TINY LANTERNS SEEPED WHITE LIGHT AMONGST THE ferns and grasses of Professor Baskin’s back yard. How different it looked at night, full of shadows and unidentified shapes, the fish pool gurgling sanitized water to the orange carp within. Its own lights were recessed and cast a blue shimmer as if the pool were a flying saucer docked in this sprawling yard. Fifty-six people from the conference were at the party, hand-picked from the participants by Sydney himself. There were important directors of CAFE from Toronto and Ottawa, and I spotted the eminent judge himself, now shed of his cashmere coat, looking almost informal in rolled-up sleeves, puffing on a fat cigar.
“Not Cuban,” I heard him say in a raised voice.
Not while the bearded dictator clings to power.
Where was A? There was something wrong with my throat; I kept clearing it, then it would close again. Drinks helped. He had not spotted me in the crowd back at the theatre, nor in the foyer afterward, where he’d stood surrounded by press cameras.
I received a slap on the back from my old CAFE friend, Daniel Rose.
“You were good up there yesterday,” he said. “Held your own.” His curly hair was uncombed and he wore a collarless shirt under his jacket.
“Thank you.” I gave one of those quick bows that I’d invented the instant I set foot on this soil. “And how is your beautiful wife?”
His face tightened. “Sharon has left me.” Then, when I did not quickly respond, he said, “Are you surprised?”
Of course he wanted me to tell him I was astonished, that surely no woman could leave such an accomplished and passionate man, but this was not a night for polite lies.
“No,” I said, “I am not surprised.”
He laughed, more like a bark. “Seems no one but me was.”
He’d been drinking. It was apparent in his hooded eyes and the way he bobbed sideways as if searching for his centre of gravity. Next he’d be wanting to pull me to some back end of the garden and talk long hours about his great sorrow, because I, Carlos, the exile who had suffered so much, would understand his crushing loneliness. Yet I could think only of his wife who had finally managed to break free.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I am searching for my old friend.”
“Mario?”
I’d just spotted him at the side of the cobblestone patio with our host, Sydney, their heads tilted towards each other.
“Yes, Mario.”
Daniel lifted his arm and made an arc through the air and declaimed, “Then you must go to him.”
My hands were shaking so hard that my glass splashed its contents to the patio floor, but I was not distressed by this awkwardness. This was not some examination hall or guerrilla camp in the back country: I knew this place better than A did. The nervousness was even welcome, a sign that I was fully alive, and that everything I remembered from my old life was about to pounce like a cat into the middle of this polite gathering.
While A listened to Sydney he leaned over, frowning, his chest concave as he attempted to understand what was being said. I was drifting back to the examination hall in Santa Clara, scrabbling to answer mathematical questions and watching the boy with stapled huaraches and calloused heels, the whiff of country in his hair. I could enumerate his shoes through the years, beginning with peasant sandals, on to American sneakers while at university, then the cheap prison-issue thongs, followed by the scuffed combat boots of his days in the camp. And what did he wear now? A pair of brown loafers, excellent leather.
I crossed the patio, waiting for him to look up so that I could relish the moment of astonishment as it transformed his face.
“You must introduce me.” Rita, who had disappeared into the crowd the moment we arrived, was suddenly at my side. “Now’s our chance.”
I felt myself being propelled across the yard, Rita’s step secure in her high-heeled sandals, her hand pressed into my back. This was too fast, the approach was all wrong. I should be alone, backlit, face in shadows, walking a steady pace, not this pell-mell march. Rita, of all people, should understand this. We passed a journalist whom I recognized, a short man who called after us, “You’re going to Mario?”
“I have known this man for nearly twenty years,” I cried over my shoulder.
And how long since I’d seen him? Four years at least.
We barrelled past the musical entertainment, a woman dressed in a long skirt and shawl who daintily plucked the strings of a harp.
“Oh no,” Rita moaned. “‘Greensleeves.’”
Melting wax gathered on the tablecloth beneath silver candelabra and the dancing flames lit up an arrangement of food, but I was not hungry. The cobblestone was uneven under my feet, each placed in a careful random pattern, edge to edge. We were Eskimos hopping across ice floes, approaching our prey. The journalist had pulled out his notebook and was trailing in our wake to be witness to the historic meeting. I was not even faintly drunk, despite my best efforts. Syd looked up, smiling from some amusement, his hand sliding off A’s shoulder. Seeing me about to interrupt his tête à tête did not give the professor any pleasure. The slim body, which had teetered with forbidden longing just two weeks earlier, had found a new object of affection.
Rita chattered at my side, “Poor guy must be sacked after the long flight.”
A glanced up, alerted by the sound of Rita’s heels, and up close I could see his eyes were red, and he was squinting as if trying to see properly.
