Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

  Then there's the matador outfit: the body-hugging black jacket covered with embroideries or jewels. Beneath it is a white blouse so lustrous that it must be silk, so lustrous that you can't help but admire the silkworms who wove their cocoons of continuous silken thread six hundred meters long and then were plunged into boiling water to stop them from piercing the cocoon and emerging as moths because that would have cut short the precious long fibers. All to make Tristána's lustrous blouse.

  Dangling from each tiny fruitlike earlobe is a single gray pearl drop. You have to wonder if oysters suffer with the irritation that creates those luminous orbs. You have to wonder how serious Tristána was about cross-dressing.

  A cummerbund encircles her tiny waist. It is dark blue, neither navy nor royal, but the best of both. Like what we hope for for our unborn children. I've always found cummerbunds uncomfortable; they get loose and sag, or else they ride up, and either way, they end up looking sloppy. It seems an odd choice for a matador, who needs to be completely comfortable in his clothes because he is engaged in a life-and-death struggle with a bull. But Tristána is not really a matador. A real matador might have his cummerbund sewn to his blouse so that it never rode up or down while he parried and thrust.

  Without a doubt it is the pants—pantalets? capris? pedal pushers?—that introduce the element of sexuality. It seems ludicrous to say they look like they could have been painted on. They are painted on. They cleave so reverentially to the shape of Tristána Llobet that the viewer (me) feels the distinction between the painted art and the three-dimensional body getting fuzzy. So much is in the pants. They are short and black and tight. They cling to her bottom, which is like the bottom of a Greek athlete. Lalo never mentioned the shapeliness of his great-aunt.

  "You haven't said anything." Lalo's face is barely three inches from mine.

  "I haven't thought of anything smart to say yet," I say. "Scratch that. She's amazing to look at."

  "Yes, we know that."

  "And she never took a real turn in the bullring?"

  "Of course not," he says. Lalo leans toward me and for a moment I imagine he wants to kiss me because the uncanny sexuality of his holy aunt has, like a Jesuit mnemonic, pricked his desire, and I am near at hand. I would not stop him. But that is not his intention.

  Lalo just keeps leaning, as if into the onrushing bull. Both thumbs lightly touch both index fingers, and then pull back in a delicate verónica. He says, "I have this theory—no, I believe this bullfight business mattered enormously. She loved it and hated it. She could not stop herself from watching. But she was horrified. She connected that single bull's death with every bloody sacrifice of every innocent creature since, well, since the Crucifixion."

  "She saw man's inhumanity, came back to Nicaragua, stopped dressing up, and set out to do good works."

  "You're simplifying," Lalo says.

  "No, I'm trying to give it a story line."

  "Except it wasn't like that. When she returned, the first thing she did was turn her portrait to face the wall."

  I say, "But she's so beautiful in the painting."

  "She hated that. She never let them turn it around while she lived."

  "I've never believed a beautiful woman who complained about how rough it is to be beautiful. All that unwanted attention."

  "She wasn't like that."

  "You were never there when she walked into a room."

  "Yes, I was. But she was very old, and I was very young."

  "Isn't it enough to have such a beautiful aunt? Why does she need to be a saint?"

  "Because she was one."

  "I think her beauty could be a problem with the Vaticanistas, Lalo. Honestly. I had no idea she was this gorgeous. Even more than Carmen."

  Napoleon of the Missing Fingers, in sopping clothes, jolts into the room, then comes to a halt. He is sucking up oxygen. He drips on the tiles.

  "Don Lalo!"

  "Sí, Napo." Lalo speaks softly. His voice is the volume control for every other voice around us.

  Napoleon tells Lalo about an accident at the beneficio. A rotten wall has given way. It's been breached, and water is pouring into the shaking room. All those hundreds of quintals of dried coffee beans in jute sacks waiting to be loaded onto the trucks that, once the roads are again passable, will drive them to the Pacific port of Corinto to be loaded onto container ships for passage through the canal and up to the port of New Orleans.

  The coffee beans will be ruined.

  But will they turn into coffee? Don't be an idiot.

