by Daniel Klein
Rico stands, his muscular arms folded across his substantial chest, inspecting the family members one at a time. His eyes linger on Fernanda, the eldest of the Mondragon daughters at fifteen. Her moon face is distorted by welts from crying, making it look even more cow-like than usual, and her late-arriving breasts are all but invisible under one of Hector’s alpaca shirts. Marcella experiences an emotion that just a day before would have been unimaginable: consolation in her daughter’s unattractiveness. Rico’s eyes move to Hector.
At seventeen, Hector is still growing, but he is already taller than any man in his home village and appears to be taller than any man in Soacha too. There was a rumor of a lanky Brazilian landlord on his father’s side, although Nicomedes, himself, was only five feet tall, as was his father before him. Without being conscious of it, Hector has the posture of a man who is at ease with his stature. He holds his shoulders back and his head erect, habitually looking down at the people he talks to. This last does not please Rico at all.
“Your name!” Rico barks.
“Hector.”
“A farmer, I bet.”
“I was.” Hector hesitates a moment, then adds, “Sir.”
Rico squints, studying Hector’s face for signs of sarcasm, but Hector answers this scrutiny by casting his gaze even lower, to Rico’s feet. Hector understands that, real or feigned, this gesture signifies submissiveness—even the dogs of Puerto Alvira can read its meaning. Hector also knows that he values his family far more than his pride.
“I’ll give you a chance,” Rico says. “You can sell cigarettes for me. At least they’ll be able to see you.” He gestures for Hector to follow him up the hill.
“Now?” Hector asks.
Rico glares and Hector follows.
The rear half of Rico’s hovel is shrouded in a blue plastic tarpaulin. From beneath it, he withdraws three cartons of American cigarettes, Camel and Camel Filters, and shoves them at Hector.
“Twenty thousand a pack,” Rico says. “You take that Number 2 bus over there and get off at Sagrado. Carrera Seven. You’ll see other boys there too. The brave ones stand right in the middle of the road. They sell twice what the others do.”
“Then that is what I will do,” Hector says. Before leaving for the bus, he again stares compliantly at Rico’s feet and asks, “Can someone help my family?”
“Let’s see how you do,” Rico answers.
If we were visitors from Rio or Buenos Aires or even the United States, touring Bogotá in our rented BMW, and on our way to dinner at, say, Andres Carne de Res out on the Autopista Norte, we would pass the American Embassy on our left at Sagrado and then brake to a stop at the traffic light at Carrera Seven. There we would encounter ten or twelve boys, most of them teenage, but some younger, and every one of them seedy and foul looking. Some look threatening, conveyed as much by the need in their eyes as by the seemingly menacing way they dart from car to car, brandishing their wares, contraband foreign cigarettes and domestic flowers. On this particular evening, however, one of the boys appears neither seedy nor menacing. To be sure, he looks indigent; his unwashed face and hair and his stained shirt attest to that. He is taller than the others, yet this alone does not account for the difference in the impression he makes. There is in his bearing a confidence that the other boys lack, a sense that while he knows he is better than this job, he will nonetheless perform it with dignity.
He appears to walk more slowly than the others as he approaches our car, but we quickly realize that this is an illusion—his stride is twice the length of theirs so he is at our window before them. We now see his face and it, too, seems out of place—too sympathetic, too refined-looking. We wonder if he is one of the ‘fallen ones’ we have heard about, a son of a government functionary who fell out of favor and lost his job and then his property. Smiling, he holds his cigarettes in front of his thin chest. Although none of us smoke, we feel compelled to buy a pack from him as an act of charity. We also think of the twenty thousand pesos we hand to him as encouragement—we do not want this young man to give up hope. Of course, our compassion is made easier by the fact that twenty thousand Colombian pesos will in no way affect which items we will choose from the menu at Andres Carne de Res.
