ME: i thought you had a cell phone
CYRUS: Broke a long time ago. So the first place we found that had people, phones, was a roadside restaurant a few minutes before the pueblo. We got out and I managed to scream out what had happened as I pointed to the body and a couple of men from the restaurant rushed out and helped us lay the body there, on the ground. Her eyes were wide open, by the way, and her mouth
ME: jesus
CYRUS: Various people gathered around, and somebody mentioned calling the police, and I guess we managed to communicate that there were others by the river — the injured boyfriend, his friend. A couple of people from the restaurant got in a car and went for them. And an old woman, she brought us some limes
ME: limes?
CYRUS: She brought us two lime wedges and said something about shock and that we should suck them and we did. Someone covered her with a blanket. I saw the pay phones and I had a calling card in the truck and I went to one of the pay phones in a daze. I think I threw up again. But I called my dad, I was desperate to ask him about the cpr, to see if I had maybe killed her or at least missed an opportunity to save her. Something like that. I wasn’t
ME: you did everything you could. i’m so sorry
CYRUS: thinking clearly. And my teeth were chattering and each time they clicked I remembered her teeth
CYRUS: I did get my dad on the phone. Who knows what I sounded like. I was very confused, certainly. Sobbing. Managed to ask about the cpr, if I had done it wrong. He reassured me, although I don’t remember what he said. That nothing was my fault. That she would have already choked on her vomit or something. Not that a psychiatrist knows anything about cpr. I also think he said something about my coming home
ME: none of this is in any way
CYRUS: I got off the phone and went back to the truck. One of the people who worked at the restaurant said we could go so we left
ME: your fault
ME: you didn’t wait for the police?
CYRUS: Fuck no. We just left. We drove back to the apartment in total silence. We had put our clothes back over our swimsuits but were dried off from the heat by the time we got home. Like I said it was in the 80s. But my teeth were still chattering
ME: you didn’t talk about what happened at all?
CYRUS: We did later. Kind of. After we showered, we both realized we hadn’t eaten all day and although I felt sick I felt hungry, really hungry. We went to a little restaurant near our place we always go to. We started
WHICH know I hate but which helped get this taste out of my mouth. We talked about it then
ME: what did she say
CYRUS: The taste is back, by the way
CYRUS: She was shaken up in her way. She said she wished she’d never got in the water. But she also seemed excited. Like we had had a “real” experience
ME: i guess you had
CYRUS: Yeah but I had this sense — this sense that the whole point of the trip for her — to Mexico — was for something like this, something this “real” to happen. I don’t really believe that, but I felt it, and I said something about how she had got some good material for her novel
ME: is she writing a novel
CYRUS: Who knows
ME: and she responded how
CYRUS: She’s probably writing a novel now
CYRUS: She was quiet. I’m sure she was angry/hurt. Then she said something about how this just is the world, that things like this happen, that one can be as cautious as one wants, can waste one’s life being cautious, but that there is no avoiding the reality of death. I remember laughing at the phrase “reality of death” to show I thought it was an embarrassing cliché
ME: have you two made up
CYRUS: No. Yesterday we were both in the apartment reading and smoking but barely talked. We haven’t really spoken to each other today
ME: well, you both probably just need some time, right? i mean, this would shake anybody up
ME: i am really sorry
CYRUS: Yeah
ME: about all of this
CYRUS: Thanks
CYRUS: How is Spain?
3
INSTEAD OF CONFESSING TO ISABEL THAT MY MOTHER, MY BRILLIANT and unwaveringly supportive mother, was well, that I was a liar of the most disgusting sort, I decided to imply more and more that my father, the gentlest and most generous man I knew, was a thug, a small — time fascist, El Caudillo of his household. Not only did this lie, in my view, draw Isabel’s attention away from whatever discomfort she had regarding the initial dishonesty about my mom, replacing that discomfort with sympathy, but it also served to decrease my guilt; I felt much better about blaspheming both my parents, about distributing my failure as a son between them. And because this lie about my father was comically absurd, because he was the man of all the men I knew most free from any will — to — domination, it felt more like a harmless joke than a morbid tempting of fate or karmic gambling with parental health. I also felt that, in order to avoid any future confusion, I needed to get my stories straight, and so decided to replay the confession I had made to Isabel and Rufina to Teresa, who would then tell Arturo and Rafa, all of whom believed I had, when we first met, recently suffered one of life’s profoundest losses. Surely some part of the mystery I liked to think I held for Teresa derived from the fact that, after my dramatic performance at the party, I made no subsequent reference to my suffering, although suffering could be read into my silences. That I was thousands of miles away from the rest of my family so soon after such a tragedy, although I never specified the timeframe, prepared the ground for my lie about my impossible father, and my new claim that I might not return to the U.S. after the completion of my fellowship furthered my image as exile. At any rate, when the rains and early dark began to give way to warmer, longer days and milder nights, and the accordion player was back in La Plaza Santa Ana and the streets were again alive, I began to see more of Teresa, who did not seem to have a job, although in theory she was employed at the gallery. I would walk to Salamanca after “working” in El Retiro and Teresa would leave the gallery in someone else’s hands and accompany me to movies, bookstores, cafés.
Whenever I was with Teresa, whenever we were talking, I felt our faces engaged in a more substantial and sophisticated conversation than our voices. Her face was formidable; it seemed by turns very young and very old; when she opened her eyes wide, she looked like a child, and when she squinted in concentration, the tiny wrinkles at their outer corners made her seem worldly, wise. Because she could instantly look younger or older, more innocent or experienced than she was, she could parry whatever speech was addressed to her. If you were to accuse her, say, of reading too much into a particular scene in a movie, she would widen her eyes and look at you with an innocence that made you feel guilty of projection; if you accused her of some form of naiveté, her squint would bespeak such expanses of experience that the accusation was instantly turned back upon you. Her eyes could deflect or reflect or ironize, and then her smile, which was wide, would instantly restore a tabula rasa, benevolently forgiving any claim against her.
I believed the dialectical movement of her face, however, was challenged by our particular circumstance; I never spoke English with Teresa, not since the first night of our meeting when my volubility had swelled. I told her that this was to promote my acquisition of Spanish, but it was, in fact, to preserve the possibility of misspeaking or being misunderstood, and to secure and amplify the mystery of that inaugural outburst. I believed my rant on the way to Rafa’s party had impressed her, and I was determined not to ruin it with banalities. With my performance in the car her sole sample of my English, I hoped she would always translate my fragmented Spanish in her head, transforming my halting and semicoherent utterances into the most eloquent English she could imagine. She would not, like Isabel, merely intuit depths, but would actually sound them in her painstakingly mastered second language. Of course she would never arrive at a satisfactory English formulation of whatever my Spanish negatively figured, but this would further preserve the mystique of my powers in my mother tongue. Such conversations would be the counterpoint to her ongoing work with Arturo of translating my poems, work she had almost entirely taken over; there she tried to imagine every possible Spanish correlative to my English, such as it was; here, she tried to extract from my remedial Spanish the poet’s native eloquence.