Richard
Brooklyn
That snowy January morning, Richard was the first to awaken. It was six o’clock and still dark outside. After spending hours drifting between sleeping and waking, he had finally slept as if anesthetized. All that was left of the fire was a few embers; the house was an icy mausoleum.
He had spent Saturday night wedged against the wall, his legs numb from the weight of Lucia’s head, awake some of the time, the rest dreaming in a dazed fashion thanks to the magic brownie. Still, he could not recall being so happy in a long while. The quality of the brownies varied a lot, which made it hard to calculate how much you could consume to produce the desired effect without becoming high as a kite. It was better to smoke it, but that gave him asthma. The last stash had been very strong; he would need to divide it into smaller pieces. The weed helped him relax after a hard day’s work or to drive away ghosts of the vindictive kind. Of course, being a rational man, he did not believe in ghosts. And yet he saw them. In Anita’s world, which he had shared for several years, life and death were linked inextricably, and good and bad spirits roamed everywhere. Long ago he had admitted to himself that he was an alcoholic, which was why he had avoided liquor all these years. He did not think he was addicted to any other substances or had any major vices, unless cycling was an addiction or vice, and the small quantities of weed he used definitely did not fall under that category. The piece of brownie he had eaten had affected him powerfully; otherwise, he would have gotten up as soon as the fire went out in the hearth and gone to bed, instead of spending the night sitting on the floor and waking the next morning with sore muscles and a weakened will.
His back ached and his neck was stiff. Only a few years before, he and his friend Horacio Amado-Castro used to go camping upstate, spending the night in sleeping bags on the hard ground, but now he was too old for such a lack of comfort. Curled up alongside him, Lucia, however, had the placid expression of someone sleeping on feather down. Evelyn, stretched out on the cushion and wrapped up in her parka, boots, and gloves, was snoring lightly with Marcelo on top of her. It took Richard several seconds to recognize her and remember why this tiny young woman was in his house, their collision, the snowstorm. After hearing part of Evelyn’s story the previous night, he once more felt the moral outrage that in the past had stirred him to defend migrants and still made his father’s blood boil. Richard had ultimately distanced himself from taking action, ending up enclosed in his academic world, far from the harsh reality of the poor in Latin America. He felt certain that Evelyn’s employers were exploiting and possibly mistreating her, which would explain her terror at such a slight accident.
He pushed Lucia aside somewhat brusquely to get her off his legs and out of his mind, then shook himself like a wet dog and struggled to his feet, his mouth parched. He reflected that the brownie had been a bad idea: it had led to the revelations of the previous night, to Evelyn’s story, Lucia’s as well—and God knew what he had told them. He did not recall having let slip any details about his own past, something he never did, but he must have mentioned Anita, because Lucia had commented that all those years after losing his wife, he still missed her. “I’ve never been loved like that, Richard, love has always been in half measures for me,” she had added.
Richard looked down at Lucia and felt a sudden rush of tenderness. She was still asleep on the floor and her sprawling limbs gave her a vulnerable, adolescent look. This woman who was old enough to be a grandmother reminded him of his Anita when she was resting, his twentysomething Anita. For a second he was tempted to stoop down, take Lucia’s head in his hands, and kiss her. Disconcerted by this dangerous impulse, he controlled himself at once.
Whenever Richard turned on his computer, a screen saver of Anita and Bibi appeared, their expressions accusatory or smiling at him depending on his mood. It was not a reminder; he had no need of that. If his memory were to fail him, Anita and Bibi would be waiting for him in the timeless dimension of dreams. Occasionally a vivid one would stick with him, and he’d spend the entire day with one foot in this world and the other in the shifting sands of a dreadful nightmare. Each night when he switched off the light before going to sleep, he would summon Anita and Bibi in the hope of seeing them. He knew he was the one who created these nocturnal visions, and so if his mind was able to punish him with nightmares, it could also reward him, although he had not discovered a sure way of producing those consoling dreams. Over time, his mourning had changed in tone and texture. In the beginning it was red and piercing; then it became gray, thick and rough like burlap. He became used to this dull pain and incorporated it into his everyday discomforts, along with heartburn. The guilt though remained the same, as cold and implacable as glass. His friend Horacio, always ready to celebrate the good and minimize the bad, had at one point accused him of being in love with misfortune. “Tell your superego to fuck off, man. The way you examine every single action, past and present, is twisted. The sin of pride. You’re not that important. You have to forgive yourself once and for all, just like Anita and Bibi have forgiven you.”
