The letter ended with a Swedish phrase familiar to me, Jag alskar dig, I love you, and a Scripture reference in Song of Solomon. Nothing unusual about that. He often added a Scripture reference to his letters. Then at the bottom the P.S., in English, and my own name. Let’s keep all this from Teddy. I’ll explain it to him myself when he is old enough and ready.
Looking at it with new eyes now (as “Ready Teddy”?), I saw that he had dated it September 10 at the top. No year was added, but I thought I could make out 1954 in the faded postal stamp on the envelope. That was the year my father was away so much in Guatemala City, while my mother and I remained in the hills. It was in the previous January that I spent a few days with him in the Capital, as my seven-year-old birthday treat.
He came and went in his old Buick from January to July, and in between we had watched, my mother and I, for those envelopes with Correo Aéreo in the corner. That was a joke, since they were carried close to the ground. They would start out in a truck from the Capital to the nearest repository of mail five winding miles away from our village, then be delivered in person by someone doing errands in the village pick-up, walking the last undriveable distance.
But this letter would have been just to my mother. I was not there in September. Near the end of July we had left for a month in the States, the three of us, to get medical help for my father. We left in the middle of the night. I remembered almost walking in my sleep, stumbling over the bumpy lane to the pickup truck. Someone drove us to the airport. We stayed with a couple of my father’s sisters and by the end of August I had been tucked into the boarding school in Florida, while my parents returned to Guatemala.
I didn’t dwell on that now. I’d long ago learned to circle it, like a murky pool. The point now was that I didn’t know where in the country my father would have been when he wrote and mailed this letter.
Querida, it began. Dear, darling. I scanned the first page quickly for anything that looked easily translatable. Please take care of yourself and don’t worry about me. I have what I need. No appetite anyway. In the next line, he sent his greetings to the village, and “encouragement” to F. Tell him to carry on. F, I assumed, was Felipe López. He was a leader in the village, and father to my own friend, Luis. Luis’s mother had been my “nanny” when my mother was teaching in the village school before I was old enough to attend. For the life of me I couldn’t resurrect her name now, but Felipe and Luis I had never forgotten.
I have been trying to reach TG. We need to talk. TG would be Tomás Garcia, I was quite sure, a man from Guatemala City who used to visit our village often in a green station wagon. A small person, urbane and bright-eyed, he appeared in my memory whole, presenting himself as important, as he had always seemed to be. He came bearing gifts, books and supplies for adults, and candy for all the kids in the village.
The following sentence expressed regret for how tú (my mother, that would be) had been wounded. I braked here, red alert. But, as much as you wish I would, I will never —. The word he used was a form of retractar. Recant? Change his mind? He was seeing J in a new light, he said. Who the heck was J? It could be Jesus, referred to often in our house like a favorite cousin, very much alive. But there were other J’s in our village, four Juans, as well as a guy actually named Jesus—heysooce, we pronounced it—who was known to have fathered children with more than one woman. I played with his kids, like all the others, only vaguely aware that something was a little strange.
Second page. Where do we go next? That was clear. Then lines I couldn’t decipher. He seemed to be saying that he was supposed to own no land (sin tierra, landless, a term also meaning peasants), but that he owned two pieces of land, and he loved them both and intended to keep them. He carried them on his back as if they were part of him.
That hardly made sense. And I didn’t know he owned land. I supposed it was metaphorical, ground to stand on, or ground he would hold up or defend. It was a big linguistic stretch.
Then the love sign-off in Swedish (Jag alskar dig), and Song of Solomon 4:6, and the P.S. in English.
There was something stiff about the whole letter, an awkward whisper, as if someone was listening in, not like the mail we used to get from him, full of teasing and jokes. He had hurt my mother somehow, that much was clear, or he thought he had. But it occurred to me that could be just the follow-up to an argument, the kind my parents often had, tiresome adult wrangling over some theological point, and then apologies with embarrassing affection, words that sounded “mushy” to my ears, even in Swedish.
Except that was hardly a reason for my mother to keep it, let alone hide it, and that hinted at something beyond an ordinary argument. He had done something, I felt more than ever sure, maybe as serious as shacking up with another woman, like heysooce, maybe with a village girl. He had the opportunity, no doubt, maybe the desire, how would I know? Had mixed-breed children grown up back at our village, blond, a little taller than the others? Had he refused to give up the other woman, though he still loved my mother? It was too predictable and corny. I didn’t want him to be predictable and corny.
So now what did I know? Nothing. I’d learned nothing. This mysterious, portentous fragment of my father had not told me anything I could build on, maybe nothing important at all. Reading it had not changed a thing.
It was after 1:00 A.M. I removed my shoes and lay down on the bed in my clothes, still not quite dry. Grow up, Teddy, I thought. I should get out of here, now, tomorrow, go home, back to Boston. I needed to nail down a job, move into my apartment, learn to live life without Rebecca.
But I’d told Catherine I would be looking for my father’s grave—the grave or its absence—and telling her that, telling someone, writing it, made it more than ever a real “agenda.” Surely there was someone who could help me. I could at least check on that. Tomás Garcia, for instance, the T.G. in the letter. If he was still living and available. If I was prepared to hold the conversation it would require. Whatever, I had only one week left to do it.
I found myself curled into a fetal position. Disgusted, I stretched out full length, pressing my feet against the cumbersome footboard. I was a bad fit everywhere I put my body, even in a bed.
ELEVEN
The very next day, Catherine claimed to notice a change, a new freedom in my speech, she said. I denied it. The lesson we’d just finished had been the same as all the others, like pushing a freight train up a hill.
I suggested taking another week, though I didn’t intend to. She wiggled her shoulders, noncommittal. “That’s up to you. But I won’t be available next week. Not that it should matter. Méndez will find someone to take my place.” Obviously she entertained no regret at our parting. Why should she? The twinge that brought was entirely unjustified.
When school was over at four, I took off for my run and a beer. The TV in the bar was full of news of a soccer tournament, an important event, judging by the clamor of the men around me. A game was about to begin and a reporter was thrusting a mike in the faces of players. One after the other they gave their spiels in rapid-fire monotone sentences, exactly as I’d heard it scores of times by football players back home. They were saying the same things, too. Just gotta get out there and show ‘em who we are. Just gotta play both ends of the field. It might have been three minutes before I realized how I was listening, which was not by conscious translating. The language entered my head not as words and phrases, but as meaning. Skeptical, I left my beer and wandered around in the plaza, deliberately eavesdropping on bits of conversation. I listened to a couple arguing, about money, of course. I got it. He had been suckered, according to her, into buying warranty insurance on a television set.
I headed for a tienda and bought a Guatemalan newspaper and began to read as I stood there on the sidewalk. I remember even now the story my eye fell on and that I read with no trouble. Charles Glass, ABC news chief and Mideast correspondent, had escaped from Hezbollah