He took a seat in the back row of the theater. The travelogue was about Indonesia. It showed elephants at work in a teak forest. After that came an instructional film on home canning. Che studied the backs of heads, diagnosing impatience and inertia both. Phrenology in the dark, and onscreen the graduated dial of a pressure cooker.
“Here the string beans are processed in steam for at least twelve minutes to insure that any spores of Clostridium Botulinum are destroyed.”
Che went into the men’s. He washed, avoiding himself in the mirror, filled and tamped his pipe, saw the feet sticking out. They were battered and bruised, shoeless. He opened the stall door. A tramp lay curled among newspaper, his head alongside the base of the toilet, one eye crusted over.
“Are you ill, señor? Let me help.”
The tramp covered himself with papers. “Beat it. Piss off.”
Che watched an unruly black duck blab its way out of the roasting pan in a color cartoon. He thought of microbes swarming invisibly over the floor.
LOOKING for a post office so he could wire home for money, Che found a library instead. Granite gray, pillared, dense, it was dustily cool inside, while petunias planted round the flagpole wilted in the heat. The shelves were brown and thick with varnish. The ceiling fans were still. He pulled a book at random—A Bride in the Hand by Lila Claire (C) — and caught a falling ant that had been laying its eggs inside, or eating the glue.
The librarian’s freckled elbows supported her at the desk. She had a thin nose, red hair fine as a baby’s, and was lovely in her sleepiness. Just over her shoulder, in light that leaked under the shade, particles of dust barely moved. And Che, struck by desire sudden and acute as asthma, could not move at all. She was Lila to him, a flight. He would turn the other people in the room to paper. He would shrink the room itself. And his hand would fit hers so easily, an afterthought.
He understood murder: When the thing you want most but cannot have is so close that it overflows the eye.
CELIA told his fortune with cards. She showed him the queen of hearts and said he would die for love. Che was embarrassed.
“Better than dying by accident,” she said.
He remembered the first corpse he had ever seen, remembered incoherent sensings in the way that dream pieces return, so vividly that they must actually have happened. It was just spring, the park pale green with buds, walking home and the school satchel chafing his leg. She lay under a tree, a pine tree, not old or young, gray as a clam, bewildered, and none of the men standing around had thought to close her eyes.
“You shouldn’t think so much,” Celia said, refilling his cup.
“And what instead?”
Her smile made him think of incisions; there was lipstick on her teeth.
“Tell me. What instead?”
They were sitting at a square, oilcloth-covered table in the hotel kitchen, where everything was freshly stacked and wiped. It was late; even the wash boy had left. Celia had Havana tuned in on the radio, Arsenio Rodriguez, a mambo. She cut the deck twice without looking: Jack of spades, jack of spades. “Go ahead. Don’t make yourself a choice.” The time he truly wanted to be a doctor, writing out twenty-five reasons. When had that been? He could see her red nails on the back of his hand, but the flesh was numb.
He recalled a line from Marti: “That which is suspicion today will be outcry tomorrow.”
THE bus had been loud with arguing. The beach was crowded, but quiet. Che rolled up his trousers and waded. He found green bits of glass tumbled smooth, a jellyfish big as a hubcap. With each receding wave needle-billed birds ran up to peck at airholes in the sand.
He thought of Granados swinging a gaviota to break its neck, and the foul meat they swallowed to show they were ready for anything. The “wastes” of Patagonia: Just starting out, full of dare, they had burned all their guidebooks and maps in the cookfire. Sand in the gas tank, sand on the chain sprockets, while the beach was covered with clicking black stones. And they talked all night about the great Italian restaurants in Santiago.
Che understood that they wanted him to take their picture. Overelaborate mime. Hold it this way, press down here. The man got between the two women, his arms draped over them, theirs circling his waist.
“Más. Uno más!”
Then he had to get between the women. They smelled of oranges. He knew his ribs stuck out and he needed a bath. The man said something. Che shrugged. The man gave him a warm can of beer and went away.
The “wilds” of Amazonas, the “rugged peaks” of Peru. Miami Beach Welcomes You. The Playground Paradise. Everyone, he supposed, carried a guidebook, a catalogue of expectations which made it possible to travel without going anywhere, to go nowhere while traveling. Only the sea, he supposed, was without borders.
A postcard (Avenue of Palms) home:
Dear Family,
I am well. This is not a ransom note. Trust that there is some explanation for my being here, and as soon as I know what it is, you will too. When Ponce de Leon searched for his fountain, anything seemed possible by the method of wandering. For today the only result is fatigue.
Love to all — E.G.
He could not risk Celia’s charity any longer. The organ stings of bad drama were all too easy to imagine. He noticed the smell of church incense in her vicinity. He found candy on his pillow, and now even the maids called him “gaucho.” But then he had come to mistrust his own judgment. Mundane objects seemed to impose themselves, mundane words took on too many meanings. “Something in the water” was his grandmother’s expression, applied to any distress. Was it absurd to wonder if Celia was drugging the coffee? The more he tried to clear his head, the worse the tangle became. United Snakes. Wriggling in the water.
This was the time, a typically reticent Sunday. Celia’s cockatiel was swooping around the lobby as he went out. The cars on the boulevard were shiny. He passed a cotton candy wagon and a blue drugstore. The expansion of his lungs made him smile.
If he made his route back a straight line, there were a hundred islands in between, lagoons and melon juice and coral heads and fast deadly fish. He passed a boy selling coconuts with painted faces. He supposed an island boy like that who could say: “El Señor? He lived all those years in a place behind that hill, and no one ever knew a thing about him.”
If you knew how, there was true satisfaction in being tired. He had his duffel bag, and a brim above his eyes, and he was walking south.
NO SMOKING
JOAN WAS HAVING A birthday the way other people have flu. She’d turned thirty-seven five days ago, but those forlorn and morbid symptoms still hung on. The ferries tripled on Friday and everyone already on the island took deep breaths. She passed the scone shop and the book nook and the toggery. She passed Ramona’s sidewalk tables, where trust-fund carpenters sat with their imported ale. They wore jaunty little hats. They discussed timber prices and dilemmas of wiring. The dogs at their feet were stuporously pictorial.
She’d got up on her birthday (sunny after early-morning fog) believing that in some way she must mark it. One evaded or ignored a charged event and its tendency was to curve back with months of trouble. Nothing convinced her. But she had rules for safety, remote, uncodified. She put a half pint of Jim Beam in her pocket and went all over the beach thinking how plain she was in every way. She hunkered by tide pools, chanting in her mental voice, “I will never never have children.” Vapid abjections, indulgent. As a punishment, she stopped smoking.