Downstairs in the Ávila parlor the television was silent. The bad guy was dead, and Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly had left on the train, on their way to another life, their love consummated somewhere far off the screen. I got up and paced the little room. Three steps to the bed, five to the bureau, four back to the desk. I didn’t really want to know what my father meant in the letter—whatever he thought I was too young to be told. Maybe I still wasn’t “old enough,” not yet “ready Teddy.” Maybe I’d never be. Whatever my father intended to explain, I had become who I was by not knowing it for thirty-three years. Who would I become if I knew?
So what did I know, what facts, essential, probable, beyond reasonable doubt? My father was dead. He had died here in this country and was presumably buried here. Then why not find his grave? What could be more concrete and specific, more grown up, if you looked at it that way? Go find it, if it was findable.
Yes, but. I heard it in my head as “Yahbut,” my pronunciation as a kid, like a word from yet another language. Yes...but, my parents would say, correcting patiently. Yes, but, if I go looking for his grave what I might find out is that there is no grave. Because that possibility is always there, always returning with the old stab of longing. That’s what I really wanted. Of course. To find him alive. Time to say it, in so many words. Say it out loud: Find him alive. How old would he be? Mid-sixties. Not old. I pictured him as tall as ever, straight, not stooped, blond hair now gray. Find him. How hard would it be?
On the other hand, the very idea made me distinctly uncomfortable—the search for the father, that Freudian cliché. And there was always the other terrible possibility, as well, that he might not want to be found, and I might even endanger him by looking.
So why was I here? I was left with only one essential fact, one beyond any doubt. I said that out loud, too. I am here. I had no reason to be, nothing I could defend, but I was here, and only one “agenda” was valid right now, to drown myself in Spanish for these next three weeks and do virtually nothing else. I was committed to that, signed in and paid for. It set up its own contract and promised its own brand of sanity.
To start the program immediately (before I could waffle), I studied vocabulary until exactly one A.M., then set the alarm and konked out to the sound of the rain, splashing down on the sorrowful, noseless saints around the patio pool.
SEVEN
I woke at dawn to a splatter of gunfire. That’s what I thought, until I remembered (how could I have forgotten?) that birthdays often began with firecrackers, always at break of day, and followed, as they were now, with the frantic barking of half-a-dozen dogs and the crowing of roosters, near and distant. That agitated the parrot, who called “Hola! Hola!”
I pulled on clothes and shoes and headed for the central plaza, running in half-light on the cobblestones, fog swirling around my feet and up over the red-tiled roofs. Ancient architecture floated beside me, an amazing lot of it in partial ruins, intricate heaps of rubble toppled in the long series of earthquakes. The plaza was already astir, but quiet, enough to hear the splash of the fountain in the park—water streaming from the breasts of maiden statues—and the swish of somebody’s broom outside a store.
The shell of the old cathedral occupied one side of the square. At right angles to that, yellow light warmed the windows of the police station, housed under two-story colonial arches. Three uniformed men stood in the doorway smoking, assault rifles slung over their shoulders. A little spurt of adrenaline. No threat to me, or I to them, but a rifle is a rifle.
At one side of the park a group of Mayan women were already tying their backstrap looms to the trees and spreading their weavings on the grass, a twenty-foot long carpet of color. Several of them carried babies on their backs, secured within a wide strip of fabric. Not far away two long-haired teenagers curled asleep on benches, their packs under their heads, fair-skinned gringos, I noted, as were the half-dozen other runners who approached me out of the mist, like Caucasian ghosts. They panted on by me without a greeting, as if on the last lap of some super-marathon from Stockholm or Chicago. I was panting too, at close to 4,000 feet above sea level.
I stopped to breathe and stare for a moment into the Moorish courtyard of San Carlos University. The name echoed distantly in my head and then up front, with a little ping. My father had worked at San Carlos, at the campus in Guatemala City. I asked him once what he did there. “Talk to the ‘stugents,’” he’d said, teasing me with one of my own pronunciations. Another odd memory. Apparently there was more than one kind of forgetting. There were the details that hoped to be found, like a child playing hide and seek, popping out from behind a chair, and there were the ones that hid themselves in earnest.
The run finished, I did a set of push-ups in my room, took a shower and went to breakfast. Alone in the dining room, I ate freshly made tortillas, brought and served by a black-eyed Mayan girl—really a girl, no more than twelve, I thought. A large white apron covered her woven skirt, her long hair tucked under a silly looking maid’s cap. I greeted her, “Buenos días,” but she refused to answer or meet my eyes. Her hand shook as she poured my coffee. Scared witless of the gringo. Her clothes smelled strongly of woodsmoke, and of something else, burnt vegetation. A quick vision presented itself, smouldering cornstalks, carried about the house to get rid of lice and lizards. That triggered another smell, things just in from the rain, wet clothes and hair, wet chickens, wet dogs, all gathered around an open fire in the middle of a room.
Doña Rosa, entering the kitchen in a flowered housecoat, gave the maid instructions in Spanish, her arm around her, patiently repeating, then apologized to me in a whisper, wringing her hands. “No me comprenda.”
“What’s her name?” I asked.
She shrugged. “No name. Call Maria.”
“Where does she live?”
A wide sweep of the arm. I understood that more than Doña Rosa knew. The child walked here from a distance, bringing tortillas made before dawn.
At school Catherine and I worked through the morning hours at a table in the courtyard, where the temperature warmed quickly to a sweet seventy degrees, and would, I soon learned, day after day. At noon I joined the Ávila family around the dining room table, Juanita in her green school uniform and Marco (no longer in school for whatever reason) and his father, both in dark business suits, on break from the family tienda, one of the downtown stores. While they chattered in Spanish, I struggled to catch a phrase here and there, with my dictionary and glasses beside me on the table.
Back to school then, for an exhausting afternoon of forced dialogue with Catherine, the relentless one. I ended the day at a bar, sipping a lukewarm Gallo while I watched television with the regulars and listened to their sharp consonants and remarkable rolls of the tongue. A soccer game was in progress between the Rojos and the Cremas and the room was full of cheers and curses. I was not a soccer fan, but I strained to catch the substance within the curses: Puta! Que imbécil fuiste! Ay, Dios!
On the way home I bought an English language newspaper, the International Edition of the Miami Herald, a couple of days old on the stands. Mostly I was after the baseball scores, with the late season gloom of a Red Sox fan. The Sox, at the end of another losing season, were fourteen and a half games behind the Yankees, fifth place in the AL East. I barely glanced at other news. The front pages were filled with the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North pictured repeatedly with his hand raised, swearing in, swearing in.
I studied all evening in my room, wired to my tapes, John Coltrane and Oscar Peterson. Later Doña Rosa rustled up the stairs in her slippers with a cup of warm milk and a sugar cookie as big as a saucer. To fatten me up, she said. I was too flaco. Besides, she scolded, I would make myself sick if I worked so late. I needed to sleep. “Is why you pipple always sick in Guate, Señor Peterson.