The macaw shrieked and stretched out its wings and, still on its perch, started to flap them energetically, desperately, as if wanting to fly.
White Smoke
When I first met her at a Scottish bar, after who knows how many beers and almost a whole pack of unfiltered Camels, Tamara told me that she liked to have her nipples bitten, and hard.
It wasn’t actually a Scottish bar, but an ordinary bar in Antigua, Guatemala, that served only beer and was called (or at least known as) the Scottish bar. I was sitting at the counter, drinking a Moza. I prefer dark beer. It makes me think of dark taverns and sword fights. I lit a cigarette and she, on a stool to my right, asked me in English if she could have one. I guessed by her accent that she was Israeli. Bevakasha, I said, which means you’re welcome in Hebrew, and I held out a box of matches. Immediately, she became friendly. She said something in Hebrew that I didn’t understand and I made it clear that I could say only a few words and recite a prayer or two and count to ten. Fifteen, if I tried. I live in the capital, I said in Spanish to show her that I wasn’t American, and she confessed, perplexed, that she’d never thought there was such a thing as Guatemalan Jews. I’m not Jewish anymore, I said smiling, I retired. What do you mean, not Jewish anymore, that’s not possible, she shouted in that way Israelis often shout. She turned to face me. She was wearing a white Indian-style blouse made of light cotton, well-worn jeans, and yellow espadrilles. She had copper-colored hair and emerald blue eyes, if there’s such a thing as emerald blue. She told me that she’d recently finished her military service, that she was traveling through Central America with her friend, and that they’d decided to stop in Antigua for a few weeks to take some Spanish classes and earn a little money. Her, she pointed. Yael, her friend, a very pale and very serious girl with beautiful shoulders, was the one who’d served my beer. I said hello and they started speaking in Hebrew, giggling, and at some point I thought I heard them mention the number seven, though I didn’t know why. A German couple walked in and her friend went over to serve them. She held my hand tight, said that she was pleased to meet me, that her name was Tamara, and then took another one of my cigarettes without asking.
I ordered another beer and Yael brought us two Mozas and a plate of potato chips. She stood in front of us. I asked Tamara what her last name was. I remember it was Russian. Halfon is Lebanese, I said, but my mother’s maiden name, Tenenbaum, is from Poland, from Łódź, and they both shrieked. It turned out that Yael’s last name was also Tenenbaum, and as they were verifying the information on my driver’s license, I considered the remote possibility that we came from the same family, and envisioned an entire novel about two Polish siblings who believed their family had been exterminated and then, after not seeing each other for sixty years, were suddenly reunited thanks to two of their grandchildren, one a Guatemalan writer and one an Israeli hippie, who met accidentally at a Scottish bar that wasn’t really a Scottish bar, in Antigua, Guatemala.
Yael took out a liter of cheap beer and filled three glasses. They handed me back my license and we toasted — to us, to them, to the Poles. We fell silent, listening to an old Bob Marley song and contemplating the never-ending brevity of the planet.
Tamara lifted my lit cigarette from the ashtray, took a long drag, and asked me what I did for a living. I told her with a straight face that I was a pediatrician and a professional liar. She held up a hand, as if to say stop. I really liked her hand and I don’t know why I recalled the verse of an e.e. cummings poem that Woody Allen quotes in one of his movies about infidelity. Nobody, I said, trapping her hand like a pale, fragile butterfly, not even the rain, has such small hands. Tamara smiled, told me that her parents were doctors, that she sometimes wrote poems too, and I guessed she had attributed the cummings line to me, but I didn’t feel like setting her straight. And she didn’t let go of my hand.
Yael filled our glasses and I smoked awkwardly with my left hand as they spoke in Hebrew. What’s wrong? I asked Tamara, and with a disconsolate pout she told me that someone had stolen her stuff the day before. She sighed. I spent all morning walking around the craft market, she said, through some ruins, all over the place, and when I sat down on a bench in the Central Park (that’s what people in Antigua call it, even though it’s really a plaza), I realized that someone had slashed my bag open with a knife. She explained that she’d lost a little money and some papers. Yael said something in Hebrew and they both laughed. What? I asked, curious, but they kept laughing and speaking in Hebrew. I squeezed her hand and Tamara remembered I was there and told me that the money didn’t matter as much as the papers. I asked what papers. She smiled enigmatically, like a Dutch girl selling tulips. Four hits of acid, she whispered in bad Spanish. I took a sip of beer. Do you like acid? she asked, and I said I didn’t know, that I’d never tried it. Tamara spoke euphorically for ten or twenty minutes about how essential acid was as a way to open our minds and turn us into more tolerant, peaceful people, and all I could think about while she blathered on was of tearing her clothes off right there in front of Yael and the Germans and any other Scottish voyeur who might care to watch. To get her to stop talking, and to calm myself down, I suppose, I lit a cigarette and passed it to her. The first time I tried acid, with my friends in Tel Aviv, she said as we passed the cigarette back and forth, I got really drowsy, very, very relaxed, and I think I saw God. I seem to recall she used the Spanish word Dios, although she might have used Hashem or God or Adonai or YHVH, the unpronounceable all-consonant tetragrammaton. I didn’t know if I should laugh, so instead all I did was ask her what it looked like, the face of God. He didn’t have a face, she told me. So what did you see? I asked. She said it was hard to explain and then closed her eyes and took on a mystic air and awaited some divine revelation. I don’t believe in God, I said, wakening her from her trance, though I do speak to Him every day, or just about. She turned serious. You don’t consider yourself a Jew and you don’t believe in God? she asked reproachfully, and I just shrugged and asked what for and went to the bathroom before there was any chance to start on such a pointless topic.