Monastery Page 7

  Roldán took out his cell phone and dialed a number. He asked for a tow truck. Don’t worry, he told me. It’s a friend, he said, who can quickly change your battery here in Melchor de Mencos, on the other side of the bridge, and you can continue on your way to Belize.

  I felt something in my knees. Maybe impotence. Maybe a devastating solitude. Maybe the panic of being drawn, further and further, into a grand spiderweb of swindlers.

  Roldán stood smoking beside me until his friend arrived with the tow truck and then he negotiated a price with him and warned him to treat me well. I thanked him. I offered him a few bills, which he stubbornly refused. I said, perhaps out of fear at finding myself alone and stranded in the middle of the Petén jungle, that he should let me buy him a beer in town. I’ve got to be going too, he said, shaking his head.

  I climbed into the passenger seat of the tow truck. It smelled of sweat, of grease, of rancid fish, of burned-out brakes. From the rearview mirror hung a pink plastic crucifix, a laminated postcard of a blonde with her tits out, and two furry dice, one white and the other black. I read the writing on the windshield, along the top in big gold letters: CHRIST IS MY NORTH. Don’t even think about going on to Belize tonight, Roldán said, holding my door. Better to stay in town, have a tasty dinner, get a good night’s sleep, and leave nice and early tomorrow morning, in no rush. I felt that same something in my knees again. We’ll see, I said. I closed the door. Seriously, he shouted over the tow truck’s hefty engine. It can be dangerous, out at night.

  IT DIDN’T LOOK LIKE a mechanic’s workshop. There was no sign anywhere. The place was nothing more than a small lot with an earthen floor, enclosed by three adobe walls and a big gray metal gate that opened out onto the road. There were tools lying around and piled up all over. Parked in one corner was a Mercedes-Benz from the seventies, possibly white, all rickety and rusty. Next to it, a little boy age two or three was sitting on the floor, completely naked. He was playing with a handful of pegs and nuts. The guy with the tow truck was also the owner and the only mechanic there. He was named Nicasio. After hooking the battery up to an old machine, he confirmed that it was indeed unusable now. He told me he could get ahold of a new one, a luxury one, imported, at a very good price. That I should pay him half up front and leave the keys to the car with him. That I should give him a few hours, that there was a diner on the corner where I could wait, have something to drink, and he’d come and get me when he’d finished the work. I looked at my watch. It was already five in the afternoon. Then I looked at the car: open, weary, its innards exposed. I took my backpack out of the trunk and headed for the gate. The naked boy watched me, sprawled out in a puddle of mud.

  I WALKED TO A LITTLE PARK at a fork in the road. There was no one there. There was no breeze, no shade, no respite. At the entrance, badly painted on a dirty white archway, a sign welcomed me to the town. I took my last cigarette out of the pack and sat down to smoke on a bench that was still a bit wet. Almost immediately, a young man approached carrying bags full of nuts and an old set of bronze scales. Anything for you, señor? I’ve got peanuts, he said. I’ve got fava beans, cashews, macadamias, salted almonds. I bought a couple ounces of cashews. After weighing them and taking my money, he sat down beside me. I asked him about the origin of the town’s name, Melchor de Mencos. They say that it was the name of a general who defeated the British, he said, centuries back. But who knows if that’s true, he said. He looked up at the highway, as though searching for someone, or as though someone were searching for him. I also looked out toward the highway. I saw a man with dark brown skin, taking small steps forward, as though dancing forward. Then I saw a truck carrying a scraggy white cow on its flatbed. Then I saw three kids on a single bicycle. And you’re just passing through? the young man asked me. Something like that, I said. I finished my cigarette in silence.

  I WALKED PAST A GIRL who was slobbering red and chasing after a group of chicks. Her white dress looked like it was already stained red. Her loose white stockings also looked like they were already stained red. Her headband and her black patent-leather shoes lay forgotten behind her by the open door of an evangelical church, through which came the chanting of the parishioners and the preacher. The girl was holding half a pomegranate in her dark hands. Suddenly, she brought the half pomegranate to her mouth and took a big bite and started to fire little red pellets at the chicks.

  I WALKED PAST A MAN leaning up against the trunk of an almond tree. He was sitting on the grass, his legs stretched out. He was, I assumed, taking advantage of the tree’s shade. He was wearing black pants and a white shirt with a black tie. He had a newspaper on his lap. As I came closer, I saw that he had a green circle on each temple. They were two slices of lime, held there with a shoelace tied around his head. Little drops trickled all down his face, perhaps of lime juice or sweat or both. Come here gringo and let me suck it, I thought I heard him whisper behind me as I hurried away from the almond tree. But when I looked back, the man seemed to be fast asleep.

