Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

  "What was that about?"

  Lalo peers into the drenched courtyard. "It is always that way—"

  "I've never heard of a chicken chasing a person." I wish Susie were here. She would know the name of the breed and what color eggs it might lay. "My neighbor in VerGroot is getting chickens. Maybe this very minute."

  "Whenever it rains. It's either the chickens or the girls."

  I am getting antsy. I don't have Lalo's capacity to sit still. "So? The Cuban lover?"

  "He was passionate about volcanoes and we are a country of many volcanoes. Carmen met him at a party to oppose the visitations of the Fatima statue. He was also passionately anticlerical."

  "The Fatima statue? I have no idea what you are talking about." Please, please, flap your hands like pennants atop a ship's mast, shiver with delight or horror. Is this what I want, for Lalo to lose control? Isn't that what happened before?

  "There is a statue of the Virgin of Fatima, and it is a very holy and special statue, and once a year she comes to Nicaragua and all the best families vie for the honor of hosting her. They have a party in her honor."

  "A statue?"

  "As I said, a very holy statue. It was blessed by the three who had the vision at Fatima. You have heard of Fatima?"

  "Yep. So Carmen met a fellow atheist? And fell in love?"

  "She was planning to go to Volcán Monocromito that day, but something came up—something with Olga—and so she stayed behind. He went, lost his footing, slid down the scree, and was incinerated. I would think you read about it in the newspapers. It was a very big story, slightly different from the usual Nicaraguan news item but a disaster nonetheless."

  "I definitely don't know how Posey missed it. It's a gruesome way to go."

  "No worse than many of our early martyrs."

  "Did you say that to Carmen? To put it in perspective?"

  "Only to you."

  "I'm honored." That sounds wrong. Will he think me facetious? I am anything but. I want him to tell me things he tells no one else. I want nothing more than to listen to Lalo's stories and secrets.

  "Did the Cuban come before or after Waldo visited down here?"

  "After," Lalo says. "How does it matter?"

  "I don't know," I say. Because I don't. "I should probably go check on Ezra."

  "I like Ezra," Lalo says. "His brain is compartmentalized, but that is not entirely a bad thing in a young boy."

  "I don't think he's compartmentalized at all."

  "Is his brother like that? Henry?"

  "Henry is ... well, Henry is more like Waldo. At least so it seems now. Maybe next year will be different. They switch on and off, you know. Good twin, evil twin, Jekyll and Hyde, apples and oranges..." Lalo stares. I think with kindness.

  So I just go on. "Anyway. Henry is methodical. He has this laser focus. Ezra is more diffuse, he sees the bigger picture."

  "He is like his father in one way."

  "More than one, I'm sure. But Henry is more so. Or do you mean something specific?"

  "I mean Carmen. He is taken with Carmen."

  Waldo never clarified about Carmen. I am not supposed to mind, because it happened even before Providence. And I don't mind. I slept with seven men in seven countries who spoke seven different languages. But Carmen. Carmen is beautiful. Carmen is fearless, and I am anything but. And now this. Now Ezra!

  "He certainly is. I should probably go see him."

  "I will go back to the beneficio," Lalo says. And just like that he gets up. He levitates from the rocking chair and is on his way, through the downpour and beyond. I am still looking at my fingers.

  30

  The Cross-Dresser, Oil on Canvas, 65 x 501/4 In., 19-

  The text, as we possess it, has certainly been rewritten to suit the taste of later times. It contains extravagances borrowed from other hagiographical fictions.

  —Alban Butler, "St Mary," Butler's Lives of the Saints

  SOMEWHERE IN THIS HOUSE of coffee riches, bad harvests, rain that won't stop, clothes that won't dry, and delusions of sanctity, Ezra is alone with his spoon and his dream journal.

  From the veranda it is impossible to see the village. On our first day here I stood barefoot on the cool tiles and inhaled unknown flowers while Lalo pointed to the village below us. I didn't see much past the llama del bosque tree, with its flaming red flowers and its defiance.

  Now I look toward the unseeable village and squint into the stupendous rainfall and brace myself against the wind. I need to stop shivering. Waldo would have something very funny to say just now. He would make up a limerick.

