Forty Three
The Resort turned out to be all that Carmen had promised. Which fell upon Antoinette as something of a surprise, since she had received the other woman’s singing descriptions of the place only with a tolerant skepticism. But now here she was, finding it all rather lovely, in spite of herself. It was a city of sand; and as the dunes mounded out of the jungle toward the sea, so the scatter of thatch-roofed bungalows mounded out of the dunes. There was also a starkness that Antoinette began to appreciate as the two women ate breakfast under the shade of an enormous palapa. The sea was a blue sheet — an element. The sand was another element (and even the buildings were only more sand that had been shaped and molded by children with buckets). The elements lay side by side, equal under the flare of the sun, white and blue. And as she craned her neck up toward the sky, she saw that it was a third element, since there was no single spot where the sun was brightest, rather all of the sky was equally dazzling. From the bottom of the pool there came those lines of brighter light, playing over the area of relative shade where they ate the sliced papaya and pineapple. All things were in that reduced, unambivalent state. It wasn’t at all crowded either. There were a few couples still unraveling from their nocturnal passions, not quite adapted yet to the day nor ready to exist as individuals. They were in the pool too, in those tight huddles, drifting, making their secret submerged love caresses under the coruscations of light.
Presently the waiter returned, with his pasty smile and a white ceramic pitcher in each hand. “Más café?�? Carmen gestured affirmatively at her cup and continued an earlier conversation.
“So I’ll call you in the afternoon. So you know what’s happening.�? She swept her eyes around everything and smiled. “Have fun.�?
Why am I here? Antoinette thought to herself. “Wouldn’t it be more impressive if I went with you? I could say that I’m with the authorities. Let him hear the word kidnapping a few times.�?
“Oh boy, that’s not the way with Felo.�? Carmen nodded her head gravely. “Lemme try my way, and then…whatever, okay.�? This seemed to go a bit of the way toward convincing Antoinette. “I have to go to him bien suavecita, like a little girl, you know. He doesn’t really want William with him. Believe me. I just have to convince him that I’m still a good mother, so he can forget about his son again and go back to all his little putas.�?
“How are you gonna do that?�?
Carmen made an array of connected ideas in the space in front of her eyes. She picked one out. “Felo’s not very religious, you know. Ever since I got involved with my things…�? No. That wasn’t the idea she wanted. She picked out another one and began again, reeling out the words slowly. “I just have to tell him that what happened with William has nothing to do with…�?
“With the spirits and all that?�?
“Well, yeah, but…�? Carmen still wasn’t happy with the choice of words.
Antoinette saw there were elements here too, juxtaposed, making smooth borders one against the other, points of immense, grinding pressure. She had assembled a whole mosaic understanding, makeshift, from a thousand colored shards. But it was useless; it did not satisfy. And now at hand, or just behind her shoulder, or under the crystal water of the pool, or in any case at some distance where it was convenient and graspable, was the truth.
“But, now just between us…�? Antoinette lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “It does have something to do with it, right?�?
“What does?�?
“I mean, you said Magaly was paranoid. She wanted to be the Caballo, right?
Carmen nodded, reluctantly following the line of Antoinette’s logic.
“So maybe she did one of those, whaddaya-call-its, a trabajo on William. Maybe she put an egg with his name on it in her freezer, or something — a curse.�?
Carmen was relieved when she saw where it had all been leading, though she did not know why. Neither did she know why she wanted to get up from the table and run a great distance along the powdery sand, not stopping until everything was far behind her. There were another few gestures to make yet, a few more meaningless syllables to utter, and she would be alone on the road, driving towards the house. She knew that the present moment must pass meaninglessly; it would slide away into nothing unless she said something stupid. She must say only things that were like smooth pebbles in a river, to which no meaning could attach itself. “Oh, maybe…�? She shrugged and started to rise from the table.
But Antoinette was already inside the clarity, in that new environment of starkness. There was the boy on the one side, smooth and pale and in his original, undeformed condition. He lay miserably under, no, between the two inexorable pressures.
“No, no…�? Antoinette continued. “That’s right, you said that the spirits said there were no trabajos against William, that nobody was trying to hurt him that way, right?
“Ah?�? Carmen was feigning distraction with a senseless search through her purse.
“Right? She insisted again.
“Yes, right, right.�?
“And supposedly he wasn’t possessed by any of the spirits either when the other boy was killed.�?
Carmen was listening to her now.
“So, do you see? Do you see what happened to him, Carmen?�?
Carmen stared at the Doctor’s face for a long time, before giving her leave to continue. The face was full of merciless certainty. “What happened to him?�?
And the Doctor told her what she already knew. “It was you. You and his father. You wanted him to be the Caballo so badly, not for him, but for yourself. And he was afraid. Christ he’s a little kid, and he was afraid. Terrified. You wanted him to give himself into that. What could he understand of it all – the smoke, the people, the candles, sleeping inside his own body while a spirit… C’mon Carmen. And then, on top of that, his father…�? The memory of it slapped her brutally. “He showed me. My god, I saw it. It was all just too much…too much for him.�?
There were more words, but Antoinette knew that these Carmen would not understand. It was a product of that starkness, wherein things were plain, where straight lines and geometry were sovereign. They had squeezed and squeezed until something inside him yielded, some tragic but natural fissure. It wasn’t his fault, they had both done it to him.
Carmen might have stood there, with the wire inside her pulled tight, until either she shuddered apart or some incidental force loosened it for her. There was no reason to do anything else, so Antoinette brought her back into the world. “Go.�? She said delicately. “Go. Good luck. Call me in the afternoon. Let me know what’s what.�? And so she went.
Carmen drifted off to the jeep and Antoinette walked out from under the shade of the palapa toward the beach. Under the sun, she slipped the tie-dyed shawl off her shoulders and felt the gazes of men begin to follow her, like flecks of metal toward a magnet. The bottle of SPF lotion lay still unopened in her bag by a chaise. But it was all right. She reckoned there were perhaps ten or twelve minutes of unprotected safety, and she wanted to walk a bit along the white powder expanse. She gave herself into that small danger, and immediately it positioned itself as a geometric form among the other forms — a minor red circle, no it was a sphere. As she ventured nearer to where the sand was moist and agreeably cool, the sea lent its absolute blue color to a new form that was just beginning to rotate in space. Where there had previously been only a triangle, a four-faceted pyramid was rising up into that new dimension. All of its sides gleamed equally, as if illuminated not by some point source of light, but from within. There was the Antoinette Face, of course, the Doctor Marelli Face, and the Toni Face. The fourth face did not yet have a name, but that was not important. What mattered (though not half as much as the perfection of the shell she just found in the sand) was that all the faces were hers simultaneously. After she undid the top of her suit, she wrapped her hand around the pink shell in a way that meant she was going to keep it always.