  I WENT INTO A LITTLE STORE on the town’s bustling main road. An elderly man was leaning on the counter, barely upright, barely holding an almost empty bottle of Quetzalteca Especial aguardiente. Can I help you? said a squat lady from the other side of the grille. I walked over. I greeted her, seeing through the grille that she sold only domestic cigarettes. I asked for a pack of Rubios. The elderly man muttered something. The lady passed the pack to me through the grille, and then I passed her a few bills. The elderly man came toward me a bit and muttered something again, holding out his hand. He smelled of urine. Don’t bother the gentleman, the lady scolded him. And you just ignore him, she said to me, handing me back a few coins through the grille, which I immediately wanted to give the elderly man. But his old hand couldn’t hold them and the coins fell to the floor. I crouched down to retrieve them. When I stood back up, right there beside me was the mustached officer from immigration: still serious, still in his green khaki uniform, still with his reading glasses hanging around his neck, but now in the company of a man in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and with huge shades and a toothpick between his teeth and a black pistol well tucked into his waistband. I wiped my forehead with the sleeve of my shirt. I took off, almost at a run, into the gloom of the main road.

  AN ENORMOUS RED MACAW was perched on a broomstick at the back of the diner. From time to time, it scratched at its chest with its beak or let out a cry or a sharp screech. Its red feathers looked dull and sad. On each of the four tables, on a floral plastic tablecloth, was a bottle with an atomizer. In case, the girl said as she seated me. It’s just that the bird’s a little crazy, she said, looking at the enormous macaw. Sometimes it just attacks people, she explained. But a spray of water will scare it off.

  I opened the new pack of Rubios and lit one and immediately started to feel better, to breathe easily again. From the kitchen, behind a bead curtain, I could hear the murmuring of women’s voices, laughing, groaning, a merengue on the radio, the clinking of plates and glasses. A couple of white lightbulbs hung from the ceiling. The macaw looked sleepily at me from its perch.

  The same girl came out through the bead curtain carrying a tray. She walked over to me. I noticed that she was barefoot. I noticed that she now had a baby tied to her back (or did she before and I hadn’t seen it?) with a long blue sash. The baby was sleeping. Here you are, she said, and placed on the table an ashtray, a bottle of Gallo beer, a small glass. I thanked her. You’re welcome, she said. You don’t want to eat anything? she asked me, almost embarrassed, and I said not now, but thanks, maybe later. A stray dog tried to come into the diner, but she scared it away with a clap. Then she just stood where she was, holding the tray flat against her ample breasts, perhaps waiting for something. I asked her why it was called the Fallabón Diner. That’s what they call this neighborhood, she said. Years ago, she told me, Fallabón used to be its own village, right here, but now it’s a part of Melchor de Mencos. (I learned later that the name of the village, Fallabón, comes from a fir
e and explosion that had taken place near there, in a timber warehouse, in 1950; it’s an Anglicism, from the English words fire and boom.) The baby whined and the girl reached back and stroked its cheek with a finger. So is that your car, in Don Nica’s workshop? It is, I said, reluctant to explain to her that it wasn’t really my car, but a friend’s. She clicked her tongue, as if to say good luck, or as if to say what a shame. I asked her if she could recommend a hotel, since maybe I’d have to spend the night, and she thought a moment and then told me that La Cabaña Hotel was good, that it was close by, on the main road. There’s even a pool, she said. La Cabaña Hotel, I repeated, so as not to forget, and wiping the sweat from my forehead with a paper napkin, I thought I saw something small and dark climbing the back wall. Perhaps a spider. Perhaps a horsefly. Perhaps a scorpion. And is that yours, the macaw? I asked the girl. She smiled. It’s just part of this place, she said, but I didn’t understand whether that meant the restaurant or the neighborhood or the whole town. Does it have a name? Sure, she said. Gómez, she said. The macaw screamed something, maybe because it had heard its name and wanted to join in the conversation. I stubbed my cigarette out in the ashtray. So he’s male? I asked the girl and she just gave a laugh and shrugged and said probably, nobody really knows. I saw that the floor tiles under the macaw were covered in gray-and-white droppings. Excuse me, whispered the girl, and went back into the kitchen.

  I poured myself a swig of beer with plenty of foam. The beer was warm but it went down well. I poured myself another swig. I lit a cigarette and took a deep breath. I moved the bottle of water closer, just in case the macaw decided to flap down off the broomstick. I opened my backpack and was about to take out a book to read for a bit, when I felt the presence of somebody standing behind me.

  You, kid, bring us two beers, yelled the immigration officer.