  Lalo squeezes my shoulder hard between his fingers. He has incredibly strong fingers. It must be a Llobet trait.

  He lopes out of the room after Señor Bonaparte, toward rain and wind.

  "Can I go with you? I won't be a bother."

  "Next time."

  He is gone. I think he says, "Close the door when you leave." But he could just as easily have said "There are more in my sleeve" or even "Something, something before you grieve."

  So I am alone with Tía Tata. This is my chance. To stare her down? To touch the paint? If I were to touch the applied paint of any Spanish Sargent in any museum, an alarm would wail and within seconds I would be dragged off to ignominy and shame. Here I can touch all I want. I can drag my oily fingertips around the canvas seeking bumps and ridges. I can lick the painting; I can go eyeball to eyeball with Tristána. I can lie on the floor and see how she looks from that angle.

  But what's the point without Lalo?

  I need to ask myself when I first knew of his existence.

  I must have heard about him before Waldo called from DSG to tell me he was coming to stay, oh, by the way. Oh, by the way, oh, wife, while the boys and I are caving you and the dogs will be alone with my old and dear friend, so old and dear that you have never before met him.

  Is that what he said? Did he say, You remember him, my old roommate, my comrade in arms, my friend in need, my teammate and fellow drinker?

  The first time I saw him was at the VerGroot train station. I can swear to that.

  Someone else, Olga or Carmen, will swear up and down that I had absolutely met Lalo before, in Cambridge or New York, that I expressed interest in all his family history, and that this had transpired in flawless Spanish. After they say that, I will be carted away to a sanatorium for those of us who are sloppy with memory. It will be located at such a high altitude that simply getting enough oxygen becomes a daily task. There will be pamphlets all over asserting the medical benefits of breathing hard to make you remember what you should have remembered in the first place.

  When the rain comes down like this, it is as if it has rained since the dawn of time and will rain forever after. When the rain comes down like this in VerGroot, one of us makes a fire in the living room and we curl up in the sumptuously sagging chairs and read Roald Dahl or Edgar Allan Poe, and Dandy and Flirt take up the space closest to the ire, and the whole room smells like wet wool with a soupçon of canine musk. Ez and Henry play speed gin rummy. Then the rain can rain all it wants. But how often does it happen that we are all in the same room doing those things, each of us contributing to the others' safety and sanity? Not very often. Here the rain is coming down far worse than that, and I don't even know where Ezra is.

  31

  A Little Knowledge

  The story of Pelagia of Tarsus is one of those Greek romances which appear to have been originally fabricated to supply edifying fiction for the Christian public ... The stories ... are almost entirely legendary, and are confused one with another. No data are preserved ... The attempt, however, to reduce all these hagiographic fables to a recrudescence of the worship of Aphrodite is quite unreasonable.

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

  I WOULDN'T MIND EATING. But everyone seems to have something else to do. Tiny Doña Luisa, with her arms like dragonfly wings, has spent the whole day in the kitchen with Doña Odilia, listening to the voice on the radio describing the fury of the
hurricane, denouncing the rain as if it were Beelzebub personified. ¿Y los damnificados? ¿Que hacemos con los damnificados?

  Ezra is teaching Carmen every card game he knows. Mami and Tía Sofia taught me, and I taught Ezra all those card games. Maybe he learned crazy eights from Posey. Waldo is indifferent to card games, except fifty-two pickup.

  Since Ezra is with Carmen it seems unnecessary to worry about him. After all, she lives here. She knows where the kitchen is, as does Ezra by now. I do too. Ten times at least I walk past and listen to the voice on the radio rising and falling, about the damnificados this, and the damnificados that. What does the devil, or his minions, have to do with a perfectly normal hurricane?

  Graciela finds me. She slides in on poison dart frog webbed feet. Webbed feet would be lovely today. She hands me the cordless phone.

  It is Waldo, and he sounds—as they say—as if he is right next door.

