Antony was right, I'd gotten over leaving him and Schell behind as I fell, every day, deeper in love with Isabel. Sometimes, on those open country roads, while the Cord was still running, and Isabel's head lay on my shoulder, I'd open it up all the way, and heading straight into the future, with the wind rushing in the window, I'd feel like I was born anew, never having known anything about the con.
WAIT, THERE'S MORE
As Isabel had said, when she told me the story of the ghost in the silver mine and I thought it was just about over: "Wait, there's more."
We settled in Mexico City and got a small apartment in the Polanco section. It wasn't difficult to find work, as Isabel and I were bilingual, and we labored as translators for anything from business documents to minor literary works. Through relatives who still lived in the country, Isabel was able to locate her father, a mild-mannered and jovial old man, who came and lived with us in the city. He served as a witness and sole guest at our wedding.
Once we had established ourselves more securely, I took some of the money Schell had given me and whatever we could save and put it toward tuition at the University of Mexico. There I studied literature, and my early tutors would have been proud of my accomplishments. After many years of working and studying, with great support from Isabel, I managed to acquire a doctorate. Even better, I was offered a position at the university and wound up teaching all of those works I'd studied when I was younger and, even more satisfying, the great writings of my own people. It was a heady time for us, and life happened fast and happened faster. During these years Schell and Antony were never far from my mind, and sometimes I had the greatest longing to see them again, to know how they were, to tell them how happy I was. Every day when the post arrived, I'd search for a letter, even just a postcard, but nothing ever came.
World War II started. During those dark years and for many following Captain Pierce's words returned to me time and again. The Monster had risen. I knew, as many did not, that the grim protocols of Adolf Hitler, a horrifying program of genocide, had been germinated in the United States by "great men" the likes of Henry Ford and the disreputable, crackpot findings of the Eugenics Record Office. And as time progressed, I could see that even the scale of this atrocity would not satisfy the Monster, but that it would return time and again to haunt humanity.
In 1946, after Isabel herself had graduated university with a degree in mathematics, we had our first child, a boy we named Antonio, of course, after Mr. Cleopatra. Our second son, Diego, was born two years later. During this time of young parenthood, I'd wished to have some contact with Schell, as most people want to speak to their parents when they, themselves, become parents. I tried to locate him, but to no avail.
The years followed one after the other, like a string of scarves from the great Saldonica's breast pocket. One night in 1965, the year I turned fifty, the year my younger son was seventeen, the age I was when I'd left Schell, Diego was rummaging around our attic and found the suit Schell had given me to wear on the long-ago escape to Mexico.
He came downstairs and handed me a slip of paper folded in half, saying "I found this in the pocket." I opened the yellowed note and there was a phone number written out in Antony's oddly delicate hand. I remembered him saying, "Call it. An old woman will answer. Tell her who you are…and I'll get back to you." I smiled at the sight of it and had a halfhearted notion to dial until I realized that any woman who was old in '32 would now be long dead. Instead, I folded it and shoved it into my wallet behind a tattered and creased photograph of Schell and Antony standing beside the Cord, a lifetime ago.
Later that year, I was in California, at Berkeley, participating in a weeklong academic conference called Literature of the Americas. I spent the first evening drinking and gabbing with colleagues I'd not seen in a few years; by the second night I'd already begun to miss Isabel and our sons and stayed to myself in the hotel room, watching television and reviewing a paper I was to deliver the next morning. At one point I opened my wallet to retrieve my photo of her, clumsily knocking loose all of the photos, which scattered on the table. With them came that slip of paper. I don't know what got into me-curiosity? loneliness?-but I dialed the number. There were five rings, and I was about to hang up, when an old woman answered.
"What's your name?" she croaked.
"Diego," I said.
She asked for my phone number, repeating each numeral as I uttered it. Then, without another word, she hung up. I was bemused and never really expected to receive a call back. It was not until I was in bed, at around one in the morning, that the phone rang.
"Hello?" I said into the receiver, my mind fuzzy from sleep.
"What's up, kid," said Antony. I sat up straight, instantly wide awake, and burst out laughing to hear his familiar voice.
"Throw some sawdust under it," he said. "Where are you?"
I told him about the conference. He told me, "Ditch that bullshit and come see me." He gave me directions and a phone number, and then hung up without further discussion.
As soon as I finished my lecture the next morning, I ducked out of the conference and rented a car. He lived not too far away, up in the hills outside Berkeley. It was early afternoon when, after getting lost a few times, I pulled into the drive of a house that sat alone atop a wooded hill.
I knocked on the front door, and a young Mexican woman answered. She introduced herself as the housekeeper, Marta, and showed me to a patio set away from the back of the house, at the edge of the hill, which offered a breathtaking view of the valley below. Antony was sitting in a wicker chair, beneath a grape arbor facing the vista. In front of him was a glass-topped wicker table holding an ashtray, a pack of cigarettes, and a beer can.
"Antony," I cried, and he turned and smiled. Unlike most people who shrink with age, he was still a giant. His face was etched with wrinkles, and he'd lost some hair; what remained had gone white. But his eyes were still a piercing blue, as sharp and alert as ever.
"Kid, you gonna make me get up or what?" he said.
I walked over to him and gave him a hug. He enclosed me in one of his huge arms, and his incredible strength was still evident. He waved to the chair opposite him and I took a seat. The first words out of my mouth were, "What happened to you guys?"
He told me how he'd come out to California, decided the climate suited him just fine, and never looked back-except to send for Vonda the Rubber Lady, who joined him as soon as he said the word. Although they never married, they had a good life together, starting a profitable business cultivating marijuana. "Didn't I ever tell you I always wanted to be a farmer?" he asked. After Vonda died of cancer in 1956, Antony retired on the considerable sum he and Vonda had managed to stash away. Now, he said, he was just as happy to sit in the sun, sip a cold one, and daydream.
Next it was my turn to fill him in on what Isabel and I had done with our lives.
"That's great, kid," he said. "Schell would be proud of you."
"Antony," I said, "I'm fifty and you're still calling me kid."
"Fifty, Christ, that's child's play. Try out my age for a while. I feel like a three-hundred-pound meat loaf. My brain hasn't done an honest day's work in years."
"And Schell?" I asked.
Antony took a deep drag on his cigarette and shook his head. "I'm sorry, kid. Right after you left and I took off for California, he and Morgan bought the farm. They'd stayed too long at the old house. It burned to the ground one night, with them in it. The police said it was arson, because the fire was so hot the bodies were burned beyond recognition."