I spoke too hurriedly the words I’d selected, “The world shrinks, my friend. Who could have foreseen this moment?” I waited for the anticipated moue of astonishment but he merely stared at me politely. I was thinner perhaps, or it was a shock, this sudden intrusion from home. I’d spoken in Spanish, in the accent of our state, but he merely continued his steady stare. I felt my gut twist. The group around us waited for the historic moment to unfold. Why were these old comrades not embracing?
So I called him by his real name, not Mario, but A, which only a fellow citizen would know. I spoke it tenderly, aware that I was possibly the only man in this city, even this country, who would remember.
He started, shoulders bracing, and a look of alarm crossed his face. “I am sorry,” he said in a tight voice, “but I have forgotten your name.”
Lantern light flitted over his forehead like the beating wings of a moth. His expression was incurious as he spoke, and I saw the way he looked at Rita, his eyes darting sideways as if seeking a mode of escape.
“Carlos,” I said with an effort at tranquility. “Carlos Romero Estévez.”
Rita’s fingers dug into my waist.
He waited a long, eternal beat then said, “I do not understand why you are here.”
I reddened, then quickly recovered. “I live here now.” The words surprised me by their simplicity. At last his hand reached out and I quickly moved to shake it, remembering that it would be a limp clasp, not the earnest pumping that is fashionable amongst the men of this country. Instead he gave my cheek a pat.
“So you too have been rescued.”
We could only wonder at the sequence of events that had brought us both to this manicured yard in the middle of a city we’d barely heard of.
“Tell me where I know you from,” he said.
Was it possible he had forgotten our shared history? Citronella fragrance sifted through the air, mixing with the barbeque fumes. I cleared my throat.
“We were schoolmates,” I began, then stalled. Where to begin? I stared harder and wondered if he was mocking me again. But there was no laughter in his eyes, only a hunted look, and his jaw was so tight that his lips were colourless. And so I remarked on the preparatory school we had both attended, his disobedience there, and as I spoke his expression grew even more uneasy and I got the impression I was saying too much, that all of this was a past that had swum away from him, overlaid by more important enterprises.
I glanced at our host sipping at his spritzer, a wedge of lemon clinging to the rim of his glass.
“You will live here now?” I said, reverting to English.
“No. I am in Frankfurt. A post at the national university.”
How odd this was, this suddenly banal exchange, as if we were tourists meeting in an airport lounge.
“Writer-in-Exile chair?”
“You know it?” He seemed surprised, eyes locked in a permanent squint, and I was shocked by wrinkles pleating his skin. His lips were frayed, and his teeth, never the best, were a mess.
“Of course.”
Sydney coughed discreetly. “Perhaps you should introduce Rita. She’s been waiting.”
“Of course,” I said again. “My friend, Rita Falcon.”
“Like the noble bird.” A smiled his old warrior’s smile.
“Thank you for speaking to us at the conference,” Rita said in a low voice. “We need to hear your story.”
A nodded, almost a bow, yes, the very bow I had first assumed a year ago.
The reporter was scribbling something in his note pad.
At this moment a tray was presented with drinks and I selected a martini and glanced at the waiter to thank him. I recognized the handsome boy who’d been lounging in the second-floor bedroom of this house more than twelve months earlier. Rita dropped her arm from my waist and was now pressing forward to listen to the revolutionary hero.
“Frankfurt is excellent,” he was telling the group of avid listeners. “I am giving speeches and they have arranged translations in several European languages.”
He was so thin, bony as a bird. Soon he must learn to digest northern food, or he would fade away. His gestures were heated and insistent, as if he were afraid of the possibility of his own disappearance. Suddenly he clutched his knee, swearing, and began to hobble back and forth as if to shake off some terrible pain. The slight gimp I’d noticed as he crossed the conference stage was now a definite lurch. We all stared and wondered what ghastly wound was concealed by his ill-fitting trousers.
A waved off their help, and tried to smile. But there was no hint of amusement in his face, only a bewildered exhaustion.
I lifted a bottle of vodka off the table and took it to the far end of Sydney’s yard. With the darkness came a muted clamour, as if the party had been draped in flannel. I heaved myself onto a decorative rock. The air back here was saturated with lilac scent, a smell which whisked me back to my family’s home high on the hill above Santa Clara. Each spring our maid would snip the branches of the flowering bush on the patio and bring a bouquet inside to use as a centrepiece at the table.
Sydney was reaching for A and Rita, pulling them into a huddle, then he pressed his mouth toward the new exile’s ear, no doubt speaking slow clear phrases of instruction.
I do not get stupid when I drink, only more alert. A looked up once and I am sure he was searching for me in the darkness. The rock was cool against my body, and the moss growing in its crevices, which I stroked now with my fingers, was as coarse and damp as pubic hair. No one could see me, but I could see all of them.