But she got up and came over to me. She gazed into my eyes. She forgot whatever it was that usually danced in the aerial space just over her forehead. She forgot Fernando, June and Carlos.
Is it true? she asked me.
Of course Florence was looking for Daniel in me. And I wondered if I too would have seen him in my passport photo if I had known him, if I would have reencountered him in the genetic amalgam of my face, or if my mother didn’t need men even for that. Not even to lend a little of their biotype to her daughter. I wondered what Florence was seeing there in her trance, as she stared at that speechless thirteen-year-old oracle, rolling a ball of clay in her hands.
And I felt strange. I, who had always refused impossible projects (like the horizon seen from Copacabana), had devoted myself to one that was almost that: a fairytale father, a father scattered across the globe by myself in a number of potential places — all of them beyond the horizon seen from Copacabana. Of course: among all of the potential places I hadn’t listed the Ivory Coast. And yet there was less ocean and sky between Rio de Janeiro and the Ivory Coast than between Rio de Janeiro and the western United States.
If I set sail by boat from Copacabana, all I’d have to do was travel straight in a northeasterly direction to arrive at the Ivory Coast. If I arrived very secretively, a smuggler of myself, I wouldn’t even need a passport, I wouldn’t even need to stop at an immigration official’s booth and go through the tedious border protocol.
It didn’t really matter if this woman believed me (us) or not. She could shoo us out of there and tell us never to come back, opportunists that we were. And I would shrug as effortlessly as Fernando did, his habitual effortlessness. And I would leave there and never return and she could think what she wanted of me (us). I felt as if I’d entered the wrong movie theater and instead of finding an exciting science fiction film I’d come across a romantic comedy or a musical. I hate musicals. I definitely didn’t know what I was doing there anymore: in Florence’s studio, on Redondo Road, in Jemez Springs, in New Mexico, in the United States, in the northern hemisphere; I didn’t even know what I was doing on the third ball orbiting the sun. Everything was strange and I felt strange with that woman staring at me through her milky eyeballs.
And she stared and stared and kept staring. Until she found what she was looking for.
When I woke up in the motel in Albuquerque, I was alone. There was a note in Carlos’s handwriting in Portuguese (dictated, of course) on the bedside table. WE’VE GONE TO BRAEKFAST. WE DIDNT WANT TO WAKE YOU. WE’LL BRING A BAGEL. I had gone to bed with wet hair (where was my mother to tell me I shouldn’t do that? In what recess of my memory?) and an egg of hair had appeared on the right side of my head. I wet it in the sink. I combed it. It made no difference. I forgot about it and went out to find Fernando and Carlos.
They were eating breakfast in silence, staring at the huge TV on the wall in front of a group of squalid little tables. A politician was talking about politics on the TV.
You’ve got an egg on your head, said Fernando. Carlos laughed.
We drove around Albuquerque ceremoniously. Fernando was quieter than usual. Carlos jotted down the names of streets and any information that struck him as relevant in his notebook. We went to San Pablo Street Northeast and I was dismayed to discover that I remembered nothing of the house where I had spent the first two years of my life. Nothing. Zero.
It was like a slice of earth that had been removed from the ground. It had a dry garden in front of it just like Florence’s dry garden, but smaller. It had a dry tree. We got out of the car and wandered down the block aimlessly. It wasn’t as cold there but it was still cold and I pulled my stocking hat (which I’d put on to cure my messy hair) down over my ears.
There wasn’t the slightest recognition in me. Fernando could have been telling me a big lie, showing me a house chosen at random, and it wouldn’t have made any difference.
But there was recognition in him and it wasn’t easy and I knew it.
Did houses purge themselves of their former inhabitants with the arrival of their new inhabitants? Or were there several layers of ghosts in their memories, like layers of wallpaper? Did houses have memories?
Even if they didn’t, adult men did. Fernando had lived in that house with my mother for six years. Fernando had slept in that house with my mother for six years, and woken up, and looked at the dry tree when it was dry in the winter and when it was green in the summer and in all of its in-between stages. He had walked through those rooms for two thousand days. He had opened the door as he got home from work (which made me realize that I didn’t know what his job had been). He had closed the door as he left for work. And one day he had closed the door for the last time and it hadn’t been as he left for work.
Do you want to take a photo? Fernando asked.
I said yes and he took his old camera out of his jacket pocket and told Carlos and me to stand in front of the house (when we got the film developed, we would see that I had my eyes closed and Carlos’s mouth was a bit crooked, because he was about to say something or run his tongue over his parched lips).
Then we went back to the car and I considered the expedition to my early childhood over.
There wasn’t much else to do besides leave. Put those events in our pockets and leave. Celebrate Thanksgiving with June and her senile dogs the next day, and spend the two days after the next day at her place on Camino Sin Nombre, and scale the map again with our noses pointing north and the hope that the Saab wouldn’t decide to break down again.
Yes, of course, there were the Next Steps, and they were frighteningly toilsome. I searched my soul for energy, determination, courage, patience and other honorable sentiments. Other military-salute sentiments, the sort that make up the marrow of heroes.
But the next day and the day after that and the day after that still had something to say, before the rest of my once-again-post-New-Mexican life could begin. There was still, at least, a localizable vestige of my mother in Albuquerque, and that vestige was called Isabel and we were going to meet her.
Isabel appeared in a white kimono, the kind used by people who practise martial arts, tied with a green belt. I didn’t know if it put her down at the bottom of the hierarchy, up at the top or somewhere just so-so. Over it she was wearing a waterproof jacket that was very thick and very green.
She walked into the coffee shop where we had arranged to meet, picked her way through the people until she got to our table and hugged me. We were almost the same height. Then she shook Fernando’s hand with martial-arts vigor and Carlos’s hand with the same martial-arts vigor.
She sat down and looked at the enormous slice of chocolate cake that Carlos was eating and asked what’s that? Can I have a taste? And Carlos cut a (small) piece off with his fork and held it up to her mouth and thought it was funny. Him, a boy, feeding a grown woman. There was chocolate with chocolate filling and chocolate icing and pieces of chocolate negligently smeared around the Salvadorian boy’s mouth, but they disappeared politely into the Puerto Rican woman’s mouth.
And she said I’m always starving after practice.
And Carlos asked if she did judo or karate and she said aikido. And he said he’d never heard of it. And she said I’ll take you down later so you can see what it’s like.