  He is fine. Dandy and Flirt are fine. The house is fine. The weather is lovely. The hydrangeas are bright blue. Susie's niece from Indiana came to visit, and she broke her leg while standing still. Posey is fine. She is in the semifinals of the Maine coast seniors' table tennis tournament. She is favored three to one to win. Dick has called Waldo twice to expatiate on his newlywed libido.

  This is not information freely given. This information is extracted from Waldo, like glass splinters removed with tweezers. He does not mind giving it up; it is the process that he recoils from: all those questions, all that poking with a sterilized needle.

  "What about Henry? What's he up to? Has he discovered any more extinct creatures?"

  "Henry has moved on to human experimentation," Waldo says.

  I have to think. "On you?"

  "On himself."

  "I don't get it."

  "He read an article in the Harvard Health Letter about bedsores, which are easy to get if you absolutely don't move. If you can be completely motionless for just a few hours, the pressure on your back can squeeze shut the capillaries, and without fresh blood, the tissues start to degrade and eventually die. Hence a bedsore. Now, absent a coma, most of us move all the time, even when we're sleeping."

  "Fascinating. But what about Henry?"

  "He wants to see if he can give himself a bedsore."

  "Let me talk to him, please."

  "I can't. That would involve moving, and he's pretty determined."

  "Bring the phone to him!"

  "You don't get it—he can't move at all. Just talking to you would generate all sorts of movement. You can understand."

  "You overestimate my capacity for understanding. It's pouring rain here. Nothing is dry. Towels in the bathroom never dry. You could get a bedsore in five minutes because of all the moisture in the air." I am standing by the window, looking through a wavy pane of glass into the penumbra surrounding the courtyard, the courtyard that is a deluge, Angel Falls, Niagara Falls, Iguazú, and Victoria, all bunched together and reduced to domestic scale. The storm drains in the center and corners of the courtyard are seething and frothing.

  "But Henry's not in Nicaragua. He's here," Waldo says.

  I have to ask. "What if something terrible happens?"

  "It won't. Plus, you have to respect his research on the subject," Waldo says. "I think I can safely say that he now knows more about bedsores than anyone else in VerGroot."

  "This sounds insane," I say. "A little knowledge—"

  And then silence on the other end. Is a dangerous thing hangs unspoken between us, dangerously.

  I would swear there is no sound other than our breathing for over a minute, but I have never been able to gauge elapsed time.

  "Don't worry, Al. He'll be fine. He can write it up for a science project."

  What am I worried about? All will be well. I adore Waldo, and Waldo loves Henry. Once he told me that Henry was like Dick, only with social skills. I disagreed. I think Henry is more like Waldo in his approach to science: he wants to know things and he wants to create things, and he wants results. He is not especially patient. As for his social skills, it is too early to tell.

  I say, "You're right. He will be fine. And you love this stuff, don't you? This—this—myself as a guinea pig, my house as a laboratory."

  "I wouldn't have put it quite like that."

  "Maybe you two should come down here. When the rain stops. Or we should just come home, when it stops." Can he hear my breathing? I say, "I miss you so much."

  "Me too. Can I talk to Ez?"

  "I don't know where he is," I say.

  "How is that possible?" I will not respond to this insinuation. I will not say, Not only is it possible, it is true. I will not say, How is what possible?

  "He's with your friend Carmen, the babe. I have to assume she's trustworthy as regards ten-year-old boys."

  "Are you crazy?"

  How quickly it flees, the resolve to say nothing, nada.

  "What are you saying?" A small fist tightens around one of my inner organs.

  "Nothing, nothing," Waldo says, or chants. "I'm just pushing your buttons. Unwise at this distance."

  "Unwise is just the beginning."

  "Just tell him we miss him. Is he enjoying the saint stuff as much as you are?"

  "Who said I was enjoying it?"

  "Just an educated guess," Waldo says. "Speaking of which. Guess who called."

  "Posey?"

  "Nope. Someone I don't normally talk to."

  "Most of the world's population? I give up. Come on, Waldo! We're having a hurricane here. I'm feeling very itchy in my skin."

