Boarding pass; the piece of pasteboard I’d been given at the desk where I’d first shown my ticket. “Brother,” I murmured, and handed it to her.
“Yes,” she said, with the same smile. She looked at my boarding pass, ripped it in half, gave half back, and said, “Three-quarters of the way down the aisle, on your right.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“My pleasure, Father.” Her perky smile grazed my cheek and hit the passenger behind me. Why did she remind me so much of that policeman, the one who’d said, “Have a good flight”?
Three-quarters of the way down the aisle another stewardess, somewhat older and more harried and human, placed me in my seat amid a gigantic Puerto Rican family on its way home for the holidays. (When I say gigantic, I do not mean to imply that any of them were tall.) (Nor do I mean to imply, by that disclaimer, that any of them were thin. I was a bit squeezed.)
They were a wonderful family. Their name was Razas, their original home was “near” the town of Guanica on the south shore, and they welcomed me into their midst (or their fringe; I’d been placed in a seat against the wall, next to a window) as though they’d just rescued me from a blizzard. Three or four of them helped me adjust my seatbelt, my footrest and my chair-back, my bag was successively stowed in half a dozen different thoughtful locations, and it became utterly impossible for me not to accept a pillow.
And then we were in the sky, and the airport lights outside my little oval window had been replaced by blackness, thinly populated by faraway stars. I had thought I might be nervous during takeoff, since that’s the traditional time for first-flight jitters, but it had all happened so abruptly, while I’d been trying to comprehend Spanglish being cheerfully shouted at me by three Razas at once, that I didn’t think to be frightened until the opportunity had passed.
It now developed that the Razas were under the impression they had come out for a picnic rather than a plane trip. Baskets of food, shopping bags of food, boxes of food, all blossomed into existence as though in some parody of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Great thick sandwiches, chicken legs, fruit, beer, soft drinks, cheese, tomatoes — it just kept pouring out. Everybody’s mouth was full, and everybody went on talking just the same.
There were other similar family groups around us. Songs were sung, stories were told, running children were spanked, visits were made up and down the aisle, and the stewardesses stayed pointedly away.
In some bewildering fashion, this rigid plastic environment with its three-seat pews and its narrow aisle had been turned into a front stoop, a series of front stoops, and December had been turned into spring. Enveloped in this atmosphere, full of chicken and beer and friendliness, soothed by the clamor all around me, I sat back at last in my little corner, my head resting on my pillow, and my thoughts turned again to Travel and its myriad manifestations.
It seemed to me the Razas were somehow the opposite of the automobile people, those who were in a state of Latent Travel even when at home and who finished their lives wandering from trailer court to trailer court, dragging a simulacrum of home behind them. The Razas, on the other hand, had such strong self-identification, such vital ties to one another and to their heritage, that without conscious effort they defeated Travel, they swept away its qualities of isolation and disruption and disconnection. Where those others were Traveling even when at home, the Razas were at home even when Traveling. Their self-created environment overpowered the external environment. They had found an answer to the question of Travel that I didn’t think had ever been dreamed of by anyone in our community. When I got back, I told myself drowsily, I would have a lot to tell the others about my adventures. So thinking, I dropped gently away into sleep.
Our plane was to land, Dwarfmann-time, at 4:26; perhaps it did. The sun wasn’t up yet, I know that much, and I felt bleary from too much food and too little sleep. And from the change in climate; New York had been chilly, becoming cold, but San Juan was warm and humid. The wool sweater I habitually wear beneath my robe in the wintertime had become an instrument of torture, hot and scratchy and confining.
The Razas were met by several platoons of relatives, and after much shouting and smiling and shaking of my hand they all straggled away together, a portable crowd scene. They offered me several lifts, but I knew they would be going now in the opposite direction from the town I wanted, and I refused to permit them to go twenty miles out of their way.
After I’d shaved and brushed my teeth in the airport men’s room, and removed that heavy sweater, I began to feel more human again, but coffee in the coffee shop nearby caused a relapse. A pleasant girl at an information counter gave me a map of the island, on which she marked with a red Flair pen the route to Loiza Aldea. “Will you be driving a rental car, Father?”
“Brother,” I said. “No, I’ll be walking.”
“But it’s twenty miles!”
“There’s no hurry about my getting there. Thank you for the map.”
Twelve
The house could not be seen until you were almost upon it, coming around the curving dirt road through the heavy jungle underbrush. And when first seen, it was far from impressive, a squat, one-story-high, flat-roofed structure with gray stucco walls and small louvered windows. It was neat enough, and so was the bit of lawn and garden hacked out of the jungle all about it, but I suppose I’d been expecting a fairy castle. This was simply a small blunt house tucked into a fold in the coastline, with the Atlantic Ocean just in front, nibbling modestly at a small white sand beach.
I was very hot and very tired, and I’m sure my face was sweaty and dusty, but now that I was here I very much wanted to get this interview over and done with. No, the truth is, I didn’t want to face Eileen at all. I shrank from it so completely that the only possible method was to leap forward, shove myself into the scene and hope for the best.
The dirt road, having approached the house from the side, now skirted around to the front. I followed it, glancing at the ocean with some longing — I would have enjoyed lolling in that cool-looking water for half an hour or so, clothing and all — and then I went up the cement steps to the tile-floored small front porch. Humming sounds from the air-conditioner rumps sticking out of two windows suggested that someone was at home. The front door consisted mainly of frosted glass louvers, tightly shut. There was no bell, so I knocked on the metal part of the door.
I had to knock twice more before I got any response, and then it was a sleepy male voice that called through the louvers, “Who is it?”
Raising my own voice to something just under a shout, I said, “I’m looking for Eileen Flattery.”
“And who are you?” The door remained firmly shut.
“Brother Benedict.”
“You’re what?”
“Tell her it’s Brother Benedict.”
The louvers cranked open, and a puffy face squinted out at me. “Good Christ,” it said. The louvers cranked shut again, and for quite some time nothing at all occurred. During that interval, I had much leisure to consider whether or not the puffy face was another “young man” of Eileen’s, and to decide it couldn’t possibly be. Couldn’t possibly.
I was gazing seaward, trying not to think how hot and uncomfortable (and apprehensive) I was, when the louvers abruptly cranked open again. I spun back, but too late. There was a quick after-image of startled eyes peering out, but the louvers were already folding shut once more, like something in a Busby Berkeley musical number.