interesting, that, don’t you? They used to say ‘psychopaths’ when I was young.”

  Sarah wiggled her toes again. “Isn’t it wonderful,” she leaned down to say to them, “the way that bogus agronomists are crawling all over the place, struggling to improve life for everyone?

  “Oh, yes, Sarah,” she answered herself in a crumply little voice. “Deeply heartwarming. But that word ‘agronomist’—I think the word you want is ‘agriculturalist,’ interestingly. You know, when I was just a little toe—”

  “Oh, Sarah,” I said.

  “Excuse me, Dennis.” Sarah looked at me icily. “I was talking to my foot.”

  For the rest of the afternoon, we were very, very cautious with one another. Was dreading dinner. But Sarah was on her good behavior, or a variant of it. Was weirdly tractable, polite. Just as well, especially because the de Leóns turned out to be exactly what one would have expected—exactly what one would have feared.

  The Sra. steely in linen and small gold earrings. The Sr. somewhat more appealing. Handsome, very Spanish, melancholy. Obvious habit of power; cordiality engineered to infinitesimal degrees of correctness. Daughter, Gabriela, petite like mother. Pure, unclouded face, whispery clothing—quite taken with Sarah; many limpid smiles. Missed the States, she said, her friends from boarding school in Connecticut. Threatened “So much to talk about.” All three excellent English.

  Maids, passing out hors d’oeuvres and cocktails—rum + Good Morning! fruit juices. Gigantic house, huge collection of antique Indian textiles, pre-Columbian artifacts, splendid colonial furnishings, etc. Evening inexplicably slippery at first—odd tides of dusk from the series of enclosed patios and gardens flowing around the bulky forms inside. Everyone floating a bit, like particles dislodging themselves from something underwater, which was my mind.

  Found Sarah in a hallway, staring at a row of photographs. From behind, I watched her examining the face of a beautiful young man, pale, black-
haired, who was staring into the camera with an expression of sardonic resignation.

  “That’s my son, Rubén,” said Sra. de León, who had come up quietly next to me. “We’re very proud of him. He’s living in Paris, now. He’s been a great help to his father in the last few years.” She gave Sarah a frosty, slightly challenging smile.

  Eventually we were all moored around the table. Dinner excellent. Amazed by quality. Sadly, though, was unhungry in the extreme. Throughout parade of courses McGees and de Leóns conversing with the informal amiability of old friends: an archaeological site just uncovered nearby, then lurid local gossip—a nun from the U.S. who claimed to have been abducted from a convent in town and tortured. Though eventually, de León told us, the Embassy revealed that the cigarette burns all over the nun’s back had been inflicted by a lesbian lover.

  “It’s always in small places that the most incredible things happen, isn’t it?” Dot said. “New York City can’t compete with this story.”

  De León turned to Sarah with a brief burst of male charm. “This government is a collection of amateurs,” he said obscurely.

  “Vicente is sentimental about the old days,” Sra. de León said. “When less was required of us.”

  “I will not walk around my own property armed,” Sr. de León said, his warmth disappearing in the frozen wastes of his wife’s smile.

  There was a small silence as Sra. de León looked at her napkin with an amused, measured loathing. “Ah,” she said, as maids brought in trays of dessert and coffee. “Here we are.”

  The McGees appeared to be accustomed to the climatic shiftings between the de Leóns. “Vicente”—McGee waved his fork—“Angélica has outdone herself tonight.”

  “A triumph,” I said, gently pedaling Sarah’s foot. “And I never would have dreamed it was possible to do something like this with a banana.”

  “Oh, nor I,” Sarah said, withdrawing her foot.

  “Very simple,” Sr. de León said. “Just caramelize lightly, add a little orange, a little rum, and flame.” He handed me a small stack of cards; turned out he had had all the recipes from dinner typed up.

  Gabriela laughed. “Daddy is so shy, isn’t he,” she said.

  “Yes, ha,” I agreed. Consommé with Tomato, Avocado, and Cilantro, I read. Sole with Good Morning! Grapefruit. Carrots with Zest of Good Morning! Orange. Volcano Salad. Good Morning! Bananas with Juice of Good Morning! Oranges and Rum. Dark Roast Good Morning! Coffee and Cardamom Chewies. “I hardly know how to thank you,” I said. “These will really make my article—”

  “It is my great pleasure,” de León said.

  “And it will be nice to have some decent press up there for a change,” Gabriela said.

  “Gaby,” Sra. de León chided.

  “No, but it’s true,” Gabriela said. She turned to Sarah. “You know, it happens all the time. Some reporter, who knows nothing about this country, who doesn’t care anything about it, who only cares about making a reputation for himself, comes down and says he wants to write an objective story about life here. And the next thing you know, you open up some magazine and read the most fantastic stuff. As if the country were one big concentration camp—as if all we ever did was bomb the villages.”

  Sarah put down her fork.

  “I know,” Gabriela said. “Never one word about the wonderful things—”

  “Gaby,” Sra. de León said, and put down her own fork, “why don’t you show our new friends the garden.”

  It was a great relief to leave the table. Gabriela led us through the pungent floral riot, and cut some elegant little lilies for Sarah. Sarah thanked her; asked how far the plantation extended. Gabriela looked puzzled for a moment, then laughed. Explained that we weren’t on the plantation at all—that it was hours and hours away, over terrible roads. Said, “Of course, these days if we were to go we would use helicopters, and it would only take minutes. But we never do anymore. Even Daddy hardly goes.”