Half-jokingly, Lucia Maraz had once told him he was turning into a fearful old hypochondriac. “I already am one,” he replied, trying to adopt her joking tone, and yet he felt hurt, because it was undeniably true. They were at one of those dreadful social events in their department, this time to bid farewell to a retiring professor. He came over to Lucia with a glass of wine for her and mineral water for himself. She was the only person he’d had any desire to talk to there. And she was right, he lived with a constant feeling of anxiety. He swallowed handfuls of vitamin supplements because he thought that if his health failed everything would go to hell and the whole edifice of his existence would come crashing down. He protected his house with burglar alarms, because he’d heard that in Brooklyn, as everywhere else, robbers were active in broad daylight. He protected his computer and his cell phone with such complicated passwords that every so often he forgot them. Then there were the elaborate car, health, and life insurance policies. In the end the only insurance he lacked was against his worst memories, which would assail him the moment he stepped outside his routines, threatening to overwhelm with disorder. He preached to his students that order is an art rational beings possess, a ceaseless battle against centrifugal force, because the natural dynamic of all living things is to expand, multiply, and end in chaos. As a proof you only had to observe human behavior, the voracity of nature, and the infinite complexity of the universe. To maintain at least a semblance of order, he never let himself go, but kept his existence under control with military precision. That was why he had his lists and a strict timetable, which made Lucia laugh out loud when she discovered them. The bad thing about working with her was that nothing escaped her.
“How do you see yourself in old age?” Lucia had asked him.
“I’m already in it.”
“No, you’ve got a good ten years yet.”
“I hope I don’t live too long, that would be awful. The ideal would be to die still in perfect health, say at around seventy-five, when my body and mind are functioning properly.”
“Sounds like a good plan,” she said cheerfully.
To Richard it was a serious plan. At seventy-five he would have to find an effective way of putting an end to it all. When the moment arrived, he would travel to New Orleans, where he could hear the music of the French Quarter’s quirky characters. He intended to finish out his days playing the piano with some stupendous musicians, who would allow him to join their band out of pity, and lose himself in the blare of the trumpet and the saxophone, the exuberance of the African drums. And if this was too much to ask, well then he wanted to leave this world silently, seated beneath a dilapidated ceiling fan in an old-fashioned bar, comforted by the rhythms of a melancholy jazz tune, quaffing exotic cocktails with no thought of the consequences, because he would have the lethal capsule in his pocket. It would be his last night, so he could permit himself a few drinks.
“Don’t you ever feel the need for female company, Richard?” Lucia asked with a mischievous wink. “Someone in your bed, for example?”
“Not at all.”
He saw no need to tell her about Susan. That relationship was not important either for Susan or for him. He was sure he was one among several lovers who helped her bear an unhappy marriage, which he considered should have ended years before. This was a topic they both avoided: Susan said nothing about it, and he did not ask. They were colleagues, good companions, linked by a sensual friendship and intellectual pursuits. Their encounters were straightforward: always the second Thursday of the month, and always in the same hotel; she was as methodical as he was. One afternoon a month was enough; each of them had their own life to live.
