Sweet things, p.6
Sweet Things, page 6
“Why make a target of yourself?” the rental man asked.
Pedro had argued with her over the phone, the line cutting in and out. “Stay at an airport hotel. Don’t make the journey alone. It is four hours from Monterrey. Why pay for a rental car? I can come and get you in the morning.”
The thought of Pedro arriving in Galeana with an Englishwoman frightened her. The narrow streets, the shops where nothing much was sold because nothing much was purchased, the relatives crowded into a cinder-block room, the whirr and clunk of the malfunctioning air conditioner, were things she did not want to encounter. Pedro had made it out of that world. He was a telecom engineer. He traveled the world and earned good money. They’d met in Zurich. Pedro, dark, suave, the epitome of Latin elegance and refined manners, and she, the clever Oxbridge technologist who knew all the answers except the ones she was working to find. They fell in love while having drinks and conversation about 5G. They both agreed they held the future in their hands.
But the more he attempted to convince her, the more assertive she felt she had to be. After all, he was not only in love with her. Love is a reciprocal arrangement. If she let him have his way on how she came to him, he would have his way on everything.
She’d been to Galeana once already on a brief trip. It seemed a dream to her. There was a village she wanted to see again. She had fallen in love with it as they walked hand-in-hand through the ancient streets.
Iturbide stood on the crest of the highway. It was shady and green, the last breath of the verdant before the descent began and the Joshua Palms with sea urchin spines stood amazed and abandoned to die in the desert.
And it was the day of the dead.
What better place to see the shrines and the Calaveras in the quiet square than Iturbide. People with faces painted as skulls, white, morbid, and surprised by death, would be kneeling in the square, offering shot glasses of reposado to their ancestors and reminding themselves of those whose features had faded from memory by placing sugar skulls on the cenotaphs. So many never returned to the mountain village.
She was almost certain she was entering Iturbide. As she slowed her rental and rolled down the windows, she could hear the bell tolling for vespers. An old woman in a blue skirt would be tugging at the lone bell-rope that hung as if it were the snake from paradise creeping down the white stucco tower of the church. The front wall over the door would be red with bougainvillea and she imagined the Crown of Thorns, the suffering and blood that defined the Mexico she loved as the fluttering red petals. If the wind came up, they would scatter, pulsing from a sacrificial wound.
But she was not in Iturbide. Not the Iturbide she remembered. There has been a town hall at the far end of the square. A youth dance had taken place after school. Pedro explained it was a way to keep the young people in the sleepy town. They would grow up, marry. They would live in one of the old, low, brightly colored houses on the side street. She’d seen couples and their children, making their way up a side street and she understood how important love is when it is asked to bind people not only to one another but to a place.
Pedro and she sat on a park bench and talked about death.
“There is no death for us, at least not the way you see it, Annie. You’ve been taught to grieve for what is lost permanently. We have been taught to respect and worship those who are dead. Each year, the day after your Halloween, we have the Day of the Dead. We call upon the saints, but we also call upon those who walk with the saints in the twilight of a dusty autumn day. My grandmother, my father, my aunts, and uncles, all live in that twilight. When you return, I hope you will return on the Day of the Dead, and I will introduce you to them all and you will hear them speak to you in the silence.”
When she parked the car she was certain she was not in Iturbide. Had she taken a wrong turn? Highway 58 leads directly to Iturbide. There could be no mistaking it. All she had to do was follow the road toward the sky and then leave the sky behind. The church was not where she remembered it. The square had fewer trees. The bell-rope ran inside the church rather than dangle free on the outside. She missed the bright red flowers.
A group of women with their backs turned to her, black shawls over their heads, and long dresses with elaborate embroidery were kneeling beside a shrine, laying kernels of colored corn on the ground in the pattern of a multicolored flower. As Annie approached, she thought it odd that the women were picking the sugar Calaveras from the shrine and eating them. From what she knew of the tradition, the candy sugar skulls were only for the dead. Another woman reached up and took a shot glass of tequila that stood beside a faded antique photograph of a man and downed the drink in one mouthful.
