Not long before you were born, June explained. Isabel was Suzana’s English student. They ended up becoming friends. Isabel had recently arrived from Puerto Rico and was studying theatre. And she knew how to make mojitos and margueritas.
So she’s an actress?
No, said June.
And she didn’t say anything else. The things June didn’t say were another kind of chatter. If she suddenly went vehemently quiet, there was no room for you to ask her a thing.
Later Isabel went back to Puerto Rico for a few years, she went on. But she’s been back in Albuquerque for a while now and would love to meet you. All of you.
We spent the night in a motel chosen for its price. Carlos decreed that it was muy bueno. Very good. The heated pool was a little bigger than the one at the motel near Starkville, and the towels were whiter. The bedroom was better lit, the bedspreads newer and the watercolors on the walls less faded.
That night we didn’t talk. Fernando turned on the TV, selected a Mexican channel and watched a soccer game and Carlos wrote down the Highlights of the Day in a notebook that Florence had given him as a present. In his shaky scrawl, he wrote the motel in Albuquerque is very good. And he showed me, pleased with himself. He had brought some more tourist brochures from the reception and read to me that Albuquerque had OVER THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF HISTORY. He asked if we could buy some scissors and glue the next day, because he wanted to cut those things out and stick them in his notebook.
I looked at the brochure. The Albuquerque area was inhabited by Native Americans for hundreds of years. The current city was founded in 1706, when Governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdez wrote a letter to the Duke of Albuquerque telling him that he had found a village on the banks of the Rio Grande. From that time on, the city — named after the duke — grew from a small settlement into a wealthy metropolis with over eight hundred thousand inhabitants. Come visit the city where the people and culture are
Fernando?
What?
What’s this word here?
He glanced at the brochure. Enmeshed.
What does enmeshed mean?
Imagine a net, a mesh. If something’s enmeshed it’s like it’s caught in a net. Tangled.
And he demonstrated by interlacing the fingers of both hands, without taking his eyes off the television.
Enmeshed was a funny word. I tested it in my mouth, in a whisper. Come visit the city where the people and culture are enmeshed in the fabric of time and history.
I thought about it. Was it possible for the people and culture of a place not to be enmeshed in the fabric of time and history? Was there a people or a culture without time or history? But it was just a tourist brochure and tourist brochures, I was learning, hadn’t been written to make sense. The words had to be pretty. So did the photos. The photos in the tourist brochure of Albuquerque were pretty and showed a bunch of dry chilies hanging from a veranda, a couple riding bicycles on a mountain trail (their helmets didn’t have rear-view mirrors), and a lot of hot air balloons in the blue sky of the HOT AIR BALLOONING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.
Carlos finished writing what he needed to write in his notebook, put his brochures away, turned off the bedside lamp and fell asleep with his head on my shoulder. I closed my eyes. I drifted off, lulled by the low volume of the TV on which a Mexican sports commentator was narrating the plays of the game so fast I couldn’t keep up. Before my eyes closed, I saw the walls changing colors.
Fernando held my hand as we walked around Florence’s dry garden and looked at the sculptures without paying attention. It was the only time that he and I walked along holding hands. He held my cold little hand with his cold large hand and at a glance, genetics aside, we could have been father and daughter.
Then we entered Florence’s studio and there was the spirit of things in progress there. The studio was a place in the gerund, a place where things left their crude state, being produced, becoming. Florence kept the pottery that she sold in a large cupboard with glass doors and invited us to have a look and gave me and Carlos a lump of clay each.
For you to make something with. Anything at all.
Carlos stared seriously at the misshapen lump of clay in his hand, creased his forehead and started kneading and tugging on it to see if maybe something would come out of there of its own accord. A spontaneous sculpture. I took my piece and started rolling it in my hands. All my creativity was able to produce, at that moment, was a ball. Something disobliged to have angles, a round artifact. A globe of earth.
Florence?
Yes?
It was June who had spoken. Florence, she repeated, we need to talk to you.
Talk? Florence smiled and shook her head a little and her hair shook on her head. OK, let’s talk.
And she pulled up a chair and June and Fernando sat on a couch covered with an old wool blanket. Carlos and I remained standing, a slight distance away, playing with the lumps of clay in our hands. Florence sat on the chair, her body leaning slightly forward, hands in her lap with her fingers interlaced.
Your work is very beautiful, June continued, appointing herself spokeswoman of the group, and cleared her throat. Very beautiful. But that’s not why we came here.
Florence was listening, very attentive and interested, as if we were about to give her a far-reaching explanation of the butterfly effect or antimatter.
We came here because of that little girl over there.
The faces all turned towards me and I, not knowing what to do, did nothing and kept rolling my ball of clay.
Some time ago, in the late seventies, Vanja’s mother came to live in New Mexico, June continued. She was quite young. Her name was Suzana. She had come here from Brazil when she was still a child, with her father, after her mother died.
June spoke slowly. With her smile fading slightly at the lack of sense in those words, Florence listened.
Some time later, a few years later, Suzana married Fernando (and June placed her hand on his shoulder, but quickly removed it, as if she had committed an indiscretion, a faux pas). And later they broke up. And she had a short relationship with another man. Your son Daniel. It didn’t last long. I don’t know if you ever met her. Probably not.
Florence was beginning to understand. She showed it by nodding. A relationship with her son Daniel. Short. Didn’t last long.
When was that? she asked.
They spent some time together in early 1988, said Fernando. It’s been almost fourteen years. She lived in Albuquerque, on San Pablo Street Northeast.
I was surprised by Fernando’s instant math. But maybe he knew those numbers off by heart. Maybe he knew that (other) story off by heart, a compulsory talent he wished he didn’t have.
Yes, said Florence, Daniel lived in Albuquerque at that time. But I only remember meeting one girlfriend of his, from his time in Albuquerque, and she wasn’t called Suzana. She was Ashley. Or Audrey. Or Abigail. Something like that, that started with an A. It’s been a long time.
Florence understood, but she didn’t understand everything.
We came here, June continued, because during the time she spent with your son Suzana fell pregnant, and at the end of the year she had a daughter.
And everyone looked again at that little girl over there, life model, guinea pig, a bizarre specimen with some deformity or shocking dysfunction visible to whoever went to the trouble of looking.
The obvious question, that I (dysfunctional) had never thought of: what guarantee was there that I really was the daughter of that woman’s son? One could only be sure of such things by resorting to the cold protocol of science. What guarantee was there that that whole story — Suzana, Albuquerque, short relationships — was true? We might have been a bizarre troupe of experimental con artists, trying to see if we could convince innocent old ladies with our heterogeneous accents and cock-and-bull stories involving dubious paternities and abnormal disappearances.