TWO DAYS AGO, at approximately three forty-five Thursday morning, a truck driver named Gregorio Rabassa misjudged the clearance beneath the pedestrian overpass on the thirty-second block of Avenida Cahuide. His truck, packed with washing machines and destined for a warehouse not far from there, hit the bottom of the bridge, sheering the top off his trailer and bringing part of the overpass down onto the avenue below. The back of the trailer opened on impact, spilling the appliances into the street. Fortunately, at the time of the accident there were no other cars on that stretch of road, and Mr. Rabassa was not seriously injured. Emergency crews arrived within the hour, flooding Cahuide with light, and set about clearing the road of debris. Scraps of metal, pieces of concrete, the exploded insides of a few washing machines, all of it was loaded and carted away. Except for the ruined bridge, little evidence remained of the accident by the morning rush, and many people who lived nearby didn’t even hear what happened while they slept.
The neighborhood to the east of Cahuide does not have one name, but many, depending on whom you ask. It is known most commonly as The Thousands, though many locals call it Venice, because of its tendency to flood. I’ve heard it referred to in news reports as Santa María, and indeed, it does border that populous district, but the name is not exactly correct. A few summers ago, after a wave of kidnappings, police dotted the area with checkpoints and roadblocks, and the neighborhood became known as Gaza, an odd, rather inexact reference to troubles on the other side of the world, only briefly and occasionally noted in the local press. How this nickname stuck is a mystery. The Thousands is an ordinary neighborhood of working poor, crammed with modest brick houses lining narrow streets. It is set in the foggy basin between two hills, and the only people who know it well are those who call it home. A turbid, slow-moving creek runs roughly parallel to Cahuide, and is partially canalized, a project intended to alleviate the annual flooding, but which has had, I am told, the opposite effect. The main road entering the neighborhood is paved, as are most others, but some are not. My uncle Ramón, who was blind, lived there with his wife, Matilde, who was also blind, and their road, for instance, was not paved.
On Thursday morning, my uncle and his wife left their house early, as they always did; drank tea; and chatted briefly with Señora Carlotta, who sells emollients and pastries from a cart at the corner of José Olaya and Avenida Unidad. She tells me they were in good spirits, that they held hands as they left, though she can’t recall what it was they spoke about. “Nothing really,” she said to me this afternoon when I went to visit. Her broad face and graying hair give the impression of someone who has seen a great deal from her perch at the corner of these two rather quiet neighborhood streets. Her cheeks were wet and glistening as she spoke. “We never talked about anything in particular,” she said, “but I always looked forward to their visit. They seemed to be very much in love.”
Each working day, after drinking their tea and chatting with Carlotta, my blind uncle and his blind wife boarded the 73 bus to the city center, a long meandering route that took over an hour, but that left them within a few steps of their work. They were both employed as interpreters by a company whose offices are not far from the judicial building where I work: Ramón specialized in English to Spanish; Matilde, Italian to Spanish. All sorts of people are willing to pay for the service, and the work could be, from time to time, quite interesting. They would spend their days on the phone, transparent participants in bilingual conversations, translating back and forth between businessmen, government officials, or old couples in one country speaking to their grandchildren in another. Those cases are the most taxing, as the misunderstandings between two generations are far more complex than a simple matter of language.
I went to visit the offices yesterday on my lunch hour, to clean out their desks and talk to their colleagues. I have been named executor of their estate, and these sorts of tasks are my responsibility now. Everyone had heard about the accident, of course, and seemed stunned by the news. I received condolences in eight languages from an array of disheveled, poorly dressed men and women, who collectively gave the impression of hovering just slightly above what is commonly known as reality. Each interpreter wore an earpiece and a microphone, and seemed to have acquired, over the course of a career, or a lifetime, a greenish tint like that of the computer screen that sat before him. All around, the chatter was steady and oddly calming, like the sea, or an orchestra tuning up. One by one, the interpreters approached, shared a few hushed, accented words, all in a strange patois that seemed both related to and completely divorced from the local dialect. I had to strain to make out their words, and everything would end with an embrace, after which they would shuffle back to their desks, still lilting under their breath in a barely identifiable foreign language.
Eventually, an elderly gentleman surnamed Del Piero, who had worked in the Italian section with Matilde, pulled me aside, and led me to a bank of ashy windows that looked out over a crowded side street. He was bent, had a thin, airy voice, and his breath smelled strongly of coffee. His sweater was old and worn, and looked as if you could pull a loose strand of yarn and unravel the entire garment. Mercifully, he spoke a clear, only slightly accented Spanish. They had worked together for years. He thought of Matilde as his daughter, Del Piero told me, and he would miss her most of all. “More than any of these other people,” he said, indicating the open floor of the translation offices with a disappointed nod. Did I hear him? He wanted to know if I could hear him.
“Yes,” I said. “I hear you.”
“She was a saint, a miracle of a woman.”
I squeezed his arm, and thanked him for his kind words. “My uncle?” I asked.
“I knew him too.” Del Piero shrugged me off, and straightened his sweater. “We never got along,” he said. “I don’t speak English.”
I let this rather puzzling remark go by with barely a nod. We stared out the window for a moment, not speaking. A slow-moving line had formed along the wall on the street below, mostly elderly, each person clutching a piece of paper. Del Piero explained that on the last Friday of each month, one of the local newspapers held a raffle. Their offices were around the corner. You only had to turn in a completed crossword puzzle to enter. The man in a baseball cap leaning against the wall was, according to Del Piero, a dealer in completed crosswords. By his very stance, by the slouch of shoulders, you might have guessed he was involved in something much more illicit—the trade in stolen copper, the trafficking of narcotics, the buying and selling of orphans. I had barely noticed him, but now it was clear: the buyers came one at a time, furtively slipping the man in the cap a coin or two, and taking the paper he handed them. The old people rushed off with their answer key, to join the line and fill in the squares of their still-incomplete puzzles.
“What are they giving away this month?”
“How should I know?” Del Piero said. “Alarm clocks. Blenders. Washing machines like the ones that killed my Matilde.” His face went pallid. “Your uncle wasn’t blind. I know you won’t believe me. But he murdered her, I just know he did.”
Del Piero muttered a few words to himself in Italian, and then walked back to his desk. I followed him. “Explain yourself,” I said, but he shook his head sadly, and slumped in his chair. He looked as if he might cry.
No one else seemed to notice our miniature drama, and I wondered if translators in this office often fell to weeping in the course of their labors. I grabbed a chair, and sat in front of his desk, staring at Del Piero as I do in court sometimes when I want a witness to know I will not relent. “Say it again. Explain it to me.”