“Perdóneme. ¿Es esto Iturbide?”
One of the women, her face deathly pale as the bleached sands of the desert, her eyes blacked out, and her teeth painted on her lips and cheeks as if death had stripped away her flesh looked up at Anne and said nothing.
The bell was tolling. The women who kneeled at the shrine picked up their skirts and ran toward a process as it left the church. Annie followed. The procession moved slowly.
The priest at the head of the line was swinging his sensor. The smoke was sweet, almost sickly, but it held a bitter tang as if it were smoke that had been retrieved from the ceiling of a church after a mass and mixed with the scent of cigars and cooking and chocolate that had boiled over into the fire.
No one spoke. Everyone’s head was bowed. The silence, the reverence of a dusk when not a bird chirped or a rustle of a long dress could be heard, was mesmerizing. Annie wanted to embrace it. She felt as if it was a part of her that lay waiting in her soul that she had not yet discovered. And when the gate on the cemetery opened with a cry, Annie could see the arid plain below her, the graves packed as tightly as white bags of sugar, and each resting place was decorated in a photograph of the deceased and flowers, and seeds, the sugar Calaveras.
The priest, who was also in a calavera face, raised his arms, and the women, the men, the children moved toward the graves until they were standing on top of them. An elderly man and a woman embraced. A man put his arm around the boy and the boy, with blackened eyes, looked up at the man. A woman held a sleeping child in her arms. All had the white faces of the day painted over their flesh. And with that, they sank into the resting places and vanished as the sun sank over the village and the sky became dark.
Annie sank to her knees and began to pray for the dead. She wanted to whisper words of thanks but was overwhelmed and astonished by the silence. And when she opened her eyes, she was alone among the graves. The white paint had worn off the stones and the crosses. The monuments were toppled, and the walls were rubble. There was no priest, no flowers, no brightly colored petals, no sugar skulls or shot glasses of tequila or small loaves of bread for the dead. Even the vista of the arid plain to Galeana was shrouded in fog.
As she made her way back to her car, the village, the church, the side streets were in ruins. The square was empty. The shrine was gone. This was not Iturbide. Whatever this place was or had been left her feeling cold and empty inside. Had she taken a wrong turn?
She had no idea where she was.
Doubling back the way she came, as the darkness deepened, she kept checking her cell phone to see if she had any signal. She would call Pedro. She would describe the place where she had stopped. He could direct her or come for her.
She thought she heard his voice on the phone as she pulled off at a white roadside shrine in the valley. The shrine lay at the foot of an Aztec or Toltec rockface carving of a hunter. Pedro had told her it was an ancient prince who claimed the green valley as his private hunting preserve. The figure, known as Antares, had slid from the mountainside one day when an earthquake shook the valley. Nothing remained except the carving of a foot and a dog barking at the hooves of a deer.
“Pedro? Hello? Can you hear me?” He was breaking up. Only parts of words reached her. “I’m lost. I took a wrong turn. I lost something in myself and for a moment I was certain I found it. I found it in this village that vanished around me. Hello?”
The only words that came through were “San Sebastian” and “bridge.”
She sat in the rental car and wept. San Sebastian? She scanned the map the man at the rental agency had given her as he warned her about traveling alone on Highway 58 from Linares to Galeana.
“That is a difficult route. You would be advised to go all the way back to Monterrey and cross the Sierras there. The way south, even though it is less picturesque and through the desert, is the safest. The truckers use that route unless they are in a hurry.”
There was no San Sebastian on the map.
