Thirty Nine
The boy was standing in the kitchen of the Garden House, watching the old woman as she cooked. The words “garden�? and “house�? had come together in his mind as a result of his efforts to understand what the place really was, since there had been nothing at all like it in his experience. He had already appreciated, at least in a technical sense, that it was in fact a house; his grandmother had a rather large bed in one of the rooms; there was a room filled with all the artifacts and appliances normal to the preparation of food; and there were a number of bathrooms (though this seeming extravagance he felt he did not yet fully understand), one of which was so large that it had its various parts spaced out within what were actually two small adjoining rooms. He knew from his bicycle trips through Forest Hills that houses could be made quite large, so large that he could scarcely guess at what the occupants might be doing in all those extra rooms with nothing in them but lots of tables and lamps and rows of books on the walls. But in spite of the occasional parted curtain at night that let him glean what little he had of their interiors, those houses still seemed so utterly closed to the outer world. They seemed impenetrable, meant to keep things out. And it was in this respect that the house to which he had been brought was so alien, for it was at once profligately large and yet completely open. At night, that extreme degree of openness allowed the breezes that formed over the sea to sweep right through, bringing the agreeable salt air to his nostrils while he lay in his new bed waiting for sleep to take him. And it was not only the sea breeze that was encouraged to enter and transform the interior. Garden was the only word that made any sense when he thought how the greenery that covered the land so thickly and in such apparent chaos had not been cut away from the house, as it put out its many creeping tendrils and shoots, but rather the growth had been invited inside the walls, where miraculously it cooperated, arranging itself into streamers and clusters of variegated flowering wonder that covered almost every surface.
Presently, the old woman sensed him standing there and turned to him. Though it could only have been his presence that she felt (since Celestina the servant girl had been sent to market), she feigned delighted surprise at seeing him already up and dressed and presumably disposed to consume lots of the hearty breakfast she was fixing for him.
“Buenos días, mi amor.�? She beamed at him.
His grandmother was fat, but she was fat in the best possible way. There was nothing at all oppressive about her bulk. The flesh, under its tumbles of clean-smelling cotton fabric, was more compelling than any bed he could imagine. Many times already she had bade him surrender to her bosom, and he had done so, finding himself swept up in a swoon of delirious pleasure, especially when the great arms came around him and squeezed. Her fatness was a wonderful thing, he decided.
But now, though it hurt him to do so, he was thinking about Wanda again. The image of the enormous nurse from the hospital was full of dread. Though Wanda never touched him or spoke more than ten words in his direction, she had become a symbol of the whole terrible experience. When he thought about any moment at Elmwood, she was always there, an immovable breathing presence in the corridor. And when his mind grappled, however briefly, with a thought of the mechanisms that had delivered him to the hospital in the first place, strangely she was there too — the bulk of her white uniform gleaming in a vast, dark terrain. She had crawled up from the Well, he decided, and was waiting, waiting behind that imperturbable facade of cocoa-colored flesh for the moment when she would take him down with her.
Now that Willie was away from the hospital, it despaired him that still Wanda kept slipping into his mind; it mortified him that he had not been able to look upon his grandmother without seeing Wanda’s image superimposed. When his grandmother first appeared coming out from under the shade of the front porch to greet the arriving jeepeta, and he had suddenly realized just how few details comprised his memory of her, it was impossible to keep himself from recalling the much more recent and painfully detailed memory of the enormous, black nurse. They were both mountainous women, full of odd sounds that came up from under their clothes as myriad folds of skin rubbed together. But gradually he was allowing himself to believe that the women belonged to two very different categories of obesity. Partly because it helped to dispel any thought of Wanda whenever he was near to his grandmother, and partly because he had discovered that only the most polarized comparisons were at all useful, he decided simply that Wanda was evil and his grandmother was good. And once the matter was so arranged in the space before his eyes, he was delighted to see that all of the grandmotherly hugs and kisses which still lay in his future would now be unpolluted by thoughts of the frightening nurse. So presently he ran toward the old woman as she stood by the stove. He ran, feeling no snag, no catch, no pinch, no tug at him as he detached himself from what had been holding him. He buried his face into the ultimate softness of her flank, gathering as much of her into his arms as he could.
After breakfast they sat together for a while, and the immediacy of their contact began to fracture. Her efforts to maintain that space of wellness around them in the kitchen became suddenly labored. This did not diminish Willie’s enjoyment of the good feeling that had just been, but rather the change in her connected itself to something that had happened during the night.
“Where’s Papi?�? he said into the breach suddenly, to check his hunch.
And the change in her expression confirmed it for him. He knew then that the commotion of the night before, which until now had been remembered as nothing more than a lot of noise that kept him awake for twenty minutes or so, was really some sort of trouble, and that his father was at its heart. He knew then that the warmth of the breakfast, the embrace, the kisses that had been peppered over his head, the offer of utter sanctuary within his grandmother’s bosom had been her way of trying to shield him from whatever it was. And yet the knowledge did not surprise him; it was not the first time events that had at first seemed random and unrelated were later seen to arrange themselves in a sequence of cause and effect.
