We were on the crest of a hill. In the valley below lay Cuernavaca, the City of Eternal Spring instead of eternal pollution. The sky was blue, not the grey haze of Mexico City, and the space above the car hood shimmered in the heat. We could actually see the volcano el Popo, which José said would be visible from Mexico City too if we ever had a day without smog. Together he called el Popo and the dormant volcano beside it the Sleeping Woman, said each one of the four peaks was named after a part of her body. I tried to focus on the volcanoes, breathe in clean air, and block my ears to sick-making heaves. José was right, the four mountain peaks did look like a woman asleep.
In art, to anticipate is to lose the truth of the movement, the gesture, the landscape, all the telling details. I had anticipated too long and too hard this trip, seeing my mother in a home I’d never known, imagining the three women of our family finally joining forces to track down a missing father and husband in his homeland. Now, instead, I concentrated on the distant volcano.
Faith stopped heaving. Her head — clammy not hot — lay heavy on my hand. I tried to imagine what could have brought this on, whether Faith said anything or gave any sign before her strangled plea for José to pull over.
José was into what must be his highway driving mode. Much more relaxing than his kamikaze city style. Faith hadn’t been taking part in our conversation. I thought she’d dozed off in the back seat. It was as though José and I were alone in the car.
“When did you last see your parents?” I asked as we drove.
“My mother. My father died two years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
José shrugged. “We weren’t that close.” The tone of his voice seemed to contradict his shrug. I waited.
José glanced over, put both hands on the wheel. “It felt like I spent most of his last few years trying to connect. The grown son he’d imagined would have stayed close to home, worked the land with him or, at the most, got a job in one of the water-bottling factories nearby. That son wasn’t me. He didn’t get it, what I was doing, who I am, what I’d become. We were both disappointed all the time. We quit trying. It got so I started finding excuses to stay in the city. Then he died. At least I made it back before the end. Anyway, this is one of the few holidays my mother insists on me driving down for.” A pause. “Families, huh.”
I watched the way he crossed one hand over the other as he turned the wheel. Switched from one topic to the next. “I guess I’d better explain how you and Faith can get around Cuernavaca. You’ll be minus a chauffeur once I’ve gone.”
I got the message. The subject of families was closed.
“It’s easy to get around the city, just hop a bus, they call them rutas, for two pesos and you’ll be able to go just about anywhere. Out to the San Antonio hacienda that Cortés built. Or to Tepoztlán, you’ll have to go there, just outside Cuernavaca. A great hike to the top to a tiny pyramid that marks a sacred site. Worshippers go up there to watch the sun rise and pray for the gods’ intervention.”
“People still believe in all that?”
José looked over at me, even slowed down a little. “Well, yeah. Why not? What do you believe in?”
That was when Faith called out, “You’ve got to pull over. I’m going to be sick.” I didn’t have time to say what I believed. Even less to decide if I did.
Thanks to an old sink behind a gas station, Faith was sort of cleaned up by the time we reached Mom’s place. The wrought-iron gate where José let us off led to the villa where her employers and landlords must live, the ones who ran the language school she worked in. The swimming pool, bougainvillea, mango, and banana trees we glimpsed from the road must belong to them as well. As must the broken Coke bottles glued to the top of the gate and along the fence, their jagged edges forming a bizarre frame.
She appeared in the door of a two-storey apartment block down the driveway from the villa, greying hair pulled back into a sloppy bun, loose strands escaping around her face. I had a flashback: Mom standing in more or less the same position at the foot of another hill in Montreal, one covered in snow.
I waved. She smiled, waved back, started up the drive. Her breasts were heavier now than they were those many years ago, but her waist still indented slightly above generous hips — just like Faith’s. Compared to the two of them and Papi, I’d always been out of place. Skinny, curveless me.
“I was starting to get worried,” she called out to us. “You’re late.”
I certainly wouldn’t be the one to tell her why. Mom tended to imagine the worst ever since Papi disappeared.
The day before Papi left, Mom stood at the bottom of Mont-Royal, just like she stood at the foot of this rise, while the three of us — Papi, Faith, and I — trudged to the top above Beaver Lake dragging the crazy carpet behind. Once there, Papi lay stomach down — mouth down as the Mexicans say — toes digging into the snow, with Faith boca abajo on him because she was the oldest and the biggest and me on top of the two of them. In one motion, Papi pushed off.
Papi was a big man, thick bones, solid muscle, with a bit of a paunch. Faith took after him, except for the paunch. The two of them like two sturdy cushions under my bony frame, softening the bumps and hollows we hit. It never got that good again.
That day, ten years ago — me fourteen, Faith sixteen — we must have looked bizarre, too old for kids’ games but shooting down the hill anyway. Racing after a childhood.
Faith gave a gasp on the first bump as my body floated up and slammed back into hers. Wind chomped at the top of my head and along my back. Crystals of snow flew up from the toboggan runners and burnt my tongue.
That time, Papi didn’t whoop and sing, or even gasp and grunt. Just kept his head to the sled as we hurtled down. Like he was trapped between the lash of wind, the crunch of snow, and his daughters’ weight.
I saw the approaching sled.
I tried to shout, but my voice — high and breathy at the best of times — was swallowed by the wind.
Our path veered. We headed for the trees along the sides, on target for the spear of a branch. I tucked my chin, closed my eyes, and felt the scratch of a twig on my cheek.
I raised my head and saw we were headed straight down the hill now, on a collision course with Mom. She waved, hair and scarf whipped by wind, her body standing firm, smiling as we plummeted down. God, couldn’t she see? The ride from hell, and she did nothing but smile. No wonder she named us Faith and Hope; she wasn’t capable of imagining anything else.
At the last minute, Papi put his head up, threw his arm to the side, and changed the course of our run. Mom kept waving and smiling, pretending everything was all right.
The next day Papi left. Without saying a word. Then or now.
They say Mont-Royal is a volcano, supposedly extinct. But I swear I have felt its rumblings ever since.
Papi’s leaving was as physical as a sled broadsiding Mom where she stood. From out of nowhere, she said. When she could have seen it coming. So could I if I’d only read the last poems he’d typed: “The Forgotten Lines,” “Intimacy Untold,” “Animal of Despair.” The words he never spoke that I might have heard if I’d read them in time. He painted word pictures, now I tried to bring them to life with a graphite pencil or a brush. Both of us looking for what could have been, what wasn’t, and the wide spaces in between.
So many words still left unspoken. As many after his departure as before, if not more. Meaningless words were the only ones uttered, not the words that mattered most. Why did he go? Where had he gone? For how long?
The