The certainties, p.5
The Certainties, page 5
At the makeshift bar at the back of the hall, Pia finds the builder. He’s wearing a collared shirt and dress pants, shiny black shoes that remind her of the ones her father would wear to business meetings. ‘Red or white?’ he asks.
Sometimes, when she drinks wine, Pia thinks she can taste the country it came from. Tonight, her glass of red is earth and ripe fruit with a hint of green grass. It reminds her of the village where she grew up—the grape pickers coming at dusk off the terraced hills. She glances at the builder, sees that he looks preoccupied. When she asks what’s going on, he tells Pia that he had to go to the mainland to help with his daughters, that his ex-wife has decided to move back to the island so she doesn’t have to manage things alone. Then he adds that the fishing boat from the south harbour still hasn’t come in. The last radio contact was hours ago. He turns toward the front of the hall and takes a swig of his drink, his brow furrowed.
A song Pia doesn’t recognize comes on and a cheer erupts amongst the wedding party. Pia and the builder move toward the front of the hall to watch the bride spinning circles under the lanterns, her satin skirt billowing and the lantern’s squares of light falling all around her, and around Pia, too—across her arms, the moon of her scar, her hands.
Suddenly Pia is by the fountain in the plaza again, looking over at the man her mother is speaking to. He’s wearing the dark trousers and light blue shirt of a middle-class man, his sleeves rolled up, sunglasses peeking out of his shirt pocket. She sees him as she always does, even as another part of her is searching for a detail she’s overlooked all these years: the man waving her mother over, and her mother sitting Pia down by the cascading water—Stay here. Then the man and her mother move away—and when they are almost the size of cutout dolls, the man grabs her mother by the arm. Her mother leaves the plaza with this man, heading toward a row of parked cars. She doesn’t look back at Pia, not even once.
This is her mother’s first disappearance.
BY NINE O’CLOCK the rain is coming down so hard that the roof of the village hall starts to leak. The crowd thins, and those who stay dance around buckets. At ten the barman says, ‘They’re worried about the roads.’ The groom’s family, who live on the north end of the island, gather their coats and head toward the door. They don’t want to be stranded if the road washes out. Everyone else makes for the hotel—the groomsmen holding jackets over bridesmaids’ heads. At the hotel, the groom lifts the bride, mud lacing the hem of her gown, over the threshold.
In the bar, the quartet is playing up-tempo jazz—a tune Pia can almost remember. She thinks of a club she and one of her girlfriends would go to—in the basement of a rundown building in one of the poorer parts of her abuela’s city. There was no sign above the door, the windows were always closed…but every night there was music and everyone, even locals at the end of long days of labour, danced until four in the morning.
The barman tops up Pia’s glass of wine, ignoring the builder. This is because there’s a rule about leaving the island and coming back, some sort of penance to be paid that Pia has yet to understand. As well, the builder had married a local and moved her to the mainland, and it seems that many of the islanders hadn’t forgiven him for the failure of his marriage, or for leaving his wife and daughters in the large house they’d bought in the city and coming back here alone.
One morning, shortly after she and the builder started sleeping together, Pia had bumped into his ex-wife. This was outside the builder’s cottage as Pia was on her way for a morning run.
‘So you’re the cook?’ the ex-wife asked. She had a large box in her arms, and she held it carefully as if whatever was inside was breakable. ‘I just think you should know,’ she said, and this was followed by a long string of he this, and he that…the box weighing in her arms as the two of them stood in the early light, the girls in a nearby car with the windows up, staring forward. His ex finally saying ‘you know, when there are children involved,’ and Pia saying nothing because their worlds were, at that moment, so far apart—these notions of possession, of ownership, want. ‘If he’d stayed in medicine things would’ve been different…’ She’d said this and then stopped talking, seeing a flicker of surprise cross Pia’s face. ‘He’s a doctor. Didn’t he tell you? Left a year after his clinical training.’
