I AM THE KIND OF MAN WOMEN love. My face is seamed by time, and in each line they count a century of my country’s hopeless, bungling despair. In this ordinary expression they see peasant uprisings, earthquakes, and dictators whose asses widen with each year in power. Women stare into my sad eyes and trace each day spent in prison, my sufferings barely imaginable. Yet they do imagine. Then they run a manicured nail across the skin between my eyebrows and touch my pulse, and their smiles are coated with desire.
What they don’t always see is that I am afraid.
My prison was a room in the basement of my sister’s colleague and her husband: Marta and Rodolfo. I was lucky to be there, hidden from enemies. This woman was a professor at the university, in the department of cultural studies. The basement room had been a wine cellar, but there was no wine anymore, just red stains on the concrete floor and a faint briny smell. There was no toilet, only a tin bucket. Each morning when I passed the bucket to Marta I could read the disgust in her eyes. I watched the way she held out her arm stiffly as she climbed the stairs, horrified that the contents might slosh onto her tailored blouse. She knew my shit intimately. The maid wasn’t allowed below although sometimes I heard her singing as she cleaned, her pail scraping across my ceiling. And often at night I could hear them arguing upstairs. Rodolfo would start in a low voice, which would gradually erupt into a shout, “Get him out! It is too dangerous!”
I would huddle beneath, anticipating the worst. Because I’d lost everything, had no useful opinions, nowhere to go, my life was waiting for others to decide. If I walked out the door to buy a magazine at the kiosk next to City Hall, I would disappear forever. You do something careless, once, and everything changes, not just the world, but your insides.
Both state and national police had my case on file. My employer, the newspaper, abolished all references to my work. No one was allowed to publish my poetry or my essays, and my books had been stripped from the shelves. I had insulted a very serious man.
Marta wanted to get rid of me, too. I had made her house into a place she dreaded entering. Yet my sister, Rosario, sent food, money, and probably the goddamn shit pail and begged Marta (I can hear this, Rosario’s wheedling voice) to have pity. “It is an unfortunate situation.”
We all underestimated the sensitivity of our General’s ear. That supreme organ had sucked up the whispered idiocy of the poor writer, and with a few muttered words, he’d caused my life to shrink to nothing. One day you are everybody’s friend, cake-walkingdown the streets of the Old Town like the mayor, half-pissed, money sprinkling out of your pockets onto the cobblestones, wondering only which bar to visit before returning home for supper. At first I thought — we all thought — this will blow over in a few days.
Carlos, after all, is nothing, nobody, a flea in the ear of the General.
The morning after my catastrophe I saw my face in one of the daily papers, grainy, a not particularly flattering snapshot taken back in my days with the Normal Forces, wearing fatigues and that crummy short-brimmed hat. Every male child has to endure eighteen months in the military before his real life begins. Believe me, I’ve made up for wasted time.
At first it was a lark being a fugitive. You could even say I felt a trifle proud at being selected, out of many, to perform this role. It would all blow over in a week or two, we thought; yet this is where we miscalculated. It turned out that I was despised by this malevolent official. I developed a chronic cough, as if the word had lodged in my throat and no amount of water or wine would clear it. The General’s despising was notorious, and now, so was I.
In the small room I sat on the leather-backed chair and knew that given the chance again, I wouldn’t have spoken so boldly. I am no hero. It is more important to be alive, to breathe the diesel-perfumed air of our city than to crouch like a mole in this tunnel.
At first, in my basement chamber I was treated like a member of the family. When Marta came home from work at the university she would scoop up chops and rice the maid had cooked, pour something to drink, add a sweet that she’d picked up from the café, and bring the tray downstairs. While I was eating she would pull up a chair and tell me about her day. I think she was lonely.
