Hey dudes,
Jed, I will respond to your last comment on B’gra Part 3 when I’m not on this stupid piece of shit computer. But I do want to say that it was a beautiful thing you wrote and it is exactly the tone I wantd for the conclusion. I will write more later.
But, gentlemen, I think I may be getting close to a conclusion. Check out these last two sections abnd let me know if you like the cut of myu jigsail, what?
Cheerio, John Paul
He slept a sleep so deep and dreamless that waking up the next day was a shock — life was still here for him like something spilled out on the floor. He didn’t perceive the sun in his eyes as light — to him it was only a sharp pain. Something crawled from his churning stomach to the base of his throat and sat there, coiled.
The knowledge that he needed to go to class nuzzled him, like some pathetic, insignificant animal. Not even his books appealed to him now. What he’d done was as final and lasting as things got. Either Carondele was now something like a mortal enemy, or else he had had a hand in his — what would they have done to him? — his death. A hand in his demise.
And so it began for him: torture by things he couldn’t change. It seemed like some fat old man had come and taken a seat on him, pinned him inside his own head. The sense of guilt was there, somewhere. But mostly there was the fear—the fear that Carondele had gotten away. He wondered if Carondele’d smelled the fear on him.
Because Carondele would have told the others who would have told others who would have told others, and there was an army of them out there. In his head it was like he could see the whole, corrupt world turning to him and reaching out its claws, grabbing at his throat.
He could either feel very sorry or very afraid — an immutable sense of isolation came at him. There have been people shipwrecked on desert islands with more hope. So after minutes that stretched out like hours, that most fatal of needs was born in him: the need to share. He needed to share what he had done. Of course he thought of the American because who else would he have thought of? Sure, he wouldn’t know the way forward, but that American with his simple little sad face would keep his mouth shut. He was a friend. Yes, that’s what he was. That must be it: friend.
Bocanegra swung his legs down off the glorified cot that was his bed, threw aside the weathered cotton blanket on top. He was going to Las Quilles. His clothes were filthy and with a weird kind of film to them, but he gave them no thought as he took his keys and a few coins from off the wardrobe. He was gone, slamming the door shut behind him, twisting the key to lock it tight (no unexpected visitors this time), and flying for the stairs.
He was thinking things might be all right—maybe he would head north, who could say, Nova York or something—thinking there was always hope and that hope was a good thing. Hope and work were the only things a body needed.
And again, the little Indian maid stood at the landing, like some symbol: as he descended she glanced up at him, stopping him dead in his tracks.
“Bueno, senor,” she said. He looked at her eyes. He’d never really seen them before: they were ink black, so black you might have seen the end of the universe in them, or so black that you might have seen nothing at all. There were folds of flesh in the corners, and in one a milky whiteness along the lower lid, along with a mottled bit of brown. Her soil-colored face was cracked and pocked, but there was something about it that might have been pretty once. Some force tugged her mouth a little to one side, which could have meant stroke or it could have meant an expression of deference or it could have meant that she had seen Carondele as he’d gone the night before.
“Buenos dias,” he murmured. He stared at her for a second longer, switched his eyes by an act of will to the door knob, and walked slowly to his exit. He twisted the knob and it creaked and it felt to him like he was holding a bloodied knife in his hand. A shaft of light leapt from the opening in the door, and again he perceived it as pain. He walked slowly out onto the street. It was a full minute or two — bracing himself against a jamaica tree, the thing coiled in his throat now taking shape and substance and about to leave him as vomit — before he saw them.
They were two thick, sturdy men, and they rested unsmiling against the bed of a blue pickup that Bocanegra had not seen on his street before. Each had on jeans with tucked-in dress shirts, leather boots protruding arrogantly from under the hems. One wore a straw hat that was too big for him, the other’s hair had been swept into a well-greased pompadour. They were ugly, ugly, visibly mean men.
They watched him for a second from behind their glasses, and then they turned away, one looking south and the other north. These were Franco’s men, no doubt. There was no room for interpretation—he was trapped.
So instead of heading east on Duruti for Las Quilles, he headed south on Bolivar. He walked along the streets with their grime and bleaching dust. The sun was directly above him now — it had gotten incredibly hot — and the palm trees and buzzing flies marked his progress like some rhyme: Palm trees and flies, apologize. Palm trees and flies, apologize. Only there was nobody left to apologize to.
He walked and his head hung so that the top of his skull and his shoulders formed a line as straight as a blade. His feet dragged and he stuck his hands in his pockets and he felt the gravity of things on his cheeks. He walked and dangled between disquiet and resignation and despair. Not quite a Jesus but not exactly a Judas, either.