Hector surprises himself with his ease and proficiency at this job. It is little more than forty-eight hours since his father was murdered and they fled Puerto Alvira, although he does not reflect on any of this as he stands in the middle of Carrera Seven. He only thinks about his prospective customers, evaluating their faces through their windshields and calibrating his facial expression and gait accordingly.
Within two hours, he has sold out the three cartons Rico gave him. It is dusk in Bogotá and the traffic doubles as well-to-do natives and tourists set out for their evening’s entertainment. It would be a pity to forgo this opportunity to sell even more cigarettes, so Hector strikes a deal with one of the younger salesmen, a boy of no more than twelve from Ciudad Bolivar. Hector buys this boy’s remaining stock—two cartons of Winstons—for half the street mark-up and sells them out by eleven p.m. In this way, he will be able to keep fifty thousand pesos for himself while giving Rico full payment for the three original cartons.
It is when Hector is down to his last two packs of Winstons that a BMW sport convertible containing two laughing middle-aged women slows in front of him. Hector can tell just from the timbre of their laughter that they are foreign, and indeed, they are German tourists doing the grand tour of Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia. They buy both packs of cigarettes, handing him a fifty-thousand note and waving off the change. The driver, a dyed blonde with thin lips, asks his name and he gives it, bowing slightly when he does so. Then the woman tells Hector that she and her friend are looking for a guide for the night, a personal guide who can show them the real Bogotá. The light has changed and behind the BMW other cars start to blare their horns, but the German visitors pay them no mind, waiting for Hector’s reply.
The only parts of Bogotá that Hector knows at all are Soacha and Ciudad Bolivar, and although these are, indeed, the real Bogotá, they are not what these two women have in mind. It should be said here that at this point in his life Hector has never had a sexual experience with anyone but himself, but he is both a farm boy and a reader, and between these he has a comprehensive knowledge of sexual acts and behavior. He knows what these women want and he knows how profitable it could be for him, but he passes up the opportunity this time, mostly because he wants to get back to Soacha to be with his family on their first night in Bogotá.
A mud brick hut was built and inside it a wooden platform on which the seven family members slept in clumps. Going door to door in the residential quarter of La Merced, Marcella found herself and Fernanda housecleaning jobs at five hundred pesos per twelve-hour day. But it was Hector who kept the family from sliding off the embankment into the trench that was known in Soacha as ‘the pit of the homeless.’ For fourteen hours each day, he sold both Rico’s cigarettes and the contraband he began buying himself from a dealer in Ciudad Bolivar. And there were times now and then when Hector accepted the propositions of middle-aged female tourists along with their money. From these women he acquired what might be called a working knowledge of feminine desires along with a vocabulary of basic English.
A year passes, then most of another. Unknown even to his mother, Hector is saving money, hiding it in a small tin box he buries under their hut’s mud floor. He has a plan that will bring his family sanctuary.
One night, an Australian woman brought Hector back to her room at the Melia Santafe. After he had completed his chore with her, Hector stopped at a beer stand across the street from the hotel where he found three boys about his own age having an animated discussion about the best way to get to the United States. If you went to Mexico, made your way north, and then swam across the Rio Grande at night, you could get there without encountering a single immigration policeman. But one of the boys had a cousin who had tried that route and was captured and beaten to a pu
lp—not by police, but by Texas vigilantes. No, the best way was to fly directly to Miami with a counterfeit visa and take your chances. The worst that could happen is they sent you back.
But if you made it—if you got there home free, my friend—your life will be made of gold! And so will the lives of everyone you love.
The cost of a counterfeit visa bought directly from an officer at the American Embassy, Hector was told, was five million pesos.
CHAPTER FIVE
Every Christmas Eve after dinner, Franny deVries slips her DVD of Fanny and Alexander into her player, and she and Wendell and Lila watch the movie to its end when, back together after some terrible trials, the extended Ekdahl family gathers in Uppsala for a grand christening supper. Franny calls the Bergman film their very own midnight mass.