That was the first couple of weeks. Then it changed. I had become a guest who lingered too long, whose every throat-clearing and fart was an irritation. Whereas at first they would invite me upstairs late at night, after the children were put to bed, to watch television and drink coffee (Marta’s coffee is like tar, with a shimmering membrane of oil floating on top), they gradually retreated into their private lives. As if they wanted to forget about this pathetic human pacing their basement room. Marta’s smile, when she brought food, became strained and distant, then disappeared altogether. When your life has shrunk, and when the only human contact is the food provider and the remover of the shit pail, your heart drills in your chest at the sound of feet clattering down the stairs. You begin to sweat in anticipation. You arrange yourself in the room, first sitting, then standing propped against the wall, hands in pockets. What else could I do but receive their diminishing attentions? I knew they wished me to disappear, but I had no choice in the matter. I depended completely on their good will and it made me disgusting. To them, and to myself.
I began to stink. It was difficult to bathe. Marta and Rodolfo have two small daughters, curious, sociable girls who must not know of my existence. This caused great strain.
“No!” I heard Marta cry when one of the girls put her hand on the door to the basement. “You mustn’t!”
I strained to hear more, what excuses Mama used: deadly fumes? rodent infestation? Perhaps not so far from the truth.
There was a tiny window just above my head which revealed a portion of sidewalk, but I was not, in theory, permitted to open it, not even an inch. Nor was I allowed to part the curtains.
“It is too dangerous Marta said.
Of course. Dangerous not just for me, but for all of them. I immediately began to disobey, for without sun or air a man decays, he becomes rank, a rat dying inside the plaster of the walls.
I cheated often. On Friday nights, very late, I switched off my light, propped open the window an inch, then parted the curtain just enough to feel the outside air press in, and to hear shouts and laughter from patrons leaving the bars. Sometimes I was sure I recognized voices — Sylvan and Ana — and I would listen for the sharp click of a woman’s high heels on cobblestone. What if I sneezed or hiccupped? I imagined the pair of legs stopping, followed by a grunt of discomfort, then a face peering in. My nerves fired with each sound. Still, like anyone, inside this fear, curiosity flickered. One evening a pair of stockinged ankles came so close to my window that my hand rose to seize them. I wanted to see how much worse I could make it for myself. No, I wanted to stroke her skin, make her cry out. And where were all my friends, my so-called pals from the newspaper, the writers union? “Too bad for Carlos they were saying, as they sat for endless hours in the café gulping sugary pastry.
I began to love my own country now that I was forbidden to enter it.
Marta raced to my room in a state of excitement, forgetting even to flinch at the layers of unhygienic smells. She’d pulled her thick hair back into a ponytail and it tossed from side to side as she dropped onto the other chair and faced me. I was suddenly ashamed at my appearance, the pasty unshaven face and filthy clothes. I had refused to let her wash them, thinking of their increasing stiffness as a metaphor for what was happening to me. I was a sorry specimen.
“I have interested an organization called CAFE in your case she said in a breathless voice.
“Café?”
“Canadian Alliance for Freedom of Expression.” She spoke these words in slow, careful English. “Their group in Vancouver wishes to help you.”
“Vancouver?” My mind searched for geography. “Help me? How?” I was suspicious and scared. For here, in this dank basement room, I was, at least, safe. I got up and started pacing. The sole of my shoe had come loose and flapped against the cement.
“They want to bring you to the west coast of Canada, as a refugee.”
Her face shone with pleasure.
A refugee. I thought of those photos: famine-stricken Africans with distended bellies grabbing for food, Red Cross trucks.
“It’s good news, Carlos. You’ll be free.”
I looked at her. It will be you who is free — of me.
That night I hardly slept. But then night and day had long since lost their identities. The light in my cell was a timeless glimmer, like some monk’s lantern in the caves of Tibet. I woke up at what may have been dawn, with my left hand clasping a woman’s ankle, which slipped away as the walls crowded in. I must have wakened the household with my cries of ecstasy.
Sunlight bruises when the eyes have been in hiding. I was swept out of the house at dawn, pressed roughly into Rodolfo’s car by an anxious Marta and my sister Rosario, who both chattered non-stop and made me crouch in the back seat so I would not be seen. I hardly had a chance to smell the dewy grass or charcoal burners from the nearby market. Rodolfo stayed home with the sleeping children while his wife took the wheel.