Del Piero raised a hand for a moment, then seemed to reconsider, letting it drop slowly to the desk. There were beads of sweat gathering at his temples. The man was wilting before me. “What is there to explain? He could see. Your uncle moved around the office like a ballerina. I don’t do anything all day, you know. No one speaks Italian anymore. Two calls a day. Three at most. All from young men who want visas, boys whose great-grandfathers were born in Tuscany, or Palermo, or wherever. And I negotiate with court clerks to get copies of ancient birth certificates. Do you realize that Italy barely existed as a nation then? All this fiction, all these elegant half-truths, just so yet another one of ours can flee! I know the score. They’re all flying to Milan to get sex changes. Cheap balloon tits, like the girls in the magazines. Collagen implants. I can hear it in their voices. They’re not cut out for life here. And so, what do I do? All day, I wait for the phone to ring, and while I wait, I watch them. The Chinese, the Arabs, the Hindus. I listen. I watch.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He could see, damn it. I know this. Matilde and I would sit by that window, waiting for the phone to ring, drinking coffee, and I would describe for her what was happening on the street below. That swarthy guy in the ball cap—we talked about him every Friday! And she loved it. She said your uncle described things just as well. That he had a magical sense of direction, so perfect that if she hadn’t known better, she would’ve doubted he was blind.”
“He wasn’t born like that, you know. He used to be able to see. What she said sounds like a compliment to me.”
“If you say so.” Del Piero looked unimpressed. “They’re going to fire me now.”
I didn’t want to feel pity for him, but I couldn’t help it.
He went on: “Matilde would have quit in protest. She loved me that much. And if she quit, your uncle would have too. He was their best worker—they never would’ve let him walk. His English was better than the Queen’s!”
The Queen? I stood to go. “I appreciate your time,” I said, though his phone had been silent since I’d arrived.
Del Piero caught me looking. “I got a call earlier. I might get another this afternoon.” Then he shrugged; he didn’t believe it himself. He walked me out, his sad, heavy eyes trained on the floor. At the staircase, he stopped. “Coloro che amiamo non ci abbandonano mai, essi vivono nei nostri ricordi,” he said.
“Is that so?”
Del Piero nodded gravely. “Indeed. It’s not much, but it’ll have to do.”
I thanked him. Whatever it meant, it did sound nice.
—
RAMÓN LOST HIS SIGHT in a fireworks mishap at age seven, when I was only three. I have no memories of him before the accident, and to me, he has always been my blind uncle. He was my father’s youngest brother, half brother actually, separated by more than twenty years, and you could say we grew up, if not together, then in parallel. By the time Ramón was born, my grandfather’s politics had softened quite a bit, so the child was spared a Russian name. My grandfather lived with us, but I never heard him and my father exchange more than a few words. I spent my childhood ferrying messages between the two men—Tell your father this, tell your grandfather that . . . They’d had a falling-out when I was very young, a political disagreement that morphed into a personal one, the details of which no one ever bothered to explain.
Ramón’s mother, my grandfather’s last mistress, was a thin, delicate woman who never smiled, and when I was in elementary and middle school, she would bring her son over every week or so to see my grandfather. I was an only child in a funereal house, and I liked the company. Ramón made a point of addressing me as nephew, and my father as brother, with such rigor that I understood his mother had taught him to do so. I didn’t mind. He always had a new dirty joke to share, something beautifully vulgar he had learned from his classmates at the Normal School for Boys in the old city center. He must’ve been fourteen or fifteen. A serious student of English even then, he would record the BBC evening news on the shortwave, and play it back, over and over, until he understood and could repeat every word. His dedication to the exercise always impressed me.
To my ear, the house got even quieter whenever Ramón and his mother arrived, but he liked our place for precisely the opposite reason: with its creaky wooden floors, he could hear himself coming and going, he said, and the space made sense to him. It was large, and the high ceilings gave the human voice a sonority that reminded him of church. Sometimes he would ask me to lead him on a tour of the place, just to test his own impressions of the house, and we would shuttle up and down the steps, or tiptoe along the walls of the living room so he could trace its dimensions. He had memories of the house from before the accident, but they were dimmer each day, and he was aware that his brain had changed. It was changing still, he’d tell me ominously, even now, even at this very moment. I thought he was crazy, but I liked to hear him talk. My mother had lined the stairwell with framed photographs, and Ramón would have me describe what seemed to be quite ordinary family scenes of birthday parties and vacations, my school pictures, or my father with a client celebrating some legal victory.
“Am I in any of them?” Ramón asked me once, and the question caught me so off guard that I said nothing. I remember a ball of pain in the hollow of my stomach, and panic spreading slowly up to my chest, my arms. I held my breath until Ramón began laughing.
He would have been forty-four this year.
The centerpiece of each visit was a closed-door sit-down with my grandfather. They spoke about Ramón’s studies, his plans, my ailing grandfather dispensing stern bits of wisdom gathered from his forty years as a municipal judge. I was always a bit jealous of these; the undivided attention my grandfather gave Ramón was something my father never gave me. But by the time I was ten, the old man was barely there, his moments of lucidity increasingly brief, until everything was a jumble of names and dates, and he could barely recognize any of us. In the twenty-odd years since my grandfather passed away, my father’s mind has collapsed along a similar, if slightly more erratic pattern, as perhaps mine will too, eventually. My inheritance, such as it is. One day, after Ramón’s conversation with my grandfather, he and I went on a walk through the neighborhood. I must have been twelve or thirteen. We were only a few blocks from my house when Ramón announced that he wouldn’t be coming to visit anymore. “There’s no point,” he said. He was finishing school, and would soon be attending the university on a scholarship. We were walking in the sun, along the wide, tree-lined median that ran down the main avenue of my district. Ramón had a hand in his pocket, had insisted on going barefoot so he could feel the texture of the grass between his toes. He had tied the laces of his sneakers, and wore them slung around his neck.
“What about me?” I said.
He smiled at the question. “You’re a lucky boy. You live with your dad.”
I had nothing to say to that.
“Do you want to see something?” Ramón took his hand from his pocket, opening it to reveal a small spool of copper wire, bent and coiled into an impossible knot. I asked him what it was.
“It’s a map,” he said.
I took it when he passed it to me, careful not to disturb its shape.
“Every time we turn, I bend it,” he explained. “And so I never get lost.”
“Never?”
“I’m very careful with it.”
“It’s nice,” I said, because that was all I could think to say.
