Behold Things Beautiful Read online

  Her lecture was tomorrow. Tomorrow! She should have allowed herself more time to recover from the trip, had assumed the one-hour time difference between Luscano and Montréal would limit the jet lag. Instead of reviewing her notes, the in-flight movies had seduced her with the last chance to wallow in North American culture. Adaptation, then The Hours, and coincidentally, both had featured Meryl Streep. Watching her perform, Alma had hoped to absorb some of that steely self-awareness and puritanical bearing, qualities her mother had come closer to mastering than Alma ever had, her last lucid thought before falling asleep.

  3

  Several blocks northeast of the house on Calle Buenos Aires, a man in white trousers and a tennis sweater observed the sea through a telescope by the window. Patrón Pindalo began most Sundays in the third-floor turret of his house, convinced he learned more of the comings and goings in Luscano’s port from his telescope than from reading El Día’s column on the shipping news. The slow scan of the horizon, the wonder of seeing an enhanced reality in which hidden details were exposed and amplified, focussed him for the morning tennis game he demanded of the pro at the club.

  Patrón Pindalo leaned into the high-powered lens. A regatta of sailboats was dispersing from the yacht club’s piers, and further east three fishermen hoisted nets of shellfish onto their boat. A ship trolled in direct line with the sun and the glare prevented him from discerning its name or flag. He looked up from the telescope but could not locate the ship, impressed once again by the power of the lens, one of those gringo gadgets he’d purchased on a trip to the north.

  The door opened behind him. The muchacha stood in the doorway holding the tray with his glass of juice, a concoction of orange, carrot and ginger, an anti-aging strategy to counter the effects of seventy-two years of hard work for his family, for Luscano. Patrón Pindalo approached the muchacha and took the glass, swallowing the juice in one long gulp while eyeing the young woman. She was new to the household, quite appealing today, he decided. Other days she struck him as awkward, half asleep, and he had to repeat his orders three times to make sure she understood. Patrón Pindalo returned the glass to the tray. “Did you wake the children?” She nodded. “Get them ready for church. I’ll have Damian drop them off on our way to the club.” He’d noticed that his grandchildren were often late for church, school, their music lessons. It was time to teach them manners and discipline. He might have failed as a father but now that Ernesto had abandoned the children, he had a chance to redeem himself as a grandfather.

  He returned to his post by the window, noticing dust on the sill. Next time he saw the muchacha he’d tell her to give the room a proper cleaning. Things were going downhill, including his reputation. It was a national embarrassment how badly his children had turned out. At least Celeste was in Miami, beyond the reach of Luscano’s rumour mill, but Ernesto, what had come over him, leaving this house, his wife and children? He should have known enough not to humiliate all of them, his father included, for Luscano to gossip and titter over. Perhaps he’d fallen for the new muchacha. That would be understandable if not acceptable. Discretion, he’d drilled it into Ernesto all of his thirty-nine years, was essential to the Pindalo work ethic. His son refused to learn, hanging on his father’s back, a lifelong burden of guilt.

  Patrón Pindalo eyed the lens again and made out the faint silhouette of a cargo ship. Perhaps it was the one he was waiting for. He’d readied the stevedores on his payroll to receive the goods. Engrossed in his ocean spying, he didn’t hear the trunk slam shut in the driveway down below or see the car glide through the front gates. What Patrón Pindalo did see, the Liberian flag and the name, Belleza, on the cargo ship, confirmed the arrival of the shipment of olive oil, figs and cashews in which the rifles and munitions were supposed to be buried.

  4

  The taxi careened around the Plaza Federal. Alma hung onto the strap above the back-seat window. Outside, the capital unravelled in damp bolts, grainy through the downpour, and much of it familiar. Distributed among the old colonial architecture, the galerías and coffee counters were a few new buildings, not skyscrapers but high for this low-rise city, their facades streaked with rain. Some bore the signage of banks, their entrances guarded by men in khaki uniforms with holsters. At the campus a damp banner hung from columns supporting the stone archway — ¡No a los sindicatos! — the no crossed off, replaced with a handwritten sí. The taxi stopped. Heaving her bag onto her shoulder, Alma opened the door and lunged to the curb. She fumbled with Hannelore’s umbrella as the back wheels of the taxi receded.