Marta raced through the empty early morning streets and I felt each pit in the asphalt as I lay hunched across the vinyl seat, cheek hot against plastic. The international airport was thirty kilometres out of town. Everyone except me seemed wildly happy about the unfolding adventure. Especially Marta, who would have her house back whole and would send Lucía, the maid, into the basement that very day with a pail of soapy water and wire brush.
“You are a fortunate man Rosario called over her shoulder. “You’ve have been offered a new life.”
I was less excited than stunned. I thought of childhood journeys in my father’s old car when I would lie like this, but my body much smaller, knees folded up to my chin, head pressed against my sister’s sweaty thigh. Did I even want this new life? I’d become like a hospital patient: you do what you are told and are grateful for the attention.
I was clean now, freshly scrubbed and dabbed with deodorant and hair gel, decked out in new-old clothes, nails buffed and teeth flossed. The evening before, after darkness fell, I’d been permitted to creep up the stairs and lower myself into the family bathtub, an oversized porcelain monster from the previous century. Not without a pang of regret, for I had become attached to my dirt. I swept the terry cloth between my legs then down each thigh and between each festering toe until an odd smell joined the perfumed suds: something had left my body for good.
We finally arrived at the parking lot near the ugly cement building. This example of our glorious civic architecture was built under the last administration, with the hope of enticing tourists and foreign investment to our land. When I woozily lifted my head I saw yellow light spill through the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the terrazzo floor within. Silvery jets pulsed on the tarmac, spewing diesel fuel exhaust, while gnomes in forklifts toted luggage.
As a newspaper man, this building was hardly foreign to me. I’d spent many an hour in its lounge waiting for mysterious mechanical problems to be solved. Our national airline is famous for its antique equipment and flexible schedules.
“Lock the doors!” my sister cried. The place was full of thieves, even at this hour.
“Does he have his bag?” Marta said.
I had already begun to exist in the third person.
They’d selected, after a quick argument, a spot between two delivery vans to park. These would shield us as we exited the car. I felt my body creak as it unfurled, my poor spine fused from the weeks of confinement. Hot tar bled beneath our feet as we made our way to the automatic doors of the airport entrance. My pockets bulged with precious documents: passport and birth certificate, something from the Canadian government with official signatures, and the letter from CAFE written in stilted academic Spanish. Much work had been done on my behalf. This astonished me. Who were these helpful strangers in a faraway country? The doors opened and we were sucked in by the blast of icy synthetic air. It was too much, too sudden, and I started to skid across the polished floor.
“Carlos!” My sister grabbed the back of my shirt. Then she said to Marta, “Where does he go?”
Marta pointed. “Far end. First he has to check in.” She glanced around the nearly empty building. “There shouldn’t be any trouble.” This phrase hung in the air like a command.
The two women saw me off to the Departures gate, both of them in a state of high agitation. I saw that Marta hadn’t applied her makeup, and the neck of her blouse was open, showing a glimpse of freckled chest. Her eyes roamed the foyer, scanning each passenger’s face, each official’s badge. She couldn’t wait to get out of there.
“This is the best thing Rosario kept saying in that high-pitched voice, which is always too excited or too sorrowful.
“Do you have your ticket? Your passport?” Marta chimed in, equally nervous.
I felt entirely exposed, convinced that my newly shaved face was fluorescent, that any idiot could see what I was up to, and who was that man with his nose in a magazine? A plain-clothes member of the Special Forces, trained to sniff out criminals like myself? The General’s own agent? Even a child, a girl of no more than ten banging the side of a vending machine, was a possible plant. When she turned around I would see that she wasn’t a child at all, but a midget, a dwarf-policewoman, toting not a harmless O’Henry bar but a cocked handgun.
Goodbye dear country, goodbye dear sister, goodbye Marta, a fast embrace then their brightly coloured dresses danced toward the exit, leaving only a light fragrance of cologne.
The colour of the airplane was navy blue: this is a sensible and reassuring hue, and the pilot’s voice was so calm he appeared to be on the edge of falling asleep. I’d been in airplanes before, of course, but never to penetrate the skies above northern lands. How cold would it be, and how dark?