Three months earlier, the idea of finding himself with a woman at a reception of this kind, searching for topics of conversation and testing out the ground for the next step, would have made Richard’s ulcer explode, but ever since Lucia had been living in his basement he had found himself imagining dialogues with her. He wondered why with her exactly, when there were other more suitable women available, such as his neighbor, who had suggested they become lovers because they lived so close to each other and because she occasionally looked after the cats. The only explanation for these imaginary conversations was that loneliness was starting to weigh on him: another symptom of old age, he told himself. There was nothing more pathetic than the sound of a fork on a plate in an empty house. Eating alone, sleeping alone, dying alone. What would it be like to have female company, as Lucia had suggested? To cook for her, wait for her in the evening, go out hand in hand with her, sleep curled up together, tell her what he was thinking, write her poems. Someone like Lucia. She was a mature, stable, intelligent woman who had a ready laugh. She was wise because she had suffered, but did not cling to suffering the way he did. And she was pretty. But she was also bold and bossy. A woman like her took up a lot of room: it would be like struggling with a harem; too much work, a bad idea. He smiled, thinking how presumptuous it was of him to suppose she might accept him. She had never given any sign of being interested in him, except the occasion when she had cooked for him, but back then she had just arrived and he was on the defensive or his mind was elsewhere. I behaved like an idiot, I’d like to start over with her, he concluded.
On a professional level, Lucia had proved to be an excellent choice. A week after her arrival in New York he asked her to give a seminar for the faculty and students. They had to hold the session in a big lecture hall because more people enrolled than they had expected. It fell to him to introduce her. The topic was CIA interventions in Latin America. Richard sat in the audience while Lucia spoke in English without notes, in that accent of hers he found so beguiling, detailing how the agency helped to overthrow democracies, replacing them with the kind of totalitarian government no North American would accept. When she finished, the first question was from a colleague who referred to the economic miracle in Chile under the dictatorship. From the tone of his comment, it was obvious he was justifying the repression. The hair stood up on the back of Richard’s neck, but he forced himself to remain silent. Lucia did not need anyone to defend her, and replied that the supposed miracle had evaporated, while the economic statistics conveniently ignored the enormous inequality and poverty.
A visiting professor from the University of California mentioned the violence in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and the thousands of unaccompanied children who crossed the US border either to escape or to search for their parents. She suggested reorganizing the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s. Richard took the microphone in case there was anyone in the audience unaware of what she was referring to. He explained that it was an initiative by more than five hundred American churches, lawyers, students, and activists to help the Central American refugees, who were treated as delinquents and deported by the Reagan administration. Lucia asked if anyone there had taken part in the movement, and four hands were raised. During that period Richard had been in Brazil, but his father had become so involved that on a couple of occasions he was put in jail. Those were some of the most memorable moments in his elderly father’s existence.
The seminar lasted two hours, and was so fruitful that Lucia was given a standing ovation. Richard was impressed not only by her eloquence but because to him she looked very attractive in her black dress and silver necklace, and with the pink highlights in her hair. She had the cheekbones and energy of a Tatar, and he remembered her as she’d looked years earlier, with a reddish mass of hair and tight jeans. Even though she had changed, he thought she was still striking, and had he not feared being misinterpreted, he would have told her so. He congratulated himself on having invited her to his department. He knew she had been through difficult years: an illness, a divorce, and heaven knew what else. It occurred to him to ask her to teach Chilean politics for a year at the university as it might serve as a diversion for her, but it would be even more useful for the students. Some of them were colossally ignorant, arriving at college without being able to place Chile on a map, and most likely unable to situate their own country in the world. They thought the United States was the world.
Richard would have liked Lucia to stay longer than two semesters, but it was hard to come up with the funds: the university administration was as slow in making decisions as the Vatican. When he had sent her the contract, he’d offered to rent her the basement apartment, which was unoccupied at the time. He imagined Lucia would be delighted to have somewhere so sought-after in the heart of Brooklyn, close to public transport and at such a reasonable rent, but when she saw it, she could scarcely conceal her disappointment. What a difficult woman, thought Richard. They had started off on the wrong foot, but since then things had improved between them.
He was convinced he had been both generous and understanding toward her. He had even accepted the eventual presence of the dog, which according to her would be only temporary, but which had already lasted more than two months. Although pets were forbidden in the rental agreement, he had turned a blind eye to this Chihuahua that barked like a German shepherd and terrified the mailman and neighbors. He knew nothing about dogs but could see that Marcelo was very odd, with bulging toad’s eyes that seemed not to fit in their sockets and a tongue that lolled out because of all the missing teeth. The tartan wool cape the dog wore did nothing to improve his appearance. According to Lucia, Marcelo had turned up on her doorstep one night, close to death and without an identity collar. “Who could possibly be so cruel as to throw him out?” she said to Richard with a pleading look. That was the first time Richard had noticed Lucia’s eyes. They were as black as olives, with thick eyelashes and fine laughter lines around them—cat eyes, although that was an irrelevant detail. What she looked like did not matter. To retain his privacy, ever since he had purchased the house he had followed the rule of avoiding all familiarity with his tenants, and he had no intention of making an exception for her.