If there were people on the street that day, he didn’t see them. They were ghosts to him as they did their human stuff: a soccer game with a flattened can, plantains for 10p a bushel, a vendor with cotton shirts shouting some obscenity, a couple gringos stunned into silence by the heat. What was it all to him?
He came finally to his destination, a high, wide, toffee-colored building with three pompous columns and a statue of the Virgin Mary crowning it all. Here he was, finally. The library.
As he walked up the steps he thought for a second that it had all been a joke and that things were not as they had been for the past two days. He thought that if he turned he might see Carondele with his flapping lips giving the balled fist salute. And so he turned around: and there they were, across the street, in the shade from a palm tree, two ugly men. Watching him from the hood of a blue pickup.
Somewhere, a radio played, but all he could hear was the books calling to him.
* * * * *
Once, when he was still a kid, Michael left by the back door of his parent’s house — he had left by that door before, but never in order not to be seen. Not that day: his trip was a secret. It was a Sunday, somewhere between the first day of school and Halloween, it was a time to mourn the death of summer, a time of ill-defined adolescent longing.
It wasn’t a long walk to his destination, past the strange, adult houses of the strange, adult neighbors. On the trees the leaves were still green in some places and the putrefied cherries like strung corpses in others. Then it was a right on the road where the gas station was (head the other way and that road would take you to his school—Michael shuddered), another block or two, and across the street. He breathed out as he walked and wondered would mist form.
The walk was so easy and fast that the sight of his destination startled him: an old building with a massive, curled, golden spire and white walls the color of over-bleached cotton. Under a stained-glass window with a picture of a suffering saint, a gilded door stared back at him like a metallic eye.
Louise Freedham (née Horowitz) was Jewish, hadn’t seen the inside of a synagogue in seventeen years, her husband an atheist. When Michael tugged open the enormous golden door, he was walking into an esotericism, a region as forbidden and exotic as that of the scrambled channel number 79 (a channel where the women moaned, and every once in a while a nipple would gape at you from the pallid screen like a squid’s eye).
There was a too-big whooshing sound as the heavy door closed, and the preacher stopped what he was saying to stare. He had a head that looked bald but was actually painted with close-cropped hair the color of hay, a pair of glasses in which the candles shone like lighthouses or the miniature headlights of a hundred speeding cars. In this Church, people wore button-down shirts and sweater vests and canvass shoes and skirts and blouses — instantly, he understood the phrase “Sunday Best” – and in unison the soberly-dressed people turned to him, at least a hundred of them.
The hay-haired priest knitted his eyebrows, nodded once in Michael’s direction, and continued what he was saying — he’d been accepted like the fly buzzing on the windowsill or dandelions in the yard. The words were at times soft and sometimes sharp and evil-sounding and hypnotic. Five minutes passed before Michael realized that it was not English he was hearing. He watched it all with his eyes wide and his throat swallowing at something, his hands tense and his fingers digging into his thighs.
A decade could have passed, or else a half a minute.
Then suddenly the people in the front row rose in unison and walked to the pulpit. Each one kneeled before the priest-man, who fed them a little candy. Then the people did something funny with their right hand and got up. It transfixed Michael until the moment he understood that this was the end of the show — and now that reality had come again, he understood that he was spying. He was a spy, and a stranger. He saw his mother in front of him and his father like shadows that move quick along the wall. He saw all of this without his eyes.
They were going to catch him!
He must leave. Michael ran at the door behind him and tugged with all his strength. It was heavier; this time, on the inside, there was some strange kind of suction. His little muscles strained against the weight of the door, and sweat came out on the place above his lip. The building was suddenly very dark and he felt the great depth and height of it — it was like tidal waves on TV, only real! — and then a scream came to his throat and died there. He wasn’t strong enough. He wasn’t strong enough or he didn’t think he was strong enough. He tugged at the door and the tears came to his eyes so that the room blurred and went black, became an abstraction. He pulled and pulled and his arms felt so hollow and weak that now all he could do was cry. He cried hard and then he was sobbing and slumped against the door and slapping his hand on the door and moaning like something forgotten.
Michael’s arms went numb and then there was the big, bright white face with the white hair saying something: it was called Polish. It was the strange words and then:
“Leetle boy — you are scaret?” And a big grin and a mouth of minced teeth and a whiff of breath like mold and garlic and your mother’s wood-cleaner, the kind of breath that tugged on your brains. The nose was so laced with beet-red veins that the skin seemed fractured, and the metal-blue eyes were covered in a white film like the white part of a fried egg. Michael screamed again, this time aloud.
