Travel Writing

by Peter Ferry

  I held up my glass. “Would you like another one of these?”

  “And I never have more than one nightcap. See, I’m a real stick-in-the-mud.”

  We walked back. She was standing at the top of the steps with Cooper about to open the door, and I was standing at the bottom when I called her name. “Carolyn.”

  “Yes?”

  “May I write you?”

  She thought about that for a moment. “Yes,” she said.

  Book Two

  …

  Some Time Later, with a Flashback and a Contemporary Interlude

  1

  …

  Travel Writing

  Dateline: San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

  by Pete Ferry

  IT WAS LYDIA’S first time in Mexico. We were quite young. My Spanish was a bit rusty, and she didn’t speak any yet. I had just gotten my first travel-writing assignments, and I was anxious to get going, but all Lydia wanted to do was hang around San Miguel de Allende.

  Not that there is anything wrong with San Miguel de Allende. It is a lovely place, really, one of a handful of towns scattered across Mexico that have been declared national monuments in their entireties and preserved because of their colonial character. That means a cathedral, narrow cobblestone streets, plazas and bandstands, arcades and tile roofs, a colorful town market, adobe walls over which orange and bright purple bougainvilleas crawl and drape, and tantalizing glimpses from the street through a door just closing or one left ajar of private inner spaces, of courtyards, fountains, flowers, secret trees, and hanging baskets of green, blue, and yellow birds.

  Maybe it is because San Miguel is so lovely a place or that it has an excellent art school and a couple of little language schools that there are just a few too many Americans around. Enough so that the waiters all speak English, that there’s an English-language bookstore on the main plaza, a good pizza place one block from it and, depressingly, a subdivision just outside of town that is occupied almost exclusively by retired gringos.

  Of course, as a first timer, it was all of this minus the subdivision that Lydia liked, but as a “professional travel writer,” it was all of this especially the subdivision that I found embarrassing. I wanted to go somewhere where I could use my bad Spanish and good phrase-book, where they didn’t have Cobb salad on every menu, and where they didn’t take American Express. Instead we ate at Mama Mia’s three nights running because the pizza was good and also cheap, which I used as a justification because neither of us had much money. Besides, we liked the waitstaff, which was young, casual, irreverent, and after nine there was live music on the tiny stage in the open courtyard. But three nights was enough. I wanted to leave the next day. Lydia wanted to stay through the weekend to see the guitarist we saw the first night. We quarreled and compromised; we’d stay Friday night and leave early Saturday morning.

  In the meantime I spent a day driving over the mountain to visit Guanajuato, the old silver-mining capital of the region full of stately nineteenth-century government and university buildings and built quite dramatically in a narrow, winding canyon. I saw no other Americans, spoke Spanish all day long, and drove home feeling mollified and self-righteous.

  Strangely, Lydia felt exactly the same; she had explored the part of San Miguel on the hillside above the center and found the little bullring I had searched for in vain, then spent the afternoon in the studios of the Instituto Allende chatting with other painters. We were each a little smug over our pizza that night, and I think we were both wondering just how much we needed each other. The courtyard at Mama Mia’s began to fill up, and we turned our chairs toward the stage. Just before nine, five Mexican men crowded into the table next to us. One of them was a big guy with broad shoulders, a bushy mustache, and a big white smile. They talked in loud Spanish. They were wearing cowboy hats and boots, new blue jeans, and brightly colored shirts with snaps rather than buttons. They seemed like farmers out on the town, but they had more money than I expected farmers to have, and they were out of place in a crowd of tourists and urban Mexicans. The big guy stepped on Lydia’s foot coming back to the table and apologized in English. She made her stock joke about having two of them, and he laughed appreciatively.

