“Where is your husband?” I asked, when we were back in the living room.
“If you mean Andreas’s father, I haven’t a clue.”
Embarrassed, I gazed at the blank monitor of the television screen. I am not a sentimental man, but I could think only of the sleeping child with his thick hair like mine. I wondered if he was only pretending to sleep, as I so often did as a boy.
Rita had laid out a row of snacks, some sort of pâté and crackers, smoked oysters. But I was not hungry at all. Fatigue had cloaked my whole body now, and the constant search for English words and meanings had left my mouth dry and exhausted.
I pulled out a cigarette: at last, the breath I’d been waiting for.
“Sorry Rita said. “Not in here.”
I stared at her.
“But you can take it out on the balcony.”
She followed me there, showing me first how the latch on the glass door worked, how I must slide the bar across. Two chairs and a small plastic table were set up on the tiny cement shelf overlooking nothing, just an alley, the air still damp. I lit up, then sat on one of the chairs and immediately skidded forward on the damp webbing.
Rita must have imagined us sitting out here, because there was a small bowl of fresh pretzels on the table and a coaster for the drink I didn’t have. Across the alley was another walk-up, a mirror of the building I was now in. The glow from the cigarette seemed significant, a tiny bright light I’d brought with me and kindled to life with my breathing.
Rita sat in the other chair and propped one leg up on the railing. “You must be tired.”
“Yes I nodded with heavy eyes. “I will sleep very soon.” Did she look disappointed? “You’ll meet the others tomorrow she said, drilling her fingers on the side of her chair. “Syd Baskin is president of CAFE. There have been so many people involved with this project.”
It took me a moment to realize that “this project” was me.
I exhaled, lowered my lids, but not too much. Could I detect the smell of the sea in the air? At home the sea has a different spicing, blended with the smell of food from street venders. Why couldn’t I relax after the long journey? Instead I was popping nervous energy inside the exhaustion.
“You don’t look like your photograph she said gently.
“I have not been eating well.”
“Of course.”
When I tilted my head and blew out the cigarette smoke, I felt her watching. This was the arrival of the exiled poet. Because of his time in jail he would tire easily, not be able to process the new sensations, and like a blind man who is suddenly given sight, he is overwhelmed. Did she not say she was a dancer? Then I was caught in her choreography, and glad of it. Even my fingers seemed important as they tugged the cigarette out of my mouth.
“Do you know any of your poetry by heart?”
I felt my ass slip down the webbed chair.
“By heart?”
“By memory.”
“Yes, of course.”
Perhaps she was right: the poet must play himself before he sleeps. And so I pulled out my modest volume, Insomnio, from the jacket pocket and handed it to her.
“Page five.”
She nodded solemnly and located the work, a narrative poem about the mariners who founded Santa Clara and began the cycle of corruption. I recited the full six stanzas, my voice low and whispery, punctuated by the dripping drainpipes and passing traffic. Rita held the book in her lap but didn’t look once at it: she seemed hypnotized by the motion of my lips.
Was she pondering the miracle that had brought me here to her small balcony on this rainy Vancouver evening? Maybe she’d guessed it would be like this, my voice thin and fragile, like the cheap paper of my book.
When I had finished I said in the same voice, as if we were still inside the poem, “And now I must sleep.”
I lay on the small bed, an X-Men quilt pressed over my body, surrounded by the noises of Andreas’s menagerie: gerbils snuffling about their cage and goldfish darting between the folds of their aquatic world. If I opened my eyes I could watch the shadowy movements of a mobile, cut-out reptiles painted a fluorescent green. If I breathed in I could smell the woody nest of the small brown desert rats. The room bristled with animal life and it seemed possible that I would never sleep again. My mind was speeding crazily. I was buckled inside this cramped apartment when I wanted to roam the city streets and find out where I was. The new life was just out of reach, a tantalizing metre or two away, while I was trapped by stucco walls. The gerbil raced crazily on the rungs of his exercise wheel, wood chips flying, his small body brimming with nocturnal energy.
Why does it matter if it’s four o’clock or five o’clock to the prisoner? The cell is like a sick room, where days are measured by the arrival of a nurse to take your temperature, or the regular howl of a fellow patient as dawn breaks.
I needed to create the image of a clock, of a world which ran by time and breathed time, a world which still existed. As a child in school we used to cut out cardboard hands and pin them on our scruffy hand-drawn clocks.
“At what hour do you eat lunch?” the teacher asked, and we dutifully rotated the hands to point at the correct numbers. We could lie. We could correct time, and even shoot the hands backward. We could even, like the fat boy we all called Bimmi, crunch up the hands and stuff them in our mouths.
In Santa Clara I was lucky enough to have a cellar window that aimed onto the street. Why didn’t I cry out? Because my prison was actually (as Marta never hesitated to point out) a safe house, and I dared not attract attention. A blind man went for bread every morning, tapping his cane along the cobblestone. Perhaps he was a bit mad, for he would mutter profanities and become furious if the landscape changed in any way. One time the waiter from the tiny café next door dragged his sandwich board a foot further into the walkway, and the blind man stumbled against it. What a racket! The air was blue with curses involving donkeys, children, and natural disasters. I strained to hear, half-delighted and half-appalled. Tap-tap, tap-tap. In that sad basement room I creaked off the mattress and rose, snapping at the waist of my underwear. It was the point in the morning when only the bakery was open and only the blind man was up and about. Later, it was children going to school. The little ones were first, shrieking and scampering, throwing a ball to the pavement, chewing gum and passing around sticks of licorice — a distinct smell which entered my cave. Fifteen or twenty minutes later the older children sauntered by. They didn’t care if they were late. They were tired, yawning heavily, reluctantly pawing off sleep.
I became an olfactory expert and recognized women by the way they smelled. I didn’t see faces, but when, against all rules, I lifted the bottom of the window an inch or so, then the curtain as if it were the hem of her skirt, I could watch those slim ankles march by. A strong rose fragrance accompanied one particular woman and I learned to wait for her. Sometimes, despite the inhospitable cobblestone, she wore high heels, red patent leather, or black. My entire erotic life was contained in that pair of feet, viewed for no more than a second or two, but imagined for the rest of the day. Sometimes, on her way home from work, she stopped by the chicken place. I recognized the succulent smell of Hugo’s rotisserie-roasted Pollo Loco and could easily picture her conversation with old Hugo and how his skin would graze hers as he poured change into her waiting hand. His stand was directly across from the Avenida San Sebastián metro stop a block away. She walked quickly after her purchase, lured by the smell emanating from the bag and her own fatigue, which drew her towards home and the moment when she could slip out of her shoes (now a little spotted from the day’s journey) and draw her stockinged feet up onto the sofa. She would flick on the TV to the telenovela starring that girl with hair down to her ass, and plunge her fingers into the greasy bag.