RICHARD CALCULATED THAT IT WAS STILL too early to phone his father, although the old man woke at dawn and waited impatiently for his call. On Sundays they always had lunch together at a restaurant his father chose, because if it depended on Richard they would always have gone to the same place. “At least this time I’ll have something different to tell you, Dad,” murmured Richard, realizing how interested his father would be to hear about Evelyn Ortega, since he was always concerned about immigrants and refugees.
Joseph Bowmaster, by now very elderly but still completely lucid, had been an actor. He was born in Germany to a Jewish family with a tradition as antiquarians and art collectors that could be traced back as far as the Renaissance. They were refined, cultured people, but the fortune they had amassed was lost during the First World War. In the second half of the thirties, when Hitler appeared unstoppable, his parents sent Joseph to France on the pretext that he was making a close study of the Impressionists, but in fact to get him away from the imminent Nazi danger. They meanwhile made plans to emigrate illegally to Palestine, at that time controlled by Great Britain. To placate the Arabs, the British limited the immigration of Jews to the territory, but nothing could stop the most desperate.
Joseph stayed on in France but devoted himself to the theater rather than studying art. He had a natural talent for acting and for languages. As well as German, he was fluent in French and set himself to studying English. He was so successful that he could soon imitate several accents, from Cockney to BBC pronunciation. In 1940, when the Nazis invaded France and occupied Paris, he managed to escape to Spain, and from there to Portugal. For the rest of his life he would remember the kindness of those people who, at great risk to themselves, helped him in this odyssey. Richard grew up listening to the story of his father’s wartime escape, and with the idea etched on his mind that to help the persecuted is an inescapable duty. As soon as he was old enough, his father took him to France to visit two families that had kept him hidden from the Nazis, and to Spain to thank those who helped him survive and to cross into Portugal.
By 1940, Lisbon had become the last refuge for hundreds of thousands of European Jews desperate to obtain documents to reach the United States, South America, or Palestine. While awaiting his opportunity, Joseph stayed in the old quarter of the city, a maze of narrow streets and mysterious houses, in a boardinghouse fragrant with jasmine and oranges. There he fell in love with Cloe, the owner’s daughter, who was three years older than him, a post office employee by day and a fado singer by night. She was a dark beauty with a tragic expression befitting the sad songs she sang. Joseph lacked the courage to tell his parents he was in love with a Gentile, until they emigrated together, first to London, where they lived for two years, and then New York. By this time war was raging furiously in Europe, and Joseph’s parents, precariously settled in Palestine, had no objection to their new daughter-in-law. All that was important was for their son to be safe from the genocide the Germans were perpetrating.
In New York, Joseph changed his surname to Bowmaster, which sounded English through and through, and thanks to his feigned aristocratic accent found parts in Shakespeare plays for the next forty years. Cloe on the other hand never learned English properly and had no success there with her country’s plaintive fados. However, instead of being plunged into despair by her failure as an artist, she began to study fashion and became the family’s breadwinner, because the amount Joseph earned in the theater never stretched to the end of the month. The divalike woman Joseph had met in Lisbon turned out to possess a great practical sense and a capacity for hard work. She was also unswervingly loyal, devoting herself fully to her husband and Richard, their only child. Richard grew up spoiled like a prince in a modest apartment in the Bronx, shielded from the world by his parents’ love.