  Alma cut through the quadrant, past the fountain and empty benches, and made for the oldest structure battened with vines. Ivy curled around the cornerstone set by the founding Franciscans: Anno Domino 1825 Facultad de Filosofía & Humanidades. Inside, a papery odour blended with stale cigarette smoke. She turned down the hallway. Two young men glanced at her as they conversed in low tones, mindful of the lectures underway inside the classrooms.

  The double doors to the lecture hall were shut, a sheet of paper taped to the wood. Alma, ven a mi oficina, F., the handwriting, like her own, representative of a generation drilled by teachers adhering to state-sanctioned rules of script. Flaco’s come to my office as imperative as his emails, rightly assuming she’d remember the dean’s office on the second floor overlooking the river. Alma lingered outside the hall. Carvings on the length of each door depicted trees of learning, books substituting for leaves, the ersatz foliage thick and plentiful. Borges came to mind, perhaps because of his long career at the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires or his poem that celebrated books, secret and visible like the stars, from “The Guardian of the Books.”

  She pushed on one of the doors and it opened to the hall, larger than she’d remembered. Two aisles led through rows of benches towards a raised stage. Alma took the steps to the stage and dropped her bag alongside a tray of bottled water and glasses on a table by the podium. She removed her jacket, draped the pale blue linen over the back of the chair. It was damp and wrinkled, as was her skirt. She tried to smooth the fabric with her hands.

  The panelled walls gave off a brittle smell, the incense of prayers, she imagined, intoned by centuries of students fearing failure. Overhead six antiquarian carriage wheels hung from the ceiling, each a spoked circle of light bulbs. She’d once prayed for one of those fixtures to crash onto a mumbling professor’s head. Alma would not drone her audience to sleep. But how many would come?

  The door opened and Flaco bounded up the aisle. He kissed her cheek and asked after Hannelore. Alma shook her head. He understood it was not the time and helped her set up, lowering a screen behind the stage. Alma plugged an adapter into the socket and connected her laptop to the projector.

  Flaco dimmed the lights and ambled to a corner of the stage. “If you stand here you can see the river.”

  Alma sat down and listened to the rain pummelling the windowpanes bordered by roseate stained glass. Flaco came to sit down beside her. “Chica, we agreed, I’m going to tell them in my introduction.”

  What could she say? He’d probably already told his students. A few were now straggling into the hall.

  Alma poured a glass of water and distracted herself with the label on the bottle — Agua mineral del manantial gitano — printed in the red and blue of Luscano’s flag. For blood and the sky, they’d learned in school, for sacrifice and possibility. She noticed the fine print on the label, embotellado por Pepsi Cola SA and showed Flaco. He filled her in on the water wars that had ended with corporate giants controlling the country’s bottlers and supply of the precious resource. Today’s rain was an aberration, welcome but insufficient. Next door, Uruguay had actually entrenched the human right of access to water in its constitution. “But in Luscano, money always wins,” Flaco said, transformed into the dean he’d become in her absence, Dr. Molino conveying the nuances of the water problem. Despite the strands of grey intruding on his dark curls and the bitterness in his
voice, he was still the old Flaco, eyes flashing with conviction. Alma drew on his energy, reserving it for her lecture.

  The hall was filling up. Students slid along the benches, dropping knapsacks and umbrellas onto the floor. In their jeans and windbreakers, the devices and cell phones they carried, they reminded Alma of her students in Montréal. They had that same looseness in their carriage and aura of resignation. The dean had obliged them to attend the lectures on Latin American poets; this was the last one in the series and Alma could imagine their relief. Older students and faculty members occupied the front rows. Alma scanned their faces as they greeted one another with holas and kisses, hands dancing to conversation, a few curious glances tossed her way. Soon all the benches were taken and the last students had to lean against the wood panelling on the back wall. The crowd numbered at least one hundred. Quite the turnout for a dead poet, albeit one with a cultish following.