When she was a teenager, Annie stayed up all night with an elderly aunt in the Midwest US who was addicted to Broadway musicals. A late show called Midnight Matinee on a channel almost out of reach of her aunt’s television antenna was playing the almost forgotten Rogers and Hammerstein musical, Brigadoon, about a Scottish village that only appears once every two hundred years because it is cursed. The only thing that can break the curse is if someone, on the right day, stumbles across the town and falls in love with a certain woman. The townsfolk are destined to fade in and out of eternity. Annie tried to imagine what eternity would feel like – the cold, the endless darkness, the wind on an autumn night pulling the temperature down from the sun and casting it into the grave. The feeling of nothing except longing. The love that was always on the other side of the mountain and, as in a dream, the road that would not lead to that love no matter how many times a person traveled it.
San Sebastian. Annie pictured a martyr, tied to a tree, being shot with arrows. His suffering eyes. She had seen paintings of him in the National Gallery. The young man with curly hair has his eyes raised to heaven as if asking when his suffering will end, when will he walk among the dead, and what the bridge is between this world and the next.
Annie thought for a moment that Mexico contained the secret of what that bridge was. Moving from death to life and back again, crossing the vast void with every sense – sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell with the volume turned up as high as it could go and blaring the world into every thought – was not just a matter of standing on one’s own grave and eating the sweet marzipan skulls that were only fit for the dead, but a desire to assert love even if it meant negating the self in white face paint, and flowers woven in black braids of hair and permitting death to enter the world so it can live forever. She closed her eyes and thought she was dreaming when she opened them, to the sight of children in bright paper costumes, their faces painted white, their teeth outlined in black upon their cheeks, and their eyes two sockets of darkness with eclipses in the center of each. Each of them held out their hands as if asking for alms or inviting her to dance with them.
Eleanor
Her father never hung Mexican fly strips because he believed the insects were tiny demons and chased them around the house with a fly swatter. The walls, especially in the summer when the barnyard was ripe, were splattered with splotches of legs and wings. When her mother tried to rub them off with a rag and Dutch Cleanser, her father shook the woman violently by the wrist and insisted that leaving the bodies, like writing on the wall from the Old Testament, would serve as a warning to other flies, though the admonitions never worked and the house filled up with the insects day after day until Eleanor found it impossible to sleep even when she pulled a pillow over her head.
Now that she was out on her own with “No hope of ever going back,” her father’s words, she hung up a Mexican fly strip beside the desk in the room Bob found for her on Curtis Street with Mrs. Carlisle so the insects wouldn’t buzz annoyingly when Eleanor went on Facebook. Bob was her rescuer. The people at the truck stop agreed there was something wrong with the way her father hit her and hit her hard as Eleanor screamed she was being abducted. Mrs. Carlisle was her guardian. They told Eleanor she was safe but could no longer be Eleanor Bane.
Mrs. Carlisle recorded her conversations with Eleanor’s permission. Eleanor wanted to make sure that even if something happened to her others would know what she had been through. Mrs. Carlisle assured Eleanor that nothing would happen to her, that she and Bob and the organization would do everything they could to protect her. The organization gave girls like Eleanor their freedom. It gave them their lives, taught them to read and write, and how to become part of the world they had been denied. The struggle for such young women was not merely leaving the homes and families they had known but leaving behind the identities they had been given. Many of the girls were only eighteen or nineteen. Bob wondered how Eleanor had lasted to twenty-three.
“No one wanted to marry me,” she said. “They told me I was worthless and would make a poor wife. I had to watch as the girls I knew when I was younger became the sixth or seventh wives of men who were old enough to be my grandfathers. I told everyone I did not want children. They inspected me. There may have been some reason why I could not bear children. The old men said I was barren.”
Bob told her that out here, in the real world, that didn’t matter. Children were her choice. Eleanor had trouble understanding that, but she trusted Bob. Bob was her friend but he wasn’t on Facebook. Mrs. Carlisle wasn’t on Facebook either. Bob said his line of work didn’t permit him to have social media pages and that Mrs. Carlisle flew beneath the radar, whatever that was, so girls like Eleanor would stand a chance once they broke free and got out into the world.