  The guitarist came out and then a singer. She was the reason for the crowd; she was very good and sang love songs and ballads in both Spanish and English. A few people got up to slow-dance. We were delivered a pitcher of sangria compliments, it turns out, of the big guy. I guessed that was where he went. This was all quite awkward because he wasn’t sitting across the room, but immediately beside us, and there was nothing to do but grin, nod, clink glasses and toast each other. Still, we’d already had a few drinks, drinking at six thousand feet is problematic to begin with, and Lydia seemed a bit tipsy. I tried to catch her eye, but couldn’t. Then when the musicians took a break, the Mexicans engaged us. Where were we from? What were we doing in central Mexico? Did we like it here?

  Lydia was in her element, and I had fun watching her. She had a brand of gay repartee and easy banter tailor-made for this situation. Pretty soon she had all five laughing, even the two who clearly didn’t speak much English. I was now aware of a little guy in addition to the big guy. He may have been the big guy’s sidekick or it may have been the other way around. At any rate, they were a tag team; they had lots of eye contact, sidebars, and inside jokes.

  There was more music, and at the next break I offered to share the pitcher of sangria the big guy bought us and was relieved when the Mexicans accepted; but when I came back from the bathroom, there was another pitcher on the table, and when I tried to beg off using the elevation as a reason, I saw the big guy’s eyes were not on me but on Lydia’s face next to me, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that she was mouthing something to him. Okay, I got it. There had clearly been a conversation in my absence, and I was now an unwitting player in one of the pocket dramas Lydia regularly produced. This one was called “Pete the prig vs. Lydia the free spirit,” and I knew the only way out of it was not to get in it, so I shut up, but it may already have been too late. Then a little later I heard the big guy say to the little guy, “No lleva sostén.” She’s not wearing a bra.

  The little guy answered, “Tal vez tampoco lleva las bragas.” Maybe she’s not wearing panties, either.

  I said, “Las lleva.” Yes, she is. Then in English I said, “I watched her put them on,” and smiled.

  There was an awkward silence. Then the big guy laughed loudly and slapped my back. “You speak Spanish, my friend!”

  “Un poco.”

  “Please do not take offense. It is just that your wife is a very pretty girl.”

  “She’s not my wife,” I said.

  “Then your fiancée . . .”

  “She’s not that, either.”

  “Your friend?” asked the little guy.

  “I guess we haven’t figured out what we are. We’re working on that. Right now we’re just traveling companions.”

  “Then you won’t mind if I ask her to dance?” asked the big guy.

  “Of course not.”

  He enfolded her in his arms. He was very large and she was very small. Back at the tables (they had been pushed together), he talked earnestly to her about something while tapping her forearm with his very large index finger. The little guy was sitting on the other side of Lydia, his arm draped across the back of her chair. I leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Have you ever gone to bed with a Mexican?”

  She laughed. “Not yet.”

  “Have you ever gone to bed with five?” I asked.

  She laughed again. “Oh stop it!”

  I gave up. I turned back to the stage. There was more music, more wine, more dancing. Things got a little blurred for me. Then the guitarist was putting his instrument back in its case, the waiters were putting chairs up on the tables, and the little guy had sat down beside me to say, “My friend, we would like you and Lydia to be our guests. There is a wonderful cantina outside of town—”

&nbs
p; “What’s it called?” I asked.

  “It’s called La Casa del Fuego. . . .”

  “It’s a brothel,” I said. “I read about it.”

  He dipped his head once. “There are women there, yes, but it is many things. It is also a restaurant and a nightclub and a casino, and it’s open all night.”

  “No, thank you. We have to get an early start tomorrow.”

  “Oh come on.” Lydia was suddenly sitting where the little man had been. “This sounds like fun.”

  “You promised,” I said. “It’s already one o’clock and I want to be in Oaxaca by tomorrow night.”

  “Come on, Pete, we’re on vacation.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “I’m not getting in a car with a bunch of drunken Mexicans I don’t know.”

  “Is that it? Is it that they’re Mexicans?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why did you say that?” Now we were standing on the sidewalk in front of Mama Mia’s and the Mexicans were waiting for us down the block.

  “Because we’re in Mexico, for Chrissake. If we were in Albania, I’d have said ‘Albanians.’” I knew that sounded bad as soon as I said it.