  There was a gringa from VerGroot

  A scorpion landed on her foot.

  The rain was eternal

  Its noise was infernal

  How she longed to be back in VerGroot.

  It is useless. Waldo has the gift. His meter generates spontaneously, like fruit flies in rotting tomatoes. I can keep at it forever and I will still be counting syllables on my fingers.

  "I bet he has not told you about her voices."

  I jump at least a foot. It feels like a foot; it's probably an inch. I knock my shin against a low table.

  "Olga! You startled me!"

  "Carmen just said the same thing. There are a lot of you with uneasy consciences."

  "I have a finely tuned startle reflex. What voices?"

  "Tía Tata's. She heard voices telling her what to do. Saint Walburga, Saint Hedwig, even Saint Winifred."

  "He hasn't said anything. I'm sure he will. What else do we talk about?"

  "Winifred and Hedwig don't speak to each other, not even in Heaven," Olga tells me.

  "I don't understand," I say. But maybe I do. Thanks to Hubert, I know Winifred was cruelly beheaded by the aspiring Caradog, whose un-Christian lust she'd declined to gratify. Winifred did not remain beheaded. Her Uncle Beuno came along and replaced her severed head upon her shrugging shoulders. Meanwhile, poor Caradog was swallowed up by the earth, and a stream sprang up where Winifred's head had fallen. To this day, red-stained pebbles sparkle beneath the water. Hubert visited the shrine of Saint Winifred in Holywell when he was an impressionable fourteen. He dipped his fingers in the holy well, splashed water on his face, and was cured of his adolescent acne. All I know of Hedwig is she walked though Silesia with bare bloody feet, carrying her silken shoes.

  "Winifred speaks only Welsh. Hedwig speaks Polish and considers Winifred to be a legend—pure fiction."

  I understand even less. "Lalo hasn't said a word."

  "That doesn't surprise me," Olga says. Her skirt is wrapped around her many times. Today I can see how bony she is. "He hasn't decided yet whether hearing voices is a good thing or a bad thing."

  "Which is it?"

  "Mostly, it's annoying. I hear voices all the time. Sometimes they make perfect sense. Other times they just tell terrible jokes and say nasty things about people. It can be hard to keep a straight face."

  "I had no idea," I say.

  "I'm a diagnosed schizophrenic, after all. Voices pretty much come with the territory. ¡Que barbaridad?" Olga says. I think she is enjoying this. "More of you hear voices than will admit to it. I just admit to hearing them. I admit to everything."

  "I had no idea."

  "So you say."

  "You seem pretty well to me," I say. When there are no animal-human mishaps to occupy her, Posey has been known to share tales of schizophrenics who stop taking their meds and slaughter their girlfriends, mothers. Beloved pets, whoever. In other words, anything is possible.

  "I am the bane of my family. The black sheep. I am an embarrassment and a blot."

  "That seems a little extreme."

  She grips my forearm between her elegant bony fingers, stronger than hemostats, whiter than new-fallen snow. "What do you know about extreme?" she demands. Droplets of saliva extrude from the corners of her lips. "Here you are, frightened of the rain. Don't look at the ground! Your skin shrinks from the shadow of a puddle. If you think Lalo is in love wi
th Tía Tata, you are wrong. She is the not the one for him. She is a distraction."

  "A distraction? But he's devoted."

  "You haven't even seen the painting yet, have you?"

  "No."

  "I never look at the painting," Olga says.

  "We just haven't gotten around to it."

  "Do you have any idea what happened when Waldo was here, when they were in college, when they were so very young and eager and dangerously handsome? Any idea at all?"

  Where is everyone else? Where, oh, where is Ezra?

  "I didn't know Waldo back then. That was before, before us."

  Olga's face closes in on mine. "So you exist without history, without a past? I find that ridiculous. ¡Que barbaridad!"

  I step back. I am already against the wall. "Waldo told me Abelardo had beautiful sisters, and he wished he had a beautiful sister as well. To even things out." My neck feels very stiff. Gunnar Sigerson once explained to me that people with mental illness don't understand about personal space, about the impermeable bubbles we invisibly install around our bodies.

