“Paying a visit to one of your relatives?”
Carmen nods.
“Me, it’s my children,” the man says pointing to two urns graced by faded colour photographs and fresh flowers.
“They died young,” Carmen remarks.
“Yes, seven and nine. It seems like only yesterday.”
Unable to cut short the conversation, Carmen positions herself in front of the pictures and studies the round faces of the two kids, one on a blue bicycle, the other holding on to a swing. The odour of incense comes out of nowhere and, as is the case whenever she smells it, Carmen feels an invisible foot treading on her chest.
“I’m Marcus,” the man says.
“That’s funny. I met a Marcus once in similar circumstances.”
Not knowing why, she starts to cry again, and, like a giant sweeping over acres of land, Marcus places his hand on her back. The columbarium comes alive, as if thousands of urns were suddenly spreading their dove-like wings.
The telephone rings at around 4 p.m.; he is in the depths of sleep and his formless, aimless dreams coil around him like a boa constrictor. He grunts a little by way of answering, hangs up, and staggers over to his daughter’s bedroom. She is out but her things are there. The blinds, as always, are down and he gropes around nervously in the dark. In her backpack is a binder, a Bret Easton Ellis novel, and an astonishing number of pencil drawings haphazardly jammed into the pocket. No sign of his daughter’s wallet.
His colleague called after the investigation unit had shared its leads with the city’s precincts; nine wallets were found amid a pile of clothes at the Sutro Baths. Their owners are to be summoned to the police station for fingerprinting. The prints will be compared to those collected at similar gatherings, because the nighttime bathers are suspected of belonging to a group that entered the prison at Alcatraz as well as a military bunker and a few other off-limits locations. While this appears to be a minor offence, the media focus on these characters’ stunts may give rise to exemplary penalties.
Growing more and more anxious, Simon hunts so frantically through every unwashed article of clothing, ever piece of paper in the hope of digging up Jessica’s wallet, that he doesn’t hear her come in. She clears her throat to interrupt his search.
In her left hand she waves a tiny red purse.
“I still have it, don’t worry.”
“How did you know what I was looking for?”
“Nine of my friends have just been arrested. News travels fast.”
She gracefully flicks on the ceiling light and begins to sort out the mess caused by Simon’s digging. She is beautiful and he is nearly taken aback by this realization. He so seldom looks at her.
“Why did you do that? Why did it bother you so much that we spent the night at the baths?”
“It was dangerous. The pools are unsanitary.”
“Oh, bullshit!”
Simon sits down on the single bed populated with intertwined unicorns. For some reason, Jessica never expressed the wish to get rid of her childhood sheets, even though she in many ways leads an adult life, with all the attendant furtiveness.
“I’m quite willing to discuss it, but you have to enlighten me about the group you belong to.”
“Are you going to talk to Mom about it?”
He thinks about this briefly.
“It didn’t cross my mind. Why?”
“Because she’s too dumb to understand.”
Simon’s cheeks flush and he averts his gaze so his daughter won’t detect the petty pleasure he derives from her statement. Jessica sits down in an armchair shaped like a huge open hand, and mechanically grabs a pen to scribble with. Keeping her eyes down, she explains:
“We revive the past. The idea is to occupy deserted or misused historical sites and bring them back to life.”
“Why go to all that trouble?”
“Why do hundreds of morons get together each year at Gettysburg to recreate the same battle? History shouldn’t be confined to books; it has to live, breathe. Bleed.”
While Jessica’s pen produces oddly shaped figures, Simon stares at his feet. He feels ashamed. His daughter finally lifts her head toward him.
“What about you? What’s your excuse?”
“I was doing my job.”
“No, not for the other night. For why you stay with mom even though you know very well she’s cheating on you.”
Simon winces, averts his eyes again, and refrains from asking her how she knows this. He realizes how alike they are. Taciturn but observant. Through the wall from the adjoining room come volleys of Japanese speech. Alan has come back from school and resumed his never-ending marathon of anime, to which Jessica is wholly impervious. The mutual indifference manifested by his son and daughter never ceases to amaze him.
“Is that why you brought out the heavy artillery at the Sutro Baths? That’s where you went on your first date, Mom and you. You were angry?”
Once again Simon finds nothing to say. Jessica’s perceptiveness is hard to bear, but knowing she watches him so closely warms his heart.
The next morning when he comes home from work he discovers an envelope under his pillow. I found this in grandma’s apartment. Your turn to make the past come alive. Inside is a photo of a handsome, dark-complexioned man standing in front of a small house painted green. Written on the back in faded ink are an address and the name of a Mexican city. And the inscription, la casa de Roberto. Simon shakes his head in disbelief; the outlines of the picture seem to quiver. As if his father was waving to him from the last millennium.
It’s impossible this morning to tell the sky and mountains apart. The clouds perfectly imitate the hazy crest of the Sierra Nevada so that everything is confused. Were they pioneers worried about getting to the cordillera before nightfall, Carmen muses, they would find it hard to estimate the remaining distance to the foothills. She has always tended instinctively to see her country’s geography through the eyes of the first ones to have crossed it, whether on foot or horseback, in heroic circumstances.
Beside her, Marcus is snoozing, as he does each time he sits down in the passenger seat. When a bluish snoring fills the car, Carmen turns down the piano filtering out through the speakers. Her companion’s purring guides her through the hairpin turns that lead to Yosemite Park.
Since they first met at the columbarium, they have frequently gotten together. If she had to explain this new friendship to someone, she wouldn’t know how. As luck would have it, she is enough of a loner to be spared that task. Marcus invites her to the restaurant, she suggests outdoor expeditions, they stop for lunch in cafés so out of the way that no chain has managed yet to hang its logo on them. With Marcus, everything seems to belong to another world, another period, where the wheels turn more slowly, the floors creak, and the dust settles in swirls that the cleverest folks decipher the way others read tea leaves. His hands tremble constantly and behind the thick, foggy lenses of his glasses he seems to scan the landscape as though looking for the key to it, the vanishing point.
Though generally reserved, Carmen turns into a bona fide motormouth in Marcus’s company. First she holds forth on neutral topics: the importance of fire for the reproduction of sequoias, gardening in a Mediterranean environment, the training of marathon runners, the life of John Muir, in whose honour the trail running along the crest of the mountain range was named. But soon she finds herself baring her soul to him as she has rarely done, even with her lovers. Only Simon knows as much about her, because he alone has witnessed everything.
And so she confides to her new friend the truth about her ill-fated love affairs, and the story of the other Marcus, Marcus Wilson, the father that Frannie concocted for them. She relates Frannie’s death, the discovery of her birth mother’s identity, Pablo Neruda, and Simon’s silence, since he apparently decided he is no longer her brother. Like a hollow tree trunk into which one’s secrets are whispered, Marcus gently receives these confidences. He, on the other hand, is not forthcoming with the details of his own life. Nevertheless, Carmen manages to establish a timeline, one that was shattered at its midpoint. From the bits of information provided by Marcus she has gathered that he lost his wife and two children in a brutal accident. His career in computer engineering nosedived in the aftermath and never entirely recovered. Marcus then went from job to job, drained and worn out, under the orders of contractors who would meet him on the roadside with a handful of labourers, hence his smattering of Spanish. That is why he can make sense of Neruda’s poems, which he reads aloud with a tolerable accent. No one has ever recited poems to Carmen. The old-fashioned romanticism of the gesture is not lost on her. Nothing, however, in the old man’s behaviour suggests anything beyond innocent affection, beyond the joy of still being able, at the age of despair, to find a soul mate.