The builder leans against the bar talking to one of the local fishermen. In the weeks since he and Pia were last together, he’s had a haircut, and the flints of grey at his temples stand out. When he senses Pia’s gaze, he reaches out and places his hand on her back, his palm warm through the fabric of her dress. The builder isn’t aware that Pia knows he was a doctor. It’s none of my business, she’d thought. Though once or twice, when he was touching her body, she wondered about it. Did he think as much about the workings under her skin as he did about the feel of her skin beneath his fingertips? The builder takes a long drink from his glass and sets it back down on the bar. ‘Shall we?’ he asks. And because she can see in his face how easy it is to fall into something out of laziness or habit she thinks no, not yet…and she closes her eyes and lets the quartet’s brassy sound become a hot afternoon on a busy street in her home country as she tries to find a spot of shade.
The widow’s son walks into the bar just before last call. He has a red welt on his cheek that will be a bruise by morning. He drapes his arms over the oak counter in a show of exhaustion and orders a drink. ‘I’m famished,’ he says. ‘Don’t suppose there’s some leftovers in the kitchen?’ A handful of islanders gather around him, and he tells them that he’s come right off the boat, though—of course—he did check in on his mother, let her know he was okay.
The barman drops a pint of beer in front of him. The widow’s son takes a long swig, then continues. The trawler ran into trouble in the swells just as they were turning back to port. They lost one engine, and then the radio went out. ‘Then we saw a flare. Way off in the distance. We went after it for maybe an hour but had to turn back.’
One of the kitchen staff sets a fish pie down in front of the man, and he picks up his fork, holds it over the pie for a few seconds as if he’s forgotten how to eat. Then he looks the barman steadily in the eyes and says, ‘Honestly? I’ve been at it, what? Fifteen years? That sea was the worst I’ve seen.’
The bar starts to empty just before midnight. One of the locals who’d left earlier returns in a heavy slicker to say that the road south has started to flood and might only be passable for another half-hour. The bride and groom, who’d been holding court at a back table, make a round of the room. They say good night to everyone before heading tipsily up to their suite. The quartet keeps playing, and the barman pours Pia a last glass of wine.
Pia rests in the lazy feeling she has now: of having done a good day’s work, of being unwound by the wine, of the ease of having the builder beside her with his hand on her thigh. Sometimes it surprises her that she can feel so good and grounded yet still be comfortable with the idea of being transitory. In two months’ time she could be anywhere in the world—in a city she’s never been to, in a kitchen she can’t imagine, in bed with someone she can’t conjure at all. For a second Pia thinks, smugly, that it’s because she’s willing to run toward things, that what she’s been through has made her brave. But then she thinks of her mother—of the last time she saw her—and as the quartet finishes its set and the last of the hotel guests applaud, her confidence in her bravery wanes.
When Pia was ten, her mother told her that every feeling you ever have lives on inside you long after you feel it. Like cracks in your bones. She said this as they stood on the street outside of Pia’s new school in the city. A boy had shoved Pia for trying to play with his football, and she’d fallen, scraping herself on the paving stones. Pia held her arm up while her mother inspected the injury. A teacher had wiped it clean hours before, and Pia remembers wishing there had been more of a mark—a larger gash, fresh blood—something beyond the red welt and small cut she presented to her mother as proof.
‘All of this feeling,’ her mother had said, drawing a circle around Pia with her finger, ‘all these feelings, they stay. So choose how you want to feel…Are you sad or are you angry?’ She was using her professional voice—the one Pia knew from the radio. Pia studied her mother’s expression to see which would be better: sad or angry. After a minute her mother grew impatient. ‘Tell me the boy’s name,’ she said. At ten, Pia hadn’t understood that she had a choice, that she could handle this herself, swallow it down. Or, she could give over her power. And so she had told her mother the boy’s name.
Pia never knew what, if any, repercussions occurred because of this. It was as if a curtain had been drawn, and she was protected from the dealings on the far side of it. But, too, it was as if she had exiled herself—made herself superfluous, precious, in a way she knew her mother disliked. And the boy? He never spoke to Pia again. And so Pia studied his careful avoidance, that distant orbit he maintained when the bell clanged and children were let loose into the sunlit schoolyard. This was an orbit she learned to replicate with friends and lovers—and it served her well every time she told herself to pick up and start over again.