Richard turned out to be as good-looking as Joseph, though not as tall and lacking the actor’s extravagant temperament; rather, he was more melancholic, like his mother. Busy with their own lives, his parents loved him without smothering him, treating him with mild neglect, as was common in those days before children became projects. This suited Richard, because they left him in peace with his books, and no one demanded much of him beyond getting good marks at school, behaving properly, and being considerate. He spent more time with his father than with his mother, because Joseph had a flexible schedule, whereas Cloe was a partner in a women’s clothing store and habitually stayed there sewing until late at night. Joseph took his son with him on his errands of mercy, as Cloe called them. They went to hand out food and clothing donated by the churches and synagogues to the poorest families in the Bronx, both Jewish and Christian. “You never ask people in need who they are or where they’ve come from, Richard. We’re all the same in misfortune,” Joseph would preach to his son. Twenty years later he proved this by confronting the police on the streets of New York to defend undocumented immigrants who had been rounded up in raids.
Whenever he recalled his happy childhood, Richard asked himself why he had not lived up to what he was taught as a child, following the example he was given, and instead failed as both a husband and a father.
During the night, with his defenses lowered, his demons had come and clawed at him. Years before, he had tried to keep them in a sealed compartment of his memory, but eventually gave this up because his angels disappeared along with them. Later, he learned to cherish even his most painful memories: without them it would have been as if he had never been young, or loved, or a father. If the price he had to pay for this was more suffering, then so be it. Sometimes the demons won the fight against the angels, and the result was a paralyzing migraine, which was also part of the price. He carried with him the heavy debt of the mistakes he had made, a debt he had shared with no one. But now, in the winter of 2016, circumstances were finally forcing him to open his heart. The slow exorcism of his past began on that night sprawled on the floor between two women and a ridiculous dog, while outside a snowy Brooklyn slept.
“COME ON, LADIES, WAKE UP!” he cried, clapping his hands.
Lucia opened her eyes. It also took her a while to figure out where she was.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Time to get going.”
“It’s still dark! Coffee first. I can’t think without caffeine. It’s like the North Pole in here, Richard. For the love of God, turn the heating up, don’t be so stingy. Where’s the bathroom?”
“Use the one on the second floor.”
Lucia got up in several stages, first on all fours, back bent, then with her hands on the floor and her backside in the air, as she had learned in yoga. Finally she stood up.
“I used to be able to do push-ups. Now if I stretch I get a cramp. Old age stinks,” she muttered on her way to the stairs.
I can see I’m not the only one approaching decrepitude, thought Richard with a hint of satisfaction. Then he went to make coffee and feed the cats, while Evelyn and Marcelo woke up as if they had the whole day in front of them with nothing to do. He stifled his urge to make the girl hurry up, realizing she must be exhausted.
The second-floor bathroom was clean and did not seem to be used much. It was big and old-fashioned, with a claw-foot bathtub and brass faucets. In the mirror, Lucia saw a woman she did not recognize, with puffy eyes, blotchy red skin, and pink-and-white hair that made her look like a clown. The highlights had originally been beet colored, but now they were fading. She took a quick shower, dried herself on her T-shirt because there were no towels, put on her sweater, and combed her fingers through her hair. She needed her toothbrush and her makeup bag. “You can’t go into the world without mascara and lipstick,” she told the mirror. She had always seen vanity as a virtue, except during the months when she had chemotherapy and gave in to defeat until Daniela obliged her to return to life. Every morning she found the time to do herself up, even if she was going to stay at home and not see anyone. She would prepare herself for the day, applying her makeup and choosing her clothes like someone donning armor: it was her way of presenting herself, full of confidence, to the world. She loved brushes, rouge, lotions, colors, powders, materials, textures. She was unable to do without her makeup, her computer, her cell phone, and a dog. The computer was her work tool; the cell phone connected her to the world, especially Daniela; and the need to share her existence with an animal had begun in Vancouver and continued during the years she was married to Carlos. The dog Olivia had died of old age just when she herself got cancer. During that time she had to weep for the death of her mother, her own illness, and the loss of Olivia, her faithful companion. Marcelo was a gift from the gods, the perfect confidant. They talked to one another, and he made her laugh with his ugliness and the inquisitive look in his toad eyes. With this Chihuahua that barked at mice and ghosts, she could release the unbearable tenderness she felt inside but could not show to her daughter for fear of overwhelming her. Usually her grooming ritual was her time of meditation but that morning she could only think of Evelyn Ortega’s story.