Ramón nodded. “My father isn’t coming back. Your grandfather. His mind has . . .” He cupped his hands together, then opened them with a small sound, as if he’d been holding a tiny bomb that had just gone off.
“The old guy’s not going to miss me.”
The sun was bright, and Ramón turned toward it, so that his face glowed. I couldn’t deny that he looked very happy.
When we got back to the house, my grandfather was in the living room, asleep in front of the television, taking shallow breaths through his open mouth. He’d been watching opera, and now Ramón’s mother sat by his side, combing his hair. She stood when she saw her son, nodding at me without a hint of warmth, and then gathered her things. She left the comb balanced on my grandfather’s knee.
“It’s time to go,” she said. “Careful. Don’t wake your father. Now say goodbye to your nephew.”
He shook my hand very formally, and I saw very little of him after that.
My grandfather died two years later.
—
LAST NIGHT I couldn’t sleep. For hours, I lay on my back, the bedside lamp on, admiring the ceiling and its eerie yellow tint. My wife slept with the blanket pulled over her head, so still it was possible to imagine I was all alone.
I thought of the truck, out of control and speeding, tearing the bridge down as it raced south. Or of Ramón, walking Matilde steadily, lovingly, to her death. In their haste, the local emergency crews neglected to block off the bridge’s stairs on either side of the avenue. Four hours later, my uncle and aunt climbed these same stairs on their way to the bus stop, but they never made it, of course, tumbling onto the avenue instead, where they were killed by oncoming traffic.
It had been in all the afternoon papers on Thursday, along with photos of the truck driver, Rabassa, an unshaven young man with a sheepish smile, who wore his light brown hair in a ponytail. In interviews, he offered his heartfelt condolences to the families, but, on the advice of counsel, had little else to say about the accident. I would have given him the same advice. In the classic understated style common to our local journalists, the ruined bridge was now being called THE BRIDGE OF DEATH, or alternatively, THE BRIDGE TO DEATH.
At home, my wife and I instructed the maid to let the phone ring, and at the office, I asked my secretary to screen all the calls, and hang up on radio, television, or print reporters. It was only a matter of time, and by yesterday morning, when it was discovered that Ramón was related to my father, the scrutiny only intensified. There were now two scandals in play. In the afternoon, when I went to pick my daughters up from school, a young reporter, a boy of no more than twenty, followed me to my car, asking me for a comment, for anything, a phrase, a string of expletives, a word, a cry of pain. He had hungry eyes, and the sort of untrustworthy smile common to youth here: he could commit neither to smiling nor to frowning, the thin edges of his lips suspended somewhere in between. “Do you plan to sue?” he shouted, as my daughters and I hurried toward the car.
Last night I read the afternoon editions very carefully, with something approximating terror: What if someone had managed to get through to my father, to pry a comment from him? It would be difficult, given his situation, but not unthinkable, and surely he would oblige with something outrageous, something terrible. I bought a dozen papers, and read every page—testimonials from neighbors, interviews with civil engineers and trucking experts, comments from the outraged president of a community advocacy group and the reticent spokesman of the transport workers union, along with photos of the site—a hundred opinions through which to filter this ordinary tragedy, but fortunately, nothing from my father. There was nothing on the television either.
This morning, Saturday, I went to see my old man to tell him the news myself, and make certain the asylum’s authorities were aware that soon the press would be calling. Apparently there had been attempts already, but I was relieved to discover my father had lost more of his privileges, including, just last week, the right to receive incoming calls. He’d long ago been barred from making them. Of course, there were some cell phones floating among the population of the asylum, so the secretary couldn’t offer me any guarantees. She didn’t know all the details, but his nurse, she assured me, would explain everything.
My old man has been in the asylum for three years now. He is only sixty-eight, young to be in the shape he’s in. Every time I go, he’s different, as if he’s trying on various pathologies to see how they suit him. It happened so slowly I hardly noticed, until the day three and a half years ago that he attacked a man in court—his own client—stabbing him multiple times in the neck and chest with a letter opener, nearly killing him. It came as a great surprise to us, and the press loved the story. The scandal went on for months, and no aspect went unreported. For example, it was noted with evident delight that my father’s client, the victim—on trial for money laundering—might serve time with his former lawyer if convicted. One columnist used the matter to discuss the possibility of prison reform, while a rather mean-spirited political cartoonist presented the pair as lovers, holding hands and playing house in a well-appointed prison cell. My mother stopped answering the phone and reading the papers; in fact, she rarely left home. But none of this chatter was relevant in the end: the money launderer recovered from his stabbing and was acquitted; my father was not.
His trial was mercifully brief. My old man, charged with assault and attempted murder, facing a prison sentence that would take him deep into his eighties, wisely opted for an insanity plea. Out of respect for his class and professional history, room was made for him at the asylum, and though it was jarring at first, over time he has become essentially indistinguishable from the other guests.
I was shown to the visitors’ room by a pale, tired-looking nurse, who told me my old man had been in a bad mood recently. “He’s been acting out.”
I’d never seen her before. “Are you new?” I asked.
She walked briskly, and I struggled to keep up. She told me she’d been transferred from the women’s pavilion. I tried to make small talk, about how things were over there, if she was adjusting to the inevitable differences between the genders, but she wasn’t interested, and only wanted to tell me about my father. “He’s a real sweetheart,” she said, and she was worried about him. He wasn’t eating, and some days he refused to take his medication. The previous week, he had tossed his plate at a man who happened to bump him in the lunch line. “It was spaghetti day. You can imagine the mess.”
In case I couldn’t, she went on to describe it, how my old man walked calmly from his victim, and sat down in front of a television in a corner of the cafeteria, watching a nature show with the sound off, waiting for the nurses to arrive; how when they did, he crossed his wrists and held his arms out in front of him, as if expecting handcuffs, which, she assured me, “we rarely use with men like your father.” Meanwhile, a few terrified patients had begun to cry: they thought the victim was bleeding to death before their very eyes, that those were his organs spilling from his wounded body. The nurse sighed heavily. All sorts of ideas hold sway among the residents of the asylum. Some believed in thieves who stole men’s kidneys, their livers, and their lungs, and it was impossible to convince them otherwise.
We had come to a locked door. I thanked her for telling me.
“You should visit him more often,” she said.
A fluorescent light shone above us, cold, clinical. I kept my gaze fixed on her, until I could see the color gathering in her cheeks. I straightened the knot of my tie.
“Should I?” I said. “Is that what you think?”
The nurse looked down at her feet, suddenly fidgety and nervous. “I’m sorry.” She pulled a key ring from her jacket pocket, and as she did, her silver cigarette case fell with a crash, a dozen long, thin smokes fanning out across the concrete floor like the confused outline of a corpse.