THE BUILDER BEGINS TO UNDRESS as he enters Pia’s room. It’s the smallest room in the hotel—under the peaked roof on the uppermost floor, the ceiling slanting from its highest point just left of the entry to its lowest point above her bed. Some nights the builder forgets where he is, and he sits up in the dark and smacks his head, saying ‘Ouff.’ The walls are lilac and the windows are hung with heavy curtains that block the morning light. Right now, though, the windows are dark and pummelled by rain, a rhythm Pia finds soothing.
Pia watches the builder’s reflection in the wardrobe mirror, his fingers undoing his shirt buttons. His hands interest her: how careful their movements are, how clean he keeps them—for someone who spends so much time with hammers, nails, stone and wood.
Pia thinks about the things doctors see that most of us don’t. When she looks at the builder’s hands pushing his trousers down to his ankles, she wonders why he hasn’t told her more about himself. Pia doesn’t know much about the medical world. Her abuela was a woman of concoctions—grey pastes for burns and milky teas for colds or chest infections, a cure-all bitter soup that tasted of nettle. But once, when Pia was fourteen, her mother was hospitalized. The call came suddenly and so Pia’s abuela took Pia to the hospital rather than leave her alone in the house. Everything there was white and brightly lit and people were either moving very quickly or as if through brume. Pia and her abuela entered the room a nurse had indicated. Pia’s mother was sitting up in bed with her hair brushed down around her shoulders, bruises on her wrists, her eyes dark as river stones.
‘What?’ the builder asks.
Pia realizes she’s been staring at him, at his hands. And because he asks, she tells him: ‘I’m just thinking about your life as a doctor.’
He steps out his trousers, stands there. ‘Who told you? Not that it matters.’
‘Your ex, the day I ran into her outside your cottage.’
She feels the moment between them like a knife—a knife held above an animal bone you’re about to sever, over flesh you’re about to slice.
The builder says nothing, as if he’s weighing what to say. Then he gives up, and moves toward Pia. And she thinks: the body is also a way of saying. Just as he cups her chin in his hand, bends down to her, the lamps in her room flicker: once, twice, before fully going out.
Pia hears the builder thump his knee in the dark. ‘Do you have candles?’ he asks.
‘In the top drawer of the dresser.’
The builder rummages around in the drawer. After a minute he strikes a match and uses the flare to locate a candle and light the wick. He finds a second candle, lights that, drips some wax into a glass seashell intended for a guest’s jewellery, and then he presses the two candles into that waxy base. He pulls his trousers on, opens the door to the hallway, and sticks his head out. All the lights in the hotel are off.
By the time Pia and the builder get dressed and wander downstairs, some of the guests have already gathered. The night clerk has set tea lights from the dining room along the mantel in the lounge, and arranged some candles on the round wood table. The bride and groom are on the sofa, groggy with sleep, the bride bundled up in a blanket. The bass player and pianist sit in the wingback chairs and one of the groomsmen perches on the stone ledge, poking a coal fire to get it going again. The room and everyone in it are dun-lit—like the seventeenth-century paintings Pia once saw in a museum.
‘What time is it?’ Pia asks.
‘Just past two,’ the night clerk says. She apologizes as if she is somehow to blame, saying that storms are a common occurrence on this part of the island but the generator usually kicks in. When she stops with her reassurances, there is silence and Pia is suddenly aware of the wind: how hard it batters the building and how loud, so that it’s almost impossible to hear the rain.
THE BARMAN, WHO SOMETIMES stays overnight on a bunk in the office, and the builder gather up some tools and put on slickers and head out to the back patio to take a look at the generator. Pia picks up a candle and heads to the kitchen. There are a few things in the refrigerator that won’t last without power and she’s the only one from the hotel restaurant staff with room and board. She takes ice from the freezer and lays it over the fish, the eggs and the dairy—because people will still want breakfast. Then she stands in the kitchen trying to think of what else she needs to do, listening to the wind rattling the windowpane above the sink.
