He guffawed, unoffended. “Lordy, no! I had a hunch the fellow got hung up on the word red, and indeed, that was the case.”
It took a couple of seconds for that knot to untangle. Subversive literature? “What bloody nonsense!” I said.
“Oh, indeedy-dee. Ludicrous. But ludicry, if I may coin a word, is often the name of the game around here.”
The doors to the exterior, just yards away now, beckoned with wafts of cool air as they opened and closed. Out on the sidewalk the breeze mixed with the exhaust of a fleet of taxis double-parked at the curb. Cabbies whistled and yelled. I turned to Crane to say goodbye. He looked rumpled and tired, his shirt half out. “I appreciate whatever you did,” I told him.
“Don’t mention it, old chap,” he said. Thunder sounded faintly. “Rainy season,” he announced.
A taxi pulled into a space in front of us, the rusted hulk of an old Ford Crown Vic. “Zona Uno?” called the driver, getting out of the car and opening the trunk. He wore a Mets cap.
“Are you going downtown?” Crane asked me.
I opened the back door without answering. Four people instantly pushed past me into the cab, two in front and two in back. With a squeeze there was room for one more.
“Take it,” I said to Crane. “Are you going that way?”
“Yes, to the Centenario.” He surveyed the seat skeptically. The cabbie barked something, slamming down the trunk. “It’s yours,” said Crane.
I got in, both bags on my lap, and reached my hand through the window. He shook it, palming a business card. “Centenario,” he repeated. “I’ll be there most of the month. Call me if you need another salvamento.”
What?
“Deus ex machina.”
Oh. A joke? “Sure,” I said. I had no intention of ever seeing him again. Then the vehicle was off with a roar, plowing a path through the wet evening haze. In a few minutes we were on a main artery. All the way to the hotel, I watched for landmarks that might have meaning for me, but nothing did—an enormous statue of somebody, a viaduct, wave after wave of plump graffiti. No leaps of sensory memory. On the dark horizon ahead an urban glow edged the sky. Soon buildings closed in on either side, neon lights flashed, and we were locked in a preposterous horn-blaring traffic jam. By the time we reached the hotel, it was raining hard.
TWO
For a long time as a kid I used to think I could make my father reappear. If I got the equation just right, the right location or the right minute, the right thing to tell or ask him, a door would suddenly open and he would be there, looking just as I remembered him. I hadn’t engaged in that fantasy for a long time, and I would never have admitted that I chose the Pan American Hotel with that intention, but it did happen to be the last place I’d seen him in happy circumstances.
He had brought me to the Capital on my seventh birthday for a gift of priority time, just the two of us. The hotel was meant as part of the treat, but the gentility of it, with its glossy terrazzo floors and bowing staff, only befuddled me. I liked things better outdoors. We poked our way through the intersecting streets and avenues, calles and avenidas, now efficiently numbered, but once with strange names, Street of Solitude, Street of Sorrows.
My father kept asking me what I would like to do most. All I wanted was to be in his presence, if I’d known how to tell him that. He had been away from home a lot in the previous months. I didn’t care what we did, but buy bubble gum was what I finally said, and off we went on the quest. We found it in the underground Central Market, literally under the ground. I studied the word on the colored wrapper: Dubble Bubble. Was that Spanish or English, I wondered, or both, like Chiclets.
We sat on a bench in the public plaza fronting the wide National Palace, while he taught me how to blow bubbles. He had grown a droopy mustache in the time since I’d seen him last, and for the rest of the day it held specks of pink. The mustache was gray, and it made him look older, though his hair was still blond. There was something else. His stature had somehow diminished. He was tall, a towering person, and his clothes had always seemed a little too small for him. Now they looked too big and they were the same clothes I’d seen him in hundreds of times.
“What are you staring at, raggmunk?” he asked. That was his Swedish name for me. It meant “potato pancake.” In Spanish I was apt to be an elote, an ear of corn.
“That dumb mustache,” I answered, and then we arm-wrestled, there on a bench in the sunny plaza. He won, of course. He had big hands. Both of mine could have fit into one of his. I never thought he threw a match just to make me feel good, though he hammed up the process, and this time he went into full-bodied contortions that collapsed me in laughter.
That was at the end of January in 1954. This August evening, thirty-three years later, and I now older than he was at the time, the memory surprised me with what it brought to the surface. Maybe I wasn’t ready after all. Maybe never.
After registering, I went directly to my room on the second floor. A long night’s sleep was what I thought I needed, but the traffic outside my windows was so clamorous I gave that up. I went down to the dining room for a glass of scotch and was informed apologetically by the waiter that there was no scotch, nor any other alcoholic drink, because the hotel owner was a teetotaler himself—“a follower of Riosmont.” That’s how I heard it, as one word. It sounded like the name of a cult.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He spelled it, politely. “M-o-n-t-t. General Efraín Ríos Montt. Vos?”
“Oh, sure.” I said. Never heard of the man. I settled for a coke and retreated to a divan on the mezzanine. In the lobby below, among the twenty-foot potted palms, a four-man marimba band began vamping with studied lethargy. I listened for a while as they wandered from one song to another. When they launched into a slow rendition of I’m in the Mood for Love, I went back to my room.
The traffic noise had not abated, but I slipped gratefully between the sheets, then watched sleep instantly lift away, like an airborne package. So I resorted to an old crutch, the baseball alphabet routine, this time with second basemen as the subheading. I had gotten all the way through G, skipping E, which was usually hard—Roberto Alomar, Marty Barrett, Pete Coscarart, then Bobby Doerr, Nelly Fox and Joe Gordon—and was groping for an H when I fell asleep.
In what seemed like minutes I sat up, startled out of a dream. Someone had unlocked the door to the room and come in, I was sure. I fumbled for the bedside lamp. No one was there. My surroundings suggested only civility and good will, the slightly worn furnishings, the ceiling fan noiselessly turning, a decanter of agua pura on the table covered by a starched white napkin, next to my money belt. I checked the contents. Nothing had been touched, passport, wallet, letter. The French doors that served as a window were shut, as I had left them. It was 4:00 A.M. and still dark outside. Both the rain and the traffic had stopped.
Half-awake in the early morning silence, I returned to the search for an H. And who should appear but Miss Heifferston, like a joke my brain was playing on itself. It had been many years since I had given Miss H a thought. Some of the kids had called her “the heifer,” and she was indeed bovine, but her voice was sweet and high, like a little girl’s. “Guess what, children,” she announced, standing with me at the front of the first grade classroom, her hand tightly clasping my elbow. “A new friend is joining us today. His name is Teddy Peterson, and he comes to us from far, far away in a land where people are very different than we are. So he is going to tell us something about it, aren’t you, Teddy?”
I could see myself now, that boy, up there in front of twenty-five staring faces, too tall already, taller than anyone else in the class. He was not supposed to talk about it, where they used to live, and he couldn’t talk anyway. It was as if he suddenly had no language at all, though he knew three, and one of them was English. He couldn’t even breathe, and something screwy was going on down around his