  “Ready?”

  Alma resisted telling him, no, you do it.

  Flaco winked at her and rose. “We are honoured,” he bellowed into the microphone, “to have Alma Álvarez here from Canada. She is our final guest in the series on twentieth-century poets of the Americas. Her lecture, “Evasion and the Sublime,” will cover the work of a great Uruguayan poet.

  “Professor Álvarez completed her undergraduate studies at this university. In 1991, while finalizing her thesis on the writer she’ll be discussing today, she was brought there.” Flaco pointed towards the rain-drizzled windowpanes.

  It seemed to Alma that everyone turned to look outside. All but one woman, a red scarf draped over her jacket, who kept her eyes on Alma, insinuating herself. Slowly, the scene clarified: the bonfire, this woman shouting through the chaos. It must have been spring 1990, the day a team of thugs in uniform had raided the university library, ordering banned books to be removed from the shelves and tossed into a pile on the quadrant. Alma struggled to resurrect fear from memory with the same accuracy as concrete sensations, the terrible smell of burning books, the sizzling sounds of water dousing the flames and in the smoke, the outraged face of this woman with the red scarf. Alma remembered her now, the librarian cursing the soldiers setting fire to the books. Professors and students, Alma, Flaco and their friends, stood frozen until she incited them into action and they ran to find buckets, teapots, jugs, filling them with water from the fountain. “Save the books!” the woman shouted even after the guns were drawn and all the others had stepped back in fear. Alma submerged Flaco’s voice with the words she’d later discovered quite by accident in a library in Montréal. Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too. Heinrich Heine from a play he wrote in 1862, the truth of his words lost and lost again. We should have known, I should have known, she’d thought then and often since.

  “After her release, Professor Álvarez left for Canada, where she now teaches. You know her work if you’ve taken my class on Luscanan poetry. The poem she wrote that so angered the military is included in the anthology Voces acalladas…” Alma had never even seen the anthology, Silenced Voices, named after the university magazine Flaco had kept going during the junta. Its existence, mentioned here so publicly, meant little compared to the brave woman with the red scarf gazing up at her from the bench.

  Applause as Flaco took his seat. Alma reached for the remote, stood up and walked to the podium. She thanked him for the introduction, her voice tinny, the Spanish tremulous. For years she’d delivered a shorter version of this lecture to students who’d never heard of the poet. Most in this audience had studied her in high school but Alma doubted they appreciated her significance. The first slide, a photograph of the poet, appeared on the screen behind her. She wanted her listeners to experience the burning gaze, the tightness of the three strands of pearls around the poet’s neck and the hair curled precisely by her temples. It captured the duality of victim and aggressor, obedient daughter and sexual explorer.

  “I die strangely….

  “So begins ‘The Ineffable,’ published in her second volume of poetry when she was twenty-four. Delmira Agustini foreshadowing her unusual death.” Twenty-four, the age of many students in this hall, Alma’s age when she left Luscano. “The ineffable: that which must not be uttered. And yet the poet is obliged to speak and the price is costly.

  “…It is not life that kills me / It is not death that kills me, nor is it love.”

  Alma drew into herself to express all that this poet represented. Evasion, Agustini’s will to refute fate, and the sublime, a silent, ferocious despair cursing thought.

  “I die of a thought, mute as a wound….

  “Then, in the lines that follow, the incantation of questions addressing the reader so that we participate in the enactment of plot.

  “‘The Ineffable’ is one of her celebrated sonnets and to understand it fully, we have to understand the times. Montevideo in the early twentieth century was a lonely place for the first woman to write erotic poetry in Spanish. Delmira Agustini dared to provoke and transgress, refusing to permit the Uruguay of her time to constrict her words.” Perhaps these students would find the strength to prevent their country’s charms and limitations from defining them.