I fiddled with the sealed package of Canadian cheddar cheese. I picked at the plastic with both fingers, sawed at it with my teeth, then gave up, pocketing it for later. I’d been drinking since takeoff; the liquor was free and plentiful and I was, I confess, nervous. Not of flying, but of arrival.
“I can never open those things, either my seatmate said. He glanced at the pocket where I’d slid the cheese.
My face reddened, as if I’d been spotted boosting the cutlery.
“You headed for Vancouver?”
“That is so.” I nodded. My mind flooded with endless English drills from preparatory school: I did see, I saw, I see, I will see, I would see…
He looked like an explorer in his tan fatigues with dozens of deep pockets and flaps. His hair was thick and orange, his face freckled, yet lined. He was a young man, and I suspected he’d stayed too long in the sun for his pale complexion.
“What kind of business are you in?” he said.
I slugged wine from the plastic cup. “I am a poet.”
His mouth stayed open. “No kidding.”
“And what business are you?”
“I’m a sand broker. Right now I’m working on a shipping deal from Vancouver to Hawaii.”
I couldn’t think of a word to say.
“Actually he confessed. “I think I’m the only one in the world who does this.”
“Alas, I am not the only poet.”
I pulled out a copy of Insomnio.
“I don’t read much Spanish he said, politely leafing through the pages. “Just enough to get by in the field. What brings you to B.C.?”
I should have been alerted by his inquisitiveness. Instead, giddy from the wine and the altitude, I began to tell him the story in fractured English.
“My situation is funny, “I said, “and more than a little tragic.”
He closed the blind over the porthole so that he could see me without the coating of sunlight.
“I am about to become a writer-in-exile I began, using the phrase for the first time.
“Really?” His eyes scanned my face. “In exile from what?” The question was a surprise. “From anyone who might know me.”
My seatmate waited for more, feet stretching as far as possible in his heavy boots, perhaps to avert the possibility of thrombosis.
“This is all I am able to say.” I enjoyed the tinge of mystery, but his stare continued, so I added with a philosophical shrug, “We are all in exile from our authentic lives: it is the state of modern man.”
He gave a little laugh and said, “I can tell you are a poet.” Then he pulled out a black eyeshade from one of his many pockets and slipped it over his head.
Perhaps with his eyes covered he thought he’d disappeared, like the famous ostrich. To my surprise I felt a tug of loneliness and hurt.
When, hours later, the plane began to dip towards ground, I leaned over my dozing seatmate, lifted the blind and peered down at the patchwork of buildings and highways below. The sun had disappeared and a faint drizzle coated the airplane’s wing. Mountains rose in the distance, just as at home.
He pulled up his eyeshade and smiled. “There she is he said. “Vancouver. Your new life.”
Suddenly I doubted him. A sand broker? Selling sand to Hawaii? It was absurd, a transparent cover. Yes, but for what?
The wheels hit the glazed tarmac and there was a deafening screech of brakes.
“Someone will be waiting for you Rosario had told me with full confidence that our operation would unfold according to plan. “Just look for the CAFE sign.”
Yes, but first I must make my way through Customs and Immigration with my documents, and I felt that instinctive terror at the sight of agents whose job it was to sniff out liars, cheats, and anyone whose belongings didn’t match his story. A blonde woman in a white shirt peered at my passport with its four-year-old photograph, then my envelope of documents, and asked a few questions which I had to ask her to repeat. I felt myself growing red with strain, but perhaps she was used to such a reaction, because suddenly she slid the papers back into the envelope and said, “That’s fine. You may go.”
For several seconds I stood under the lights, unable to move. It was too easy, almost a miracle. The automatic doors popped open and I arrived in Canada to see a small mob of greeters waiting on the other side. I searched for those eager well-wishers who would be holding the CAFE sign, yet all I could see was a banner reading, “Welcome Home Mormon Brothers.” I made my way to a curved vinyl seat, set my bag on it, and waited to be discovered.
The Vancouver airport looked much like the one I’d left hours earlier. Its air contained the same layered perfume of disinfectant, stale coffee, and fuel, yet here a hard rain drilled the plate glass windows. Outside on the grey tarmac, the plane I’d so recently departed hummed with sweat. In an hour or so, cleaned out and refuelled, it would return to Santa Clara.