  Sarah silent, considering. Then asked who was it, that being the case, who saw to the planting, harvesting, etc.

  Gabriela mercifully innocent—entirely impervious to offense potential of Sarah’s question.

  “Oh, we have what amounts to a rather large village living up there,” Gabriela said. “And some very reliable overseers. But we always used to go out at harvest time ourselves, anyway.”

  Frankly, was very touched by her regretful tone. “You enjoyed it,” I observed.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I loved it. We all did. We loved to watch the harvest, to ride around the countryside on our horses…Well, it was a long time ago, when we could do that—that was back when our Indians still had their own little plots of land up north, and we had them brought down on trucks for the harvest, big trucks, from their tiny villages. And they were all from different villages, so they wore different colors and patterns in their clothes, and they spoke all sorts of different languages. They were so strange, so beautiful. I used to love to listen to them, and to watch them. To watch them harvesting the coffee…”

  “Harvesting coffee,” I said. “You know, I never think of coffee as a legume, but, of course—coffee beans!”

  Gabriela smiled and shook her hair. In the moonlight she had a newborn look. “Coffee isn’t really a bean at all,” she said. “It’s a berry. It’s very nice to look at—it turns bright red. But it’s a nuisance to pick. You really have to watch what you’re doing or you can strip the plant. Still, at least, it’s not heavy, as long as you’re not hauling the sacks. So it’s one thing that small children can learn to do. Fortunately for the families.”

  Sarah started to speak, and stopped.

  “It was so beautiful,” Gabriela said. “I wish I could show it to you as it was then…” She sighed. “You have to forgive me for talking and talking like this. But there are so few people who would understand what it’s like for me. People here can’t really understand because most have never lived in the States or Europe, and my friends in the States can’t understand, because they’ve never been here.”

  “Do go on,” I said. I glanced reprimandingly at Sarah.

  “Oh, I don’t know…” Gabriela smiled faintly, as though she were watching something across the garden. “Well, it’s been so long since I’ve been back, hasn’t it. I was about twelve, I suppose, the last time. That’s right—because my brother, Rubén, who’s in Paris now, was sixteen. It’s incredible to think about that time, really. It was very confusing. It was very hard, particularly for my parents, because it was just when things were at their worst in this country, and the guerrilla movement really had some strength. And Rubén had picked up some funny ideas. He was just at that age, you know, when children are very susceptible. And I suppose some older boys had gotten hold of him because our family, well”—she smiled sadly—“because our family is very well known. And Rubén began to go around saying things he couldn’t possibly even have understood—talking about giving land away, ‘returning it,’ was how he put it. And ruinous increases in wages. Things that would absolutely destroy his own family. And Mommy and Daddy tried to reason with him. They were very patient—they kept telling him, Rubén, you know, certain people own the land. They have legal title to it. You can’t just snatch it away from them, can you? And if we’re to drink coffee, if we’re to eat fruit, someone is going to have to pick it. And it’s a tragedy, of course, that you can’t just pay the laborers anything you’d like, but it’s a fact. It’s simply a fact. Because what do you think would happen to the world if we did? And a banana cost ten dollars? Or a cup of coffee cost twenty dollars? But Rubén would always just slam out of the house. So it was a very hard time for us all. And of course that was the period when the workers had to be watched very, very closely, because, you can imagine—if it was possible to contaminate Rubén, imagine how much easier it would be with a poor, uneducated Indian.”

  Gabriela reached out to touch a pink rambling rose. “So,” she said, “we were all up for the harvest one year, and there was a
morning when I woke up very, very early. Before the sun rose. I woke up to this delicious smell, this absolutely delicious smell, of roasting coffee. And I thought, well, now it’s time to get up. And then about one thousand things happened in my mind all at once, because I realized it wasn’t time to get up—it wasn’t time to get up at all, and something was happening that couldn’t possibly be happening. And so, before I even knew what I was doing or why, I rushed over to my window. And the window was black and red—black with night and red with fire, wave after wave of fire in the black sky. And the whole store house, all our coffee, was up in flames.”

  “Oh—” Sarah said. She sat down on the rim of an old fountain from which cascaded tiny weightless white flowers.

  “Yes,” Gabriela said. She seated herself next to Sarah and drew me down beside her. “It was terrible. And after that I never really went back. Mommy and Daddy felt it would be too dangerous, and of course it wasn’t nearly as pleasant, because security was tightened up a lot, too. The army came—there are still hundreds of soldiers living there, in fact.” She laughed. “Daddy doesn’t like that at all. He says it’s more of a—what do you call it?—protection racket, than protection, and that the army is bleeding us worse than the workers. But what can you do, after all? And there are guard towers now, and the landing strips, and those awful, you know, fences. So it’s not so nice anymore.

  “But Rubén went back once again with my father. And instead of bringing him to his senses, it all just seemed to make him worse—angrier and wilder and more unhappy. My parents wanted him to go away to school. To Harvard, or perhaps to Oxford. But he wanted to stay in the country, and it turned out to be a very bad thing for everyone that he did. Because then he really became involved with all these crazy student groups. It was so sad. They were so young—they thought they were idealists, but, really, they were just being used. Rubén had been such a sweet boy, such a wonderful brother, but he became very hard. It was just this hard, awful propaganda all the time.”