“Ah, tu Papa salió temprano�? she said with a dismissive gesture of the hand, meaning that it was better not to look for any regularity in his father’s comings and goings, and again, that all was well in the world.
Since his arrival at the Garden House, his grandmother had done little more than ply him with vast quantities of her kitchen’s excellent output and encourage him to spend as much time as possible out of doors (though warning twice against climbing on the sharp rocks by the sea). Having pleased her as much as he could that morning with regard to eating, he presently conducted himself once again to the vast, green realm behind the house.
It was the beginning of his fourth full day there. The homogeneity of the spectacular weather coupled with the changeless landscape had begun to require of him a singularly adapted perspective on the passage of time. Though it was all extremely agreeable, he had already realized that the days could seem quite long, too long if one wasn’t careful. He did not know why, but boredom was a state he wanted to avoid with all of his will. He had observed that in this place nothing really happened by itself, that it was necessary to cause things to occur if one was to be occupied by the course of the day. In response to this awareness, he devised two possible strategies with which to travel from one end of the day to the other: one passive, one active.
In the passive mode, the world would be like a blank sheet of paper. He could draw a grid pattern on the page, creating rows of boxes, then he would simply walk tirelessly through the day, filling the boxes with hyper-detailed mental notes of whatever he saw that was even slightly remarkable. The prior day had been a passive day. He had seen the corpse of an unidentifiable rodent under a blanket of pearly, white maggots. The animal had lain down in the shade of a large, gray stone; and its dingy coat would have been all but invisible as he walked by, were it not for the maggots that made a bright patch in the surrounding dimness. He had seen a cluster of strange, gelatinous spheres, clinging to the underside of a broad leaf. The sun had been low in the sky at that point, so that light was shining through from below the leaf. When he bent to look at them more closely, in the center of each glowing crystal was a tiny, wriggling presence. He wanted very badly to touch, but it was a passive day.
Presently, breakfast was already beginning to bleed little jets of energy into his legs as he walked across the area of trampled grass and into the thicker jungle. He had set himself to the very difficult task of rediscovering that one leaf with the round jellies underneath, when a movement distracted him. All he saw was a brownish-gray mass moving quickly around knee-height. He turned to run and follow, but the shuddering of the foliage was too uncertain to prompt him to anything more than a few agile steps in that general direction. He stooped and listened. He pricked his ears up and sent out the rays of his vision as far as he could through the thick growth. Suddenly it seemed to run around him in a wide half-circle. He could hear its frantic, small-mammal gallop and a kind of panting. The sound of the movement trailed away into the distance. He saw a flock of small, pale birds leap all at once out of the head of a tree and scatter into the sky. Then he could hear it, at first from what seemed like an absurdly great distance, then closer and closer coming towards him. His own thirst for the chase vanished. There was a long moment of ambivalence where he could not decide between merely standing there or turning to run away, back to the safety of the unseen house.
Before he could make up his mind, it was there all at once, a dog. It came bounding wildly out of the green shadows and slid to a halt not six feet from where the boy was standing paralyzed. But the alarm quickly passed. The animal had that singularly doggish delirium in its eyes as it regarded him sideways. It had been overjoyed to find a boy in the jungle that it might play with, and had gone into its “Oh so happy doggy!�? dance. The animal was in that brief moment of complete muscular tension, between one mad dash and the next. It was waiting for the boy’s signal, so that it would know whether to engage him fully in play or disappear again behind the veil of shimmering green.
The boy understood; he crouched down slowly to make himself less threatening. The dog was moved by the gesture and began to approach, dipping its ears back submissively. But there was something wrong with the animal. Apart from the fact that its coat was appallingly matted, the boy could see as it turned its other flank toward him, that one side of its body was pink and hairless and mottled with bright red ulcerations. The animal laid down at his feet on the comparatively good side of its body. The boy was torn. He was at once repelled by the sight of the creature’s travailed side (with many of the sores still moist), and yet he could not resist its plea for affection. He scratched between the dog’s eyes, down the front of its snout. The dog became utterly motionless, rolling its eyes back in its head, letting the tip of its tongue appear between the teeth. The boy changed hands and continued, using his wrist to dab at the tears that had begun to roll down his face.
A cry shattered the stillness suddenly. More birds took to the air. When he looked down from watching them spiral and dance in the sky, the dog was gone.
“Weeeel-yan.�? His grandmother called again from the house. He got up from his crouch and started running back to the house, toward the sound of the voice, the ground and patterns of growth becoming more familiar as he drew nearer. She was there under the portico, untying her apron. Drawn by a sound, the boy looked around the side of the house and saw that two jeepetas were pulling into the shade of the marquesina. Dust from their approach had made a red cloud over the dirt road. One jeepeta was his father’s, the other was unknown. The boy tucked himself into the shelter under one of his grandmother’s great arms. “Tu Papi…�? She said to him in a soft voice, motioning toward Felo.
Celestina tumbled out of the house suddenly, dressed and made up for an errand to town. She looked over at the old woman, then at Felo, walked over to the latter and remained there with an eager, expectant smile. Felo put the keys to the jeepeta in her open palm, then narrowed his eyes at her for moment, as if to say “Ya tu sabes.�? The old woman disengaged the boy gently from her arm and told him that she would be back in just a short while. Felo helped hoist his mother up to the great height of the passenger seat. When she was in, she leaned out of the window and waved at the boy, still standing where she had left him under the portico.