  "I should probably go find Ezra." I am up against the wall like a dead fly.

  She doesn't move. "Did you hear that the rescue teams can't even get into the airport? You were so lucky to arrive when you did. You and Ezra. Otherwise you might have had to return to Miami, or worse."

  "And miss this hurricane?" I ask.

  "Don't you ever listen to weather reports up there?" Is she genuinely perplexed? Do I have to defend my weather channel-surfing habits?

  "Of course we do. But Nicaragua doesn't figure largely in our weather reports. If you can believe that."

  "I know it for a fact," she says. "A fact, a fact, a fact."

  "Please show me your aunt's portrait," I say to Lalo, I ask, plead, implore. Demand?

  "We'll have to shut down the beneficio for the duration. It's not the worst thing. It's not as if anyone can pick coffee in this rain. But the wind is the worst thing. They say it is getting to a hundred and fifty miles per hour on the coast. ¡Que barbaridad!"

  "What coast?" Lalo has returned from the beneficio soaked to the skin, slick as an otter. In his entire body the only dry area appears to be his eyelashes. They constitute a separate ecosystem.

  Hubert told me there are places on the coast of Wales that, because of the Gulf Stream, have a tropical microclimate. There are Welsh gardens that share a latitude with the frozen Hudson Bay and Siberian gulags, and yet palm trees, datura, heliconia, and agapanthus grow there, and thrive. Hubert is working on a thesis relating Wales's tropical flora with the golden age of Welsh miracles, the sixth century, when the place was chock-full of holy hermits, preachers, animal lovers, and dowsers (viz. Beuno, Winifred, Melangell, Dweywen, Illtyd, Cadoc, Cybi, David, and Seiriol, for starters).

  When Lalo was running amok in the snow in his Brooks Brothers pajamas, did some part of him stay warm? Why doesn't he mind the rain-rain-go-away-come-again-some-other-day as much as I do?

  I must be staring. Lalo says, "The Atlantic. All the hurricanes come from the east."

  "I should have known that."

  "Not necessarily. Here all weather is personal and immediate. Life or death," he says.

  Does he remember the blizzard at all? What does he remember? Does he remember the dangerous umbles? COLD?

  "You are thinking of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes. But the rain too is life or death. We are farmers here and too little rain can be terrible, but too much rain can be disastrous."

  "Too much rain can certainly be disastrous. I'm terrible with rain. A failure. I can't tell you how many times a day I think about our tumble dryer."

  Lalo says, "Perhaps you don't know your own Inner Resources."

  "My Inner Resources are all outer," I tell him. "Because I am so very damp. And I'm not even outside."

  "Tonight we will eat well and drink fine Argentine malbec, and you will be fine."

  "I haven't seen your aunt's portrait yet," I say.

  "The light is terrible."

  "I don't care. I'd just feel better if I could see it, and then we can look again when the sun is out."

  He takes hold of my elbow in a new gesture. New to me. "But first I must bring a message to my mother. Will you wait right here? Shall I tell Graciela to bring you a cafécito?"

  I drink not one but three cafécitos while Lalo is off wherever he is with tiny, bird-boned Doña Luisa. I am sitting in the large living room. It is bigger than the entire ground floor of our house in VerGroot and I wish I could find a secret niche to curl up in. I am not agoraphobic or claustrophobic or any phobic at all, but here I am a shipwreck. Graciela comes in on marmoset feet bearing a cafécito on a tray. She departs, on tapir feet, and then returns with another cafécito at the exact instant I drain the coffee from the previous cup. I smile at her warmly. I want her to know I appreciate her attentions and that I am far from taking them for granted. I hear Ezra and Carmen in another room, playing cards, or an ancient game played with smooth totemic rocks. They will never tell me.

  Lalo's been gone for a donkey's age. And then he appears.

  "Do you have many vegetarians here?" Suddenly, I need to know this.

