It was past twelve when an old man in the uniform of the customs police hobbled up the street as if his legs were made of stone, produced a set of keys, and threw open the huge hammered-steel doors of the warehouse. We shuffled in, blinking against the darkness. When my eyes became accustomed to the light, the mounds of unclaimed goods piled up on pallets around me began to take on form. There were crates of crescent wrenches, boxes of Tupperware, a bin of door stoppers. I saw bicycle horns — thousands of them, black and bulbous as the noses of monkeys — and jars of kimchi stacked up to the steel crossbeams of the ceiling. And then I saw the shoes. They were heaped up in a small mountain, individually wrapped in tissue paper. Just as Uncle Dagoberto had said. The others ignored them. They read the description the customs man provided, unwrapped the odd shoe, and went on to the bins of churchkey openers and chutney. I was dazed. It was like stumbling across the treasure of the Incas, the Golden City itself, and yet having no one recognize it.
With trembling fingers, I unwrapped first one shoe, then another. I saw patent leather, suede, the sensuous ripple of alligator; my nostrils filled with the rich and unmistakable bouquet of newly tanned leather. The shoes were perfect, insuperable, the very latest styles, au courant, à la mode, and exciting. Why had the others turned away? It was then that I read the customs declaration: Thirty thousand leather shoes, it read, imported from the Republic of Italy, port of Livorno. Unclaimed after thirty days. To be sold at auction to the highest bidder. Beside the declaration, in a handscrawl that betrayed bureaucratic impatience — disgust, even — of the highest order, was this further notation: Left feet only.
It took me a moment. I bent to the mountain of shoes and began tearing at the tissue paper. I tore through women’s pumps, stiletto heels, tooled boots, wing tips, deck shoes, and patent-leather loafers — and every single one, every one of those thirty thousand shoes, was half a pair. Uncle Dagoberto, I thought, you are a genius.
The auction was nothing. I waited through a dozen lots of number-two pencils, Cabbage Patch Dolls, and soft-white lightbulbs, and then I placed the sole bid on the thirty thousand left-footed shoes. One hundred huevos and they were mine. Later, I took the young amazon up to my room and showed her what a man with a name like Chilly Buttons can do in a sphere that, well — is this the place to gloat? We were sharing a cigarette when Uncle Dagoberto called. “Did you get them?” he shouted over the line.
“One hundred huevos,” I said.
“Good boy,” he crooned, “good boy.” He paused a moment to catch his breath. “And do you know where I’m calling from?” he asked, struggling to keep down the effervescence in his voice.
I reached out to stroke the amazon’s breasts — her name was Linda, by the way, and she was a student of cosmetology. “I think I can guess,” I said. “Calidad?”
“Funny thing,” Uncle Dagoberto said, “there are some shoes here, in the customs warehouse — fine Italian shoes, the finest, thirty thousand in a single lot — and no one has claimed them. Can you imagine that?”
There was such joy in his tone that I couldn’t resist playing out the game with him. “There must be something wrong with them,” I said.
I could picture his grin. “Nothing, nothing at all. If you’re one-legged.”
That was two years ago.
Today, Uncle Dagoberto is the undisputed shoe king of our city. He made such a killing on that one deal that he was able to buy his way into the cartel that “advises” the government. He has a title now — Undersecretary for International Trade — and a vast, brightly lit office in the President’s palace.
I’ve changed too, though I still live with my mother on La Calle Verdad and I still attend the university. My shoes — I have some thirty pairs now, in every style and color those clever Italians have been able to devise — are the envy of all, and no small attraction to the nubile and status-hungry young women of the city. I no longer study semantics, hermeneutics, and the deconstruction of deconstruction, but have instead been pursuing a degree in business. It only makes sense. After all, the government doesn’t seem half so unfriendly these days.
THE APE LADY IN RETIREMENT
SOMEHOW, she found herself backed up against the artichoke display in the fruit-and-vegetable department at Waldbaum’s, feeling as lost and hopeless as an orphan. She was wearing her dun safari shorts and matching workshirt; the rhino-hide sandals she’d worn at the Makoua Reserve clung to the soles of her pale splayed tired old feet. Outside the big plate-glass windows, a sullen, grainy snow had begun to fall.
Maybe that was it, the snow. She was fretting over the vegetables, fumbling with her purse, the grocery list, the keys to the rheumatic Lincoln her sister had left her, when she glanced up and saw it, this wonder, this phenomenon, this dishwater turned to stone, and for the life of her she didn’t know what it was. And then it came to her, the word chipped from the recesses of her memory like an old bone dug from the sediment: snow. Snow. What had it been — forty years?
She gazed out past the racks of diet cola and facial cream, past the soap-powder display and the thousand garish colors of the products she couldn’t use and didn’t want, and she was lost in a reminiscence so sharp and sudden it was like a blow. She saw her sister’s eyes peering out from beneath the hood of her snow-suit, the drifts piled high over their heads, hot chocolate in a decorated mug, her father cursing as he bent to wrap the chains round the rear wheels of the car…and then the murmur of the market brought her back, the muted din concentrated now in a single voice, and she was aware that someone was addressing her. “Excuse me,” the voice was saying, “excuse me.”
She turned, and the voice took on form. A young man — a boy, really — short, massive across the shoulders, his dead-black hair cut close in a flattop, was standing before her. And what was that in his hand? A sausage of some sort, pepperoni, yes, and another word came back to her. “Excuse me,” he repeated, “but aren’t you Beatrice Umbo?”
She was. Oh, yes, she was — Beatrice Umbo, the celebrated ape lady, the world’s foremost authority on the behavior of chimpanzees in the wild, Beatrice Umbo, come home to Connecticut to retire. She gave him a faint, distant smile of recognition. “Yes,” she said softly, with a trace of the lisp that had clung to her since childhood, “and it’s just terrible.”
“Terrible?” he echoed, and she could see the hesitation in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, grinning unsteadily and thumping the pepperoni against his thigh, “but we read about you in school, in college, I mean. I even read your books, the first one, anyway—Jungle Dawn?“
She couldn’t respond. It was his grin, the way his upper lip pulled back from his teeth and folded over his incisors. He was Agassiz, the very picture of Agassiz, and all of a sudden she was back in the world of leaves, back in the Makoua Reserve, crouched in a huddle of chimps. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Of course I’m all right,” she snapped, and at that moment she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind the halved cantaloupes. The whites of her eyes were stippled with yellow, her hair was like a fright wig, her face as rutted and seamed as an old saddlebag. Even worse, her skin had the oddest citrus cast to it, a color about midway between the hue of a grapefruit and an orange. She didn’t look well, she knew it. But then what could they expect of a woman who’d devoted her life to science and survived dysentery, malaria, schistosomiasis, hepatitis, and sleeping sickness in the process, not to mention the little things like the chiggers that burrow beneath your toenails to lay their eggs. “I mean the fruit,” she said, trying to bite back the lisp. “The fruit is terrible. No yim-yim,” she sighed, gesturing toward the bins of tangerines, kumquats, and pale seedless grapes. “No wild custard apple or tiger peach. They haven’t even got passionfruit.”