  THEY EACH ACKNOWLEDGED ME STERNLY, with just a glance, and positioned themselves at a table in front of me. The girl came out through the bead curtain. She carried a bottle of beer in each hand. The baby was still sleeping, tied to her back. Here you are, Don Francisco, she said. The officer muttered something, perhaps thanking her. He had taken a red handkerchief out of the pocket of his green khaki uniform. He finished wiping the sweat from his neck and his face. Then he took a long sip of beer and wiped his lips and his grayish mustache with the red handkerchief. The other man reached out and grabbed the girl’s forearm hard and pulled her over toward him until she was sitting on his lap. Do you have pork carnitas? he asked her in a lecherous whisper, his long-nailed hand holding her neck, like a hook. His voice sounded too feminine to me. We do, she said, never looking up from the floor. The baby on her back stirred, whined. And do you have cracklings? Them too, she said, her voice muted, her gaze still fixed on the floor. Well then, go bring us one portion of carnitas and another of cracklings, he said, and gave her a shove toward the kitchen. She tottered a little. Right away, she said, recovering her balance. The man took off his shades and his cowboy hat and took out the black pistol and put them all down on the table. Still chewing on the toothpick, he raised his right hand as though swearing an oath before a judge. And if that fucking bird comes anywhere near me, he said, I swear to God I’ll put a couple of bullets in him.

  Both men laughed loudly, almost cackling, perhaps looking at me. The girl slipped away quickly, head down, the baby swaying on her back.

  I wanted to smoke. I noticed the cigarette I was holding in my fingers was shaking slightly. I couldn’t stop looking at that dirty hand in the air, and as I looked at it, I suddenly thought of the heart attack my Polish grandfather had suffered at the end of the seventies. I was very young at the time, but I can still remember my mother’s uncontrollable weeping when she got the call from the hospital. My grandfather had been lucky. It was only a minor attack. He recovered quickly. And as a result, following the three instructions he received from his doctor, he quit smoking, started drinking a couple of ounces of whiskey daily (for his nerves, he used to say), and got into the habit of walking. He walked a lot, every morning, for exercise. He would leave the house very early and walk around his neighborhood. Sometimes for up to two hours. Sometimes I’d go with him. And during one of those walks, while he was alone at the end of the Avenue of the Americas, right by the statue of Pope John Paul II, a motorcycle with two guys on it stopped beside him. They knocked him to the ground, he told us later, outraged. They gave him a blow to the head, he said, showing us where. They wanted to kidnap him, he said, perhaps now exaggerating what had been a simple robbery. They took everything he had on him, he said, now indignant, or almost everything, now proud. He managed to keep the ring with the black stone that he wore on his right pinkie finger. Sometimes he told us he had pleaded with them till they let him keep his ring. Sometimes he told us he had struggled with them to keep his ring. Sometimes he told us he had fought with them to keep his ring. Which version he told depended on the passing of the years, or on his nostalgia, or on his mood, or on the character of the person who was asking him (my grandfather understood, maybe at an intuitive level, that a story grows, changes its skin, does acrobatics on the tightrope of time; he understood that a story is really many stories). He had bought that ring in 1945, he liked to tell us, in New York, the first stop on his journey to Guatemala after being freed from Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In New York, at a Jewish jeweler’s in Harlem, he had paid forty dollars for it. And he had worn it for the rest of his life, for the next sixty years, on his right pinkie finger, as a way of mourning for his parents and siblings and friends and all the others exterminated by the Nazis in the ghettos and concentration camps. A few years back, when my grandfather died, that ring was left to one of my mother’s brothers, who wept when he inherited it and decided to keep it in the safe in his office. It was just an old black stone in an old gold setting. But one night, someone broke into that office and managed to open the safe and stole everything inside, including my grandfather’s ring with the black stone.

  And there before me, on the pinkie finger of that dirty hand now holding a tortilla filled with pork and cracklings, was a ring very much like my grandfather’s ring. Or perhaps it was exactly the same as my grandfather’s ring. Perhaps it was exactly the same black stone, and exactly the same setting in gold metal, and it was exactly the same shape and size. Or at least it was all exactly like the ring in my memory, the ring as I recalled it or as I wanted to recall it, on my grandfather’s pale and slightly crooked right pinkie finger. And although I knew it was impossible, even preposterous, even absurd, I couldn’t help imagining that this ring, on this greasy hand, was indeed my grandfather’s ring with the black stone. Not a similar one. Not an exact replica. But the same one. The one my grandfather had bought in New York, in Harlem, in 1945. The one he had worn for the rest of his life on his right pinkie finger. The one he had managed to save after convincing or compelling—at the end of the Avenue of the Americas, at the end of the seventies—some muggers or maybe kidnappers. The one that, when he died, was inherited by one of my mother’s brothers. The one that had been stolen from a safe one night by a thief who never knew what he was stealing; by a thief who never knew that in that insignificant and somber black stone, one could still see the perfect reflections of my grandfather’s exterminated parents (Samuel and Masha), and the faces of my grandfather’s exterminated sisters (Ula and Rushka), and the face of my grandfather’s exterminated brother (Zalman), and the faces of so many exterminated men and women and boys and girls and babies who were killed as they slept in the arms of their mothers, as they dreamed in the gas chambers; by a thief who never knew that in that small black stone it was still possible to hear the murmur of all these voices, of so many voices, intoning in chorus the prayer for the dead.

  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 a
lmost 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.