Franny can live inside this movie, burrowing under a fur comforter with the rest of the Ekdahls as they set off in a horse-drawn sleigh on the snow-covered streets of Uppsala. A small family theater binds this Swedish family together. There, speaking lines written by Strindberg and Shakespeare, they are able to connect with one another more intimately than they can anywhere else. At the christening supper, Carl Ekdahl raises his glass of aquavit, calling for a blessing on their family and their theater:
“The world is a den of thieves and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.”
“The little world,” Franny echoes in a whisper, and she weeps.
* * *
It is mid-October in Grandville with a premature winter chill in the evening air. Franny has heated a Lipton chicken Cup-a-Soup on her hot plate. She locks up her shop and, Cup-a-Soup in one hand and sketchbook in the other, walks briskly to the Phoenix, lets herself in, turns on the stage lights, then heads back to the stairs where she climbs to the balcony. There, she sits in the front row, sipping her soup and gazing at the stage.
She does not know if it was duty or guilt that compelled her to volunteer to design the set for How’s Never? She does know that this allowed her to gracefully withdraw from either appearing in the play or directing it, as Babs Dowd had asked her to do. Franny told Babs that she had not had a chance to design a set in years and only now, with all this wonderful new talent around, could she get back to her first love in theater. There was some truth in this, more of it as Franny immersed herself in the project, sketching late into the autumn nights. Her personal challenge was to see how much she could alter the play itself, rescue it from its inherent self-parody, by placing it in an ingenious environment. Her first attempts were to pattern the presidential bunker after the hovel Jean-Marc had designed for their college production of Lower Depths—dark, oppressive, damp. But just watching a single rehearsal of How’s Never? with such a set in mind, Franny knew it was a very bad idea; it would only exaggerate the play’s unreality, tear at its already threadbare substance.
The trick would be to push the design in the opposite direction, toward the fantastic. Franny’s first attempts at this were Disneyesque—broad, rounded oblongs in primary colors bordered in black stripes. Put a cartoon in a cartoon box. But again, Franny realized this would just cheapen Babs’s play even more than it already was. Of course, that had a certain appeal—calling a spade a spade; at least the audience would know Franny knew exactly what they were getting. But she could not permit herself to be that devious.
“Don’t design a set—invent a language!” Jean-Marc always said. It was just such pronouncements, delivered in a lilting Parisian baritone as if each time he had just invented the idea, that made Franny fall in love with Jean-Marc when he arrived on the Ithaca College campus in the spring term of her junior year. After not thinking about Jean-Marc for years—maybe even a full decade—he had been creeping into Franny’s mind regularly since she began working on the set for How’s Never?
A perfect language for the set popped into Franny’s mind when she awoke this morning—Biblical! Yes, obviously, a biblical language. Take all of that glib, faux-theological dialogue in How’s Never? and surround it with New Testament images. That could put the entire play in winking quotation marks without compromising it. Franny had immediately grabbed Jansen’s History of Art from her bed table and begun searching for prototypes. A Renaissance Madonna—say Bellini or Raphael? No, that could too easily veer from a wink to a supercilious put-down. She flipped the pages to William Blake’s surreal illuminations for All Religions Are One. Jesus, they were gorgeous, and heaven knows they were biblically inspired, but they were genuinely spiritual, and any audience member who tuned into that spirituality would be lost from the get-go. But as she looked at Blake’s painting of God contemplating the world He just created, Franny had an inspiration.
After Lila left for school, Franny went into her daughter’s bedroom and scanned the bookshelf. There, on the bottom shelf, dusty and long-unopened, was the children’s illustrated Bible that Beatrice had given her granddaughter on her sixth birthday. Sitting cross-legged on the cold floor, Franny studied the pictures: Adam and Eve gaping at the serpent, their nakedness camouflaged from young eyes in a peek-a-boo of hanging leaves and fruit; Moses hoisting the holy tablets above his head like an athlete displaying his trophy; Jesus astride a donkey, waving shyly at the villagers who line the streets as if he is a matinee idol embarrassed by his sudden notoriety. The pastel colors, the earnest expressions on the subject’s faces, the artist’s clumsy but touching attempt to give them a contemporary feel, as if these biblical folk could be living right next door—it was all just perfect for How’s Never? Like the play, the illustrations were both sincere and naïve. Franny could have her wink and serve the play too.
