Señora Perera carried her empty tray back into the kitchen. She turned out the lights in the living room and flung a scarf over Gidalya’s cage. “Good night, possibly for the last time,” she said, first in Spanish and then in Polish. In her bedroom, she removed the diamonds from her lapel and fastened them onto the jacket she would wear in the morning. She got ready for bed, got into bed, and fell instantly asleep.
SOME BITS of this notable widow’s biography were not granted to interviewers. She might reminisce about her early days here — the resumption of medical studies and the work for the new small party on the left — but she never mentioned the expensive abortion paid for by her rich, married lover. She spoke of the young Federico Perera, of their courtship, of his growing prominence in the legal profession, of her party’s increasing strength and its association with various coalitions. She did not refer to Federico’s infidelities, though she knew their enemies made coarse jokes about the jewelry he gave her whenever he took a new mistress. Except for the diamonds, all the stuff was fake.
In her fifties she had served as minister of culture; under her warm attention both the national orchestra and the national theater thrived. She was proud of that, she told interviewers. She was proud, too, of her friendship with the soprano Olivia Valdez, star of light opera, now retired and living in Jerusalem; but she never spoke of Olivia. She spoke instead of her husband’s merry North American nieces, who had often flown down from Texas. She did not divulge that the young Jewish hidalgos she presented to these girls found them uncultivated. She did not mention her own child-lessness. She made few pronouncements about her adopted country; the famous quip that revolution was its national pastime continued to embarrass her. The year with the cow? I thought about everything. I thought about nothing.
What kind of cow was it?
Dark brown, infested with ticks, which I got, too.
Your name for her?
My Little Cow, in two or three tongues.
The family who protected you?
Righteous gentiles.
Your parents?
In the camps. My father died. My mother survived. I brought her to this country.
… whose air she could never breathe. Whose slippery words she refused to learn. I myself did not need to study the language; I remembered it from a few centuries earlier, before the expulsion from Spain. Nothing lightened Mama’s mood; she wept every night until she died.
Señora Perera kept these last gloomy facts from interviewers. “The people here — they are like family,” she occasionally said. “Stubborn as pigs,” she once added, in a cracked mutter that no one should have heard, but the woman with the microphone had swooped on the phrase as if it were an escaping kitten.
“You love this sewer,” Olivia had shouted during her raging departure. “You have no children to love, and you have a husband not worth loving, and you don’t love me anymore because my voice is cracking and my belly sags. So you love my land, which I at least have the sense to hate. You love the oily generals. The aristocrats scratching themselves. The intellectuals snoring through concerts. The revolutionaries in undershirts. The parrots, even! You are besotted!”
It was a farewell worthy of Olivia’s talents. Their subsequent correspondence had been affectionate. Olivia’s apartment in Israel would become Señora Perera’s final home; she’d fly straight to Jerusalem from Miami. The diamonds would support a few years of simple living. But for a little while longer she wanted to remain amid the odors, the rap blaring from pickup trucks, the dance halls, the pink evangelical churches, the blue school uniforms, the high-way’s dust, the river’s tarnish. To remain in this wayward place that was everything a barn was not.
LUIS WAS WAITING for her at dawn, standing beside the limousine. He wore a mottled jumpsuit.
“Much trouble last night?” she asked, peering in vain into his sunglasses while trying to avoid his corrupt breath.
“No,” he belched, omitting her title, omitting even the honorific. This disrespect allowed her to get into the front of the car like a pal.
At the airport they climbed the steps of a tipsy little plane. Luis stashed his Uzi in the rear next to the medical supplies. He took the copilot’s seat. Señora Perera and the nurse — a Dutch volunteer with passable Spanish — settled themselves on the other two buckets. Señora Perera hoped to watch the land fall away, but from behind the pilot’s shoulder she could see only sky, clouds, one reeling glimpse of highway, and then the mountainside. She reconstructed the city from memory: its mosaic of dwellings enclosed in a ring of hills, its few tall structures rising in the center like an abscess. The river, the silly Parisian bridge. The plaza. People were gathering there now, she guessed, to hear today’s orations.
The Dutch nurse was huge, a goddess. She had to hunch her shoulders and let her big hands dangle between her thighs. Some downy thatch sprouted on her jaw; what a person to spend eternity with if this light craft should go down, though there was no reason you should be stuck forever with the dullard you happened to die with. Señora Perera planned to loll on celestial pillows next to Olivia. Federico might join them every millennium or so, good old beast, and Gidalya, too, prince of rabbis released from his avian corpus, his squawks finally making sense … She offered her traveling flask to the nurse. “Dutch courage?” she said in English. The girl smiled without comprehension, but she did take a swig.
In less than an hour they had flown around the mountain and were landing on a cracked tar field. A helicopter stood waiting. Señora Perera and the nurse used the latrine. A roll of toilet paper hung on a nail, for their sakes.
And now they were rising in the chopper. They swung across the hide of the jungle. She looked down on trees flaming with orange flowers and trees foaming with white ones. A sudden clearing was immediately swallowed up again by squat, broad-leaved trees. Lime green parrots rose up together — Gidalya’s rich cousins.
They landed in the middle of the town square, beside a chewed bandstand. A muscular functionary shook their hands. This was Señor Rey, she recalled from Lina’s instructions. Memory remained her friend; she could still recite the names of the cranial nerves. Decades ago, night after night, she had whispered them to the cow. She had explained the structures of various molecules. Ma Petite Vache … She had taught the cow the Four Questions.
Señor Rey led them toward a barracks mounted on a slab of cement: the infirmary she had come to inspect. The staff — a nurse-director and two assistants — stood stiffly outside as if awaiting arrest. It was probable that no member of any government had ever before visited — always excepting smugglers.
The director, rouged like a temptress, took them around the scrubbed infirmary, talking nonstop. She knew every detail of every case history; she could relate every failure from under-medication, from wrong medication, from absence of medication. The Dutch girl seemed to understand the rapid-fire Spanish.
Surgical gloves, recently washed, were drying on a line. The storeroom shelves held bottles of injectable ampicillin and jars of Valium — folk remedies now. A few people lay in the rehydration room. In a corner of the dispensary a dying old man curled upon himself. Behind a screen Señora Perera found a listless child with swollen glands and pale nail beds. She examined him. A year ago she would have asked the parents’ permission to send him to a hospital in the city for tests and treatment if necessary. Now the hospital in the city was dealing with wounds and emergencies, not diseases. The parents would have refused anyway. What was a cancer unit for but to disappear people? She stood for a moment with her head bowed, her thumb on the child’s groin. Then she told him to dress himself.