I watched her gather them. Her face was very red now.
“My name is Yvette,” she said, “if you need anything.”
I didn’t answer.
Then we were through the door, and into a large, rather desolate common room. There were a few ragged couches and a pressboard bookcase along a white wall, its shelves picked almost clean, save for a thin volume on canoe repair, a yellowing Cold War spy novel, and some fashion magazines with half the pages missing. There were a dozen men, not more, and the room was quiet.
Where was everyone?
Yvette explained that many of the patients—she had used this word all along, not inmates or prisoners, as some others did—were still in the cafeteria, and some had retired to their rooms.
“Cells?” I asked.
Yvette pursed her lips. “If you prefer.” She continued: and many were outside, in the gardens. The morning had dawned clear in this part of the city, and I imagined a careless game of volleyball, a couple of men standing flat-footed on either side of a sagging net, and quickly realized these were images drawn from movies, that in fact, I had no idea how those confined against their will to a hospital for the criminally insane might make use of a rare day of bright, limpid sun. They might lie in the grass and nap, or pick flowers, listen for birds or the not-so-distant sounds of city traffic. Or perhaps glide across the open yard, its yellow grass ceding territory each day to the bare, dark earth, these so-called gardens, each inmate just one man within a ballet much larger, much lonelier than himself.
My father preferred to stay indoors. Early on he wasn’t permitted outside, and so had become, like a house cat, accustomed to watching from the windows, too proud to admit any interest in going out himself. In the three years I’d been visiting him, we’d walked the gardens only once: one gray morning beneath a solemn sky, on his birthday, his first after the divorce. He’d walked with his head down the entire time. I mentioned this, and Yvette nodded.
“Well, they’re not exactly gardens, you know.”
Just as Yvette was not exactly a nurse, this prison not exactly a hospital. Of course I knew. I watched a woman read to a group of inmates, what amounted to a children’s story, and she could hardly get through a sentence without being interrupted. My father sat in his usual spot, by the high window in the far corner, overlooking a few little-used footpaths that wended between the trees surrounding the main building. He was alone, which upset me, until I noticed that all the patients in this group were essentially alone, even the ones who were, nominally at least, together. A dozen solitary men scattered about, lost in thought or drugged into somnolence.
Yvette patted my arm, and excused herself wordlessly.
I made my way toward my father, past a small table along a salmon-colored wall that was stacked with games and pamphlets, and with a bulletin board just above it, announcing the week’s program—POETRY NIGHT, SPORTS NIGHT, CEVICHE NIGHT. Hardly an evening passed, as far as I could tell, without a planned activity of some kind; it was no wonder these men seemed so tired. They all wore their own clothes, ranging from the shabby to the somewhat elegant, and this lack of uniform dress operated as a kind of shorthand, revealing at first glance which of these men had been abandoned, and which still maintained, however tenuously, some connection to the world outside. There were unkempt men in threadbare, faded T-shirts, and others who looked as if they might have a business meeting later, who still took the trouble to keep their leather shoes oiled and polished. A man in denim overalls sat at one of the two long tables writing a letter. An unplugged television sat at an angle to the small couch, its gray, bulbous eye reflecting the light pouring in through the windows. The curtains were pulled, but the windows themselves did not open, and the room was quite warm.
I sat on the windowsill.
“Hi, Papa,” I said.
He didn’t respond, only closed his eyes, gripping the arms of his chair to steady himself. He looked like my grandfather had so many years ago, shrunken, with long, narrow fingers, the bones of his hands visible beneath the skin. I hadn’t seen him in six weeks or so. I asked him how he was, and he looked up and all around me, gazing above me and beyond me, with a theatrical expression of utter confusion, as if he were hearing a voice and couldn’t figure where it was coming from.
“Me?” he asked. “Little old me?”
I waited.
“I’m fine,” my father said. “A robust specimen of old age in the twilight of Western civilization. It’s not me you should worry about. Someone snuck a newspaper in here two weeks ago. You can’t imagine the scandal it caused. Is it true the oceans are rising?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
He sighed. “When will the Americans learn? I can picture it—can you picture it? The seas on a slow boil, turning yellow, turning red. The fish rise to the surface. They feel pain, you know. Those people who say they don’t are liars.”
“Who says that?”
“Water heightens sensitivity, boy. When I was a child, I loved to sit in the bathtub. I liked watching my cock float in the bathwater and then shrivel and shrink as the water got cold.”
“Papa.”
“Sometimes it’s so loud in here, I can’t breathe. I will break that television if anyone attempts to turn it on. I will pick it up and break it over the head of anyone who goes near it. Just keep your eye on it. Just tell me if someone plugs it in. Will you do that, boy?”
I nodded, just to keep him calm, and tried to imagine the act. My father versus the television: his back would crumble, his fingers would crack, what remained of his body would collapse into a thimbleful of dust. The television would emerge unscathed; my father most certainly would not. When he spoke he waved his arms, fidgeted and shook, and even these small gestures seemed to be wearing him out. He was breathing heavily, his bird chest rising and falling.
“The nurse says you haven’t been eating.”
“The menu is not interesting,” my old man said. He bit his bottom lip.
“And your meds? Are they interesting?”
He glared at me for a second. “Honestly, no. There is a gentleman here with whom I have made a small wager. He says there is a women’s pavilion, not far from this building, full of loose women, crazier than hell. They tear your clothes off with their teeth. I say that’s impossible. What do you know of it?”
“It’s a beautiful day out, Papa. We could go out and see for ourselves.”
“No need for that.”
“What does the winner of this wager get?”
My father smiled. “Money, boy—what else?”
“I don’t know anything about it, Papa,” I said. “But I have some news.”
At the sound of these words, after all the talk and movement, he fixed his stare on me, nodding, then closed his eyes to indicate he was listening.
“Ramón. Your brother Ramón. He’s dead.”
My father squinted at me. “The young one?”
I nodded. “Has anyone called you about this?”
He looked surprised. “Called me? Why would anyone call me?”
“The press, I mean. Have you talked to anyone?”
He dismissed the very idea with a wave of his hand. “Of course not,” he said. “Am I in the papers?”
“The usual.”
He smiled with a melancholy pride. “They don’t get tired of me.”
“I’m executor of the estate,” I said.
“What estate? Ramón doesn’t have an estate!” My old man laughed. “Let me guess . . . You’re honored.”
I could have hit him then. It happens every time I visit, and each time, I breathe, I wait for it to pass. And I think of my daughters, who will never see their grandfather again, and specifically of my youngest, who has no memories of him at all.