Eleanor wasn’t sure what social media was. It sounded like a party. When she asked Bob if Facebook was a party he smiled and said it had been built for that but now it was often a dangerous neighborhood where people attacked one another, and Eleanor didn’t want to be attacked anymore. She wasn’t permitted to post pictures of herself which was fine because she didn’t have any. Her hair had been dyed brown and cut short so they told her she looked like a pixie, and she wasn’t sure what a pixie was either. Her name was Mindy now. Mindy Smith.
That’s what it said on her name tag from happy land where she put her dyed hair in a brown net fitted over with a wrap-around brim to shade her eyes instead of a full brown baseball cap. If Mindy thought she recognized someone from her past, Bob showed her the way to drop her chin, hunch her shoulders, and look away. The boys on the job who joked with her got to wear full baseball caps. Mindy Smith’s job was to keep the floors swept and mopped and to unload cartons of burgers and plastic bags of fries as the line cooks ran out. Eleanor didn’t mind. Being someone else most of the week was a relief. She was busy and useful and Mr. Gallard who own the restaurant told her she was diligent. That meant focused. He showed his gratitude by handing Mindy a cheque that Mrs. Carlisle would deposit into an account for Eleanor so that when all the fuss blew over there’d be a nest egg, like a robin’s, waiting for her so she could start a life where she didn’t have to look over her shoulder. At the end of each day, Eleanor returned to her room when Mrs. Carlisle came to pick her up.
“We have to practice discretion,” Mrs. Carlisle said. “Even though you are over the age of majority,” whatever that meant, “we still brought you across state lines and because we’re out of state they may come for you. The laws are different here than where you were,” Mrs. Carlisle said. “The Children are looking for you and they won’t give up until they find you and drag you back whether you want to be dragged back or not.”
Facebook was full of faces but it was a lonely place. The Children didn’t permit her to have Facebook but she had heard some of the girls in the compound giggling about it behind their hands so when Eleanor arrived at Mrs. Carlisle’s house she asked if she could have Facebook and Mrs. Carlisle said, “Sure,” because there was an old laptop kicking around that ought to do the trick and she sat down and taught Eleanor how to go online.
Eleanor giggled because the only thing she’d ever seen online was a fish her brother Roger caught in the creek back home before their father renamed him Isaac and wouldn’t permit him to wear a hat when they worked in the fields. She didn’t have any friends on Facebook except for the boy in Nigeria who wanted to marry her. She wasn’t sure he was sincere and she told him she didn’t have the money to fly him over so they could proceed with the necessary steps before matrimony. Maybe someday but not right now. Then he stopped being her friend. Making friends was difficult.
Learning to read was even harder. Mrs. Carlisle took pity on her one day and taught Eleanor how to sign her name so she could make bona fide applications for work. Eleanor didn’t know what bona fide meant. It sounded slightly evil but she sensed Mrs. Carlisle meant well. The letters looped around each other like tangled vines in the weeds beside the stream back home.
When the flies came into Eleanor’s room, Mrs. Carlisle gave her a Mexican fly strip and Eleanor thanked her and said she learned a lot about them by watching them die slowly. Mrs. Carlisle was surprised but not surprised. Eleanor explained that when she lived on a farm everything was about life and death and the things that die seldom stand a chance against the things that live. The Lord Almighty did not distinguish who or what should survive because everything was in His hands and most of the time His fist was clenched because He was a task-master Almighty who made people do His bidding or he’d smite them and they would bide no more. Eleanor told Mrs. Carlisle the story of her father and how he had driven his family beyond the reach of God in his pursuit of holiness only to bring them back, closer, and closer, to the nearness of the Lord because He must be obeyed as one obeys an earthly father no matter what.
The summer Eleanor was ten her earthly father came in from the cornfield late one hellfire of an afternoon. He hadn’t worn his hat and had been working in the sun since dawn. His bald head was sunburnt and blazing red, although Eleanor wasn’t sure she could say something was blazing on account of blazing being associated with you-know-where down there as she pointed to the floor. Her father told the family he had a vision. The Lord had called to him.