It’s years later, a full decade and then some, and Michael’s thinking about this day. It’s Black Friday in Mexico and the old women are sailing by in billowing, black dresses that make him think of Zorba the Greek.
He sits alone at Bocanegra’s table on the patio of Café Las Quilles, and it has been almost three days since he’s seen his friend. He thinks now about the day Bocanegra told him his thoughts on God — that God was a thing to be mocked. But Bocanegra had been raised in a monastery (did he hear right?); he had never missed mass. It is Good Friday and some millennia ago (it’s written) Christ was led to the place where he died for our sins.
He has felt Bocanegra’s absence like an almost-physical pain.
The first day he didn’t think much of his absence — he was reading Under the Volcano, and it was the exact truth about everything. The second day Bocanegra didn’t come to Las Quilles, Michael worried whether he had said something to offend him. On the morning of the third day, though, it occurred to him that these were dangerous times (it was easy to forget sometimes). He at first wondered about the revolutionaries — maybe Bocanegra, who distrusted all agreement, had said the wrong thing? But that didn’t seem quite right, wasn’t really Bocanegra’s style.
He remembers Bocanegra pronouncing the word “faith,” then el fé — el fé el fé el jefé — with his lip curling. Christ was a myth, the bible was a book, and religion was not more than the opiate of the masses, dissei Bocanegra. It strikes Michael that what Bocanegra really wanted was a world without history or a memory.
(He thinks: it’s a funny thing about memory: in a millisecond he remembers all this and then he remembers with perfect clarity a Polish mass in Illinois which he left screaming over a decade earlier [there are women streaming by in billowing black dresses; Zorba the Greek].)
And then in his mind Michael remembers — how could he forget? — that the mayor has been shot. It occurs to Michael, as he sits at Bocanegra’s steel table and stares out over the ministerial plaza, his friend is in trouble with the law. He understands unknowingly a truth Bocanegra discovered three days earlier: that the police haven’t been disbanded, exactly: they’ve just taken off their uniforms. And then: jesus christ — he hasn’t seen Bocanegra since the night of the assassination.
Michael’s truth comes at him in a trickle that widens into a stream and then into a raging river: by degrees he feels something profound and confused for his vanished friend. He stands up jerkily from the table where he’s sitting, his hands shaking because what’s happened to Bocanegra? His heart is full and there’s a ticklish little ball lodged in his throat, and he walks across the ministerial plaza, sweat now spiking his pores and the sun hitting him in such a way that it is like a physical pain: he’s never seen this sun before.
Now Michael is walking a walk that isn’t totally human and not even really animal, and he leaves the ministerial plaza and comes to Avenida Ninos Heroes. After that comes Victor Hugo, and then, for reasons beyond description, he heads south on Bolivar. He walks past the Mercado Central, stuffing his hands in his pockets to keep them from shaking. The vendors are calling out at him, “American, yes? English, yes?” and the kids are playing soccer with a flattened can. Nothing registers but the sun.
The palm trees mark his progress, he smells crickets in a calico bag, and then that’s all he can smell. It becomes for him the smell of the sun and the day, and all of Mexico becomes nightmarish and evil. He is propelled forward by a force beyond comprehension – he’s sobbing now, like he hasn’t since that day of the Polish mass. But this time without any tears. There’s a woman on the stoop in front of her shop with her legs out over some concrete steps; she removes her cigarette and watches his progress, her face curious and mocking, and then, finally, the library rears up with its three marble columns and the great virgin like something completely impossible. Without him knowing it, it was Michael’s destination, and it fills him with the obscure and confused sensations of a Polish mass that you can’t escape from.
This sensation is complicated when Michael sees his deceased friend Bocanegra on the steps of the library. There are shadows from palm tree fronds like an enormous, black bayonet under his feet. His friend has a kind of aura — something dark and static about him, but bright and moving, too, like lightning at nighttime. Michael’s heart runs over, he shouts Bocanegra’s name and the other looks up, turns his face to him; it is a good-looking, sympathetic face with dark eyes and strong bones under them like lengths of rope; his frame is like a limbless tree, with only a little narrowing at the hips and a little widening at the shoulders.
“Carlos!” he shouts. “Hey! Carlos!” Bocanegra stops on the marble stairs for a moment, raises his right hand briefly, and then drops it as his eyes seek out the ground in front of his feet. He continues to walk, this time with exact, thinking steps, to an idling blue pickup truck. Bocanegra gets inside. The driver looks over at Michael — maybe curiously, but it’s hard to tell with his glasses — puts the truck in gear, and then is gone down Bolivar.
Which poses the question, “Gone?”