  Alma’s voice warmed as she moved on to the poet’s legacy. Gabriela Mistral and Alfonsina Storni later drew on Agustini’s work to express their suffocation and despair from finding themselves ahead of the world in which they were born. Papers rustled, heads bent over notebooks, hands propelled pens. Alma too had sat hunched here to absorb the knowledge offered her. But back then, she hadn’t understood the nature of the gift, writers who’d delivered her elsewhere, to another country, another life or state of mind. It was the root of her obsession with Delmira Agustini’s words, their transcendent powers.

  “By the age of twenty-seven, Delmira Agustini had completed a sufficiently large body of work, largely misunderstood by her contemporaries, to conclude that her only hope of true liberation was in death.” Alma continued with that. The chilly rain in Montevideo on the evening of July 6th, 1914 as the poet walks to meet her ex-husband in his rented room. Their last minutes together, Enrique Job Reyes’s cigar and the Smith revolver he draws from the nightstand. “Enrique Job holds the gun to her ear and fires. He aims at her temple and fires again. Then he turns the revolver on himself, shoots but misses, and fires again.”

  “Have you never carried inside a dormant star / That was burning you wholly without shining?” Alma recited the sonnet projected on the screen behind her. In Montréal, at this point in the lecture, she’d tell her students, memorize the poems you love, you may need them one day and they could save you.

  Light played in the stained glass. Through the window, strands of wild moss dangled from the willow tree and beyond, across the river, the abandoned building, the iron bars of its windows covered with graffitied plywood.

  Flaco stared at her, chin on his hand, eyes intent on conveying encouragement. She became aware of a generalized squirming, some coughing, as the sea of faces came into focus, among them the librarian with the red scarf, who nodded at her to go on, finish, as if she understood that it’s so much easier to tell of someone else’s fate, no matter how tragic, than your own.

  Alma returned to the poet’s writing life, describing how Agustini took her place among the modernistas, along with Rubén Darío, whom she met and corresponded with, and José Martí, writers who moved the region’s poetry from its Iberian, colonial influences towards a fresh complexity of language. Before opening the floor to questions, she closed with the poet’s words. For the students who’d sat through her lecture, for the brave librarian and most fittingly for Flaco, “In only one kiss we became old.”

  The legs of the table teetered on the cobblestones as Flaco removed his jacket, tossed it onto an empty chair and rolled back the sleeves of his shirt. “You were superb, chica. The students loved you!” His loud declarations had passersby glancing back and a man sitting at the only ot
her occupied table outside La Loca peered over his newspaper. “It was brilliant to close the lecture series with you,” Flaco said, as if it had been her idea. “Last week after Chico Fulano’s droning, self-adulating discourse, my students complained. But with you they were spellbound!”

  Alma laughed at the absurdity of being compared to the Mexican octogenarian with scores of novels and literary prizes under his belt. Residual giddiness from the long flight and the effort of the lecture, the students with their questions on how they could get to Canada, and the faculty and staff who’d come to greet her, some familiar, most forgotten or perhaps she’d never met them before, their genuine interest and pride that she’d returned. “Didn’t you find it a bit cheap to begin with the murder-suicide?”

  “The film noir opening got their attention and that’s what a lecturer has to do. Plus you managed to cover the full range of Agustini’s works. I’d never seen those prose poems. I tend to think of her in terms of the sonnets.” Flaco summoned the waiter from inside La Loca.

  A wedge of sea glittered in the sunlight beyond the old city’s rooftops. Alma had purposely taken this seat under the coral tree, the cathedral behind her at a far end of the Plaza Federal and the restaurant to her left. La Loca had not changed from the days when they’d come here after classes. Through the windows, she could make out the boxing posters on the restaurant’s walls and the framed blue-red soccer jersey, number 42, worn by Luscano’s infamous forward, the one who’d become so rich he’d bought a Ferrari for the last president elected before the junta as a payoff for having the tax evasion charges against him dismissed. The outrage at that time, documented in El Día, seemed naive, almost quaint now, considering all that had happened since.