Finally I spotted her, a woman wearing a yellow rain slicker, still dripping wet, racing towards the Arrivals door, holding a soggy cardboard sign. I lifted my bag, about to rise, but then I stopped myself. My heart was hammering so hard I could barely breathe. She would think me high strung, out of control, asthmatic. So, for a moment, I just watched.
Her hair was dark and long, pasted to her skull by the rain, and yet I could see that she was pretty. A slash of lipstick coated her mouth.
She scanned the clumps of arriving passengers, men in raincoats and flustered mothers with children and toppling mounds of luggage, her eyes fastening for a moment on the so-called sand broker who heaved a leather satchel over his shoulder and marched down the hallway. One wave of passengers came and dispersed, then another. The smile on her face grew strained.
Still I waited; I was not yet ready to enter my new life. It was the last few seconds of being unseen. Whenever the double doors sprang open, she lifted her wet sign and smiled in anticipation. Over and over again she was denied her pleasure. I was being cruel, yet it was inevitable. I had to watch her without being watched myself. My knees popped up and down, a nervous rhythm. Then it was time. I gripped the satchel and began to rise again, but stopped and watched as something curious happened.
A tall, thin man had pressed through the automatic doors, wearing a sweater-vest under his dark jacket and a pair of loose corduroy pants. He looked around, brow furrowed, shifting his bag from one shoulder to the other. He was about my age and even had a thatch of dark hair, but his eyes were huge and he held himself erect. Even from a distance I could see the high cheekbones, the fine features that were almost girlish.
She smiled encouragingly and went up to him, the sign raised to her chest level.
“I am Rita she said very clearly, then, “Welcome to Vancouver.”
I felt my heart flex in excitement and for a few seconds even thought, there has been some mistake, he is the exile, the real one.
His eyes settled on her. “Not me, sweetie.” He tapped the soggy sign. “I’m waiting for the wife, wherever she may be.”
Rita flushed, mortified. She’d been so sure. Then, stepping back, she was faced with the question: if this man was not Carlos, then who was?
I slowly advanced, carrying the athletic bag that held all my precious belongings, and felt the oversized jacket engulf my shoulders. My sneakers, a last-minute purchase, were held together with Velcro tabs instead of laces. Rosario had bought these for me. Thank you, dear sister. I slid an unlit cigarette between my lips and let it dangle.
I spotted a tiny flash of disappointment as I held my hand out.
“I am Carlos Romero Estévez.”
She could hardly speak, perhaps feeling some tumult of emotion at my arrival. She ignored my hand and rose on tiptoes to kiss me, not on both cheeks, but on one, like a mother greeting her child. I felt the shroud of wet plastic press into my chest.
“I’m so glad you’re here she said. She shook her hair, sprinkling more rain. Her skin was soft and unlined, although I could tell she was over thirty by her eyes and the leanness of her face.
“I am Rita Falcon, from the CAFE board of directors.”
I smiled and said, “Thank you.” And when she looked puzzled, added, “Thank you for my arrival, thank you for my existence.”
She laughed, perhaps embarrassed by my sincerity. “You must have more luggage.”
“Just this.” I hefted the nylon bag Rodolfo had given me. Rita kept staring, eyes shining with pain and perhaps approval. I thought of the other passenger, the one who was waiting for his wife. Why had she been convinced that he was the exiled poet?
“Welcome to Canada she remembered to say, but the phrase was rushed this time, an afterthought.
“Yes I agreed, and inhaled deeply to show her that I wanted to know this place, to feel its air swell my chest, and that I was unafraid.
We drove into the city in her old Toyota, rain sputtering against the windshield and the wipers not working properly. We passed rows of stark concrete bunkers on the outskirts of the city, their roofs cradled by fog. And Rita talked.
“I work part-time at the university she told me. She had removed the bulky slicker, and I saw that she was a slender woman, with muscular arms and a long neck, and dark hair that brushed her shoulders.
“You are a professor?”
“Goodness no. I just work in the Grad Centre. Admin.”