“How did it happen?” my old man asked.
And so I told him the story, what I knew of it—Rabassa’s truck and the washing machines, the pedestrian bridge and the bus—as my father listened with closed eyes, letting his chin drop to his chest. As I recounted the events, the order of them, their inevitable conclusion, it sounded so asinine I felt he might not believe me at all. They had not been close. They had spoken little since my grandfather died, since my father had carved up the inheritance, keeping all that he could for himself. Ramón used his share to support his mother, and when she passed away, to buy the house where he and Matilde lived. There was little left over for anything else. My father’s sister, my aunt Natalya, and his full brother, my uncle Yuri, pooled their shares together and bought a condo in Miami overlooking Biscayne Bay. My father got the bulk of the estate, of course, enough to live comfortably for many years, and that eventually covered his defense, the divorce settlement, his upkeep at the asylum. He even set aside a portion for me, his only child, which my wife and I used as a down payment on a house in a part of the city with only one name, and no pedestrian bridges. We have lived there since we were married eight years ago.
When I finished, he was quiet for a long moment, and seemed to be processing what I had told him. He could have just as easily been trying to recall who this brother was, and why it should bother him that Ramón was dead.
“She wasn’t blind,” my father said finally. “That bitch had cataracts, it’s true, but she could see. She killed him.”
For a moment, I couldn’t say anything; I just stared at my father, wondering why I’d bothered. “Jesus,” I said. “She sure seemed blind at the wedding.”
My father looked at me. “How do you seem blind?”
“I was joking.”
“Jokes,” he said, disgusted. “I don’t like your jokes.” He stood abruptly. His shirt hung off him like a robe, and his belt had been pulled tight to the last hole, cinching his pants high above his waist, the fabric ballooning about his midsection. I reached to help him, but he shook me off.
“Papa, you have to eat,” I said.
He ignored me, covered his eyes with one hand, and staggered toward the center of the room, a shaky arm raised before him. He stumbled toward the lesser of the two couches, where a nicely dressed gentleman sat thumbing through a pornographic comic book. As my father approached, the man cried out and fled. I called to my father, but he paid no attention, only changed direction, moving toward one of the tables now. There, the man writing the letter abandoned his work, and shuffled off to the corner of the room. The nurse who had been reading hurried over to see what was the matter, but I got to my father first, this blind, wobbling zombie; I put an arm around him, holding him gently, his thin frame, his hollow chest.
It took almost no effort to restrain him.
“I’m blind, I’m blind,” he murmured.
I listened to the cadence of his breath. The other inmates had spread out to the pink corners of the room, as far as they could manage to be from my old man. They eyed one another tensely, and no one spoke. Just then, a black-haired nurse appeared before us. She wanted to know if everything was all right.
“Yes,” I said, but my father shook his head. He cleared his throat, and it was only then that he dropped his hand from over his eyes, blinking as he adjusted to the light.
“Alma,” he said, “my brother has died, and I am bereft. I must be released for the funeral. He has been murdered. It is a tragedy.”
The nurse looked at my old man, then at me. I shook my head very slightly, hoping he wouldn’t notice.
“Mr. Cano, I’m very sorry for your loss.” Alma sounded as if she were reading from a script.
Still my father thanked her. “You’re very kind, but I must leave at once. There are details to be taken care of.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
“My brother . . .”
“Papa,” I said.
“Mr. Cano, you cannot leave without a judge’s approval.”
I held my father, and felt the strength gather within him at the very sound of these words. He puffed up, his shoulders straightened. This was likely the least effective pretext one could give my father, the son of a judge, a man who had spent first his childhood and then his entire adult life wandering the corridors of judicial power, a man who had passed on to his own son, if little affection, at least much of this same access. He smiled triumphantly, and turned to me. “Your cell phone, please, boy. I know a few judges.”
I pretended to search my pockets for my phone, as my old man watched me hopefully. By then Yvette had joined us, somehow gentler than I had noticed her to be at first, and she met his gaze, then touched his shoulder, and just like that he slipped from my hold, and into her orbit entirely.
“They’ve murdered my brother . . .” I heard my old man say, his voice mournful and low. Yvette nodded, leading him to the blue-green couch, and he went without a fight, collapsing onto it heavily. She kneeled next to him. Alma went off to soothe the other patients, who had been watching us with great anxiety, and just like that, I was alone. I could hear Yvette and my father murmuring conspiratorially, fraternally, now laughing tenderly, a voice breaking, now humming in unison what sounded like a nursery rhyme. With Alma’s encouragement, the other inmates were spreading about the room again, in slow, tentative steps, as if trying to move without being seen. Yvette walked over to me.
“I’m sorry about your uncle,” she said.
She glanced at my father, and then left us alone. I took her spot beside him, and together we watched the men drifting to their former places. The days here, I realized, are punctuated by these outbursts, these small crises that help break up the hours. These men had been socialized to expect discrete moments of tension, to defer to the impulse, whether theirs or someone else’s, to fashion a disturbance from thin air. And they were experts too, at forgetting it all, at recovering, at turning back into themselves and whatever private despair kept them company. Except one of them: a slight, well-dressed man pacing back and forth in front of me and my father, occasionally pausing to flash us a confused glare. It took me a moment to realize what had happened: he carried a comic book in his right hand. We’d taken his seat.
I pointed him out to my father, and he shrugged. “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
“He was sitting right here.”
“Of course. They were all sitting right here. And they can all sit right here again as soon as I get up.”
“Papa, don’t get upset.”
“I’m not upset,” he said, then corrected himself. “That’s not true. I am upset. I would prefer he stop staring. It’s rude. Tonight I will take his belt, and hang him with it.”
I sighed. “Why would you do that, Papa?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice suddenly weak.
It was honest at least: he didn’t know. My father remained, all these years later, the person most mystified by his predicament, by the actions and impulses that had brought him here. “It’s okay, Papa.” I tried to put an arm around him, but he shook me off.
“It’s not okay. I’m going to die here. Not tomorrow, not next week, but eventually. The oceans are rising, and my blind brother has been murdered. My ungrateful son never visits, and my whore wife has forgotten me.”
“Ex-wife,” I said. I didn’t mean to.
My father scowled, his gaze narrowing. “Whore ex-wife,” he said. “Go. No one wants you here. Leave.”
