The catch trap, p.1
Planet Earth, page 1
PLANET
EARTH
STORIES
Nicholas
Ruddock
Copyright © 2025 Nicholas Ruddock
Published in Canada in 2025 and the USA in 2025 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
houseofanansi.com
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Planet Earth : stories / Nicholas Ruddock.
Names: Ruddock, Nicholas, author
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20250172461 | Canadiana (ebook) 20250172488 |
ISBN 9781487013561 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487013578 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.
Classification: LCC PS8635.U34 P53 2025 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
Cover image: Landfire by Cheryl Ruddock
Interior design and typesetting: Lucia Kim
Ebook developed by Nicole Lambe
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House of Anansi Press is grateful for the privilege to work on and create from the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee, as well as the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.
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We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts,
the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.
Cheryl, the cover painting, the flames
WOLVERINE
There are cobras in Peru. They’re in the long grass by the river or in dried-out arroyos. They sway to their own rhythm, to the rhythm of the wind, to the slow quotidian rotation of the earth. They hug the dampness of loam, the chalk-dry dust. They regurgitate the bones of mice and feral dogs. Born in deep holes in the ground, they are several centimetres long at birth and have hundreds of brothers and sisters fighting for space, writhing together in seething balls, clustered. Most inevitably die, but one or two survive and leave the nest and thereafter live on their own. They are quick and merciless and, we assume—by measuring the size of their brains—that they react instinctively. That’s anthropomorphism, however; perhaps they calculate every move at a speed beyond our own abilities or reasoning.
Why do I tell you this? Because of Mario Vargas Llosa.
I was born in Peru, as he was, twenty years before me. So we share a birthplace, and, of course, that singular locale bestows a similarity to our early years. But ultimately it is the divergence in our lives that commands attention. Well, it commands my attention, not his. He is world-famous as a writer, and I am not. He entered politics and rubbed shoulders with dictators, I did not. He won the Nobel Prize, I did not. Should I go on? He etcetera and I etcetera, our lives so different, more so as the years advanced. But we forged a bond once, on the night he struck Gabriel García Márquez in the face with his intemperate fist, and since then we have had a connection, of which he is unaware. No blame can be laid at his feet for what happened much later, in Toronto, Canada. He wasn’t there, but a famous man can become, unwittingly, a mentor to violence.
I shall explain. At the age of seventeen, having led a normal youthful life, I was accepted to the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, in Lima. There I met and became enchanted with a dark-haired girl named Estella. At that time, she accentuated her equally dark eyes with half-moons of kohl, and she was a fledgling member of the Communist Party. Her father, a banker, and her mother, a dressmaker, were not enthused with her politics or with me, her new boyfriend. They were distantly polite, that’s all. But at my house, things were different. My parents were shocked and frightened and said directly to us, “What can you be thinking of, Eduardo? And you, Estella? By now the secret police will have your name, Estella, and therefore Eduardo’s by association, and it is our money, earned by what you would call bourgeois labour, saved over the years in the safe banks of capitalism, that have allowed you to waste your time in cafés, both of you. Also to skip classes and to foment class warfare.”
Estella and I stood together, holding hands, trying not to respond in an inflammatory way.
“Eduardo,” they continued, “you say you are in love with this girl, against whom we have nothing but whose parents must feel the way we do—betrayed. Look about you, both of you! You do this from the comfort of our large home in a neighbourhood of affluence from a bedroom with lace curtains and high ceilings, in which, by the way, you seem to have no concept of physical restraint.”
When Estella was not present, my mother and father continued to harangue me, at our table, over roast pork or beef or fish from the sea, saying the two of us would inevitably be targeted and punished by the state, that Estella was bent on self-destruction, that she would take down those in her retinue with her. They had seen it often, proud and ancient families ruined. My mother also said that she had heard, through the grapevine of mothers and grandmothers, that Estella Sepulveda had many lovers, taking them indiscriminately. I should be wary of transmitted disease, she said. I shuddered at the thought but knew it was not true. In many ways, in her intimacies, Estella was shyer than I, more innocent.
Our parents took action. They joined forces at the end of the school year and, for the summer, she was banished to Paraguay, I to Mexico. Before we left, we met briefly at a café by the seawall to say goodbye. Pigeons ate disconsolate crumbs and gulls stalled overhead. Poets in chairs tilted forward, their hair slicked back, their faces chiselled. Anorexic were the women, bearded the men.
“We are to be exiled like Trotsky,” she said.
“I’m the one who has to go to Mexico, therefore I am Trotsky, not you.”
She looked at me with those sad, dark eyes.
“Trotsky was killed in Mexico with an axe. By an assassin. He was targeted. The same could never happen to us,” she said.
I laughed. I knew nothing about the world of intrigue, assassination. My life was not in danger, and those facts, how Trotsky died, by axe, the details, were news to me. “Estella! I am too supple to receive blows from an axe! Too quick! Look at me, for two months I shall work in my cousin’s cinema, then we shall be reunited.”
“We are being torn from our native roots.”