She sifted through traffic, changing lanes twice, and laughed. “Sorry. Graduate Centre, administration. We all talk in short forms. But you understand now?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“You will have a position at the university, too.”
“Yes.” I had heard about this.
“Writer-in Exile. Nice office. You’ll be able to work, to write.” Rita rolled down her window, thrust an arm out into the drizzle, and the roar of traffic crammed into our little car.
“Over there are the mountains.” She raised her voice to be heard.
I stared but saw nothing, only the deep, phlegmy greyness, steam lifting from the earth.
“Wait till the clouds clear she said, cranking the window back up. “It’s a knockout.”
She didn’t look at me once during the ride, as if she couldn’t bear to. Instead she pointed to the rain-slurred buildings as they appeared through the fog: this was her old high school, this was the theatre, the important café, while I kept wiping the fogged-up window with my sleeve, trying to see this place where I’d landed.
We spun through downtown Vancouver and the buildings were like holograms, untouched by age or wind or neglect, apparitions of buildings that might be, shedding water from their shiny surfaces. The Toyota took a sharp turn into an area of small stucco houses and leafy trees, perhaps the famous national maples. We passed a soccer field where men and women were kicking a ball through the bog, their bodies entirely coated in brown sludge.
My own body gave a jerk.
“I am a poet I declared suddenly, ridiculously.
Rita smiled, stroking her hand over the wheel. “I’ve been taking Spanish classes all month, since we knew for sure you were coming.” She took a breath and recited, “Yo tengo mucho respeto para los poetas.”
I sank back into the seat. The windshield wipers sliced the view, back and forth, back and forth.
“Good I said. “I am glad.”
We pulled up in front of a large brown building, six storeys high, with a green door and many small windows set into the prickly facade. Its roof was flat, like a factory, and the rust-coloured chimney belched steam. Across the street was a school, its concrete yard deserted, twin basketball nets torn from the backboards.
“This is your house?” I was puzzled. There were many buildings like this in Santa Clara, containing nondescript flats for the factory workers and maids. I had rarely set foot in one. “It is big.”
“It’s not just my place Rita said, giggling. “I have a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor.”
I must have hesitated, for she pressed me forward and we entered the building, passing through a modest foyer lined by mailboxes. It was the size of the anteroom to my father’s office. We rode up a tiny clanking elevator and stepped off, and the first person I saw was myself, reflected in a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The man I glanced at was unfamiliar, too thin and poorly dressed, a slump to his shoulders. I touched the corner of my eye where it drooped. At home I am known for a certain style, leather jackets and slim pants, and the casual five o’clock shadow, which here, in the dim light, I noted had thickened to something more sinister.
“This way Rita said, dangling a key. “Eight-B.”
The corridor was long and narrow, carpeted in faded maroon. We passed half a dozen doors, each with a brass number and a fisheye peephole. Reaching the end of the hall, Rita unlocked the door and entered just ahead. I smelled burnt popcorn and watched as a teenaged girl rose from a couch and switched off the television set.
“He’s asleep the girl said. “In your bed, like you said.”
“Good.” Rita pulled out a couple of bills and gave them to her. “Thanks Sandy.”
The girl slid a math text and notebook into her pack and left, without casting a single glance my way.
The room was small, with low furniture and a black lacquered table pushed against one wall. I could hear the clatter of the elevator outside as the doors snapped shut and it wheezed back to ground level. A vase by the door held a single yellow bloom, and another vase on the black table held a quartet of irises.
“Who is sleeping on your bed?” I said.
“Andreas, my son. He’s lending you his room for a couple of nights.”
“May I see him, your boy?”
She paused a second, then said, “Sure. This way.”
We walked through a tiny kitchen and down a short hallway, which held a series of black and white photos. These displayed my hostess wearing a skin-tight leotard, posed in strange theatrical landscapes with oversized objects: a giant clock, a chair built for giants, and a huge toothbrush. I squinted at these as we passed, then at Rita’s firm body as she marched ahead of me now, clad in T-shirt and jeans. In one photo she glared at the camera, her lips tinted bright red.
“This is you?” I touched the image, slid my finger across the posed face.