—
THE LAST TIME I saw Ramón was at a family party, about three years ago. It was my father’s sixty-fifth birthday, his first since the arrest. This was before the divorce got under way, and my mother was still hanging in there. We decided to get my old man out for the party, just for the evening—not an easy task, but certainly not unheard of for a family of our connections, and our means. I was optimistic in the weeks before the party, and saw to it that my mother was as well. I thought it would be good for them both, to see each other, and especially good for him to be reminded of the life he’d once had. I paid courtesy visits to bureaucrats all over town, spoke elliptically about my father’s situation and looked for the right opening, the right moment, to place money discreetly into the hands of those men who might be able to help us. But nothing happened: my calls went unreturned, the openings never came through. In the end, I had to tell my mother, only hours before the party, that the director of the asylum, whom I had spoken to directly and pressured through various surrogates, wouldn’t take the bribe, just as no judge would sign the order, and no prison official would allow themselves to be bent. My father wouldn’t be joining us.
She had spent a lifetime with him, and had become accustomed to getting her way. It was clear she didn’t believe me. “How much did you offer?”
“More than enough,” I told her. “No one wants to help him anymore.”
My mother sat before her mirror, delicately applying makeup, her reddish-brown hair still pulled back. She had outlined her lips, and examined them now, getting so close to the glass I thought she might kiss herself. “It’s not that. It’s not that at all,” she said. “You just didn’t try hard enough.”
That night Ramón arrived by himself, dressed as if for a funeral in a sober black suit and starched white shirt. His hair was cut so short that he looked like an enlisted man, or a police officer, and he had chosen to come without the dark glasses he sometimes wore. I’d never seen him this way. I was surprised to find him there, as was my mother, and for a moment much of the whispered conversation at the party had to do with his presence: Who had invited Ramón? How did he know? Why had he come? I led him through the thin crowd of friends and well-wishers, introducing him to everyone. Oh, you’re Vladimiro’s younger brother, some colleague of my father’s might say, though for most of them, this was the first they’d ever heard of Ramón. If he noticed the chatter, he didn’t let on. There were many fewer guests than we had imagined—even my uncle Yuri had called with an excuse—and the brightly decorated room seemed rather dismal with only a handful of people milling around. It was early yet, I told myself.
Ramón moved easily through the party, falling gracefully in and out of various conversations. He let go of my arm every time we stopped before a new group of people, holding his hand out and waiting for someone to shake it. Eventually, someone would. He held Natalya in a long embrace, whispering, “Dear sister, dear, dear sister.” I left him chatting with my wife while I went for drinks, and our daughters, three and four years old at the time, climbed into his arms without hesitation. He beamed for a quick photo, and then released them, and measured their height against his waist. My wife told me later that he had remembered not only their names, but also their birthdays and their ages, though he hadn’t seen them since my youngest was born.
My mother had positioned herself at the landing of the staircase, at one end of the large room, where she could survey the entire affair, and eventually we made our way over to her. Ramón asked me to leave them alone. They huddled together for a few moments, whispering, and when my mother raised her head again, her eyes were glassy with tears. She gathered herself, and called for everyone’s attention. Ramón stood by her side. She began by thanking everyone for coming to celebrate this difficult birthday, how much it meant to all of us, to my father and his family. “We did what we could to have him here with us this evening, but it just wasn’t possible,” she said. She looked at me. “My husband has sent his youngest brother, Ramón, in his place, and I want to thank him for coming to be with us.”
After acknowledging the polite applause, Ramón scanned the crowd, or seemed to, his lifeless gray eyes flitting left and right. There couldn’t have been more than fifteen people altogether, everyone standing, waiting for something to happen. Someone coughed. Ramón asked that the music be turned down, cleared his throat, then went on to describe a version of my father I didn’t recognize. A generous man, always available with a loving hand for his younger brother, a man who had helped guide and encourage him. Who had sat with him “after the accident that left me blind, the accident that made me who I am.” My mother was sobbing softly now. “Vladimiro helped pay for my studies. He paid for my tutor, and helped me land the job where, by the grace of God, I was to meet my wife, Matilde.” Then he raised a hand, and began singing “Happy Birthday,” his voice clear and unwavering.
He sang the first line entirely alone before anyone thought to join in.
I found him, not long after, sitting in what had been my grandfather’s favorite chair. He smiled when he heard my voice, he called me nephew. I asked him about life. It had been so long since we’d really talked. Matilde was well, he told me, and sent her regrets. They’d bought a house in the Thousands—Where? I thought to myself—and were talking about having a baby. He congratulated me on my family, and said, with a playful smile, that he could tell by the timbre of my wife’s voice that she was still quite beautiful. I laughed at the compliment.
“Your instincts are, as ever, unfailing,” I said.
We were—my wife and I—very happy in those days.
Ramón talked briefly about his work, which in spite of the feeble economy, remained steady: Italian was an increasingly irrelevant language, of course, but as long as America remained powerful, he and Matilde would never go hungry. Each day he took calls from the embassy, the DEA, or the Mormons. They trusted him. They asked for him by name.
We fell silent. The party hummed around us, and looking at our uncomfortable guests, I wondered why anyone would want to be part of our family.
“How did my father sound,” I asked, “when you talked to him?”
Ramón ran his fingernails along the fabric of the armrest. “I didn’t actually speak to him, you know. He had someone call me.” He paused, and let out a small, sharp laugh. “I guess he couldn’t get to a phone. I assume they’re very strict about those things.”
“I suppose.”
“But then, I’ve heard you can get anything in prison,” he said. “Is that true?”
“It’s not exactly a prison, where he is.”
“But he could’ve called me himself if he’d wanted to?”
I looked over my shoulder at the thinning party. “He’s never called me, if that’s what you want to know.”
Ramón tapped his fingers to the slow rhythm of the music that was playing, an old bolero, something my father would’ve liked.
“That was quite a performance,” I said. “Your speech, I mean.”
“It was for your mother.”
“Then I suppose I should thank you.”
“If you like.” He sighed. “My father loved Vladimiro very much. He was so proud of your dad, he talked about him all the time. He was heartbroken that they’d stopped speaking.”
“Is that true?”
“Why do you ask if you won’t believe my answer?” Ramón shook his head. “Do you visit him?”
“As much as I can.”
“What’s that mean?”
“As much as I can stand to.”
Ramón nodded. “He’s not an easy man. Matilde didn’t want me to come. She has a sense about these things. And she’s never wrong.”
I thought he might explain this comment, but he didn’t. It just lingered. “So why are you here?” I asked.
“Family is family.” He smiled. “That’s what I told her. She had quite a laugh with that one.”