  “And if we were in Columbus, you’d say ‘drunken Ohioans’?” She was laughing at me. “Sure you would.” She turned away.

  “Lydia, where are you going?”

  “I told you; I wanna see this cantina. I’m going with them.”

  I caught her elbow. “I can’t let you do that.” At that elevation, at that hour, at that level of inebriation, it was the wrong thing to say, and I knew it.

  “You what?’”

  “Nothing.”

  “You can’t let me do it? You can’t stop me from doing it. Watch.” She turned and walked loosely if unsteadily toward the men. One of them was watching her breasts. She hooked her arms through two of theirs, and they all went down the middle of the street and got into a big white pickup truck. Its lights came on, and it drove away from me. I could hear ranchero music blasting from it. The truck went around a turnabout and came back toward me, the music filling the empty street. Three of the men stood in the bed leaning on the cab. I could see the little guy was driving and I could see the big guy was riding shotgun. As the truck passed me picking up speed, I could see Lydia sitting between them, her small, round, alabaster face lighted momentarily by the streetlight, her eyes fixed straight ahead.

  2

  …

  The Doctor

  I REALIZED ONE summer day that I was spending entirely too much time sitting at my desk by the window in my room, and I got up early to cross the plaza with Art and eat a good breakfast in the sidewalk café beneath the arcades. I even bought the English-language paper, hoping to find out how the Cubs were doing. In it beneath a heading that read, “Whereabouts—Please contact the American Embassy,” halfway down a long list of names, I found mine. It surprised me. Was I missing? I tried to remember the last time I had talked to or even written anyone at home except Carolyn; it seemed as if it had been days, but it had been weeks, many weeks. Actually, I hadn’t called home since I’d left San Miguel and come here. Later I put some pesos in the beggar’s tin.

  The beggar had a lot to do with why I didn’t leave my room often: the beggar, the fruit cart, and my work. Despite the steepness of the hill, the stones in the street were so large and irregular that there was little danger of the fruit cart rolling away. The beggar sat behind the fruit cart in the shelter of a doorway with a rusted sardine tin beside him. He looked like a pile of refuse that the street sweeper was sure to come back for. The only part of his anatomy that you could pick out from his colorless heap was his face, featureless and organless now, looking like a swollen, misshapen fist. When you dropped a coin into the tin, the beggar scrambled to recover it and then waved it impatiently, almost frantically, above his head until the fruit-cart man came to replace it with a banana, an orange, a slice of melon, a few nuts, a mango, a piece of papaya, a tangerine or a slice of coconut with a streak of hot sauce across it. The beggar ate with the same impatience, clutching and gulping each morsel like a chipmunk, and when it was gone, waited for more footsteps, another coin, more food. I didn’t like the beggar much, but he fascinated me. I didn’t even pity him because he was just too far removed from the whole of my experience, but I had come to realize lately I envied him a little. I’d been tempted several times to drop a few hundred pesos in that tin of his and watch the fruit-cart man dump his entire inventory on the beggar’s head. Perhaps it was his table manners that offended me so.

  Late in the day after the rain, the high-plateau sun beyond my roof shined down into the street onto the fruit cart and reduced everything for a few minutes to color, a few colors, insistent primary colors like a child’s finger painting. Early in the morning before the beggar came, even before the fruit cart came, a woman carrying a pan of water opened a door in the wall and washed yesterday’s peels and rinds and shells into the gutter.

  We all need our monsters—that much is certain—and sometimes they need each other; neither Saddam Hussein nor George Bush was very interesting all alone. The same is true of Mr. Claggart and Billy Budd, or should that pairing be Mr. Claggart and Captain Vere? I think so. As for everyone’s favorite monster, Adolf Hitler’s greatest contribution to destruction in our time wasn’t a worldwide war or the murder of twelve million, but providing the rest of us with a model of absolute evil just when we had wisely begun to doubt its existence. Since 1945, God only knows how many lives have been given and taken in the name of morality; certainly righteousness is the greatest destructive force on the planet today.