She hardly looked back. “I’m a dancer, when I get the chance.” She pointed towards the end of the hall. “That’s his room, where you’ll sleep.”
A poster of a fierce-looking Gila monster, mouth yawned open and glaring, was clipped to the door.
“He’s crazy about reptiles and amphibians she said.
“So am I.”
Why did I say this? It was not true at all.
She pushed open the door on the opposite side of the hall and at first, in the dark, it was hard to see anything. Then I spotted the child lying twisted in his sheet, his arms wrapped around a stuffed toy.
“He has black hair, like mine I whispered and moved closer.
She leaned over, kissed the boy’s cheek, pushed the hair back from his forehead and kissed him again. He sighed, a warm, minty exhalation.
“Where is your husband?” I asked, when we were back in the living room.
“If you mean Andreas’s father, I haven’t a clue.”
Embarrassed, I gazed at the blank monitor of the television screen. I am not a sentimental man, but I could think only of the sleeping child with his thick hair like mine. I wondered if he was only pretending to sleep, as I so often did as a boy.
Rita had laid out a row of snacks, some sort of pâté and crackers, smoked oysters. But I was not hungry at all. Fatigue had cloaked my whole body now, and the constant search for English words and meanings had left my mouth dry and exhausted.
I pulled out a cigarette: at last, the breath I’d been waiting for.
“Sorry Rita said. “Not in here.”
I stared at her.
“But you can take it out on the balcony.”
She followed me there, showing me first how the latch on the glass door worked, how I must slide the bar across. Two chairs and a small plastic table were set up on the tiny cement shelf overlooking nothing, just an alley, the air still damp. I lit up, then sat on one of the chairs and immediately skidded forward on the damp webbing.
Rita must have imagined us sitting out here, because there was a small bowl of fresh pretzels on the table and a coaster for the drink I didn’t have. Across the alley was another walk-up, a mirror of the building I was now in. The glow from the cigarette seemed significant, a tiny bright light I’d brought with me and kindled to life with my breathing.
Rita sat in the other chair and propped one leg up on the railing. “You must be tired.”
“Yes I nodded with heavy eyes. “I will sleep very soon.” Did she look disappointed? “You’ll meet the others tomorrow she said, drilling her fingers on the side of her chair. “Syd Baskin is president of CAFE. There have been so many people involved with this project.”
It took me a moment to realize that “this project” was me.
I exhaled, lowered my lids, but not too much. Could I detect the smell of the sea in the air? At home the sea has a different spicing, blended with the smell of food from street venders. Why couldn’t I relax after the long journey? Instead I was popping nervous energy inside the exhaustion.
“You don’t look like your photograph she said gently.
“I have not been eating well.”
“Of course.”
When I tilted my head and blew out the cigarette smoke, I felt her watching. This was the arrival of the exiled poet. Because of his time in jail he would tire easily, not be able to process the new sensations, and like a blind man who is suddenly given sight, he is overwhelmed. Did she not say she was a dancer? Then I was caught in her choreography, and glad of it. Even my fingers seemed important as they tugged the cigarette out of my mouth.
“Do you know any of your poetry by heart?”
I felt my ass slip down the webbed chair.
“By memory.”
“Yes, of course.”
Perhaps she was right: the poet must play himself before he sleeps. And so I pulled out my modest volume, Insomnio, from the jacket pocket and handed it to her.
“Page five.”
She nodded solemnly and located the work, a narrative poem about the mariners who founded Santa Clara and began the cycle of corruption. I recited the full six stanzas, my voice low and whispery, punctuated by the dripping drainpipes and passing traffic. Rita held the book in her lap but didn’t look once at it: she seemed hypnotized by the motion of my lips.
Was she pondering the miracle that had brought me here to her small balcony on this rainy Vancouver evening? Maybe she’d guessed it would be like this, my voice thin and fragile, like the cheap paper of my book.
When I had finished I said in the same voice, as if we were still inside the poem, “And now I must sleep.”