—
AND THEN, this afternoon, I went to Gaza. I took the bus, because I wanted to ride the 73, and sit, as Ramón and Matilde so often had, in the uncomfortable metal seats, beside the scratched and dirty windows, closing my eyes and listening to the breathing city as it passed. The air thickened as we rode south, so that it felt almost like rain, heavy, gray, and damp. The farther we went on Cahuide, the slower traffic became, and when I got off at the thirty-second block, beneath the remains of the bridge, I saw why. A stream of people filtered across the avenue in a nearly unbroken line: women carrying babies, stocky young men bent beneath the loads teetering on their backs, and children who appeared to be scampering across just for the sport of it. The median fence was no match for this human wave: already it had been knocked over, trampled, and appeared in places to be in danger of disappearing entirely. The harsh sounds of a dozen horns filled the street with an endless noise that most people seemed not to notice, but that shook my skull from the inside. I stopped for a moment to admire the bridge, its crumbling green exterior and shorn middle, its steel rods poking through the concrete and bending down toward the avenue. A couple of kids sat at the scarred edge, their legs dangling just over the lip. They laughed and floated paper airplanes into the sky, arcing them elegantly above the rushing crowd.
I walked up from the avenue along an unnamed street no wider than an alley, blocked off at one end with stacks of bricks and two rusting oil drums filled with sand. A rope hung limply between the drums, and I slipped under it, careful not to let it touch my suit. A boy on a bicycle rolled by, smacking his chewing gum loudly as he passed. He did a loop around me, staring, sizing me up, then pedaled off, unimpressed. I kept walking to where the road sloped up just slightly, widening into a small outdoor market, where a few people milled about the stalls stocked with plastics and off-brand clothes and flowers and grains, and then through it, to the corner of José Olaya and Avenida Unidad. There I found Carlotta.
The lawyer who’d called me yesterday with the news had advised me to look for a woman at a tea cart. She can show you the house, he said over the phone. Your house. That afternoon, as promised, a courier came by with Ramón’s keys, along with a handwritten note from the lawyer once again reiterating this small piece of advice: Look for Carlotta, the note read, though there was no description of her. You’ll never find the house without help.
In fact, it did all look the same, each street identical to the last, each house a version of the one next to it. Carlotta was sitting on a small wooden stool reading a newspaper when I walked up. I introduced myself, and explained that I needed to take a look at my uncle’s house. She stood very slowly and wrapped me in a tight embrace. “They were so wonderful,” she said. She kept her hand on mine, and didn’t let go, just stood there, shaking her head and murmuring what sounded like a prayer. I waited for her to finish. Finally, she excused herself, went inside the unpainted brick house just behind her, and emerged a few moments later dragging a boy behind. He was eighteen or so, skinny, and looked as if he’d just been sleeping. He wore unlaced white high-top sneakers with no socks, and his thin, delicate ankles emerged from these clownish shoes with a comic poignancy. Her son, Carlotta explained, would watch the stand while we went to Ramón and Matilde’s house. It wasn’t far. The boy glanced in my direction through red, swollen eyes, then nodded, though he seemed displeased with the arrangement.
As Carlotta and I walked up the street, she pointed out a few neighborhood landmarks: the first pharmacy in the area; the first Internet kiosk; an adobe wall pockmarked with bullet holes, site of a murder that had made the news a few years ago. A police checkpoint, from the days when the name Gaza came into use, had stood right at the intersection we strolled through now. These were peaceful times, she said. She showed me the footbridge that crossed over the canal, and the open field just beyond it, where the turbid floodwaters gathered once a year or so. It was where the teenagers organized soccer tournaments, where the Christians held their monthly revivals, and where a few local deejays threw parties that lasted until first light. Awful music, she said, like a blast furnace, just noise. Her son had been at one of those, she told me, just last night. He was her youngest boy. “He’s not a bad kid. I don’t want you thinking he’s trouble. Do you have children?”
“Two daughters.”
She sighed. “But girls are different.”
We turned left just before the footbridge, and walked a way along the canal, then turned left again to the middle of the block, stopping in front of a saffron yellow house. It was the only painted one on the entire street.
“It’s yellow,” I said to Carlotta, disbelieving. “Why is it yellow?”
She shrugged. “He did translations, favors. People paid him however they could.”
“By painting a blind man’s house?”
Carlotta didn’t seem to find it that funny, or remarkable at all. “We called your uncle ‘Doctor,’” she said, and gave me a stern look. “Out of respect.”
I said nothing. There was a metal gate over the door and two deadbolts, and it took a moment to find the right keys. I’d never been to their house before, and I felt suddenly guilty visiting for the first time under these circumstances. Just inside the door there were a jacket and hat hanging from a nail, and below it, a small, two-tiered shoe rack containing rubber mud boots, beige men’s and women’s slippers, and two pairs of matching Velcro sneakers. There were a couple of empty spaces on the rack. For their work shoes, I supposed, the ones they had died in. Without saying a word, Carlotta and I left our shoes behind, and walked on into the house wearing only our socks. We didn’t take the slippers.
The space was neatly laid out, as I had assumed it would be, and dark, with no lightbulbs anywhere and no photos, not of family, not of each other. Because the long, damp winters are even longer and damper in this part of the city, heavy translucent plastic sheeting hung from every doorway in wide strips, so that moving from one room to another required a motion not unlike swimming the butterfly stroke. The idea was to trap heat in each room, but the effect, along with the hazy light, was to give the house the look and feel of an aquarium. I parted the plastic curtains, and found myself in a sparsely furnished kitchen, kept in meticulous order. The refrigerator was nearly empty, and there were no extra utensils in the drawers, just a pair of everything—two forks, two spoons, two steak knives. I opened the tap and a thin line of water dribbled into a single dirty bowl. There was another one, a clean bowl already dry, sitting by the sink.
I walked to the bedroom, as spare and clean as the kitchen, where a small wooden cross hung just above the neatly made bed. I opened and closed a few drawers, looked into the closet, and found two pairs of glasses in a box on top of the dresser, one with plastic yellow lenses, one with blue. I tried on the yellow pair, charmed by this small evidence of my uncle’s vanity, and even found myself looking for a mirror. Of course, there wasn’t one. This is all mine, I thought, to dispose of as I see fit. To sell, or rent, or burn, or give away. There was nothing of my family in this house, and maybe that was the only attractive thing about it. My father kept everything of any value, and Ramón got everything else, all this nothing—these clothes, this cheap furniture, this undecorated room and nondescript house, this parcel of land in a neighborhood whose name no one could agree on. It was all paid for, the lawyer told me, they owned it outright, and my uncle had no debts to speak of. Unfortunately, he also had no heirs besides his wife, and she had none besides him. I was the nearest living relative.