Some of Franny’s customers that morning were disappointed by her unwillingness to join the daily seminar, but Franny was drawing. And by the time she closed up her shop, she had filled an entire sketchbook.
Now Franny flicks her eyes from a page in her sketchbook to the stage and back again. She has patterned the presidential bunker after the holy manger in the children’s Bible. Straw-covered dirt floor, stone foundation, raw wood roof beams, the gate of a horse stall deep on stage left, and flying overhead, like the canopy that hovers over the Blessed Infant’s crib in the book, a silk banner displaying the presidential seal. Franny is thrilled; she has invented the perfect visual language for How’s Never?
Down below, people are arriving for tonight’s rehearsal, the first without scripts in hand. Franny recognizes Sally Rule’s voice. Sally is playing the president’s wife, playing her in much the same manner as she portrayed Lady Britomart—vaguely British, haughty, and snippy. It is what Sally does, but actually her hauteur works quite well in How’s Never? Franny can easily visualize Sally tossing her head imperiously as she kicks up some manger straw. Next, Franny makes out Babs Dowd’s voice. Babs is directing her own play; despite her request to have Franny direct, Babs is obviously delighted with the way things have worked out. She has developed a little routine that she uses at every rehearsal; she will start a note to an actor by saying, “I’m not sure what the author had in mind here, but . . .” The actors love it.
It takes Franny a fraction of a second longer to recognize the third voice, possibly because it does not belong to a member of the company. It belongs to Franny’s mother, Beatrice. Franny automatically shuts her sketchbook. If she timed it just right and walked very softly, Franny could be down from the balcony and out the theater door with no one noticing. And there is a good chance this is what Franny would have done if she had not heard footsteps ascending the balcony stairs. She recognizes her mother’s tread more quickly than she recognized her voice. Franny also recognizes the anxiety the sound of that tread still calls up in her.
For most of her childhood, Franny felt like a sneak. Not because she was particularly deceitful or naughty, but because of
her mother ’s relentless scrutiny of her. In the mornings, her mother would examine her hands and nails, her hair and face and, on occasion, she would lift the hem of Franny’s skirt to check her underpants. This last Mother did sterilely, her arm extended straight out, grasping the hem between her thumb and forefinger, and peering at Franny’s underpants through her reading glasses as if they were a research specimen. But even more humiliating were Beatrice’s evening invasions of Franny’s bedroom when she would snap on the overhead light, and say, “I was so worried about you, Darling!” Years later, when Franny confronted her mother about this practice, Beatrice insisted that she was simply concerned about her only child’s health, but by then Franny knew better. It was not germs that terrified her mother, it was vulgarity. The contamination she probed was not viral, but social. Beatrice’s obsessive fear was that her child would turn out like Wendell—fatuous, uncultivated, and ambitionless. And that is why Franny, who adored absolutely everything about her father and yearned to be like him, felt like a sneak.
She feels this now as her mother appears at the top of the balcony stairs and peers around. Franny is fully aware that if anyone in this diagram is sneaky, it is her mother, just as it was her mother who was the sneak when she barged into her bedroom as she lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and dreaming of escape. But even though Franny is now thirty-seven years old, this awareness is no match for the guilt her mother’s footsteps reflexively inspire in her.
“Sally said I might find you here,” Beatrice is saying as she strides down the aisle.
For a woman of sixty-one, Beatrice looks fabulous, in part because of the care she bestows upon herself—her weekly facials at Canyon Ranch, her biweekly trims and dye-jobs at the Hermes Salon, her daily workout at home—but also as a result of the ‘little tuck’ in Costa Rica that her new husband treated her to as a sixtieth birthday gift. Beatrice’s vanity came late in her life—about the same time Lila started needing a bra, as Wendell once pointed out.