  Lalo does this strange thing where his body takes on the shape we are speaking of, in this case, edible meat. His eyes enlarge and become bovine. The famous eyelashes flutter like those of a contented Belted Galloway. I don't believe I have perceived this before, seen the transformation of Lalo into a chicken or a melon; perhaps it is a phenomenon triggered by our crossing into the tropical latitudes. All I know is that Lalo as food triggers hunger. A Lalo transmogrified rearranges my cells into a gazillion arrows pointing straight in his direction. Suddenly I crave steak, and not just steak but rare steak, steak tartare, the unheated flesh of mad Nicaraguan cows.

  "Not by choice. Our churrasco is second only to Argentina's."

  "I didn't eat meat for almost ten years," I say. "When I was pregnant with Henry I craved sardines. Thank God for sardines."

  "Waldo used to keep tins of sardines at Quincy House. They were his favorite. He ate them with popcorn and beer." He is doing it again. His arms press tightly to his sides and he is making himself as small as possible in order to fit inside a flat rectangular tin. A tin with a Norwegian sailor on its wrapping.

  "He never told me," I say. For nine months I carried Henry and never once did Waldo mention his own fondness for sardines.

  "We made him sit by an open window when he ate them. Even in the winter. Even in snowstorms."

  (I have never drunk so much coffee in my life, strong coffee in little cups. I have never drunk coffee in sight of the trees that grew the coffee beans. If you told me Nicaraguan coffee had aphrodisiac properties, I might not argue with you.)

  "I will tell Doña Odilia to make churrasco, and soon. Her marinade is so good, and so famous, that thieves once broke into the kitchen in a pathetic attempt to steal the recipe. As if she had a recipe! Fifty years ago half this farm was cattle. Now we just keep a few hundred head. Would you like to see them?"

  "I think we should see the painting of your aunt."

  "There are just one or two things you should know first. I do not exactly recall what I told you, during our pleasant conversations in VerGroot."

  "Nothing. You told me nothing," I say. "It was Carmen who told me."

  Have I made someone happy today? Oh, strange and wondrous phenomenon. Lalo is delighted. "That explains it! Now I understand! I'm not crazy after all!" And then he hugs me. Just like that. After all this, after madness and rain and longing for sainthood, his long arms go around me. They could go around me almost twice. It lasts for just seconds. If it lasted longer I might be able to feel dry.

  "She probably told you Tía Tata was so beautiful that Sorolla went insane with love, and never painted properly again."

  "No."

  "She probably told you that Tía Tata had seen Julito Ernesto Julio San Felipe kill six bulls successively in Madrid and conceived a pas
sion for him and that was why she chose to be painted as a matador."

  "No!"

  "She probably told you how Sorolla spent a winter painting portraits in Buffalo, New York, where they have the lake effect, which means they have more snow there than anywhere else in all of America, and that he spent no less than four hours a day weeping in a hot bath, looking at watercolors of the rainforest, and that was the only reason he did not go completely mad."

  "No! Lalo! None of that. Please stop."

  He sits down on one of the automotive sofas. He rests his elbows at the very tips of his thighs before they turn into knees. "I think I should have a cafécito," he says. "And you as well."

  "I've had plenty of coffee. I have a gringo stomach."

  Lalo says, "You are not as gringa as you think you are. Your mother was Spanish. My ancestors were Spanish. We are Iberians together."

  Graciela slides in on capybara feet. Lalo drinks his cafécito in one delicate gulp.

  With the palms of my hands I press my damp throbbing temples. Of course it is the rain and the humidity. I always get these humidity headaches in the summer in VerGroot.

  "Are you ill?"

  "No," I say. "Will you take me to see the picture?"

  "Follow me."

  I follow him along the veranda, past a wooden santo I don't recognize, past the open doors of the library. It must be the library. There are bookshelves from floor to ceiling and most of them are filled with books.

  The next door is shut, and smaller. Lalo opens it. The painting is leaning against the far wall, and if it is life-size, then Tristána Llobet was about my height. But beautiful. You'd have to see it to understand. Even with that severe expression of someone about to kill or be killed, she is beautiful. The painting is beautiful. She is so long and graceful that you can't help but think of gazelles or greyhounds, although nowadays when I think of greyhounds it is as the donors for Dandy's blood transfusions.

  She is standing sideways on the raked dirt of a bullring. Her gaze is directed out of the picture and out of the bullring.