I lay on the small bed, an X-Men quilt pressed over my body, surrounded by the noises of Andreas’s menagerie: gerbils snuffling about their cage and goldfish darting between the folds of their aquatic world. If I opened my eyes I could watch the shadowy movements of a mobile, cut-out reptiles painted a fluorescent green. If I breathed in I could smell the woody nest of the small brown desert rats. The room bristled with animal life and it seemed possible that I would never sleep again. My mind was speeding crazily. I was buckled inside this cramped apartment when I wanted to roam the city streets and find out where I was. The new life was just out of reach, a tantalizing metre or two away, while I was trapped by stucco walls. The gerbil raced crazily on the rungs of his exercise wheel, wood chips flying, his small body brimming with nocturnal energy.
Why does it matter if it’s four o’clock or five o’clock to the prisoner? The cell is like a sick room, where days are measured by the arrival of a nurse to take your temperature, or the regular howl of a fellow patient as dawn breaks.
I needed to create the image of a clock, of a world which ran by time and breathed time, a world which still existed. As a child in school we used to cut out cardboard hands and pin them on our scruffy hand-drawn clocks.
“At what hour do you eat lunch?” the teacher asked, and we dutifully rotated the hands to point at the correct numbers. We could lie. We could correct time, and even shoot the hands backward. We could even, like the fat boy we all called Bimmi, crunch up the hands and stuff them in our mouths.
In Santa Clara I was lucky enough to have a cellar window that aimed onto the street. Why didn’t I cry out? Because my prison was actually (as Marta never hesitated to point out) a safe house, and I dared not attract attention. A blind man went for bread every morning, tapping his cane along the cobblestone. Perhaps he was a bit mad, for he would mutter profanities and become furious if the landscape changed in any way. One time the waiter from the tiny café next door dragged his sandwich board a foot further into the walkway, and the blind man stumbled against it. What a racket! The air was blue with curses involving donkeys, children, and natural disasters. I strained to hear, half-delighted and half-appalled. Tap-tap, tap-tap. In that sad basement room I creaked off the mattress and rose, snapping at the waist of my underwear. It was the point in the morning when only the bakery was open and only the blind man was up and about. Later, it was children going to school. The little ones were first, shrieking and scampering, throwing a ball to the pavement, chewing gum and passing around sticks of licorice — a distinct smell which entered my cave. Fifteen or twenty minutes later the older children sauntered by. They didn’t care if they were late. They were tired, yawning heavily, reluctantly pawing off sleep.
I became an olfactory expert and recognized women by the way they smelled. I didn’t see faces, but when, against all rules, I lifted the bottom of the window an inch or so, then the curtain as if it were the hem of her skirt, I could watch those slim ankles march by. A strong rose fragrance accompanied one particular woman and I learned to wait for her. Sometimes, despite the inhospitable cobblestone, she wore high heels, red patent leather, or black. My entire erotic life was contained in that pair of feet, viewed for no more than a second or two, but imagined for the rest of the day. Sometimes, on her way home from work, she stopped by the chicken place. I recognized the succulent smell of Hugo’s rotisserie-roasted Pollo Loco and could easily picture her conversation with old Hugo and how his skin would graze hers as he poured change into her waiting hand. His stand was directly across from the Avenida San Sebastián metro stop a block away. She walked quickly after her purchase, lured by the smell emanating from the bag and her own fatigue, which drew her towards home and the moment when she could slip out of her shoes (now a little spotted from the day’s journey) and draw her stockinged feet up onto the sofa. She would flick on the TV to the telenovela starring that girl with hair down to her ass, and plunge her fingers into the greasy bag.
I wondered if my own image might flicker across the screen: Most Wanted Man.
Wanted, yes, but never by the right people.
On rainy days bicycle wheels splashed through puddles. Car exhaust pumped through my window, making my eyes smart, yet I sucked in the complex flavours of diesel fuel avidly. This was the world, my only world now. There was a man who had a bronchial condition, and when he passed my window he scraped his lungs with a deep, phlegmy cough. The hacked-up mucus landed with a splat, inches from the bars: it was a sound I dreaded.
I hated him, the Phlegm Man.
As I loved the woman with the red shoes. My Angel. They were all mine.
And in this boy’s room in Canada, even the desert rat finally fell asleep in his nest.