I interrupted, to show her that I was attentive to her story: “Like a Hittite funeral pyre.” She glanced at me. It was an imperceptible glance, but I caught it on the edge of the rearview mirror. There was that same little smile on her lips I had noticed when I invited her to go fishing, but in her eyes I saw (or imagined I saw) a flash of indulgence, as when we forgive a small child for committing an imperfect crime, like stealing a cookie and forgetting to brush the crumbs off her face.
“They set them on fire,” she continued, looking out the window and ignoring my interruption, “but when the grass was consumed the bodies underneath were only half-charred. The two marranos had to repeat the operation seven times (pile up the grass, set the fire, wait until the fire died, root with long tree branches into the smoldering grass to uncover what was left of the bodies, repeat). In the meantime, Pedro de Horta and the rest of his (Christian) men waited for them aboard their ship. Around the time of the fifth torching, the men threatened mutiny if they did not sail immediately. De Horta later wrote in his diary that he considered abandoning the two marranos in the marshes, but that the faces of the would-be mutineers, contorted by fear into the shape of wolves, made him change his mind. He held off his men, with whippings and prayers, through two more torchings, until the marranos came back on board. They were isolated in the bowels of the ship until they arrived in San Cristóbal de La Habana, a week later, but neither of them got sick, De Horta reported in his diary. The two marranos asked his permission to stay in the city and he granted it, since they were now old and had served him well for many years. This was the first and only time men tried to colonize the marshes.” McCabe closed her eyes and seemed to doze. We were reaching the river. “What did the men die of?” I asked. “Does it matter?” she said, her eyes still closed.
10
Sea of Tranquility
We sat in the canoe in silence, transfixed by our fishing rods and the dark green water, avoiding each other’s gaze. It became scorching hot. We did not catch any fish. McCabe insisted on carrying the picnic basket alone all the way to Wanetka Falls, about two miles up on foot and then down a steep, rocky path. She swayed under the basket’s weight and, a few times, staggered and almost lost her footing, but she cut me off with a sharp “No, thanks,” when I offered to help. I walked a few steps behind her, so I don’t know if her face showed tiredness or any emotion. When we finally sat under a weeping willow overlooking the Falls, she looked perfectly fresh.
I told McCabe how I used to picnic under this willow every Sunday in August with my parents and grandmother. I left out the Cohens, who always came along. It must have been my instinctive prudence. Call it paranoiac reflex, if you wish. While I almost never lied, I always suppressed some facts, the reasons opaque even to myself, more like unformed forebodings bubbling up from some subconscious cesspool of fear than reasons in the strictest sense, that is, reasons as a product of the brain’s actuary function, which also churns out shopping lists and tax returns. Seldom did I tell a story about myself that had not been cleansed of certain details that I feared could be used against me. Ninety percent of them were completely trivial. However, I felt safe only if I had taken something out of a story and hidden it in a mental lockbox. How did I get to be so secretive? Being a spic in Elmira and a homo to boot? Or did it have a genetic basis? Survival of the secretivest. Not a bad thing in spite of its ugly hiss.
By the time I was done reminiscing, McCabe had devoured all of her food and was eyeing mine. I told her she could take as much as she wanted, because I was not hungry. She ate nine chicken wings, a pound of potato salad, and half a strawberry-rhubarb pie, licking her fingers between each course, and then dozed off. I had never seen McCabe asleep. Old McCabe’s pink, fat self had repulsed me so thoroughly that I usually focused on her left earlobe when politeness forced me to look at her. I always kept a good deal of physical space between us. This new McCabe did not make me gag reflexively. There was a peculiar serenity about her, as if a plump blood sausage had been emptied out, the skin tightened and scraped with an abrasive substance, and then filled with an odorless, colorless essence. Her serenity allowed me to examine her now, with an entomologist’s cold precision.
She was wearing old jeans tucked inside half boots, and a man’s red plaid jacket over a brown turtleneck. It was the first time I had seen her not encased in leather. Her breasts had shrunk to the size of grapefruits. The freckles on her face were smaller and less close to each other, or maybe bigger and so close to each other that they gave her a new complexion, ivory replacing ruddy and blotchy. Perhaps it was just an optical illusion, now that her face was less round and the skin pulled back over her bones.
Since her reappearance, she had eaten twice as much without gaining an ounce. Heaping plates of steamed potatoes and pig knuckles, tureens of tripe and oxtail soups, goat stews, mounds of fat sausages of all colors and origins—among which I could identify only the boudin blanc from having seen its picture in a magazine (not being a sausage lover myself)—scrambled eggs with calf brains, and a variety of stewed animal entrails all began appearing on the dinner table from the first day McCabe returned, as if Petrona again had received instructions behind my back. There were now two distinct dinners served: mine, faithful to the master menu of the month I had given Petrona; and McCabe’s, increasingly visceral and gargantuan. Only good wines were served now—the ones I kept under lock and key—different ones every day, cannily chosen. Every day, I checked my key and the wine cellar lock, still spying on Petrona, hoping to catch her stealing my wine or ordering the meats that McCabe now ate, which were delivered daily and in vast quantities.
Petrona was her usual hieratic self. She was the only one in the household who had not changed: surrounded by unexplained phenomena, I acquired for a while a nervous twitch on the left corner of my mouth that made me look as if I were smiling even when distressed. On arrival, Petrona always greeted me with a Buenos días, señora in her obsequious pre-Columbian lilt, quickly glancing at the tip of my nose, never my eyes, and then lowering her eyes back to half-mast, which is where she kept them when she was around me (in her own home I was sure that she was a straight-gazed, unblinking John P. Wayne). Her departure was identical, gesture for gesture, the only difference being a subtly textured Buenas noches, señora, evoking each night a different shade of contempt. In between, on the rare occasions on which I spoke to her, she stuck to her meretricious script with Noh-theatre discipline. Petrona behaved as if she were immortal, connected every minute to all the Petronas that had existed before her and would exist ever after. I felt vertigo one day looking at Petrona’s impassible face, which suddenly became the face of millions. Was that what Mrs. Wilkerson felt when she looked at my mother’s own guarded face? Spying on Petrona yielded only one curious fact: she liked to eat sugar cubes. I never found out how any of the household’s new food and wine transactions were accomplished, and I dared not ask. After all, everything in this house—the food, the wine, even Petrona—belonged to McCabe. I was a guest.