“Do you think this café is under surveillance, Estella? My parents say it is.”
She looked about, her eyes moving from the street to the waiters, the customers, then to me.
“Of course,” she said.
Estella, the café, the sea, the birds, the secret police. Our life was thrilling. But we were also children of our parents, and obedient, so our summer separation would become a fact.
“We should not write,” she said, “our letters will be opened. I am unable to prevaricate or dissemble. It does not matter, our love is inviolable.”
We leaned across the table and kissed in full view of the spies, who were no doubt inwardly writhing in jealousy.
In Mexico City, I was given a room in the house of our cousins, on the second floor. My window overlooked extensive gardens. There was perfume in the early morning from flowers I could not name. A slow breeze shifted through the curtains, soft and pliant. I did not notice the notorious smog of the city until I was out in the street, mornings, walking to the bus stop. Then my throat would go dry as it never had in Lima, where fog smoothed the edges of rush hour, where the traffic lights blurred like watercolours, as though they were subaquatic, in yellow, green, and red.
I thought of her, the way she looked up from her books, her manifestos, her pamphlets, and even more so the way she threw her clothes to the floor saying, “Now our bodies are in service to the state.”
“What do you mean by that?” I had asked.
“Eduardo, this is how the proletariat is formed.” Then she laughed, which in my heart made me wonder, as I touched her, if I should question her sincerity. For in private, I admit, I questioned my own. Society had been under siege for so long, yet nothing seemed to change.
Those mornings in Mexico, I alighted from the number 52 bus between 8:58 and 9:02. I passed a kiosk, an apothecary, a bakery, and then I opened the door to the theatre, which was situated on a busy corner. The key was large, heavily toothed, cumbersome. It required some hand-jiggling and subtlety before the tumblers gave way to the lobby, the morning hush.
“Show up, be well-groomed, take tickets. Nothing could be simpler, Eduardo my nephew. Check the washrooms, there’s a mop in the closet.”
Those were my instructions. My uniform was of simple grey material with red piping and there was a hat, fez-like without a tail, which I was shown how to wear.
“Like this, Eduardo, see? This angle? Jaunty.”
I was given a bobby pin to use in case it slipped.
“Tear tickets in half like this, when ushering please use this gesture with your arm—lik
Two gold stanchions were joined by a scalloped rope, the rope as scarlet as the lipstick of the Hollywood actresses portrayed on the posters outside, pouting, smiling fetchingly, or knowingly, or both. Every one of our tickets had five digits stamped onto it in the same deep red. Also scarlet-red were the carpets and the heavy curtains and the wallpaper, though the wallpaper was decorated with gold filaments in an abstract pattern, meaningless.
“You are an eye on the street, Eduardo, and as you can see the neighbourhood is in decline, there is random violence, but in our cinema we are left alone, as a general rule. Crime rarely touches us. We portray magic, how the world should be, even for criminals. To be forthright, they are some of our best customers.”
The outside world was a hectic arm’s length away. Inside, the reels unwound, the soundtrack rose and fell like waves of a distant sea, muffled, foreign. The voices of the actors—this I would have written to Estella had she allowed an exchange of letters—“were like syrup or castanets, smooth and desultory then staccato amidst laughter false and true,” and there was shouting and the firing of guns and a crying or crying out, most often in English, a language I did not understand.
If you had told me that I would meet Mario Vargas Llosa there, that my life would be changed, I would have laughed. How ludicrous.
But one day my cousin said, “Eduardo, my friend, economic necessity dictates that the movies we show are fluff. You can see that. We pander that we may eat. However, for the upcoming festival, I have arranged to show films only by the Swedish director Bergman. Once a year we have this opportunity to show cinema as it can be, as genius. But he can be depressing, Bergman, even as he strikes to the heart—some would say the breaking heart—of love.”
“Yes, cousin.”
For the festival, the clientele changed. Men in dark suits arrived with young women in gowns, and smooth was the silk caressing the bodies of those ladies, tempting the whimsy of thin cotton. Estella, Estella, my thoughts were of her. The scarlet rope and the gold stanchions were pressed into service for the first time, for crowd control. Cigarette smoke filled the lobby, spilling from throats and tongues and heads tossed back. Small cigars were ground down and bent into white sand, into pedestal ashtrays we had polished for the occasion. Banks of flowers appeared too, erupting from vases of coloured glass. The background music changed into something more sombre, off-key, northern.
“May I have your tickets, please,” I said again and again, “thank you.” I fancied myself, for those few days and nights, as Hermes, conductor of souls to the underworld, gatekeeper to an inner sanctum where truth, for once, stumped artifice.
Those exact words I wrote to her by hand, breaking our pact of silence. To my surprise she replied, fondly, ignoring the censors, “Eduardo, you are learning so much about inequality from decadent intellectuals, and the quality of your writing is ever so much better. I love you. Do not write again.”
