By that time we had already closed out our bank accounts, so I ran upstairs for a roll of cash. We settled on a price and I paid up. I also tipped generously so that they would dispose of my brother’s horrifyingly wrecked car, and so that the officers would forget our names and addresses forever. I took my brother to the hospital.
When I returned home many hours later, Cathy asked me if this had been the trouble I’d been expecting. What trouble? I asked her. What the astrologer predicted for you. Astrologers don’t predict anything, I told her. My brother’s going to be fine, don’t worry. I left the story about the cat unfinished and went back to work on the book that was due to be published before we moved.
At last, my wife and I finished almost everything that we had begun in Mexico City, and in the middle of May, in one momentous effort, we left the country with our little boy, our cat, and our piano. Since my second book had already gone on sale and our university jobs in the hardly glamorous city to which we’d moved didn’t begin until after August, I decided to get back to my story about the man and the cat before classes started. As much as I disliked the idea of having to finish the poor beast off, I felt an overwhelming sense of metaphysical responsibility demanding I write out its demise. You always have to finish what you start, especially if the warring stars above augur your misfortune.
At the beginning of August we moved to our new, permanent address. There, Gula and I and our little boy began to enjoy spending time in the garden, a real novelty for us. At night I worked on the story about the cat and the man.
Gula had always been insufferably independent, but she’d never had any direct experience of the outdoors. Now she spent entire days hunting mice and exploring trees: she’d never even seen one before. Meanwhile, I finally killed the cat in the story I was writing.
When one’s imagination runs dry, superstition is its last refuge, but superstition — once invoked — goes right on menacing us even when we have no need of it anymore, even when we deny its reality: no one really believes that such invocations have any effect on the world; we’re rational people after all, but we still knock on wood! One morning we noticed that Gula hadn’t come home to sleep in our bed for a few nights. I went down to the basement and found her — the epitome of feline vanity — stretched out, feverish and dusty, under an air-conditioning duct. We took her to the vet. It turned out that she’d eaten a poisonous root that had destroyed her liver — she had only a few hours left to live. We carried her back home. There we made her a comfortable bed of towels and old scraps of flannel, and we let her die in peace.
DIARY OF A QUIET DAY
9:00 A.M. Before my son was born I used to spend whole days at the beach, as though I were already retired. Not that I ever went out to dance clubs or sipped cocktails from coconut shells, nor was I ever one of those adrenaline junkies who risk their necks parasailing. Instead I’d sit, just planted in the sand, reading a book. It runs in my family. When we were kids, my parents frequently took us to spend weekends at the beach. These were only weekend trips, so we made sure to enjoy every moment to the fullest extent. We’d arrive late on Friday evening. Then, on Saturday morning, we’d eat breakfast in shifts so that we could secure a palapa facing the sea, right at the edge of the surf, where we would all settle in for the day: my parents imperiously enthroned in the shade, and the nine of us children — brazenly lazy, almost obscenely identical — stretched out reading in a row of beach chairs like a flank of cavalry.
Ever since my son was born, however, a day on vacation is more like a feverish trance: from six A.M. to eight each morning we’re in the swimming pool; then it’s time for breakfast and off to the beach. There we tumble in the waves, dig holes, build sandcastles, make seaweed wigs, and poke around for crabs to torture. I end up with sand encrusted on parts of my body I didn’t even know existed. Around noon we retreat to the house’s air-conditioned embrace. We eat lunch, then I put my son down for his nap. In the afternoon, while Cathy is looking after him, I settle down — as in days gone by — to read a paperback edition of The Odyssey. Perhaps being a father now helps me to see that all the tension in Homer’s epic comes from the friction between the hyperkinetic Odysseus and the placidly dim-witted Telemachus, a good-for-nothing son who neither defends his mother from the pretenders who accost her, nor sets sail in search of his father.
Today is different. We’re staying at an enormous house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a strip of sandbars and islands which begins at Cape Henry, just a few miles from Norfolk, and stretches south more than three hundred miles, beyond Cape Fear and Wilmington — a haven for pirates, once upon a time. We — my wife, our little boy, a pair of grandmothers, two dogs, and a cat — opened up the house last Sunday and we’ll close it next week. It’s now Wednesday, maybe Thursday. The day before yesterday the rest of my wife’s family arrived. Because they live far inland, up in the hills, they hate — possibly without realizing it — the sea and everything to do with it. One day at the beach was enough to convince them that there’s no sport in tormenting crabs — they walk backward, after all — and spur them to organize a few outings in the car, with seat belts properly buckled and the air-conditioning high enough to blow-dry their hair. Through gritted teeth, my wife angrily gave in to her family obligations — the inexorable summons of her bloodline — so she and our son are heading out with them for the day. I’m staying here to get some work done.
As I helped to pack the Diet Cokes and the party-size bags of Tostitos as big as TV sets, I was seized by the dizzying prospect of spending an entire day of perhaps immoral peace and quiet: in the gringo universe, where having children is more a self-indulgent whim than a real decision, one quickly learns that if your kids aren’t driving you crazy, it’s because they’re driving someone else crazy, somebody without kids of their own.
10:30 A.M. From the spacious third-floor balcony you can see the ocean. Between our place and the beach is another row of houses similar to this one. People around here christen their homes as they do their yachts. Each one has its own sign emblazoned with some quasi-nautical name: Circe, Ogygia, Poseidon. The breeze is not especially refreshing and I feel sorry for my relatives driving around out there. By now they must have reached the town of Kitty Hawk where, in 1903, the Wright Brothers defied gravity with their tiny, pathetic first flight, which lasted all of twelve seconds. Since then we’ve never stopped perpetuating that defiance: we fly to Tokyo, we stay up all night drinking Diet Coke, we make babies for the hell of it.
The ocean is tempting but the books I’m reading are checked out from the university library, and it looks bad if you return them all greasy, stained with Coppertone. This house — somebody else’s — feels very strange, its quiet emptiness closing in around me. I never really thought I could miss my oversized brothers-in-law.
11:00 A.M. The conquest of the Canary Islands was a strange thing, really more of a sudden interruption in the midst of timeless tranquility. In one of her books, the Cuban Professor Eyda Merediz — like myself, an émigré to Washington, D.C. — writes that Spain’s incorporation of the Fortunate Isles into its Empire provided a model for subsequent Spanish incursions into the Americas: Columbus’s bizarre descriptions of his first landing in the West Indies result from his perceiving Atlantic America through the nascent mythology of the Canary possessions. This probably also accounts for the perverse insistence on seeing our own tormented continent as an Edenic territory: what those Spanish captains found on the Canaries was nothing like the complex, militarized civilizations that Cortés or Pizarro fought to conquer, but a separate universe, infinitely isolated in its megalithic serenity. The German anthropologist Hans Biedermann has shown that, before being assimilated into Spanish culture, the Guanches were the last bastion of the European Stone Age: despite a reliance on draft animals they neither used wheels nor forged metals.