  On the other side of the courtyard is a santo, a life-size wooden statue of a gaunt man in a torn friar's habit. Some kind of animal crouches at his feet and looks up with adoring eyes. This is the first time I've seen this santo over there. Was it dragged out from elsewhere because of the rain and the wind? In order to watch the rain and the wind?

  Waldo says, "Your friend. The merry monk."

  "Hubert," I pronounce. "He's not a monk anymore."

  "He was worried about your well-being. Ezra's too. He knew all about the hurricane."

  "What else does he know?"

  "He asked if you had a Saint Christopher medal."

  "Jee-sus. Of course I do. I never leave home without it. Neither do you."

  "I have no idea what you're—"

  "There's one in your glove compartment. What else did he say?"

  "He said he has an inside track on the competition."

  It is possible that Waldo is making all this up.

  There is a crunch, rather a loud crunch. "Are you eating an apple?" I demand.

  "It's a cucumber. Too many seeds."

  "Just tell me what he said."

  "He has a friend in high places who knows something about somebody else's aunt, not Lalo's, who also wants to be a Nicaraguan saint. She just got a big leg up on the competition at the Vatican because she cured someone of deadly bee stings. If you get my gist."

  "This probably sucks for Lalo. What else did he say?"

  "I suggested he call you guys rather than expect me to explain. He said this other aunt, La Macarena, had better funding than poor Lalo's."

  "La Matilda."

  "It sounds fishy to me," Waldo says.

  Kerspishhhhhooompah. A watery, crashing, bellowing, head-thumping din. The telephone line goes dead. Briefly, I suspect Waldo of engineering the cutoff. I've seen him do that with Posey: quietly depress the button midsentence and then hours later pretend they were cut off by the CIA/KGB/FBI/RCA. But even Waldo could not have created the diluvial cacophony that I just heard. Rain, rain, go away, don't come back for another day, when I'm far, far away, in Rome or Marseilles.

  There is no receiver, so I pocket the dead phone and go in search of Ezra.

  No Ezra, no Carmen.

  That evening Ezra tells me a dream: he had to collect DNA samples from a bedsore, but when he approached the bedsores with his instruments and his plastic bag, there was no person. It was an aquatic lizard, like those fis
h that grow feet and walk onto land in illustrations of the march of evolution. A huge wind knocked all the trees over on the river's edge so the walking fish had to climb over them, which it found almost impossible, so Ezra and Henry climbed down from some branches and helped it. The boys couldn't carry the walking fish because it was so slippery and slimy, but they had nets with them, and Carmen was there with a red plastic pail.

  "When did you have this dream?"

  "During my siesta," Ezra says.

  "I can't believe you dreamed about bedsores," I say.

  "You always said that was the beauty of dreams."

  "What did I say?"

  "That you don't have to make them up, and you don't have to believe them."

  "I said that?"

  "I need to tell Carmen something."

  I tell him that I will kiss him good night, and then I do.

  I wasn't dreaming. I don't know what I was doing but I wasn't dreaming because it is a fact that you can fall into a dream state only once you are in the deep REM sleep and you can achieve REM sleep only after a minimum of forty-five slumbering minutes.

  It is not possible that Lalo is sitting at the edge of my bed, mere inches from not-dreaming me. So I must be dreaming. He is posing as a bedtime-story reader, and I expect a fabulous tale involving rabbits, large hats, loving parents, and cruel adversaries with speech impediments.

  "You must have been having an amazing dream," he says.

  "I wasn't dreaming," I tell him.

  "You had the aspect of a dreamer," Lalo says.

  "What are you doing here? Besides watching me not dream?"

  "I could tell you that I was looking for something. But that would not be true. This is true: I thought I heard Ezra sleepwalking and naturally I was concerned."

  "In this room?"

  I am wearing Waldo's very faded, very soft Harvard crew T-shirt. I also have faded T-shirts from MIT and Tufts and Penn, because after a race the losing team has to give its T-shirts to the winning team.

  "In his room. But he is not sleepwalking. He is engaged in catapulting." Lalo is wearing starched and ironed pale blue pajamas with dark blue piping. Brooks Brothers, it seems safe to assume.