Pia is holding her candle up to the pantry when a draught of air blows out the flame. In the dark the smell of garlic, onions and root vegetables flares alongside a tang of smoke that must come from one of the cured meats. And suddenly Pia is in two places at once: standing in the middle of this kitchen in a storm on the island; and in the house in the village by the sea, a six-year-old whose mother wakes her in darkness, saying ‘Vamos, nena’—pulling her arm so hard that Pia is yanked out of bed. Then she and her mother race down the stairs and through the dining room and kitchen. Before Pia can even ask what’s happening she is thrust into the closet where the house’s former inhabitants had kept potatoes and onions, and where Pia’s mother now stores coats and shoes and her husband’s rifle. Her mother closes the door, whispers, ‘Por favor, por favor, cállate,’ and cocks the rifle.
In the silence of that closet, Pia leans against her mother. She listens to the noises in the house: men entering, their unfamiliar voices, footsteps. She reaches down and picks up one of her father’s shoes. And when the footsteps come closer, and the voices of men casually talking pass by the hiding place, she tries not to cry and so sucks on the toe of the shoe. Outside, the sideboard or the china cabinet is knocked over: a thump and a crash of glass. ‘Una bonica foto,’ one of the men says, and then some flying object hits the wall and the voices are laughing again. Pia stays perfectly still, wishing her father home from business, wishing herself still asleep in her bed. She thinks then about the asp her father once showed her in the grassy foothills above the village, and how she was afraid and wanted him to kill it, but how he said, No, we’ll leave it, this snake is only sleeping.
The generator kicks in and illuminates the kitchen at half-lustre: the clean prep station, the glistening appliances. Pia takes a deep breath, then picks through the pantry for something to offer the guests. She returns to the lounge to find a dozen people gathered around the low table—sitting on the floor, sprawled on the sofa and the overstuffed chairs. In the muted light of the sitting room she can hardly see the guests’ faces, but their hushed conversations are calm. The bride is nestled under the crook of her husband’s arm; the pianist sits sideways on the wingback with his long legs dangling over its padded upholstery. Pia lays out some bread, cheese and fruit, then goes to the bar and comes back with two bottles of wine. The hotel owner is on the mainland, but she knows he would approve—a wedding night, the windows rattling.
The talk, as the guests eat and drink, is easy. Everyone has a story about an encounter with the natural world that has affected their sense of safety: a river flooding its banks, an ice storm, a small earthquake in a foreign city where the groom and his friend held onto a lamppost while the city shimmered.
Hearing the groom’s story makes Pia think about one of the recordings she has of her mother’s radio broadcasts. In it, she is covering a major earthquake. Her mother’s voice, in English, dispatched to an audience halfway around the world: ‘The houses are gone…the roof of the school has collapsed…’ Thanks to the recordings her abuela made, Pia has maybe two or three hours of her mother’s voice from those years. There are also other recordings Pia found amongst what was left after her mother was killed, including one made from a safe house where her mother was meeting a group of workers and students organizing a strike, her voice on the tape saying, ‘We are moving inside now but it’s too dark to see…’
The conversations around the table have become quieter and more private—people speaking to those closest to them. The bride has fallen asleep on the sofa and the groom, still awake, gently strokes her hair. The groomsman laughs at something the trumpet player says, his face lit with pleasure. The builder, the barman and the hotel clerk have been in the back office for some time now. Through the open door Pia can hear the chatter on the shortwave radio, reports of a distress call.
Pia brings more tea lights in from the restaurant, and opens a third bottle of wine. The barman had come in a while ago to switch off some lights, saying it was unclear how long the storm would last and that they needed to conserve the back-up generator’s fuel. But none of the guests in the lounge—the musicians, the bridesmaid with the rope of auburn hair who’s flirting with the bass player—seem to want to be up in their rooms listening to the wind and rain when there’s the distraction of company.