While the boy was watching the plume of red dust climb higher into the air, his attention was diverted back to the second jeepeta, which had not yet revealed its driver. A man emerged from the vehicle with a cellular phone held tightly to the side of his head. He was much shorter than Felo, older, with gray at the temples, and quite muscular in that way that seems to deny a degree of mobility. The man was gesticulating as he spoke into the phone, at times wildly, or else just clenching his free hand into a fist at his side. His eyes were shifting between distant points in space. Felo watched him and listened to the conversation intently. As the boy regarded them both from behind a row of squat potted palms, he noted that his father did not seem quite himself. There was something strange in the way he kept sweeping his hand over the slick, black mound of his hair. The posture, the expression on his face, the fidgets of tension and the way all of his movements seemed mated to the peaks and lulls of the other man’s conversation; the boy had seen nothing like it before from his father. Then, just as the other man ended his phone call abruptly, it came to the boy all at once: it was fear. The knot of the situation was unfurling right in front of his eyes, and the minor details of it were utterly without meaning, because his father was afraid, visibly afraid. It was an event so important that he knew it would occupy his mind for hours. The understanding made a flutter of delight in the boy’s stomach.
Now he wanted to watch more closely, to feed the pleasure that was growing within him. So the boy moved from his spot behind the enormous clay pots and came closer to them, to crouch behind the arcing leaves of a giant Agave. He still could not understand what was being said, but now he could hear the tone of the voices. There was more pleasure. Felo was being sternly admonished by the other man. And in spite of the great disparity in their heights, he was meek in the face of the assault. Felo began to equivocate, but the shorter man just waved his formidable arms in the air and silenced him. They stood in that silence for a while, the short man with arms crossed and brow knit, Felo waiting for his next word. The short man barked a monosyllable, and made himself busy with something in the back of his jeepeta. In another moment he was holding two large boxes of corn flakes, and Felo was taking them into his arms. Saying nothing more, the short man drove violently away, the wheels kicking up a shower of gravel and dust.
Felo hung there for a while, seemingly stunned. The red dust swirled lazily in the bright sun and began to settle on his clothes. Seeing his father just standing there in such a state began to change the color of the boy’s mood. The pleasure he had felt seemed suddenly corrupt, tasted ill, as if the red dust had come into his throat. The notion of a contaminant that rained down from the sky made sense somehow. He wanted to protect everything from it; the jungle, each perfect leaf, the one with the jellies under it, the tragic dog, Oh, especially the dog! Could he be found in time? And was his father just another huddled form too, suffering under the vile dust?
Presently Felo was sitting on the gravel driveway, with the two boxes in a stack beside him. His face was between his knees. The boy began to move toward him in slow, careful steps. It was in the boy’s mind to brush the bad dust from his father, to put his small hand on the man’s face, to smile with him for a moment in the sunlight. Felo heard the light pressure of the boy’s sneakers on the gravel, looked up and saw him, and came to his feet as if startled. But the boy was not dissuaded from his course, remembering how the poor dog had been afraid too. His father was so tall that there was no need to crouch, so he just smiled at him.
But there must have been dust in his father’s eyes because he seemed to misread the smile. There was a long moment of tranquil expectation. The boy began to raise his arm toward his father’s hand, and then there was an explosion at a great distance. There was nothing to comprehend, because nothing had happened. Nothing really. Out of the receding sound of the explosion came sudden pain, molding itself around a spot deep inside the boy’s skull, then radiating. His father was gone. There was nothing but blazing white, not even clouds, nor the green crescent of trees reaching skyward toward the center of his vision. He could not tell whether the pain that seemed to have had its genesis inside his head was really his own, or whether he had somehow borrowed the pain of another. Something squeezed him hard around his middle, once, then again more violently. Oh, yes, he thought as hot liquid flowed up through his throat, into his mouth and out, but not far. The smell of the expelled material was strong and aversive. It seemed to be a part of a surface that was very close to his face. Pushing himself away from the smell was an effort to which no particular part of his body seemed appropriate. So he tensed all his muscles at once. Nothing happened, except that the pain in his head suddenly connected itself to a network of lesser pains distributed all over his body. Something sharp was pressing against his right temple. Realizing that his eye lids were closed, he opened them now. There were unreal forms which played colorfully in his vision for a moment; but he knew what these were and waited patiently for them to finish with him. Out of a general blur condensed a vast, brown field on the right (to which his face was intimately joined), and to the left was sheer light. At an immense distance, where the brown field made a horizon with the brightness, there were two shiny black oval shapes. Oh, yes, he thought again, understanding. Papi’s shoes. There was still not enough strength to lift his face out of the vomit or to pull the sharp bit of gravel from his temple. No strength for anything but listening and seeing. So he listened again to the echo of his father’s voice “…maricón…�?, and watched again the beautiful arc of his right hand as it moved in slow motion through space, the gold ring catching the sunlight right before impact.