Then it happened. On the second night of the festival, just before the screening of Cries and Whispers, Mario Vargas Llosa stepped into the lobby. The most famous writer in the Americas, a latecomer, unmistakably him, it could be no one else, alone. Casually, I took his ticket as though this happened to me daily, evincing no surprise. But I did say—and here I quoted from Herman Hesse—“Price of admission your mind, sir,” and he laughed and stopped in his headlong rush. We compared our Peruvian accents, our neighbourhoods in Lima. Then a reedy note from within, the expiration of a solo accordion in E minor, and Mario Vargas Llosa said, “Excuse me, but Bergman…” and he shook my hand, and in he went, and the lobby was empty.
The ticket seller from outside left her booth, smiling at the take. She was holding a thick sheaf of pesos.
“Eduardo,” she said, “soon our bosses will be even more millionaires.”
Together we stood looking into the street at the rising quarter-moon, the passing kaleidoscope of cars, buses, sirens, heat. Her shoulder touched mine, then moved away. I thought again of Estella, wondering where she was, and with whom. I declined a cigarette.
Intermission came. The second film was to start in twenty minutes, Shame, from 1967. I saw Vargas Llosa in a knot of conversation by the outer door when “Mario!” came a shout. Everyone heard it, a greeting with such pleasure yet command, and all turned to see a shorter man, moustachioed, in a white linen suit, picking his way through the crowded lobby, his arms held open for an embrace.
But no welcome came.
“You son of a bitch!” Vargas Llosa said, and he struck the still-smiling and unsuspecting newcomer with his right fist, delivered straight from the shoulder in the classic stretched-out boxer pose. A cracking sound like eggs or bone jumped out of either the fist or the face, and, quivering now with his own violence partially spent, Vargas Llosa watched his victim fall backwards to the floor.
“García Márquez!” he shouted that all could hear, “how could you do this, to me, to Patricia? Get up you blowhard egotist!”
Then, laughing at some fiction or fact that only he could understand, he drew back his polished boot and kicked the already-dazed man—flapping hands splayed out in front in useless supplication—in the ribs. Once, twice, three times.
“Hunghh-humph,” gasped the Colombian writer, for it was certainly he, also unmistakable, also apparently alone.
Vargas Llosa looked at me.
“Strike like a cobra, dear boy of Peru,” he said, “this is how it is done.”
I stepped up. It was my ground, my territory. Respectfully, I nudged Vargas Llosa to the side and knelt to the wounded. From his nose came a slow snuffling-pulsing ooze of dark blood, viscous, falling to the floor, and here the floor was tiled in a picturesque mosaic a century old. His blood dripped down upon a jungle tableau of green and yellow snakes seething in concert, also upon parrots squadroned across a muddy river, upon a jaguar’s face black with jewelled eyes, supine upon a branch. Márquez’s suit coat itself was smeared with red semi-clotted mucous, as was the collar of his open shirt, his mustache, a small pool gathering at the base of his throat.
“No more, no more,” he managed to say.
By then other theatregoers had intervened. The confrontation was over and done with. Lights in sconces flicked off and on, beckoning all to the inner theatre. By then the beaten man was back on his feet. His left eyebrow was swollen and abraded, and he held a shaky shirt cuff muffled to his nose.
“I’m okay, I’m okay.”
Smiling then as though nothing had happened, a brave face still stunned, concussed.
“Can you go back in?” I asked.
“Of course. I am here for the art of Bergman, not for this.”
I held him fast by the elbow. He was wobbling and would have fallen had I not supported him to a back row seat. By then the house lights were dropping and the word “Shame” leapt subtitled to the screen. That simple word, so apt under the circumstances, resonated with all of us. Faces of concern looked our way. Several handkerchiefs travelled hand to hand in gestures of universal sorrow. As for Vargas Llosa, he had disappeared, gone with his devils or his angels, whichever they were, gone with his intemperance, his cobra strike.
Afterwards, as I emptied the ashtrays and vacuumed the carpets and mopped up the drying blood from the tiles, what I remembered most of this extraordinary night was the power of the Peruvian writer’s anger, the spontaneity, the no-shame of it, the fierceness, the fire of his eye, the violence unleashed without restraint. Revenge was the only explanation. The patience and then the impatience, the knowledge of coiled strength, the recognition of the moment.
The rest of the summer passed quickly. Then I was back in Lima, and Estella was waiting at the airport. We kissed and went straightaway to a meeting of the Marxist League. I moved from my parents’ house, and with our summer earnings we rented a small flat near the university. Now we were free of overt criticism. We lay together in joy and fascination every night in a bed with a cool breeze that felt its way over the rooftops from the sea. It wasn’t long before she was pregnant because, Estella said, “the concept of birth control is foisted on the poor by the rich, the ruling class fear the young for their fecundity.” She wrote pamphlets on this theme and distributed them on the street. When our first child was born, poverty dictated that we leave the university. The cost of books alone was prohibitive. We had to take jobs to support our family and were proud to do so. She wrote articles for her magazines while I found work in a public library, whistling under my breath as I stocked the shelves, looking quickly at new publications, especially those for small children. I stopped my own writing endeavours, my style seemed old-fashioned. Better I should stick, I thought, to the simple honesty of labour.