After a long pause, the lawyer added: “Well, except for your father.”
“What do I do with it?”
“See if there’s anything you want to keep. You can sell the rest. It’s up to you.”
And now I was here, hidden in the Thousands. At home, my phone was ringing, the city’s frantic journalists demanding a statement. Soon they would be camping out in front of the asylum, tossing handwritten notes over the walls and into the gardens, or crowding before the door to my house, harassing my children, my wife. Say something; entertain us with your worries, your fears, your discontent, blame your father, the men who built the bridge, or the ponytailed truck driver. Blame your blind uncle, his blind wife, the fireworks vendors, or yourself. My head hurt. I miss Ramón, I thought, and just as quickly the very idea seemed selfish. I hadn’t seen him in years.
Carlotta had stayed in the living room, and from the hallway I watched her blurred outline through the plastic. I swam through the house to see her.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “I’m sorry to make you wait.”
She had nested into the soft cushions of my uncle and aunt’s white sofa. There was a throw rug on the floor, somewhere near the middle of the room, and the soles of her feet hung just above, not touching it. Her hands lay in her lap. She seemed much younger in the subdued light of my uncle’s home, her skin glowing, and her hair, graying in the daylight, appeared, in this shadowed room, to be almost black.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
It was a fair question, for which I had no answer.
“Nothing,” I said. “Maybe I could live here.”
Carlotta smiled generously. “You’re not feeling well,” she said.
My wife would be surprised this evening when I told her about my day. She listened patiently as we prepared a meal, our daughters clamoring for our attention, and told me only that I must be careful. That places like that weren’t safe. She’d never been to The Thousands or Venice or Gaza, but like all of us, believed many things about our city without needing them confirmed. Hadn’t there been a famous murder there a few years ago? And didn’t this latest accident only prove again that our world had nothing to do with that one? And I agreed quietly, “Yes, dear, you’re right, he was my uncle, my brother, but I barely knew him”—and I stopped my story there. I walked around the counter, gave her a kiss on the neck, picked up my eldest daughter, and laughed: Ramón’s yellow glasses, can you believe it? His blue ones? His yellow house? And we put the girls to sleep, my wife went to bed, and me, I stayed in the living room, watching television, flipping channels, thinking.
“What will you do with it all?” my wife asked as she leaned against the doorjamb already in her nightclothes, and I could see the graceful outline of her body beneath the fabric. She was barefoot, her toes curling into the thick carpet.
“I was thinking we should move there,” I said, just to hear her horrified laughter.
She disappeared into the bedroom without saying good night.
“Did you know them well?” I asked Carlotta.
She thought about this for a second. “They were my neighbors.”
“But did you know them?”
“I saw them every day,” she said.
And this means a good deal, I know it does. There was a time when I saw him every week, and we were closer then, maybe even something like brothers. “Ramón and I grew up together. And then we lost touch.”
“You look tired,” Carlotta said. “Why don’t you sit? It might make you feel better.”
But I didn’t want to, not yet. I went to the record player, lifted the dull plastic dustcover. A few dozen old LPs leaned against the wall, and I thumbed through them: they were my grandfather’s opera records. I put one on, a woman’s elegant voice warbled through the room, and just like that, this melody I hadn’t heard in so long—decades—dropped my temperature, and made the ceiling seem very far above me, at an unnatural height. Carlotta tapped her toe to the music, though it seemed utterly rhythmless to me. It was true: I didn’t feel well.
“What did people think of them in the neighborhood?” I asked.
“Everyone loved them.”
“But no one knew them?”
“We didn’t have to know them.”
And I thought about that, as the singing went on in Italian, a lustrous female voice, and I was struck by the image of the two of them—Ramón and Matilde—sitting on this very same couch, my aunt whispering translations directly into his ear. Love songs, songs about desperate passion, about lovers who died together. I could almost see it: his smile lighting up this drab room, Matilde’s lips pressed against him. They had died that way, best friends, strolling hand in hand off the edge of a bridge, until they sank. I sat down on the throw rug, leaning back against the sofa, staring ahead at an unadorned wall. My feet were very cold. My eyes had adjusted to the light now, and the house seemed almost antiseptic. Clean. Preposterously dustless for this part of the city. We sat listening to the aria, Carlotta and I, a melody spiraling out into the infinite. The singer had such energy, and the more she drew upon it, the weaker I felt. I could stay here; I might never leave. I could inherit this life my uncle had left behind, walk away, I thought, from my old man and his venom.
“My father did everything he could to ruin my uncle,” I said. “He cheated him out of his inheritance. He’s in prison now, where he belongs.”
“I know. I read about him today in the paper. They talked to him.”
For a moment I thought I had misheard. “What? Which paper?”
I turned to see Carlotta smiling proudly. Perhaps she hadn’t heard the terror in my voice. Already I’d begun imagining all the horrible things my father might say, the conspiracy theories, the racist remarks, the angry insults with which he might have desecrated the memory of his dead brother.
“I don’t remember the name of it,” Carlotta said. “The same one I was in.”
“What did my father say?”
“There were journalists all over the neighborhood yesterday. My son was on television. Did you see him?”
I raised my voice, suddenly impatient: “But what did he say?”
“Mr. Cano,” Carlotta whispered.
Her shoulders were hunched, and she had leaned back into the couch, as if to protect herself, as if I might attack her. I realized, with horror, that I had frightened her. She knew who my father was. I stammered an apology.
She took a deep breath now. “He said he didn’t have a brother. That he didn’t know anyone named Ramón.”
“That’s all?” I asked, and Carlotta nodded.
“No one named Ramón,” I said to myself, “no brother.”
She stared at me like I was crazy. How could I explain that it didn’t sound like him, that it was too sober, too calm?
“Why would he say that?” Carlotta asked.
I shook my head. I felt my eyes getting heavier. Was it cruel or just right? “We should go,” I said, “I’m very sorry, there’s nothing here I need,” but it wasn’t true, and I couldn’t leave. We sat, not speaking, not moving, only breathing, until I became aware that Carlotta was patting my head with a maternal affection, that my shoulders were sinking farther toward the floor, and I gave into it: loosened my tie, wiggling my toes in my socks, my feet frozen, the chill having spread through my body now.
This record will not end, I thought, I hoped, but then it did: a long, fierce note held without the orchestra, culminating in a shout of joy from the singer, the audience chastened, stunned by the beauty of it. A long silence, and then slowly, applause, soft at first, then waves of it, which on this old recording came across like a pounding rain. I was shivering. There was no question we were underwater.