  I saw Albert Decarre six times as a patient in the months after I got home from Mexico, though I’d intended to see him only once. The first time I told him I was haunted by something that I had seen and something that I knew, but we didn’t discuss either of those things until the last time I saw him. What we did talk about was my family, the love my parents shared for forty-one years, and the guilt I felt for hurting Lydia.

  “Can you tell me about that relationship?”

  I told him that it had everything a relationship is supposed to have except something neither of us was ever quite able to define, but both of us knew was missing.

  He took notes. “The thing that was missing. Did you see it in your parents’ relationship?”

  “I suppose. I think it was like glue, something that bonded them, some absolute commitment, the ‘in sickness and health, for richer for poorer, for better for worse’ part. That wasn’t there. I always knew that something would happen, and we wouldn’t be strong enough to survive it, and we’d come apart. And we did.”

  I should tell you that despite myself, I liked Albert Decarre. He was intelligent, empathetic, thoughtful, helpful, troubled, and world-weary. His face was deeply lined and his eyes sunken, things that had not shown up in his photograph. He carried sadness with him. He was also quite elegant; that’s the only word for it. He was slim, graceful, and soft-spoken. His clothes fit perfectly. His hair fell just so. At the same time, he always seemed to be on the very verge of something you didn’t want to be the cause of. Within minutes of meeting him, I knew exactly why Jeanette Landrow had been afraid of hurting him.

  My sessions with Albert Decarre were really conversations; if he was thoughtful and soft-spoken, he was not reticent. He listened well but he also spoke well, and we often built on each other’s ideas, and we sometimes came to important conclusions. This happened at least twice.

  But if I liked Albert Decarre in the beginning, I did not trust him. I knew as well as anyone that Lucifer can be beguiling. I never forgot that his ease, charm, and apparent confidentiality (he could be surprisingly forthcoming) were all tricks that had seduced others and could seduce me, too. I came to realize, however, that there was a difference between them and me: If he was tricking me, I was also tricking him. Sometimes I sat there watching him as he recrossed his legs and talked, or absentmindedly stroked his chin and talked, and I would h
ave to repress a smile; I was the safe that was about to fall on his head, the car that was about to veer across the centerline into his lane. There were even times when the satisfaction I felt was tinged with some feeling for him; I was, after all, going to destroy him, and anyone—even a bad man—who is about to meet his fate can enlist our sympathy. I came to think of this as a twist on the Stockholm syndrome; I was the captor and I was beginning to identify with him, the captive; of course, he didn’t know he was a captive at all. Later my identification would become different and stronger.

  Most of the conversations we had were about love, the nature of love. One of the important conclusions we reached—and I think it fair to say we reached it together—was that just because one doesn’t love another anymore doesn’t mean that he or she never did, that the death of love is as natural a phenomenon as the birth or existence of love, and that love doesn’t have to commit suicide or be murdered; it can die naturally, accidentally or even incidentally. It can die even when we don’t want it to, just like a person. I was naturally thinking of Lydia, Lisa, and Carolyn when we talked about this stuff. As I watched Decarre, I wondered who he was thinking of.

  Another thing Decarre said that I tried to apply to both of us was, “The hardest truth of all is that sometimes in this life you must hurt other people. Not that you do or can, but that you must.” He compared these occasions on a personal level to earthquakes, forest fires, and natural selection on a global one. He said that they are necessary—if painful—adjustments for the greater good and to avoid them is to invite imbalance and worse. It may surprise you to know that as he said these things, I didn’t sense that he was justifying or rationalizing, so much as realizing. Naturally I thought about myself and Lydia, and I thought about Albert and Lisa, and then I thought about him and me. And that is when my identification with him truly crystallized because I suddenly knew that I had to do what I was about to do, exactly because he had had to do what he had done. Any doubt I may have had was erased. He and I were alike; we were both beset by lamentable compulsion. I scheduled my final session with him and left.